Speaker 1: Imagine a small object, something you could just hold between
your finger and thumb. Let's say a golf ball. Now
try to imagine that that same golf ball weighs more
than the entire planet Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's already an impossible thought, right.
Speaker 1: And not just a little more, but so dense, so
gravitationally powerful, that if you brought it near our world,
it would just consume it instantly. And what's left behind
is just this sphere of influence, barely bigger than a line.
I mean, it sounds like complete science fiction.
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 3: But you know the fact that this isn't just possible,
but is actually an unavoidable outcome of the laws of nature.
Speaker 2: Well, that tells you something.
Speaker 3: It tells you just how unreliable our own senses really are.
The universe it operates on scales and densities our brains
never ever evolve to grasp.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. We take a stack of dense,
fascinating sources, articles, research, conversations, and we untangle them to
give you the knowledge you need, fast and thorough. Our
mission today is to pull insights from a conversation with
a leading astrophysicist who really he challenges our most basic
ideas about reality, about scale, and about our place in
the cosmos. We are going way beyond what our five
senses can tell us.
Speaker 2: And that's the whole point of the source material.
Speaker 3: Really, the central idea is that human perception is, to
put it, mildly, wildly insufficient for understanding what's real.
Speaker 1: Insufficient. I like that.
Speaker 2: Think about it.
Speaker 3: Our eyes they see this tiny, tiny sliver of the
electromagnetic spectrum. Our ears pick up a narrow band of vibrations.
Science only moves forward when we stop trusting our what
the source calls are error prone biology.
Speaker 1: And start trusting the machine.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 3: We have to use machine driven methods, telescopes, particle accelerators,
all of it to get an objective report on reality.
And that objectivity that's the only way we ever arrived
at the frankly terrifying truth of the black hole.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's get into it, this massive concept the
black hole. We started with that crazy golf ball analogy,
But to really build up to that, we need to
start with something a bit simpler, right, something like escape velocity.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 3: Escape velocity is just the specific speed you need to
go to well to break free from the gravity of
a planet or a star and never.
Speaker 1: Come back like a rocket launch.
Speaker 3: Perfect example for Earth. That speed is about seven miles
per second. That's roughly twenty five thousand miles per hour.
Speaker 1: Seven miles per second. You know, when you say it
like that, it makes that old saying what goes up
must come down. It's not actually true, is it.
Speaker 2: Hey, No, it's true for a baseball.
Speaker 3: Sure, But if you have the power to get something
moving at seven miles per second, it is gone.
Speaker 2: It has escaped Earth grasp for good.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's scale that up. This is the thought.
Speaker 3: Experiment, right, This is the thought experiment that leads us
straight to a black hole. Imagine if Earth had more mass,
its gravity would be stronger.
Speaker 1: Right, it would be harder to get.
Speaker 2: Away, exactly.
Speaker 3: The gravitational well gets deeper, so you'd need a higher
escape velocity to climb out of it. You're seven miles
per second becomes eight thn ten than one hundred.
Speaker 1: So we just keep packing more and more mass into
the same space. Gravity get stronger, and the escape velocity
just keeps climbing.
Speaker 2: It just keeps going up.
Speaker 3: But here's where it gets really interesting, because eventually you
hit a wall, you hit the cosmic speed limit.
Speaker 1: The absolute fastest anything.
Speaker 2: Can go, the speed of light.
Speaker 3: It's about one hundred and eighty six thousand miles per second,
and once the escape velocity needed to leave an object's
surface hits that number, you've reached the threshold.
Speaker 1: Because nothing can go faster than light.
Speaker 3: Nothing, it's an absolute constant of nature. So if even
light itself cannot escape that gravitational pole, then absolutely nothing
else can, not matter, not energy, nothing.
Speaker 2: It's a trap.
Speaker 1: And that's it. That's the definition of a black hole,
the point where even light can't get out.
Speaker 3: That's the fundamental definition. Yes, and it's not a flat,
two dimensional hole. You have to remember, it's a three
dimensional hole in the fabric of space time itself. No
matter which direction you approach it from, you're caught.
Speaker 1: It brings us back to that golf ball, that density paradox.
Speaker 3: It's a mind bender, isn't it. The source details that
for a black hole to have the mass of our
entire Earth, all that matter would have to be crushed
down into a volume the size of a golf.
Speaker 1: Ball, and the boundary the point of no return.
Speaker 2: The event horizon. That would be a sphere just a
little bit bigger than a lime.
Speaker 1: That's the part I just can't get my head around.
You take our entire planet eight thousand miles across and
you shrink it to a lime. Where does all the
stuff go? It can't just vanish, It doesn't.
Speaker 3: And this is a really important distinction. That line sized sphere,
that's just the event horizon. It's the boundary line the
gravitational agg right, all the actual mass of the Earth,
every bit of it, has been compressed down inside that
boundary to a single, infinitely dense point at the very
center the singularity. A singularity a point with zero volume
but all the mass exactly. It's a point where our
current laws of physics just break down. We can't really
describe it. So the mass is definitely still in there,
it's just compacted into a space we literally can't comprehend.
Speaker 1: That's terrifying. But it also leads to this really crucial
point that you know movies always get wrong. Black holes
are not giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, are They not?
Speaker 3: At all? That is such a critical thing to understand.
The gravity you feel from an object depends on its mass,
not its density. As long as you're you know, a
safe distance away.
Speaker 1: So the gravity is the same whether it's a star
or a tiny black hole, as.
Speaker 2: Long as the mass is the same.
Speaker 3: Yes, The source gives this perfect unsettling example. If our
sun right now just magically turned into a black hole,
oh wow, we wouldn't fly into it. Earth would just
continue orbiting it at the exact same distance, feeling the
exact same gravitational pull. Nothing would change gravitationally.
Speaker 1: We'd freeze, obviously, but we wouldn't get sucked in.
Speaker 3: You'd freeze, but you'd be in a stable orbit. The
danger is only if you get too close and cross
that now tiny event horizon.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if they're invisible light traps, how on Earth
do we know they're real? We can't see them.
Speaker 3: This is where modern astrophysics just completely triumphs over our
you know, our naked eyes.
Speaker 2: We have a few key methods. The first one is cure.
Speaker 1: Einstein general relativity.
Speaker 2: General relativity.
Speaker 3: It tells us that gravity isn't a force, it's a
curvature in the fabric of space time. Massive objects warp
the space around them.
Speaker 1: So we don't look at the black hole. We look
at what's happening around it, or even behind it exactly.
Speaker 3: We look deep into the cosmos at galaxies that are
way way behind a suspected black hole. The black hole's
immense gravity acts like a lens, a cosmic magnifying glass,
a gravitational lens, a gravitational lens yes, and when the
light from that background galaxy passes through this warped space
on its way to us, the light gets bent.
Speaker 1: So what does that look like?
Speaker 3: In our telescopes we see the distant galaxy shape get
completely distorted. It gets stretched, smeared out into arcs. Sometimes
you even see multiple images of the same galaxy.
Speaker 1: IEP Looking through a warped piece of.
Speaker 3: Glass precisely and in the most perfect alignments, you can
get what's called an Einstein ring. Out of distortion tells
us exactly how much mass is in the foreground, even
though we can't see it. It's undeniable proof that something
incredibly massive is sitting there bending space exactly as Einstein predicted.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. It's like seeing the wind by watching the
trees bend. What's the second method?
Speaker 3: The second way involves something really common in the universe,
binary star systems. Most stars you see in the sky
aren't alone like our sun. They're locked in a gravitational
dance with a companion.
Speaker 1: Two stars orbiting each other or more.
Speaker 3: And when one of those stars is massive enough, it
can end its life and collapse into a black hole,
but its companion star is still there.
Speaker 1: So you have a normal star orbiting nothing.
Speaker 3: Orbiting an invisible partner. And as that remaining star gets older,
it starts to expand, it swells up, and its outer
layers of gas can get close enough to be pulled
away by the black hole's gravity.
Speaker 1: And that material, I'm guessing it doesn't just fall straight in.
Speaker 3: No, because of angular momentum, it spirals in. It forms
this incredible violent structure called an accretion disc. It's like
a giant, terrifying whirlpool of plasma swirling around the event
horizon and then must get hot, unimaginably hot. The material
in this disc is moving at a huge fraction of
the speed of light. The friction, the magnetic fields, the
gravitational shear, it all converts that energy into heat.
Speaker 1: How hot are we talking?
Speaker 3: Millions of degrees and something that hot radiates energy, but
not as visible light. It shines brightly in high energy
wavelengths like X rays and ultraviolet light.
Speaker 1: AH, which is invisible to us but not to.
Speaker 2: Our space telescope exactly.
Speaker 3: We have X ray and UV telescopes in orbit that
are designed specifically to see these things. We can see
the X ray pulses, we can measure the spectrum of light,
and by watching the orbit of the visible star, we
can calculate the mass of its invisible partner.
Speaker 1: And if that mass is too big to be a
regular star or a neutron star, if.
Speaker 3: It's over about three times the mass of our Sun,
there's only one thing it can be.
Speaker 2: It has to be a black hole. And we've found
does and dozens of these systems. We're literally watching black
holes feed.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so how do they form in the first place?
What creates one of these things?
Speaker 3: It's all about the death of the most massive stars.
Star is much much bigger than our Sun.
Speaker 1: So not every star becomes a black hole.
Speaker 2: Oh no, most don't.
Speaker 3: At the end of its life, a massive star runs
out of fuel and its core collapses. This triggers a
huge explosion, a supernova. But if the star is truly enormous,
maybe twenty times the mass of our Sun or more.
Speaker 1: The gravity is just too strong.
Speaker 3: The inward pull of gravity is so overwhelming that the
outward explosion just fails. The energy of the supernova isn't
enough to escape.
Speaker 1: So instead of blowing itself apart, it crushes itself.
Speaker 3: The star implodes, the explosion is snuffed out by its
own gravity, and the entire core collapses down on itself,
all the way down to a singularity.
Speaker 2: It's gravity winning the final.
Speaker 1: Battle, and the Source points out that it's actually good
thing that not all stars do this.
Speaker 3: It's vital for our existence. The stars that do succeed
in exploding as supernovae are the ones that spread all
the heavy elements they created in their cores out into
the galaxy. Carbon, oxygen, iron, all the building blocks of
planets and people. Those explosions enrich the gas clouds that
form the next generation of solar systems. If every big
star just collapse into a black hole, the universe would
be mostly hydrogen and helium.
Speaker 2: Life as we know it would be impossible.
Speaker 3: We are quite literally made of the ashes of successful supernovae.
Speaker 1: That is just an incredible connection, and it brings us
right back home to our own star. The Source calls
our sun wimpy, which is kind of reassuring.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, in the black hole department, it's definitely a wimp.
It doesn't have nearly enough mass. But you know, that
doesn't mean it won't eventually kill us. It'll just do
it in a different.
Speaker 1: Way by expanding into a red giant. Right, It'll swell
up and swallow the inner planet.
Speaker 3: That's the endgame, yes, But before we get to that,
let's talk about the timeline.
Speaker 2: How long does the Sun have left?
Speaker 1: The consensus I think is about another five billion years,
which is a number so big it's hard to even
think about. It is.
Speaker 2: It's longer than the Earth has even existed so far.
Speaker 3: But the amazing thing is we know that number with
a pretty high degree of certainty.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not like we can stick a dipstick
in the Sun and check the fuel level.
Speaker 2: No, we can't.
Speaker 3: This is really one of the great triumphs of twentieth
century astrophysics.
Speaker 2: It's a comparative method.
Speaker 3: First, we identify our stars type it's a G type
yellow dwarf.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: Then we look out across the universe. We find huge
clusters of stars, thousands of them that all formed at
the same time. And within those clusters we see stars
like our Sun, but at every different stage of their
life cycle.
Speaker 1: So you find baby yellow dwarfs, teenage ones, middle aged ones,
and dying ones.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and we can plot them all in a chart
based on their brightness and their temperature. It's called the
hurt Sprung Russell diagram or the HR diagram.
Speaker 1: And this diagram shows the whole life story of a star.
Speaker 2: It's a map of stellar evolution.
Speaker 3: And by finding where our own Sun fits on that
universal map, we can tell exactly how far along it
is in its life. The data show is it's right
in the middle, about halfway through its stable hydrogen burning phase.
Speaker 1: And we have a way to double check that, don't
we something right here at home?
Speaker 2: We do?
Speaker 3: We cross validated with geology. We can use things like
radiometric dating of meteorites and rocks to get a very
precise age for the Earth itself.
Speaker 1: Which is about four and a half billion years right.
Speaker 3: And since the Earth and the Sun formed together out
of the same cloud of gas and dust, their ages
have to match. The fact that the age of the
Earth lines up perfectly with the astrophysical models for the
Sun's age. While that gives us incredible confidence in the
five billion year timeline. The two independent fields agree perfectly.
Speaker 1: Okay, So another thought experiment from the source, a terrifying one.
What if the Sun didn't expand but just blanked out?
Right now, what happens to us?
Speaker 2: Well, the first thing is we wouldn't know.
Speaker 1: For a bit, right the eight minute lightspeed delay.
Speaker 3: For eight minutes and twenty seconds, everything would seem normal.
Then suddenly the sky would go completely black. A moment
after that, we'd feel the gravity vanish. Earth would stop
orbiting and just fly off in a straight line into
deep space, and it.
Speaker 1: Would get cold. The source says we'd freeze at minus
four hundred and sixty two degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 3: That's the background temperature of the universe, about three degrees
above absolute zero. The temperature drop on the surface would
be quick, but not instant. Why not the oceans and
the atmosphere they hold a huge amount of heat. Think
of it like a giant thermal battery. That stored solar
energy would take oh maybe a few weeks, maybe a
few months to radiate away completely. But once it's gone,
we plummet to that deep space temperature.
Speaker 1: So is there any way to survive in the short.
Speaker 3: Term, maybe we'd have to abandon the surface and go
deep underground, relying on the Earth's own internal.
Speaker 1: Heat from the core, right from.
Speaker 3: Geothermal energy, radioactive decay in the core, volcanic vents. That
energy is totally independent of the Sun. You could build
a habitat near one of those, but.
Speaker 1: That's a finite supply too, isn't.
Speaker 2: It It is.
Speaker 3: It would last a very very long time, maybe millions
of years, but eventually the Earth's core would cool two.
The long term goal would have to be finding a
new planet, a new star.
Speaker 2: There's no other.
Speaker 1: Way that shift from these huge cosmic scales back to
our own survival. It leads to one of the most
I think profound ideas in the source material, this idea
of molecular kinship.
Speaker 2: It is an astonishing concept.
Speaker 1: The claim is that every single breath you take contains
molecules that were once inhaled by every other human who
has ever lived.
Speaker 2: It sounds totally impossible until you.
Speaker 1: Do the mas right. It's a numbers game.
Speaker 3: It's all about the sheer number of molecules. Here's the
ratio that breaks your brain. There are more molecules of
air in a single breath you take than there are
breaths of air in the entire atmosphere of the Earth.
Speaker 1: Let we just process that more molecules in one breath.
Speaker 3: Than total breaths in all the air on the whole planet.
The number of molecules is just that much bigger.
Speaker 1: So when I breathe out, those billions and billions of
molecules go out.
Speaker 2: Into the air and they mix.
Speaker 3: The atmosphere is an incredibly efficient mixer. You have wind,
weather patterns, convection. The source says that within about a decade,
those molecules you just exhaled are thoroughly and evenly distributed
across the entire globe, which.
Speaker 1: Means they are guaranteed to be in every breath taken
by every other person on.
Speaker 2: The planet, guaranteed.
Speaker 3: It creates this literal physical connection. You are breathing in
atoms that were once in the lungs of your ancestors,
of Julius Caesar, of every person in history.
Speaker 1: It's a wild thought, a real sense of kinship.
Speaker 2: And it's not just air.
Speaker 3: The source points out the exact same principle applies to water.
Speaker 1: Let me guess the ratio more molecules of water in
a single glass.
Speaker 3: Than there are glasses of water in all the world's
oceans combined.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 3: So when you drink a glass of water and your
body processes it and it eventually returns to the environment
through the water cycle, those molecules scatter, they become part
of the universal reservoir, and they end up in everyone
else's glass of water too.
Speaker 1: So we're all literally sharing the same atoms. When you
realize that this deep interconnectedness, what does that do to you?
Does it make you kinder? Or does it push you
toward nihilism? You know, if we're all just tiny specks
made of the same recycled stuff, does any of it matter?
Speaker 3: That is the philosophical core of it isn't it? And
the source takes a very strong stance against nihilism.
Speaker 2: The argument is.
Speaker 3: That the wisdom you gain from studying the universe contains
no force of nihilism at all. Ohso the proof is
in the behavior. You will not find armies of astrophysicists
marching under a banner of cosmic indifference, slaughtering each other
over borders. The perspective it grants prevents that.
Speaker 1: It's a check on our ego on our petty conflict.
Speaker 2: Now lifts you above it.
Speaker 3: The Source describes it as looking down on human arguments
from a plane of existence above what you're arguing. When
you're thinking about the five billion years until the sun dies,
a fight over a parking spot seems ridiculous, Absolutely ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Frames the whole thing.
Speaker 3: It's not about ignoring problems, but about seeing them in
their true minuscule scale, which gives you the clarity and
humility to solve them without the usual aggression.
Speaker 1: And that idea of humility of seeing ourselves in the
proper scale that leads right into this next really provocative
claim human physiology may be overrated.
Speaker 2: And necessary reality check.
Speaker 3: I think we have this deep seated bias anthroposcentrism that
our physical form is somehow the pinnacle of evolution.
Speaker 1: But the Source argues that's not the case.
Speaker 2: Not at all.
Speaker 3: It argues that the one thing that truly stands out
is our mind, our brain's capacity for abstract thought, for science,
for art. Our physical bodies, they're actually incredibly fragile, so
specialized for this one planet, this one gravity.
Speaker 1: And this feeds right into what the Source calls the
alien paradox. Which is when we imagine aliens, we can't
help but imagine us.
Speaker 2: We do.
Speaker 3: We imagine them with two arms, two legs, ahead eyes, fingers,
a humanoid body plan, and that, the Source argues, is
a profound failure of imagination.
Speaker 1: Because our bodies are just the result of one specific
path evolution took here on Earth exactly.
Speaker 3: Our gravity, our atmosphere, our history of coming out of
the water, all those pressures shaped us. An alien that
evolved on a different world under totally different pressures would
have no reason to look like us.
Speaker 1: The Source gives two great reality checks for this it does.
Speaker 3: The first is just to look around on Earth. A bananatree,
a mushroom, an octopus. They don't have humanoid bodies, yet
we share DNA with them.
Speaker 1: The second reality check.
Speaker 3: An alien from another planet which shares zero DNA with us.
There's no shared ancestry at all. So the idea that
convergent evolution across light years of space would somehow produce
a near identical body plan is well, it's statistically absurd.
Speaker 1: So it truly advanced intelligence might not even have a
body we recognize. It could be a cloud of gas,
a planet sized.
Speaker 2: Fungus, a decentralized consciousness. We just don't know.
Speaker 3: We're so locked into our own physical form that we
keep projecting it onto the star. To truly look for life,
we have to let go of that bias.
Speaker 1: Speaking of things we can barely imagine. What about the
biggest boundary of all, The size of the universe itself
is an infinite?
Speaker 3: The short, honest answer is, we don't know for sure. But,
and this is important, we have no reason to believe.
Speaker 2: It is an infinite.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what do we know.
Speaker 3: We know the size of our observable universe. That's the
part we can see, and it has an edge, a horizon.
Speaker 1: The Source uses a really good analogy for this, the
ship at sea.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect way to think about it.
Speaker 3: If you're on a ship in the middle of the ocean,
you can see the horizon right, a clear edge. But
you know the ocean doesn't end.
Speaker 1: There, right. If you sail towards it, you just see
more ocean.
Speaker 2: A new horizon appears.
Speaker 3: The edge was just the limit of your vision from
your specific location. The universe is like that. Our cosmic
horizon is about fourteen billion light years away in every direction.
That's simply the farthest that light has had time to
travel to reach us since the Big Bang.
Speaker 1: So if we could magically teleport to that edge, we.
Speaker 3: Would just find ourselves in a new patch of universe,
with a whole new observable bubble around us, stretching out
another fourteen billion light years. We can only talk about
a little bubble. What's beyond that is for now conjecture.
Speaker 1: It's mathematically simpler to just assume it goes on forever,
isn't it.
Speaker 3: In many ways, yes, the equations of cosmology work out
very nicely if you assume an infinite, uniform universe. It's
cleaner than trying to invent some kind of arbitrary edge.
So for now we can only speak with certainty about
our own observable horizon, and.
Speaker 1: That limit on what we can observe brings us right
to the public's fascination with well with things that might
be observing us. UFOs UAPs all this military footage that
keeps coming out.
Speaker 3: Yes, and this is where a scientific rigor becomes absolutely essential.
Speaker 2: The source is very firm on this. We have to
be precise with our words. UFO means unidentified flying.
Speaker 1: Object, the keyword being unidentified.
Speaker 2: The keyword.
Speaker 3: The problem is that so many people in imediately make
the leap from UFO to alien spaceship, and those are
not the same thing at all.
Speaker 1: It's a huge logical fallacy, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It's the definition of one. The thinking goes, I don't
know what that.
Speaker 3: Is, therefore it must be an advanced alien from another
star system. The Source just says, look, once you admit
I don't know what it is, that's the end of
the sentence.
Speaker 2: You can't then.
Speaker 3: Jump to an extraordinary conclusion from a position of ignorance.
Speaker 1: It could be anything a weather balloon, a drone, weird.
Speaker 3: Reflection, a secret military project, and atmospheric phenomenon. There's a
long list of possibilities you have to rule out before
you can even begin to consider interstellar visitor. You need
extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim.
Speaker 2: A blurry video is not it.
Speaker 1: And then there's the other part of the narrative, the
massive government cover up. The Source has a pretty witty
take on this.
Speaker 3: It's a great observation. It's the irony of what it
calls the competence critique. Explain that the same people who
will tell you often very loudly, but the government is
a bloated, inefficient, incompetent bureaucracy that can't even pave a
road properly.
Speaker 1: Are often the same people who believe that this same
incompetent government has flawlessly executed a perfect, multi decade leak
proof conspiracy to hide the single most important event in
human history.
Speaker 3: The two ideas are mutually exclusive. You can't have it
both ways. If they're capable of that kind of perfect,
silent competence, then they're not the bumbling organization everyone complains about.
Speaker 1: The source also points to a really interesting group of witnesses,
the amateur astronomers.
Speaker 3: Yes and amateur here is a badge of honor. These
aren't just casual stargazers. These people know the night sky
inside and out. They know where Jupiter is supposed to be,
what a satellite flare looks like, how weather affects observation.
Speaker 1: They have the baseline knowledge. They know what's normal.
Speaker 3: Because they know what's normal, they are the least likely
grouped to be fooled by something mundane. And what's fascinating
is that they as a group report fewer unexplainable sightings
than the general public.
Speaker 1: Because they can identify things.
Speaker 3: The moment they see something strange and figure out it's
say a high altitude balloon, it stops being a UFO,
it becomes an IFO and identified flying object.
Speaker 2: Their expertise filters out the noise.
Speaker 1: So, after decades of searching, the scientific community just hasn't
seen the evidence it needs. The Source has this locked
box metaphor.
Speaker 3: Right if if someone tells you I have an alien
in this locked box, but I won't let you open
it or scan it or test it, then from a
scientific perspective, that's exactly.
Speaker 2: The same as not having an alien at all.
Speaker 3: Claims require proof, verifiable, testable, high quality data.
Speaker 1: But other and this is the big turn. After tearing
down the poor evidence, the source makes this incredibly powerful
case for why aliens must exist.
Speaker 3: This is the core conclusion based on pure probability. The
Source is unequivocal. Aliens almost certainly exist out there. The
logic is simple and powerful.
Speaker 1: What's the foundation of it.
Speaker 2: Two things.
Speaker 3: One, the universe is fourteen billion years old. That's an
enormous amount of time for life to get started. Two,
the ingredients for life as we know it, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
nitrogen are the most common abundant ingredients in the entire cosmos.
Speaker 1: The raw materials are everywhere, and we have.
Speaker 3: Our own planet as a test case. Life got started
on Earth almost as soon as it possibly could. Once
the planet cooled down, Bang, single celled life appeared within
a couple hundred million years. Nature had no trouble getting
the job done here.
Speaker 1: So if it happened here so easily with common ingredients.
Speaker 3: It's statistically very likely to have happened on a huge
number of other planets. We now know that exoplanets are everywhere,
billions of them in our galaxy alone. To suggest we're
the only ones is, as the source puts it, philosophically irresponsible.
Speaker 1: And we're not just talking about intelligent life, are we.
Speaker 2: No, that's what everyone jumps to.
Speaker 3: But finding any life, even just bacteria on Mars or
algae in an ocean on Europa, would completely revolutionize biology.
Speaker 2: It would be the biggest discovery ever.
Speaker 1: So to understand how little we've actually looked, we need
another Scoale analogy.
Speaker 2: We do our galaxy.
Speaker 3: The Milky Way has a few hundred billion stars. The
observable universe has maybe a trillion galaxies. It's just numbers
on a page until you try to visualize it. In
our search so far, If you imagine our Milky Way
galaxy is the size of a large dining room table,
the entire volume of space we have searched for signs
of life is about the size of a single coin
placed on that table.
Speaker 1: Wow, we barely started.
Speaker 3: We've barely looked out our front door. The Seti Institute
has a great analogy for this. To say there's no
life out there based on our search so far is
like scooping one cup of water from the ocean, finding
no whales in it, and concluding the entire ocean is
empty of whales.
Speaker 1: It's an absurd conclusion. And our search is limited by
time too, not just space.
Speaker 3: That's maybe the biggest hurdle, the synchronicity problem. If an
alien civilization sent a radio message two thousand years ago,
who was here to receive it?
Speaker 2: The Romans? They didn't have radio telescopes.
Speaker 1: And we've only had a technology for about eighty years.
Speaker 3: It's this tiny, tiny window in cosmic history. We have
to be listening at the exact moment a civilization that
is alive at the exact same time as us happens
to be transmitting in our direction. With technology we can detect,
the odds of that overlap are slim.
Speaker 1: But even with all those constraints, the astrophysicist in the
source material ran the numbers.
Speaker 3: They did using a framework like the Drake equation, but
updated with our latest knowledge about exoplanets and the speed
at which life formed here. They came to an estimate.
Speaker 1: And the number is They.
Speaker 3: Calculate there are probably about one hundred living active civilizations
in our Milky Way galaxy right now.
Speaker 1: One hundred. That's incredible, not millions, but not zero.
Speaker 3: It means we're not alone. But the galaxy is not
exactly crowded either. Space is just that big.
Speaker 1: So if they are out there, what happens if we
find them? This is where the source offers a pretty
stark warning.
Speaker 2: A warning that's really about us, not them.
Speaker 3: It points out this irony we are obsessed with meeting
aliens while we actively ignore and destroy the incredible unstudied
species right here on our own.
Speaker 1: Planet, and we tend to project our own nature onto
them constantly.
Speaker 3: Hollywood loves the idea of evil alien invaders, but the
truth is we have zero evidence that aliens would be hostile.
We have, however, thousands of years of undeniable evidence that
humans are hostile to other humans.
Speaker 1: That's the mirror, isn't it.
Speaker 3: It's the mirror. The source points to a brutal historical fact.
Every single time in human history that a technologically advanced
civilization has encountered a less advanced one, it has ended
disastrously for the less advanced group every single time.
Speaker 1: So when we imagine aliens coming here to conquer us
or steal our.
Speaker 3: Resources, you're just imagining what we would do. We're projecting
our own colonial, violent history onto the stars.
Speaker 2: We assume they would.
Speaker 1: Act like us, and if they're advanced enough to cross
the galaxy, they're obviously way way smarter than us.
Speaker 3: I mean, we haven't even been back to the Moon
in over fifty years. A species that can travel, but
queen stars is on a completely different level. The Source
ends with this funny but also kind of sad observation
that if they did show up, our first instinct would
probably be to shoot at them, and they wouldn't be scared,
they wouldn't be defeated. They would probably just laugh at
the primitive little species, turn around and leave, confirming we're
not ready to join the galactic community. So we've gone
from the immense scale of black holes, these singularities we
can only detect by their gravitational shadow, to the ticking
clock of our own son's finite life, and then down
to this incredibly intimate idea of molecular kinship. The fact
that we're all breathing the same historical air, and.
Speaker 1: That cosmic perspective. It really does challenge us, doesn't it.
It suggests our physical form is nothing special, our earthly
fights are petty, and that the universe is almost certainly
full of life, even if we've only just started looking.
Speaker 3: But that brings us back to that final difficult question
about what happens when we do find someone. We know
our own history, We know how the powerful have always
treated the less power, and if we finally need a
civilization that is exponentially more capable than we are, all
of our fears about them are movies, are stories. They
aren't based on any knowledge of who they are. They're
based on a perfect, dark reflection of who we have been.
Speaker 1: So, given that historical pattern of contact here on Earth
and the warning about our own tendencies, what do you
think is the greater risk in finding an advanced alien civilization,
their actual intentions, or our own immediate and probably fearful reaction.
We'd love to know what you think.