Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Are we alone? I mean, it's the ultimate cosmic question,
Speaker 2: isn't it. It really drives so much of our science,
Speaker 2: our speculation.
Speaker 3: It absolutely does. And for generations of this search for
Speaker 3: extraterrestrial technological civilizations etcs as we call them, it's been
Speaker 3: fueled by this image of finding something huge.
Speaker 2: Right like beings way way beyond us, cosmic architects, maybe
Speaker 2: galactic empires, wielding you know, unimaginable power, that kind.
Speaker 3: Of thing exactly. That's been the dream. Yet despite all
Speaker 3: our efforts, better telescopes, more sense searches, the universe is
Speaker 3: just quiet, very quiet.
Speaker 2: And that quiet isn't just a letdown. It's a genuine
Speaker 2: scientific puzzle, a big one.
Speaker 3: It truly is one of the most perplexing.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, and that's why we're doing this deep dive today.
Speaker 2: We've got some fascinating sources suggesting a really different take,
Speaker 2: almost well, almost simple.
Speaker 3: A radical idea in its own way.
Speaker 2: Totally. We're going to unpack this concept called radical mundanity.
Speaker 2: The core idea, maybe the reason we haven't found aliens
Speaker 2: isn't because they're super rare or hiding, but because they're
Speaker 2: just well ordinary, Yeah, too mundane for us to notice easily.
Speaker 3: And we're digging into the work of doctor Robin Corbett here.
Speaker 3: His research, it was published on the r arcsoof pre
Speaker 3: print server, offers this theoretical framework. Okay, he basically investigates
Speaker 3: the chances of finding etcs if we assume this mundanity
Speaker 3: idea is correct, and it's vital research because it challenges
Speaker 3: that whole super science bias in SETI.
Speaker 2: Right, it might change what we should even be looking
Speaker 2: for exactly.
Speaker 3: And why we're hearing this cosmic silence.
Speaker 2: So it all comes back that famous question from doctor
Speaker 2: Enrico Fermi way back in nineteen fifty the one we
Speaker 2: still can't answer, where is everybody?
Speaker 3: That question just cuts right to the heart of it,
Speaker 3: doesn't it the Fermi paradox, It really does, and the
Speaker 3: paradox itself it's the stark clash between what we expect
Speaker 3: and what we actually see, or rather, what we don't see.
Speaker 2: The expectation comes from the sheer numbers, right, billions of galaxies,
Speaker 2: billions of stars.
Speaker 3: In each hundreds of billions. Yeah, and we now know
Speaker 3: planets are everywhere, almost every star seems to have them,
Speaker 3: and loads are in that Goldilocks zone, the habitable zone.
Speaker 2: So statistically, even if life is incredibly rare, multiply that
Speaker 2: tiny chance by the gazillions of planets out there.
Speaker 3: You should get a galaxy buzzing with life, and a
Speaker 3: lot of it should be intelligent technological. Given the billions
Speaker 3: of years the universe has been.
Speaker 2: Around, plenty of time for civilizations to pop up, grow,
Speaker 2: maybe even spread out. We should see sign somewhere.
Speaker 3: That's the expectation, but the observation still zero. Absolutely no
Speaker 3: definitive proof, no giant alien constructions, no obvious signals, no
Speaker 3: you know, take me to your leader moments.
Speaker 2: Nothing.
Speaker 3: It's this gap, the high probability versus the stark quiet
Speaker 3: reality that pushes fields like astrobiology, SETI exoplanet science forward.
Speaker 3: We have to figure out why our assumptions don't match
Speaker 3: what we're seeing.
Speaker 2: If that assumption of like cosmic grandeur keeps getting shot down,
Speaker 2: then something fundamental in our thinking must be off.
Speaker 3: And for decades, the answers people came up with for
Speaker 3: the Fermi paradox tended towards while the sources call them
Speaker 3: extreme scenarios.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, let's touch on those briefly, because this new
Speaker 2: idea is supposed to replace them, right exactly.
Speaker 3: So, the first big category is that life is just rare,
Speaker 3: or it destroys itself. This often involves the idea of
Speaker 3: the great filter.
Speaker 2: The great filter like some massive hurdle that's almost impossible
Speaker 2: for life to get past.
Speaker 3: Right, And maybe that filter is behind us. Maybe just
Speaker 3: getting life started from non life, or jumping from single
Speaker 3: cells to complex creatures like us, maybe that was the
Speaker 3: incredibly rare event. If so, hey, maybe we're first or
Speaker 3: one of the very few.
Speaker 2: That's the optimistic few sort of. Yeah, But the filter
Speaker 2: could be ahead of us.
Speaker 3: Too, right, that's the more chilling possibility. Maybe civilizations inevitably
Speaker 3: hit a wall, runaway climate change, nuclear war, maybe some
Speaker 3: kind of out of control AI.
Speaker 2: They just snuff themselves out before they can really go interstellar.
Speaker 3: Pretty much in that case, advanced civilizations might exist, but
Speaker 3: they're either incredibly rare or they just don't last very
Speaker 3: long on a cosmic timescale.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's one set of ideas.
Speaker 3: What else, then you've got explanations where life is common
Speaker 3: but they have reasons to stay quiet. The famous one
Speaker 3: is the dark forest hypothesis.
Speaker 2: Ah, yeah, from science fiction, but scientists discuss it seriously,
Speaker 2: the idea that the universe is dangerous.
Speaker 3: Exactly if resources are limited. Announcing your existence could paint
Speaker 3: a target on your back. Any new kid on the
Speaker 3: block might be seen as a threat by older, more
Speaker 3: established civilizations.
Speaker 2: So they practic is extreme radio silence, stay hidden to survive.
Speaker 3: Right, which implies they also have the tech to detect
Speaker 3: others who aren't being quiet and maybe silence them. It
Speaker 3: suggests a pretty predatory cosmos.
Speaker 2: Yikes. Okay, and the last classic.
Speaker 3: One, the zoo hypothesis. This one's a bit more benign,
Speaker 3: but still requires immense technological superiority.
Speaker 2: They know we're here, but they're just watching, like we're
Speaker 2: a cosmic nature preserve sort of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they deliberately avoid contact, maybe following some kind of
Speaker 3: prime directive not to interfere with our development.
Speaker 2: But again that implies. They're so advanced they can enforce
Speaker 2: this across huge distances. They're essentially galactic zoo keepers.
Speaker 3: That's the key point. All these traditional explanations. They rely
Speaker 3: on extremes, extreme rarity because of a filter, extreme silence,
Speaker 3: because of danger, extreme power to run a zoo.
Speaker 2: They all assume that if a civilization survives past our stage,
Speaker 2: it becomes some kind of cosmic powerhouse, a super science society,
Speaker 2: as you said precisely.
Speaker 3: But what if that core assumption is wrong. What if
Speaker 3: the choice isn't just between cosmic gods and total emptiness.
Speaker 2: What if most advanced life is well just a bit
Speaker 2: more advanced than us, not godlike at all.
Speaker 3: That's the door radical mundanity opens. But first we need
Speaker 3: a way to measure advancement, right, ye, a scale.
Speaker 2: Right which brings us to Kardashchev.
Speaker 3: Exactly to get away from just philosophical handwaving and talk
Speaker 3: about physics energy. Doctor Corbett's study uses the Kardashev scale.
Speaker 3: It's a classic model from a Soviet astronomer, Nikolai Kardashchev.
Speaker 2: And it basically ranks civilizations by how much energy they
Speaker 2: can use.
Speaker 3: Right, that's the benchmark, that's it purely based on power consumption,
Speaker 3: which is a fundamental constraint. And it's a logarithmic scale, remember.
Speaker 2: Meaning the jumps between levels are enormous. Not just a
Speaker 2: little bit more power, but orders of magnitude.
Speaker 3: More astronomical leaps. So let's start at the bottom room.
Speaker 3: Type I civilization. This is a civilization that controls all
Speaker 3: the energy available on its home planet.
Speaker 2: So we're talking weather control, tapping all gethermal wind, solar,
Speaker 2: maybe advanced fusion power, basically managing the entire planet's energy budget.
Speaker 3: Total planetary energy management. Yeah, something like ten to the
Speaker 3: sixteen watts. Humanity, for context, is still climbing towards that.
Speaker 3: Carl Sagan estimated US around point seven maybe point seventy three.
Speaker 3: Now we're not quite there yet.
Speaker 2: Okay, So Type I is planetary mastery. What's type two?
Speaker 3: Type two civilization, Now you take a colossal jump. This
Speaker 3: civilization harnesses the total energy output of its host star.
Speaker 2: It's entire star like our sun.
Speaker 3: Yep, for a star like our sun, that's about ten
Speaker 3: to the twenty six watts. That's ten billion times more
Speaker 3: energy than a Type I civilization uses. This is where
Speaker 3: you get into proper superscience man.
Speaker 2: The classic image here is the dice in sphere, or
Speaker 2: maybe a dice and swarm. These massive structures built around
Speaker 2: the star to capture all its light and heat.
Speaker 3: That's the theoretical mechanism. Yes, building something on that scale,
Speaker 3: it boggles the mind. Structures bigger than planet's completely enclosing
Speaker 3: a star.
Speaker 2: And the crucial point for detection is they couldn't hide this,
Speaker 2: could they, even if they wanted to.
Speaker 3: That's the argument physics demands that energy conversion creates waste
Speaker 3: heat thermodynamics. Even a super efficient Type two civilization capturing
Speaker 3: nearly all its stars light.
Speaker 2: Would still radiate heat, waste heat exactly.
Speaker 3: So instead of seeing a normal star, we'd see something
Speaker 3: dimmer invisible light, but with this huge unnatural spike in
Speaker 3: the infrared.
Speaker 2: Spectrum, like a giant heat signature where a star should be. Yeah,
Speaker 2: something that screams.
Speaker 3: Artificial, unmistakably artificial, a massive blob of mid infrared radiation.
Speaker 3: If even one Type two civilization existed in our galaxy
Speaker 3: and had been around for a while.
Speaker 2: We should have spotted that heat signature with our infrared
Speaker 2: surveys like Wyser Spitzer.
Speaker 3: We should have the fact that we've found basically no
Speaker 3: really convincing candidates for these megastructures. That is the Fermi
Speaker 3: paradox in action, it deepens the mystery.
Speaker 2: Okay, so Type two is stellar mastery, and then there's
Speaker 2: type three.
Speaker 3: Type three civilization. This is almost abstract. They harness the
Speaker 3: energy of their entire home galaxy.
Speaker 2: The whole galaxy, billions of.
Speaker 3: Stars, billions of stars, galactic overlords. Essentially, if the type
Speaker 3: three existed, it wouldn't just be detectable, the entire galaxy
Speaker 3: would look fundamentally different. Clearly managed or engineers.
Speaker 2: In our galaxy doesn't look like that at.
Speaker 3: All, not even close. So the clear absence of type
Speaker 3: two and type three civilizations is what really forces this rethink.
Speaker 3: If the super powerful aliens aren't there, what's left.
Speaker 2: Which brings us back to this idea mundanity.
Speaker 3: Right, if the extremes, extreme rarity or extreme power don't
Speaker 3: fit the observations, maybe we've been aiming too high, overestimating
Speaker 3: the technological ceiling for most life.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's really unpack this radical mundanity that doctor Corbett proposes.
Speaker 2: This is where it gets really interesting, kind of flips
Speaker 2: the script.
Speaker 3: The basic idea is surprisingly simple maybe the silence is
Speaker 3: explained if the galaxy just contains a modest number of
Speaker 3: technological civilizations, and crucially, their technology level is only modestly
Speaker 3: highhigher than ours, not Type two or three, maybe Type one,
Speaker 3: or just a bit past it like Type one point
Speaker 3: one exactly. Their technological ceiling is just lower than we've
Speaker 3: often assumed. They never reach the star harnessing stage.
Speaker 2: And Corbett breaks this mundanity down into two parts, right,
Speaker 2: two dimensions.
Speaker 3: Yes, two key aspects working together. First is technological mundanity.
Speaker 3: This is about the physical and practical limits.
Speaker 2: So maybe etcs just don't make the breakthroughs needed for
Speaker 2: type two. Or maybe it's just too expensive or resource intensive.
Speaker 3: Precisely, think about building a dice in sphere. The sheer
Speaker 3: amount of material, the energy investment, the logistical nightmare. Maybe
Speaker 3: it's just fundamentally beyond the reach of a civilization confined
Speaker 3: to its home planet's resources, no matter how smart they are.
Speaker 2: So achieving Type I planetary mastery, that's achievable. It solves
Speaker 2: local problems, ensure sustainability on their world.
Speaker 3: Right they survive, they thrive, perhaps become stable. But that
Speaker 3: leap from managing a planet's energy to managing a star's energy.
Speaker 3: Maybe that gap is just too vast.
Speaker 2: Kind of technological cul de sac around TYPEOD.
Speaker 3: That's a good way to put it. Maybe there are
Speaker 3: fundamental physics limitations or material science barriers, or simply the
Speaker 3: economics are astronomical and make it unfeasible. Stellar engineering stay
Speaker 3: science fiction for them, so.
Speaker 2: Their tech would be recognizable to us in principle, clean fusion,
Speaker 2: maybe efficient interplanetary travel within their own system, advanced computing,
Speaker 2: but still planetary.
Speaker 3: And scale exactly, still bound by the resources and energy
Speaker 3: available on one world. And the second dimension is numerical mundanity.
Speaker 3: This is about how many there are, right, The hypothesis
Speaker 3: suggests there just aren't that many etcs out there, not
Speaker 3: millions densely packed, but also not zero, just a modest number, a.
Speaker 2: Handful, dozens, maybe scattered across the huge expanse of the galaxy.
Speaker 3: Something like that. Enough to exist, but few enough and
Speaker 3: far enough apart that the chances of us stumbling across
Speaker 3: them or them finding us become pretty low, especially.
Speaker 2: If they're not building giant, flashy megastructure or shouting with
Speaker 2: powerful beacons.
Speaker 3: That's the key connection. If they're only modestly advanced and
Speaker 3: modestly numerous. We're not looking for cosmic gods beaming signals
Speaker 3: across thousands of light years. We're looking for effectively Type
Speaker 3: I planetary engineers quietly managing their infrastructure.
Speaker 2: It changes the whole search paradigm completely.
Speaker 3: The contrast is stark. We've been searching for galactic scale disruptions,
Speaker 3: signs of super science. Radical mundanity says we should be
Speaker 3: looking for quiet.
Speaker 2: Competence civilizations that are successful, stable, but ultimately limited by
Speaker 2: the physics of distance and energy on a galactic scale.
Speaker 3: They just don't have the capability or perhaps the motivation
Speaker 3: to make a huge cosmic splash.
Speaker 2: Okay, so if we accept this premise modestly advanced, modestly
Speaker 2: numerous to the rough, what does that actually mean for
Speaker 2: their ability to, say, explore the galaxy or for us
Speaker 2: to detect them. It implies constraints absolutely.
Speaker 3: If they're mundane, they're still fundamentally bound by physics and
Speaker 3: resource limitations, much like us. Their ability to act on
Speaker 3: a galactic scale is severely curtailed by their Type I
Speaker 3: maybe type one point one energy budget.
Speaker 2: And these constraints are the reason.
Speaker 3: For this silent precisely, a civilization that hasn't cracked stellar
Speaker 3: level energy, can't easily conquer or communicate across the vast
Speaker 3: interstellar voids.
Speaker 2: Let's break down those constraints. Corvett talks about constraint one
Speaker 2: galactic conquest via robotics, even if they wanted to expand,
Speaker 2: maybe for science or survival.
Speaker 3: The sheer scale of the galaxy is a killer app basically,
Speaker 3: even for a civilization a bit ahead of us, say
Speaker 3: type one point one or one point.
Speaker 2: Two, sending probes out like von Neumann, probes that replicate themselves.
Speaker 3: That's often proposed as a solution to the Fermi paradox.
Speaker 3: Why haven't self replicating probes filled the galaxy? But launching
Speaker 3: and sustaining such a program requires unbelievable amounts of energy
Speaker 3: and resources, far beyond a planetary budget.
Speaker 2: Think about our own Voyager probes, huge effort decades later,
Speaker 2: they've barely left the Solar System in galactic.
Speaker 3: Terms exactly, and talk about maybe sending a probe to
Speaker 3: Alpha Centauri just over four light years away, and the
Speaker 3: engineering challenges are already immense. The energy costs are huge.
Speaker 2: Now scale that up. Trying to explore thousands, maybe millions
Speaker 2: of star systems with robotic.
Speaker 3: Probes, the cumulative energy needed to build them, launch them,
Speaker 3: accelerate them to reasonable speeds, maybe decelerate them, ensure they
Speaker 3: work for centuries or millennia. It just likely exceeds the
Speaker 3: energy income of a planet bound civilization.
Speaker 2: So the sheer vastness of space remains a fundamental barrier.
Speaker 2: Interstellar travel is hard even for them.
Speaker 3: It seems plausible, yes, the logistics, the energy cost. It
Speaker 3: acts like a natural break on galactic expansion for any
Speaker 3: civilization that hasn't achieved type two power levels.
Speaker 2: Okay, so widespread physical travel or colonization is probably out
Speaker 2: for mundane civilizations. What about communication that brings us to
Speaker 2: constraint too high powered beacons?
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a big one for SETI. For decades,
Speaker 3: the hope was we'd detect a deliberate, powerful signal, a beacon.
Speaker 2: Something designed to be noticed across the galaxy shouting we
Speaker 2: are here, like the Wow signal. Maybe, though that wasn't confirmed, right.
Speaker 3: But think about the energy needed to run such a beacon.
Speaker 3: To make it powerful enough to cross hundreds or thousands
Speaker 3: of light years and still be detectable above the background noise,
Speaker 3: I have to.
Speaker 2: Keep it running for a long time right, millennia, millions
Speaker 2: of years. You don't know when someone might be listening exactly.
Speaker 3: The total energy expenditure would be astronomical. We're talking about
Speaker 3: potentially diverting a significant fraction of a type by civilization's
Speaker 3: entire energy budget just to maintain this speculative shout into
Speaker 3: the void.
Speaker 2: Would a mundane civilization see that as a sensible use
Speaker 2: of resources.
Speaker 3: Probably not. It seems inefficient, wasteful. Even they'd likely have
Speaker 3: very efficient communication within their own solar system, focused laser beams,
Speaker 3: maybe tight microwave links, perhaps even quantum communication if they've
Speaker 3: cracked that stuff.
Speaker 2: That doesn't spray energy wastefully across.
Speaker 3: The galaxy exactly. So, the lack of obvious powerful beacons
Speaker 3: isn't necessarily proof no one's out there. It might just
Speaker 3: be a sign of their well, they're mundanity, their practicality.
Speaker 3: They don't have the energy to spare for galactic vanity projects.
Speaker 2: Okay, So if they're not physically exploring widely and they're
Speaker 2: not shouting with powerful beacons, how could we possibly detect them?
Speaker 2: That leads to constraint three weak techno signatures.
Speaker 3: This is really the crux of it for future searches.
Speaker 3: If mundane etcs exist, the only signs were likely to
Speaker 3: detect are their unintentional signals.
Speaker 2: Their leakage radiation, like the accidental electromagnetic noise from their technology,
Speaker 2: is leaking out into.
Speaker 3: Space precisely the hum of their civilization, Their equivalent of
Speaker 3: our old TV broadcasts, radar signals, maybe planetary defense grids,
Speaker 3: power transmission, whatever em noiser daily lives generate that isn't
Speaker 3: perfectly contained.
Speaker 2: But you mentioned earlier, even our leakage is getting weaker,
Speaker 2: isn't it as technology gets more efficient?
Speaker 3: It is, And that's a critical point in Corvette's argument.
Speaker 3: Are our early radio and TV was broadcast omnidirectionally, very leaky,
Speaker 3: relatively strong signals. But now we use fiber optics, which
Speaker 3: keeps the signal contained. We use focus satellite beams, low power,
Speaker 3: We're moving to spread spectrum techniques.
Speaker 2: Laser comms all much harder to detect from light years.
Speaker 3: Away, much harder so in etc. That's even just say
Speaker 3: a century or two ahead of us. Technologically, they've likely
Speaker 3: already transitioned to these highly efficient, very low leakage methods.
Speaker 2: They've managed your data with incredible sophistication. Maybe using technologies
Speaker 2: we haven't even thought of yet, But the result is
Speaker 2: less accidental noise escaping.
Speaker 3: Almost certainly, their whisper would be incredibly faint by the
Speaker 3: time it crossed interstellar distances to reach us.
Speaker 2: So detecting that faint leakage that's a whole different ballgame
Speaker 2: compared to searching for a beacon.
Speaker 3: Hugely different. It needs incredibly sensitive instruments, massive collecting areas,
Speaker 3: sophisticated signal processing to dig that tiny artificial noise out
Speaker 3: from the natural cosmic status. And you need to stare
Speaker 3: at individual star systems for a long time.
Speaker 2: So the silence we hear now might not be an
Speaker 2: empty universe. It might just be the sound of our
Speaker 2: own current technological limitations. We can't hear the whispers yet.
Speaker 3: That's the essence of the radical mundanity explanation for the silence.
Speaker 3: It's a problem of signal strength and detection threshold, not
Speaker 3: necessarily absence.
Speaker 2: Okay, So Corbett took this principle, these constraints and use
Speaker 2: them to test the different possibilities for what the galaxy
Speaker 2: might actually look like.
Speaker 3: Right, He set up a kind of logical framework based
Speaker 3: on those two variables. Number of civilizations many are few
Speaker 3: and their tech level high Type three or mundane Type
Speaker 3: I ish. That gives four possible scenarios.
Speaker 2: And by applying the constraints no obvious megastructures, the difficulty
Speaker 2: of beacons, the faintness of leakage, he could basically rule
Speaker 2: out three of them exactly.
Speaker 3: Let's walk through the eliminations. The first two are fairly straightforward,
Speaker 3: based on the lack of super science evidence. Hypothesis one
Speaker 3: many civilizations AMD very high technological level false. If there
Speaker 3: were many Type two or three civilizations, the galaxy would
Speaker 3: be obviously teeming with astro engineering projects and their heat signatures.
Speaker 2: It isn't simple enough. What's next.
Speaker 3: Hypothesis two very few civilizations A and D very high
Speaker 3: technological level also seems false. Even just one or two
Speaker 3: Type two civilizations, if they've been around for millions of years,
Speaker 3: should have had enough time and power to become detectable.
Speaker 3: They're waste heat, maybe probes, something should be visible somewhere.
Speaker 3: The silence argues against this too, right.
Speaker 2: No supercivilizations, whether common or rare, so the answer must
Speaker 2: lie with mundane technology. But there are two options there.
Speaker 3: Now it gets interesting. Hypothesis three many civilizations A and
Speaker 3: d mundane technological level. Corbett argues this one is also
Speaker 3: likely false.
Speaker 2: Wait, why if they're mundane, they're quiet, But if there
Speaker 2: are lots of them, wouldn't the combined whispers add up.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't we eventually detect something just by sheer numbers.
Speaker 3: That's the critical point. If there were truly many, maybe
Speaker 3: thousands or millions, scattered through the galaxy, even if each
Speaker 3: one only leaks a tiny bit of radiation, the cumulative
Speaker 3: effect becomes significant. Statistically, some should be relatively close by, close.
Speaker 2: Enough for even their faint leakage to be detectable with
Speaker 2: our current or near future capabilities.
Speaker 3: Plausibly, yes, over the decade SETI has been active. If
Speaker 3: the galaxy was densely populated with Type BI civilizations, we
Speaker 3: probably should have picked up some persistent, structured, artificial looking
Speaker 3: noise by now, even if it was weak. The profound
Speaker 3: lack of such signals suggests the population density isn't that high.
Speaker 2: So the silence is just because they're individually quiet. It's
Speaker 2: also because there aren't that many of them overall.
Speaker 3: That's the inference. The lack of any compelling signal, beacon
Speaker 3: or lukage forces us away from the many mundane scenario.
Speaker 2: Which leaves only one possibility standing in his framework.
Speaker 3: The last one. The conclusion that seems to best fit
Speaker 3: the observed silence if you accept the premise of mundanity,
Speaker 3: is very few civilizations with mundane technological level.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's the synthesis of radical mundanity. Not empty,
Speaker 2: not teeming with gods, but yeah, sparsely populated, with civilizations
Speaker 2: kind of like us, just maybe a bit further down the.
Speaker 3: Road, exactly a modest number scattered across the vastness. They're successful,
Speaker 3: they made it past whatever filters lead to technology, but
Speaker 3: they are fundamentally constrained by planetary resources and energy. They're
Speaker 3: not cosmic architects. Their type I maybe type one point
Speaker 3: one engineers grappling with the same issues of interstellar distance
Speaker 3: and energy costs.
Speaker 2: That we are, and that explains the silence. They lack
Speaker 2: the sheer power to make obvious signals or structures, and
Speaker 2: there aren't enough of them for their combined faint leakage
Speaker 2: to be easily detectable by us.
Speaker 3: Yet it resolves the Fermi paradox quite elegantly, really, without
Speaker 3: needing galaxy wide catastrophes or hidden watchers it's an explanation
Speaker 3: rooted in plausible physical and economic limits.
Speaker 2: And the big takeaway, maybe the most important part, is
Speaker 2: that it doesn't mean we're alone.
Speaker 3: Not at all. It actually makes detection seem well, not imminent,
Speaker 3: but potentially achievable. It's just incredibly difficult. We're not looking
Speaker 3: for a foghorn, We're listening for a pin drop miles
Speaker 3: away in a noisy room.
Speaker 2: The neighbors are home, they're just not having a loud party.
Speaker 2: They're quietly managing their household.
Speaker 3: That's a great analogy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this shift in perspective that doctor Corbett offers,
Speaker 2: it's pretty fundamental. It suggests the reason for the paradox
Speaker 2: isn't some grand, terrifying cosmic drama, but maybe just a
Speaker 2: lack of cosmic extravagance exactly.
Speaker 3: The universe might be less like Star Wars with galaxy
Speaker 3: spanning empires, and more well just big and mostly empty,
Speaker 3: with occasional pockets of quiet, competent planet bound life. Less
Speaker 3: terrifying perhaps, but maybe more constrained.
Speaker 2: And if this whole radical mondanity idea is on the
Speaker 2: right track, it has huge implications for how we actually
Speaker 2: do set how we search.
Speaker 3: Absolutely massive implications. It means we should probably deprioritize searching
Speaker 3: for those super powerful obvious beacons or giant dice In's
Speaker 3: fear heat signatures. They might simply not exist in large numbers,
Speaker 3: if at all.
Speaker 2: Instead, the focus has to shift entirely to detecting that
Speaker 2: faint incidental leakage radiation.
Speaker 3: That becomes the prime target. The search needs to become
Speaker 3: more surgical, more patient. We need extreme sensitivity and the
Speaker 3: ability to filter out natural noise sources very effectively, and.
Speaker 2: Corvid's study actually suggests this might be within reach.
Speaker 3: Historically speaking, it does offer that optimistic note for perhaps
Speaker 3: the first time. He argues detecting this faint leakage might
Speaker 3: not be centuries away, but it requires the next generation
Speaker 3: of instruments.
Speaker 2: He mentions this square kilometer array SKA specifically, right that
Speaker 2: huge radio telescope project being built now.
Speaker 3: Yes, the SKA, or potentially the generation of telescopes that
Speaker 3: comes after it.
Speaker 2: Why is the SKA so suited for this mundane search.
Speaker 3: Because its design goals are exactly what's needed. It's aiming
Speaker 3: to be the most sensitive radio telescope ever constructed, with
Speaker 3: an enormous collecting area spread over huge distance.
Speaker 2: So it can pick up incredibly faint signals.
Speaker 3: That's the plan. Its sensitivity and processing power are being
Speaker 3: optimized precisely to pull weak structured signals like leakage radiation
Speaker 3: could be out of the cosmic background noise, even from
Speaker 3: significant distances.
Speaker 2: It's not looking for the shout, it's listening for the whisper.
Speaker 3: Perfectly put, the SKA is the kind of tool you'd
Speaker 3: build if you believed the radical mundanity hypothesis was correct.
Speaker 3: It matches the target. If those quiet Type II civilizations
Speaker 3: are out there, the SKA or its successors represent our
Speaker 3: best chance yet of finally hearing their faint planetary hum.
Speaker 2: So the search gets harder in a way, needing more sensitivity,
Speaker 2: more patience, maybe more clever signal analysis, but the target
Speaker 2: itself feels more realistic, grounded in physics we actually understand.
Speaker 3: I think that's fair to say, we just need to
Speaker 3: build much better ears and point them very carefully at
Speaker 3: the quietest places.
Speaker 2: Okay, that leads us perfectly into a final thought for you,
Speaker 2: the listener, to chew on building directly from this idea
Speaker 2: of mundanity.
Speaker 3: Orbit is right, and radical mundanity holds true if most
Speaker 3: etcs really do seem to stall out technologically around the
Speaker 3: type I level. What does that imply?
Speaker 2: It suggests a kind of universal speed limit on technological growth,
Speaker 2: doesn't it?
Speaker 3: It could? Does it mean that the real great filter
Speaker 3: isn't about getting life started or surviving nuclear war? But
Speaker 3: it's actually the monumental challenge of making that leap from
Speaker 3: planetary energy mastery type one to stellar energy mastery type two?
Speaker 2: Is the silence simply because that jump is fundamentally too hard,
Speaker 2: or too expensive, or maybe just physically impossible for any
Speaker 2: civilization confined to a planet. Is that the barrier no
Speaker 2: one or almost no one crosses.
Speaker 3: It's a fascinating possibility. Maybe the silence isn't philosophical. Maybe
Speaker 3: it's just engineering and economics on a cosmic scale.
Speaker 2: So the provocative question for you is, if there's this
Speaker 2: potential technological ceiling around type I, what does that mean
Speaker 2: for us? What does our own ceiling look like? Are
Speaker 2: we already bumping up against the point where the energy
Speaker 2: and resource costs of our next big leaps true interplanetary
Speaker 2: infrastructure interstellar probes start to become fundamentally prohibitive for a
Speaker 2: planet bound species. Are we closer to our mundane limit
Speaker 2: than we think something to ponder.
Speaker 3: Arter s