24 korrents from this recording
Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.
0:03:14 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIn which case, those kinds of collisions are so rare that you would expect one in a trillion stars to have planets. Instead, every star in the night sky has planets.
0:16:53 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsLife and the Earth co-evolve. That's what Brandon Carter didn't see is that actually, the fate of the Earth the fate of life are inextricably combined. This is really important for astrobiology, too. Life doesn't happen on a planet, it happens to a planet.
0:23:02 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWhat we were arguing in that paper is that it's an immature technosphere. Because right now, with climate change and all the other things we're doing, the technosphere right now is destroying the conditions under which it needs to maintain itself.
0:25:06 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThe biosphere is not going away. There's nothing we could do. The idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous. The Earth is not a furry little bunny that we need to protect. But it's the conditions for us.
0:27:13 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
The hard steps model of intelligent life is suspect: none of the steps it names turn out to be hard.
Their wordsBut what we actually found was that none of those are actually hard. The whole idea of hard steps, that there are hard steps, is actually suspect. What's amazing about this model is it shows how important it is to actually work with people who are in the field.
0:44:12 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsSo, we'll call that the indirect Fermi paradox and there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There's never been any money to look.
0:44:49 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it
0:51:46 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd so, what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. And the only way that we're this whole process from a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed.
0:53:55 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsBut I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists. So, that's why we called it the pessimism line. Throughout history, there's been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they've been yelling at each other, that's all they had to go with.
0:56:15 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIntelligent life and how long intelligent, technological civilizations, I think there's a big question about how long those last. And I'm hopeful, but in terms of just, I think life is absolutely going to be common, pretty common in the universe.
1:04:24 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsSo, trying to establish a base on Mars it's going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple a century at least. So, it's not like a backup plan now, we have to solve the problem of climate change, we have to deal with that.
1:11:35 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
The true unit of life is not DNA and not the cell but the biosphere — the whole community.
Their wordsBecause the bacteria, even though they're individual examples of life, and I believe this the true unit of life, it's not DNA, it's not a cell, it's the biosphere. It's the whole community.
1:37:30 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThere's the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don't get to use it all.
1:39:25 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsDoes every technological civilization trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate Anthropocene crisis? And the answer we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably.
1:47:52 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsBut here's the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something. The thing you added, the little fictional term you added into the equations is something called exotic matter and it doesn't exist. It's really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do.
1:48:38 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsSo, we could be fooled into thinking like, "Oh, technology's going to go on forever, we're always going to find new advances." As opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time. So, you have to be careful about that bias that we have living in this time of great acceleration.
1:59:52 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess. Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
2:06:02 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass. The people who advocate like, "Oh yeah, we should be sending powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space." I'm like, "Why would you?" Because we just don't know, I'm not going to say they are warlike. I'm not going to say they're not warlike, I have no idea.
2:16:32 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent, scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that there's any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think the standards, none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence.
2:22:36 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsLike, okay, there's an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly. They don't want to be detected. They've got super powerful technology, but they really suck at using it because we keep seeing them, we keep seeing them, but then they disappear. I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under.
2:28:43 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd what I've come to now is the most important question for physics is, what is life? What the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell, fundamentally? And what I really mean by this, this is where I'm going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is agency.
2:37:53 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd then we end up at the bottom of that with this idea of everyday I wake up and I check my phone and I'm like, oh, it's going to be 60 degrees out. Great. And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from.
2:47:17 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsMany of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter.
3:12:46 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsBut they said, "Look, in the end, actually the only way to actually get a real brain in the VAT is actually to have a brain in a body." And it could be a robot body, but you still need a brain in the body. So I don't think LLMs will get there because they can't. You really need to be embedded in a world, at least that's the E-four idea.