Adam Frank
Professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, who works on star and planet formation, the search for technosignatures, and the astrobiology of civilisations.
Adam Frank did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 1st of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 2nd of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 3rd of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 4th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 5th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 6th of 24 in this recording
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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
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 7th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 8th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 9th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 10th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 11th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 12th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 13th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 14th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 15th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 16th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 17th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 18th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 19th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 20th of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 21st of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 22nd of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 23rd of 24 in this recording
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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.
↗Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455youtube.com 24th of 24 in this recording