We’ve been obsessed about aliens for a long time, but it really feels like in the last few years, the search is getting a lot more serious. We both have practical tools like the James Web Space Telescope, which allow us to search the atmospheres of other worlds. And then you’ve also got sort of an increased attention because of UAPs. You’ve got NASA, you’ve got the military, you’ve got the government looking into our aliens visiting us here on Earth. And you know, there’s no evidence that they are, but it’s an interesting question. And are we alone in the universe? Really is a scientific question that deserves an answer, and we will keep hunting for it until we find it. So, my guest today is Dr. Adam Frank. I’ve interviewed him many times in the past. He’s an author. He’s a scientist and a person who is sort of right at the heart of searching for techno signatures in the universe, trying to find evidence of alien civilizations beyond Earth. He’s got a new book called The Little Book of Aliens. And it really sort of covers the history of the search for aliens. Uh various ideas that people have and what the future might hold for our search for other life of any kind in the universe. So enjoy this interview with Dr. Adam Frank. Adam, when did we first wonder about aliens? Like when did that occur to us? Yeah. Uh a long long time ago. Um it’s really one of the oldest questions you can see humanity sort of arguing about. Um and in fact formally you can see the Greeks uh yelling at each other. Uh Aristotle had the opinion that the earth was unique particularly because he thought the earth was the center of the universe. But then Democrus and the um atomists held the position that the universe was made out of atoms and atoms were universal. Therefore there should be other planets with other life on them. So literally people have been arguing about this for 2,500 years. Occasionally they’ve burnt each other at the stake over it. So it’s been an issue that can get heated, no pun intended, or maybe a puns intended, but it’s a really it’s an ancient ancient human question. But like our modern conception of other planets around other stars with life forms existing, like when did that start to sort of creep into our collective consciousness, do you think? Yeah, that’s a good question and that you know it’s funny after my you know sort of 30 years of you know doing astronomy and sort of keeping the question of uh alien life on other planets in the back of my head um it’s only recently that I started to really with these last two books particularly the new book obviously the little book aliens um that I started to really look at the history of it and I think it’s around the 17th century after Newton and people started to get a better idea of how to do the physics of stars the physic at least you know just conceiving them as as other sons even if we didn’t really know what was powering the sun. Um you see like in the in the 16th century there is um a bunch of books that are written often with the title of the many worlds hypothesis or something along those lines where you see people actually thinking about stars and planets going around them and the possibility of life on them. So it’s really 1600s 1700s is you you get a birth of new what we might call alien uh optimism that there is the possibility of life out there. So uh that and that that you know maintains until you get to evolution the theory of evolution and then people start asking well is life really going to form on these other worlds and what’s remarkable is actually by the 1900 by the early 1900s because people thought astronomers thought that planets were going to be difficult to form people were pretty pessimistic about the possibility of life in the universe. Do people fundamentally misunderstand the Fermy paradox like what Fermy was really getting at? I I think well there’s you know what as I talk about in the book there’s really two different Fermy paradoxes and they get deployed in different ways. The first Fermy paradox is the one I think he actually meant when he was, you know, talking over lunch and suddenly, you know, blurted out where are they? And what Fermy realized that day was that even if you had a space fairing race that was moving at a tenth of the speed of light, could travel between the stars at a tenth of the speed of light, that they would be able to cover the entire galaxy, basically settle every world in the galaxy in a very short time scale relative to the history of the galaxy. So that’s what we call the direct firmy paradox. But the one that people get confused about is what we, you know, what I call the indirect firmy paradox. People have this idea that like every night astronomers are pointing their radio telescopes at the stars and searching for life and that we’ve never found any. That that we’ve done some kind of extensive search for signals of aliens and we’ve never found them. And that is completely wrong. And the and the reason it’s completely wrong is so mundane is that there’s never been any money to do those searches. So very little searching has been done. Um so that that’s really the that that’s the the problem with that one. So people think that we’ve searched and we haven’t looked and the qu the reality is we’ve never really really searched. Do you think that that Fermy understood how feasible it would be for an advanced civilization to settle the galaxy? You know what’s interesting about the Fermy paradox is probably Fermy never thought about it again after that lunch conversation. Yeah. Right. Um it was really heart in 1975. So this idea of the firmy paradox kind of floated around people you know were it was it was very much in the gray literature as we call it but then it was um Hart uh who in the 1975 who wrote a paper that sort of formalized the Fermy paradox as a paradox and Hart used it you know the logic of Hart’s uh reasoning uh which I describe in the book goes basically that look uh if in there’s so many stars there should be lots of intelligent life If even one of those species uh was able to propagate, you know, was able to travel through the universe, then they should have covered the entire univer or the entire galaxy by now and we don’t see anybody here. Therefore, there’s no other intelligent life. Like that was the b way he based his logic. So he certainly thought uh that it was possible to colonize to settle other worlds that uh and then there’s this idea of the Vonoyman probes that you know maybe it’s machines that are doing this. It doesn’t have to be biological critters. It could be just automated probes that are hopping from one uh solar system to the other consuming resources to build the next version of themselves and then hopping to the next solar system. So I think the people other people thought about this more uh more generally and you know the the Fermy parad that the direct fermy paradox does have some issues about it and we’ve written some papers I think you and I even talked about it one time um some of the paper that we did but it’s really the indirect firmy paradox that I think is the one that people misunderstand most of all because we’re just about ready to really search for life like now there’s finally funding and there’s a community and we have you know it’s not SEI anymore I don’t even really want to use that term SEI anymore because to me That refers to a one part of of what I would call technos signature science. That heart paper lives rentree in my brain for sure. That that is really his those arguments are devastating. Yeah. Yeah. And so like if if if there was a counterfactual and the aliens were inhabiting the cosmos, what would that look like? What would we see a as for a bustling cosmos? Uh we would probably see uh well that’s it’s that’s a really interesting question that we can ask like if there were a b you know if there really was life or many places then a would we expect to already be colonized? you know, would we expect to have would should we should we find ancient monuments or something ancient, you know, let’s um uh or should they be here right now, which of course if you’re into UFOs, you say they are here right now. Um so just a couple points on that. So as we discussed you that paper that we wrote a few years back where we simulated the the settlement of the of the galaxy we found that you there’s one question of how long it takes to to settle the solar system but then there’s the question of the steady state like once you’ve settled the whole or not the solar system the galaxy once you’ve settled the galaxy then what happens if every settlement has a finite lifetime which you know settlements nothing lasts forever right then you can end up big holes. You can have regions die off and they can remain unsettled for millions, hundreds of millions of years. That’s what we found. So, it’s possible that we’re living in a bubble that that you know, one way out of the Fermy paradox is we’re living in one of those unsettled bubbles and eventually they’ll come through again. You know, there might have been one here billions of years ago. And as we showed in that paper with Gavin Schmidt, there’s no way to tell if there was a civilization, a technological civilization here uh on Earth a billion years ago that may that lasted 10,000 100,000 years, all evidence would be gone. So that’s an important point when thinking about that the direct Fermy paradox. So to your question, what would it look like? That’s an interesting let’s assume that we live in one of these bubbles. So that’s why there’s no one here right now. Would we be able to tell that the the galaxy was bustling? um you might try and look for their communication signals. They’re, you know, you what you’re going to want to look for are inadvertent um uh indications that they exist. So, you know, maybe they’re using radio uh to communicate and maybe we’d be able to pick up their signals. Um maybe they’re using tight beam laser because that’s actually probably the best way to really communicate across, you know, large distances even across solar systems. Um cuz it you know radio if you’re beaming it out w to you know wide uh widely you have so much you need so much power to be able to still be heard a long way away. Uh so we might be able to pick up those kinds of things. We might be able to see their drives the propulsion whatever they’re using if they’re using these giant phased uh laser arrays to push solar panel or or light sails around. We might be able to see that. But it’s also possible that with the technology we have right now that we’re not sensitive enough to detect that. So it’s possible they could be everywhere except here. Uh but we don’t yet have the uh capacity to find it. But of course we are developing that technology so quickly that in 10 20 30 years maybe we would be able to detect a drive plume. But it’s been theorized that that the universe was habitable from about say 6 billion years ago. And so alien civil, you know, advanced civilizations have had a 6 1/2 billion year head start on us. So if there is a vibrant civilization, vibrant multiple civilizations of aliens in the cosmos and they are reaching, you know, they’ve had billions of years of technological progress to turn what is a wilderness of the cosmos into, you know, the the I guess the cosmos equivalent of a of a city, whatever is the end state of of settlement. What would that look like? Yeah. God, that’s cool. The the question though, but that so there there’s there’s a bunch of sub questions there that, you know, we take on in in in in my research group, we take on quite a bit and in the book I really try and unpack which is can you even have a contiguous civilization for billions of years? Right? So we we sort of have this assumption that civilizations, you know, become advanced and then somehow they’re they’re eternal. Um, and that part I really wonder about that that whether or not you can hold a single culture, right? Whatever civilization they’re going to have is is going to have some kind of culture, whatever version of that. And for billions of years, could you would it be one civilization or would it be a series that rise and fall Allah Isaac Azimov’s foundation? Um, yeah. Or or think about Baghdad, right? Like how many people have have set up in that region and built city after city on the bones of the previous city. Right. Right. And that’s exactly what I wonder about whether or not I mean a fully settled galaxy, something like, you know, in in in Foundation, you know, where Trantor is the imperial capital. Uh then yes, you would expect all all of these worlds to have been to have settlements on them or at least the ones that are economically viable, the ones that you can do something with. You probably are not going to settle on worlds where uh there’s nothing for you to do. Uh you know, life life the most important requirement of life is to keep on living. So these worlds have to be useful to them in what ways? And so this also raises the question of would they even after if a civilization lasts millions and it’s advanced would it even be biological anymore right would they even you know and if they’re not biological if they become uh um you know siliconbased or even if not they could become silicon based either by downloading their consciousness into that I’m not sure that’s possible or they just somebody creates AI and that’s what takes over would they even need planets anymore so That’s what’s so interesting about this question and again this is the kind of stuff I try and deal with in the book so people can see that when you start really thinking about this you got to push your imagination past you know science fiction is great because science fiction can really help us imagine the alternatives but it’s almost like you have to formalize the ideas in science fiction and systematize them to be able to evaluate which ones are more probable than others and what the physics consequences the physics biology uh consequence quences are of the different alternatives. So the idea that they’re for example that they’re only between the stars, they become they’re basically silicon and they’re only traveling between the stars. Would we have any indication that they existed if they never landed planet side? So these are you know these are the kind of questions we try and ask in my research group and the kinds of things I’m trying to explain to people in the book. I mean when we if you like take a car into a place like New York City that is a part of planet Earth that has been utterly reshaped to meet the needs of the civilization that lives there. What does that look like? Yeah. Now that’s interesting. So this is this idea this leads us to techno signatures, right? that that a a world that has been reshaped by its or not just a world like the everything a galaxy an entire the whole galaxy what what would a what would a galaxy modified for the needs of the advanced civilization it would you think would be something we could see what would we see well we might see Dyson spheres it might be that like some very large number of those stars have been harvested right that they have had um uh solar you know some kind of solar collector around them either Dyson spheres or Dyson swarms and for for your listeners who don’t know a Dyson sphere was this idea that came that Freeman Dyson came up with in 1960 very early on when he recognized that as a civilization progresses it’s going to need more energy and the best energy source that you had natural energy source that you have is a star. So perhaps advanced civilizations cover their stars or at least build spheres around these stars, the interior of which is covered with solar collectors of some form. So it so uh the idea of a of a civilization covering, you know, harvesting all of its stars energy. You can extrapolate to the next level and imagine a civilization that has access to all of its galaxies stars. So in that case you might see a galaxy that is luminous in infrared light uh without starlight without the visible starlight because these Dyson swarms are all the second law of thermodynamics tells us you can’t harvest energy without some consequence and that would be uh waste heat waste uh and which would mean glowing in the infrared. So that would be a possible uh consequence. And people like Jason Wright and others have been looking for uh uh Dyson spheres, the infrared signatures of Dyson spheres. And it’s interesting like with with Jason’s latest paper, he kind of dismantled the the original expectations of that. You know, the thought is well, it makes sense to build a sphere that is at the orbit of the Earth, but actually that’s not the most energyefficient, massefficient way to do it. In fact, you want to build something small close to the star, be efficient with your materials. And you and and another idea going around was whether you need to have shells that are at different distances harvesting the waste heat from each other. And his calculations were no. So just one tight sphere harvesting as much energy before the thing actually starts to melt, right? And you’re getting the maximum amount of energy out of that star with the minimum amount of matter invested. And like I think about this in my imagination like if a an advanced civilization maybe it’s AI wanted to optimize their reachable universe into whatever form gave them the most value they could possibly do what you know what would that look like right cuz then you’re moving stars you are tearing stars apart you are feeding stars to black holes to get the most efficient outcome uh you are using computing substrate at whatever is the right distance. You are moving planets to pack them into habitable zones. Like that seems dramatic in the way that flying to space on Earth, you look down at night and you’re like, “Okay, I see city lights.” Right. Right. It’s hard to miss. Yeah. And that’s the thing that kind that level of astroengineering uh is is extraordinary and how the degree to which any civilization reaches that. But I don’t think necessarily that we have to go there or you know I mean because one of the things that we have to do in the field is as I said try and systematize what the trajectories of civilizations are and that means you have to sort of lay out all the possibilities of technology and technological development and then what the consequences of those would be as well as the some sense of the social forms that would uh um that might mitigate that because it’s not clear that everybody would want to do that that would you know that we have this sense we live in this very interesting brief moment of human history where we’ve had this amazing acceleration right that that you know we’ve gone from the Wright brothers flying in 1903 to a helicopter on Mars in 2023 but you know most of human history was a much flatter uh development of technology and you can even see that now the fastest somebody could go an average person could go in 19 uh60 60 was about 500 mph on a jet plane. The fastest an average person can go right now is about 500 miles on a jet plane. Technology can definitely stall. So I think we have to be careful about uh this idea that you know it’s going to go on forever that there’s infinite amounts of technological progress which will give us infinite amount of god-like powers. I think it’s possible and that’s one trajectory but another trajectory is that things stall out and you have relatively stable forms of technology that are used to you know astroengineer or populate planets to or that planets have to enter into some kind of sustainable state with their the e with their biospheres. So all of those possibilities are the kinds of things that we have to understand when we try and imagine both the trajectories of civilizations but also what it is we’re looking for because we’re so close now to being able to look for it. I mean we can now JWST is right on the hairy edge of being able to detect say chlorofluorocarbons you know an industrial chemical in you know a trap on one of those trappist planets but I mean isn’t this kind of cognitive dissonance because like on the one hand let’s say the aliens have had a 6 billion year head start on us and then on the other hand we don’t see we clearly don’t see the evidence of them reshaping the universe at the vastest scale and then you say well be but maybe people don’t want to do do that. But then you say, “Well, but maybe the grabby aliens always want to.” And you go back and forth. And it feels to me like the universe that we see is whatever the universe can be at maximum. That we’ve reached our max. We’ve had 6 billion years. We’ve reached our maximalist state right now. We’ve seen whatever is possible in the same way that we have seen essentially the maximum amount of the spread of life on Earth. The Earth life’s everywhere. It’s it’s in the bottom of 10 km bore holes. It’s it’s trapped under the ice in Antarctica. It’s floating 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. It’s in every extreme environment that’s possible. Life has found a way to get in there and and exploit whatever it can, right? And and and so like on the one hand we say, “Well, we don’t see that. So maybe, you know, they just haven’t gotten around it and whatever.” And then on the other hand, people say, “Well, we sure can.” Like there’s no reason why we can’t. I let’s build our warp drives and let’s get on it. But it feels like like whatever is possible for us in the universe has already been tried and that’s our future. Yeah. I don’t I don’t think I you know that that doesn’t resonate with me a lot just because also the big assumption there is civilizations la civilizations last contiguously for billions of years. That’s the thing I’m probably most suspicious of. Um I think that that civil I don’t it’s not clear to me that you can get civilizations lasting for such long times and that there is this infinite uh expansion of technologies that there may really you know we already know like with the speed of light right the speed you know it’s it’s entirely possible that there’s no warp drive like sorry warp drives are just not possible we’d all like them to be possible but they’re just not and you think about that think about what that actually implies let’s just take that if warp drives are if you’re stuck with the speed of light then it’s actually becomes and and your biology is such that you don’t last for thousands of years then suddenly even even smallcale interstellar civilizations become very difficult and so this is something I really unpacked in the book because I found it really fascinating how do you have diplomacy when it takes a hundred years you know if it’s just you and a and a star that’s 100 light years away that’s your that’s the you know you have three star say you have three planetary systems 100 lighty years away every interaction ction takes 200 years. You send him a message like, “Hey, how you doing?” You know, 200 years later, good. You know, so it’s like the idea of a civilization that could marshall its forces that could um bind itself together to to to carry out activities together becomes really difficult to imagine how that might happen. So that’s why the thing that the reason why that doesn’t resonate with me so much, this the idea that you’re you’re uh asking for, though it’s entirely possible, right? because we could talk about the ways it would be possible, but is that I really question what it means to be a longived civilization and and I’m not sure you get one longived civilization and whether or not you can really have interstellar truly interstellar civiliz everybody’s a one-off a planet oneoff you know but you look at a place like London you know before it was London it was Londinium and before that it was a settlement like it’s a useful place people have been improving it as a location and then various civilizations have been using that improved location over time. So you may not get one continuous civilization, but you are at least getting an imp overall improvement of the environment or a changing of the environment by these these people. So I mean for me it it feels like there must be some fundamental reason that we haven’t discovered yet why expanding beyond our star system makes sense. And like the arguments that people make about like in the future you’re going to turn all of Jupiter into Computronium and you’re going to, you know, and then in fact it’s the lag that kills you. Like as soon as you have to spend a second of lag that’s, you know, then the alien supercomputers are going to be losing on their online gaming and they’re not going to stand for that. And so they’re just not going to want to to build any kind of compute substrate that that has ping times that are just too long. they they’re not willing to leave the system because like who wants the lag? That’s that’s terrible. That that that feels to me like a reasonable explanation that that everyone will always realize that it’s actually best to stay home. Yeah. And I think that’s you know and I can see that happening on different levels. It’s best to stay home because really leaving home is super expensive and very difficult and you know you lose contact with them almost immediately, right? they they you send a century ship to um Alpha Centuri or whatever and they start a civilization and then that civilizations drift. They become very different from each other. So it’s not like you’re you know the um the the United Colonies or the United Planet, United Federation of Planets. each one becomes its own separate thing and has its own separate uh so I think that that’s in I consider that to be a real possibility that um it’s just so you know um um interstellar travel may just be really difficult so you may have you know the whole galaxy may be full of civilizations but they’re not interstellar civilizations they’re interplanetary like you look at our own our own future right the next should we make it through climate change and all the other things that we have to deal with I can imagine the every nook and cranny of the solar system being inhabited, right? We wrote this paper a little while ago asking about could you take asteroids and spin them up and and then live on the inside of them. So, you know, that’s I think that’s entirely feasible and that’s something that may be possible in a few hundred years. But so, so you can imagine that solar systems get completely inhabited and there’s lots of ways to find evidence techno signatures from from solar system engineering. Uh there’s an idea that we’ve been exploring called service worlds that you know if you want to harvest a lot of energy don’t put don’t cover half the earth with solar panels cover the moon with sever solar panels because you’re not using the moon right or that’s where you put your dangerous u industry and such. So you know there may every every civiliz every every um system that has a technological civilization go look at the planets that or the moons that that you know those are the ones to focus on. That’s where the industry is going to be. So I can it’s it’s easier for me to conceive of lots and lots of solar systems than that are each h inhabited then and then a galactic empire. We’ve already found the best planet in the universe for us earth. You mean that earth is earth is yeah well no I think there’s probably I mean I wouldn’t imagine I people talk about these sort of super earth or super habitability. So I’m not sure that we we found the best one for us, right? Yes. Uh yeah. And we just recently wrote a paper Amado and I just wrote a paper about oxygen that maybe you know for technology you really need an oxygen-rich atmosphere because without it you’re not going to be able to have combustion and without combustion how do you get that was a really interesting paper. I I love that kind of thing where you just someone just like, “Well, what about this?” And you’re like, “Oh, yeah.” Yeah. You know, the octopuses are going to have a hard time starting fire underwater. That’s right. Right. Water worlds. So, that’s what’s I mean, I can imagine a universe that is full of life, that is teeming with life, where, you know, every, you know, every liquid moon, you know, every Europa has intelligent squids doing intelligent squid things. but that we don’t have that the interstellar travel may be the really hard part and that’s isolated and that’s difficult but that life is popping up everywhere. Yeah. They’re they’re banging the rocks together and just nothing, no spark. Um so now you referenced this earlier on. You said, you know, people are thinking that maybe the people who believe in UFOs think that aliens are coming to us and that from Paradox Solved, aliens are coming here all the time. uh and there has been a real resurgence lately in this. Do you think there’s any there there? um at currently there’s no there there in the terms of of actually having data you could use right as um Mike Turner the you know one of the great particle physicists once said to me said you know with a really good scientific project you put a quarter in and you get a dollar out and the problem with UFOs is you put a quarter in and the quarter’s gone right so what we have is we have lots of stories you know often by people who you know there’s you have no reason to think that they’re lying uh or you have fuzzy blob pictures but the problem is none of those can you build a scientific theory that you you can then scaffold the next question. Right? In science you don’t just answer a question be like well we’re done that you know almost immediately your answer to that question becomes the technology that you use to answer the next question. And up to now UFOs the you know has has been a mix of narratives people seeing things fuzzy blob pictures conspiracy theories. Roswell in particular, you know, I have a whole chapter on Roswell. I went and I read the Roswell books and it after a while pretty quickly I was like, “This is a mess, right?” Um, you know, and then hoaxes, pure on hoaxes. And there, you know, Roswell has a few of those. That that very famous 1990s show, uh, Alien Autopsy. Um, I don’t know if you do you remember that one. It was ad, uh, Riker, Commander Riker was the was the narrator, and I was so disappointed in him for that. And that turned out to be a total hoax, right? It was the whole thing was filmed in some guy’s living room in Brixton, England. So, um you know, up to now, I don’t think there’s anything there there. The the narratives about the military has, you know, alien spacecraft in the uh in their garages. We’ve heard this forever, right? So, you know, in the book, I talk about um one of the first reports that came out on UFOs in the ‘ 50s. the the uh the leader of that the military leader of that uh I think it was a I think it was a captain afterwards he published a book you know after I mean after he uh retired he published a book and said there there was this report this top secret report called the estimate of the situation which claimed that aliens were or that UFOs were alien spacecraft no one’s ever found the report like after digging and digging you know the report so it’s like and the problem with this is that if you’re a scientist it just looks like a morass of of speculation and stories that you can’t do anything with. But the difference that’s happening now is I think thanks to the pilots, I think those pilots are who, you know, they’re they’re reporting what they saw. Um that there’s there’s an in there’s the kind of interest in it that may now lead to some real scientific investigation and we’ll see where that leads, right? We want to be that investigation has to be agnostic. Uh and we will see where where it leads. And I personally, you know, if there was good solid data that that linked the, you know, that that had a link between the data and the claim that these things are behaving in ways that no uh human technology can reproduce. I’m open to to changing my mind. That’s the beauty of science is it shows you how to change your mind. But at this point, it’s a, you know, it’s still a mess. And there’s really, there is nothing that out there that would warrant the conclusion that we’re being visited by extraterrestrials right now. With all of this interest both from governments as well as the military as well as NASA perhaps, you know, begrudgingly being brought into this. Um, there’s going to have to be like to get more information, more data. there’s going to have to be increased amounts of transparency, but also potentially new methods of searching. This starts to overlap into some of the other thinking that you’ve had over the years, which is like, you know, here’s some ways to look for stuff in the solar system. Here’s some ways to look for ancient civilizations on Earth. So, what do you think would be a productive way to get some serious evidence about the presence of alien civilizations here in the solar system? Yeah, I think that that’s a great question and I have a whole chapter in the book that sort of details, okay, you want to do science on UAPs, here’s what you have to do. And the important thing for that is to, you know, you’re not going to be looking to answer the question, are there aliens on Earth? You’re going to be looking to collect data about UAPs. You’re looking, you’re just looking to collect data and then analyze that data in a way that gives you the ability to uh determine the performance characteristics, right? And then from that, you’re going to have to then try and draw conclusions about is this human technology, is this not human technology. So, what you’re, you know, there’s really three options. You can build uh groundbased sensors looking up. You can put satellites that look down and you can also mount things on uh aircraft and maybe you want to do all three. Uh but the important thing and that people really especially in the UFO community often don’t understand is that unless you have fully characterized the instruments, you don’t know what you’re getting. Right? This is the problem with the radars, the military radars, is that you know unless I know when was the last time that radar was uh refurbished, what’s I need the entire history of the thing. I really need I need the machine itself and I need to have built it myself or else I just can’t trust it. And this is exactly what we do in astronomy, right? The J James Webb Space Telescope, we understand everything about its behavior. We understand how it responds to infrared light when the telescope is at 20° and we understand how it responds to infrared light when it’s at 80°, right? We know everything about it. That’s the only way that we can link the data. We can be sure of the data and that we can then link the data to a claim or a conclusion. And UFOs are no different. It’s not like UFOs get a pass on this. And so we’ll need to build those kinds of instruments uh and deploy them. And I think that’s probably going to be coming soon. I think, you know, the public is interested in this. And so, you know, we’ll we’ll do that work. We may learn some really interesting things even if we don’t learn anything about uh life in the universe. Um but that’s the only really way to do it. And the important thing to not notice is that let’s say let’s say we did all that and we found that there were certain objects that were making right-hand turns at Mach 500, right? Something that really, you know, a human powered technology can’t do. Well, what’s the what what do you do now? Like that would be stunning. And what do you do next? Well, the only thing you can do next is more science, right? Because it wouldn’t tell you what it was. It wouldn’t tell you where it was from. It would just tell you like, wow, this thing is behaving in a way that human technology can’t produce. So, you know, like I said, that’s the example of good science, right? You put a quarter in and now a dollar comes out. You did this, you found something extraordinary, which would be mind-blowing, but then that, you know, you don’t stop there because you still wouldn’t know what it was. And, you know, then you have to ask, do I try and shoot one down? You know, do I try and capture it? Uh, you know, or do I just keep trying to do, you know, now I develop the next level of sensors that can, you know, tell me the next level of detail about it. When you talk about life in the universe and one of the possibilities is that we are alone but for most people that is like emotionally they literally just can’t wrap their heads around that. Um how do you think it might be reasonable to think that we are actually alone and or like why do you think people get that response? Uh well, I think it, you know, it’s entirely I I’m an alien optimist and and I want to also note for me it’s just as profound if we found a biosphere, a microbial biosphere on an alien world as if we find a civilization. Like I don’t really care, you know, cuz either way it’s profound because the thing is is that uh um life is so different from non-life. like, you know, living systems are so entirely different that we just want to know whether or not life itself is is an accident. You know, that it only happened here and that’s it, right? Cuz that that would be a stunning stunning possibility and and kind of weird and depressing in a lot of ways. Um so if we just found one example of life elsewhere even if it was just microbial that would actually if we find one example then there’s probably other example means we’re not an accident and there’s probably other examples even if they’re you know in other galaxies or whatever but it and because life is so creative then to me all bets are off that you know who knows where somewhere life has done amazing things. Um, but let’s say even that’s not possible. Let’s say that we really are an accident. That would be stunning. That would really be I, you know, and I think I I you know, I would have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. Um, if we searched and searched like obviously, you know, you kind you’re not going to be able to conclude that in 30 years, but let’s say we had 500 years of searching and we simply never found any evidence of any other biospheres, of any other uh activity, any other life anywhere else. Um you know on the one hand it would mean that we would really need to cherish like I I think ethically it would change everything that you know the killing of like on some level everybody needs to become a vegetarian from that point onward right because that means life is so rare and so sacred and so important that we have to do everything we possibly can to maintain it and then you know in some sense interstellar travel or the the settlement of other worlds I think becomes imperative to spread life if we’re the only life there is. You know, I take it as life is a good life is important. Uh I would say that you know then you know uh yeah everybody the conclusions everybody has to be a vegetarian and we absolutely have to start settling the stars. Yeah. I say trees are better than rocks, right? Yeah. Yeah. And and it and and that if we are truly alone then boy did we mess up. Did we mess up if we didn’t get off this planet and ensure that life could spread across the universe? Right. Right. You know, the way I’ve always looked at when people talk about settling Mars or settling the solar system, you know, some people have this idea that it’s unethical to, you know, to settle Mars. I really disagree with that. I mean, um, I mean, obviously, if there’s life on Mars, then we have to be super careful. But, you know, it’s not us settling Mars. It’s not human beings settling Mars. It’s the biosphere. It’s Earth biosphere. We’re the agent of the biosphere that’s going to be sending a green tendril out to Mars to expand it. So, you know, the whole history, as you pointed out, the whole history of Earth’s biosphere is just covering everywhere, getting any any nook and cranny on the planet life has spread to, and we should see the rest of the planets. That’s exactly, you know, we’re just the we’re just the agents of the biosphere for that. There have been proposed dozens of ways to search for techno signatures and you’ve been involved in many of the meetings that have helped figure out those ideas. There’s some master list kicking around that I really want to get my hands on, but apparently it’s not ready yet. Yes, it’s not ready yet. Yeah, but it will be soon, I think. Please send it to me when it’s ready. Uh what what do you think best bang for the buck? If you had to go all in on one technique, where would you invest? If you had to push all the chips in, what would be the single technique that you think could give us the best bang for the buck? Well, I really think it’s it’s it’s atmospheric techno signatures. It’s things associated with looking at planets, right? Because the great thing about atmospheric tech and you know atmospheric is one particular find, but I would I would say planetary, right? looking for in that first famous meeting in 2018, uh, what I called metabolic te techno signatures, techno signatures associated with a, um, with a civilization just going about its business, right? Because in the early days of SETI, because of the requirements of radio uh uh messaging or radio technology, what you really required was somebody sending you a message, somebody pointing at you with a big radio telescope and pumping lots of energy into a message or a beacon, maybe it’s not even a message, you know, aimed at somebody. And that never really made a whole lot of sense to me. It’s the it was the only thing they could do. So it was brilliant and it was pro, you know, provocative work, but I think it’s much better just to go find aliens doing what aliens are doing. And so that requires looking at planets and that’s what we can do now. We can look at alien planets, which is where aliens are probably going to live. Um, and just look for them going about their civilizationing business. So go ahead. Do they know we’re here? Uh, they probably could. they, you know, I mean, certainly if you were looking at, if you had telescopes that of the kind that we’re getting soon, like even with JWST, uh, you could, you would know that Earth has had a biosphere for billions of years. Earth would have been Earth has been recognizable as a habitable or as excuse me as an inhabited planet for a long long time. And for the last Yeah. 100 years or so. If you’re within a 100 light years, you’re you can see that uh we’re ch we’ve been changing the planet. We’ve been we’ve been adding techno signatures to the planet and there are tens of thousands of stars within 100 lighty years of us like it’s uh I think that number is pretty good. Yeah, it has 60,000 I forget the number exactly. Um yeah, so there are definitely there’s there’s there’s worlds that have you know that are within the range to see like oh oh yeah, look the city lights the back, you know, the back side of the planet is lighting up. Oh, okay. You know, if we get an email from the aliens, should we open it? That isn’t it? You know, yeah, we should open it up, but I’m not sure we should respond, right? I mean, you know, that should we even open it? Like, why? Cuz you think there’s a virus in it or something that uh in like what’s the easiest way to to deal with a potential rival? Send them instructions for a machine that will destroy their planet. Will destroy them? Yeah, I think we should open it up. We should definitely I mean I don’t think I there’s no way we could not open it up, right? We’re just too curious. Yeah, that’s what they’re real We’d have to be real careful about um about what we did with it. Yeah. I wouldn’t sure you know I mean like it’s like you know getting email, right? You know, but is what’s attached to it? Right. That’s the Do we open the attachment that maybe Yeah. Do we open the attachment? Yeah. Yeah. Um you know, this goes to that whole the dark forest hypothesis which I take seriously. I think I you know I I I’m not a big fan of medi for that reason. I think we should really be careful about because you know it’s one thing to say yes we are visible. Um but you know there’s lots of planets in this or lots of stars in the sky. It’s not clear that anybody’s looking for us directly or that’s different from sending a giant or putting up a giant flashlight or sending up a flare to announce your presence where you really tell everybody hey look hey everyone we’re here. Um I think that’s something that we should be careful about because we often have this idea that like oh aliens they’re peaceful they’re wonderful but uh that’s anybody’s guess. I mean it’s not clear you know intelligence may be associated with being a predator right that’s certainly for us it’s been you know being it’s the predatory species that are the most intelligent often. So yeah I think one one should be careful there could be wolves among the stars. A hippopotamus isn’t a predator. It will mess you up. So that’s a good point too. Yes. Great. Large grazing civilizations might also have their own problems that we need to deal with. Yeah. Yeah. I think about that. Um do you think they’ll look like us? No. No. And that’s one of the things. So that’s why especially with the you know in the book in writing the book I want I was really also aiming at people in the UFO community because I get why people you know why people who are I get why you know whether you’re in the UFO community are just really interested. I get it. Look, my whole life is about, you know, studying life in the universe. It’s super exciting, but you know, you always have to engage in the science because the science has a lot to tell you, right? And so this idea that the grays, you know, the little the little humanoid looking aliens, when you look at evolution, and we know a lot about evolution, it’s really really hard to imagine that on another planet, you would get all the accidents because, you know, evolution is a battle between um convergence and contingency. Convergence says, look, yeah, if there’s air, you know, if you’re living on a planet with an atmosphere, you’re going to get some version of wings. Wings are a great way of, you know, some evolution will stumble on wings, but it doesn’t tell you what the wings are going to look like or how many wings or what version, you know, we’re just talking about surfaces, surfaces that air can flow over. So the idea that you’re going to get So that’s that’s convergence and contingency are all the accidents, all just the, you know, a snail is sliding along and then a rock rolls over it and it dies and that’s the end of that lineage. Uh so the idea that you’re going to get all the accidents that you need to reproduce a head on shoulders with arms, you know, two arms and two legs, it’s just not going to happen or it’ be it’s so improbable that you would get this kind of configuration. You know, the problem with that view is it doesn’t do nature service. Look at all the insane varieties of life we have where everybody comes from the same last common ancestor. If you start off with a different lineage of an entirely different lineage of life, you know, it’s just not going to look like like us. So, I would I would put a lot of money down that not only are we the only humans, we’re the only humanoids. Um, and we should expect to be if we find when we actually find aliens and get to, you know, meet them, we should expect to be um surprised and and grossed out probably, but also like we’ll get it. Like I think we see that alien and we go, “Oh, I get it.” Right? That we’ll we’ll see them and it’ll make sense. Like we’ll know we’ll they have a way of seeing the electromagnetic spectrum. They have a way of of encountering sound waves. They have a way of of interacting with their environment, manipulating their environment. And we also know, you know, if we know where they came from, then they’re how they function will makes be apparent to us. We go like, “Oh, I get it.” Like I I never imagined it, but I get it. That’s exactly what it is. like definitely you you know life will be constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry and the logic of Darwinian evolution right I think those things those are all going to be universal but the p you already just look on earth and you look at the path that can take you know it’s there’s an infinite amount of variety nature is so much more creative than we are and um it’s kind of obsessed with crabs though does lot a lot of walking sideways right a lot of a lot of tentacles too um but uh Um, you know, it’s been said that if you even even if with Earth, if you went back a few billion years and rewound, you know, reround the tape and reran it, Earth’s evolution, not there’s not a single creature, single species alive today that you would that would still be that would be here. It would have just would have had it off in a different direction. There’d be fins, there’d be wings, there’d be legs, but it wouldn’t look anything like what we what we have. So, Adam, what are you obsessed with right now? Uh, Starfield, the video game. Have you played No Man’s Sky? Uh, no I haven’t. I played it when it first came out when it was not that so much better now. So there’s like Elite Dangerous Dangerous for So Elite Dangerous I played for a long time. But um I’m really I’m really digging. It took me a while to get into Starfield, but I’m really digging it. But that’s not I don’t think that’s the question you’re asking. I’m I I find that a perfectly satisfying answer. But no, I was interested. So like you know I want a sneak preview of what paper you’re working on next is my sneaky way of asking this question. Yeah. Yeah. So the so on one one whole field I’m been taking on or working in is the idea of just what is life like what separates living things from non-living things. So we got a grant recently um from the Templeton Foundation to study what’s called semantic information. So look at let’s look at life from you know this is um like Sarah Walker’s perspective. I saw people just like yesterday about this two years ago cuz our paper our paper just came out and then today I have something in um uh I wrote I wrote a piece on it for big think. Okay. So uh the idea that like you know you want to look at life not as a thing but as a process and information is the most what really separates this the idea is what really separates living from non-living systems is the the use of information. So black holes have information but they don’t use it. They don’t process it for any of their own ends. They hoard it. That’s a big That’s a So, we published our first paper just came out yesterday. Okay. That’s the one that I saw. I didn’t real I didn’t notice your name on it, but I didn’t look it carefully. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a really exciting It’s just a first step. We’re just, you know, sussing out this idea of we’re using um um a paper by Colchesky and Walpert from 2018 where they formulated the idea of a theory of semantic information and now we’re starting to apply it. So, that I’m really interested in. Um, we’re also working on a paper to ask, this is a great question about techno signatures. How long will the lunar lander be visible on the moon surface? In other words, if somebody came a billion years ago and, you know, dropped like maybe a big monolith or something on the moon, how long till just micrometeorites, it’s called gardening, that’s what they call it, gardening, would just wear it away. So, you know, for solar system, we’re just doing those calculations now. How long would something last? Um, so, uh, that’s another project that I’m working on. Do you think that, you know, your Silaran hypothesis about Earth, the math is different on the moon where we don’t have the same kinds of of weathering that’s happening on the moon? Cuz I’ I’ve, you know, I’ve heard people make the proposal that the best place for us to do a a core sample is on the moon. like dig down a couple, you know, through several hundred meters of regalith, bring it all back home and slowly you’ll get you’ll get a record of every solar flare, every gamay burst, every supernova and in theory every melted monolith. Right. Right. Uh that is exactly right. I mean, right, the earth weathering, you know, you have a few million years before pretty much the whole surface is re, you know, reworked. But on the moon, stuff’s going to sit there forever. So that’s why nobody ever done the calculation. people have done, you know, there’s lots of calculations about weathering of the regalith of the lunar soil, but nobody said, “Okay, put a plate there. Put a metal plate, you know, 3 in thick, um, and ask how long is that going to be there before it’s sort of broken apart so finely that you couldn’t see it.” Cuz people have proposed doing we have all these highresolution maps of the moon. Let’s do machine learning and see if they, you know, have can the machine find anything unusual. The machine has a no problem finding the lander. you know, you can you can give it to a computer and it’ll instantly identify, hey, that’s weird. So, that’s what we’re trying to find out. So, that’s a project that will be coming along. Yeah. And that idea that searching for anomalies like someone did something similar with they fed like the entire dark energy survey database to a machine learning algorithm and said, “Identify all the galaxies that you can and then but also tell us everything you couldn’t identify.” And those are interesting and in and there is boundless to be new things, new kinds of objects that people have never proposed before out there in the universe. It’s just a matter of it’s it’s needed in the haystack. So So the book again, the excuse me, the book again, your book, the book, the book. Did it give you a copy? Oh, there we go. The little book of aliens on sale um October 24th. Uh, it’s, you know, everything you need to know about everything there is to know right now about life in the universe. So, I hope people will be interested in buying it, including UFOs and UAPs, which, you know, I also deal with, you know, trying to look at how how science will look at them. Wonderful. Well, thanks, Adam, for taking the time to chat with me today. And good luck with the book and good luck with uh finding aliens. Great. Thank you. I’ll let you know if we find any. Perfect. Now, I’m going to talk a little bit more about sort of conclusions that I got from this conversation with Adam. But first, I’d like to thank our patrons. Thanks to David Richards, Mark Anstis, Antonio Luffy, Lara, Justin Cable, Vlad Shiplin, George Andrew M. Gross, Jeremy Matter, Josh Schultz, and Jordan Young who support us at the Master of the Universe level, and all of our other supporters on Patreon. I think we’re at a great time where we’ve had all of this speculation about whether or not there are aliens in the universe and it’s been an argument and for a while it was sort of considered something that you just don’t propose to NASA to actually go look for aliens. But in 2018 the dam broke and people started to accept or recognize SETI and just the search for techno signatures in the universe as a legitimate form of scientific study. And there are dozens of ideas that have proposed. We could see time being used on the James Webb Space Telescope to search for bio signatures and techno signatures in the atmospheres of other planetary systems. And so we are now moving into this era where what was before kind of a philosophical question, a the kind of conversation you’d have over beers with your buddies to a proper scientific question. And and of course it’s one of the most fundamental questions that we can possibly ask. Are we alone in the universe with either way that question gets answered, it is important for us. Now I’ve talked to Adam Frank several times in the past about this and other topics. And so I thought if you want to sort of continue the conversation with Adam uh one more recently we talked about that idea that he mentioned about turning asteroids into space habitats that you could take an asteroid spin it up and live on the inside of this Taurus that you’ve got. It’s a fascinating concept and could give us a practical way to live in the solar system. The other interview that I did with him was a few years ago and sort of talking about that idea of how civilizations might spread across the Milky Way. When you consider civilization starting and stopping, could we be living in a just in a gap in the spread of a galaxywide empire? And it’s sort of an interesting conversation. So enjoy both of those interviews here on the channel. All right, thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time.