You Don't Understand The Fermi Paradox

We've been obsessed with aliens for a long time, but it really seems like in recent years the search is getting a lot more serious. We both have practical tools like the James Web Space Telescope, which allows us to search for other worlds' atmospheres. and then there's also kind of an increased attention because of the UAP, you've got NASA, you've got the military, you've got the government investigating our aliens that visit 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? It really is a scientific question that deserves an answer and we will continue searching until we find it.

So my guest today is Dr. Adam Frank. I have interviewed him many times in the past. an author, he is a scientist and a person who is at the center of the search for technological signatures in the universe trying to find evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations beyond Earth. He has a new book called the little book of aliens and it really covers the history of the search for aliens, 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? that occurs to us, yes, a long, long time ago, it's really one of the oldest questions that you can see humanity arguing about it and in fact before you can see the Greeks shouting at each other.

Aristotle had the opinion that the Earth was unique. particularly because I thought the Earth was the center of the universe, but then the democratic atomists and um held the position that the universe was made 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 20,500 years, they've occasionally been burned at the stake for it, so it's been a topic that can get heated no pun intended or maybe pun intended, but it's actually an ancient human question, but like our modern conception of other planets around other stars with existing life forms, when did that start to infiltrate our Collective Consciousness?

Do you think so, that's a good question and you know it's funny after my, you know, 30 years of doing astronomy? It's like keeping the question of extraterrestrial life on other planets in the back of my head. I've only recently started working on these last two books, particularly the new book, obviously, the little alien book. I started really looking. in its history and I think it was around the 17th century after Newton and people started to get a better idea of ​​how to do the physics of stars, the physics at least you know, just thinking of them as other suns, even if you don't.

We really know what powered the sun. You see, in the 16th century, there are a lot of books that are often written with the title of the many-worlds hypothesis or something like that where you see people thinking about the stars and the planets orbiting them and the possibility of life in them, so it's actually the 1600s and 1700s, that's when something new is born, what we might call extraterrestrial, uh, optimism that there is a possibility of life out there, so that and that which you know holds until you get to Evolution, the theory of evolution and then people start to wonder if life is really going to form on these other worlds and what's notable is that actually between 1900 and early 1900 because the People thought that astronomers thought that planets were going to be difficult to form.

People were quite pessimistic about the possibility of life in the universe. Do people fundamentally misinterpret the fery

paradox

as what fmy was really referring to? I think well, you know what, as I talk about in the book, there are actually two different fery

paradox

es and they are implemented. in different ways, fmy's first paradox is the one I think he was actually referring to when he was, you know, talking at lunch and suddenly, you know where they are and what Fery realized that day was that even if you had a space fairing race, that was moving at one tenth the speed of light they could travel between stars at one tenth the speed of light they would be able to cover entire galaxies, basically settle all the worlds in the galaxy on a very short time scale relative to the history of galaxy G, so that's what we call the direct fmy paradox, but what confuses people is what we know, what I call the indirect fmy paradox.

People have the idea that, like every night, astronomers point their radio telescopes at the stars. and looking for life and we have never found any that we have done some kind of exhaustive search for signs of aliens and we have never found them and that is completely wrong and the reason why it is completely wrong is so mundane is that there has never been money for do those searches, so very few consistent searches have been done, so that's really the problem of people thinking that we have searched and we haven't looked and the reality Do you think that fery understood how feasible it would be for an advanced civilization settle in the galaxy?

Know? What's interesting about the ferry. The paradox is that Fery probably never thought about it again after that conversation at lunch. He's right, it was really heart in 1975, so this idea of ​​the fmy paradox floated around people, you know, it was very much in the gray literature, as we call it, but then it was um Hart, uh, in 1975, who wrote a paper that formalized Fery's paradox as a paradox and Hart used it, you know, the logic of Hart's reasoning that I describe in the book is basically that look, if there are so many stars, there should be a lot of intelligent life if even one of those species, uh, was able to spread, you know, was able to travel through the universe, so they should have already covered the entire UN or the entire galaxy and we don't see anyone here, therefore, there is no other intelligent life like that.

The way he based his logic on it, so he certainly thought it was possible to colonize other worlds and then there's this idea of ​​the V Noyman probes, you know, maybe it's machines that are doing this, it doesn't have to be biological bugs. . They could just be automated probes that are jumping from one solar system to another consuming resources to build the next version of themselves and then jumping to the next solar system, so I think people thought about this more generally and you. I know that the fmy direct paradox has some problems with it and we have written a few articles.

I think you and I even talked about it once in some article we did, but it's actually the indirect paradox of steadfastness that I think is the one that people mis

understand

more than anything because we're almost ready to actually pursue life, like If now there was finally funding and there was a community and we know that it is no longer SEI. I don't even want to use it. The term is no longer established because to me that refers to a part of what I would call technological science, that the role of the heart lives on a tree in my brain, surely that is really its own.

Those arguments are devastating, yes, yes, and so, if, if, there was a counterfactual and aliens inhabited the cosmos, what would that look like, how would we see a bustling Cosmos, uh, we would probably see well, it's a really interesting question that we can do if there was a but you know if. there really was life or a lot of places, so we would hope that they were already colonized, you know, we would hope to have it, we should find ancient monuments or something ancient, you know, leave it, or they should be here right now, of course, if you like UFOs, you say that they're here right now, so just a couple of points on that, while we were discussing that paper we wrote a few years ago where we simulated the settlement of this galaxy, we discovered that there is a question. of how long it takes to settle in the solar system, but then there's the question of the steady state, like once the entire solar system has settled or not, the galaxy, once the galaxy has settled, what happens if each settlement has settled? a finite life where you know, nothing settlements last forever, so you can end up with big holes, you can cause regions to die and they can remain unstable for millions, hundreds of millions of years, that's what we found, so that we may be living in a bubble that you know, one way out of the fmy paradox is that we are living in one of those unstable bubbles and eventually they will come out again, you know there could have been one here billions of years ago and as we showed in that article with Gavin Schmidt there is no way to know if there was a civilization, a technological civilization here, on Earth, a billion years ago, that could have lasted 10,000 100,000 years.

All the evidence would disappear, so that's an important point when thinking about the direct fmy paradox. So to your question, what would it look like? It's interesting, let's say we live in one of these bubbles, so there's no one here right now. Could we say that the galaxy was full? You could try searching. their communication signals there, you know, what you want to look for are inadvertent indications that they exist, so you know maybe they're using the radio to communicate and maybe we can pick up their signals. maybe they're using narrow beam laser CU, which is actually probably the best way to really communicate across great distances, even across solar systems, um, because you know radio, if you transmit it towards W, you know it's very spacious, you have a lot. it takes so much power to be able to still be heard a long way away, uh, so we could pick up that kind of thing, we could see their impulses, the propulsion, whatever they're using, if they're using these.

Giant phased laser arrays to push the solar panel or illuminate Sals around, it is possible that we can see it, but it is also possible that with the technology we have now we are not sensitive enough to detect it, so it is possible that they are everywhere parts. except here, but we don't have the ability to find it yet, but of course we are developing that technology so fast that in 10, 20, 30 years maybe we will be able to detect a column of momentum, but it has been theorized that the Universe was habitable since about 6 billion years ago, so the alien civilization, you know, the advanced civilization has had a 6.5 billion year head start on us, so if there is one vibrant civilization, multiple vibrant civilizations of extraterrestrials in the cosmos and they're coming, you know I've had billions of years of technological progress to turn what is a desert of the cosmos into you know, I guess the cosmos equivalent of a city, whatever the final state of the settlement is, what that would look like.

Yes, God, that's great. However, the question is, but there are a lot of sub-questions that, you know, we address in my research group, we address quite a bit and in the book I really try to unravel, can you even have one? contiguous civilization for billions of years, so we have this assumption that the civilizations you know become Advanced and then somehow they are Eternal um and that part I really wonder whether or not you can have a single culture, whatever the Whatever civilization you're going to have, it's going to have some kind of culture, whatever version of that is, and over billions of years, could you be a civilization or a series that goes up and down?

Allah Isaac aov Foundation, yes. or think about Baghdad, like how many people have settled in that region and built city after city on the bones of the previous city, and that's exactly what I'm wondering, whether or not I'm talking about a fully settled galaxy, something like you. You know in the Foundation, you know that where Tranor is the imperial capital, so yes, you would expect all of these worlds to have settlements, at least the ones that are economically viable, the ones that you can probably do something with. You are not going to settle for worlds where there is nothing you can do, you know, life, life, the most important requirement of life is to continue living, so these worlds have to be useful to you in many ways and this also raises the question.

Would they do it even later if a civilization lasts millions and is advanced? Would it still be biological? either downloading their Consciousness into it, I'm not sure that's possible or someone just creates Ai and that's what takes over, would they need more planets? That's what's interesting about this question and, again, this is the kind of thing that I try and cover in the book so that people can see that when you start to really think about this you have to take your imagination further. 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 are the physical consequences, the physical, biological consequences, uh, of the different Alternatives, then the ideathat there, for example, they are only between the Stars becomes They are basically silicon and only travel between the stars.

Would we have any indication that they existed if they existed? I never landed on Planet Side, so these are, you know, these are the kinds of questions that we try to ask in my research group and the kinds of things that I try to explain to people in the book, I mean when, if you like, we took a car. a place like New York City that is part of planet Earth that has been completely reshaped to meet the needs of the civilization that lives there, what does that look like, yeah, that's interesting, so this is this idea that takes us to techno brands, right? that a world that has been reshaped by its or not just a world like everything something a galaxy a whole G the whole galaxy what would be a galaxy modified for the needs of advanced civilization?

Do you think that would be something we could see? What would we see? Well, we could see Dyson spheres. It could be that, like a lot of those stars, they were properly collected and had solar energy, you know, some kind of solar collector around them, either Dyson spheres or Dyson swarms, and by His listeners that they don't You know a Dyson Sphere was this idea that Freeman Dyson came up with in 1960 very early when he recognized that as a civilization progresses it will need more energy and the best source of energy than the natural energy source. what you have is a star, so maybe advanced civilizations cover their stars or at least build spheres around these stars, the inside of which is covered with solar collectors in some way, so the idea of ​​a civilization that covers, you know, collect all the energy from your stars you can extrapolate to the next level and imagine a civilization that has access to all of your galactic stars, so in that case you could see a luminous galaxy in infrared light, uh, without starlight, without visible light because these dice and swarms are all the second laws of thermodynamics that tell us that you cannot harvest energy without some consequence and it would be a waste of heat, which would mean glowing in the infrared, so that would be a possible consequence and people like Jason Wright and others have been looking at uh uh Dyson spheres the infrared signatures of Dyson spheres is interesting as with Jason's latest article he dismantled the original expectations that you know the idea is good it makes sense to build a sphere that is in the orbit of the Earth, but in reality that is not the most energy and mass efficient way to do it;

In fact, you want to build something small near the star, be efficient with your materials and you and another idea you thought about was whether you need to have layers that are at different distances collecting heat from the waist from each other and your calculations were not just a tight sphere collecting as much energy before the thing really starts to melt and you're getting the maximum amount of energy from that star with the minimum amount. of inverted matter and I think about this in my imagination, like if an advanced civilization, maybe AI wanted to optimize their accessible Universe in whatever way that gave them the most value, they could do what they know, what would that look good because then you're moving stars, you're smashing stars, you're feeding stars black holes to get the most efficient result, you're using a computing substrate or what's the right distance, you're moving planets to pack them into habitable zones like that, it looks dramatic.

In the same way that flying into space on Earth you look down at night and say, "Okay, I see the city lights, sure, they're hard to miss, yeah, and that's what that level of astroengineering, uh, uh, it's extraordinary and how the degree." which any civilization comes to that, but I don't necessarily think we have to go there or you know, I mean because one of the things we have to do in the field is, like I said, try to systematize what the trajectories of the civilizations. and that means you have to lay out all the possibilities of technology and technological development and then what the consequences of that would be, as well as some sense of social forms that might mitigate that because it's not clear that everyone would want to do that, Would you know that we feel like we live in this brief, interesting moment in human history where we've had this incredible acceleration?

You know, we've gone from the Wright brothers flying in 1903 to a helicopter on Mars in 2023, but you know that most of human history was a much flatter technological development and you can even see that now the fastest anyone can could go, an average person could go in 19 UH 60 was about 500 M hour on a Jet. The fastest the average person travels right now is about 500 miles on a jet plane. Technology can definitely stop, so I think we have to be careful with this idea that you know it will continue forever and that there are infinite amounts of technological progress that will give us an infinite amount of godlike powers.

I think it's possible and that's one trajectory, but another trajectory is that things stagnate and you have relatively stable forms of technology that are used to, you know, astronomical engineering or populating planets or planets have to come in. in some kind of sustainable state with its E with its biospheres, so all those possibilities are the kinds of things that we have to

understand

when we try to imagine both the trajectories of civilizations but also what we are looking for because We are so close now to be able to look for it. I mean, now we can, right on the edge of being able to detect, let's say, chlorofluorocarbons.

You know an industrial chemical. You know a trapis on one of those trapis planets, but me. Isn't this kind of cognitive dissonance because, on the one hand, let's say the aliens are six billion years ahead of us and, on the other hand, we don't see, we clearly don't see the evidence of them? reshape the universe on the broadest scale and then you say "well, but maybe people don't want to do that" but then you say "well, but maybe aliens always want to do that" and you go back and forth and it seems to me like the universe . what we see is all that the universe can reach at its maximum that we have reached our maximum we have had six billion years we have reached our maximalist state right now we have seen everything that is possible in the same way that we have seen essentially the maximum amount propagation of life on Earth there is life everywhere it is at the bottom of 10 kilometer boreholes it is trapped under the ice in Antarctica it is floating 30 kilometers above the surface of the Earth it is in all the extreme environments where life is possible life has found a way to get in there and exploit everything it can properly and and so on the one hand we say well we don't see that so maybe you know they just haven't prevented it and but whatever so on the other hand , people will say, well, sure we like it, there's no reason we can't, let's just build our warp engines and move on, but it seems like everything that's possible for us in the universe has already been tried and that's our objetive. future, yeah, no, I don't think you know that doesn't resonate with me much just because also that big assumption that there are civilizations, civilizations last continuously for billions of years, that's what I'm probably most suspicious of. um, I think that civil, I don't know, it's not clear to me that you can achieve civilizations that last so long and that there is this infinite expansion of technologies that, maybe, you really already know, like with the speed of light. right, the speed, you know, it's entirely possible that there isn't a warp drive, I'm sorry, warp drives just aren't possible, we all wish they were possible, but they just aren't, and you think about it, think about it. what that really entails. take that if warp drives are if you are stuck with the speed of light then it actually becomes and your biology is such that you don't last for thousands of years then suddenly even small scale interstellar civilizations become very difficult and by that this is something that I really broke down in the book because I found it really fascinating how you can have diplomacy when it takes a hundred years, you know, if it's just you and a star that's 100 light years away, that's your, you know that you have three star says that you have three planetary systems 100 light years away each interaction takes 200 years you send them a message like hey, how are you, you know 200 years later, well, you know, so it's like the idea of ​​a civilization that could gather their forces that could um come together to carry out activities together it becomes really difficult to imagine how that could happen, so the reason why that doesn't resonate with me as much is the idea that you're, you're asking even though it's completely possible, because we could talk about ways that would be possible, but I really question what it means to be a long-lived civilization and I'm not sure that you get a long-lived civilization and whether or not you can really have Interstellar truly civil interstellar They may all be a single planet 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 was a useful place that people have been improving. like a location and then various civilizations have been using that upgraded location over time, so you may not get a civilization with you, but at least you're getting an imp, a general environment upgrade, or an environment change environment from these people, so I What it means to me is that it seems like there must be some fundamental reason that we haven't discovered yet why expanding beyond our star system makes sense and I like the arguments people make about how in the future you're going to turn all of Jupiter into computronium and you're going to know and then actually it's the lag that kills you, as soon as you have to go through a second of lag, then the alien supercomputers are going to lose in their online games and They are not going to tolerate that and therefore they simply will not want to build any type of computing substrate that has excessively long ping times and they are not willing to abandon the system because who wants to? the delay is terrible, that seems like a reasonable explanation to me that everyone will always realize that it's actually better to stay home, yeah, and I think that's a hoot, you know, and I can see that happening on different levels , it's better to stay home. because actually leaving home is very expensive and very difficult and you know you lose contact with them almost immediately, they send a century old ship to um Alpha centor or whatever and they start a civilization and then the civilizations drift away and They become very different from each other. others, so it's not like you know the United Colonies or the United Federation of Planets of United Planets, each one becomes something separate and has its own uh, so I think that's what I consider to be a real possibility of which um it's just so you know um um Interstellar travel can be really difficult so you might know that the whole galaxy may be full of civilizations, but they're not interstellar civilizations, they're interplanetary like if you look at ours. future, the next, should we get over climate change and all the other things we have to deal with?

I can imagine that every corner of the solar system is inhabited. We wrote this article a moment ago asking if you could take asteroids and spin them and then live inside them, so I think it's completely feasible and it's something that may be possible in a few hundred years, but then you can imagine that the solar systems become completely inhabited and there are many ways to find evidence technical signatures of the engineering of the solar system uh, there's an idea that we've been exploring called service worlds that you know, if you want to collect a lot of energy, don't put it in, don't Cover half the Earth with solar energy.

The panels cover the moon with a solar panel because you're not using the moon correctly or that's where you put your dangerous industry and so on, so you know there can be all the civilizations, all the systems that have a technological civilization, and look at the planets . that or the moons you know, those are the ones we should focus on that's where the industry will be, so I can, it's easier for me to conceive of many solar systems than to be inhabited at one time and another Galactic Empire, we have already found the best planet in the universe for us.

The earth. Do you mean the Earth is the Earth? Yes, well, no. I think probably, I mean, I imagine people talk about these kinds of super Earths or super habitability, so I'm. I'm not sure we've found the best one for us, right, yeah, yeah, and we recently wrote an article, uh alade or Bobby and I just wrote an article about oxygen that you might know that for technology you really need an atmosphere rich in oxygen because without it you will not be able to have combustion and without combustion, how do you achieve that? It was a really interesting role.

I like thatkind of thing where someone just says, What's up with this? and you're like, oh yeah, yeah, you know, octopuses are I'm going to have a hard time starting fires underwater, that's right, aquatic worlds, so that's what I mean. I can imagine a universe that is full of life, that is teeming with life, where you know every liquid moon, you know that every Europa has intelligent squids doing intelligent things. squid stuff but we don't have that interstellar travel can be the really hard part and that's isolated and that's hard, but that life is showing up everywhere, yeah, they're hitting the Rocks together and nothing, there's no spark, um, so now you referenced this before, you said you know people are thinking that maybe the People who believe in UFOs think that aliens are coming to us and that paradox resolved aliens come here all the time.

And there's been a real resurgence lately in this. Do you think there are any there? Currently there are none there. the terms of having data could really be used like Mike Turner, you know, one of the great particle physicists once told me, he said, you know, in a really good science project, you put in a quarter and you get a dollar and The problem with UFOs is that you put a coin in and the coin comes out right, so what we have is we have a lot of stories that you know. Often, from people you know there are, you have no reason to think they are lying, or you have a blur. images, but the problem is that none of those can build a scientific theory that can then structure the next question directly in science, it doesn't just answer a question, say, well, we're done, you know almost immediately your answer to that.

The question becomes the technology you use to answer the next question and so far the UFOs you know about have been a mix of narratives, people seeing things, blurry blob images, ridiculous conspiracy theories, Roswell, in particular, you, I have a whole chapter on Roswell. I went and read the Roswell books and after a while pretty quickly I thought this is a disaster, right? um, you know, and then pure hoaxes upon hoaxes, and you know, Roswell has some of those that that famous show from the '90s, uh, alien autopsy, um, no I don't know if you remember that one was uh rker Commander rker was the narrator and I was very disappointed in him for that and that turned out to be a total hoax, right, it was all filmed in some guy's house. living room in Brixton, England, so, you know, so far I don't think there's anything there, narratives about the military have, you know, alien spaceships in their garages, we've heard this forever, so we already know You know.

The book I'm talking about is one of the first reports that came out about UFOs in the '50s, the leader of that, the military leader of that, I think he was a captain after he published a book, you know, after. I mean, after he retired, he published a book and said that there was a report, a top secret report called the situation estimate that claimed that aliens were or that UFOs were alien spacecraft, no one has found the report after digging and dig. I know the report, so it is like that and the problem with this is that if you are a scientist it seems like a swamp of speculation and stories that you can't do anything with, but the difference that is happening now is that I think thanks to the pilots, I think those pilots are who you know, they're reporting what they saw, um, that there's a kind of interest in it that may now lead to real scientific research and we'll see where. goes well, we want the research to have to be agnostic, uh, and we'll see where it leads and, personally, you know if there was good, solid data that linked, you know, that had a link between the data and the claim that these things were They are behaving in ways that no human technology can produce.

I am open to changing my mind. That's the beauty of science. It shows you how to change your mind, but at this point you know it's still a mess and there is really nothing out there to justify the conclusion that we are being visited by aliens right now with all this interest from both governments and military and NASA, you may know that they are reluctantly bringing you into this. have to be for more information, more data, there's going to have to be greater amounts of transparency, but also potentially new methods of searching, this is starting to overlap with some of the other thoughts you've had over the years, which are like You know here are some ways to look for things in the solar system.

Here are some ways to search for ancient civilizations on Earth. So what do you think would be a productive way to obtain serious evidence for the presence of extraterrestrial civilizations here in the solar system? Yes. I think it's a great question and I have a whole chapter in the book detailing that kind of thing. Well, if you want to do science with UAP, this is what you have to do and the important thing is that you know that you are not going to do it. will seek to answer the question: are there aliens on Earth? you're going to be looking to collect data on the uaps that you're looking at, you're just looking to collect data and then analyze it in a way that gives you the ability to uh determine the performance characteristics correctly and then from that you're going to have to try to draw conclusions about whether this human technology is not human technology, so what you know, there are really three options that you can build, uh, ground sensors that look up and you can put. downward-facing satellites and you can also mount things on airplanes and maybe you want to do all three, but the important thing that people, especially in the UFO community, often don't understand is that unless you've fully characterized the instruments, you don't I don't know what you're doing right and this is the problem with radars, military radars, is that you know unless you know when the last time that radar was upgraded.

What I need? The full story of what I really need. I need the machine itself and I need to have built it myself or I just can't trust it and this is exactly what we do in astronomy with the J James web 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 is at 80 degrees, we know everything about it, that's the only way we can link the data, we can be sure of the data and then we can link the data with a statement or a conclusion and UFOs are no different, it's not that UFOs ignore this, so we will need to build those types of instruments and deploy them, and I think that will probably happen soon.

I think you know the public is interested in this and so you know we'll do that work, we can learn some really interesting things even if we don't learn anything about life in the universe, but that's the only way. to do it and the important thing to keep in mind is that let's say we did all that and we discovered that there were certain objects that were turning to the right and they turn on Mack 500 to the right, something that you really know that a human powered technology can't. Do it right, what are you doing now?

That would be awesome and what will you do next. Well, the only thing you can do next is more science, because it wouldn't tell you what it was, it wouldn't tell you where. That's why I was just telling you, 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 it. cents and now it's a dollar. You found something extraordinary that would be mind-blowing, but then you know you don't stop there because you still wouldn't know what it was and you know, so you have to ask if I try to take one down.

Know? I try to capture it, you know? Or am I still trying to do it? Know? Now I develop the next level of sensors. Can you tell me the next level of detail when you talk about life in the universe and one of the Most likely, we're alone, but for most people that's emotionally, literally, they just can't understand that. How do you think it could be reasonable to think that we are actually alone? Why do you think people know that answer, uh, well, I think you know it's entirely I'm an alien optimist and I also want to point out that to me it's so profound if we find a biosphere, a microbial biosphere on an alien world, as if If we found a civilization like I really don't care, you know, because either way it's profound because the thing is that life is so different from non-life as you know, living systems are so completely different that we just want to know if life itself not that. an accident, you know it only happened here and that's right, because it would be a surprising possibility and kind of strange and depressing in many ways, so if we found an example of life somewhere else, even if it was just microbial, that actually, if If we find one example, then there's probably another example, it means we're not an accident and there's probably other examples, even if they're, you know, in other galaxies or whatever, but that and because life is so creative, so for me . the bets are off you know who knows where somewhere life has done amazing things um but let's say even that's not possible let's say we really are an accident that would be impressive that would be really I know that and I think I would know I find it hard to understand that, um, if we searched and searched, obviously, you know you can't, you won't be able to conclude that in 30 years, but let's say we had 500 years of searching and I just never found any evidence from other biospheres of any other activity, any other life anywhere else, you know, on the one hand, it would mean that we would really need to appreciate the likes.

I think it would ethically change everything you know, killing the likes. On some level, everyone needs to become a vegetarian from then on, because that means that life is so rare and so sacred and so important that we have to do everything we can to maintain it and then, you know, in a sense, star travel or the settlement of other worlds I think it becomes imperative to spread life if we are the only life that exists, you know, I take it to mean that life is a good life, it is important, uh, I would say you know that , so you know, uh, yeah, everyone, everyone's conclusions.

It has to be vegetarian and we absolutely have to start settling on the stars, yeah, I say trees are better than rocks, right, yeah, yeah, and and that and and if we're really alone then, boy, are we wrong? Were we wrong if we did? I do not leave this planet and ensure that life can spread throughout the universe. You know, the way I've always looked when people talk about colonizing Mars or colonizing the solar system. You know, some people have the idea that it's unethical. Know? to colonize Mars, I don't really agree with that, I mean, obviously, if there is life on Mars, then we have to be very careful, but you know, it's not us that settle on Mars, it's not human beings that that settle on Mars, it is the biosphere, it is the biosphere of the Earth. biosphere agent that is going to send a green tendril to Mars to expand it so that you know the whole story, as you pointed out, the whole history of the Earth's biosphere is covering everywhere, reaching any corner of the planet that it has spread to life. and we should see the rest of the planets, that's exactly, you know, we're just the agents of the biosphere, that's why dozens of ways to look for techno firms have been proposed and you've been involved in many of them. the meetings that have helped me discover those ideas or some master lists that I really want to get my hands on, but apparently it's not ready yet, yes, it's not ready yet, yes, but it will be soon.

I think please send it to me when you are. Ready, what do you think is the best profit for the book if you had to go all in on one technique? Where would you invest if you had to put all your chips in what would be the one technique that you think could give us the best profit? For the money, well, I really think it's the atmospheric technical signatures, the things associated with taking a good look at the planets because the best of the atmosphere and the atmosphere is a particular find, but I would say that the planetary search is correct at that first meeting famous in 2018, uh, what I called metabolic technology signatures, techno signatures associated with a civilization that was just going about its business properly because in the early days of SEI, because of the requirements of radio messaging or radio technology, what I really needed was for someone to send you a message, someone points a big radio telescope at you and pumps a lot of energy into a message or a beacon, maybe it's not even a message that you know is intended for someone and that never made much sense.

For me, it is what it was. the only thing they could do was brilliant and it was professional work, you know, provocative, but I think it's much better to just look for aliens doing what aliens are doing and that requires looking at planets and that's what we can do now thatAdam Frank several times in the past about this and other topics so I thought if you want to continue the conversation with Adam uh one more recently we talked about that idea he mentioned about turning asteroids into space habitats where you could take an asteroid, spin it around and live inside this Taurus of yours.

It's a fascinating concept and could give us a practical way to live in the solar system. The other interview I did with him was a few years ago and he kind of talked about this idea of ​​how civilizations could spread across the Milky Way if we consider civilizations. Starting by stopping, could we be living in a gap in the expansion of a galactic Empire? It's an interesting conversation, so enjoy both interviews here on the channel. Well, thanks for watching and I'll see you around. Next time