Do aliens exist?

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Speaker 1: I am Morgan and the creator of PhD Comics. And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and definitely not an artificial intelligence. And welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio. Listeners of the podcast will though that I am particularly fascinated by aliens and the search for alien intelligence, because I hope that those aliens will one day reveal the future and secrets of physics to us. But I'm also equally fascinated in the search for intelligence here on Earth. And I don't mean among the political class, but I mean in our computers, whether our computers can be intelligent, whether they will be intelligent, maybe they will discover secrets of physics and unraveled them for us. Well, today we have an amazing combination of those two ideas wrapped up together in one podcast. Yeah, we are once again taking questions from some friends of ours, so to be on the podcast, we have the host of a popular podcast here to ask us questions. So to be on the program, we have the host of the podcast Sleepwalkers with us here today, So Kara Price and Oz Walshing. Hey, guys, hi, Hi, thanks for coming on, thanks for having us. We're not just listeners, but we're we're super listeners and big fans and hoping that you can explain the universe to us today, not the whole universe, just some sounds like a great idea of for podcast. Yeah, So Kara and Oz are produced and host the podcast Sleepwalkers, which is also by Our Heart Radio, and which is about everything you need to know about artificial intelligence, right guys, hopefully it is everything, but yeah, the way it's affecting people's lives in different areas. And I was interested, you know, to hear Daniel that you use machine learning in your work, because we're focusing more and more on how AI can help us understand complex systems, so not just simple cause and effect, but you know, multifarious interacting causes which produce hard to explain effects. So we were looking today at death actually, and how death involves the collapse of all these different systems, and the collapse of one system might affect another system, and how hard it is for doctors to predict time of death because it's hard for people to conceive of the interaction between different types of systems and different types of data points. But that's something that computers are very good at. That's right. One of the things we do is that we take these big, complex pictures of particle collisions and then we have to try to unravel and we have to try to wonder what's going on in the data. Is that we use machines, we computer intelligence to do that sometimes, but we also want to interpret it. I was listening to your podcast last week about making sure these things makes sense and how do we understand the decisions these computers have made. And that's the same problem we have UM here in particle physics, because nobody wants to publish a paper that says, um, the computer found a particle in the data. We can't see it, but trust us it's there. Very interesting. Yeah, we were talking to UM author Provoca, who ran DAPPA for a few years until Seen, and she was telling us that this concept of explainable AI is a big priority at Dopper right now. So cool to hear you're working on. Start us off. Maybe if you can tell us a little bit about yourselves and a little bit about the podcast and how we can find it. I mean, you said, my name is Karat Price. I'm the co host of Sleepwalkers, and my background is well in content production, but that's not fun for a podcast. But I did have a show on hof Post called Talk Nerdy to Me. That was a video show where we asked other big questions not only pertaining to the universe, but sometimes pertaining to the universe. So I do have a general understanding of some of the things that you guys talked about on your show, and I've gotten to speak to some really interesting folks at NASA, and I've gotten to it was during the time of you know, when they first detected gravitational waves, and so we did a lot of research around that, and I became particularly interested in gravitational waves from that um for the show. And also I grew up with a father who was obsessed with both the universe and extrachestrial life and actually edited a book called the Universe. And he was an adult man, so he could not go to space camp, but sent me to space Camp when I was ten years old. I think I went there before I went to sleepaway Camp. So I've always had a solar system consciousness, I think more so than your average middle schooler that has to learn about it in school. At least I sort of grew up in the shadow of the nineteen sixties and how being a parent that really was obsessed obsessed with the fact that we had landed on the Moon, and obsessed with astronauts and going to space, and also understanding sort of is there life in the cosmos? So from a personal standpoint, these are the things that I think about kind of on a daily basis. So being on your show is quite interesting. And and then also you know this idea of will we ever find life on Mars or on other earthlike plants where they can actually survive, or will they find us? Or have they or have they found this green and us tell us a little bit about you. Yeah, I'm afraid I don't have nearly quite such a romantic origin story as Kara. But I'm interested in origin stories, origins of the universe, origins of computer science, origins of artificial intelligence. And I was a huge fan of Kara's work on Talk Nettie to Me, so um, when I started thinking about Sleepwalkers as a show, you know, she was the first person and I reached out to for advice on how to build it. And then I got very lucky that she didn't just want to give me advice on how to build it, but also join the show. So really, you know, it's a show which is about technology and about artificial intelligence, um, but it uses those topics as a way in to have big conversations about our culture and our society and what makes us human more are the limits of our humanity? And so you know, as the series is progressed, we've gone from looking at how algorithms are able to understand us and know us in some sense better than ourselves and thus influence us, whether that's to buy or to vote, or to appear at protests or to keep swiping on dating apps, And then as a series is progressed, we've looked at you know, medical applications. As Karrol was mentioning, um, what what happens in a world when we can use AI to interpret our biological signals, a mess of our biological signals to tell us when we might die, or the mess of our genome to tell us what kind of illnesses we may be prone to, how tall our children maybe and what color their eyes will be and whether we want to intervene in that. And our final episode of the series of season one is coming out in two weeks, which features an interview with Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens and Homodaeus, really asking the question what does all of this new technology mean for our status as humans? Are we on the verge of speciating becoming a new species of people who are technologically enabled? And obviously there's a bunch of people looming in the background like Elon Musk who kind of constantly ringing the bell for for terror, and he's somebody who's worked on transhumanism in the form of neuralink. Also somebody who's interested in the potential for us living in a simulation. Which is an episode of your show I really enjoyed. But but we try and take a more um, you know, more neutral line looking some of the optimistic things that this new technology will allow for us and for our species to enjoy and perhaps even have more time to play or listen to podcasts podcasts. Well, hopefully I will make our next podcast, so we would have to ye from our voice hopefully cool. Well, if you are interested in artificial intelligence, which I think everyone should be at this point, please go check out their podcast. But today we'll be answering questions from Oz and Cara related to the universe and aliens and astrology and fate, and so let's jump into it. Well, I think I speak for all women. No, I'm joking. Um, I think astrology is becoming a multibillion dollar industry with absolutely no uh grounded facts. And so I'm always interested in talking about astrology, but I don't really know so much about how it relates to astronomy, even though I probably should. And so I figured i'd ask a question about that and maybe you guys could give me a decent answer. So I can, you know, school my friends. So the question is, what does astronomy have to do with astrology? Right besides the word stro in front of it, I think I think you just answered the question. Actually, I think those letters are about all they have in common. I mean, astrology is like, you know, looking at the stars and identifying constellations and imagining somehow that the constellations that were in the sky when you were born might dictate who you are and the events that happened to you in your life. You know, it's really mysticism, whereas astronomy that's like a scientific study of the universe. Let's look out into space and try to figure out what's out there and how does it work? And can we build a model that actually makes sense? And so there's really almost no overlap at all. UM overlap might be that astrology relates to constellations, and constellations are kind of weirdly a lot of people's introduction to astronomy. You know, people look up at the stars and they see these constellations and that's fun. That sort of draws them into the mystery and the majesty of the night sky. Now, is it possible that, um, the way in which we look at a strong g today, future generations will look at what we think of as astronomy. In other words, would it be a system for understanding the world which future scientific revelations proofs or demonstrates was actually a flawid understanding. I'm sure that the future generations will look back at our astronomy and they will snicker at our misconceptions. Right, they will think, oh, my gosh, they thought that the universe was like this. It turns out it's like that. But that's you know, that's the part of the process of science is corrections, and there's nothing to be ashamed of in a modern day astronomy. We've made dramatic understandings, and anything that we misunderstand, we're happy to have a new understanding. Astrology is a little bit different, you know, it's a it's not a scientific understanding. It hasn't come to be out of a method which has been built to separate fact from fiction. It is really just pure fiction. When I think about astrology, astrology is to astronomy sort of like what weather gods are or rain dances are to meteorology, you know, like which is a much more precise science, right, yeah, exactly. You know. The thing that amazes me is that these things are so often linked because they really have almost nothing in common. And I go to planet I take my kids to planetariums, for example, and very often they start off a planetarium show with the constellations. They're like, this is this constellation, this is that constellation. And I'm thinking, this is supposed to be like an extronomical educational experience, supposed to be learning about the universe. But constellations have no insight into the universe at all. They're just they're an artifact of where we happen to be in space. You know, you look at the stars in a particular constellation, they look close together because of where we are, but you know, some of them are zillions of light years apart. You look at them from another perspective, there's no constellation there at all. So it always, it always frustrates me that essentially they begin with astrology, with with the zodiac signs, with basically Bronze age myths, you know, as an entrance to astronomy. That always frustrates me. So the stars don't ever align really for anybody. I mean, some people have charmed lives, but I don't think it's because of the stars. Is it possible? And I've always wondered, you know, people feel the moon for example, Like I've been with people who want it's a full moon. They feel some kind of connection to the moon, or they feel some sense of excitemental wildness. Um, is that pure projection? Is there is there any possibility that sort of events or planets moving throughout Galic se can on a particle level affect us or connect with us? Well, I don't know, your friends, are they sort of they get sort of hairy and a little more toothy when the moon comes out like that all the time, when they sounds fascinating. Um, I think it's it's not a stretch actually said that the moon affects people, right, because the Moon is pretty close, and it certainly has a physical effect on the Earth that causes the tides. It affects the things on the planet, that's for sure. But I suspect that that's a lot a lot of that is psychostomatic. That you know, seeing the moon affects the way people feel. You have to do some sort of blind study where people couldn't see the moon and just feel it. But the other planets and stars, you know, we were It's funny. We're talking about this just recently on the podcast. It is true that you feel the effects of other atoms in the universe. In fact, every other atom in the universe. There's, for example, an electromagnetic field that connects you the protons and electrons in your body with the electrons everywhere. But those things are negligible because the power of those things drops as the distance squared, So the electrons and alpha centauri have no measurable effect on you and the out and the you know where that we know of where Jupiter is, where Saturn is, doesn't affect whether or not you should like say yes to a date or invest in SpaceX right, that's Alpha Centauri is acting super crazy to Well, to be fair, Dannie, you shouldn't base all decisions on astrology or astronomy either one. That's right. Well, the stock market is just a random chance anyway, so you know, just roll a dime and make your investments as advice and mercury. And they started with constellations because it sort of gives you a little bit of context about what we humans seeing this guy and what we are yearning to understand how this guy is related to our lives. Right, I think it's really interesting, so I can I can imagine Daniel, it must be frustrating on the one hand to have the specter of astrology haunting astronomy. On the other hand, the fact that people have a baseline interest in the stars maybe is you know, net positive. I think so. Yeah. I just wish it wasn't diverted into astrology. You know. It's like if somebody asks, hey, tell us about you know, the particles in the universe and what everything is made out of. You don't start off with, well, there's fire, air, wind, and earth, you know whatever, like the four elements. The Greeks thought you begin with things we actually know. You begin with you true facts about the universe. Uh. I think I think there's so much amazing stuff in astronomy that you don't have to begin with astrology to get people excited, just while them with reality. The universe is a crazy, amazing place and there's lots of cool stuff out there. You know, when people refer to a whole you know, the universe telling me to quit my job, or it's just the universe doesn't think that I know that I should be with this guy or this girl whatever. Um, you know, like the universe has a personality and opinions about your dating life, and you would disagree as a degree in psychotherapy, right exactly what. It's the same we see in coverage of AI as people like to anthropy, anthropomorphize UM machines and algorithm algorithms, the algorithm, the algorithm algorithm, you know, and and it's kind of a bit of a cop out, isn't it to thinking about how we are responsible for our outcomes. Yeah, I think there's something really fascinating there. Actually, it says something really interesting about human intelligence and consciousness. Um. You know here, I'm very far from my area of expertise, But I think that that people are really good at identifying intelligence outside of themselves. Right. It's certainly a survival tactic to say, like, oh, this creature here seems to be aware and intelligent and how and be an agent and uh. And so I think that's how people identify, you know, will in other beings. And it's very natural to extend that to the universe, to say, like, you know, it seems like there's some organizing intelligence that's acting in this way to bring storms or to star wars or whatever. And I wonder how easily people will apply that to AI. You know, when we have a I that is that can mimic human human intelligence that really is interchangeable with a human being, will people be tempted to give them human rights? You know, because they appear to suffer, Do they really suffer? You know, these are really fascinating questions that I think you guys probably should answer in your podcast. Well, if you watch, I mean, if you watch, like there's Boston there's videos on the Boston Dynamics YouTube right of or there's there's videos where you watch robots either getting beat up or watch robots, you know, dog fight, breaking into dog, robot fights um or dogs pulling a truck? Am I supposed to feel bad for this robot dog that has to pull a truck as opposed to what dogs should be doing, which is playing and using their minds and building tech companies? So, you know, I think we don't exactly. Yeah, I think these questions are going to come up. I think they're already coming up, you know, just in terms of who are we who are we blaming? When when algorithms go wrong? Can you even blame an algorithm? Yeah? I guess the real question mark, I think obviously, you know, all goes back to you. That's right. He didn't know what he was making. And when the dog aies take over, we'll have to ask them if they're interested in astrology, if they just skip over and go straight to astronomy. Let's let's the dog constellation. What's the fight? I think Orion has a dog, doesn't the Ryan of a dog? There you go? Maybe the hunter? Yeah, But it seems like you're saying the answer is that astronomy is a science. It's based on facts and observations and data, But astrology is really just sort of people making stuff up. Astrology is spiritual mysticism, and you know, some people find it helpful, but it's definitely not science. In this political moment, you know, with you know, you have the ministers in Britain saying, you know, we're past the age of experts, and you have a lot of conversation about fake news in the US. And that's something we've looked at on our podcast is deep fakes and how manufactured media can you know, disturb the notion that truth exists anywhere, and that's obviously having big implications for our politics. Is that how much of a concern is that in the world of science that you know, in the end, somebody might turn around and say, well, I choose my facts and in my universe astrology is just as vad as astronomy. Well, I think that the sort of two answers, they're one. Um. I think the general public has already lost a lot of faith in science as an institution, not because science has misbehaved, but because our political leaders have begun dismissing it and then pushing it away from having a role at the table. The facts of reality are not always convenient. Um. But I think there's another angle to that, which is fakes. In science and actually there you know, there are scientists who fabricate data and produce papers, um with with images that are not actually taken from their experiments. But the fascinating thing is that they're very easy to detect. I mean, they just take an image that's in another figure in the same paper and like inverted or flip it or whatever. So there might be a day when scientists use sophisticated AI to generate false data for their papers, but that day is not yet here. Well, and you also just have the larger problem of misinformation in the case of you know, the flat earther movement. I still can't tell if the flat Earther movement is a bunch of trolls of people really believe that, you know, like, does anybody actually seriously believe that? I mean, I think it's a crazy option of YouTube rad goals. I don't think there's going to be much progress made in the scientific establishment. It's an interesting example of how the algorithm has impacted people's perception of reality and science, because those were most people who have been radicalized in that way. Um, we're radicalized on YouTube by being suggested other videos like videos, Well, folks just need to listen to our show and they'll understand everything exactly. Well. The thing about that idea of fake sciences that do you think, Daniel, that we can always just verify these things. You know, like if somebody says, hey, I can clone human beings but nobody else can do it, then you know that cast some shadow on their claim, right. Yeah, that's the nice thing about sciences. There's always somebody else out there who wants to prove you wrong, and so fake results don't last very long. Um. We talked about that on a podcast recently about cold fusion, how folks claim to have invented fusion that you could do at room temperature, but then within months lots and lots and lots of groups tried to reproduce it and couldn't and so it went from a media sensation to you know, um to fringe ridiculousness in just a few months. And so I think that's one of the real strengths of sciences that it has this self correction because we can always refer to the experiments because in the end, it's grounded in truth and facts. That's not always the case about you know, mainstream discussions in the news media. So you have two other questions, and these are pretty interesting about life and other planets, and also about those UFO sightings by the Navy. Yes, and so we'll get into those, but first let's take a quick break. All right, We're here with carea Price and ask wall Shit, the host of the podcast sleep Walkers, which is about artificial intelligence and society and culture. And today we're taking questions from them, two experts and AI asking one expert about the universe in one cartoon is deep Questions about the universe. And so Karrol, what's here a second question? Well, it really freaks me out to think that there could be a bunch of life like creatures living on a planet that I don't know exists. So my question is, what are the chances that there's such a thing. Why do you say life like? Well, I guess, I guess. You know what, it really trips me out to think about there are human beings on another place that don't know that there are human beings on Earth. So we're all we're both living, minding your own business, shopping at whole foods, living on different planets, and is that happening? Is that possible that there is that there are supermarkets. On another point, like a humans like people or just like weird blobby green aliens who also happen to have whole foods. I think care is worried that maybe on alien whole foods that prices are lower. How do I That's impossible, That is physically impossible. No. I guess my point is is, you know, if there are earthlike plant it's could they be producing earth like human beings? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, is there life elsewhere in the universe? And you know, if they only exist as slimy, tentacled creatures, can they still push a shopping cart at whole foods? Right? That's a deep question about the universe. A lot of people have asked, um, And I think it's a fascinating question because it goes right to like the context of human existence. You know, are we alone in the universe or are we one of many? You know? Um, is there other civilizations out there? And I think that's something people have wondered for a long long time. And the fascinating thing is that we still really have no idea what the answer to that question is. But the most amazing thing is that I think one day we will This is the kind of question that we are currently ignorant of the answer, right, we don't know that if there's lots of other civilizations out there or we're the only one. But one day we will know, and people will look back and wonder, like, what was it like to be ignorant about this really basic question about the universe? And so it's fascinating and exciting and also sometimes frustrating to live back in that age of ignorance about the universe. But is it possible that there are other intelligent life forms in the universe? And we will never until the end of time? No, absolutely, I mean, all of these things are possible. Um. You know the here, here's the whole range. Like, we know that there's lots of earthlike planets out there. We know that like twenty of stars there have an earthlike planet, which is incredible because there's one in five. Yeah, and you know, we only learned that recently. We've known for a long long time that there's zillions and zillions of stars in the universe, but we didn't know how often they made earth like planets, like is it unusual? Um? And that's that's the problem, is that we only have this one data sample Earth, and so we were tempted to extrapolate and wonder if there's lots of others, But we don't know if we're unusual. And does earthlike mean between thirty and forty degree or between zero and forty degrees celsius normally with oxygen, nit string, combon dioxide and the atmosphere and water. What are the dorsal definition of Earth like and and whole. Yeah, No, it means a rocky planet. So this is a surface and roughly the right amount of solar radiation so that you could get liquid water on the surface. We don't know if there's gonna be liquid water there. We certainly don't know about oxygen. Oxygen is actually hard to make. You need microbes for a long time to produce oxygen typically, but just you know, very basic rocky planet with about the right distance from the sun so that the water is not frozen and so it's not super duper hot. Right, that's pretty basic requirement. And so we now know that there's zillions and zillions of those, And now the question is how many of those have life, and how many of those have intelligent life, and how many of those have technologically intelligent life, and how many of those have technologically intelligent and intelligible life right that we can actually communicate with and recognize. And the frustrating thing is that that the numbers either is somewhere between of those planets have a life and Earth is the only one right one over like a trillion, and we just really don't know the answer. It's that are somewhere in between, and the reason is that we've only ever seen this one planet where it's happened, which is Earth. As a book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Condera, beautiful book about about love, and the protagonist is wondering about his relationship and should he stay or should he go? And there's this phrase in German which survives into the English translation, which is einmal is kind mal or once is none, basically to say that if you only have a sample size of one, you can never make a good decision. Scientifically, we only have this one data point, and it'll it'll just blow it open. Once we can visit one more planet, just one more will tell us a huge amount, because if that the other planet also has life on it, boom, life on another planet. We've discovered it, we've answered the question. If it doesn't right, then it tells us that the number is probably a lot less than of Earth like planets have life on them. Um. And the other reason why it's sort of a struggle is that we still don't really know how life started on Earth. You know, if we had a really detailed mechanistic understanding of that process, you know, to go from lifeless but with the ingredients of life to life beginning, then we can answer this question scientifically. We can build models, we can say how often that happened, but we don't. It's still a mystery to us. We know it took about five dred million years or maybe a billion years or some controversy, but we don't know how it happened, and so we can't really speak concretely about whether it's likely to happen elsewhere. Well, I can have a question for you guys. So let's assume that there is an advance realization out there, or there are many out there. Do you think it's inevitable that they will all be overtaken by artificial intelligence, or that they will develop it and maybe taken over by it, as some people fear will happen to us. Do you feel like AI is inevitable? That's a very interesting question. Yeah, And I was about I was going to say that, you know, if if you if you think about statistics, you know, one over a trillion chance, I wouldn't I wouldn't bet on that. So from that point of view, you know, I would if I was a good today in a falsetti because I would think that, you know, in a statistical likelihood is that something does exist out there. So what is AI? I mean AI is statistics and probability, and computers are able to harness the power of statistics and probability in order to make predictions about the future. So you would assume that other beings of our sentience and intelligence would also create, you know, computer like machines to help with mathematical equations, and if they did, the logical progress of that would I think to be towards artificial intelligence. I'm curious for daniels thoughts on that. I think that's a wonderful question. Actually, once wrote a science fiction story in which an organic creatures develop artificial intelligence, which then wipes them out and then um and then thousands or millions of years later that that machine based society develops organic computers UM, which then grew into intelligence and wipes out the machine based to thezation, it all comes full circle. The organic computer even look like like you have one in your head right now, brain, Sorry news, Yeah, exactly, No. I think that these really fascinating questions, and this is exactly why I want to meet the aliens. Why why I want to collaborate with them, why I want to be first in line to talk to them, because these are deep questions that can only really be answered by getting more data. You know, is the physics that we've developed the physics of the universe or the physics of humanity? Is artificial intelligence and natural outgrowth of technology and computerization, or is it just the consequences of human thought and civilization. We really don't know the answer to that, and we can't really ever tell until we meet those aliens and talk to them about it. Well, speaking of meeting other aliens, we'll get to your last question, Kara, which is about those UFO signings by the Navy. But first let's take a quick break. All right, Carrot, what's your last question? It's about something that is seems straight out of the X files, right, Yes, it is out of the X files, I think. I mean, what's going on with the U. S. Navy and UFOs. I've always followed UFOs sort of casually or just the hype the crazy, but it seems like it's in the New York Times now now I'm paying attention. I mean, unidentified flying object is a drone? No, if we know what a drone is, it's not a UFO, right. I mean UFO is a technical description of something in the sky that is unregistered by whatever the traffic control is. Teenager flying a camera, right, But in this case that's not so glamorous. It's the Navy. Pilots have seen weird stuff in the sky, and because they're in the Navy, we're trying to trust them more than you know, the tin hat brigade. Um. But the real question is is what they're seeing real or is it more likely that their brains are being, you know, in some sense overwhelmed by all the century data of flying that fast and that high. Um, what's going on? Tell us? I don't know why that step back per second to assume that, like, for example, I've have not seen these latest articles in the New York Times is there something new going on in the world of UFO sightings and spotting. There is a little bit. There's this sort of a long history of Navy pilots seeing weird stuff and reporting it. And there was like an incident in two thousand four around aircraft carrier where some pilots reported seeing something that could do things that no plane could do. You know, it could drop really really quickly towards the ocean, it could disappear under the water and come back up, and the pilots there said that it looked like like a big tic tac And you know, these things happen occasionally people brush them off. But recently the Navy released some footage, some video of an encounter in two thousand two thousand fifteen where the pilots actually got this stuff on video, and it shows these aircraft doing some pretty weird stuff, you know, making sudden stops and starts and turning really quickly, dropping a really fast, accelerating really quickly, things that appear to do things that we that humans couldn't survive, you know, because humans can't survive very very fast accelerations. And so there were these this footage and the Navy released it to the public, and so it's out, there's on YouTube. People like watching it and dissecting it. And and then there was just very just a couple of weeks ago, I think the Navy briefed a bunch of top lawmakers in the United States, you know, about what is the status of the UFO thing, and so it's sort of come like into the mainstream, away from the fringes, so that I guess that's the big news is that the Navy is being kind of open about it, right, I think I think that's what is throwing people off, that it's openly talking about these sightings and it uploaded video, yeah, exactly. And the Navy has now like an official policy for pilots for how to report UFO sightings. Um. Whereas it used to be like something I think pilots were loath to admit, you know, because it made them seem crazy. Now the Navy is encouraging pilots and giving them a formal process to report this stuff so that we can get a clear picture for sort of what's going on, which I think there's a lot about the times in which we live that now you're not crazy if you see a UFO, you're just being a good pilot. You're probably crazy to be a pilot in the Navy. Maybe a little bit. Uh No, I'm just kidding. There is a relationship between this and AI actually, because it's the same Senator Mark Warner. It's one of the people who has called for a briefing from the Navy. Is also today introducing something called dashboard, which stands for Designing Accounting Safeguards to help broaden oversight and regulations of Data ACT. And that was the man that is a golden acronym. It is pretty good. Here's the guy who's out in front on trying to compel technology companies to tell users the value that generating from their data each month, like literal cash value. But he's also the guy who, as Carro said, called these call for these closed door hearings. I mean, if they're closed door, it maybe something going on with the Navy about these UFO sightings. And his spokesman said something like, it doesn't matter what they are, whether it's drones or little green men. Senator Warner is focused on keeping our pilots safe and getting Google to paper back from my GEO location data. Well, I thought this is really fascinating and I was wondering, like, what do people out there think about UFOs? Do they think it's evidence of aliens? Do they think that's impossible? So I walked around campus a UC Irvine this morning actually and asked folks what they thought about the latest UFFO sightings and whether they thought aliens had ever visited the Earth. Here's what people had to say. Do you think aliens have visited us here on Earth? Uh? Not? Why not? I don't have proof of that or any signs of them vis kipping us. Okay, cool, I don't think so. No, why not? It's because you would have known by then. Like I'm not sure, like if we have actual evidence what about UFOs, I don't know. It could be anything. I think it's possible, but I don't think like there's any reason to think that they have, um what about us? I feel like that could be like just stuff in space, Like, but I think it's possible that there's aliens and that they visited us, but like, I don't have any reason to believe it. I guess. I mean there's been that whole thing is scenative, right, So I think it's definitely possible, but I don't know if there's definitely proof that it has happened. If they're here on Earth and flying around, why don't they just make themselves known right on this Their waiting for like us to become intelligence pecis by their standards. No, no, why not? Because I'm Egyptian, So that would mean that the pyramids would play and I don't like that. I think there's explanations that don't involved extraterrestrials. But again, I don't know to this generally skeptical of the alien hypothesis. Skeptical is a good word. Yeah, so some pretty well a wide range of answers they're right, and a lot of people seem very skeptical, and some people seem very Egyptian and strong opinions about us. I think he took that as a cultural threat. You know, pyramids they appropriated by extraterrestrials. Yeah, but I think overall there's a lot of skepticism. I think, you know, people have heard about stories UFOs, but I think they imagine, you know, if aliens came, it would be a thing you'd see about, you'd read about in the cover of the New York Times. You'd see the aliens meeting the president, right like it wouldn't just be one story and then fizzle away. So I think because people have heard of these stories and lots of times, then they sort of turned into nothing. There's a lot of skepticism now built up in the general public about whether aliens have visited, and that would be the time for aliens to strike, by the way, that's right, spoonful for a bunch of times, and then when our guard is down they can swoop in that why why would you imagine they strike? Maybe they're just visiting here as a scientific delegation to give us the secrets of the universe, right, But first I want to play practical jokes on us. Is that what you're saying. One of the things I found interesting about this story, um, is that the navy pilots, very few of them have actually seen these things with their own eyes. What happens is their radar systems or their weapons systems will will tell them. They will tell them as something there will see an object, and then they'll fly down to where the objects meant to be and they'll be nothing that they can see with their own eyes. Although there wasn't in one case where this kind of bull flews right straight past the window of the airplane, So short of aliens, like, what are the explicable phenomena of physics which would explain what's happening here? Yeah, this is really fun because I looked this up and I said, like what experts say? And the experts have like a list of explanations, but they're all very generic. You know, they're like, well, pilots fatigue, basically hallucination. But you know, we see these videos, right, so there's something there. It's not just the pilots being being tired, um or they say like weird atmospheric effects or you know, um classified government programs testing new kinds of aircraft. Basically your list of generic explanations. And at the end they always say, of course it could be aliens, but you know that's very unlikely, and so this just sort of this go to list. But the problem with those explanations for me is that they're not specific. They're not saying, well, I looked at this video and here's an alternative explanation. There's no specific, credible hypothesis that can say here's how this event happened, here's how that event happened. It's just sort of a general sort of the same reaction that the folks on the streets had. It's sort of a general skepticism, so like, well, I'm just not going to believe it unless I have three or four ten pieces of data that show me it's aliens. They're willing to sort of scoff off one event, which is fair, right, I don't know is it fair? I mean, if aliens came to Earth, how would it happen? Right? Like, I think that's really more interesting question, Like say aliens had come to Earth, right, what would that be? Like? Why would they be here and sort of zip around playing games over the ocean near fighter um, near U. S. Navy fighters and not make themselves known? Right? That's sort of a like in what scenario does that happen? To me? That's sort of the interesting question. You mean they could be like tourists or scientists studying that kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. I mean we talked a minute ago about, you know, the likelihood of finding other life. My personal belief, not based on any science at all, is that the universe is filled with life and because it just seems very unlikely that the Earth is the only place for this to happen, and we know how many earthlike planets there are, and so I imagine that the universe is filled with life. And then the question is like, why haven't the alien visited? And you might say, oh, they're really far away. But it turns out that the universe is um is pretty old in comparison to its size, so it doesn't actually take that long to explore. Like if you're a single civilization and you want to explore the whole galaxy, it doesn't take billions of years. It only takes tens and thousands, tens of thousands of years, and the galaxy is very old in comparison to that number. So it sort of feels like they should be out there, that should be exploring, we should have been contacted. So then if you wonder, like why haven't we been, you have to come up with explanations like there they have come, but they're hiding from us because, like you say, maybe they're scientists, they're observing us, or they're tourists or whatever. When you say it's older than it's large, you mean it grows very slowly and therefore, um it's more navigable. What's what's the relationship between the age and the size of the universe. That that makes it more likely that we should have been contacted. I mean that the galaxy is big, right, and so you might think, oh, it's it's too far to get to those stars, you know, like the nearest stars tens of light years away or light years away, and the other side of the galaxies is thousands and thousands of light years And that's true, and that means it would take a long time to get there. But the but it's been there for a long time. That's what I mean that it's older than it is large. But we also don't have any life forms that live longer than We don't have life forms that live hundreds of thousands of years. Sure, but civilizations might, right, And and that's another question, is like it could be the civilizations only last or fifty years before they get taken over by AI or kill themselves in nuclear holocausts. That's certainly another possibility. Let's bleak. I mean, but you have to find hopefully, hopefully the stars will align and mercury will be in the right phase will survive. But you are confronted with that fact, the fact that the universe seems like it's filled with places for life to flourish and it's not that big. So life, if it had developed, might have found us already, but it hasn't, And so you have to try to answer that question, like why haven't we been just full on contacted by alien visitors? Um? But it certainly it's true that if aliens come to visit us rather than us finding them, it's very likely they're more technologically advanced than we are, which means they might have the technology to stay hidden. But you know, you have to wonder about the motives they're like, why would they say hidden if I went to another planet, if I found intelligent life on another planet, I don't want to go talk to them, meet their scientists, talk physics, you know, figure out what math they figured out that we haven't, um, why stay quiet? So it kind of sounds like you're saying, Daniel, that it is physically and mathematically likely that there are other life forms out there, But it's it seems unlikely that they would come visitors and be so kind of weird and secretive about it, right, like that would have these erful signings without a big splash or that you know, we would see these small glimpses of them. But and that's it, Yeah, exactly. And then, of course, you know, make some assumptions about alien psychology, which certainly I'm not justified in making. But it seems unlikely to me that they would come all this way, um, spend all that energy and then just sort of like not engage, um, and that they would be able to they would come all this way, not engage and yet still spotted. That seems sort of like clumsy and immatur ish in contrast with the amazing technology required to get here, right, You're like, it sounds like a bad plot point. There's also the assumption that we would know how to understand them. Oh yeah, that's a whole other question, Right, do we even speak to them? Could we understand their language? Maybe there are aliens that are here, we just don't know how to understand them yet or see them because they're maybe in a different visual plane. I just always wonder maybe it's not them, it's us, it's me. That would be their answer, Yeah, what did you want to talk to this? It's not you? Well, we you know that. That touches on the whole different, fascinating question, which is could we even recognize alien life? It's possible we could land on another planet and there could be life going on, but it's just of a form that's so literally alien to us that we don't even recognize it because we're looking for life that's recognizable, because we've only ever seen life on Earth, and life could be you know, could take place on much longer time skills, you could have life that you know, where the beings last for hundreds of thousands of years, and their metabolism is crazy slow, and so we don't even see them moving right, They're they're talking to us, but they're they speak so slowly we only get a tiny little snippet of it. You know. It's we have to broaden our minds when we think about life in the universe because we've only ever seen this one example. Why is it I've always wanted to know that water is considered to be the crucial ingredient for a life. I mean, is it possible we'll look back on water as the astrology of nine And why? Why do why are we so convinced that two hydrogen one oxygen particle which supports our life, is crucial to all life throughout the whole galaxy. Yeah, it's a great question and the only argument really is that all life we've ever seen relied on water, But again that's only life on Earth, and so you're totally right. It could be that there's a completely different way for things to be alive and that doesn't require water, or like they can live in frozen water, or they can live in vapor or something like that. And so, you know, one question is that there is there earthlike life out there, and that would be fascinating because it's more likely we could speak to them and learn physics from them. But another question is are there weird other forms of life? You know? Is there life in the sun in currents of energy in the sun? Totally possible, right, so people are living off of the sun. Essentially, the sun could be alive for all we know. Australians, I've often wondered with their aliens. To our Australian listeners, we love you. I feel like our questions of an answer. I'm curious, Kara and Oz you sort of said that this idea of life and other planet's really trips you up. Can you tell us a little bit bit about why that trips you up and why you brought these questions to us. I think the question of life is is very relevant to our sleep Bokers podcasts and AI because you know, people see autonomy and algorithms, they see an output, whether it's an A I'm making a song, or whether it's an AIM a king a diagnosis, or whether it's an AI doing a job that was previously done by human And the natural response, as we talked about, is to say, okay, well, you know, to assign personhood and say okay, that's life. But is it? I mean, it's such a big definitional question here what is life? And one of the questions we're going to look at in our final episode of the series is there a fundamental difference between carbon life US and silicon life computers. And if we do believe that such a thing as silican life exists, well it doesn't require oxygen or water to exist. And so I think the question which is which has been haunting our our podcast is what are we? And how do we define ourselves? And as humans we've always you know, I'd like to define ourselves in opposition or in the absence of so you know, if you look at the history of theology in the you know, in the in the sixteenth century, God War, a total explanation until you know, you had people who came to challenge the status co about the creation and the seven days and where the earth was flat, and so this concept of the God of the gaps emerged, where every phenomenon that couldn't be explained was was attributed to God until the number of phenomena that couldn't be explained shranked the number that you know, the God who was only responsible for those wasn't wasn't so much for God anymore. Um. And so I think for me, the reason why we wanted to get your incredible insight today into into life on other planets is because it really starts to put on the same strings that we're pulling on, which is, you know, what is life and how do we define ourselves? And you know, this desire, this human quest to explore the universe or to understand how AI works is you know, is constantly in search of a of a question I think which often comes back to who we are? Do AI lives matter? Basically? Well that and also are our lives at risk? I think it's a lot of people's big question. Not at risk, but you know, will we be dominated? In a certain sense, some of us obsessed about what life means here on Earth. Maybe there are there's clear evidence of life out there, or well some of us obsessed about life out there, maybe there's really interesting and amazing things redefining life right here on Earth. Rate I think it's always interesting to think about the way in which, you know, alien invasion is depicted in films and in science fiction. I mean not always. I can't speak so so much on science fiction and literature, but um, the idea that it's somewhat sinister, I think is what's interesting to me. That we fear what we don't understand, especially when it resembles us in some way, right, which is the same with robots. I mean, if you look at truly again going back to this, you know, the sort of Boston Dynamics examples, If you look at some of these robots that they're developing, it's uncanny. Not that they it's the uncanny valley. It's not so much as they look like human beings, but they look almost like dogs or almost like human beings. And that's what's really scary about it, Not that it's some robot version of a person. It's a robot that looks like what a person is supposed to be and it makes you feel, right, it makes you feel This week, there's been there's been two stories, right. There's been the continuing interest in the UFOs and the navy hearings, and has also been the methane emerging from Mars. And people don't care so much about the methane emerging from Mars because it's not human like and even if it does signify life, it doesn't signify any kind of life that we can computer similar to our own. Whereas these things flying through the sky obviously you know, bring to mind pilots, that's right. And so for those of you who are unaware about the methane issue, people have found methane on the atmosphere of Mars, and that's usually a hallmark of microbial life, that these little bugs are producing methane as they metabolize something. And it's convincing because methane doesn't last very long, and so it's produced, it breaks down the atmos fear, which means if you find it, he was recently made. And some people wonder if there's microbial life under the ground on Mars, and that there is another fascinating question about whether there's life elsewhere in the universe that we talked about once in this podcast, which is are we the aliens? Because there's one school of thought that says maybe life began on Mars and then came to Earth as microbes and then flourished. Right, we don't understand the process for how this began, and it's certainly possible for rocks to get blasted off the surface of Mars and land on Earth. So one not too crazy theory is that we are all Martians. Well that's the immigration debate right there. No, I mean it is when we when we talk about the United States, No wall will protect us from Mars. All right, Maybe we should say that for the next podcast. But thank you so much Kara and Oz for joining us here to the m bringing your questions. So if people want to find your podcast, what do they search for Sleepwalkers podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts or the i Art radio app, Yeah, and usta crow or Instagram, Twitter? All right, Well, thank you for joining us today and we look forward to hearing your podcast. Thanks retreat to talk to you. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's One Word, or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio, a Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.