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Adam Frank

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2024-12-22

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2024-12-22

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1. “Oh, bacteria can last. This is the thing about panspermia, right? How long can a bacteria survive in a rock that's been blasted if there's a common impact across interstellar distances? That does seem to actually be possible. People have done those kind of calculations. It's not out of the realm of possibility, but a complex organism, multicellular, multi-systemic or multi-systems, right, with organs and such.”

   2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “You know, the generation ship, too, which I talked about in the book, the idea of also the, you know, you talked about extending human lifetimes or the stasis, the cryostasis, which is a mainstay of science fiction that, yeah, right, you can be put to, you can basically put in suspended animation and such. None of these things we know are possible. But, you know, it's so interesting, and this is why I love science fiction, the way it seeds ideas, right? All these ideas we're going to talk about because they've been staples of science fiction for 50 years.”

   2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Put a thruster on those, you know? Like, why keep them in the solar system? Maybe that's maybe space is full of like these sort of traveling space habitats that are in some sense. They're worlds in and of themselves.”

   2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “It's a wild ethical question, isn't it? That book I told you about Aurora. I love the book because it was such a sort of inversion of the usual because, you know, I've read, I love science fiction. I've read so many generationship stories. And they get to that planet. The planet turns out to be uninhabitable. It's inhabited, but it's uninhabitable for Earth. Because, again, he has this idea of like, you know, life is particular to their planets. So they turn around and they come back. And then when they land, the main character goes, there's still people who are, you know, arguing for more generation ships. And she goes and she punches the guy out because she spent her whole life in a tube with this. I thought that was a really interesting inversion. You know, the interesting thing about we were talking about the space habitats. But if you really had a space habit, not some super cramped, you know, crappy, usual version of a century ship. But if you had these space habitats that were really, you know, like the O'Neill cylinders, they're actually pretty nice places to live.”

   2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Yeah, I mean, I agree with that in principle, but I think there's been, you know, I mean, there's a lot of ideas out there. People, you know, string theory, people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years. It's not like people haven't been, not like there hasn't been a lot of effort. And again, I'm not going to predict. I think it's entirely possible that we have, you know, there's incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be poked through, in which case then all bets are off, right? Once you get sort of, you know, interstellar, fast, interstellar travel. Whoa, you know, who knows what can happen. But I tend to be drawn to science fiction stories that take the speed of light seriously. Like, what kind of civilization can you build where it takes 50 years to get to where you're going and a 50 years back? So I don't know. I mean, yeah, there's no way I'm going to say that we won't get warp drives. But as of right now, it's all fictional. It's barely even a coherent concept.”

   2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Years and the technology hadn't changed. And that was actually true for most of human history, right? You used your great grandfather's tools because there was no need to have any other new tools. And you probably did his job. So, you know, we can be fooled into thinking like, oh, you know, technology is going to go on forever. We're always going to find new advances as opposed to sometimes things just flatten out. For a long time. So you have to be careful about that bias that we have living in this time of great acceleration.”

   2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “So, you know, it's a nice fiction, but really right now, you know, we live in this weird moment in history of the great acceleration where like the technology we use now is completely different from the technology we used 10 years ago is remarkably different from the technology from 100 years ago. But I remember playing Assassin's Creed where everybody's like, you know, what is it? It's 1200 and everybody's like stab, stab, stab. I was like, yeah, this is a great game. And then I got Assassin's Creed 2. And it was 300 years later and everybody's like, stab, stab, stab. And it was like.”

   2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. But what I think, you know, if you look at the physics we understand, right? Every possibility for faster than light travel really relies on something that doesn't exist, right? So, you know, the cool thing is Einstein's field equations, you can actually play with them. The equations are right there. You can add things to the, you know, right or left-hand side that allow you to get something like the Accubre drive. That was a metric that showed you like, oh, it's a warped bubble. It's a warping of spacetime that moves through spacetime faster than the speed of light, right? Because nothing can move across spacetime faster than the speed of light, but spacetime itself can move faster than the speed of light. But here's the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something. The thing you added, the little fictional term you added.”

   2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “You could attack, and there's been some work on this, like with the Accubre drive, you know, these proposals for warp drives. And we can talk about that later. I'm skeptical of those. But because it may really be possible that you just can't go faster than the speed of light. But people have done work on like, you know, what would be the signature of an accubre drive? What would be the signature? He's like, you know, could you detect if you're using a drive like that, then you certainly are distorting space-time, which means any light that's passing by has gotten, you know, its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted spacetime. So yeah, there are possibilities along with that. You know, one of the funny things, I don't know if they've gotten past this, but somebody calculated the problem with the Accubre drive or this warp drive was that if you dropped out of warp, there would be this spray of gamma rays that would like sterilize any planet in front of you. So it's like, well, yeah, you probably don't want to do that, but that would be a great bios or technosignature.”

   2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “That's why there's this emphasis now on these agnostic signatures, right? So actually, disequilibrium is a nice one. One way to define life is it is a system that is far from equilibrium, right? It's alive, right? Because as soon as it dies, it turns into, goes back to equilibrium. And so you can look at all chemicals in an atmosphere, even if you don't know whether these could be chemicals that you have no idea whether or not they have anything to do with life. But the degree of disequilibrium, the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not, you know, the chemicals have not all kind of like just gone down to it, you know, they've all reacted away to an equilibrium state. You can actually tell that in very general ways using what's called a Gibbs free energy. And that's kind of a signature. Like if you see an atmosphere that is wildly out of equilibrium, that indicates that there's something happening on that planet. Biosphere or technosphere that is pumping gases into the atmosphere.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Really difficult. It's really difficult. And it's, you know, what's cool, it's a really information theoretic kind of proposal. You really have to use information theory to say like, what's the background? How do I define something that I can say that looks weird?”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Yeah, if there are artifacts on the, and people have proposed doing this with artificial intelligence. We have, you know, the moon has been mapped down to a couple of meters with various probes. And all that data is sitting there. So why not use machine learning to like look through all those things and look for anything that looks not like the lunar surface? And they did a test program where they gave it, they gave the computer, you know, sort of like, I don't know, 50 miles around the Apollo 11 or Apollo, maybe it was Apollo 17 site. And it instantly was able to pull out the lander.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “On the moon, go, oh, look, there's somebody was here and left some debris. So there's this process called gardening, which is just the micrometeorite constant rain of micrometeorites. And that's where you get the lunar regolith, that fine powder on the moon is because of this gardening. And it turns out it is literally hundreds of millions to billions of years.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Okay, so trash is an interesting idea when you come to the actual solar system, right? We are actually, there's a whole other field of technosignatures, which are things in the solar system. What if somebody came by a billion years ago and left some stuff, right? So the Earth has been showing biosignatures for billions of years. And, you know, a species like us looking at our level, looking at Earth would have been able to know that Earth had life on it, had a biosphere for billions of years. So maybe somebody sent something by, you know, a half a billion years ago. So this idea of looking, say, at the moon for artifacts that have been there for a long time is something that people, a number of people are doing. We're just working on a paper where we just calculate this was super fun. We calculated how long would the Lunar Lander exist on the moon before micromete just chewed it down, right? How long would you be able to land?”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “They're accelerating and decelerating the whole way there, right? If you want to get to Mars in a couple weeks, you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there. You flip and burn and have it on, you know, so you also always have gravity. You have thrust gravity. So would those plumes be detectable? Because now you've got spaceships going all over the place and the odds that like, you know, the plume is going to cross your field of view could become pretty high. So yeah, I think that's a good way of looking for. That's one idea of looking for large scale interplanetary, which is kind of like when you're getting to a type two. Another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining. This was an idea, it was a group at Harvard-Smithsonian, that, you know, to be able to look for if you're really chewing up asteroids to build space habitats, there'd be dust particles left around. And would they look different from just, say,”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Thomas Beatty, who's joined us from at the University of Wisconsin, has an idea to look for plumes, right? If you have a civilization, if you have a solar system-wide civilization, right? And you got space truckers going back and forth, right? You know, from Mars to, you know, they're doing the encellus run.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Limits on how much energy you can use, but how do you use that energy? And then also, yeah, getting off planet eventually. If you want to use 10 times more energy than that, you're going to be not going to do it on world.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Is the frontier we are, and that was the topic of my last book, Light of the Stars. It's like you've got you have to do the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. You have to see the transition that we're going through now of the Anthropocene on a kind of planetary astrobiological framework. And that paper we were talking about with a 10 billion trillion worlds, that was actually in service of the work I was doing for this other book where I wanted to know how often do you go through an anthrop? How often does every civilized technological civilization trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate anthropocene crisis? And the answer we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably. And then the question is, are you smart enough to figure out how to readjust what you're doing technologically so that you're not, you know, that all boats rise, right? You want to figure out how to do this so that the biosphere becomes even more productive and healthy and resilient. So, yeah, right. It's the kind of technology. I think there's probably absolutely.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “More powerful than you are, right? And so, yeah, so there's limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “There is waste heat. You don't get to use it all, right? You can only, second law tells you that if I have a tank of gasoline, I can only use a certain fraction of the energy in that tank, and the rest is going to go to heating up the engine block. So that second law tells you that you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, uh-oh, you know, sorry is going to change on you. So there's a way in which we probably can't get to a type one without like devastating the Earth's climate. So we're probably going to have to figure out The most important thing actually here is probably this is why space becomes so the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we've been working on for a while called service worlds, right, that at some point you probably move a lot of your industry off world, right? We've got Mercury, for example. There's nothing on Mercury. There's no life on Mercury. Why don't you put your energy harvesting there, right? Because you can't mess with the biosphere. The biosphere is...”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “I think, you know, there's a problem with type one, which is that, you know, we already know about climate change, right? The effects of our harvesting energy to do the work of civilization is already changing the climate state, right? And that's something that, you know, Kardash couldn't have recognized when you, you know, there's the first law of thermodynamics, right? Which is just about energy, the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy. And Cardef wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it,”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “No, no, no. We're not even type one. But according to there was a paper written by a group that said, you know, can we continue on our path? We'll be at a type 1 at around 2300.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “You're doing it, some large fraction of the starlight that falls on your planet you're using for your own ends. The next would be to use all the starlight there is from that star, right? So that's the Dyson sphere. So he actually Dyson had already proposed his idea of the swarm and Cardchef was picking up. So that's a type two civilization. Type three is galactic scale, a civilization that could use all the starlight in a galaxy, right? So we are now, where are we now? Remarkably on a log scale, we're at 0.7 of a type 1.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “So, the Cardiff scale was the same time. This is this golden age of SETI, like kind of like 60, 59 to 65 when it just starts. Like this is, you know, Frank Drake has done his first experiment. People are like, oh my God, this is even possible. And so people are just throwing out these ideas. And as I, you know, said in the book, science is conservative. And what I mean by that is it holds on to its best ideas. So Kardashv comes up with this idea that look, if we're, again, it's always about detectability. If we're looking for civilizations, we should think about what are the state, what are the natural stages, natural in quotes, that a civilization goes through. And he was thinking in terms of energy use, which I like a good physicist. So he said, look, the first hurdle in terms of energy or threshold that a civilization will go through is using all the starlight that falls onto a planet. He called that a type one civilization. In whatever way.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Could be, I mean, like in our list of techno signatures, it would be down there, but it would be, again, if you had an advanced enough civilization that did enough of this, it would certainly you'd have a Clark Belt. And the question is whether or not it's detectable.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Well, there's something called the Clark Belt, right? So we have a bunch of satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit. Nothing naturally is going to end up in geosynchronous orbit, right? Geosynchronous orbits is one particular orbit that's really useful if you want to beam things straight down. Or if you want to put a space elevator up, right? So there's this idea that if a civilization becomes advanced enough that it's really using geosynchronous orbit, that you actually get a belt, something that would actually be detectable from a distance via a transit. There's been a couple papers written about the possibility of these Clark belts, densely occupied clark belts being a megastructure. It's not as mega as a Dyson swarm, but it's kind of planetary scale.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Right. And that's actually, you know, Dyson, that's actually why Dyson proposed it. He wasn't really proposing it because he was saying this is what civilizations are going to do. He proposed it because he was like, oh, we want to start looking for alien civilizations. Here's something that would have a detectable signature. So Jason and company have done pretty good searches. And recently they made news because they were able to eliminate a lot of places. No, these are not Dyson Spheres, but they did have a couple that were like anomalous enough that they're like, well, this is kind of what it would look like. It's not a detection. And they were saying they would never say it's a detection, but they were like, they were not non-detections.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Well, the main groups looking for megastructures are, again, Jason Wright at Penn State and collaborators. The way they're”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “That's exactly what it is, everything's coagal, and a stable solar system, you get a handful of planets, you know, five, ten, that's it probably, and nothing else. So if now suddenly you see lots of these little micro transits, you're telling you there's something else that's big enough to create a transit, but too many of them, and also within a regular shape, the transit itself, that these are these could be megastructures.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Exactly. Or just a planet, right? Or a couple of planets. There'd be so many of these that it would be like beep, beep, blip, blip, blip, blip.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “One object, right? Which is what you, if it's a swarm, you'd expect the light to be like blinking in and out as these things pass in front of, you know, if you've got thousands of these, much of the time they'll be blotting out the star. Sometimes they won't be, right? And so you're going to get an irregular sort of signal, transit signal.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “You don't really need direct imaging. You can do transits, right? They're big enough that when they pass in front of the star, they're going to produce a little blip of light because that's what they're supposed to, right? They're absorbing starlight. So people have worked out like, well, a square one or a triangular one.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “People started to say, yeah, it was like a sphere. And we actually almost thought we might have found one of these back with Bojoyan store. We saw the way we detect planets is through the transit method where the planet passes in front of the star and there's a dip in the starlight. It's a little eclipse, basically. And we know exactly what they should look like. And then with this one star, there were these really weird transits where like it was like this little dragon's tooth and then there'd be another one and another one and another one and then nothing and then three more. And in the paper that was written about this, they suggested they, you know, they went through the list of, oh, it's going to be comets, could be chunks of a broken up planet. And it could also be an alien megastructure. And of course, the news picked up on this and like everybody's, you know, news feed the next day. Alien megastructure is discovered. Turns out, sadly, they were not alien megastructures. They were probably gas or dust clouds. But it raised the possibility like, oh, these are observable. And people have worked out the details of what they would look like.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Yeah, the Dyson sphere. So, Freeman Dyson, you know, one of the greatest physicists ever was very broad-minded and thought about a lot of different things. He recognized that, you know, when a civilization progress, what they're going to need is ever more energy to do ever more amazing things. And what's the best energy source in a solar system? It's the star, right? So if you surrounded the star with solar collecting machines, sunlight collecting machines, the limit of this would be to actually build a sphere, an actual sphere around your star that had all solar panels on the inside. You could capture every photon the star produced, which is, you know, this insane amount of light, you would have enough power now to do anything, to re-engineer your solar system. So that was a Dyson sphere. Turns out that a Dyson sphere doesn't really work because it's unstable. But a Dyson swarm, and that's really what he meant, you know, this large collection of large orbiting”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “You know what's great about Megastructures is first of all, it's fun to say. Who doesn't want to say megastructure? Alien megastructure, right? Every morning I'm looking for an opportunity to say that. So the ER example of this is the Dyson sphere, right? Which is amazing because it was literally 1960 that this idea came up.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Yeah. And so isn't that amazing? You can, it's 120 light years away, but we can see into the atmosphere. We can see into the atmosphere so well that we can be like, oh, look, methane methane was a five sigma detection. Like you knew that the data were so good that it was like the gold standard of science.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Ocean world. And that is a kind of planet that it would be kind of in the super Earth sub-Neptune domain we were talking about, maybe eight times that mass of the Earth. But it's got a layer of hydrogen, an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water. You can get a giant ocean of liquid water. And that's an entirely different kind of planet that could be habitable. You know, it could be a 60 degree warm ocean. So the data that came out of JWST for that planet was good enough to be able to indicate like, oh, yeah, you know what? The models, from what we understand about the models, this looks like it could be a Hycean world.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Hot usually far away from the, you know, reasonably far away from the star. I think JWST is really kind of at the hairy edge of being able to do much with this. What's more important, I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there's not sexy pictures. It's like, hey, look at this wiggly line, but be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That's where we are right now. In order to look for life, we're going to be, we need to find planets with atmospheres, right? And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what's in the atmosphere. Is there carbon? Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that's the most exciting thing. For example, there was this planet K218B, which they did a beautiful job getting the spectra. And the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind of habitable world called a Hycean world. Hycean meaning hydrogen.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Think would play a big role. I think it would be helpful. I mean, human beings are a mess, let's face it. But I think having that recognition, that's why I always say to people, discovery of life of any kind of life, even if it was microbial life, it wouldn't matter that to know that we're not an accident, to know that there is probably, if we found one example of life, we'd know that we're not an accident and there's probably lots of life and that we're a community. We're part of a cosmic kind of community of life. And who knows what life has done, right? We don't really, all bets are off with life.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “So maybe we take 30 years to build, 10 years to get there, 10 years to get the picture back. Okay, you're dead, but your kids are, you know, I mean, so it becomes now this multi-generational project. How long did it take to build the pyramids? How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals, right? Those were multi-generational projects. And I think we're on the cusp of that kind of project.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “We can't get there. But, you know, I mean, again, this is the thing about being long lived. We've got to get to the point where we're long-lived enough that, so let's say we found, like, this is why I always like to, let's imagine that we find, say, 10 light years away, we find a planet that looks like it's got technosignatures, right? It doesn't end there. Like that would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity. And it wouldn't be like, well, okay, we're done. The first thing we do is we bigger telescopes to try and do those imaging, right? And then the next thing after that, we plan a mission there, right? We would figure out like with breakthrough starshot, there was this idea of trying to use giant lasers to propel small spacecraft, light sails, almost to the speed of light. So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures. If we actually made this discovery.”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “You know, they even have plans for how you'd be able to get these probes out into the Oort cloud on relatively fast timescales. You need to be about 500 times as far from the sun as Earth is. But right now, everything looks like the idea seems to hold together. So probably when I'll be dead, but when you're an old man, it's possible that something like this, could you imagine having like, yeah, that kind of resolution, a picture of an exoplanet down to kilometers. So I'm very excited about that.”

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43. “Onto the telescope, and you would be able to get, and they've done it's amazing, like they've already this idea is insane, they'd be able to get if everything works out 24 kilometer resolution, you'd be able to see Manhattan on a exoplanet. And this thing, it sounds insane, but actually, you know, Nat, they've already got the team, has already gotten through like sort of three levels of NASA, you know, there's the NASA program for like, give us your wackiest idea, right? And then the ones that survive that are like, okay, tell us whether that wacky idea, you know, is even feasible. And then they're marching along. And the idea is that”

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44. “Picture. But the problem is that with the, even with the thing that's going to come after JWST, it's going to be a pixel, right? You're not going to get any kind of resolution. You'll be able to get the light from it, which you'll be able to pass through a spectrograph, but you're not going to be able to take a picture. But there is this idea called the solar gravity lens telescope. I think that's what it is. And the idea is insane, right? So their general relativity says, look, massive bodies distort space. They actually curve spacetime. So the sun is a massive body. And so that means that the light passing through the sun gets focused like a lens, right? So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes out kind of into the Oort cloud and then look back towards the sun towards an exoplanet that is behind, not directly behind the sun, but is in the direction of the sun. And then let the sun act like a lens and collect, focus the light.”

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45. “Going to need much more powerful. But let me tell you, let's talk about direct imaging for a moment because I just have to go on. This is such a cool idea, right? So what we really want in the next generation of space telescopes and such is we're trying to do direct imaging. We're trying to get, you know, an image of a planet separated from its star to be able to see the reflected light or the actual emission from the planet itself.”

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46. “My God, there's all kinds of stuff. Well, like the chlorofluorocarbons, you can see Earth's pollution. And, you know, I think city lights, you had to be within the solar system.”

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47. “Interstellar distance because the real credit, you know, we really want to know is like I'm sitting here on Earth, I'm looking at these exoplanets, the nearest star is four light years away. So that's like the minimum distance. So if I'm looking at exoplanets, what kind of signals could I see?”

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48. “Wow, we just, this is fun. We just have Sophia Sheffess, who's part of our collaboration, just did a paper. We did Earth from Earth. If you were looking at Earth with Earth technology for a bunch of different technosignatures, how close would you have to be to be able to detect them? And most of them turn out to be you'd have to be pretty close, at least out to the Oort cloud. But actually, it is our radio signatures still that is still most detectable.”

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49. “If you looked at Earth at night from a distance where looked at spectra and you had sensitive enough instruments, you'd be able to see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of, you know, they bounce off the ground, right? The light bounces off the ground. So you'd convolve the sodium lamps with the reflected spectra from the ground. And yeah, you'd be able to see that they're city lights. Now, increase that by a factor of a thousand, you know, if you had a Trantor and you'd be able to detect that across interstellar distances. Thomas Beedek did this work, who's now working with us.”

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50. “It is to develop the first ever library of technosignatures. Nobody's really ever thought about this before. So we're trying to come up with all the possible ideas for what a civilization might produce that could be visible across interstellar distances. And are these good ones or is these ones going to be hard to detect or such?”

    2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source