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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. “Okay, so with technosignatures, I gave the example of chlorophorocarbon. So that would be an example of, and again, that one is a non-agnostic one because we sort of like, oh, we produced chlorofluorocarbons. Maybe they will, right? And there's solar panels, right? You can actually the glint off of solar panels will produce the way the light is reflected off of solar panels, no matter what it's made out of, actually. There was a paper that Menavi Lingam Minavi Loeb did in, I think it was 2017. We've just followed up on it. That actually could act as a technosignature. You'd be able to see in the reflected light this sort of big jump that would occur because of city lights. Artificial illumination, if there's really like, you know, large scale cities like Coruscant and Star Wars or Trantor in the Foundation, those city lights would be detectable, you know, the spectral imprint of those across 20, 30 light years. So, you know, our job in this grant.”

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

2. “Some proposals for networked biosignatures. Information theory you can use, you can try and look at the information that is in the different compounds that you find in the atmosphere. And maybe that information shows you like, oh, if there's too much information here, there must have been biology happening. It's not just rock. Same thing for techno. That's what we're working on right now, that for technosignatures as well.”

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

3. “Right. And that's part of the interesting thing, right? So that's what, you know, so we can use Earth as an example, right? We can say, look, oxygen, we know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn't for dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that phyloplankton dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it. That's sometimes mentioned. And there was even, there was a paper that somebody wrote where it was like, well, we're not saying we see it, but there's a bunch of noise in the spectrum right there. So, you know, there's a whole list of things that Earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be biosignatures. But now we're reaching an interesting point. The field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic.”

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

4. “Wouldn't necessarily call these anomalies. I'm looking for things for biosignature. I'm looking for things that a geosphere, right? They're just rock and air wouldn't produce on its own.”

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

5. “This is one of the things we did. We did a paper where we showed you could detect it across interstellar distances. You could look at the atmosphere, look at the light coming from a distant planet, pass the light through a spectrograph and see the spectral lines, the fingerprint, the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons in an atmosphere. And that would for sure tell you that there was a technological civilization there because there's no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons except through some kind of industrial process.”

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

6. “Atmosphere because life put it there. If life went away, the oxygen, and particularly oxygen and methane, that pair, they would disappear, you know, very quickly. They'd react away. They'd all be gone. So if you find a planet with oxygen and methane, that's a good bet that there's a biosphere there. Okay, what about technospheres? Technospheres, this is what, you know, so I'm the principal investigator on the first grant NASA has ever given to do these kind of exoplanet technosignatures. NASA was kind of for reasons we can talk about NASA had gotten pretty gunshy about funding anything about intelligent life. But okay, what's an example of a technosignature? Well, one could be atmospheric pollution. I'm going to put pollution in quotes here because it doesn't have to be pollution, but gases like chlorofluorocarbons. So we've dumped, you know, we dumped a huge amount of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere by mistake. It was affecting the ozone, but we put so much in there that actually...”

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

7. “Of different reasons. You have to assume they wanted to be found and they were sending you a super powerful beacon now because we know exactly where to look and we know exactly how to look, we can just go about looking for passive signatures of the civilization going about its civilizationing business, you know, without asking whether they want to be contacted or not. So this is what we call a biosignature or a technosignature. It is an imprint in the light from the planet of the activity of a biosphere or a technosphere. And that's really important. That is why kind of the whole Gaia idea ends up being astrobiological, that biospheres and technospheres are so potent they change the entire planet. And you can see that from 20 light years. So let's give an example of a biosignature to start off with, which would be a signature of a biosphere, oxygen, right? On Earth, at least, we know that oxygen is only in the”

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

8. “Yeah. So SETI, search for extraterrestrial technology, is a term that I am not fond of using anymore. I mean, some people in my field are, so I'm sorry, folks, but I'm really, what I really like is the idea of technosignatures. Because I think to me, SETI is the, first of all, intelligence. We're not really looking for intelligence. We're looking for technology. I mean, you know. And SETI, the classic idea SETI is the radio telescopes, you know, and contact, Jody Foster with the headphones, that whole thing is still part, it's still active. There's still great things going on with it, but suddenly this whole new window opened up. When we discovered exoplanets, we now found a new way to look for intelligent civilizations or life in general in a way that doesn't have any of the assumptions that had to go into the classic radio setting and specifically what I mean is we're not looking for somebody sending us a beacon. You really needed that with the classic model for a bunch of...”

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

9. “Yeah, yeah, the potentially dead part, I think. Right. It could be that making civilizations as easy, they just don't last long. So when we went out there, we'd find a lot of extinct civilization.”

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

10. “To put on my scientist's hat and just say, My gut feeling is that dumb life, so to speak, is common. I am a little agnostic about, I can see ways in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse. But until you know, we got to go look. It's all armchair astronomy.”

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

11. “You know, and then the other version is you get there, you land, and instantly, you know, the nose bleeds, and you're dead.”

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

12. “Because everything on life has the same lineage. We all come from Luca, you know, the last universal common ancestry. And what you see is often in science fiction, people will do things like, oh, well, it's okay because that metabolism, that biochemistry is so different from ours that we can coexist because they don't even know each other, you know, right?”

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

13. “Individual examples of life. And I kind of believe this the true unit of life, it's not DNA, it's not a cell, it's the biosphere. It's the whole community. Yeah.”

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

14. “There's an alternative view, though, which is there's this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora. So there's been a million century ship stories, like where, you know, Earth sends out a generation ship or century ship and it goes to another planet and they land and they colonize. And on this one, they get all the way there and they think it's the planet's going to be habitable. And it turns out that it's not habitable for Earth life. Like that, there's like bacteria or prions actually, you know, super that just like, you know, kill people. And the simplest way. And the important thing about this book was the idea that like, you know, life is actually very tied to its planet. It may not be so easy. I just thought it was a really interesting idea. I'm not saying necessarily supporting it, but that actually life reflects the planetary conditions. Not the planetary, the planet itself, the whole lineage, the whole history of the biosphere. And it may not be so easy to just sort of be like, oh, just drop it over here and it'll, you know, because the bacteria, even though they're into...”

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

15. “All this kind of stuff. Pressure, salinity, and then just like dump a bunch of things that are not used to it and then just see, does everybody just die? You know, that's it.”

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

16. “How fast could microbial evolution occur in under harsh conditions that you maybe get somebody who figures out, okay, I can deal with this. I think the moon's too much because it's so sterile. But, you know, Mars, I don't know, maybe. I don't know. We'd have to, but it's an interesting idea.”

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

17. “You know, the moon is hard because the moon is just like there's no, you know, the moon may be really hard, but you know, that'd be, I mean, I wonder somebody must have done these experiments, right? Like, how, because we know there are extremophiles, right? We know that they're, you can go down, you know. Miles below the Earth's surface, and there are things where there's no sunlight, there's, you know, the conditions are so extreme, and there's lots of microbes having a great time, living off the radioactivity, you know, in the rocks. But, you know, they had lots of time to evolve to those conditions. So I'm not sure if you dumped a bunch of bacteria. So somebody like that, somebody must have done these experiments.”

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

18. “Yeah, yeah, because it's really what about thinking about complex systems, right? A space habitat would have to be as robust as an ecosystem, as the kind of thing you go out and you see a pond with all the different webs of interactions. That's why I always think that, you know, if this process of going out into space is actually will help us with climate change and with thinking about making long-term sustainable version of human civilization, because you really have to think about these webs, the complexity of these webs and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever. The biosphere knows how to do this, right? And so, A, how do we support, how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere that also doesn't, you know, mess with the biospheres, mess with the biosphere's capacity to support our technosphere. So, you know, by doing this, by trying to build space habitats, in some sense, you're thinking about building a small scale version of this. So I think the two.”

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

19. “I think my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a bit a self-sufficient base is so far away. That like say you start doing that and then there is a full scale nuclear exchange. That base is, you know, it's not going to last because it's just, you know, the self-sufficiency requires a kind of economy, like literally a material economy that we are so far from with Mars, that we are centuries from. Like I said, you know, three centuries, which is not that long, two to three centuries, you know, look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster than 60 miles an hour unless they were falling off a cliff, right? And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour. But it is sort of centuries long. So that's why I think we'd be better off trying to solve these problems than I just think the odds that we're going to be able to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small. So we'd have to deal with it.”

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

20. “Well, I think, you know, I want to be always careful with that because, like I said, it's centuries that we're talking about, right? So, you know, the problem with climate change, and same thing with nuclear war, it's breathing down our necks now. So it's not trying to establish a base on Mars is going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple of a century at least. So it's not like a backup plan now. You know, we have to solve the problem of climate change. We have to deal with that. There's still enough nuclear weapons to really do horrific things to the planet for human beings. So I don't think it's like a backup plan in that way. But I do think, like I said, it's the prize. It's, you know, if we get through this, then we get the entire solar system to sort of play around in and experiment with and do really cool things with.”

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

21. “You know, it's a lot easier on some level, right? It depends on how, like, with nano fabrication and such. But, you know, getting down a gravity well is hard, right? So, you know, there's a certain way in which there's a lot of, you know, it's a lot easier to build real estate out of the asteroids. But we'll probably do both. I mean, I think what will happen is, you know, the next, should we make it through climate change and nuclear war and all the other and AI, the next thousand years of human history is the solar system, right? And so, you know, I think we'll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can. And it's, you know, it's a beautiful, what I love about what's hopeful about it is this idea you're going to have all of these pockets. And I'm sure there's going to be a Mormon space habitat. Like, you know, there's going to be whatever you want, a libertarian space habitat. Everybody's going to be able to kind of create their, there'll be lots of experiments in human flourishing and those kinds of experiments will be really useful for us to sort of figure out better ways for us to interact and have maximum”

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

22. “Built by hollowing out the asteroids and spinning them up and living on the inside, right? Because they have the Coriolis force. And I thought like, wow, what a cool idea. And when I ran the blog for NPR actually talked to the guys and said, did you guys calculate this, see whether it's possible? Sadly, it's not possible. The rock is just not strong enough that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one-third gravity, which is, I think, the minimum you need for human beings, the rock would just fall apart. It would break. But we came up with another idea, which was that if you take small asteroids, put a giant bag around them, a nanofiber bag, and spin those up, it would inflate the bag. And then even a small couple of kilometer-wide asteroid would expand out to, you could get like a Manhattan's worth of material inside. So forget about even colonizing Mars space stations, right? Or space habitats with millions of people in them.”

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

23. “Are you a fan of the expanse? Do you have you watched The Expanse? Great show. Because it's all about, I highly recommend to everybody. It's based on a series of books that are excellent. It's on Prime, six seasons. And it's basically about the settled solar system. It takes place about 300 years from now. And the entire solar system is settled. And it is the best show about interplanetary politics. The first season, actually, the journal, what was it, Foreign Affairs, said the best show on TV about politics? It takes place is interplanetary. So yeah, I think, you know, human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict. And I don't think it'll be necessarily all that different. Because really, I think within a few hundred years, we will have lots of people in the solar system. And it doesn't even have to be on Mars. We did a paper where we look based on, because I always wanted to know about whether an idea in the expanse was really possible. In the expanse, the asteroid belt, what they've done is they have colonized the asteroid.”

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

24. “Could be, I mean, you know, agent based modeling you could do it with. So, you know, our group has used agent-based modeling to do something like the Fermi paradox. That was, that was agent-based modeling. But you can also do this. People at Santa Fe have done this, other groups have done this, to use agent-based modeling to track the formation of hierarchies, the formation of stable hierarchies. So I think that's actually very doable. But understanding the kind of assumptions and principles that are going into it and what you can extract from those, that is what is sort of the frontier.”

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

25. “Evolution can happen on those kinds of timescales. So you wouldn't even really be the same thing you started out as, but social forms, what kind of social forms can you imagine that would be continuous over that? Or maybe they wouldn't be continuous, they'd drop out, you know, they destroy themselves and they come back. So maybe it's, you know, it's a trunk or a punctuated evolution. I mean, but we got to sort of, this is the fun part. We have to sort of work this out.”

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

26. “Yeah. And we're ready to blow ourselves to bits or drive ourselves off the planet. Yeah, no, it's really interesting. But there's got to be a way. I think that's really a frontier. So you had David Kipping on not too long ago. And David and I did a paper and Caleb Sharf. David really drove this where we, you know, it was a Bayesian calculation to sort of ask the question. If you were to find a detection, if you were to find a signal or a techno signature, would that come from a civilization that was younger your age or older? And you could see, I mean, this is not hard to do, but it was the formalism. The formalism was hard. You know, it's kind of intuitive, but the formalism was hard to show that, yeah, they're older, you know, probably much older. So it means you really do need to think about like, okay, how do billion-year civilizations manifest themselves? What signatures will they leave? And yeah, can you even, I mean, what's so cool about it? It's so much fun because you got to, like, you have to imagine the unimaginable, would you still, I mean, obviously by...”

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

27. “Yeah, because you think about it, we've only been around, I mean, as a tech, truly, you know, when we think about in Drake's definition, you had to have radio telescopes. That's been 100 years. And if we got another 10,000, 100,000 years of history, that would be, for us, it'd be pretty amazing, right? But that still, that wouldn't be long enough to really pop up the number of civilizations in the galaxy. So you really need it to be like hundreds of millions of years. And that raises a question which I am very interested in, which is how do you even talk about, I call it the billionaire civilization, right? How do we even begin to hypothesize or think about in any kind of systematic way what happens to a technological civilization across hundreds of millions to a billion years?”

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

28. “Yeah, a couple million years to spare. You know, there is a mystery there about why it takes so long, like with the Cambrian explosion, but that may have been about these windows that like you couldn't happen until the window, the planet and the life had evolved together enough that they together kind of opened the window for the next step. You know, intelligent life and how long intelligent is still a technological civilization. I think there's a big question about how long those last and how, you know, I'm hopeful, you know, but in terms of just like, I think life is absolutely going to be common in the pretty common in the universe.”

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

29. “Lots of ways to again, you know, we don't know unless we look, and you had Sarah walk her on not too long ago, you know, she's very interested in origins of life. So, you know, lots of people are working on this. But I think it's hard looking at the history of the earth. And again, this is you can do Bayesian arguments on this. But yeah, it's forming life. I don't think it's hard. Getting like basic biology started, I don't think is hard. It's still wild. It's an amazing process that actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is.”

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

30. “Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I mean. That's why. So these kinds of arguments, you have to be careful of what they can do. But what it really, I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists, right? So that's why we called it the pessimism line. There's been, you know, throughout history, there's been alien pessimists and alien optimists. And they've been yelling at each other. That's all they had to go with, right? And like with Giordano Bruno in 1600, they burned the guy at the stake for being an alien optimist. But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant. We sort of thought this was like the planck length. This was sort of the planck length of astrobiology. Gave you an actual number that, you know, if you could somehow calculate what the probability, you know, of forming a technological civilization was, this thing sort of shows you where the limit is. As long as you're above 10 to the minus 22, then you actually absolutely, it is occurred in the history. Other civilizations have occurred in the history of the universe.”

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

31. “Then, yeah, we're alone. If it's anywhere larger than that, then we're not the first. It's happened somewhere else. And to me, that was mind-blowing. Doesn't tell me there's anybody nearby. The galaxy could be sterile. It just told me that like, you know, unless nature's really against, it has some bias against civilizations, we're not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.”

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

32. “Anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe. And that we were able to constrain. And so what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. And the only way that we're the only time that this is, you know, this whole process from abiogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed, right? So therefore you could put a probability, we called it the pessimism line, right? We don't really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, right? But we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, as if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22, 1 in 10 billion trillion.”

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

33. “Well, so the main thing we were trying to do with this paper is say, look, we have all of this exoplanet data, right? It's got to be good for something, especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down empirically are two terms in the Drake equation. So F sub P, that's the second term, fraction of stars that have planets. And then N sub E, the average number of planets in the habitable zone. Those are the second and third term in the Drake equation. So what that means is all the astronomical terms have been nailed. And so we said, like, okay, how do we use this to do something with the Drake equation? And so we realized is, well, okay, we got to get rid of time. The lifetime thing, we can't say anything about that. But if we let that, if we don't ask how long they last, but instead ask, what's the probability that there have been any civilizations at all, no matter how long they lasted? I'm not asking whether they exist now or not, I'm just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization.”

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

34. “Santa Fe Institute, the stuff the Santa Fe Institute does on this as complex systems. The origin of hierarchies and such, very cool.”

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

35. “Yeah, well, like the indigenous peoples of North America, there could have been like millions and millions. We get this idea that like, oh, you know, the Europeans came and it was empty, you know. But it may have only been empty because the plague had swept up from what happened in Mesoamerica. And they didn't really build cities, but they, I mean, they didn't build. Wouldn't or stone cities. They built wooden cities, you know.”

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

36. “Yeah, like the Amazon. Like the Amazon problem, that was the conquistas came and wiped everybody out. And especially just even like the plague may have. So yeah, how much of that civilization”

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

37. “Very short amount of time. Yeah. This is not to say that there was. Like, so whenever I gave you, like I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper, and I had to always emphasize we're not saying there was a Silurian, you know, but we're just saying that if there was. That's why I love Gavin's question. Gavin's question was just like, how could you tell, right? It was a very beautifully scientific question. That's what we were really showing is that you really, you know, unless you did a very specific kind of search, which nobody's done so far, that, you know, there's not an obvious way to tell that there could have been civilizations here earlier on.”

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

38. “And it lasted 10,000 years. Fossil record's not going to have it. Yeah. Yeah. The fossil record is too sparse, right? Most things don't fossilize. And 10,000 years is a blink in the eye of geological time. So we call, or Gavin called this the Silurian hypothesis after the Doctor Who episode with the lizard creatures, the Silurians. And so that paper got a lot of press. But it was an important idea. And it was really Gavin's. I was just helping with the astrobiology, that to recognize that like, yeah, you know, we could have been visited a long time ago. There just would be no record. Yeah, it's kind of mind bl”

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

39. “Is nobody for you know millions of years, and so if that if we're living in one of those bubbles right now, then maybe we revisited, but we revisited a hundred million years ago. And there was a paper that Gavin Schmidt and I did that showed that if there was a civilization, whether it was like dinosaurs or aliens that was here a hundred million years ago, there's no way to tell. There's no record left over. The fossil record is too sparse. The only way maybe you could tell is by looking at the isotopic strata to see if there was anything reminiscent of an industrial civilization. But the idea that, you know, you'd be able to find, you know, iPhones or toppled buildings after 100 million years is, there's no way.”

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40. “Don't carry a lot of weight because there's so many ways around it. We did an actual simulation, my group, Johnson Carroll, one of my collaborators, we actually simulated the galaxy and we simulated probes moving at sublight speed from one star to the other, gathering resources, heading to the next one. And so we could actually track the expansion wave across the galaxy, have one IA biogenesis event, and then watch the whole galaxy get colonized or settled. And it is absolutely true that that wave crosses, you know, Hart was right, Fermi was right. That wave crosses very quickly. But civilizations don't last forever, right? So one question is, when did they visit? When did they come to Earth, right? So if you give civilizations a finite lifetime, you know, let them last 10,000, 100,000 years. What you find is you now have a steady state. Civilizations are dying. They're coming back. They're traveling between the stars. What you find then is you can have big holes opened up. You can have regions of space where there's”

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41. “At the entire search space for SETI, and imagine that's an ocean. All the different stars you have to look at, the radio frequencies you have to look at, how when you look, how often you look. And then they summed up all the SETI searches that had ever been done. They went through the literature. And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at? And it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it. And so now are we going to say, oh, well, there's no fish in the ocean, right? So there is absolutely positively no indirect Fermi parks. We just haven't looked. But we're starting to look. So that's what's, you know, finally we're starting to look. That's what's exciting. The direct Fermi paradox, there are so many ways out of that, right? There's a book called 77 Solutions to the Fermi Paradox that it just, you know, you can pick your favorite one.”

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42. “Where he actually kind of went through this calculation and showed and said, well, there's nobody here now. Therefore, there's nobody anywhere. Okay, so that is what we will call the direct Fermi paradox. Why aren't they here now? But something happened where people after SETI began, where people started to, there was this idea of the great silence. People got this idea in their head that like, oh, we've been looking for decades now for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence that we haven't found any. Therefore, there's nothing out there. So we'll call that the indirect Fermi paradox. And there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There's never been any money to look. There really was always done by researchers who were kind of like scabbing some time, you know, some extra time from their other projects to, you know, look a little bit at the sky with a telescope. Telescopes are expensive. So Jason Wright, one of my collaborators, he and his students did a study where they looked.”

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43. “Disappearing in New York. And this cartoon said, Oh, it's UFOs because this is already, you know, it's 1950, the first big UFO craze happened in 47. So they were laughing about this as they're walking and they started being physicists, started talking about interstellar travel, interstellar propulsion, blah, blah, blah. You know, conversation goes on for a while. Conversation turns to something else gone to other things. About 40 minutes later over lunch, Fermi blurts out. Well, where is everybody, right? Typical Fermi sort of thing. He'd done the calculation in his head and he suddenly realized that look, if intelligence is common, that even traveling at sub-light speeds, a civilization could cross, you know, kind of hop from one star system to the other and spread it out across the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years. And he realizes. And so he was like, why aren't they here now? And that was the beginning of the Fermi paradox. It actually got picked up as a formal thing in 1975 in a paper by Hart.”

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

44. “Okay, the Fermi paradox. Let's talk about the, I love talking about the Fermi paradox because there is no Fermi paradox. Dun dun dun dun. Yeah, so the Fermi paradox, let's talk about the Fermi paradox and the history of it. So Enrico Fermi, it's 1950. He's walking with his friends at Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab to the Cantina. And there had been this cartoon in the New Yorker. They all read The New Yorker. And the cartoon was trying to explain why there had been this rash of garbage cans being...”

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45. “Yeah, I think that's not unreasonable to say. I mean, especially since the formal definition, you get one in five, right? One in five is a lot. There's a lot of stars in this sky. So yeah, saying that in general, when I look at a star, there's a pretty good chance that there's something habitable orbiting it is not a unreasonable scientific claim.”

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46. “This kind of stuff, yeah. Well, for example, we know in our own solar system, we have Which has got a hundred mile deep ocean under 10 miles of ice, right? That's not in the habitable zone. That is outside the habitable zone. And that may be the best place. It's got more water than Earth does, all of its oceans. It's twice as much water on Europa than there is on Earth. So that may be a really great place for life to form and it's outside the habitable zone. So, you know, the habitable zone is a good place to start and it helps us. And there's reasons why you do want to focus on the habitable zone because like Europa, I couldn't, I won't be able to see from across telescopic distances, across light years. I wouldn't be able to see life on Europa because it's under 10 miles of ice, right? So with the important thing about planets in the habitable zone is that we're thinking they have atmospheres, atmospheres are the things we can characterize across 10, 50 light years, and we can see biosignatures, as we're going to talk about. So there is a reason why the habitable zone becomes important for.”

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

47. “Too close in, so that's the formal definition of the habitable zone. So it's a nice strict definition. There's probably way more going on than that, but this is a place to start.”

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48. “Habitable zone is an idea that was developed in the 1958 by the Chinese American astronomer Xu Shang. And it was a brilliant idea. It said, look, this is there. I can do this simple calculation. If I take a planet and just stick it at some distance from a star of what's the temperature of the planet, what's the temperature of the surface? So now you're all you're going to ask, you give it a standard kind of Earth-like atmosphere and ask, could there be liquid water on the surface? We believe that liquid water is really important for life. There could be other things that's happening fine, but if you were to start off trying to make life, you'd probably choose water as your solvent for it. So basically the habitable zone is the band of orbits around a star. where you can have liquid water on the surface. You could take a glass of water, pour it on the surface, and it would just pool up. It wouldn't freeze immediately, which would happen if your planet is too far out, and it wouldn't just boil away if your planet...”

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

49. “On average. And it turns out to be 1 over 5, right? So, you know, around 0.2. So that means you just count five of them. Go out at night and go one, two, three, four, five. One of them has an earth-like planet in the habitable zone.”

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50. “So the paper, there was this paper we wrote Woody Sullivan and I in 2016 where we said, look, we have all this exoplanet data now, right? So the thing that exoplanet science and the exoplanet census I was talking about before have nailed is F sub P, the fraction of stars that have planets, it's one. Every freaking star that you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds. I mean, it's mind-boggling because every one of those are all places, right? They're either, you know, gas giants probably with moons, so the moons are places you can stand and look out, or they're like terrestrial worlds where even if there's not life, there's still snow falling and there's oceans washing up on shorelines. It's incredible to think how many places and stories there are out there. So right, the first term was F, which is how many stars have planets. The next term is how many planets are in the habitable zone, right?”

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