YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Filippenko

lines on the record: 185
first: 2020-11-08
most recent: 2020-11-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, first author, I was second author of that paper. Yeah, so I was his direct mentor at the time, although he was one of these people who just runs with things. He was an MIT undergraduate, by the way, Harvard graduate student, and then a postdoc as a so-called Miller Fellow for basic research in science at Berkeley, something that I was back in 84 to 86. But you're largely a free agent, but he worked quite closely with me and he came to Berkeley to work with me. And Anne Schmidt's team, he was charged with analyzing the data and he measured the brightnesses of these distant supernovae, showing that they're fainter and thus more distant than anticipated. And that led to this conclusion that the universe had to have accelerated in order to push them out to such great distances. And I was shocked when he showed me the data, the results of his calculations and measurements.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, there were the two team leaders, Saul Pearlmutter and Brian Schmidt, and usually it's the team leaders that are recognized. And then Adam Reese was my postdoc.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, it was okay. Again, it was the thrill of doing the work and ultimately the work, the discovery was recognized with the prize. And we got to participate in Nobel Week. And it's okay with me. I've known other physicists whose lives were ruined because they did not get the Nobel Prize and they felt strongly that they should have. Ralph Alphar of the Alpha Beta Gammaf paper predicting the microwave background radiation, he should have gotten it. His advisor Gamalf was dead by that point. But, you know, Penzias and Wilson got it for the discovery and Alpha, apparently from colleagues who knew him well. I've talked to them. His life was ruined by this. It just nodded his innards so much.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't square with today's reality that a lot of science is done by big teams. In that case, a team of a thousand people. In our case, it was two teams consisting of about 50 people. And we used techniques that were arguably developed in part by people who astrophysicists who weren't even on those two papers. I mean, some of them were, but other papers were written by other people, you know. And so it's like we're standing on the shoulders of giants. And none of those people was officially recognized.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the way a lot of science is done now. And you look at gravitational wave discovery, which was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 2017. Ray, why set MIT got it and Kip Thorne and Barry Bearish at Caltech. And Ron Driver, one of the masterminds, had passed away earlier in the year. So again, one of the rules of the Nobel is that it's not given posthumously, or at least the one exception might be if they've made their decision and they're busy making their press releases right before October, the first week in October or whatever. And then the person passes away. I think they don't change their minds then. But yeah, you know, it.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right Yeah, yeah, and it's not even written in Alfred Nobel's will, it turns out. One of our teammates looked into it in a museum in Stockholm when we went there for Nobel Week in 2011. The leaders who got the prize formally knew that without the rest of us working hard in the trenches, the result would not have been discovered. So they invited us to participate in Nobel Week. And so one of the team members looked in the will and it's not there. It's just tradition. But it's archaic, you know. That's the way science used to be done.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If that attraction is great enough, then the apple will someday stop and even come back. The big crunch, you could call it, or the gnab gib, which is Big Bang backwards, right? That's what could have happened to the universe. But even if the universe's original expansion energy was so great that it avoids the big crunch. That's like an apple thrown at Earth's escape speed. It's like the rockets that go to Mars someday, right? with people. Even then you'd expect the universe to be slowing down with time. But we looked back through the history of the universe by looking at progressively more distant galaxies and by seeing the evolution of this expansion rate is that in the first nine billion years, yeah, it was slowing down. But in the last five billion years, it's been speeding up. So who asked for that, right? You know.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the accelerating universe is simply that if we look at the galaxies moving away from us right now, we would expect them to be moving away more slowly than they were billions of years ago. And that's because galaxies have visible matter, which is gravitationally attractive and dark matter of an unknown sort that holds galaxies together and holds clusters of galaxies together. And of course, they then pull on one another and they would tend to retard the expansion of the universe, just as when I toss an apple up, you know, even ignoring air resistance, the mutual gravitational attraction between Earth and the apple slows the apple down.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was given for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Not for the elucidation of what dark energy is or what causes that expansion, that acceleration, be it universes on the outside or whatever. It's only for the observational fact.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, never in my wildest dreams as a kid did I think that I would be involved, much less so heavily involved in a discovery that's so revolutionary. I mean, you know, as a kid, as a scientist, if you're realistic once you learn a little bit more about how science is done and you're not going to win a Nobel Prize and be the next Newton or Einstein or whatever, you just hope that you'll contribute something to humankind's understanding of how nature works and you'll be satisfied with that. But here I was in the right place at the right time. A lot of luck, a lot of hard work. And there it was, you know, we discovered something that was really amazing. And that was the greatest thrill, right? I couldn't have asked for anything more than being involved in that discovery.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why that idea caught on so quickly is that there were other physicists and astronomers doing observations completely independent of supernovae that seem to indicate the same thing.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go. It all boils down to that. And the greater your claim, the greater is the evidence that is needed and the more evidence you need from independent ways of measuring or of coming to that deduction. A good example was the accelerating universe, you know, when we found it evidence for it in 1998 with supernovae with exploding stars. It was great that there were two teams that lent some credibility to the discovery, but it was not until other astrophysicists used not only that technique, but more importantly other independent techniques that had their own potential sources of systematic error or whatever, but they all came to the same conclusion and that started giving a much more complete picture of what was going on and a picture in which most astrophysicists quickly gained confidence.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't very long odds if you're claiming that instead that you're finding evidence from another universe? I mean, it's like if the large hadron collider people had claimed After gathering enough data to show the Higgs particle when there was a 5% chance it could be just a statistical fluctuation. Their data. No, they required five sigma, five standard deviations, which is roughly one chance in two million that this is a statistical fluctuation of no physical. Greater significance.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my own feeling is probably these things don't survive. I don't think we've seen any evidence in the cosmic microwave background radiation of information leaking through. Similarly, the one way or one of the few ways in which we might test for the presence of other universes is if they were to collide with ours, that would leave a pattern, a temperature signature in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Some astrophysicists claim to have found it, but in my opinion, it's not statistically significant to the level that would be necessary to have such an amazing claim, right? You know, it's just a 5% chance that the microwave background had that distribution just by chance.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, you know, there are various forms of string theory, there's quantum loop gravity, there are various ideas, but which, if any, will be the one that survives the test of time and more importantly within that, the test of experiment and observation.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you know, if you, it's very difficult to answer right now because we don't have a single verified, fully self-consistent, experimentally tested quantum theory of gravity And of course, the beginning of the universe is a large amount of stuff in a very small space. So you need both quantum mechanics and general relativity. Same thing if our universe recollapses and then bounces back to another Big Bang. You know, there's also ideas there that some of the information leaks through or survives. I don't know that we can answer that question right now because we don't have a quantum theory of gravity that most physicists believe in and belief is perhaps the wrong word that most physicists trust because the experimental evidence favors it.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So by going down and gaining energy of motion, positive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 units of kinetic energy, it's also gaining or losing depending on how you want to think of it, negative one, two, three, four, five units of potential energy. So the total energy remains the same. An inflating universe can do that. Or other physicists say that energy isn't conserved in general relativity. That's another way out of creating a universe out of nothing. But the point is that this is all based on reasonably well-tested physics and although these extrapolations seem kind of outrageous at first, they're not completely outrageous. They're within the realm of what we call science already. And maybe some young Whippard snapper will be able to figure out a way to directly test what happened before t equals zero or to test for the presence of these other universes. But right now,”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among them quantum fluctuations out of nothing, and then inflating into a universe with, you might say, well, you created a giant amount of energy, but in fact this quantum fluctuation out of nothing in a quantum way violates the conservation of energy. But who cares? That was a classical law anyway. And then an inflating universe maintains whatever energy it had. At zero or some infinitesimal amount, in a sense, the stuff of the universe has a positive energy, but there's a negative gravitational energy associated with it. Like I drop an apple. I got kinetic energy energy of motion out of that, but I did work on it to bring it to that height.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, the more and more tests you have that it satisfies, let's say there are 50 predictions it makes and 49 of them are things that you can measure. And then the 50th one is the one where you want to measure the actual existence of that other universe or what happened before t equals zero. And you can't do that. But you've satisfied 49 of the other testable predictions. And so that's science, right? Now a conventional condensed matter physicist or someone who deals with real data in the laboratory might say, oh, you cosmologist, you know, that's not really science because it's not directly testable. But I would say it's sort of testable But it's not completely testable, and so it's at the boundary, but it's not like we're coming up with these crazy ideas.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“General relativity and quantum physics. And they may have indirect tests in that if you adopt this hypothesis, then there might be a bunch of things you expect of the universe. And lo and behold, that's what we measure. But we're not actually measuring anything at t less than zero. Or we're not actually measuring the presence of another universe in this multiverse. And yet there are these indirect ideas that stem forth. It's hard to prove uniqueness and it's hard to completely convince oneself that a certain hypothesis must be true.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idea of what happened before t equals zero and whether there are other universes out there. I like to say that these are sort of on the boundaries of science. They're not just ideas that we wake up at three in the morning to go to the bathroom and say, oh, well, let's think about what happened before the Big Bang or let there be a multiplicity of universes. In other words, we have real testable physics that we can use to draw certain conclusions that are plausibility arguments based on what we know. Now admittedly there are not really direct tests of these hypotheses. That's why I call them hypotheses. They're not really elevated to a theory because a theory in science is really something that has a lot of experimental or observational support behind it. So they're hypotheses, but they're not unreasonable hypotheses based on what we know about.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operationally or observationally, there'd be no way of seeing that it's a finite universe, of measuring a finite universe. And so in that sense, it's infinite. Even if it started out as a finite little dot. Not a dot. I'm sorry, a finite little hypersphere.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing outside. Well, I'm not, you know. Or also, you know, what slice of time you're taking depends on your motion. And that's true even in special relativity, that slices of time get tilted in a sense if you're moving quickly. The axes, x and t actually become tilted, not perpendicular to one another. And, you know, you can look at Brian Green's books and lectures and other things where he imagines taking a loaf of bread and slicing it in units of time as you progress forward. But then if you're zipping along relative to that loaf of bread, the slices of thyme actually become tilted. And so it's not even clear what slices of thyme mean. But I'm an observational astronomer. I know which end of the telescope to look through. And the way I understand the infinity is as I just told you that.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, because you have to ask how would you actually measure it? Now, I sometimes say to my cosmology theoretical friends, well, if I were God and I were outside this whole thing and I took a godlike slice in time, wouldn't it be finite no matter how big it is? And they object and they say, Alex, you can't be outside and take a godlike slice of time.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it expands exponentially. That's what the inflation theory is all about. Indeed, at your home institution, Alan Guth is one of the originators of the whole inflationary universe idea, along with Andre Linde at Stanford University here in the Bay Area. And others, Alexei Starobinsky and others had similar sorts of ideas. In an exponentially expanding universe, if you actually try to make this measurement, you send light out to try to... See it curve back around and hit you in the back of the head. If it's an exponentially expanding universe, the amount of space remaining to be traversed is always a bigger and bigger quantity. So you'll never get there from here. You'll never reach the back of your head. So observationally or operationally, it can be thought of as being influenced. That's one of the best”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if we live in what's called a closed universe now, a sphere or the three-dimensional version of that would be a hypersphere. Then regardless of how far back in time you go, it was always that topological shape. You can't turn a point suddenly into a shell. Okay, it always had to be a shell. So when people say, well, the universe started out as a point, that's being kind of flippant, kind of glib. It didn't really. It just started out at a very high density. And we don't know actually whether it was finite or infinite. I think personally that it was finite at the time, but it expanded very, very quickly. Indeed, if it exponentiated and continued in some places to exponentiate, then it could in fact be infinite right now, and most cosmologists think that it is infinite.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Special relativity applies to objects moving through a pre-existing space. There's nothing in either special or general relativity that prevents space itself from expanding faster than the speed of light. That's no problem. Einstein wouldn't have had a problem with a universe as observed now by cosmologists.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not how it's happening. Right. That's not how speed works. And in relativity, also, the other thing that is interesting is that if you take two ping pong balls that are sufficiently far apart, especially in an accelerating universe, you can easily have them moving apart from one another faster than the speed of light. So take two ping pong balls that were originally 400,000 kilometers from each other and let every centimeter in your rubber band expand to two in one second. Then suddenly this 400,000 kilometer distance is 800,000 kilometers. It went out by 400,000 kilometers in one second. That exceeds the 300,000 kilometer per second speed of light. But that light limit, that particle limit.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's not traveling faster than the speed of light because locally at any point, if you were to measure the light, the photon zipping past, it would not be exceeding the speed of light. The speed of light is a locally measured quantity. After light has traversed some distance, if the rubber band keeps on stretching, then yes, it looks like the light travelled a greater distance than it would have had the space not been expanding. But locally, it never was exceeding the speed of light. It's just that the distance through which it already traveled then went off and expanded on its own some more. And if you give the light credit, so to speak, for having traversed that distance, well, then it looks like it's going faster than the speed of light.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's like you're walking at an airport on one of these walkways and you're walking along because you're trying to get to your terminal. But the walkway is continuing as well. You end up traveling a greater distance or the same distance faster is another way of putting it, right? That's why you get on one of these traveling walkways. So you get roughly a factor of pi, you know, but it's more like 3.2, I think. But when you work it all out, you multiply the number of years the universe has been in existence by three and a quarter or so. And that's how you get this 46 billion light year radius”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have in an expanding universe the space itself between galaxies or more correctly clusters of galaxies expanding. So imagine light going from one cluster to another. It traverses some distance and then while it's traversing the rest, that part that it already traveled through continues to expand. $13.7 billion might have gone by since the light that we are seeing from the early stages, the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang or the echo of the Big Bang. Yeah, 13.7 billion years have gone by. That's how long it's taken that light to reach us. But while it's been traveling that distance, the parts that it already traveled continue to expand.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a great question. I meant to bring a little prop I have with ping pong balls on a rubber hose, a rubber band. I use it in many of the lectures that one can find of me online.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At observatories. True fact, we get lots and lots of phone calls when Venus, the evening star, but just really a bright planet, happens to be close to the crescent moon because it's such a striking pair. This happens once in a while. So we get these phone calls. Oh, there's a UFO next to the moon. And no, it's Venus. And so they're just, and I'm not saying the best four reports are of that nature. No, there's some much more convincing cases, and I've seen some of the footage and blah, blah, blah. But it's just there's so many decoys, right? So much noise that you have to filter out”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But anyway, I think UFO research is interesting. And I guess one of the reasons I've not been terribly convinced is that I think there are some scientists who are investigating this and they've not found any clear evidence. Now, I must admit I have not looked through the literature to convince myself that there are many scientists doing systematic studies of these various reports. So I can't say for sure that there's a critical mass of them. It's just that you never get these reports from hardcore scientists. That's other thing. And astronomers, you know, what do we do? We spend our time studying the heavens and you'd think we'd be the ones that are most likely, aside from pilots perhaps, at seeing weird things in the sky. And we just never do. Of the unexplained UFO type nature.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Drake equation, exactly right, right. But it may mean a good thing for our ultimate survival, right? So I'm glad you caught me on that. Yeah.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, I wanted to comment on something you said earlier. Yeah, I had said that I'm sort of a pessimist in that I think there are very few other intelligent mechanically able creatures out there. But then I said, yes, in a sense I'm an optimist, as you pointed out, because it means that we made it through the great filter, right? I meant originally that I'm a pessimist in that I'm pessimistic about The possibility that there are many, many of us out there”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Barrier as well, okay, right so I just Go ahead, study them. Great. For some young kid who wants to do it, it might be their calling. And that's how they might find meaning in their lives is to be the scientist who really explores these things. I chose not to because at a very young age, I found the evidence to the degree that I investigated it to be really quite unconvincing. I had other things that I wanted to do. But I don't categorically deny the possibility, and I think it should be investigated.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That ships of some sort could have visited us because, as I said earlier, at slow speeds, there's no problem in reaching other stars. In fact, our Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft in a few million years are going to be in the vicinity of different stars. We can even calculate which ones they're going to be in the vicinity of, right? So there's nothing that breaks any laws of physics if you do it slowly. But that's different. Just having Voyager or Pioneer fly by some star, that's different from having active aliens altering the trajectory of their vehicle in real time spying on us and then either zipping back to their home planet or sending signals that tell them about us because They are likely many years, many light years away, and they're not going to have broken that.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Science, so I would say, you know, as Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? Quoted him a number of times. We would welcome such evidence. On the other hand, a lot of the things that are seen or perhaps even hidden from us, you could imagine for military purposes, surveillance purposes, the US government doesn't want us to know, or maybe some of these pilots, Soviet or Israeli or whatever satellites, right? A lot of the or some of the crashes that have occurred were later found to be weather balloons or whatever. When there are more conventional explanations, science tends to stay away from the sensational ones, right? And so it may be that someone else is calling in life is to investigate these phenomena. And I welcome that as a scientist. I don't categorically actually deny the possibility.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, we should investigate it. It's just one of these things where they've not brought us a hunk of kryptonite or something like that, right? They haven't brought us actual tangible physical evidence with which experiments can be done in laboratories. It's anecdotal evidence. The photographs are, in some cases, in most cases, I would say quite ambiguous.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“know about them and have intentions of attacking them, and then they can squash us, right? They could have done it long ago. They'll do it if they want to, whether we advertise our presence or not is irrelevant. So I really think that that's not a huge existential threat.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Black black holes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Heck of a good group. But going back to what he said, that we shouldn't be broadcasting our presence to others. There I actually disagree with him respectfully. First of all, we've been unintentionally broadcasting our presence for 100 years since the development of radio and TV. Secondly, any alien that has the capability of coming here and squashing us either already knows about us and doesn't care because we're just like little ants. And when they're ants in your kitchen, you tend to squash them. But if they're ants on the sidewalk and you're walking by, do you feel some great conviction that you have to squash any of them? No, you generally don't, right? We're irrelevant to them. All they need to do is keep an eye on us to see whether we're approaching the kind of technological capability and”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. So, you know, I knew Hawking and I greatly respect his scientific work and in particular the early work on the unification of general theory of relativity in quantum physics to two great pillars of modern physics, you know, Hawking radiation and all that. Fantastic work. If you were alive, you should have been a recipient of this year's physics Nobel Prize, which was for the discovery of black holes and also by Roger Penrose for the theoretical work showing that given a star that's massive enough, you basically can't avoid having a black hole. Anyway, Hawking, fantastic. I tip my hat to him. May he rest in peace. That would have been a...”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exciting, that's optimistic. So, that's the optimistic part that if we don't find other intelligent life there, it might mean that we're the ones that made it.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we're the only ones, and there are such great filters, maybe more than one, formation of life might be one of them, formation of eukaryotic that is with a nucleus cells be another. Development of human like intelligence might be another, right? There might be several such filters. And we were the lucky ones. And then people say, well, then that means you're putting yourself into a special perspective. And every time we've done that, we've been wrong. And yeah, yeah, I know all those arguments. But it still could be the case that there's one of us, at least per galaxy or per 10 or 100 or 1,000 galaxies. We're sitting here having this conversation because we exist. And so there's an observational selection effect there, right? Just because we're special doesn't mean that we shouldn't have these conversations about whether or not we're special, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But given the Fermi paradox, if you accept that the Fermi paradox means that there's no one else out there, you don't necessarily have to accept that, but if you accept that it means that no one else is out there. And yet there are lots of things we found that are at or roughly at our level. That means that the great filter is ahead of us and that bodes poorly for our long-term future.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sorry, I switched gears there. If we found some intelligent or rather, you know, even trilobites, right and stuff, you know, elsewhere, that would be bad news for us because that would mean that the great filter is ahead of us, you know, right? Because it would mean that lots of things have gotten roughly to our level.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, because if we find lots of pretty advanced life. That would suggest, and especially if we found some defunct fossilized civilization or something somewhere else, that would be”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cells, although that transition may have been the so-called great filter as well. Maybe the cells without a nucleus are relatively easy to form. And then the big next step is where you have a nucleus, which then provides a lot of energy, which allows the cell to become much, much more complex, and so on. Interestingly, going from eukaryotic cells, single cells to multicellular organisms does not appear to be, at least on Earth, one of these great filters because there's evidence that it happened dozens of times independently on Earth. So by a really great filter, something that happens very, very rarely, I mean that we had to get through.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, you know, getting back to something you said earlier, let's discuss primitive life. That could be the thing that's difficult to achieve, just getting the random molecules together to a point where they start self-replicating and evolving and becoming better and all that. That's an inordinately difficult thing, I think, though I'm not some molecular cell biologist, but just it's the usual argument. You know, you're wandering around in the Sahara desert and you stumble across a watch is your initial response, oh, you know, a bunch of sand grains just came together randomly and formed this watch. No, you think that something formed it or it came from some simpler structure that then became more complex. All right. It didn't just form. Well, even the simplest life is a very, very complex structure. Even the simplest prokaryotic cells, not to mention eukaryotic.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source