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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Just tuned in right, so those are possible explanations yet. I think that to me, the most likely explanation for the Ferromi paradox is that they really are very, very rare. And Carl Sagan estimated 100,000 of them. If there's that many, some of them would have been way ahead of us, and I think we would have seen them by now. If there were a handful, maybe they're there, but at that point, you're right on this dividing line between being a pessimist and an optimist. And what are the odds for that, right? If you look at all the things that had to go right for us.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's planted its seeds in a number of places so it's not vulnerable to a single point failure, right? Supernova going off near one of these stars or something or an asteroid or a comet coming in from the Oort cloud equivalent of that planetary system and without warning, you know, thrashing them to bits. So they've got their seeds in a bunch of places, but they chose not to colonize the galaxy. And they also choose not to interfere with this incredibly prevalent primitive organism Homo sapiens. Right”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then they may not be a type of creature that feels the need to go and say, oh, there's a nice looking planet. And there's a bunch of ants on it. Let's go squish them and colonize it. No, it could even be the kind of Star Trek-like prime directive where you go and explore worlds, but you don't interfere in any way, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make two copies each, and it's an exponential, right? They quickly colonize the whole galaxy. But then the distance to the next galaxy, the next big one like Andromeda, that's two and a half million light years. That's a much grander scale now, right? And so it also could be that the reason they survived the salon is that they got over this tendency that may well exist among sufficiently intelligent creatures, this tendency for aggression and self-destruction, right? If they bypass that, and that may be one of the great filters if there are more than one, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The existence of an alien or something. I mean, unless we are the aliens, you know, we could have been contamination from some rocket ship that hit here a long, long time ago. And all evidence of it has been destroyed. But again, that alien would have started out somewhere. They're not here watching us right now, right? They're not among us. And so. Though there are potential explanations for the Fermi paradox, and one of them that I kind of like is that the truly intelligent creatures are those that decided not to colonize the whole galaxy because they'd quickly run out of room there because it's exponential, right? You send a probe to a planet, it makes two copies. They go out.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the observer. How the brain works. How did life arise? Yeah, that's big, big questions. But they, to me, don't indicate.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the fabric of reality we understand quite well. And there are a few little things like dark matter and dark energy that may be some sign of some superintelligence, but I doubt it. Okay. You know, why would some superintelligence be holding clusters of galaxies together? Why would they be responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe? So the point is that through science and applied science and engineering, we understand so much now that I'm not saying we know everything, but we know a hell of a lot, okay? And so It's not like there are lots of mysteries flying around there that are completely outside our level of exploration or understanding.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just that my own feeling is that in science now, through observations and experiments, We've measured so many things and. Basically, we understand a lot of stuff.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the empire state building and rocket ships flying to the moon and all that kind of stuff. Right. It's conceivable that we haven't detected it and that we're so primitive compared to them that we're just not able to do so.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's like you're an ant crawling around on the sidewalk somewhere, and do you notice the humans wandering around? Exactly.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of ours. And if you look at the exponential growth of technology among Homo sapiens in the last couple of hundred years and you just project that forward, I mean, there's no telling what they could have achieved even in 1,000 or 10,000 years, let alone a million or 10 million or a billion years. And if they reach this capability of interstellar travel and colonization, then you can show that within 10 million years or certainly 100 million years, you can populate the whole galaxy. And so then you don't have to have tried to detect them beyond 100 or 1,000 light years. They would already be here.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's no clear evidence that they've ever visited us on Earth here. And SETI has been now the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been scanning the skies. And true, we've only looked a couple hundred light years out. And that's a tiny fraction of the whole galaxy, a tiny fraction of these hundred billion plus stars. Nevertheless, you know, if the galaxy were teeming with life, especially intelligent life, you'd expect some of it to have been far more advanced than ours. Okay, there's no special, nothing special about when the industrial revolution started on Earth, right? The chemical evolution of our galaxy was such that billions of years ago, nuclear processing in stars had built up clouds of gas after their explosion that were rich enough in heavy elements to have formed Earth-like planets, even billions of years ago. So there could be civilizations that are billions of years ahead.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hell are they, you know Notwithstanding the various UFO reports in Roswell and all that, they just don't meet the bar, they don't clear the bar of scientific evidence, in my opinion, okay?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thirdly, it's not clear that our intelligence is a long-term evolutionary advantage. Now, it's clear that in the last hundred years, 200 years, we've improved the lives of millions, hundreds of millions of people. But at the risk of potentially destroying ourselves, either intentionally or unintentionally or through neglect as we discussed before.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing has approached our level of intelligence and mechanical ability and curiosity. Whales and dolphins appear to be reasonably intelligent, but there's no evidence that they can think abstract thoughts, that they're curious about the world. They certainly can't build machines with which to study the world. So that's one argument. Secondly, we came about as early hominids only four or five million years ago and as Homo sapiens, only about a quarter of a million years ago. So for the vast majority of the history of life on Earth, an intelligent alien zipping by Earth would have said there's nothing particularly intelligent or mechanically able on Earth, okay?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our galaxy, our Milky Way galaxy with several hundred billion stars and potentially habitable planets is not teeming with intelligent life. Yeah, I wouldn't, well, I'll get to the primitive life, the bacteria in a moment. But, you know, we may well be the only ones in our Milky Way galaxy, at most a handful, I'd say, but I'd probably side with the school of thought that suggests we're the only ones in our own galaxy. Just because I don't see human intelligence as being a natural evolutionary path. Life. I mean, there's a number of arguments. First of all, there's been more than 10 billion species of life on Earth in its history.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say I'm one of the pessimists in that I don't necessarily think that we're the only ones in the observable universe, which goes out, you know. Roughly 14 billion years in light travel time and more like 46 billion years when you take into account the expansion of space. So the diameter of our observable universe is something like 90, 92 billion light years. That encompasses 100 billion to a trillion galaxies with 100 billion stars each. So now you're talking about something like 10 to the 22nd, 10 to the 23rd power stars and roughly an equal number of Earth-like planets and so on. So there may well be other intelligent life.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you wanted to do it in zero time, you'd need an infinite amount of energy. That's basically why you can't reach, let alone. It's that it takes an infinite amount of energy to do so.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then you can do it. It's still not easy, right? Because you've got some big old huge colony and that just through E equals MC squared, right? That's a lot of mass. That's a lot of stuff to accelerate the. Newtonian kinetic energy is gigantic, right? So you're still not home free, but at least you're not trying to do it in a short amount of clock time, right? Which if you look at E equals MC squared requires truly unfathomable amounts of energy because the energy is sort of it's your rest mass m not c squared divided by the square root of 1 minus v squared over c squared And if your listeners want to just sort of stick into their pocket calculator as v over c approaches one that 1 over the square root of 1 minus v squared over c squared approaches infinity”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, right, if you could put us into some sort of suspended animation, you know, hibernation or something and greatly increase the lifetime. And so these 10,000 generations I talked about, what do they care? It's just one generation and they're asleep. Okay.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, what have you done? It's not like you snap your fingers and say, okay, let that space there be compressed and then I'll make it over to Alpha Centauri in the next month. You can't snap your fingers and do that.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A fundamental problem I see is that you'd have to get to those places in front of you so as to change the shape of space-time, so as to make the journey quickly. But to get there, you got there in the normal way A speed considerably less than that of light. So, in a sense, you haven't saved any time, right? You might as well have just taken that journey and gotten to where you were going.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've traveled. You've traveled Yeah, and then there's this idea that Alcubier drive where you warp space time in front of you. So as to greatly reduce the distance and you can expand the space time behind you. So you're sort of riding a wave through space-time. But the problem I see with that beyond the practical difficulties and the energy requirements. And by the way, how do you get out of this bubble through which riding this wave of space-time? Miguel Alcubier acknowledged all these things. He said, this is purely theoretical, fanciful, and all that.”
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, I mean, it's one of these, right, back to the future type movies, right? And you have to work things out in such a way that you don't mess things up, right? Some people say that, well, you come back to the universe, but you come back in such a way that you cannot affect your journey. But then, I mean, that seems kind of contrived to me or some say that you end up in a different universe. And this also goes into the many different types of the multiverse hypothesis and the many worlds interpretation and all that. But again, then it's not the universe from which you left, right? And you don't come back to the universe from which you left. And so you're not really going back in time to the same universe. And you're not even going forward in time necessarily then to the same universe, right? You're ending up in some other universe.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's still information, it's scrambled information, but there's a way maybe of bringing it back, right? But then. The thing that really bothers me is that as soon as you have this possibility of traversal of a wormhole, you have to come to grips with a fundamental problem. And that is that you could come back to your universe at a time prior to your leaving. And you could essentially prevent your grandparents from ever meeting. This is called the grandfather paradox, right? And if they never met and if your parents were never born and if you were never born, how would you have made the journey to prevent the history from allowing you to exist, right? It's a causal, it's a violation of causality, of cause and effect. Now, physicists such as myself take causality violation very, very seriously. We've never seen it.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rotating black hole or a charged black hole, not that we expect charged black holes to exist in nature because they would quickly bring in the opposite charge so as to neutralize themselves. But rotating black holes definitely reality. We now have good evidence for them. Do they have traversable wormholes? Probably not because it's still the case that when you go in, you go in with so much energy that it either squeezes the wormhole shut or you encounter a whole bunch of incoming and outgoing energy that vaporizes you. It's called the mass inflation instability. And it just sort of vaporizes you. Nevertheless, you know, you could imagine, well, you're in some vapor form, but if you make it through, maybe you could, you know, reform or something.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand, I think we know a lot more now about what we know and what we don't know and what the physical limitations are. And to me, most of these schemes, if not all of them, seem very far-fetched, if not impossible. So travel through wormholes, for example, it appears that for a non-rotating black hole, that's just a complete no-go because the singularity is a point-like singularity and you have to reach it to traverse the wormhole and you get squished by the singularity. Okay. Now for a rotating black hole, it turns out there is a way to pass through the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole, and avoid the singularity and go out the other side or even traverse the donut hole-like singularity. In the case of a rotating black hole, it's a ring singularity. So there's actually two theoretical ways you could get through.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, call me not very imaginative, but based on today's knowledge of physics, which I realize, you know, people have gone down that rabbit hole a century ago, Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest physicists of all time, said that all of fundamental physics has done the rest is just engineering. And guess what? Then came special relativity, quantum physics, general relativity. How wrong he was. So let me not be another Lord Kelvin.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An interesting thought. I'm certainly excited by the potential physics that suggests this kind of faster than light travel effectively or cutting the distance to make it very, very short through a wormhole or something like that.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say hello real quickly and then send the images back to us. Okay So that's a tiny little thing, right? Maybe you can accelerate that to they're hoping 20% of the speed of light with a whole bunch of high-powered lasers aimed at it. It's not clear that other countries will allow us to do that, by the way. But that's a very forward-looking thought. I mean, I very much support the idea, but there's a big difference between sending a little tiny camera and sending a payload of people with equipment that could then mine the resources on the exoplanet that they reach and then go forth and multiply, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then requires even more mass for the rocket or collect fuel along the way, which is difficult. So getting close to the speed of light, I think, is not an option either other than for a little tiny thing like Yuri Milner and others are thinking about this Starshot project where they'll send a little tiny camera to Alpha Centauri 4.2 light years away. They'll zip past it, take a picture of the exoplanets that we know orbit that three or more star system.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Short in your own frame of reference. And the amount of energy is just unfathomable, right? We can do it at the Large Hadron Collider with protons. We can accelerate them to 99.999% of the speed of light. But that's just a proton. We're gazillions of protons, okay? And that doesn't even count the rocket that would carry us, the payload. you would need to either store the fuel in the rocket, which”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will have some of the magic, but it'll also be much more able to survive the onslaught of existential threats that either we bring upon ourselves or don't anticipate here on Earth, or that occasionally come from beyond. And there's nothing much we can do about a supernova explosion that just suddenly goes off. And really, if we want to move to other planets outside our solar system, I think realistically that's a much better option than thinking that humans will actually make these gigantic journeys. And, you know, then I do this calculation for my class. You know, Einstein's special theory of relativity says that you can do it in a short amount of time in your own frame of reference if you go close to the speed of light. But then you bring in E equals MC squared and you figure out how much energy it takes to get you accelerated to close enough to the speed of light to make the time scale.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so artificial general intelligence, in my view, encompasses a lot of these attributes that you just talked about. Curiosity Inquisitiveness, you know, right”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. But I like being poetic about it because it's an amazing question. Is there something beyond just the bits, the ones and zeros to us? It's an interesting question. I like to think that there isn't anything and that how beautiful it is that our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings, our compassion all come from these ones and zeros, right? That to me actually is a beautiful thought. And the idea that machines, silicon-based life effectively could be our natural evolutionary descendants, not from a DNA perspective, but they are our creations and they then carry on. That to me is a beautiful thought in some ways, but others find it to be a horrific thought, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a form of artificial intelligence. You just tell the thing, fix yourself, basically. And then when you land on the planet, start producing copies of yourself initially from materials that were perhaps sent or you just have a bunch of copies there. And then they set up factories with which to do this. I mean, this is very, very futuristic. It's much more feasible, I think, than sending flesh and blood over interstellar distances a quarter of a million years to even the nearest stars, you're subject to all kinds of charged particles and radiation. You have to, you know, shield yourself really well. That's, by the way, one of the problems of going to Mars is that it's not a three-day journey like going to the moon. You're out there for the better part of a year or two and you're exposed to lots of radiation.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just don't see it happening. What I see potentially happening if we avoid self-destruction, intentional or unintentionally here on Earth, is that machines will do it. Robots that can essentially hibernate. They don't need to do much of anything for a long, long time as they're traveling. And moreover, if some energetic charged particle, some cosmic ray hits the circuitry, it fixes itself. Machines can do this.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A typical bright star, Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, maybe not a typical bright star, but it's 8.7 light years away. Okay, so that means the light took 8.7 years to reach us. We're seeing it as it was about nine years ago. So then, you know, you ask, how long would a rocket take to get there at Earth's escape speed, which is 11 kilometers per second? Okay, and it turns out it's about a quarter of a million years. So you'd need this colony of people that is able to sustain itself, all their food, all their waste disposal, all their water, all their recycling of everything for 10,000 generations, they have to commit themselves to living on this vehicle, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Found planets around 1%, you then multiply by the inverse of 1%, which is 1% is about the fraction of the stars that have their planetary system oriented the right way. And that already, back of the envelope calculation, tells you that of order 50 to 100% of all stars have planets, okay? And then they've been finding these Earth-like planets, et cetera, et cetera. So there are many potential homes. The problem is getting there. So then.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's amazing. So there are now thousands and thousands of these exoplanet candidates of which something like 90% are probably genuine exoplanets. And you have to remember that only about 1% of stars have their planetary system oriented edge on to your line of sight Which is what you need for this transit method to work, right? Some arbitrary angle won't work and certainly perpendicular to your line of sight, that is in the plane of the sky won't work because the planet is orbiting the star and never crossing your line of sight. So the fact that they found planets orbiting about 1% of the stars that they looked at in this field of 150 plus thousand stars.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a new discovery. I mean, the Kepler satellite, which was flying around above Earth's atmosphere, was able to monitor the brightness of stars with exquisite detail. And they could detect planets crossing the line of sight between us and the star, thereby dimming its light for a short time, ever so slightly.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots and lots of homes, possible homes. I mean, there's a planetary system around nearly every star you see in the sky. And one in five of those is thought to have roughly Earth-like planet.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not going to be easy as easy as growing a whole plot of potatoes, like in the movie The Martian, you know, or something, right? It's not going to be that easy. But there's this thin atmosphere. It's got the wrong composition. It's mostly carbon dioxide. There are these violent dust storms. The temperatures are generally cold. You know, you'd need to do a lot of things. You need to terraform it basically in order to make it nicely livable without some dome surrounding you. And if you insist on a dome, well, that's not going to house that many people, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I haven't thought about it in great detail other than recognizing that Mars is a harsh environment. Don't have much of an atmosphere there. You've got less than a percent of Earth's atmosphere. So you'd need to build some sort of a dome right away, right? And that would take time. You need to melt the water that's in the permafrost or have canals dug from which you transport it from the polar ice caps.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the good, it's a good next step. I have to happen to disagree with him as to how quickly it will happen. Right. I mean, I think he's very optimistic. Now, you need visionary people like Elon to get people going and to inspire them. I mean, look at the success he's had with multiple companies. So maybe he gives this very optimistic timeline in order to be inspirational to those who are going out there. And certainly his success with, you know, the rocket that is reusable because it landed upright and all that. I mean, that's a game changer. Sort of like every time you flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles, you discard the airplane, right? I mean, that's crazy. So that's a game changer, but nevertheless, the time scale over which he thinks that there could be a real thriving colony on Mars, I think, is far too optimistic.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, great question. There's a lot to unpack there, of course. Sorry. Humans are by their very nature explorers, pioneers. They want to go out, climb the next mountain, see what's behind it, explore the ocean depths, explore space. This is our destiny to go out there. And of course, from a pragmatic perspective, yes, we need to plant our seeds elsewhere, really, because things could go wrong here on Earth. Now, some people say that's an excuse to not take care of our planet, that, well, we say we're elsewhere. And so we don't have to take good care of our planet. No, you know, we should take the best possible care of our planet. We should be cognizant of the potential impact of what we're doing. Nevertheless, it's prudent to have us be elsewhere as well. So in that regard, I actually agree with Elon. It'd be good to be on Mars. That would be yet another place for us to, from which to.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're incredibly lucky, but we've set ourselves up to be very, very fragile. And we are intrinsically complex biological creatures that, except for the fact that we have brains and minds with which we can try to prevent some of these things or respond to them, we as a living organism require quite a narrow set of conditions in order to survive. You know, we're not cockroaches. We're not going to survive a nuclear war”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go. Dash that toilet paper, you know, or the electrical grid. I mean, imagine North America without power for a year. I mean, we've become so dependent. We're no longer the cave people. They would do just fine, right? What do they care about the electrical grid, right? What do they care about agriculture? They're hunters and gatherers. But we now have become so used to our way of life. The only real survivors would be those rugged individuals who live somewhere out in the forest or in a cave somewhere, completely independent of anyone else.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tens of thousands of years ago, including this one Toba, I think it's called, where it's estimated that the human population was down to 10,000 or 5,000 individuals, something like that. If you have a 15 degree drop in temperature over quite a short time, it's not clear that even with today's advanced technology, we would be able to adequately respond, at least for the vast majority of people. Maybe some would be in these underground caves where you'd keep the president and a bunch of other important people. But the typical person is not going to be protected. When all of agriculture is cut off, right?”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that would be perhaps not a mass extinction because you really need to, or perhaps not a complete existential threat because you have to get rid of sort of the very last humans for that. But at least getting rid of killing off so many humans, truly billions and billions of humans. The one, there have been ones.”
2020-11-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #137 – Alex Filippenko: Supernovae, Dark Energy, Aliens & the Expanding Universe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source