YouSaid · the spoken record

David Kipping

lines on the record: 252
first: 2023-01-28
most recent: 2023-01-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, yeah, I see no fundamental providence in my life or in the nature of the universe. And you just see this universe as this beautiful cosmic accident of galaxies smashing together stars forging here and there and planets occasionally spawning maybe life across the universe. And we are just one of those instantiations and we should just enjoy this very brief episode that we have. And I think trying to look at it much deeper than that is. To me, it's not very soul satisfying. I just think enjoy what you've got and appreciate it.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just a ride, that's how it is. It's just a ride. We're on a roller coaster. And we have no purpose. It's an accident in my perspective. There's no meaning to my life. There's no objective deity who is overwatching what I'm doing and I have some fate or destiny. It's all just riding on a roller coaster and trying to have a good time and contribute to other people's enjoyment of the ride.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just try to, yeah, it's hard to find that passion, but you can sometimes remember it when you're a kid, what your passions were and what fascinated you as a child. For me, as soon as I picked up a space boat when I was five years old, that was it. I was hooked on space. And I almost betrayed my passion at college. I studied physics, which I've always been fascinated by physics as well. But I came back to astronomy because it was my first love and I was much happier doing research in astronomy than I was in physics because it spoke to that wonder I had as a child that first was the spark of curiosity for me in science.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try if you can, it's very cheesy, but if you can follow your passions, you'll always be happy trying to sell out for the quick cash out, for the quick book out can be tempting in the short term. Looking for Exo Moons was never easy, but I made a career, not out of discovering ExoMoons, but out of learning how to communicate the difficult problem and discovering all sorts of things along the way. You know, we shot for the sky and we discovered all this stuff along the way. We discovered dozens of new planets using all sorts of new techniques. We pushed this instrumentation to new places. And I've had an extremely productive research career in this world. I've had all sorts of ideas working on technosignatures. Thinking innovatively pushes you into all sorts of exciting directions.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focusing on your own development through whatever it is, meditation, for me it's often running, working out, and pursuing multiple passions provides this almost synergistic bliss of all of them together. So often I've had some of the best research ideas from making a YouTube video and trying to communicate an idea or interact with my audience who've had a question that sparked a whole trail of thought that led down this wonderful intellectual rabbit hole or maybe to a new intellectual discovery can go either way sometimes with those things. And so thinking broadly, diversely, and always looking after yourself in this highly competitive and often extremely stressful world that we live in is the best advice I can offer anybody.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That tends to be seen as something that's an either or. You have to completely dedicate yourself to one thing to gain mastery in it. That's a conventional way of thinking about both science and other disciplines. And I have found that both have been elevated by practicing in each. And I think that's true in all assets of life. I mean, if you want to become the best researcher you possibly can, you're pushing your intellect and in a sense your body to a high level. And so to me, I've always wanted to couple that with training of my body, training of my mind in other ways besides from just when I'm doing when I'm in the lecture room or in my office.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only think in terms of a career in science, one thing that I maybe discovered late but has been Incredibly influential on me in terms of my own happiness and my own productivity has been this synergy of doing two passions at once. One passion in science communication and another passion research and not surrendering either one. And I think”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teleportation, quantum teleportation, you can kind of rigorously show that as long as all of the quantum numbers are exactly duplicated as you transfer over, it truly is from the universe's perspective in every way indistinguishable from what was there before. It really is, in principle, you and all the sense of being you versus creating a duplicate clone and uploading memories to that human body or a computer that would surely be a discontinuation of that conscious experience by virtue of the fact you've multiplied it. Would be hesitant about uploading for that reason. I would see it mostly as my own killing myself and having some AI duplicate of me that persists in this world but is not truly my experience.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or you could have a memory wipe when you go in. I mean, it also kind of maybe speaks to this issue of like Neuralink and how do we keep up with AI in our world. If you want to augment your intelligence, perhaps one way of competing. And one of your impetus is for going into this digital reality would be to be competitive intellectually with artificial intelligences, that you could trivially augment your reality if your brain was itself artificial. I mean, one skepticism I've always had about that is whether it's more of a philosophical question, but how much is that really you if you do a mind upload? Is this just a duplicate of your memories that thinks it's you versus truly a transference of your conscious stream into that reality? And I think when you, it's almost like the teleportation device in Star Trek.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Presumably they'd eventually forget, you know, give it long enough they might forget about their origins of being one's biological and assume this was their only reality.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that sort of sets up a contradiction because then you live in a reality which is inherently incapable of ever producing ancestor simulations. But the premise of the entire argument is that ancestor simulations are possible, that there's a contradiction.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that suit of reality, they would still presumably be able to have a very impressive computational capabilities. They'd probably be able to simulate galactic formation or this kind of impressive stuff, but they would be just short of the ability to however you define it, create truly sentient conscious experience in a computer. That would just be just beyond their capabilities. And so Carol pointed out that if you add up all the, you know, you count up how many realities there should be probabilistically if this is true over here the simulation hypothesis or scenario, then you're most likely to find yourself in the sewer because there's just far more of them than there are of any of the higher levels.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not only are you simulating that entire planet, but also some of that's being used for the computers themselves that those are simulated. And so that base reality also, the Sioux of reality, is a reality where they are simply unable to produce ancestor simulations because the fidelity of the simulation is not sufficient. And so from their point of view, it might not be obvious that the universe is pixelated, but they would just never be able to manifest that capability.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, the simulation palasis has all sorts of implications like that. I've always loved Sean Carroll pointed out a really interesting contradiction, apparently, with the simulation hypothesis that I speak about a little bit in the paper. But he showed that, or pointed out, that in this hierarchy of realities, which then develop their own AIs within the realities, and then they really ancestor simulations, I should say, rather than AI, they developed their own capability to simulate realities. You get this hierarchy. And so eventually there'll be a bottom layer, which I often call the sewer of reality. It's like the worst layer where it's the most pixelated it could possibly be, right? Because each layer is necessarily going to have less computational power than the layer above it.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To begin with, and on the one hand, you might say, look, David, I work in artificial intelligence. I'm very confident that this is going to happen just of extrapolating off current trends. Or on the other hand, a statistician would say, you're giving way too much weight to the simulation hypothesis because it's an intrinsically highly complicated model. You have a whole hierarchy of realities within realities within realities. It's like the inception style thing, right? And so this requires hundreds, thousands, millions of parameterizations to describe. And by Occam's razor, we would always normally penalize inherently complicated models as being disfavored. So I think you could argue I'm being too generous or too kind with that, but I sort of want to develop the rigorous mathematical tools to explore it. And ultimately, it's up to you to decide what you think that 50-50 odds should be. But you can use my formula to plug in.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have a 100% probability of living based reality. On the other hand, if it's not true and we never develop that ability or choose never to use it. And so then you apply this technique called Bayesian model averaging, which is where you propagate the certainty of your two models to get a final estimate. And because of that one base reality that lives in the simulated scenario, you end up counting this up and getting that it always has to be less than 50%. So the probability you live in a simulated reality versus based reality has to be slightly less than 50%. Now, that really comes down to that statement of giving it 50 50 odds.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The a priori model probability of those two scenarios, it's very difficult. And I think people would probably argue about how you assign those priors. In the paper, we just assigned 50-50. We just said this hasn't been demonstrated yet. There's no evidence that this is actually technically possible, but nor is it that it's not technically possible. So we're just going to assign 50-50 probability these two hypotheses. And then in the hypothesis where you have a simulated reality, you have a base reality set at the top. So there is, even in the simulated hypothesis, there's a probability you still live in base reality. And then there's a whole myriad of universes beneath that which are all simulated. And so you have a very slim probability of being in base reality if this is true.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the basic conditional is conditioned upon the fact that we eventually develop that technology and choose to use it. Or it's chosen to be used by such species, by such civilizations. That's the conditional. And you have to add that in because that conditional isn't guaranteed. And so in a Bayesian framework, you can kind of make that explicit. You see mathematically explicitly that's a conditional in your equation. And the opposite side of the coin is basically in the trilemma that Bostrom originally put forward, it's options one and two. So option one is that you basically never develop the ability to do that. Option two is you never choose to execute that. So we kind of group those together as sort of the non-simulation scenario, let's call it. And so you've got non-simulation scenario and simulation scenario. And agnostically, we really have to give those, you know, how do you assess the model?”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's actually probably more similar to my agnosticism about life in the universe. And it's just sort of remaining agnostic about all possibilities. The simulation argument, sometimes it gets There's kind of two distinct things that we need to consider. One is the probability that we live in so-called base reality that we're not living in a simulated reality itself. And another probability we need to consider is the probability that that technology is viable, possible, and something we will ultimately choose to one day do. Those are two distinct things. They're probably quite similar numbers to each other, but they are distinct probabilities. So my In my paper, I wrote about this I just tried to work through the problem I teach astrosis, actually teaching it this morning. And so it just seemed like a fun case study of working through a Bayesian calculation for it. Bayesian calculations work on conditionals. And so when you hear, you know, what kind of inspired this project was when I heard Musk said was like a billion to one chance that we don't live in a simulation. He's right if you add the Bayesian condition.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I loved what William Shatner said after his flight. His words really moved me when he came down. And I think... It really captured the idea that we shouldn't really be sending engineers, our scientists into space. We should be sending our poets because those are the people when they come down who can truly make a difference when they describe their experiences in space. And I found it very moving reading what he said.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would live at an incredibly special point in that story. We would be right at the very, very, very beginning. And that's not impossible, but it's just somewhat improbable. And so part of that sort of irks against me, but it also almost feels like a philosophical argument because you're sort of talking about souls being drawn from this cosmic pool. So it's not an argument that I lose sleep about for our fate of the doomsday, but it is... Somewhat intellectually annoying that there is a slight contradiction there, it feels like with the idea of a galactic spanning empire.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has an average lifetime, I say 100 years, then that would be about 20,000 years. So it's 20,000 years left on the clock. There's like a typical doomsday argument type. That's how they typically lay it out. Now a lot of the criticisms that Doomsay argument come down to, well, what are you really counting? You're counting humans there, but maybe you should be counting years. Or maybe you should be counting human hours. Because what you count makes a big difference to what you get out on the other end. This is called the reference class. And so that's one of the big criticisms of the Doomsday argument. I do think it has a compelling point that it would be surprising if our future is to one day blossom and become a galactic spanning empire trillions upon trillions upon trillions of human beings will one day live across the stars for essentially as long as the galaxy exists and the stars burn.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're typically the mediocrity principle, you're not special, that you're probably going to be born somewhere in the middle of all human beings who will ever be born. You're unlikely to be one of the first 1% of human beings that ever lived and one of the last and similarly the last 1% of human beings that will ever live. Because you'd be very unique and special if that were true. And so by this logic, you can sort of calculate how many generations of humans you might expect. So if there's been, let's say, 100 billion human beings that have ever lived on this planet, then you could say to 95% confidence, so you divide by 5%, so 100 billion divided by 0.05 would give you two trillion human beings that would ever live, you'd expect by this argument. And so if each, if let's say each planet, in general, the planet has a 10 billion population. So that would be 200 generations of humans. We would expect ahead of us. And if each one...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Annoying intellectual itch I have with the so called doomsday argument, which I try not to treat too seriously, but there is some element of it that bothers me. The Doomsday argument basically suggests that”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorts of cool stuff you could do sometimes you see these dreams of outer solar system exploration and you can like fly through the clouds of Venus or you could just do these enormous jumps on like these small moons where you can essentially jump as high as a skyscraper and traverse the moon so there's all sorts of you know wonderful ice skating on Europa might be fun so don't get me wrong i love the idea of us becoming interplanetary i think it's um it's just a question of uh time our own our own destructive tendencies as you said earlier are at odds with our emerging capability to become interplanetary and the question is will we get out of the nest before we burn it down and i don't know i obviously i hope that we do but i i don't have any special insight that There is somewhat of a”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a beautiful basket. I wouldn't want to, I personally have no interest in living on Mars or the Moon. I would like to visit. But I would definitely not want to spend the rest of my life and die on Mars. It means a hellhole. Mars is a very, very different. I think the idea that this is going to happen in the next 10, 20 years seems to me very optimistic. Not that it's insurmountable, but the challenges are extreme to survive on a planet like Mars, which is like a dry, frozen desert with a high radiation environment. It's a challenge of a type we've never faced before. So I'm sure human ingenuity can tackle it, but I'm skeptical that we'll have thousands of people living on Mars in my lifetime. But I would relish that opportunity to maybe one day visit such a settlement and, you know, do scientific experiments on Mars or experience Mars, do astronomy from Mars.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seems like a fairly obvious thing to do for our survival, right? There's a high risk if we are Committed to trying to keep this human experiment going, putting all of our eggs in one basket is always going to be a risky strategy to pursue.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of lost to send any kind of, you know, there's been a lot of conversation about sending video and video and pictures. And that's one of the things I've been a little bit resistant about in the team that I've been thinking, well, they might not have eyes. And so if you lived in the Europa surface, having eyes wouldn't be very useful if you lived in a very dark planet on the tidally locked night side of an exoplanet having eyes wouldn't be particularly useful. So it's kind of a presumption of us to think that video is a useful form of communication.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, and Sagan had There's a male and a female figure to pitch on the Golden Record. And the woman had a genitalia originally drawn and there was a lot of pushback from, I think, a lot of Christian groups who were not happy about the idea of throwing this into space. And so eventually they had to remove that. And so it would be confusing biologically if you're trying to study xenobiology of this alien that apparently has no genitalia or the man does, but for some reason the woman doesn't. And that's our own societal and cultural imprint happening into that information.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be. That's a good name for it. We've been toying a little bit with Name, but I think probably it would just be God and record at this point or god Record version two or something. But I think another benefit that I see of this activity is that it forces us as a species to ask those questions about what it is that we want another civilization to know about us. The GON record was kind of funny because it had photos on it and it had photos of people eating, for instance, but had no photos of people defecating. And so I always thought that was kind of funny because... I was an alien If I was studying an alien, if I saw images of an alien, I'm not trying to be like a perv or anything, but I would want to see the full biological, I want to understand the biology of that alien. And so we always censor what we show.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I'm part of a team that's trying to re-repeat the Golden Record experiment. We're trying to create like an open source version of the Golden Record that future spacecraft are able to download and basically put a little hard drive that they can carry around with them and get these distributed hopefully across the solar system eventually.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you put something just a few meters beneath the surface, it would have even greater protection. And so it raises the prospect of that if we wanted to... Send something, a significant amount of information, to a future galactic-banding civilization that maybe cracks the interstellar propulsion problem. The moon's going to be there for five billion years. That's a long time for somebody to come by and detect maybe a strange pattern that we draw on the sand for them to big arrow, big cross, like look under here, and we can have a tomb of knowledge of some record of our civilization. And so I think it's When you think like that, what that implies to us, well, okay, the galaxy is 13 billion years old, the moon is already 4 billion years old. There may be places familiar to us nearby to us that we should be seriously considering as places we should look for life and intelligent life or evidence of relics that they might leave behind for us.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the roadster. I'm not sure what someone would make of that if they. I mean, there have been quasi attempts at it beyond the Roadster. I mean, there's like plaques on, there's the Pioneer plaques, there's the Voyager 2 Golden Record. It's pretty unlikely anybody's going to discover those because they're just adrift in space and they will eventually mechanically die and not produce any signal for anyone to spot. So you'd have to be extremely lucky to come across them. I've often said to my colleagues that I think the best place is the moon. The moon unlike the Earth has no significant weathering how long will the Apollo descent stages which are still still on the lunar surface last for the only real effect is micrometeorites which are slowly like dust smashing against them pretty much but that's going to take millions potentially billions of years to erode that down and so we have an opportunity and that's on the surface”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was almost like a humility of acceptance as well Like knowing that you have a terminal disease, but your impact on the earth doesn't have to end with your death, that it could go on beyond with what you leave behind for others to discover with maybe the books you write or what you leave in the literature”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, perhaps be our best chance, quite frankly, of ever making contact. It might not be the contact we dream of, but it's still contact. There would still be a record of our existence as pitiful as it might be compared to a two-way communication.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's almost the most selfless act of communication because there's no hope of getting anything back. It's a philanthropic gift almost to that other civilization that you can maybe might just be nothing more than a monument, which the pyramids essentially are a monument of their existence, that these are the things they achieved. This was their, you know, the things they believed in, their language, their culture, or it could be maybe something more than that and could be sort of lessons from what they learned in their own history. And so I've been thinking a lot recently about How would we send a message to other civilizations in the future? Because that act of thinking seriously about the engineering of how we would design it would inform us about what we should be looking for.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's currently extent. But there may be very many extinct civilizations. If each civilization has a typical lifetime comparable to, let's say, AI is the demise of our own. That's only a few hundred years of technological development or maybe 10,000 years. If you go back to the Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of agriculture, hardly anything in cosmic time span. That's nothing. That's the blink of an eye. And so it's not surprising at all that we would happen not to coexist with anyone else. But that doesn't mean nobody else was ever here. And if other civilizations come to that same conclusion and realization, maybe they scour the galaxy around them, don't find any evidence for intelligence, then they have two options. They can either give up on communication and just say, well, it's never going to happen. We just may as well just worry about what's happening here on our own planet. Or they could attempt communication, but communication through.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speaks to the human condition, helps us understand what it is to be human to some degree. I think I have tried to remain very... And I've been thinking a lot with our searchers for Life in the Universe is life in the past. Can I think it's actually not that hard to imagine we are the only civilization in the galaxy right now.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can make a very cogent argument as to why you expect life and intelligence to be common in the universe and yet everything we know about the universe is fully compatible with just us being here. And that's a haunting thought, but I have no preference or desire for that to be true. I'm not trying to impose that view on anyone, but I do ask that we remain open-minded until evidence is being collected either way.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a cancer, you know. We're flirting around so to interrupt, but we're flirting around this idea of the great filter a little bit here. So we asking where is this? Does it lie ahead of us, nuclear war maybe imminent? That would be a filter that's ahead of us. Or could it be behind us and that it's the advent of technology that is genuinely a rare occurrence in the universe and that explains the Fermi paradox? And so that's something that obviously people have debated and argued about in SETI for decades and decades, but it remains a persistent people argue about whether it should be really called a paradox or not. But it remains a consistent apparent contradiction that”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That these are all manifestations of the same thing. And we are not a particularly distinct class, except for the fact we make technology. That's really the only difference to our intelligence. And we classify that separately. But from a biological perspective to some degree, it's really just all part of a continuum. And so that's why when we talk about unique, you are putting yourself in a box which is distinct and saying this is the only example of things that fall into this box. But the walls of that box may themselves be a construct of our own arrogance that we are something distinct.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would just, yeah, I said, I do think it depends on this classification. I think there is sort of, again, it's kind of buried within there as a subtext, but there is a classification that we're doing here that what we are is a distinct category of life, let's say, in this case when we're talking about intelligence. We are something that can be separated. But of course, we see intelligence across the animal kingdom in dolphins, humpback whales, octopuses, crows, ravens. And so it's quite possible that”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would that be an absolute eradication of every human being, which would be a fairly extreme event? Or would the candilac consciousness, as you might call it, the flame of consciousness, continue with some small pockets that would maybe in 10,000 years, 100,000 years, we'd see civilization re-emerge and play out the same thing over again?”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would just say, you know Specialness is something implicitly in that statement there's kind of an assumption that we are something positive. Like we're a gift to this planet or something and that makes it special. It may be that intelligence is more often, it's like we like rats or cockroaches. We're in infestation of this planet. We're not some benevolent property that the planet would ideally like to have if it can even say such a thing. But we may be not only generally a negative force for a planet's biosphere and its own survivability, which I think you can make a strong argument about, but we may also be a very persistent infestation that may even in interesting thoughts in this in the wake of a nuclear war.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the absence of any information around us, or any clues or hints of artificial behavior, artificially engineered stars or colonization, computer substrate transform planets, anything like that”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That your resolution because I mean, I think us and the techno signature community in the astronomy community aren't thinking about this problem seriously enough, in my opinion. We should be thinking about what AI is doing to our society and the implications for what we're looking for. And so the only, I think part of this thinking has to involve people like yourself who are more intimate with the machine learning and artificial intelligence world is your how do you reconcile in your mind you said earlier that you think you can't imagine a galaxy where life and intelligence is not all over the place and if artificial intelligence is a natural progression for civilizations how do you reconcile that with”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To explain why that would never happen in the entire history of the galaxy amongst potentially if life is common, millions, maybe even billions of instant instantiations of AI could have occurred across the galaxy. And so that seems to be a knock against the idea that there is life or intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. The fact that that hasn't occurred in our history is maybe the only solid data point we really have about the activities of other civilizations.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably going to have a different way of, you know, it's going to be engineering its solar system and the nearby material around it for a different goal. If it's just simply trying to increase computer substrate across the universe. And that, of course, if that is its principal intention to just essentially convert dumb matter into smart matter as it goes, then I think that would come into conflict with our observations of the universe, right? The earth shouldn't be here if that were true. The earth should have been transformed into computer substrate by this point. There has been plenty of time. History of the galaxy for that to have happened. So I'm skeptical that we can I'm skeptical in the pudd that that's a behavior that AI or any civilization really engages in. But I also find it difficult to find a way out of it.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, certainly, I tried to think about it from the observer's point of view as an astronomer. What am I looking for? Whether that intelligence is conscious or not has little bearing, I think, as to what I should be looking for when I'm trying to detect evidence of them, it would maybe affect their behavior in ways that I can't predict. That's again getting into the game of what I would call xenopsychology, of trying to make projections about the motivations of an alien species as incredibly difficult. And similarly, for any kind of artificial intelligence, it's unfathomable what its intentions may be. I mean, I would sort of question whether it would even be interested in traveling between the stars at all. If its primary goal is computation, computation for the sake of computation, then”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I guess like a Turing test problem, like if it's Displaying all those properties, if it quacks like a parrot, looks like a parrot, or cracks like a duck, isn't it, isn't it basically a duck at that point? So yeah, I can see that argument. It probably”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source