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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“I think usually astronomy moves forward dramatically and science in general when you have a new technological capability come online for the first time. And we kind of just gave examples of that there with the solar system. So what kind of new capabilities might emerge in the next 100 years? The capability I would love to see is not just, I mean, in the next 10, 20 years, we're hoping to take these pale blue dot images we spoke about. So that requires building something like JWSD, but on even larger scale and optimized for direct imaging, you'd have to have either coronagraph or a starshade or something to block out the starlight and reveal those pale blue dots. So in the next sort of decades, I think that's the achievement that we can look forward to in our lifetimes is to see photos of other Earths going beyond that, maybe in our lifetimes towards the end of our lifetimes perhaps. I'd love it if we, and I think it's technically possible as Breakthrough Starship.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As to what you think about the debate about whether Pluto should be demoted or not, which I know often invokes a lot of strong feelings, it is an incredible achievement that we were able to transform our view of the solar system in a matter of years just by basically charge coupled devices, the things that's in cameras, the invention of that device allowed us to detect objects which were much further away, much fainter and revealed all of this stuff that was there all along. And so that's the beauty of astronomy. There's just so much to discover. And even in our own backyard.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it could revolutionize the way we think about the sort of system. I mean, that revolution has happened several times in the past when we discovered Vesta in the 19th century. That was, I think, the seventh planet for a while or the eighth planet when it was first discovered. And then we discovered Ceres. And there was a bunch of asteroid objects, Janus. And so for a while, the textbooks had, there was something like 13 planets in the solar system. And then that was just a new capability that was emerging to detect those small objects. And then we ripped that up and said, no, no, we're going to change the definition of a planet. And then the same thing happened when we started looking at the outer skirts of the solar system again. We found Eris, we found Sedna, these objects which resembled Pluto. And the more and more of them we found make make. And eventually we again had to rethink the way we even contextualized what a planet is and what the nature of the outer solar system is. So regardless.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And through those pinholes almost laser light is shining through. And inside this black sphere, there are unknown things wandering around, drifting around that we are trying to discover, and sometimes they will pass in front of those little pencil thin laser beams and block something out so we can tell that it's there. And it's not an active radar because we didn't actually beam anything out and get a reflection off, which is what the sun does, the sun's light comes off and it comes back. That's more like an active radar system. There's more like a passive radar system where we are just listening very intently. And so I'm kind of so fascinated by that. The idea that we could map out the rich architecture of the outer solar system just by doing something that we could have done potentially for a long time, okay, which is just listening in the right way, just tuning our instrumentation to the correct way of not listening but viewing the universe.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which we do in the Kuiper belt especially. And that's called an occultation. And so sometimes those objects will just pass in front of a distant star just coincidentally. These are very, very brief moments. They last for less than a second. And so you have to have a very fast camera to detect them, which conventionally astronomers don't usually build fast cameras. Most of the phenomena we observe occurs on hours, minutes, days, even. But now we're developing cameras which can take thousands of images per second. And yet do it at the kind of astronomical fidelity that we need for this kind of precise measurement. And so you can see these very fast dips. You even get these kind of diffraction patterns that come around, which are really cool to look at. And that's, I kind of love it because it's almost like passive radar. You have these pinpricks of light. Imagine that you live in a giant black sphere, but there's these little pinholes that have been poked.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, all of us 400 years of astronomy are only window into the universe has been light. And that has only changed quite recently with the discovery of gravitational waves. That's now a new window. And hopefully, well, to some degree, I guess, solar neutrinos we've been detecting for it, but they come from the sun or interstellar space. But we may be able to soon detect neutrino messages that's even been hypothesized as a way of communicating between civilizations as well, or just do neutrino telescopes to study the universe. And so there's a growing interest in what we'd call multi-messenger astronomy now. So not just messages from light, but messages from these other physical packets of information that are coming our way. But when it comes to the outer solar system, light really is our only window. There's two ways of doing that. One is you detect the light from the Oort cloud object itself, which, as I just said, is very, very difficult. There's another trick.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, you know, the outer solar system is just such a, it's like the bottom of the ocean. We know so little about what's on the bottom of our own planet's ocean. And we know next to nothing about what's on the outskirts of our own solar system”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is truly belongs to us, belongs to what was scattered from Jupiter and Saturn, what fraction of it could in fact be interstellar visitors. And of course, we've got excited about this recently because of Omur Mua, this interstellar asteroid, which seemed to be at the time the first evidence of an interstellar object. But when you think about the Oort cloud intermixing, it may be that a large fraction of comets, comets are seeded from the Oort cloud that eventually come in. Some of those comets may indeed have been interstellar in the first place that we just didn't know about through this process. There even is an example, I can't remember the name, there's an example of a comet that has a very peculiar spectral signature that has been hypothesized to have actually been an interstellar visitor, but one that was essentially sourced through this Oort Cloud mixing. And so this is kind of intriguing.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might use AU cloud objects as a jumping off point or in the Kuiper belt you have things like Planet 9 even. There might even be objects beyond in the Oort cloud which are actually planet-like that we just cannot detect. These objects are very, very faint. So that's why they're so hard to see. I mean, even Planet 9 is hypothesized to exist, but we've not been able to confirm its existence because it's at something like a thousand AU away from us, thousand times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. And so even though it's probably larger than the Earth, The amount of light it reflects from the Sun, the Sun is what just looks like a star at that point so far away from it, that it barely reflects anything back. It's extremely difficult to detect. So there's all sorts of wonders that may be lurking out in the outer solar system. And so this leads you to wonder, you know, in the Oort cloud, that Oort cloud must have intermixed with other Oort clouds in the past. And so what fraction of the Oort cloud?”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's part because of graphics. These are objects that probably are mostly icy rich. They were probably formed fairly similar distances to Jupiter and Saturn, but were scattered out through the interactions of those giant planets. We see a circular disk of objects around us, which kind of looks like the asteroid belt, but just for the way called the Kuiper belt. And then further beyond that, you get the Oort cloud. And the Oort cloud is not in a disk. It's just a sphere. It kind of surrounds us in all directions. So these are objects that were scattered out three-dimensionally in all different directions. And so those objects are potentially resources for us, especially if you were planning to do an interstellar mission one day, you might want to mine the water that's embedded within those and use that as either oxygen or fuel for your rocket. And so it's quite possible. There's also some rare earth metals and things like that as well. But it's quite possible that a civilization”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The current closest star to us is Proxima Centauri, which is about 4.2 light years away, but it will not always be the closest star. And over millions of years, it will be supplanted by other stars. In fact, stars that will come even closer than Proxima within just a couple of light years. And that's been happening not just, we can project that will happen over the next few million years, but that's been happening presumably throughout the entire history of the galaxy for billions of years. And so if you went back in time, there would have been all sorts of different nearest stars, right, different stages of the Earth's history. And those stars are so close that their aort clouds do intermix with one another. So the Oort cloud can extend out to even a light year or two around the Earth. There's some debate about exactly where it ends. It probably doesn't really have a definitive end, but kind of more just kind of peters out more and more and more as you go further away.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that thought, I mean, that's kind of the beauty of the field of technosignatures and looking for life is you can find inspiration and intellectual joy in just the smallest little thing that starts a whole thread of building upon it and wondering about the implications. And so in this case, I was just really struck by, we kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier. The idea that stars are not static, we tend to think of the galaxy as having stars in a certain location from the center of the galaxy and they kind of live there. But in truth, the stars are not only orbiting around the center of the galaxy, but those orbits are themselves changing over time they're processing. And so in fact, the orbits look more like a spirograph if you've ever done those as a kid to kind of whirl around and trace out all sorts of strange patterns. And so the stars intersect with one another.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make it as interpretable as possible to be that even a dumb alien would be able to figure out what we're trying to show them here. Because there's all sorts of conventions and rules that are built in that we tend to presume when we design our messages. And so if your message is assuming they know how to do an MP3 decoder, a particular compression algorithm, I'm sure they could eventually reverse engineer it and figure it out. But you're making it harder for them to get to that point. So maybe I always think you probably would have a two-tier system, right? You probably have some lower tier key system and then maybe beneath that you'd have a deeper compressed layer of more in-depth information.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and to some degree, the more you, I would imagine, I don't work in compression algorithms, but I would imagine the more you compress your signal, the more assumptions that kind of go on behalf of the decoder, the more skilled they really have to be. A prominent sequence is completely unencoded information essentially. But if you look at the Arecibo message, they were fairly careful with their pixelation of this simple image they sent to try and”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it was just the most generic thing possible. Don't assume anything about the signal shape. Just look for anything that repeats. The signal shape can be anything. Can we kind of learn the template of the signal from the data itself? And then it's like a template matching filter to see if that repeats many, many times in the data. And so we actually applied that and found a bunch of interesting stuff, but we didn't see anything that was the prime number sequence, at least in the Kepler data. That's 200,000 stars, which sounds like a lot. But compared to 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, it's really just scratching the surface.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's 200,000 stars that Kepler monitored, and it monitored them all the time. It took a photo of each one of them every 30 minutes, measured their brightness, and it did that for four and a half years. And so you have already, and Tess is doing it right now, another mission. And so you have already an existing catalog. And people are genuinely scouring through each of those light curves with automated machine learning techniques. We even developed some in our own team. that can look for weird behavior. We wrote a code called the Weird Detector, for instance, that...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, to some degree, it's just building bigger aperture in space. The bigger the telescope, the finer ability to detach those minute signals.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prime number sequence, but maybe in the spatial pattern of this very complex light curve we see, you could encode more and more information through 2D shapes and the way those occultations happen. And maybe you could even encode messages and in-depth information from that, you know, you could even imagine it being like a lower layer of information, which is just the prime number sequence, but then you look closely and you see the smaller divots embedded within those that have a deeper layer of information to extract. And so to me, something like that would be pretty compelling that there was somebody who would manifest, unless it's just a very impressive hoax, that would be a pretty compelling evidence for this civilization.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transmit information, which is hard to think about something that satisfies those criteria, but there was a proposal by one of my colleagues, Luke Arnold, which inspired a lot of us in technosignatures. And he suggested that you could build artificial transitors. So you could build sheets of material that transit in front of the star, maybe one thin sheet passes across first, then two, then three, then five, then seven. So you could follow the prominent number sequence of these. And so there'd be a clear indication that someone had manufactured those, but they don't require any energy source because they're just sheets of material of the star. They would eventually degrade from micrometeorites and maybe their orbits would become destabilized, but they should have lifetimes far exceeding the lifetime of any battery or mechanical electronic system that we could, at least without technology, conceive of building. And so you could imagine then extending that. And how could you encode not just”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a thing of a radio wave. But the information, I mean, we kind of toyed with us. And a video I did about hypothetical civilization on my channel. But one kind of fun way, I do want to bring this conversation towards time a little bit and thinking about not just looking for life and intelligence around us right now, but looking into the past and even into the future to some degree or communicating with the future. And so we had this fun experiment of imagining a civilization that was born at the beginning of the history of the galaxy and being the first and what it would be like for them. And they would desperately searching for evidence of life but couldn't find it. And so they decided to try and leave something behind for future civilizations to discover, to tell them about themselves. But of course a radio sign is just not going to work there because it has have a power source and that's a piece of machinery. It's going to eventually break down. It's going to be hard to maintain that for billions of years timescale. And so you wanted something that was kind of passive that doesn't require an energy source but can somehow”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I mean, yeah, prime numbers is a pretty good case because there's no natural phenomena that produces prime number sequences. It seems to be a purely abstract mathematical concept as far as I'm aware. And so if we detected series of radio blips that were following that sequence, it would be pretty clear to me or it could even be Car Sagan suggested that Pi could be encoded in that, or you might use the hydrogen line, but multiplied by Pi, like some very specific frequency of the universe, like a hydrogen line, but multiply it by a abstract mathematical constant that would imply strongly that there was someone behind the scenes operating that.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I think He had some, I can imagine something like a prime number sequence or a mathematical sequence like the Fibonacci series, something being broadcast.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decades to fully ever figure out what they're trying to tell us. But if there was a message there, we could at least know that there is high information content and there is complexity and that this is an attempt at communication and information transfer and leave it to our subsequent generations to figure out what exactly it is they're trying to say.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Information is a really useful way to frame what we're looking for, though, because then you're divorced from making assumptions about even a civilization necessarily or anything like that. So any kind of information rig signature, indeed, you can take things like the light curve from Boyajin's star and ask, what is the minimum number of free parameters or the minimum information content that must be encoded within the slight curve? The hope is that maybe from a good example be from a radio signature, you detect something that has a thousand megabytes of parameters essentially contained within it. That's pretty clearly at that point not the product of a natural process, really saying any natural process that we could possibly imagine with our current understanding of the universe. And so thinking even if we can't decode, which actually I'm skeptical would be able to ever decode it in our lifetimes, it would probably take decades.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of the best sales pictures to do tenta signature work. We always have that as our fallback, that look, we're going to look for alien signatures. If we fail, we're going to discover some awesome new physics along the way. And so even any kind of signature that we detect is always going to be interesting. And so that compels us to have not only the question of looking for life in the universe, but it gives us a strong scientific grounding as to why this sort of research should be funded and should be executed because it always pushes the frontiers of knowledge.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhat tongue in cheek called it Little Green Man won because it looked a lot like the radio signature that was expected from an alien civilization. But of course, it turned out to be a completely new type of star that we had never seen before, which was a neutron star with these two jets coming out the top of it. And so that's a challenge. Those three things are really, really difficult in terms of experimental design for a scientist to work around. Something that can explain anything, can avoid anything. So it's almost unfalsifiable and could always just be to some degree, as you said, we have this very limited knowledge of the infinite possibilities of physical law, and we probably only scratching the surface each time, and we've seen it so often in history, we may just be detecting some new phenomena.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buy a signature is and you don't see oxygen, you don't see methane, that doesn't mean there's no one living there. They could always be either tricking their atmosphere, engineering it. We actually wrote a paper about that, how you can use lasers to hide your biosignatures as advanced civilization. Or you could just be living underground or underwater or something where there's no biosignatures. So you can never really disprove there's life on another planet or on another star. It has infinite avoidance. And then finally, the third one is that we have incomplete physical understanding of the universe. So if I see a new phenomenon, which boy Argent Star was a good example of that, we saw this new phenomenon of these strange dips would never seen before. It was hypothesized immediately this could be aliens. It's like a god of the gaps, but it turned out to be incomplete physical understanding. And so that happens all the time in the first pulsar that was discovered. Same story. Jocelyn Bell kind of”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, I'd say there's three big problems for me with any search for life, which includes UFOs or the way to fossils on Mars, is that aliens have three unique properties as a hypothesis. One is they have essentially unbounded explanatory capability. So there's almost no phenomena I can show you that you couldn't explain with aliens to some degree. You could say, well, the aliens just have some super high-tech way of creating that illusion. The second one would be unbounded avoidance capacity. So I might see a UFO tomorrow and then the next day and then the next day and then predict I should see it on Thursday at the end of the week. But then I don't see it. But I could always get out of that and say, well, that's just because they chose not to come here. You know, they have this, they can always avoid future observations fairly easily. If you survey an exoplanet for”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going around it, it was more likely to be dust. Dust is chromatic. Both chromatic I mean it looks different in different colors. So it blocks out more red light than blue light. If it was a solid structure, shouldn't do that. It should be opaque, right? So a solid metal structure or something. So that was one of the clear indications. And the behavior of in the way the light changed or the dips changed across wavelength was fully consistent with the expectations of what small particulates would do. And so that's very hard. I mean, the real problem with alien hunting.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a star that was just very peculiarly dipping in and out, it's brightness. And it was hypothesized for a time that that may indeed be some kind of Dyson-like structure. So maybe a Dyson sphere that's half built. And so as it comes in and out, it's blocking out huge swaths of the star. It was very difficult to explain it really with any kind of planet model at the time. But an easier hypothesis that was proposed was it could just be a large number of comets or dust or something or maybe a planet that had broken apart and as it fragments orbit around it blocks out starlight and it turned out with subsequent observations of that star which especially the amateur astronomy community made a big contribution to as well that the the dips were chromatic which was a real important clue that that probably wasn't a solid structure then that was”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bright flashes, which would be one of the consequences with whip drives, as I said, is as they decelerate, they produce these bright flashes of light, we don't seem to see evidence of those kind of things. We don't see anything obvious around the nearby stars or the stars that we've surveyed in detail beyond that that indicate any kind of artificial civilization. The closest maybe we had was Boyajin star.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it depends exactly what they're doing, but I mean, the Dyson sphere example is one that we will discuss where a survey of 100,000 nearby galaxies find that they are not, have all been transformed into Dyson's sphere collectors. You could also imagine them doing things like, we wrote a paper about this recently of starlifting, where you can extend the life of your star by scooping mass off the star. So you'd be doing stellar engineering essentially. If you're doing a huge amount of asteroid mining, you would have a spectral signature because you're basically filling the solar system with dust by doing that, there'd be debris from that activity. And so there are some limits on this. Certainly we don't see...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Raises some fairly serious problems because if any civilization in the entire history of the galaxy decide to do that, then either we shouldn't be here or we happen to live in this kind of rare pocket where they chose not to populate to. And so this is sometimes called fact A hearts. Facte as the fact A is that as civilization is not here now, an alien civilization has not is not in present occupation of the earth. And that's difficult to resolve with the apparent ease at which even a small extrapolation of our own technology could potentially populate a galaxy in far faster than galactic history.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See the stars populated by galactic empires when warp drive is eminently possible because it makes expansion so much more trivial that it makes our life harder. There's some wonderful simulation where it being done out of Rochester where they actually simulate all the stars in the galaxy or a fraction of them and they spawn a civilization and one of them and they let it spread out at sub-light speeds and actually the very mixing of the stars themselves because the stars are not static. They're in orbit of the galactic center and they have crossing paths with each other. If you just have a range of even like five light years and your speed is of order of a few percent the speed of light is the maximum you can muster, you can populate the entire galaxy within something like 100,000, about a million years or so. So in a fraction of the lifetime of the galaxy itself and so this”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's just this one minor problem that we have to get around, but when it arrives at its destination, it basically collects this vast, it has like an event horizon almost at the front of it. And so it collects all this radiation at the front as it goes. And when it arrives, all that radiation gets dumped on its destination and basically completely exterminate the planet it arrives at. That radiation is also incident within the shell itself, this hawking radiation occurring within the shell, which is pretty dangerous. And then, you know, it also has, it raises all sorts of exacerbations of the Fermi paradox, of course, as well. So you might be able to explain why we don't see a galactic empire. I mean, even here it's hard. You might be able to explain why we don't see a galactic empire if everybody's limited to Voyager 2 rocket speeds of like 20 kilometers per second or something. But it's a lot harder to explain why we don't.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Potentially, yeah, potentially. Depends on, I think, you know, the properties of whatever the spacecraft is. I mean, one problem with what droves is there's all sorts of problems with warp drives.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you're basically bending space-time. You could also do it with a wormhole or... Some of the hypothetical FTLS doesn't have to necessarily be the alchi bear drive, the warp drive. It could be any faster than III system. As long as it travels superluminally, it will violate causality.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct, yeah, and so we need to rip up relativity. I mean, that's the point the current laws of physics, so you'd have to rip up our current law of relativity to make sense of how FTL could live in that universe because you can't have relativity FTL and causality sit nicely and play nicely together.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could design it in that way. You could be, you know, if you had a warp drive or a time machine, essentially, you could be very conscious and careful of the way you use it so as to cause paradoxes or just do it in a local area or something. But the real fundamental problem is you always have the ability to do it. And so in a vast cosmic universe, if time machines were all over the place, there's too much risk of someone doing it, right? If somebody having the option of essentially breaking the universe with this. So there's a fundamental problem hawking has this chronology protection conjecture where he said that essentially that this just can't be allowed because it breaks all our laws of physics if time travel is possible”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a whole new window to the universe, not just in terms of astrophysics, but potentially for technoscience as well. I have to say with the warp drives, I am skeptical that warp drives are possible because you have kind of fundamental problem relativity. You can either really have relativity faster than light travel or causality. You can only choose two of those three things. You really can't have all three in a coherent universe. If you have all three, you basically end up with a possibility of these kind of temporal paradoxes and time loops and grandfather paradoxes.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that by no means proves that they don't exist or don't happen, but it seems like it's an unusual behavior for a civilization to get to that stage of development and start harvesting the entire stellar output.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has been, yeah, there has been, and there's been, I think, in the literature, there was one with the IRAS satellite, which is an infrared satellite. They targeted, I think, a voice of a hundred thousand stars nearby stars and found no convincing examples of what looked like a Dyson sphere star. And then Jason Wright and his team extended this, I think, using Y's, which is another infra satellite, to look around galaxies. Could an entire galaxy have been converted into Dyson spheres? Or a significant fraction of the galaxy, which is basically the Kardashv type 3, right? This is When you've basically mastered the entire galactic pool of resources. And again, out of a hundred thousand nearby galaxies, there appears to be no compelling examples of what looks like a Dyson galaxy, if you want to call it that.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things which go far beyond our capabilities such as warp drive signatures which have been proposed, these bright flashes of light or even gravitational wave detections from LIGO could be detected. You could have Dyson spheres, the idea of covering basically a star's completely covered by some kind of structure which collects all the light from the star to power the civilization. And that would be pretty easily detectable to some degree because you're transferring all of the visible light thermodynamically has to be re-emitted so it would come out as infrared light. So you have an incredibly bright infrared star, yet one that was visibly not present at all. And so there would be a pretty intriguing signature to look for.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Galactic Encyclopedias for us to unlock, which has always been the allure of the radio technique. But there could also be unintentional signatures. For example, you can have something like the satellite system that we've produced around the Earth, the artificial satellite system, Starlink type systems. We mentioned you could detect the glint of light across those satellites as they orbit around the planet. You could detect a geostationary satellite belt which would block out sunlight as the planet transited across the star. You could detect solar panels potentially spectrally on the surface of the planet, heat island effects. New York is hotter than New York State by a couple of degrees because the heat island effect of the city and so you could thermally map different planets and detect these. So there's a large array of things that we do that we can go out and hypothesize we could look for. And then on the furthest end of the scale, you have”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, alien psychology is another way of maybe making it more grounded. We can't really guess at their motivations too well, but we can look at the sorts of behaviors we engage in and at least look for them. We're always guilty that when we look for biosignatures, we're really looking for, and even when we look for planets, we're looking for templates of Earth. When we look for biosignatures, we're looking for templates of Earth-based life. When we look for tetanus signatures, we tend to be looking for templates of our own behaviors or extrapolations of our behaviors. So there's a very long list of tetanus signatures that people have suggested we could look for. The earliest ones were, of course, radio beacons. That was sort of Project Osma that Frank Drake was involved in trying to look for radio signatures, which could either be just blurting out high-power radio signals saying, hey, we're here, or could even have encoded within.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I'm just fabricating that word, really, but trying to guess at the machinations and motivations of Another intelligent being that was completely evolutionary divorced from us.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a hard question to answer because we are essentially engaging in xenopsychology to some degree. What are the activities of another civilization? A lot of that is the word.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was over the entire surface, and it doesn't, it's incredibly intelligent because maybe each node communicates with each other to create essentially a giant neural net, but it has no sense of what communication even is. And so alien life is out there is surely going to be extremely diverse. I'm pretty skeptical that we'll ever get that fantasy moment I always had as a kid of having a dialogue within the civilization.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never going to be at a point which is in technological lockstep with us, similar level of development. Even intellectually, the idea that they could have a conversation with us, even through a translator, I mean, we can't communicate with Humback Wales. We can't communicate with dolphins in a meaningful way. We can sort of bark orders at them, but we can't have abstract conversations with them about things. And so the idea that we will ever have that fulfilling conversation I'm deeply skeptical of. And I think a lot of us are drawn to that. It is maybe a replacement for God to some degree, that father figure civilization that might step in, teach us the area of our ways and bestow wisdom upon our civilization. But they could equally be a giant fungus that has, doesn't even understand the idea of socialization because it's the only entity on its planet. It just swells.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say I'm not like some extreme denialist of evidence. If there was compelling evidence for life on another planet, I would be the first one to be celebrating that and be shaking hands with the alien on the White House lawn, whatever. You know, I grew up with Star Trek, and that was my fantasy, be Captain Kirk and fly across the stars, meaning at the civilization. So there's nothing more I'd want to be true, as I've said. We just have to guard against it when we're assessing data. But I have to say I'm very skeptical that we will ever have that Star Trek moment, even if there are other civilizations out there.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source