YouSaid · the spoken record

Robin Hanson

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314
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2022-06-09
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2022-06-09
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1
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podcast

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  1. “It's actually a lot like cancer. So the dominant model of cancer in an organism like each of us is that we have all these cells and in order to become cancerous, a single cell has to go through a number of mutations. And these very unlikely mutations, and so any one cell is very unlikely to have all these mutations happen by the time your lifespan's over. But we have enough cells in our body that the chance of any one cell producing cancer by the end of your life is actually pretty high, more like 40%. And so the chance of cancer appearing in your lifetime also goes as a power law, this power of the number of mutations that's required for anyone cell in your body to become cancerous. This is the longer you live. The likely you are to have cancer cells”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Describe what a power like. Say the function x is linear and x squared is quadratic, so it's the power of two. If we make x to the 3, that's cubic or the power of three. And so x to the sixth is the power of six. And so we'd say life appears in the universe on a planet like Earth in that proportion to the time that it's been ready for life to appear. And that over the universe in general, it'll appear at roughly a power law like that. What is the exponent? What is n? Is the number of hard steps? Yes, the number of hard steps. So that's the idea. If you're gambling, You're doubling up every time This is the probability of you just keep winning. So it gets very unlikely very quickly. And so we are the result of this unlikely chain of successes.”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And that took six steps on average. The key point is on average these things on any one random planet would take trillions or trillions or trillions of years, just a really long time. And so we're really lucky that they all happened really fast in a short time before our window closed. And the chance of that happening in that short window goes as that time period to the power of the number of steps. And so that was where the power we talked about before came from. And so that means in the history of the universe, we should overall roughly expect advanced life to appear as a power law in time. So that very early on there was very little chance of anything appearing. And then later on, as things appear, other things are appearing somewhat closer to them in time because they're all going as this power law. What is the power law? For people who are not sure, math inclined,”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Inhabitable for complex life. Estimate how long. Lasts how many hard steps there's windows for doing. Different hard steps Mathematically estimate. or the passing of the hard steps or the taking of the hard steps sort of like coldly mathematical look Pre expansionary life Requires a number of steps what is the probability of taking those steps on an earth that lasts a billion years or two billion years or five billion years or ten billion years. Observed durations of One”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And in this statistical model of trying to fit all these steps into a finite window, the model actually predicts that these steps could be of varying difficulties, that is, they could each take different amounts of time on average. But if you're lucky enough that they all appear in a very short time, then the durations between them will be roughly equal. And the time remaining left over in the rest of the window will also be the same length. So we at the moment have roughly a billion years left on Earth until simple life like us would no longer be possible. Life appeared roughly 400 million years after the very first time when life was possible at the very beginning. So those two numbers right there give you the rough estimate of six hard steps.”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “First step would be sort of the very simplest form of life of any sort. And then we don't know whether that first sort is the first sort that we see in the historical record or not. But then some other steps are, say, the development of photosynthesis, the development of sexual reproduction. There's the development of eukaryote cells, which are certain kind of complicated cell that seems to have only appeared once. And then there's multicellularity that is multiple cells coming together to large organisms like us.”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So we're pretty sure that it would happen really soon so that it couldn't be the same sort of a hard step as the last one so in terms of taking a long time. So when we look at the history of Earth, we look at the durations of the major things that have happened. That suggests that there's roughly, say, six hard steps that happened, say between three and twelve. And that we have just achieved the last one that would take a long time. Well, we don't know. But whatever it is, we've just achieved the last one.”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Complicated thing to explain. Advanced life appeared by going through a sequence of hard steps. So, starting with very simple life, and here we are at the end of this process at pretty advanced life. And so we had to go through some intermediate steps, such as sexual selection, photosynthesis, multicellular animals. And the idea is that each of those steps was hard. Evolution just took a long time searching in a big space of possibilities to find each of those steps. And the challenge was to achieve all of those steps by a deadline of when the planets would no longer host simple life. And so Earth has been really lucky compared to all the other billions of planets out there and that we managed to achieve all these steps in this short time of the five billion years that Earth can support simple life.”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And so our current date is a sample, and that gives us one of the other parameters. The second parameter is the constant in front of the power law, and that's arrived from our current date”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And then after some short delay, they start expanding. And they expand at some speed. And the speed is one of those parameters. That's one of the three. And the other two parameters are about how they appear in time. That is, they appear at random places and they appear in time according to a power law, and that power law has two parameters. And we can fit each of those parameters to data. And so then we can say, now we know. We know the distribution of advanced civilizations in space and time. We are right now a new civilization and we have not yet started to expand. But plausibly we would start to do that within, say, 10 million years of the current moment. That's plenty of time. And 10 million years is a really short duration in the history of the universe. So we are at the moment a sort of random sample of the kind of times at which an advanced civilization might appear because we may or may not become grabby, but if we do, we'll do it soon.”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “We have a mathematical model of the distribution of advanced civilizations, i.e. aliens in space and time. That model has three parameters, and we can set each one of those parameters from data, and therefore we claim this is actually what we know about where they are in space-time. So the key idea is they appear at some point in space-time”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's in the body. The title is actually about loud and quiet. Right. And so the idea is there's, you know, you want to distinguish your particular model of things from the general category of things everybody else might talk about. So that's how we distinguish.”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “My co authors and I put together a paper with a particular mathematical model. And so we use the term grabby aliens to describe that more particular model. And the idea is it's a more particular model of the general concept of loud. So loud would just be the general idea that they would be really obvious.”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Isn't to leave it alone the way it started, right? So we humans, when we go around the earth and use stuff, we change it. We turn a forest into a farmland, turn a harbor into a city. So the idea is aliens would do something with it. And so we're not exactly sure what it would look like, but it would look different. So somewhere in the sky, we would see big spheres of different activity, where things had been changed because they had been there.”

    2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source