Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And they did a test program where they gave it – they gave the computer – You know, sort of like, I don't know, 50 miles around the Apollo 11 or Apollo, maybe it was Apollo 17 site. And it instantly was able to pull out the lander.
Yeah.
So.
But that could be really weird stuff. That's why there's this emphasis now on these agnostic algorithms. signatures, right? So, um, actually disequilibrium is a nice one. One way to define life is it is a system that is far from equilibrium, right? It's alive, right? Because as soon as it dies, it turns into, it goes back to equilibrium.
And so you can look at all chemicals in an atmosphere, even if you don't know whether these could be chemicals that you have no idea whether or not they have anything to do with life. But the degree of disequilibrium, the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not – the chemicals have not all kind of like just gone down to – they've all reacted away to an equilibrium state.
You can actually tell that in very general ways using what's called the Gibbs free energy. And that's kind of a signature. Like if you see an atmosphere that is wildly out of equilibrium state. You know, that indicates that there's something happening on that planet, biosphere or technosphere, that is pumping gases, you know, into the atmosphere that is keeping the whole system from relaxing.
So is it possible we can detect anomalies in space time? Well, you could detect, and there's been some work on this, like with the Akubrae drive, you know, these proposals for warp drives. And we can talk about that later. I'm skeptical of those. Because it may really be possible you just can't go fast from the speed of light.
But people have done work on, like, you know, what would be the signature of...
uh an akubre drive what would be the signature like you know could you detect if you're using a drive like that then you certainly are distorting space-time which means any light that's passing by has gotten you know it's it's its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted space-time so yeah there are possibilities along with that you know one of the funny things i don't know if they've gotten past this but somebody calculated the problem with the akubre drive or this warp drive was that if if you dropped out of warp there would be this spread
ray of gamma rays that would like sterilize any planet in front of you so it's like well yeah you probably don't want to do that but that would be a great bios or techno signature another planet obliterated so you think it's not possible to travel faster than speak i wouldn't say that i wouldn't say that but what i think you know if you look at the physics we understand right yeah um the you know every possibility for faster than light travel right
really relies on something that doesn't exist, right? So, you know, the cool thing is Einstein's field equations. You can actually play with them. The equations are right there. You can add things to the, you know, right or left-hand side that allow you to get something like the Ocubre Drive. That was a metric that, you know, showed you like, oh, it's a warped bubble.
It's a warping of spacetime that moves through spacetime Faster than the speed of light, right? Because nothing can move across space-time faster than the speed of light, but space-time itself can move faster than the speed of light. But here's the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something.
The thing you added, the little fictional term you added into the equations is something called exotic matter, and it doesn't exist. It's really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do.
So, you know, it's a nice fiction, but really right now, you know, you know, we live in this weird moment in history of the great acceleration where like the technology we use now is, you know, is completely different from the technology we used 10 years ago is remarkably different from the technology from a hundred years ago.
Um, but you know, I remember playing, um, uh, Assassin's Creed where everybody's like, you know, what is it? It's 1200 and everybody's like stab, stab, stab. And I was like, yeah, it's a great game. And then I got Assassin's Creed two and, uh, it was 300 years later and everybody's like stab, stab, stab. And it was like 300 years and the technology hadn't changed.
And that was actually true for most of human history, right? You used your great grandfather's tools, right? Because there was no need to have any other new tools. And you probably did his job. So, you know, we can be fooled into thinking like, oh, you know, technology is going to go on forever. We're always going to find new advances.
As opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time. So you have to be careful about that bias that we have living in this time of great acceleration.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that in principle, but I think there's been, you know, I mean, there's a lot of ideas out there. People, you know, string theory, people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years. It's not like people haven't been, not like there hasn't been a lot of effort. And, you know, and again, I'm not going to predict.
I think it's entirely possible that we have, you know, there's incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be poked through. In which case then, All bets are off, right? Once you get sort of, you know, interstellar, fast interstellar travel, whoa, you know, who knows what can happen. But I tend to be drawn to like science fiction stories that take the speed of light seriously.
Like what kind of civilization can you build where like it takes, you know, 50 years to get to where you're going and a 50 years back. Like, so I don't know. I mean, yeah, there's no way I'm going to say that, that we won't get warp drives, but as of right now, there's, it's all fictional. It's, you know, it's barely even a coherent concept.
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