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
Yeah. It's a wild ethical question, isn't it? That book I told you about, Aurora? I love the book because it was such a sort of inversion of the usual. Cause you know, I've read, I love science fiction. I've read so many generation ship stories and they get to that planet. The planet turns out to be uninhabitable. It's inhabited, but it's uninhabitable for earth.
Because again, he has this idea of like, you know, life is particular to their planets. So they turn around and they come back. And then when they land, the main character goes, there's still people who are, you know, arguing for more generation ships. And she goes and she,
punches the guy out because she spent her whole life in a tube you know with this i thought that was a really interesting inversion you know the interesting thing about about we were talking about these space habitats but if you really had a space habit not some super cramped you know crappy usual version of a sentry ship but if you had these like space habitats that were really you know like the o'neill cylinders they're actually pretty nice places to live put a thruster on those
You know, like why, why keep them in the solar system? Maybe that's, maybe space is full of like these sort of traveling space habitats that are in some sense a, you know, they're worlds in and of themselves.
You know, the generation ship, too, which I talked about in the book, the idea of also the, you know, you talked about extending human lifetimes, or, you know, the stasis, the cryostasis, which is a mainstay of science fiction. You know, right, you can basically put in suspended animation and such. None of these things we know are possible.
But, you know, it's so interesting, and this is why I love science fiction, the way it seeds ideas, right? All these ideas we're going to talk about because they've been staples of science fiction for 50 years. I mean, the whole field of cryogenics? Yeah, where are we at with that?
How long?
Oh, bacteria can last. This is the thing about panspermia, right? How long can, you know, how long can a bacteria survive in a rock that's been blasted? You know, if there's a common impact across bacteria. interstellar distances. That does seem to actually be possible. People have done those kinds of calculations.
It's not out of the realm of possibility, but a complex organism, multicellular, multisystemic or multisystems, right, with organs and such. Also, what makes an organism?
Altered Carbon. Have you, that's a, that's a great series. I think it's on Netflix. It's, you know, that's a really great series where that's exactly the idea of sleeves. Everybody's able to like, you know, you can resleeve in another body. And it raises exactly sort of this question. It's not the greatest cyberpunk, but it's pretty good. It's got, it's got some great, great action sequences too.
This leads us to if we're going to get to the blind spot. I am of the opinion, heretical in some camps, that the brain is not the minimal thing. the minimal structure for consciousness. You know, it's the whole body. It's embodied in me, actually, in some sense. It's communities, actually.
So, yeah, so I don't, I mean, you know, I could be wrong, but this is, you know, this is what this whole work that I did with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, the philosophy of science. Which is interesting because it leads to this question about, you know, oh, maybe we should just download ourselves into computers, right? That's another story that one tells. I'm super skeptical about those.
But that's one of the narratives about interstellar travel is just like, and that anybody we meet is going to be a machine anyway. Whether it's like, whether it's downloaded bodies or it's just going to be artificial intelligence. Like there's the whole idea of how long does biological evolution last?
Maybe it's a very short period before everybody, you know, goes to, or the machines take over and, you know. or, you know, it's some hybrid.
Yeah, so great question. And this question gets to the heart of thinking about life, right, about what life is. And this is the physical part of that. There's also sort of the informational part of it. But let's just talk about the physical part of it. which is, you know, life, anything that we're going to call life is probably going to work on Darwinian evolution.
That's the nice thing about Darwinian evolution. Just like we know the laws of physics are general, the laws of Darwinian evolution are kind of this logic, this basic logic, that, you know, anything we'd reasonably call life probably has to operate under these kinds of principles. And so, you know, evolution is about solving problems, right?
That, you know, to survive that the environment presents. And the environment is always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms so that you'd expect a kind of balance between what we call convergence, evolutionary convergence, and evolutionary contingency. Mm-hmm.
So, you know, if you've got to move along a surface, you know, a surface between, you know, a hard surface and air, then the idea of some kind of jointed stick, right, legs, makes sense.
That you're probably going to trigger that, you know, if you look at Earth's history, multiple times, multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other are going to solve the problem of getting towards energy sources using some kind of, you know, a stick-like apparatus.
Yeah, so that's one problem that has to be solved. One problem that has to be solved is I got to get to food, right? Another problem is I got to get away from predators, right? You've seen wings. We've seen wings. The line that went through dinosaurs to birds involved wings. Insects evolved wings. Mammals evolved wings.
Showing 321–340 of 594 · page 17 of 30
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