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
We've watched that movie.
Well, I think, you know, so this also, this general question also leads to many messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And I am definitely of the opinion of like, you should be very careful, you know, like, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass.
Um, you know, the people who advocate like, oh yeah, we should be sending, you know, powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space. I'm like, why would you, cause we just don't know. Like, I'm not going to say they are warlike. I'm not going to say they're not warlike. I have no idea. You know, But we sure as hell – well, first of all, who gets to decide that?
The idea that a bunch of astronomers who happen to have a radio telescope, I don't – who speaks for Earth, which I think was a great book somebody wrote. So definitely we should be cautious, I would say, because we just have zero information. You used to have this idea of, well, if they're advanced, they've managed to survive, so of course they're going to be wearing togas and be singing kumbaya.
But I just wouldn't assume that. It's also possible, though, that their cognitive structure is so different that we're not even living in the same universe in a certain way. I think we have to be prepared for that. We may not even be able to recognize each other in some way as cognizing beings.
beings one of my favorite movies is arrival i don't know if you've ever seen that one i really love that one because you know they literally they have a different language they have a different cognitive structure in terms of language and they're literally kind of living in a different physics different physics different language different different everything yeah but in the case of arrival it can at least like recognize that they're there and they managed to cross the language barrier yeah
But also, you know, if they're long-lived, they may just be like, we're not even interested. Like, we've done this. We're like, you know, 10 billion years – or sorry, say 10 million years ago, we were really interested in this, in communicating with you, you know, youngins. But now we're not at all.
And that's just, you know, one of the beauties of this, again, is how to think about this systematically because you're so far past the hairy edge. Right. Of our experience of what we know that you want to think about it. Right. You don't want to be like, don't know, can't say anything because that's not fun. But you also have to sort of systematically go after your own biases. Right.
So one of the things I loved about Arrival, too, was, you know, Carl Sagan always had this idea like we'll teach him math. We'll teach him our math. Then they'll teach us their math. And then, you know, we'll be telling each other knock knock jokes, you know, and swapping cures for cancer. Right. And, you know, in the movie, like, they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist.
And the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately, right? And it's the linguist who understands that language is actually embodied. Language is not just something that happens in your head. It's actually the whole experience. And she's the one who breaks through. And it just points to the idea that how...
utterly different the cognitive structures the you know of of a of a different species should be so somehow we have to figure out how to think about it but be so careful of our biases or figure out like a systematic way to break through our biases and not just tell something make science fiction movies you know what i mean
Got to look. got to look, got to figure out ways to look. So I, you know, I mean, I, I don't put it, it's not high on my list of, you know, things that I'm, I think are probable, but it's certainly, it needs to be explored, you know, and unless you look, you never know.
So looking on the moon, look at where would we find if, if aliens had passed through the solar system anytime in the last 3 billion years, where might we find artifacts? Where might artifacts still be around? Earth would Probably not because of weathering and resurfacing. The moon's a good place. Certain kinds of orbits, you know, maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable.
So you got to figure out which orbits actually you could put something there and it'll last for a billion years. So those are the kind of questions I don't. Like I said, I don't, it's not high on my list of thinking this could happen, but it could happen. I certainly can't, unless you look, you don't know.
Uh, you mean like in that directed panspermia?
Yeah. Or seeding some aspect of the evolution. Like 2001. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you know, it's a great story, but you know, always with Occam's razor or whatever with science, if I can, if I can answer that question without that extra very detailed, uh, hypothesis, uh, than I should. And, you know, the idea that evolution is a natural process, that's what I would go for first, right?
There's, that just seems, it's so much easier to do it that way than adding, you know, sort of, because it's kind of a duo sex machina thing of like, oh, then the aliens came down and they solved that problem that you're trying to solve by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.
I wouldn't say that. It's not a simple thing, but it doesn't, you know, putting, I think, because, you know, all you're doing is kicking the can down the road, right? The aliens formed, right? So you're just saying like, all right, I'm just kicking the can down the road to the aliens. How did they, what was their abiogenesis event?
That would not be obvious. Right. I understand the logic of what you're saying. But the problem for me with that is that, right, first you have to assume that alien civilizations are common, which I'm not sure about it, that most of them may be dead. Or they're not, you know, while I think that life is common. And again, this is just my biases, right?
So now the problem is how do we sort out sort of, you know, the biases we're bringing or the assumptions we're bringing in from... You know, from the sort of causal chain that comes out of that.
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