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
One is that you see something that has occurred in evolution that has only happened once, right? So let's take the opposite. You see something that's happened multiple times, like wings, lots of examples of wings over lots of different evolutionary lineages. So that's clearly not a hard, making wings is not a hard step.
There are certain other things that people say, no, that's a hard step, oxygen, you know, the oxygen photosynthesis. But they are so, they tend to be so long ago that we've lost all the information. There could be other things in the fossil record that, you know, went, made this innovation, but they're just gone now. So you can't tell. So there's information loss.
The other thing is the idea of pulling up the ladder that somebody, you know, some species makes the innovation, but then it fills the niche and nobody else can do it again. So yeah, it only happened once, but it happened once because basically the creature was so successful, it took over and there was no space for anybody else to evolve it.
So yeah, so the interesting thing about this was seeing how... How much, once you look at the details of life's history on Earth, how it really shifts you away from this hard steps model. And it shows you that those details, as we were talking about, like, do you have to know about the planet? Do you have to know about plate tectonics? Yeah, you're going to have to.
But I think we're at the point now, so now there may be other kinds of principles that actually, because, you know, co-evolution actually has its own, not deterministic, you're done with determinism, right? But complex systems have patterns, complex systems have constraints, and that's actually what we're going to be looking for, are constraints on them.
And so, you know, and again, nothing against Carter was a brilliant idea, but it just goes to show, you know, there's this great XTC. I'm a theoretical physicist, right? And so I love simplified. Give me a simplified model with, you know, a dynamical equation, some initial conditions. I'm very happy.
But there's this great XTC comic where like, you know, somebody is working something out on the board and this physicist is looking over and saying, oh, oh, I just I just wrote down an equation for that. I solved your problem. Do you guys even have a journal for this? And the subtitle is why everybody hates physicists. Yeah. So sometimes that approach totally works.
Sometimes physicists can be very good at like zooming in on what is important and casting the details aside so you can get to the heart of an issue. And that's very useful sometimes. Other times it obfuscates, right? Other times it clouds over actually what you needed to focus on, especially when it comes to complexity. Yeah.
uh speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation uh let's return back to the question of how many alien civilizations are out there and uh talk about the drake equation yeah can you uh explain the drake equation you know people have various uh feelings about the drake equation uh you know it can be abused but basically it was the the story actually is really interesting so frank drake in uh 1960 does the first ever astrobiological experiment he
gets a radio telescope, points it at a couple of stars and listens for signals. That was the first time anybody done any experiment about any kind of life in the history of humanity. And he does it and he's kind of waiting for everybody to make fun of him. And still he gets a phone call from the government says, hey, we want you to do a meeting on interstellar communications, right?
So he's like, okay. So they organize a meeting with like just eight people. A young Carl Sagan is going to be there as well. And like the night before, Drake has to come up with an agenda. How do you come up with an agenda for a meeting on a topic that no one's ever talked about before, right? And so he actually breaks what he does.
What's so brilliant about the Drake equation is he breaks the problem of how many civilizations are out there into a bunch of sub-problems. And he breaks it into seven sub-problems. Each one of them is a factor in an equation that when you multiply them all together, you get the number of civilizations out there that we could communicate with. So the first term is the rate at which stars form.
The second term is the fraction of those stars that have planets, F sub p. The next term is the number of planets in the habitable zone, the place where we think life could form. The next term after that is the fraction of those planets where actually an abiogenesis event, life forms, occurs. The next one is the fraction of planets on which you start to get intelligence.
After that, it's the fraction of planets where that intelligence goes on to create a civilization. And then finally, the last term, which is the one that we really care about, is the lifetime. How long you have a civilization, now how long does it last? Well, you say we humans. We humans, right?
Because we're standing, we're staring at the, you know, multiple guns pointing at us, you know, nuclear war, climate change, AI. So, you know, how long in general does civilizations last? Now, each one of these terms, what was brilliant about what he did was what he was doing was he was quantifying our ignorance.
By breaking the problem up into these seven sub-problems, he gave astronomers something to do. And so this is always with a new research field. You need a research program or else you just have a bunch of vague questions. You don't even know really what you're trying to do. So the star people could figure out how many stars were forming per year.
The people who were interested in planets could go out and find techniques to discover planets, et cetera, et cetera.
He gave astrobiology, which wasn't even a term then, a roadmap. Like, okay, you guys go do this. You go do that. You go do that. And it had such far-reaching effect on astrobiology because it did break the problem up in a way that gave useful sort of marching orders for all these different groups. Like, for example, it's because of the Drake equation in some sense that
people who were involved in SETI pushed NASA to develop the technologies for planet hunting. There was this amazing meeting in 1978, two meetings, 1978 and 1979, that were driven in some part by the people who were involved in SETI, Getting NASA together to say, look, okay, look, how, you know, what's the roadmap for us to develop technologies to find planets?
So, yeah, so, you know, the Drake equation is absolutely foundational for astrobiology, but we should remember that it's not a law of nature, right? It's not something that's it's not equals MC squared. And so you can see it being abused in some sense. People, you know, it's generated a trillion papers. Some of those papers are good. I've written some of those and some of those papers are bad.
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