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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Fascinating. Santa Fe Institute, the stuff the Santa Fe Institute does on this as complex systems, the origin of hierarchies and such, very cool. Yeah, Santa Fe folks.
Well, so the main thing we were trying to do with this paper is say, look, we have all of this exoplanet data, right? It's got to be good for something, especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down empirically are two terms in the Drake equation. So F sub P, that's the second term, fraction of stars that have planets.
And then N sub E, the average number of planets in the habitable zone. Those are the second and third term in the Drake equation. So what that means is all the astronomical terms have been nailed. And so we said like, okay, how do we use this to do something with the Drake equation? And so we realized is, well, okay, we got to get rid of time, the lifetime thing. We can't say anything about that.
Um, but if we let that, if we don't ask how long do they last, but instead ask what's the probability that there've been any civilizations at all, no matter how long they lasted. I'm not asking whether they exist now or not. I'm just asking in general, um, about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe.
And that we were able to constrain. And so what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run.
Um, and the only way that we're the only time that this is, you know, this whole process from, you know, uh, a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed. Right. So therefore you could put a, a probability you could, we called it the pessimism line. right?
We don't really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, right? But we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, as if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22, one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we're alone. If it's anywhere larger than that, then we're not the first. It's happened somewhere else.
And to me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn't tell me there's anybody nearby. The galaxy could be sterile. It just told me that like, you know, unless nature's really against, it has some bias against civilizations. We're not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
Yeah, yeah. So that's why, I mean, that's why. So this, you know, these kinds of arguments, you have to be careful of what they can do. But what it really, I felt like what this paper showed was that, you know, the burden of proof is now on the pessimists, right? So that's why we called it the pessimism line.
Throughout history, there's been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they've been yelling at each other. That's all they had to go with, right? And like with Giordano Bruno in 1600, they burned the guy at the stake for being an alien optimist. But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant. We sort of thought this was like the plank length.
This was sort of the plank length of astrobiology. It gave you an actual number. That, you know, if you could somehow calculate what the probability, you know, of forming a technological civilization was, this thing sort of shows you where the limit is. As long as you're above 10 to the minus 22, then you actually, absolutely, it has occurred in the history.
Other civilizations have occurred in the history of the universe.
There's lots of ways to, again, you know, we don't know unless we look. And, you know, you had Sarah walk around not too long ago. You know, she's very interested in origins of life. So, you know, lots of people are working on this. But I think it's hard looking at the history of the Earth. You know, and again, this is, you can do Bayesian arguments on this. Um, but yeah, it's forming life.
I don't think it's hard getting, getting like basic biology started. I don't think it's hard. It's still wild. It's an amazing process that actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is and what life isn't. That's one of the things I like about Sarah's work.
Um, we're, we're pursuing on a different level, uh, about the life as that, the only process or the only system that uses information. Um, but still, regardless of all those kinds of details, uh, life is probably easy to make. That's, that's my, that's my gut feeling.
despair yeah a couple million years to spare you know there is a mystery there about why did it take so long like with the cambrian explosion but that may be again about these windows that like you couldn't happen until until the window the planet and the the life had evolved together enough that they together kind of opened the window for the the next step um you know i i
intelligent life and how long intelligent is civil technological civilizations i think there's a big question about how long those last and how you know i'm hopeful you know um but uh but in terms of just like i think life is absolutely going to be common in the you know pretty common in the universe yeah i think it's absolutely like i think uh again if i were to bet everything uh even in advanced civilizations are common so the to me then the the only explanation is the l
Yeah, because, you know, you think about it, we've only been around, I mean, as a technical, truly, you know, when we think about, in Drake's definition, you had to have radio telescopes. That's been 100 years. You know, and if we got another 10,000, 100,000 years of history, that would be, for us, that'd be pretty amazing, right?
But that still, that wouldn't be long enough to really pop up the number of civilizations in the galaxy. So you really need it to be, like, hundreds of millions of years. And that raises a question which I am... very interested in, which is how do we even talk about, I call it the billionaire civilization, right?
How do we even begin to hypothesize or think about in any kind of systematic way what happens to a technological civilization across hundreds of millions to a billion years?
Showing 141–160 of 594 · page 8 of 30
← Previous
Next →