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
Yeah, and we're ready to blow ourselves to bits or drive ourselves off the planet. Yeah, no, it's really interesting. But there's got to be a way. I think that's really a frontier. So you had David Kipping on not too long ago.
And David and I did a paper, and Caleb Sharf, David really drove this, where it was a Bayesian calculation to sort of ask the question, if you were to find a detection, if you were to find a signal or a techno signature, would that come from a civilization that was younger your age or older? Yeah. And you could see, I mean, this is not hard to do, but it was great.
The formalism, the formalism was hard, you know, it's kind of intuitive, but the formalism was hard to show that, yeah, they're older, you know, probably much older. So that means you really do need to think about like, okay, how do billion year civilizations manifest themselves? What signatures will they leave? And yeah, can you even, I mean, what's so cool about it?
It's so much fun because you gotta, like, you have to, you have to imagine the unimaginable, right? Like, you know, would you still, I mean, obviously biological evolution can happen on, you know, on those kinds of timescales. So you wouldn't even really be the same thing you started out as, but social forms, what kind of social forms can you imagine that would be continuous over that?
Or maybe they wouldn't be continuous. You'd get, they drop out, you know, they destroy themselves and then they come back. So maybe it's, you know, it's a trunk or a punctuated evolution. I mean, but we got to sort of, this is the fun part. We have to sort of work this out. Well, I mean, one way to approach that question is like,
Could be. I mean, you know, agent-based modeling, you could do it with that. So, you know, our group has used agent-based modeling to do something like the Fermi paradox. That was agent-based modeling. But you can also do this. People at Santa Fe have done this. Other groups have done this to use agent-based modeling to track the formation of hierarchies.
the formation of stable hierarchies the so i think that i think it's actually very doable but um understanding the kind of assumptions and principles that are going into it and what you can extract from those that is what is sort of the frontier do you think if humans colonized mars
If we settle it, Mars will very quickly want to become its own nation. Well, no, there's already going to be nations
because of the distances, you know? Are you a fan of The Expanse? Have you watched The Expanse? Great show, because it's all about the, I highly recommend to everybody, it's based on a series of books that are excellent. It's on Prime, six seasons, and it's basically about the settled solar system. It takes place about 300 years from now, and the entire solar system is settled.
And it is the best show about interplanetary politics. The first season, actually, the journal, what was it, Foreign Affairs, said the best show on TV about politics. it takes place is interplanetary. So yeah, I think, you know, human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict.
And I don't think it'll be necessarily all that different, you know, because really, I think within a few hundred years, we will have lots of people in the solar system. And it doesn't even have to be on Mars. We did a paper where we look based on, because I always wanted to know about whether an idea in the expanse was really possible.
In the expanse, the asteroid belt, what they've done is they have colonized the asteroid belt by hollowing out the asteroids and spinning them up and living on the inside, right? Because they have the Coriolis force. And I thought like, wow, what a cool idea. And when I ran the blog for NPR, I actually talked to the guys and said, did you guys calculate this to see whether it's possible?
Sadly, it's not possible. The rock is just not strong enough that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one-third gravity, which is what I think the minimum you need. for human beings, the rock would just fall apart. It would break.
But we came up with another idea, which was that if you could take small asteroids, put a giant bag around them, a nanofiber bag and spin those up, it would inflate the bag. And then even a small couple of kilometer wide asteroid would expand out to, you could get like a Manhattan's worth of material inside. So forget about even colonizing Mars, space stations, right?
Or space habitats with millions of people in them. So anyway, the point is that I think, you know, within a few hundred years, it is not unimaginable that there will be millions, if not billions of people living in the solar system.
You know, it's a lot easier on some level, right? It depends on how, like with nanofabrication and such. But, you know, getting down to gravity well is hard, right? So, you know, there's a certain way in which there's a lot of, you know, it's a lot easier to build real estate out of asteroids. But we'll probably do both.
I mean, I think what will happen is, you know, the next... Should we make it through climate change and nuclear war and all the other... And AI. The... The next thousand years of human history is the solar system, right? And so, you know, I think we'll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can.
And it's, you know, it's a beautiful, what I love about, what's hopeful about it is this idea you're going to have all of these pockets. And, you know, I'm sure there's going to be a Mormon space habitat. Like, you know, there's going to be whatever you want, a libertarian space habitat.
Everybody's going to be able to kind of create their, there'll be lots of experiments in human flourishing, right? And those kinds of experiments will be really useful for us to sort of figure out better ways for us to interact and have maximum flourishing, maximum wellness, maximum democracy, maximum freedom.
Well, I think, you know, I want to be always careful with that because, like I said, it's centuries that we're talking about, right? So, you know, the problem with climate change and same with nuclear war, it's breathing down our necks now.
Showing 161–180 of 594 · page 9 of 30
← Previous
Next →