Andrej Karpathy

Yeah.

Well, it's just... We don't have really good mechanisms for seeing this life.

I mean, by what...

I'm very suspicious of our ability to find these intelligences out there and to find these Earth-like radio waves, for example, are terrible.

Their power drops off as basically one over R-square.

So...

I remember reading that our current radio waves would not be, the ones that we are broadcasting, would not be measurable by our devices today.

Only like, was it like one tenth of a light year away?

Like not even, basically tiny distance, because you really need like a targeted transmission of massive power directed somewhere for this to be picked up on long distances.

And so I just think that our ability to measure is not amazing.

I think there's probably other civilizations out there.

And then the big question is why don't they build one-man probes and why don't they interstellar travel across the entire galaxy?

And my current answer is it's probably interstellar travel is really hard.

You have the interstellar medium.

If you want to move at close to the speed of light, you're going to be encountering bullets along the way because even tiny hydrogen atoms and little particles of dust basically have massive kinetic energy at those speeds.

And so basically you need some kind of shielding.

You have all the cosmic radiation.

It's just like brutal out there.

It's really hard.

And so my thinking is maybe interstellar travel is just extremely hard.