Athena Aktipis

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1,334 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 9 Jan

Athena Aktipis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #144 Classic episode – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is a fundamental universal phenomena · 9 Jan 2026 podcast

Yeah.

But in all seriousness, though, right?

Like the ability to, you know, be an intelligent life form that can, you know, get into space.

It's going to require some level of cooperation.

So you do have, you know, sort of a filter there.

And, you know, I know I'm like the sort of great filter hypothesis idea.

There actually isn't very much about cooperation.

And I think, you know, like it's not just being...

technological but um you know having the ability to to cooperate is is key to avoid destroying ourselves yeah yeah to the point of you know yeah we could destroy ourselves um you know humans also oftentimes use cooperation for like really sinister ends right so like cooperation isn't in itself good um it's all a question of you know what is that cooperation used for um and you know that it

So it's all to say, I'm not saying that, like, it's inherently bad to go into space because we can make, like, a transmissible cancer analogy.

But I think we, you know, we do have to ask, well, you know, what is the, you know, what are the goals?

What, you know, and, you know, if we do figure out how to be, you know, an interplanetary species, like, you know...

Is that the, you know, the direction that is going to help life thrive the most?

You know, our life, life in the universe, you know.

Anyway, so many open questions.

I feel like this is a whole different episode that we're having right now.

It's a very, very succinct explanation of a very complicated process.

So sort of kind of doing a thought experiment here that like if you could have totally perfect replication, never have errors, then could you sort of get systems that would evolve to like be able to maintain cooperation forever?

And I'm going to answer maybe because

because even without mutation, there could still be other factors that could move.

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