David Kipping

If you're a deer and you come across New York City, it's not like you're going to miss that thing.

It's right in front of you.

There's no way you can miss it.

Right.

So how come we don't see beehives in the stars?

I mean, this is kind of the fundamental problem.

And he argues that that is an innate thing that an intelligent species should do.

He's coming from the economic...

Economic sides, that's kind of how economists think about things, is this kind of growing exponential expansion of capitalism, essentially, across the universe.

And yet we don't see it.

So his explanation is that it's happening, but it's a wave of colonization.

It's spreading at the speed of light.

And if it spreads close to the speed of light, you don't see it until it hits you.

You can't perceive it because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

So it's coming.

So here's this prediction.

I'm a little bit skeptical about it for various reasons.

But yeah, people have thought about that and suggested it.

My own take is that the most likely form of alien contact we'll have

will actually be with a future inhabitant of the earth so the earth has about a billion years left on the clock a long time right so it's four and a half billion years old and it's had complex life for about 600 million years 700 million years roughly so there's another roughly a billion to go and