David Kipping

I think a natural explanation for all of this stuff we see would be that these AIs do pop up.

And these berserker civilizations pop up, as they're called, and they just go around and they just cause mayhem in their galaxies.

They just convert them all into computers, whatever the hell they're up to.

They're just causing mayhem.

We could not be born in that galaxy.

The same reason why we can't be born in a distant future where the robots have taken over.

We can't be born in that galaxy.

So maybe 99% of galaxies, that's the way it is.

And we necessarily would have to be born in the backwater because we couldn't be born in Manhattan.

We couldn't be born in the center of all this activity because we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

So I think we call this extra galactic settee.

So looking at other galaxies to look for alien life.

To me, this is a really underserved and important scientific endeavor that we should get involved in because those are almost like decoupled from us.

Right.

Because their history has no impact, really, unless you believe that they can travel all the way from one galaxy to another.

But that's really hard.

But all things being equal, I think you'd say they are decoupled test tubes.

Those test tubes got nothing to do with us.

So that gives us a fair chance.

But looking at our own galaxy, it may be that we can't conclude aliens are common or rare because it's kind of linked to us.