Max Tegmark
speaker
2,248 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2018
last heard 3 Nov
Max Tegmark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
I have a minority view here, actually.
When I give public lectures, I often ask for a show of hands who thinks there's intelligent life out there somewhere else.
And almost everyone puts their hands up.
And when I ask why, they'll be like, oh, there's so many galaxies out there.
There's got to be.
but I'm a numbers nerd, right?
So when you look more carefully at it, it's not so clear at all.
When we talk about our universe, first of all, we don't mean all of space.
We actually mean, I don't know, you can throw me in the universe if you want, it's behind you there.
We simply mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us so far during the 14.8 billion years, 13.8 billion years since our Big Bang.
There's more space here, but this is what we call a universe because that's all we have access to.
So is there intelligent life here that's gotten to the point of building telescopes and computers?
My guess is no, actually.
The probability of it happening on any given planet
It's some number we don't know what it is.
And what we do know is that the number can't be super high because there's over a billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, many of which are billions of years older than Earth.
And aside from some UFO believers, there isn't much evidence that
any super advanced civilization has come here at all.
And so that's the famous Fermi paradox, right?
And then if you work the numbers, what you find is that if you have no clue what the probability is of getting life on a given planet,
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