Max Tegmark

Yeah, well, the honor is all mine.

And I'm so grateful to you for making more people aware of the fact that humanity has reached the most important fork in the road ever in its history.

And let's turn in the correct direction.

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