Max Tegmark

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,

So it could be 10 to the minus 10, 10 to the minus 20, or 10 to the minus 2, or any power of 10 is sort of equally likely if you want to be really open-minded.

That translates into it being equally likely that our nearest neighbor is 10 to the 16 meters away, 10 to the 17 meters away, 10 to the 18.

By the time you get...

Much less than 10 to the 16 already.

We pretty much know there is nothing else that close.

Because they would have discovered us.

Yeah, they would have discovered us long ago.

Or if they're really close, we would have probably noted some engineering projects that they're doing.

And if it's beyond 10 to the 26 meters, that's already outside of here.

So my guess is actually that...

We are the only life in here that's gotten to the point of building advanced tech, which I think is very...

puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders to not screw up.

I think people who take for granted that it's okay for us to screw up, have an accidental nuclear war, or go extinct somehow because there's a sort of Star Trek-like situation out there where some other life forms are going to come and bail us out and it doesn't matter as much, I think are lulling us into a false sense of security.

I think it's much more prudent to say, let's be really grateful for this amazing opportunity we've had.

And...

Well, I think what we know is that going from no life to having life that can do a level of tech, there's some sort of, to going beyond that and actually settling our whole universe with life, there's some major roadblock

there, which is some great filter, as it's sometimes called, which is tough to get through.