Michael Shermer

speaker

4,120 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Michael Shermer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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American Alchemy with Jesse Michels · I Debated UFOs With America’s Top Skeptic (It Got Ugly…) · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

Okay.

Fair question.

Well, I would say if we're talking about aliens, I would say they're out there somewhere, but they have not come here.

Now, I don't know this for sure.

So I always start with universal realism.

There is a reality.

We can know something about it.

And then fallibilism.

We're not gods.

We don't know everything.

So we have to start with some element of doubt.

So, you know, given the Drake equation and, you know, there's a trillion galaxies or more, and each of these galaxies has hundreds of billions, maybe up to a trillion stars in each one of them.

And now we know from the Kepler Space Telescope and others that pretty much all these stars have planets.

So you start crunching the numbers, you go, okay, there just has to be Earth-sized planets at an Earth-sized distance to have water and air and so on and so on.

And you're eventually going to get the development of life and then complex life and then everything.

intelligent life and then maybe communicating intelligent life, no matter how many steps are in there, the number is so big that we just can't be the only ones.

Right.

So but said that, that said, it's a big, vast, empty universe.

There's just mostly empty space.

So the chances of them having come here, I would say, is not very good.

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