Professor Avi Loeb (Host)

So I can imagine that in the more distant future, we will go through a much bigger revolution in our abilities once we learn how to...

use synthetic biology, how to design a brain that functions just like our biological brain, but we can scale it up.

Just like you can scale up an AI system made of silicon chips, you might be able to scale up a biological brain that is constructed based on synthetic biology.

And that will be a much bigger advance because

I was asked actually by a student in France, that's what triggered my essay, how come we haven't seen self-replicating intelligent probes?

Doesn't that mean that von Neumann's idea of having even one advanced civilization within the Milky Way galaxy that is capable of producing self-replicating probes

would have filled, colonized the entire Milky Way galaxy within 100,000 years if these probes propagated the percent of the speed of light, just because they double every time they reach a new destination.

And so that takes just 100,000 years, which is a small fraction of the age of the Milky Way,

to populate all the exoplanets with self-replicating probes.

And the fact that we haven't seen any, does it mean that there is no civilization more advanced than ours that can do that?

And I replied that, in fact, I interact with self-replicating intelligent probes every day.

They are called humans.

And perhaps by the time we reach a level of developing or using synthetic biology to design brains that are more capable than the human brain, then at that point we'll use them to send out these synthetic biology astronauts

to interstellar travel because we can design them to live very long.

And if another civilization accomplished that, perhaps we were put on this earth as the self-replicating probes that von Neumann was talking about.

Maybe it's us.

And we just don't know.

I mean, why are we so different from animals?

Maybe it was a result of a visit.

So at any event, my point is that