Rachell Powell
speaker
762 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Jan
Rachell Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah.
Yeah, so I think this is unresolved.
And there are massive methodological problems and conceptual problems that stand in the way of its resolution.
So I think the best we can do right now at this point
um is uh to basically you know think about the questions that we're asking and try to formulate better questions and then figure out what it would take to answer them um and so like i guess like one way that i would kind of come at this when you're asking like sort of what's the state of play i think historically there was an enormous amount of crosstalk between
Physicists in general, I mean like astronomers and SETI researchers, and evolutionary biologists.
And that's what I kind of want.
And when I say crosstalk, I mean sometimes there was non-communication.
And so this is something that I think it's a helpful way of thinking about
how to think about contingency and evolution and how that has affected the way physicists have thought about extraterrestrial life versus biologists and all the various research programs surrounding them.
And it helps illuminate some of the key differences between physics and biology, I think.
And so I think this is like a nice way of doing that.
And, you know, partly as a tour through the Fermi paradox and how biologists have viewed it very differently, largely because of the contingency phenomenon.
So maybe that's a place I can start.
Yeah.
So, OK, so basically, yeah.
I think, and this is something that you were saying we could edit out, insults of colleagues.
I won't name any colleagues specifically, but I would say that I'm going to say something which I think would irk a lot of philosophers, at least the classic kind of old school philosophers.
And that is that I think that the most profound worldview shattering insights in modern human history
haven't come from philosophy.
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