Adam Frank: observation

Transcript context

…Okay, the Fermi paradox. I love talking about the Fermi paradox because there is no Fermi paradox. Dun dun, dun dun. Yeah, so the Fermi paradox, let’s talk a about the Fermi paradox and the history of it. So, Enrico Fermi, it’s 1950, he’s walking with his friends at Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab to the Cantina, and there had been this cartoon in the New Yorker, they all read the New Yorker. And the cartoon was trying to explain why there had been this rash of garbage cans being disappearing in New York. And this cartoon said, “Oh, it’s UFOs.” Because it’s 1950, the first big UFO craze happened in ’47. So, they were laughing about this as they’re walking, and they started being physicists, started talking about interstellar travel, interstellar propulsion. Conversation goes on for a while, conversation turns to something else, they’ve gone to other things. About 40 minutes later, over lunch, Fermi blurts out, “Well, where is everybody?” Typical Fermi sort of thing. He’d done the calculation in his head and he suddenly realized that, look, if intelligence is common, that even traveling at sub lights speeds a civilization could cross, hop from one star system to the other and spread it out across the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years. And he realized this, and so he was like, “Why aren’t they here now?” And that was the beginning of the Fermi paradox. It actually got picked up as a formal thing in 1975 in a paper by Hart where he actually went through this calculation and showed and said, “Well, there’s nobody here now, therefore, there’s nobody anywhere.” Okay, so that is what we will call the direct Fermi paradox, why aren’t they here now? But something happened after SETI began, where people started to, there was this idea of the great silence. People got this idea in their head that like, “Oh, we’ve been looking for decades now for signals of extra-terrestrial intelligence that we haven’t found any. Therefore, there’s nothing out there. So, we’ll call that the indirect Fermi paradox and there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There’s never been any money to look. SETI was always done by researchers who were scabbing some time, some extra time from their other projects to look a little bit at the sky where the telescope, telescopes are expensive. So, Jason Wright, one of my collaborators, he and his students did a study where they looked at the entire search space for SETI, and imagine that’s an ocean. All the different stars you have to look at, the radio frequencies you have to look at, how when you look, how often you look. looked at the entire search space for SETI, and imagine that’s an ocean. All the different stars you have to look at, the radio frequencies you have to look at, how when you look, how often you look. Then they summed up all the SETI searches that had ever been done, they went through the literature. And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you’re looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That’s how much of the ocean that we’ve looked up. We’ve dragged a hot tub’s worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it, and so now are we going to say, “Well, there’s no fish in the ocean.” So, there is absolutely positively no indirect Fermi paradox, we just haven’t looked, but we’re starting to look. So finally, we’re starting to look, that’s what’s exciting. The direct Fermi paradox, there are so many ways out of that. There’s a book called 77 Solutions to the Fermi Paradox that you can pick your favorite one. It just doesn’t carry a lot of weight because there’s so many ways around it. We did an actual simulation, my group, Jonathan Carroll, one of my collaborators, we actually simulated the galaxy and we simulated probes moving at sub light speed from one star to the other, gathering resources heading to the next one. And so, we could actually track the expansion wave across the galaxy, have one IA biogenesis event, and then watch the whole galaxy get colonized or settled. And it is absolutely true that wave crosses, Hart was right, Fermi was right, that wave crosses very quickly. But civilizations don’t last forever, so one question is when did they visit? When did they come to Earth? So, if you give civilizations a finite lifetime, let them last 10,000, 100,000 years, what you find is you now have a steady state. Civilizations are dying, they’re coming back, they’re traveling between the stars. What you find then is you can have big holes opened up. You can have regions of space where there is nobody for millions of years. And so, if we’re living in one of those bubbles right now, then maybe we revisited but we revisited 100 million years ago. And there was a paper that Gavin Schmidt and I did that showed that if there was a civilization, whether it was dinosaurs or aliens that was here a 100 million years ago, there’s no way to tell, there’s no record left over, the fossil record is too sparse. The only way maybe you could tell is by looking at the isotopic strata to see if there was anything reminiscent of an industrial civilization. But the idea that you’d be able to find iPhones or toppled buildings after 100 million years is there’s no way. So, if there was an alien camp here, an alien village, a small civilization, maybe even large civilizations?…

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