Adam Frank: commitment

Transcript context

…The following is a conversation with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist interested in the evolution of star systems and the search for alien civilizations in our universe. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Adam Frank. You wrote a book about aliens. The big question, how many alien civilizations are out there? Yeah, that’s the question. The amazing thing is that, after two-and-a-half millennia of people yelling at each other, or setting each other on fire occasionally over the answer, we now actually have the capacity to answer that question. In the next 10, 20, 30 years, we’re going to have data relevant to the answer to that question. We’re going to have hard data finally that will, one way or the other … Even if we don’t find anything immediately, we will have gone through a number of planets. We’ll be able to start putting limits on how common life is. The one answer I can tell you, which was an important part of the problem, is how many planets are there? Just like people have been arguing about the existence of life elsewhere for 2500 years, people have been arguing about planets for the exact same amount of time. You can see Aristotle yelling at Democritus about this. You can see they had very wildly different opinions about how common planets were going to be, and how unique Earth was. And that question got answered. Which is pretty remarkable, that in a lifetime, you can have a 2500-year-old question. The answer is they’re everywhere. There are planets everywhere. It was possible that planets were really rare. We didn’t really understand how planets formed. If you go back to, say the turn of the 20th Century, there was a theory that said planets formed when two stars passed by each other closely, and then material was gravitationally squeezed out. In which case, those kinds of collisions are so rare that you would expect one in a trillion stars to have planets. Instead, every star in the night sky has planets. One of the things you’ve done is simulated the formation of stars. How difficult do you think it is to simulate the formation of planet? Like simulate a solar system through the entire of the evolution of the solar system. This is a numerical simulation sneaking up to the question of how many planets are there.…

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