Lee Cronin: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, it just feels like the cone, I might be misusing the word cone here but the width of the cone is growing faster, is growing really fast to where eventually all the cones overlap even in a very, very, very large combinatorial space. But then again, if you’re saying the universe is also growing very quickly in terms of possibilities… I hope that as we build abstractions, one idea is that as we go to intelligence, intelligence allows us to look at the regularities around us in the universe. And that gives us some common grounding to discuss with aliens. And you might be right that we will overlap there. Even though we have completely different chemistry, literally completely different chemistry, that we will be able to pass information from one another. But it’s not a given. And I have to try and divorce hope and emotion away from what I can logically justify. But it’s just hard to intuit a world, a universe where there’s nearly infinite complexity objects and they somehow can’t detect each other.…

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