Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Trivialization. That’s a great word. Trivialization, I agree with you. I tend to believe that there’s a very large number of alien civilizations out there, and I believe we would have trouble comprehending what that even looks like were they to visit. I tend to believe they are already here or have visited, and we’re too dumb to understand what that even means. And they certainly would not appear as flying objects that defy gravity for brief moments of time on a low resolution video. I tend to have humility about all this kind of stuff, but I think radical humility is required to even open your eyes to what an alien intelligence would actually look like. And to me, it’s beyond military applications. It’s like the basic human question of what is even this thing, like you mentioned consciousness that’s going on. Where’s this come from? Why is this so powerful? Is it unique in the universe? I tend to believe not. Of course, I hang out a bunch with other folks like Elon who believe we are alone, but I think that belief, just like you said, has power because it actually manifests itself in reality. So if you believe that we’re alone in this universe, that’s a great motivator to build rockets and become multi-planetary and save ourselves, especially in the case of nuclear war, because otherwise, whatever this special sauce, this flame of consciousness will go out if we destroy ourselves on this earth. And for people like Elon, it’s too high of a probability that we destroy ourselves on earth not to try to become multi-planetary. In your book on Area 51, you propose an explanation that I think some people have criticized at the very end that this might’ve been a disinformation campaign from, I guess Stalin, that the Roswell incident was a remotely piloted plane with a quote, “grotesque child-sized aviator”. Just looking back at all that now, years later, what’s the probability that it’s true? What’s the probability it’s not? So you know I’ve never revealed to that sources.…

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