Is There Anybody Out There?

at the potential of extraterrestrial life. We've already decided what they look like, right, we had that podcast. Yeah, most statistically probable alien life formance according to Joe. So the the French aliens called the cone heads are what they're gonna look like. But we haven't actually gotten in touch

with them yet. And we want to talk about some um, some some things that that scientists and researchers have proposed over the years as a kind of a method to figure out how probable is it that we will that there are other intelligence species out there and that we're going to come in contact with them eventually. Right, everybody goes with their gut, don't they? You know, they say do you think that there's life out there? And you

kind of go, well, I don't know. You're like you're answering with the part of yourself that decides whether or not you want ice cream right now. So the answer can change depending upon how hot it is outside and whether you and you're not really doing the math in

your head. I mean, it's it's not the same kind of probability with which you would, you know, if you're if you're my friends play poker or or a dice gambling game or something like that, You're you're more you're more going like yeah, totally, or like now we're answering.

We're answering with our feelings. Um, yeah, But when those feelings incorporate things like the more you know about the universe, the more you think, well, if considering how enormous it is and how much potential there is, and the fact that life does exist is where proof, then how likely is it to have happened at least one other time?

And most of us feel like it's pretty likely. Well, what if we were to narrow the question down a little bit too, something that's a little bit um more manageable and more testable than just is their other life? You mean, like if we were to come up with some sort of crazy equation where we could perhaps determine the likelihood that intelligent life out there would exist. Yeah, And to limit the product of the equation, say, instead

of asking is there life out there somewhere? What if we were to ask how many civilizations are there in our galaxy? That's the milky capable of communicating across solar systems, all right, So some sort of interstellar communication, we'd probably be talking about radio or maybe lasers. So we'd have to be able to detect it, obviously, because if we're not able to detect it, there could be all sorts

of communication going on that we're just unaware of. Right, we're ruling out, you know, really intelligent psychic materia that that only only communicate via color flash or germ thoughts or something. Yeah. Another way of phrasing this is to say technological civilizations. How many technological civilizations are there in the Milky Way other than us? Obviously we know about one. Well, is there a way we could actually start to concert this a bit, to think about real numbers that would

inform our judgment of that probability? Well, according to Frank Drake, yes, there is, or at least he proposed a way of thinking about the problem that might be able to give you at least a likelihood. Although depending on how you look at this equation, your mileage berries right, you're talking

about the Drake equation. Yes, right. What's the Drake equation? Well, essentially, it's an equation that predicts the potential number of civilizations in the galaxy to have the capability to communicate via radio transmission or other interstellar communication that we could actually detect. So it actually takes into account lots of different factors.

This is something that Frank Drake came up with in nineteen sixty one when he was trying to get fellow astronomers to convene for the first serious um A conference on the search for extraterrestrial life, which would become set, which is something that we actually haven't talked that much about before, I don't think on this podcast. No, crazily enough um And And Frank Drake was pretty young at the time. I think he was thirty or thirty one.

He had begun his career as an electronics officer in the Navy, partially because he had a he had gotten a scholarship to go to Cornell for electronics from his RTC and he would go on to get a master's in a PhD in astronomy from Harvard and worked there by chance his first summer with radio astronomy equipment and

absolutely fell in love with it. In nineteen fifty nine he would help discover Jupiter's radiation belts and observe some pulsars, and then in nineteen sixty uh he was working with radio telescopes at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Green Bank, West vir West Virginia, where he form to the very first experimental search for radio signals from potential civilizations in

nearby stars. Yeah. He's also the guy who, along with Carl Sagan, helped design the plaque aboard the Pioneer spacecraft right right. And the seventies, he was working a lot with Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was a huge proponent of the Drake equation. The two of them got along pretty famously and they even helped. They even collaborated. They dropped a record together, only two copies of which exist and both of them are outside well the system now, but

it totally it did go gold but not platinum. Not platinum ones outside the Solar System, and one is on its way out. We're talking, of course about the Golden records aboard the Voyager spacecraft. Both UH Sagan and UH and Drake had a hand in the design of those. Uh. Those are sort of our own feeble in a way, attempts at communicating with an alien civilization. But of course

they're not the best ways we could communicate. The best ways would be via a radio transmission, or if that can travel at the speed of light, and or you know, perhaps even better, if we could find a planet that we were pretty sure had life capable of receiving a signal on it and focus a an optical beam at them.

That would that would be even more In fact, NASA, as of the recording this podcast, NASA had just had just proven the feasibility of using lasers in space communication and showing that it had a much higher capacity for carrying data than radio transmission. Right. But but again, that's within an extremely narrow location. She really have to be

pointing it at something. Yeah, it's we're talking line of sight, right, so anyway, but either way we would have to we would have to be able to get something back from whatever intelligent races out there for that to be a confirmation that in fact, some other intelligent race has exists in the Milky Way. Okay, well, before we talk about the search itself, let's talk about the equation and how they used it to play this game and see if we could predict how many civilizations are out there in

our galaxy. All right, because what's really fascinating to me is that when Drake was designing this equation, we had not detected any exit planets at all. That wouldn't be until the nineteen nineties. So and now we've detected about a thousand of them. But even so, I mean that's direct detection, we of course suspect that there are a wicked lot of of them out there, that maybe at least half of star systems, is what Drake said himself

in about so uh so. So yeah, So the equation is n N being this number of civilizations that could that are advanced enough to create technology that we could listen to. Um equals are being the rate of star formation in the galaxy. Okay, so that's how often the galaxy creates new stars that you have planets, right, uh f subset P, which is the fraction of stars that form planets. So not every star necessarily has a planet attached to it, so you have to you have to

eliminate all the ones that don't planets. As far as we know, no life can exist upon a star itself. Then you have in subset E, which is the number of planets hospitable to life, so earthlike planets, anything that could actually sustain life. So now talking about something terrestrial and with water being that waters, how we know life exists?

I mean, you know it's again we're not accounting for things that for other forms of life that may or may not Right where we are, we're all we are having to extrapolate from a sample size of one being that there's only one planet we know of that has life on it. But within E. Basically, if you think that every star has one earthlike planet or one planet capable of having life, that that value would be like one, right, and then you have wouldn't be like one, it would

be one. It would be one. Precisely if F sub L is the fraction of these planets on which life actually emerges. So this is the difference between the potential for life and the actual existence of life. And then you have of f sub I, which is the fraction of these planets on which intelligent life evolves. So we've gone beyond just life now to life that's actually intelligent. Right, We're not just talking about sebreddit, We're talking about actual

intelligent life difference between bacteria and dolphins. Then we have F sub C, which is the fraction of the planets with intelligent beings that are actually capable of interstellar communications. So we might have some intelligent life out there, but they're still banging rocks together to make fire and haven't gotten to the point where they can make you know, interstellar communication because they don't have rocks that are big enough. Then you finally have L, which is the length of

time that such a civilization is actually detectable. And this is I think one of the cleverer parts of the equation that it includes this L. It doesn't assume that these ones they exist, will exist forever. They may only be transmitting for some range of time. Well, let's let's say that this civilization is analogous to Earth and just just happens to be that way. There's just some random chance where there is an alien civilization. They're intelligent, they

are capable of communicating through interstellar space. Uh, and they are at the same level of sophistication that we are at and arrived there at approximately the same time, but they're a hundred light years away. Well, we haven't been using interstellar means of communication in a way where we could necessarily detect that, because it would take a hundred

years for that those transmissions to travel over here. Now, if they had powerful enough radios early on, then theoretically we could hear it, but chances are we wouldn't be able to pick up on that, even though they would be out there right now. Right. I've also seen that number expressed as F subset capital L, meaning basically the number of civilizations that have not blowed themselves up yet. Yeah, so they would not only be sophisticated enough, but they

still they haven't killed themselves either. Yeah, And you know, right, the the idea being that certainly, on our planet, as far as we know, dinosaurs were not broadcasting radio signals into the sixty five million years ago, but they just put someone but someone could have someone could have been tuned into our planet at that point, and you know, yeah, or really the way that that's expressed, I think was a lot of how seventies nine seventies era scientists were

viewing mankind's um state of affairs at that moment, informed a little bit by the Cold War, probably, yeah, saying like like, well, you know, humans have this terrible history of making war upon each other, and there is the potential, particularly with things like nuclear weapons, that we could have a catastrophic event. So that you're saying, well, if we extrapolate that, then there might be a lot of alien

aries is out there that have the same problem. Yeah, and it's not totally unreasonable to notice that about the same time a civilization gets the power to make radio broadcasts, they're also starting to get really advanced weaponry. Yeah. So, uh, what's interesting is when you start trying to fill these variables out. Yeah, so lots of people have tried to compute this equation with their own guesses filled in, and one thing you start to notice if you read these

different estimates is they're all over the place. Well, it's because we have such a lack of information about some of these things, particularly when it comes to the actual questions about life. We have not detected life anywhere else. We have lots of guesses, but their guesses they're not based upon any observable, testable data that we've come that's come back to us where we can definitively say, here's another example, our our sample size has doubled or whatever.

So early on in early versions of the Drake equation, where people were filling out all these variables. One of the earliest is one that was documented in the series Cosmos. Yes, highly recommended, by the way, if you have not ever watched Cosmos, I mean, you know, you've got to get

over some dated effects and fashions they are. They're doing a remake, but it's my person all favorite thing, getting to see all of the super high tech computers in the background are way bigger than this podcast, but it's it's everything is covered in shag carpets, but it's still the science in it is phenomenal. And and of course Sagan's enthusiasm for science is one of those things that you cannot, you know, easily replicate. You have to actually

possess that yourself. It's hard. You can't really be insincere and try and be like science is great. You can just see his sort of like calm tope joy. Right, So let's let's talk about his Tope approach to the Drake equation. So he said that in his version, he says, all right, so in the Milky Way, imagine there are four hundred billion stars there, and then about a quarter of those have planets exactly. So then you you have just gotten down to one billion stars that have the

potential to have plants that would perhaps support life. So that, of course, if you extrapolated this to other galaxies, which the Drake equation does not do, it's specifically for the Milky Way, but he said, if you were, you'd end

up with trillions of stars to work with. But sticking to the Milky Way hundred billion, he then suggests that in every star system there will be approximately two planets suitable for life on average, meaning that some would have more, some might not have any, uh, and then that perhaps a one half of those might be planets on which life actually arose. Right, So now we're back to specifically a hundred billion planets. Once you look at those those

numbers into the equation. We're not done yet, though, he says, then you have to look at the likelihood that the life sustaining planets actually give rise to intelligence, and he gave it as a conservative estimate of one out of ten uh, saying that you know, some scientists say that that intelligence is something that is so advantageous evolution evolutionary, Lee speaking that it's almost a given that that life will get to an intelligent level. But other scientists disagree

with this assessment. So he says, let's be conservative. We'll say one out of ten. And then he said that only one out of ten of those might be able to come up with some form of interstellar communications, So you have to multiply by one tent twice. And he called that middle of the road, meaning that you know, again there are different opinions on how likely this is.

He considered that relatively conservative. And then he said, now you have to look at that length of time when such a civilization is active that would allow us to detect them, so that they would be active at a time when we would be able to right now find out about them. He says that would be the really limiting factor. He said that you know, Earth is an

example of this. But despite tens of thousands of years humans have that humans have been on this planet, we have only really relatively recently harnessed radio, so just a few decades really, So in the grand uh amount of time that humans have been alive, we've only had a tiny little sliver of a window when we've actually been active with this radio technology. And in the same may be true for other civilizations. So he said that you know, you might have as little as one in one hundred millions,

so one millions of a chance for that. So that

was the last variable he filled in. Once you fill in all those numbers and multiple I'm altogether, you are left with the number of ten ten civilizations across the Milky Way galaxy that we could potentially detect, assuming they were close enough for us to be able to communicate with them on some meaningful way, which sounds really pessimistic, especially for Carl Sagan, for for someone who's generally optimistic, as he was, But he went on to say that you know, if if you if you play with that

last number just a little bit, you could wind up with millions if possible civilizations. And some people have estimated millions, Oh absolutely, I think most of the estimates that I've seen are more around the ten thousand range. Issues I did see one that gave it to point zero zero zero zero zero zero eight civilizations. So that's not even accounting for others. Yeah, that seems to account the fact that Earth is there. But but yeah, I I don't have all the numbers there to tell you exactly how

that number was arrived at. But that was I think I think someone took a right turn in Albuquerque and in that in that equation. Well, as we've discussed um, part of the problem with this equation is is that as you move from the left to the right along the different variables that you have to plug in, your level of certainty decreases. So we we know pretty well, uh say, like the rate of star formation of the galaxy.

We're learning a lot more right now about the number of those stars that have planets and the number of those planets detecting some and then we're extrapolating a lot from what we're detecting. But it seems to be bearing out. Yeah, so we're learning a lot more. But once you get into stuff about the fraction of these planets on which life emerges, well, how do we know? So you have

you have to just guess. In these cases, you have to use your intuitions and all that, But we get back to those ice cream feelings that we were talking about earlier. Yeah. Um, one of the things that might encourage us to be more conservative or some might use the word pessimistic in estimating those later numbers is something

called the Fermi paradox. Yes, Fermis paradox. Yeah, this is uh, this is pretty simple, right, It's that if if this equation in fact suggests that there are potentially thousands of civilizations of intelligent creatures out there, you can sum it up in three words, where are they? Where is everybody? If they're supposed to be out there? But we haven't heard him, and he was talking about this before the

Drake equation actually existed back in nineteen fifty. But right, it asks if extraterrestrials are so common, why haven't they visited, why haven't they communicated with us? Or why haven't they left behind some residue of their existence? And we would be able to pick up He actually went on to suggest, like, imagine this, and it's not difficult to imagine if you

just look back at human history. So human history, we have this history of exploration and colonization, whether you want to talk about the ancient peoples and spreading out across the Earth, or the more relatively recent European expansions and colonization. We've got this history where we want to go and explore the world that we that is unfamiliar to us. And then uh claimant, so he says, well, it's it's

not always so nice. Let's assume that there's at least one intelligent alien civilization that has the same sort of of of propensity for colonization, someone out there who does essentially the same sort of thing, but they can do it on an interstellar level, and it may take thousands of years for their civilization to spread, but as they spread, they spread into more vectors, so they'll colonize one world and then over time will branch out and start colonizing

other worlds. And every world they colonize means that that's another base of operations from which they launch. And if you expand this out over the course of millions of years, then surely they would have reached a point of saturation where we would be able to detect them. And that sounds kind of crazy, but then you remember the universe is billions of years old, so a few tens of millions of years is nothing in the grand cosmological scheme of things. So if you were to think of it

that way, then where are they? Yeah, So there are a lot of hypotheses to explain this question of, uh, you know, why aren't we detecting them? The most obvious one I think you should start with is they just detecting them because they're not out there. Nobody's home psychic bacteria. And so how would you explain this? Well, you could look at this equation and say, okay, so we know the problem is not in say like h R or FP, as in the stars that are forming or the number

of planets that are out there. Right, We've got some data coming in on that, and we know pretty well that well, there's going to be enough of that. But once you get into those later variables, you say, it could be that one or more of those variables is zero. Right, It could be it could be that the number of plants that actually support life is very very very low, and then that on top of that, the plants that actually support life zero. Yeah. The so that would be

known as the rare Earth hypothesis. It's the idea that Earth is actually even more special than we thought that. It's just this really really super lucky situation with just the right chemicals. If all plants are special, then no planets are I get you. Okay, well, okay, no, we know Earth is at least somewhat special. It's at least very special in our solar systeah, sure than one out of eight planets. I'm still calling Pluto a planet. I'm going one nine, Okay, but I mean we just know that, like,

mercury ain't that special. It's just not very good. No, it's no offense to mercury, but it's kind of crappy down on mercury. So and and to be fair, a lot of the terrestrial planets that we have found out there so far have been um too too hot and too um black, lacking in atmosphere. I think things they do not appear to be capable of sustaining life as we are familiar with it. Okay, So that's that's like the rare Earth hypothesis. But maybe there are other things

that could explain it. So maybe earthlike planets are pretty common, but for some reason, A biogenesis is just super rare. A biogenesis is the word that means life arising, So we know what's happened once it's here on Earth. Um, but we don't know how it happened, and we don't know how special it is. We don't know how rare

that is. Right. It could be something that's fairly common given the kind of conditions our planet underwent, what four point five billion years ago or so, Or it could be something that's super super special and almost never happened. Or it could be that life happens all over the place, but intelligent life hardly ever evolves from it. So our galaxy could be full of planets that have bacteria but

nothing with a brain. Right. Uh. And then beyond that, you could say, well, maybe intelligent life does exist out there, and that's fine and everything. Everything in that part of the equation up to that point is supportive. But then they like the radio. Well, it could be that humans. I mean, it's it's really weird to think about this, and it makes us kind of, uh, a little more grandiose, I would say, But it could be that humans are

the first intelligent race to hit that threshold. I think that highly unlikely, considering the relative youth of Earth and humans. But let's say that that's a possibility. Our sense of avoiding hubris kind of makes us not want to choose that position but can't. Or or perhaps that those those civilizations that also have it are too far away for us, like you were saying earlier, Joe, Yeah, it could be that they're just too young for us to have detected.

All right, I mean it's important to think. Maybe the number out there is not zero, but if it's sufficiently small. Uh, the Milky Way galaxy is a hundred thousand light years wide. I mean, what if they're watching skies for a hundred thousand years? Right, So what if there are ten other civilizations is pretty low number. They are there, but they're on the other side of the galaxy. I mean that would mean they would have had to have been transmitting

for a hundred thousand years. They might be chatting with each other quite a bit and just leaving us out of it. And we're just the unpopular kid in high school has to stand in the corner all the popular kids dance over there. Not that I'm bitter or anything. Some memories don't die anyway. Sorry. Well, and then the final variable is l Well, that flits into that fits

into it at length of time. So let's say that, let's say that the length of time, like you were saying, the length of time just hasn't been sufficient enough for us to be able to detect them because they're too far away, and the speed of light, as far as we know, is the limiting factor. Now, some of the people who have estimated that the length of time a civilization transmits um is low. They've estimated this because they

have feelings about civilizations destroying themselves, really negative feelings. It could be that, but it could also be that they don't want to transmit all that long, or they don't have the resources to do it, or perhaps even natural disasters. I mean, I could easily envision a planet that was even more bombarded by meteoroids than Earth is. Well, there was that one planet that was being pulled into its son, and so that one family sent their only son off

to Earth in order to act as guardian. I'm talking about supermanager. That is a really bizarre way of communicating. Yeah, pretty you think it would say? You think it's in a note first, and rather than just just eject them to Earth, consider this radio message the light to show you the way. See. Yeah, maybe maybe people are way into sending babies as communicators and not radio signals. Oh, that's right, because they travel at a slower than light speed,

so we're still waiting on the babies. But it also to get back to what you were saying, there could be that sort of Star trek Uh concept of the prime directive, where so we assume that they want to contact us, they might not want to for for positive or negative reasons. We assume first of all that they're

not paranoid. What if they are paranoid, I mean, it would be entirely reasonable for them to just kind of hold up and say we don't want to go messing around where we you know, don't know if we're gonna win, say in a conflict or something like that. Or it could be benevolent like the vulcans well, and it could very possibly be that again, that they have shifted to a different type of interstellar communication that we don't use

and cannot detect. So radio waves is pretty is a pretty safe bet simply because it was it appears to have been kind of a building block along the way of learning how to communicate in an interstellar environment. But like we were saying, with lasers, that's a much more precise way of communicating. You have to have it lined up between laser and censor in order for you to be able to communicate. You know, you can't just fire a laser off into the sky and it it's meaningful

in any way. So what if these uh, these intelligent civilizations have gone beyond where radio waves are and they're using something like lasers to communicate because it as allows them to have far more bandwidth than they would with radio. Well, we wouldn't necessarily pick up on that because they're communicating a very specific points among themselves, not necessarily shooting off rays at random directions hoping to hit something that could

figure out what's going on. Yeah, it's entirely possible. And we also aren't even imagining all of the weird little technological trip ups that might be involved in this, uh in this filter. You know that that's creating this paradox. Uh. What if it's just that they are sending signals but

we're not listening close enough to the right place. Sure, right, things that that people like Karl Saken and Drake were talking about, where that we are really only listening to any given section of the sky for a very short period of time, and so you know, and if we you know, what if they're broadcasting and then they turn it off and we tune in a second after that, and you know, it's when when you're working with these telescopes that, yes, are are tremendously powerful compared to what

they were forty years ago. But but right you know, only a very small segment of the entire sky, yeah, much less the universe. Yeah. And and not only that, but think about if you've ever studied things like, you know, the Voyager spacecraft and how NASA has continued to retrieve data or receive really I should say received data from the Voyager spacecraft. Uh, they had they had to keep building bigger and bigger radar antenna arrays in order to

detect that increasingly faint signal. So again, if the signals that are being sent out by these civilizations are faint, it may fade and so well with just background noise that we can't quite filter it out yet. Or what if they're broadcasting it is slightly different bandwidth then we're listening to. Yeah, I think we usually listen to a microwave frequency that we we judged would be a good one for them to transmit it on but um, you know,

maybe they don't like that one. Yeah. Yeah, that's according to human people. And you know, are our sensory apparatus for listening to the universes is limited? Yeah, and again, like I said, we're having to extrapolate a lot just based upon our own experience because we can't we don't have anything else to compare it to. So if if some other civilization is significantly different enough from ours, that

alone makes this incredibly complicated. Yeah. So since we talk about the future here, we thinking one thing I want to focus on is sort of how future discoveries, those that are going on right now and in the near future and maybe even in the far future, could affect

the way we calculate the Drake equation? Are there ways that variables in the equation that are fuzzy to us right now could become much more clear The more we know about Earth, sure, I mean some of the more we know about Earth and the more we know about just our immediate surroundings. Yeah, As our methods of detecting other planets, other terrestrial planets, get better, um, we'll be able to see how many might be able to hold microbial life and then be able to perhaps maybe someday.

I mean, you know, how do we how do we test for life that isn't building pyramids or something like that, that's that's hundreds of light years away? Yeah, well, if if we just start with those planets, like say, um, when Frank Drake came up with this equation, they didn't know how how many of the stars out there had planets. I mean, they didn't have a Kepler survey. Yet we still we still don't really know. We have we have some good data that gives us some some educated guesses,

very strong educated guesses. But for as for direct direct evidence of uh, it's a relatively small number, but it's encouraging. Yeah, we're well, I think we're getting pretty good evidence that lots of stars have planets, but it certainly appears that way. Yes, yeah, um, but then you know, how do we again, how do how do we detect life on this planets because we haven't even detected life elsewhere in our own solar system,

which is a lot more accessible. Well, we can possibly do that through lots of spectral analysis and looking at the different atmospheres of plants based upon the color that we get back that can give us some indications. But also yeah, so if if a planet reflects back in a way that shows that it's atmosphere is composed primarily of oxygen, we seem to think that's something that happens when there's life, right, or perhaps even if we can watch something over the next couple of thousand years and

see how you see how the atmosphere of these planets developed. Uh, there was also the chance that we might still find some evidence of life within our own solar system. Right, say, if we were to go to Jupiter's moon Europa and discover microbial life there. I mean that I think that would blow one of these variables out of the water.

The idea that that life had arisen twice in our own solar system would be Well, if we knew that there was life on another planet in our own solar system, we would know that it is just it is just not that hard for life to arrive. Right. We would have to say, oh, okay, all right, all right, that's going to that makes that number larger in our estimation than it was before when we plug it into this equation. Right, So then we would have to think, well that that

filtering variable probably needs to be one of the other ones. Then, So maybe it's that life is less likely to become intelligent or to develop radio technology, right, or to be around at the same time we're around. I think that's the big one. Um, there are here's another one to think about. Um, maybe more we discover about the evolution of the brain would help us understand better, Um, how likely it is that, say, microbial life, given enough time,

will evolve into intelligent life. Right. Right, Because as much as we don't understand about the far reaches of space, we also don't understand a whole lot about our own bodies and especially those very delicate, very integral nervous systems that are that are making up what we consider to be intelligence. Right, And when you look at you know, even the sample size we do have, which again is Earth, that's all we've got. Uh, we only have one species

that evolved into the type of intelligence capable of interstellar communication. No, but you have lots of species that evolved to have pretty complex brains. Sure, Sure, ones that you know, like like chimpanzees that that do have communication or um or or octopi or cuttle fish that in a very different way than we communicate, but do absolutely have a form

of almost language proto language. I mean, you know, the exact definitions are a little bit shaky, but you know, these are these are creatures that recognize their reflection and and can respond to it. But if it if it doesn't ever reach the sophistication, Uh, well, first of all, for the Drake equation to work, we have to have it to the point where they can do interstellar communication,

because it's just part of the equation. And unless you're going by Douglas Adams response to it, dolphins, dolphins cannot do that. Yeah, but that's there's no telling that given them another you know, millions and millions of years, but they would not. Yeah, but there's no telling that they would either. So no, no, but but but also but also, I mean we're talking about this this handful. I mean, maybe less than ten species that we would consider even

moderately intelligent on the planet. Out of how many billions, there's a lot there's still a lot of humans that I don't necessarily lump in with intelligent groups. So fair enough, that's that's a joke. Mostly you're not that anti social. But I got I got a family reunion, a human beings can build radios. It's really it's actually pretty simple. Um yeah. Anyway, but yes, I agree that the the life variable I think could be tweaked down just and

probably within our lifetimes. I would expect that to happen, or at least I'm optimistic that it will happen. The intelligent life. I'm hopeful that, you know, we could as we learn more about our brains and the brains of other species here on Earth, we might be able to draw more conclusions there. The last two variables, though, the one about being smart enough for interstellar communication and the amount of time, those are the two I think are

going to be the longest holdouts. Um yeah. There have been people who have tried to mess with them to to try to inform those variables better. Uh. For one thing, Michael Shermer, the skeptic writer and magazine publisher. In two thousand two he published an article in Um Scientific American where he tried to say, look, we can get a pretty good average of the length of time UM that we should factor into l by looking at all of the civilizations through Earth's history and sort of averaging out

how long each civilization survived before it's collapse. Um. But then I read some criticisms of his piece, and Um, while Michael Michael Sherman has written a lot of good stuff, I think some of the criticisms of this piece were valid because he was looking at, you know, the length of time of Chinese civilizations and South American civilizations and Rome and African empires and all that, And what you think all of these had in common is they didn't

have radio, so yeah, and they were and they were localized civilizations. They weren't a global civilizations. I would argue, we have these days, right, So it may be that there's something fundamentally different about the length of time ah an interstellar communicating civilization lasts as opposed to all these empires throughout history. Well. Yeah, and it also again assumes that that's some form of you know, almost like a universal law that civilization can expect to last X number

of years. But that's completely based on on just the human history, and we simply don't know anything about any any extraterrestrial civilizations. If there are any, we don't know enough to be able to say the human experience at all relates to their experience. Yeah, And again it's assuming that as long as a civilization is capable of transmitting it, will you know that's not necessarily the case either. Now I think you know, it sounds like we're being fairly

critical here. Uh we didn't make a joke of the Drake equation, although some people have a right Yeah. X K C. D Um published a comic that said that the the unspoken variable here is how how much? What? What was your word? What was your word? Bullpucky? Bullpucky? You're willing to accept from from Mr Frank Drake. Dr I'm afraid that word is offensive. I don't remember where I heard. No, No, it's I mean, it doesn't offend me.

I'm fine with it, all right. So anyway, that being the big joke that the unspoken variable is how much bullpucky can you take from Frank Drake before you just give up on that equation? Uh? Well, you know, it's an interesting thought experiment at the very least, and hopefully before too long it will go beyond thought experiment to something where it's actually applicable as we get more information

about the universe around us. As I always say, learning is just it's just something I can continuously get excited about. So I think uh, you know, the future is a is a bright one, really, and I expect that there will come a time where humans will be in contact with some other form of intelligent life out there. I doubt that I'll be around to see it, unless I'm a head in a jar at that point, but I do hope it happens, which we all aspire to be. Yeah.

By the way, if anyone is putting heads in jars and keeping them alive a very important part of that. I want to stress that part of the bad equation, I can help you to your all. Right, I'm gonna wrap this up, guys, this has been a fun conversation. I've really enjoyed it. If you've been enjoying the podcast, make sure you go to f W Thinking dot com. That's our home for all the blog posts, podcasts, video posts, articles, all the cool information we talked about about the future

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