第 455 期·中文精讀
亞當·弗蘭克：外星文明與地外生命探索
Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
天體物理學家談地外生命存在的機率、文明能否長久存續與技術痕跡，以及尋找它們的可行方式。
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中文精讀由 AI 基於原始訪談改寫，非官方翻譯，可能存在偏差或錯誤；表述以原音訊與官方文稿為準。說明
Adam Frank 和同事 Woody Sullivan 在 2016 年算過一筆賬。他們想知道，宇宙歷史上究竟產生過多少個處在宜居帶的行星。答案是 10 的 22 次方，也就是一萬億億個。
每一個這樣的行星，都是一次被自然跑過的實驗。從無機物到生命，從生命到智慧，從智慧到能發射無線電的技術文明，整個過程究竟能不能走通，答案就藏在這一萬億億次重複裡。
能走通的唯一反例，是每一次實驗都失敗了。這就給出了一個下限，Frank 把它叫做悲觀線：只有當每顆宜居帶行星孕育技術文明的機率低於 10 的負 22 次方，人類才是宇宙中唯一的存在。只要這個機率比它哪怕高一點點，那麼在其他地方、在宇宙歷史的某個時刻，一定已經有過別的文明。
這並沒有告訴我附近有誰。銀河系完全可能是一片死寂。它只告訴我一件事：除非大自然真的對文明有某種偏見，否則我們不是第一次發生這種事。（亞當·弗蘭克）
這是天體生物學第一次把一個延續了兩千五百年的爭論，壓縮成一個可以標定位置的座標。在弗蘭克之前，樂觀主義者和悲觀主義者互相攻擊，最激烈的一次是 1600 年布魯諾被燒死在羅馬鮮花廣場。沒人知道“樂觀”和“悲觀”到底意味著什麼。現在有了一個數字，問題就從哲學變成了科學。
每一顆恆星都有行星，這條訊息曾經是革命性的
弗蘭克在訪談裡反覆強調，德雷克方程裡其實只有兩個量被真正釘死了，但它們被釘得極其徹底。
第一個是 F sub P，有行星的恆星比例。答案是一。你晚上看到的每一顆恆星，都帶著一個行星家族。
第二個是 N sub E，平均每顆恆星位於宜居帶內的行星數量。答案是五分之一左右。你朝天上隨便數五顆星，其中一顆的宜居帶裡，就有一顆類地行星。
兩個數字背後是幾十年的計算天體物理積累。1995 年，人類第一次在一顆類太陽恆星周圍發現了行星，弗蘭克說那一刻是“大壩崩了”。在那之前，二十世紀初的主流理論認為行星是兩顆恆星近距離交錯、被引力擠出來的產物，而這種事件稀有到一萬億顆恆星裡才發生一次。如果真是那樣，地球就是天文級別的孤本。結果恰恰相反，行星遍地都是。
模擬從一個百萬倍太陽質量的星際氣體雲開始，氣體湍流翻滾，某些區域密度夠高，引力抓住它往下塌，原恆星開始點火。因為角動量守恆，下落物質旋轉加速，攤成吸積盤。塵埃（弗蘭克糾正說，更準確的說法是“煙”，最細小的固體顆粒）在盤裡凝結成卵石，卵石撞成岩石，岩石撞成巨石，一路級聯到行星胚胎，胚胎互撞，最終形成行星。
溫度決定了這一切的化學。靠近恆星的地方只凝結得出金屬，所以水星基本是一顆大鐵球。往外走溫度降到某條“雪線”之外，水才能凍結，所以太陽系四顆巨行星的衛星上冰多得驚人。木衛二上的水，比地球上所有海洋加起來的還多一倍。
宇宙裡最常見的行星，太陽系一顆都沒有
這是弗蘭克丟擲的一個讓人愣住的點。他說，現在系外行星的統計已經足夠做一次“人口普查”，能看出誰正常、誰古怪。結果發現，怪的是我們。
宇宙裡最普遍的行星，質量在地球的一倍到十倍之間，分別叫超級地球和亞海王星。太陽系在這段質量區間裡，乾乾淨淨，什麼都沒有。
這些行星的內部到底是什麼狀態，人類完全沒有資料。那裡的壓強是地表的幾千萬倍，物質會被壓成什麼樣，只能靠實驗去猜。弗蘭克參與的一個專案就在羅切斯特大學的鐳射能量學實驗室，用巨型鐳射轟擊微小的二氧化矽樣品，模擬地球核心乃至超級地球核心的極端條件。這些細節決定了那顆行星有沒有板塊運動，而板塊運動可能是複雜生命的關鍵。
他特別強調，這個思路本身就是天體生物學的一次轉向。生命遭遇的是一整顆行星，行星是這個過程的主體。這句話他歸功於 David Grinspoon 和 Sara Walker。你不能說“那兒有個溫暖的池塘，池塘裡發生了有趣的化學”，你必須把整顆行星的歷史一起算進來。
地球曾經是平的，這件事對演化至關重要
弗蘭克剛完成一篇關於“難步驟模型”（Hard Steps Model）的論文，裡面有一個細節特別有意思。
地球早期只有很微弱的板塊運動。大約十億年前，這種運動突然加強了。加強之後，山脈才開始真正隆起。弗蘭克開玩笑說，這是平地球論者唯一可以興奮一秒鐘的時刻，因為在那之前，地球真的相當“平”，沒有喜馬拉雅級別的大山脈。
山脈隆起帶來風化，風化帶來侵蝕，侵蝕把海量的營養元素衝進海洋，那是微生物最想要的東西。結果是什麼呢？淨初級生產力，也就是食物鏈最底端的光合作用產糖量，暴漲了將近一千倍。
板塊運動在某種意義上給演化加了超級燃料。我們不確定具體是怎麼發生的，但很清楚，生命活動的總量確實被這種新的、更有活力的板塊運動大幅推高了。（亞當·弗蘭克）
更早的時候，地球還經歷過幾次“雪球地球”，整顆星球被冰封，海洋全部凍住。如果不是板塊運動帶來的火山活動不斷往大氣裡泵二氧化碳，行星完全可能永遠卡在那個狀態裡。就算生命已經出現，也只能停留在微生物階段，再也上不去。
這裡有一個反直覺的推論：動盪本身是演化的燃料。地球歷史上有一段被叫做“無聊的十億年”，整整十億年只有微生物。它們發明了發酵，功不可沒，但再沒有別的進展。直到大陸開始互相碰撞，新的生態位不斷開啟、舊的不斷關閉，生物才被迫回應。寒武紀大爆發大致就發生在這個視窗。
弗蘭克的說法是，生命和行星在共同演化，隨時間推移，一扇扇“演化視窗”被開啟。二十多億年前，生命發明了能打碎水分子的新型光合作用，把氧氣泵進大氣。這件事永久改變了行星的化學，也開啟了全新的可能性。你我這樣的大腦袋生物需要富氧大氣，因為氧氣對代謝極其高效。行星形成後一億年，絕無可能出現智慧生物。
難步驟模型的致命缺陷：物理學家沒問生物學家
Brandon Carter 是一位極出色的物理學家，他用“人擇推理”提出：智慧出現在地球上的時間，幾乎貼著太陽壽命的終點，這兩條時間尺度沒有理由重合，所以一定是通往智慧的某一步難到離譜。他把這類步驟叫做“難步驟”，還推算出大概有五到六步。
這套理論統治了天體生物學幾十年，衍生出無數論文。弗蘭克那篇論文裡有一張圖，把所有基於難步驟的論文列在一起，每條都提出一套不同的步驟清單。有的是內共生，有的是複雜多細胞，有的是眼睛的前體，有的是陸地生態系統。
然後他們把這張表推翻了。
Carter 是個絕頂聰明的物理學家，這個想法本身非常漂亮。真正研究演化、研究這顆行星的人，從頭到尾沒被叫進來過。你去跟一個演化生物學家或生物地球物理學家講這套，他們會看著你說：你們到底在幹什麼？（亞當·弗蘭克）
問題出在兩個地方。
第一，Carter 假設行星和生命各自獨立演化，可以當成兩條互不相干的線。可是生物地球物理學家早就完全接受：行星和生物圈是纏在一起演化的。弗蘭克說這已經超出小分歧的範疇，整套模型的地基裂了。
第二，“難”這個字本身的判定標準有問題。所謂難，是指每一代繁衍都要擲一次骰子，看這個突變會不會發生。但有兩種情況會讓一個步驟看起來很難，實際卻不然。
一種是資訊丟失。有些創新發生在太久以前，化石記錄裡已經找不到別的譜系也做過同樣嘗試的證據。你只看到一次，但那可能只是因為證據沒了。
另一種叫“抽梯子”。某個物種做出了某項創新，然後它太成功，把生態位佔滿了，別的譜系再沒有空間去重複發明。它確實只發生過一次，原因也許就是先到先得。
弗蘭克還講了一個 XTC 漫畫：一個人在白板上苦苦推導，旁邊一個物理學家探頭說，“哦，我剛寫了個方程，你這問題我解了。你們這行有期刊嗎？”副標題是“為什麼大家都討厭物理學家”。他說這話時帶著自嘲：物理學家確實擅長砍掉細節抓住核心，但面對複雜系統時，這種砍法經常把真正該看的東西也一起砍沒了。
費米悖論的兩半，其中一半根本不存在
弗蘭克對費米悖論的態度非常乾脆：根本不存在費米悖論。
故事是這樣的。1950 年，費米和同事在洛斯阿拉莫斯吃完午飯往食堂走，路上聊起《紐約客》一幅漫畫，講的是紐約垃圾桶神秘消失，漫畫解釋說是 UFO 乾的（1947 年剛發生第一次 UFO 熱潮）。他們笑著聊起星際旅行和推進方式，然後話題轉開了。四十分鐘後，費米在午餐桌上突然冒出一句：“那大家都在哪兒呢？”
他心算了一下：如果智慧生命很常見，那麼即使以亞光速在恆星間跳躍，一個文明也能在幾十萬年內鋪滿整個銀河系。所以，他們為什麼現在不在這兒？
這是直接的費米悖論。1975 年 Hart 把它寫成正式論文，論證是：現在這兒沒人，所以哪兒都沒人。
但 SETI 開始之後，另一種說法流行起來，弗蘭克叫它間接的費米悖論：我們找了幾十年訊號，什麼都沒找到，所以外面什麼都沒有。
間接的費米悖論絕對不存在，理由非常平庸：沒錢。SETI 從來沒有過經費，一直都是研究者從別的專案裡摳一點望遠鏡時間出來瞄一眼。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他的合作者 Jason Wright 和學生們做過一項研究，把 SETI 的整個搜尋空間想象成一片海洋。要看的恆星、要掃的射電頻段、觀測的時長和頻率，全算進去。然後他們統計了歷史上所有 SETI 搜尋，把文獻翻了個遍。結論是：我們舀出來的那點海水，大概相當於一個熱水浴缸。你在浴缸裡沒撈到魚，然後說海洋裡沒有魚，這個推理不成立。
至於直接的費米悖論，出路多得可以編一本書，叫《費米悖論的 77 種解法》。弗蘭克的團隊做過一個真正的模擬，讓探測器以亞光速在恆星間飛行、開採資源、繼續前往下一顆。只要給文明設定一個有限壽命，比如一萬年或十萬年，整個銀河系就進入一種穩態：文明不斷死亡、不斷重生、不斷旅行。結果是會出現大片的空洞，某些區域可能幾百萬年都沒有任何存在。
我們可能正好住在這樣一個空洞裡。他們來過，但那是一億年前。
他和 Gavin Schmidt 寫過一篇論文，結論是：如果一億年前地球上存在過文明，無論那是恐龍還是外星人，我們都無法知道。化石記錄太稀疏，絕大多數東西根本不會變成化石。唯一可能留下的線索是同位素地層，看有沒有工業文明的痕跡。至於想找到 iPhone 或者倒塌的建築，一億年足夠把一切磨平。這篇論文叫《志留紀假說》，名字來自《神秘博士》裡那集蜥蜴人。
有人拿這篇論文問弗蘭克是不是在暗示地球上有過史前文明。他強調了很多次：
我們從沒說過存在過志留紀文明。我們說的是，如果存在過，你沒法知道。Gavin 的問題非常漂亮：你怎麼才能看出來？（亞當·弗蘭克）
一萬億億次實驗，人類只舀了一個浴缸
回到開頭的那個數字。弗蘭克和 Sullivan 那篇 2016 年的論文，核心思路是：既然德雷克方程裡兩個天文項已經被釘死，那就把時間這一項從方程裡去掉。
不問文明能活多久，只問一件事：在宇宙整個歷史中，曾經出現過技術文明的機率是多少。
因為有一萬億億顆宜居帶行星，就等於有一萬億億次實驗被跑過。要讓人類成為唯一，必須每一次都失敗。所以悲觀線是 10 的負 22 次方。
我們覺得這差不多是天體生物學的普朗克尺度。它給了你一個真實的數字。只要機率高於這條線，那別的文明就一定在宇宙歷史上出現過。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他說，這篇論文真正改變的是舉證責任。兩千五百年來，爭論的雙方都只有嘴。現在，舉證責任在悲觀主義者那邊。
但弗蘭克同時提醒，這個論證有它的邊界。它說不出附近有沒有人，銀河系完全可能是 sterile 的。它只說，在宇宙歷史的某個角落、某個時刻，這件事發生過不止一次。
生命可能很常見，文明可能很短命
弗蘭克自己的判斷是：傻生命，也就是微生物級別的生命，在宇宙裡應該很常見。真正不確定的是兩頭，一頭是生命起源本身有多難，另一頭是技術文明能活多久。
關於第一頭，他承認自己只有直覺：
看著地球的歷史，我傾向於認為生命不難產生。基礎生物學不難啟動。這仍然是一個驚人的過程，我認為它要求我們重新思考“生命”這個概念本身，但我的直覺是，生命大概很容易製造。（亞當·弗蘭克）
主持人的判斷更激進：只要有了細菌，剩下的就是時間問題。中間那個“無聊的十億年”確實費解，但一顆宜居行星有幾億到幾十億年的餘量，等得起。
關於第二頭，也就是 L 項，弗蘭克覺得這是真正的大問題。人類造出射電望遠鏡只有一百年，就算再活十萬年，放到銀河系的尺度上也短得可以忽略。要讓文明在銀河系裡足夠稠密，需要的是上億年乃至十億年的文明。
那麼問題來了：一個十億年的技術文明，到底是什麼樣子？你要怎麼系統地研究它？
他和 David Kipping、Caleb Scharf 做過一個貝葉斯計算，問：如果你探測到一個訊號，那個文明比你年輕還是比你老？直覺上你會覺得五五開，但形式化算下來，答案是它大機率老得多。這意味著你不得不去思考，十億年的文明會留下什麼樣的痕跡，會以什麼形式存在。生物演化在那個尺度上早就面目全非，那社會形態呢？是連續的，還是崩了重建、重建再崩的斷續演化？
他說這才是真正的前沿。這個尺度上，你被迫去“想象不可想象的東西”。
技術圈是個未成年：它正在拆掉自己腳下的地板
弗蘭克和 Sara Walker、David Grinspoon 合寫過一篇關於“行星級智慧”的論文，核心概念借自神經生物學家 Francisco Varela 的“自創生”（autopoiesis）。Varela 給生命下的定義裡有一條：自我創造、自我維持，不製造摧毀自己的條件。
從這個角度看，生物圈已經自創生了幾十億年。生命剛出現時，微生物太少，還形不成反饋，他們叫“不成熟的生物圈”。生命變得繁盛之後，它開始對行星施加反饋，把溫度、大氣成分維持在適合生命的狀態，這就是“成熟的生物圈”。
然後，人類在最近幾百年造出了技術圈。
我們在論文裡論證的是，技術圈現在是不成熟的。因為氣候變化，因為我們做的所有其他事情，技術圈正在摧毀自己賴以維持的條件。如果我們要在幾十萬、幾百萬年的地質尺度上存在，就必須成熟起來。就目前而言，我們不是自創生的。（亞當·弗蘭克）
這裡有一個容易被誤讀的地方。弗蘭克明確說，“拯救地球”這個說法有點可笑，地球不是一只需要保護的小兔子。生物圈不會消失，人類做什麼都滅不掉它。真正脆弱的，是人類賴以生存的那套條件。人類是從全新世這一萬年的間冰期裡長出來的，我們忍受不了差別太大的地球。
至於蓋亞假說，他的評價很剋制。1970 年代 Lovelock 和 Lynn Margulis 提出時，被新紀元運動拿去搞了不少蓋亞舞蹈。核心其實很物理：生物圈能對行星狀態施加反饋，讓系統穩住。他說現在還不能確定存在“完整的蓋亞反饋”，也就是說行星能被生物圈完全控制。但有一點是確定的：生物圈是地球歷史上的主要玩家。
他舉了一個很樸素的例子。外面一百華氏度，他走出去，體溫不變。回到羅切斯特的冬天，零度，體溫還是不變。這就是穩態。生物圈做的是類似的事，溫度升了，它啟動某些過程把溫度壓下來。
那麼技術圈能不能也形成這種反饋？弗蘭克說，這正是他那篇論文想說的：技術圈需要從不成熟走向成熟。而現在這一輪“大加速”，是技術圈誕生時對生物圈的一次巨大擾動。技術圈坐在生物圈上面，如果它為自身的存在條件去破壞生物圈，那就麻煩了。
人類現在連一級文明都不到，而且可能永遠到不了
卡爾達肖夫在 1960 年代提出那個著名的三級尺度，邏輯完全是探測導向的：一個文明會依次掌握多大尺度的能量。
一級：用掉落在一顆行星上的全部星光。二級：用掉一整顆恆星的全部輸出，也就是戴森球。三級：用掉一整個星系的全部星光。
人類現在處在對數尺度上的 0.7 級。有人算過，如果按現在的軌跡走，大約公元 2300 年能到一級。
但弗蘭克指出卡爾達肖夫漏了一件事：熱力學第二定律。卡爾達肖夫只想著能量獲取，沒想過當你使用能量時必然產生廢熱。你不可能百分百利用一箱汽油，剩下的必然去加熱引擎。
所以我們很可能無法在不摧毀地球氣候的前提下到達一級文明。這就是為什麼太空變得重要。我們有個研究了一陣的想法叫“服務世界”：某個時刻，你得把大部分工業搬出行星。比如水星，水星上什麼都沒有，沒有生命，為什麼不把能量採集放在那兒？（亞當·弗蘭克）
他說生物圈比人類強大。人類在地球上能採集多少能量去做功，是有上限的，超過這個上限就會嚴重傷害生物圈。想用十倍的能量，就別在地球上用。
這也回答了一個常見爭論。應對氣候變化的藥方，指向更好的技術。弗蘭克上一本書《星光》整本都在講這個，他稱之為“人類世的天體生物學”：把人類正在經歷的這次轉變，放進行星尺度天體生物學的框架裡看。他們建模得出的結論是，幾乎每一個技術文明都會觸發自己的行星氣候危機。真正的問題是，你有沒有足夠的聰明，去調整你的技術方式，讓所有船一起浮起來，讓生物圈變得更有生產力、更健康、更有韌性。
如果我們能熬過氣候變化，終點的獎品是整個太陽系。我們將真正開始工程化太陽系。（亞當·弗蘭克）
怎麼找到一個文明：從氯氟烴到城市燈光
弗蘭克說他已經不太喜歡用 SETI 這個詞了，因為 SETI 的傳統形象是朱迪·福斯特戴著耳機聽訊號，那需要假設對方想被找到，還得假設對方造了一個超強的信標對準我們。假設太多。
他更喜歡“技術標誌”（technosignature）。系外行星革命帶來了一件禮物：我們知道該往哪兒看，也知道該怎麼看。於是可以去找文明在正常過日子時留下的被動痕跡，完全不用管它想不想被聯絡。
生物標誌的例子是氧氣。地球大氣裡的氧氣完全來自生命，一旦生命消失，氧氣和甲烷會迅速反應掉。所以如果在一顆行星上同時看到氧氣和甲烷，那大機率有生物圈。
技術標誌的例子是氯氟烴。人類當年誤打誤撞往大氣裡灌了大量氯氟烴，破壞了臭氧層。弗蘭克的團隊算過，這種分子在星際距離上是可以探測的。把一顆遙遠行星的光送進光譜儀，看到氯氟烴的光譜指紋，那就只剩一種解釋：那裡有工業過程。因為自然界沒有任何途徑能造出這東西。
他是 NASA 第一個系外行星技術標誌專案的首席研究員。這個專案要做的事，是建立人類第一份技術標誌庫。以前沒人系統想過這個問題。
候選清單裡，有太陽能板的反光，有一種特定的反射光譜跳變，跟材料無關。有城市燈光：如果一顆行星上有《星球大戰》里科洛桑那種規模的都市，或者《基地》裡的川陀，城市燈光的光譜印記在二三十光年外是可以看到的。晚上從遠處看地球，鈉燈的譜線會打到地面上再反射回來，儀器夠靈敏就能識別。
還有更有意思的一類，叫“不可知標誌”（agnostic biosignature）。它不依賴地球經驗，只問：生命這件事，在一般意義上會留下什麼印記？一個思路是化學反應網路的結構：生物產生的反應網路，和岩石、水之間的反應網路，拓撲結構完全不同。另一個思路是資訊理論：測一測大氣裡各化合物攜帶的資訊量，如果資訊量高得離譜，就不太可能只是岩石在起作用。
還有一個更樸素的判據：遠離平衡。生命是遠離平衡的系統，一旦死亡就回到平衡。你可以用吉布斯自由能去測一整個大氣的失衡程度。如果一顆行星的大氣嚴重失衡，說明有什麼東西在持續往裡泵氣體，不讓整個系統鬆弛下來。
一畫素的照片，和二十四公里的解析度
聊到望遠鏡，弗蘭克對詹姆斯·韋布的態度很坦白：他當初是真懷疑。“行吧夥計們，你們說得都對。”
韋布真正重要的地方在光譜。弗蘭克說光譜不性感，畫面就是一條彎彎曲曲的線，但要找生命，就必須先找到有大氣層的行星，然後做“表徵”，看光譜指紋裡有沒有碳、二氧化碳、氧氣、甲烷。這是當前最關鍵的一步。
他舉了 K2-18b 的例子。那顆行星距離地球 120 光年，韋布拿到的光譜好到可以推測它可能是一類全新的宜居世界，叫“氫海洋世界”（hycean world）：質量約地球八倍，外面裹一層氫氣大氣。氫氣是極強的溫室氣體，能把底下捂得足夠暖，形成一片巨大的液態水海洋，水溫可能只有六十攝氏度。甲烷的探測達到了五個 sigma，弗蘭克說這是科學界的金標準。
再往前一步是直接成像。他解釋得很清楚：即便下一代望遠鏡，拍到的也只是一個畫素。那只是一個點，遠遠談不上照片。你能拿到那個點的光，送進光譜儀，但沒有解析度。
然後是那個聽起來像瘋了的想法：太陽引力透鏡望遠鏡。
廣義相對論說大質量物體會彎曲時空，太陽就是一個巨大的透鏡。方案是往奧爾特雲方向發射一批望遠鏡，回頭看太陽，讓太陽把背後某顆系外行星的光聚焦到鏡頭上。距離大約是日地距離的五百倍。如果一切順利，解析度能到二十四公里，也就是說，你能在一顆系外行星上看見曼哈頓。
弗蘭克說這個方案已經透過了 NASA 三輪評審，從“把最瘋狂的想法交上來”到“告訴我們這玩意到底可不可行”。他說自己大概活不到那天，但主持人老了的時候，也許真能看到。
戴森球、克拉克帶，和被證偽的外星巨構
1960 年，Freeman Dyson 提出那個著名的想法。他的出發點很實用：要找文明，得先想出一種能留下可探測痕跡的幹法。文明越進步，需要的能量越多，太陽系裡最大的能源就是那顆恆星。把恆星包起來採集全部光子，你就有能力重新工程化整個太陽系。
嚴格意義上，一個剛性的球是不穩定的，戴森本人想的其實是“swarm”，一大群獨立的軌道採集結構。
這件事差點就有了候選。那顆著名的 Boyajian 星，光變曲線出現了極不規則的凹陷，一會兒一個“小恐龍的牙齒”，一會兒又沒了，過一陣又來三個。論文里老老實實列了可能性：彗星、崩解的行星碎片，以及外星巨構。媒體只抓住了最後一條，第二天所有人的資訊流都是“外星巨構被發現”。
後來證實，大機率是氣體或塵埃雲。
但這件事的價值在於，它證明這類東西是可以觀測的。不需要直接成像，用凌日法就行。一顆行星從恆星前面過，光變曲線出現一個規整的凹陷。如果是成千上萬個巨構，它們大部分時間會遮擋恆星，偶爾不遮擋，光變曲線就會變成“嗶、嗶、嘀、嘀、嘀”那種不規則訊號。穩定的行星系統裡只會有五到十顆行星，不可能出現這種密集的微凌日。
Jason Wright 那批人換了個思路找，找紅外。熱力學第二定律說，你採集了那麼多星光，結構本身會升溫，必然輻射紅外廢熱。他們最近確實篩掉了大量候選，但留下了幾個異常到“這就是它該有的樣子”的目標。弗蘭克強調，他們絕不會稱之為“探測”，但那也不是“非探測”。
另一個候選叫“克拉克帶”。地球同步軌道是一個非常特殊的軌道，天然過程不會把物質堆在那裡。如果一個文明大量使用同步軌道，衛星帶會密到在凌日訊號裡留下痕跡。它沒有戴森 swarm 那麼“巨型”，但已經是行星尺度。
我們舀了一浴缸的海水，然後說海里沒有魚
關於怎麼找，弗蘭克有一套很樸素的排序。
如果給他一萬億美元，問他是往天上找還是往地球上看，他的答案毫不猶豫：往天上找。
我總愛這麼打比方。你要是說“亞當，我想找幾個內布拉斯加人”，我說“好啊，咱們去喜馬拉雅山”。你會問“為什麼要去那兒”。我說“也許喜馬拉雅山裡也有幾個內布拉斯加人”。你會說“不不不，咱們去內布拉斯加”。我們要找外星人，為什麼不去他們住的外星行星上找？我們現在有那個技術了。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他還給 UFO 現象準備了一個“遠光燈論證”。假設有一個高階文明定期造訪地球，他們不想被發現，技術超級強大，但他們用得實在太爛了，我們老是看見他們，然後他們又消失了。這套說法要成立，得先解釋一個自相矛盾的世界。
他 2021 年在《紐約時報》寫過一篇關於 UAP 的評論，反響巨大，很多人來找他聊。他說自己專門去看了訊號情報和電子情報圈子的分析，那些人談的根本不是 UFO，談的是“純粹國家對手”，也就是他學到的那個詞。邏輯是：用簡單的無人機技術故意往對手的電子裝置裡灌假訊號，對方把雷達開到最大去尋找，你正好把他們先進雷達的電磁特徵全部收下來。
他對 UAP 的立場很清楚：完全支援用開放、中立、透明的方式做科學調查，但目前沒有任何一份證據夠得上“非人類技術”這個結論所需的證據標準。
他花了不少篇幅解釋什麼叫證據標準。科學界內部互相極其兇狠，因為有一套花了四百年建立起來的判據，用來判斷一份證據能不能支撐一個主張。手機能用，正是因為這套標準嚴格到變態，不然每一部手機都是一塊磚。他說如果他的團隊宣佈發現了某顆系外行星上的技術標誌，他們會被撕碎，而且他們預期如此。
UAP、UFO 社群也應該預期同樣的待遇。你不能因為話題很酷就獲得豁免。（亞當·弗蘭克）
要真正把這件事做科學，他的方案是“向上看、向下看、四周看”。地面探測器，就是已經在建的那種監測流星的裝置；天基探測器，裝在衛星上，這是 NASA UAP 專家組討論過的方向；還有飛機上的探測器，或者至少一個告警系統，飛行員看到不明現象，按一下紅色按鈕，觸發地面和太空的資料採集。
最容易被忽略的環節在這裡：你必須把資料來源的每一個環節都刻畫到極致。相機在各個波段的行為、軟體的極限、裝置最近有沒有返修，全都要有記錄。如果你想宣稱“我的天，我看到了一個東西以五馬赫右轉”，那你最好先把這些全釘死。
科學的盲點：我們忘了溫度是從體感來的
訪談後半段轉向了弗蘭克和 Marcelo Gleiser、Evan Thompson 合著的《盲
訪談後半段轉向了弗蘭克和 Marcelo Gleiser、Evan Thompson 合著的《盲點》。這本書的核心比喻來自眼睛本身。
視神經是視覺能夠發生的前提，沒有它就沒有視覺。但你的視野裡恰好有一個小洞，就在視神經接入的地方，你對它完全盲。
科學也有這樣一個結構。有一樣東西，沒有它科學根本不可能存在，但科學在自己的配置過程中把它推了出去，然後忘了自己推過。
那樣東西叫經驗。
我在這裡指的不是“觀察者”。關於它有很多詞：直接經驗、臨在、存在、生活世界，這是現象學裡的說法。它就是你無法擺脫的原始在場，直到你死去。在那之前，它一直在那兒。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他講了一個“溫度的寓言”，這是全書最好懂的入口。
人類先有冷熱的體感。我覺得熱，你覺得冷。科學做的事情，是從這些體感裡提取哲學家 Michel Bitbol 所說的“結構不變數”，也就是你我能夠達成一致的部分。於是我們造出裝水銀的刻度管，熱的東西液柱高，冷的東西液柱低，雙方約定一套標準。然後有了測溫術，有了熱力學，有了今天早上你開啟手機看到“今天六十華氏度，不錯”。
問題在於，我們逐漸開始覺得六十度比冷熱更真實，熱力學的形式結構比“今天真冷啊”這句體感更真實。弗蘭克把這個叫做“經驗的失憶症”。
我們取出了這些極薄的東西，這些抽象，因為那是做科學的唯一方式。然後你以為，哦，我可以把經驗塞回去，為經驗提供一個解釋。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他把這個錯誤叫“偷偷替換”（surreptitious substitution），這個詞來自胡塞爾。還有一個更好記的比喻：別把地圖當成地形。此刻兩人之間發生的事情，連同它的全部怪異，那是地形。地圖是他能寫在紙上的方程，能在實驗室裡拿來做實驗。地圖極其強大，需要被認真對待，但經驗遠遠溢位地圖的邊界。
他認為這個盲點跟科學本身已經關係不大。它是一整套被粘在科學上的形而上學。具體包括幾件東西：還原論，你不過是神經元，神經元不過是化學，一路往下到夸克；客觀視角，科學給我們一個上帝視角的第三人稱；物理主義，世界裡只有物質，別的東西沒什麼好談的；以及數學的物化，認為數學比經驗更真實。
這套東西在歷史上是合理的，弗蘭克說“在當時它講得通”。機械宇宙觀、完美的鐘表，很有說服力。但到了二十世紀初，科學自己開始反駁它，最明顯的就是量子力學。
量子力學給了你薛定諤方程。你輸入初始條件，它給你未來的預測，和牛頓物理一模一樣。然後它又說：一旦進行測量，我另有一套規則，叫玻恩定則。弗蘭克說，量子力學從一開始就在告訴你，測量很重要。
於是出現了各種詮釋，其中很多拼命假裝測量問題不存在。多世界詮釋甚至不惜發明無窮多個不可觀測的平行宇宙，只為了繞開量子力學正在告訴他們的事。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他明確站 QBism，量子貝葉斯主義。這個詮釋把玻恩定則放到中心，不問薛定諤方程推出的那些怪東西，比如薛定諤的貓，而是問：一個能動者對這個世界的行動，以及他從行動中獲得的資訊，如何更新他的先驗。這就是 Quantum Bayesianism 裡 Bayesian 的來源。
細胞沿著梯度爬，和量子測量，用的是同一套語法
讓弗蘭克興奮的是，QBism 的語言和另一個領域高度重合。
他參與了一個坦普爾頓基金會資助的專案，研究語義資訊在細胞這類生命系統裡的作用。夏農資訊衡量一條訊息的“意外程度”，是一個機率分佈的事。語義資訊衡量“意義”，而意義最基礎的定義極其樸素：這份資訊能不能幫這個生物活下去。你當然可以把意義談得很哲學，但最底層就是這個。
於是一個細胞沿著化學梯度往上爬去找食物，和 QBism 裡一個能動者對世界採取行動、獲取資訊、更新信念，在架構上有一種奇特的相似。都在講一個主體，向世界施加一個動作，從世界拿到反饋，然後改變自己。
弗蘭克說，這就是他想要的那種新物理學：把能動者、資訊、經驗放在中心，同時仍然是硬核的、可做實驗的科學。科學凱旋主義的吸引力他很理解，我手上有一組方程，方程代表一個柏拉圖式的理想，永恆地獨立存在，某種意義上是你在讀上帝的心智。另一條路在他看來同樣激動人心：這裡有一個我們，有一個世界，兩者不可分離，而我們要研究的是這場共同創生。
他明確說了，這些物理定律極其重要，將來也需要被解釋。需要的是一種把能動者留在故事中心的解釋。
石頭和細胞之間，橫著一個沒人回答的問題
這個思路往下推，會撞上一個更硬的問題：生命到底是什麼。
弗蘭克說，他做了一輩子天體物理，現在覺得物理學最重要的未解問題不在黑洞，不在暗物質，而在一塊石頭和一個細胞，本質區別在哪兒。
他描述問題時，把矛頭引向了能動性。什麼叫一個自主的能動者？這件事到底是怎麼發生的？他明確表示自己不是還原論者，也不相信“把足夠多的化學物質堆在一起，砰的一聲，它就出現了”。他認為這個問題會迫使人類重新構想自然本身是什麼。
為了說明難在哪兒，他講了自創生的那個“怪圈”。細胞膜是理解這件事最好的入口：沒有膜就沒有細胞，膜選擇性地讓某些東西進、某些東西出。膜本身是細胞內部過程的產物，而細胞內部的過程又必須依賴膜才能發生。膜創造了自己。生命裡總有這種迴圈，你找不到一條線性因果鏈的起點。
他提到理論生物學家 Robert Rosen 的工作。Rosen 提出“有效因閉合”（closure to efficient cause），認為生命系統在組織上閉合、在因果上閉合，因此不再依賴微觀狀態。他還有一個證明，爭議極大，沒人能確定它對不對：生命系統不是丘奇-圖靈完備的，它不能被完全表示為形式系統，只能被演算法部分捕捉。
弗蘭克在這裡的態度很謹慎。他說自己不打包票這個證明成立，他看重的是這個方向：一旦承認盲點存在，就會開啟一整類全新的科學問題，而不是隻能攤手說“不知道，沒法談”。
他還提到一篇自己很喜歡的論文，用 ε-machine 這類資訊理論工具論證：系統可以自我組織到與微觀狀態解耦的程度。宏觀狀態在描述自身、在陳述自身規律時，已經不需要微觀狀態了。這就是向下因果。還原論認為一切只取決於微觀狀態，知道標準模型的拉格朗日量就完事了。這個論證說，不對，宏觀層面可以自己長出一套規律。
他寫這一章時，小標題是“當時它講得通”。這是對歷史的理解：第三人稱、上帝視角、決定論的世界觀，在十七世紀是有道理的。機械宇宙，完美的鐘表，非常自洽。問題是到了二十世紀，科學自己開始說“不”。
他還講了自己讀博時的經歷。他做的是磁流體力學、恆星形成的數值模擬。給一個簡化模型，寫幾個動力學方程，配上初始條件，他就很滿足。這套辦法有時候極其有效，物理學家擅長砍掉細節抓住核心。他自己承認，另一些時候這種砍法會把真正該盯著的東西一起砍沒，尤其在涉及複雜系統的時候。
時間：我們拿地圖替換了地形
這個話題自然引到時間。
弗蘭克說，我們對時間的理解，是“偷偷替換”最典型的案例。人類把愛因斯坦那套極其優美、極其強大的形式系統，替換掉了對時間的實際經驗。於是有了塊狀宇宙：下週二已經寫在四維宇宙的塊裡了，所有事件都已經在那兒。
這套框架對做某些預測極其有效。但它不是被活著的時間。
他講了那場著名的會面。二十世紀初最出名的哲學家柏格森和愛因斯坦對談。柏格森一輩子研究時間，他要區分時間的科學影象和時間本身的地形，他用的詞是“綿延”（duration）。綿延對人類來說是充實的，它被拉開，裡面有一點點過去、一點點未來、一點點現在。
音樂是最好的例子。你聽一段旋律的時候，既在預期接下來會發生什麼，也在記住剛才發生了什麼。這個現象學結構，和形式數學裡的時間表示，根本不是一回事。
時鐘不告訴我們時間。是我們用時鐘去告訴時間。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他說這塊陣地特別值得爭。如果能從能動者、資訊、計算這個角度長出一套新物理學，那麼時間問題可能是第一個被撬動的。現在的困境是：塊狀宇宙裡下週二已經寫好了，那自由意志往哪兒放？
他對自由意志的回答很乾脆：自由意志是給定的。他引懷特海的話，科學和哲學的任務是解釋抽象，具體就是那樣擺在那兒，每天擺在你面前。你要解釋當然可以，但解釋不會給具體增添任何東西。
至於“自由意志是幻覺”這個說法，他的反駁是：幻覺是從哪兒看的？你要說它是幻覺，你已經把自己推到第三人稱視角去了，而那個視角本身才是需要被解釋的東西。
有人追問他，如果經驗是幻覺呢？他的回答把問題頂了回去：那這個“幻覺”是對誰而言的？你總得在某處安放一個觀察者。這就像層層疊疊的烏龜，你永遠得在某個地方找到一個觀察者。
他認為科學凱旋主義在骨子裡帶著一種宗教衝動，它想要那個上帝視角。那種感覺已經超出無神論，更接近某種隱蔽的一神論：真理永遠在某個脫離肉身的視角里，等著被發現。
另一種哲學傳統，從沒進過這場討論
弗蘭克指出了一個有意思的空白。關於意識的公共討論，用的語言幾乎全部來自分析哲學傳統。但在西方哲學內部，還有一整支現象學傳統，胡塞爾、海德格爾、梅洛-龐蒂，他們全部的工作就是試圖理解經驗的結構，試圖發展出一套能爬進經驗這個圓圈內部的語言。
他調侃說，你幾乎找不到一個影片，是某個著名科學家從現象學角度談科學的，儘管那是哲學裡極大的一支。
再往外，還有從其他文明核心生長出來的哲學。西方這一支從希臘、從猶太-基督教-伊斯蘭傳統長出來。印度和東亞是高度複雜的文明，它們對同樣的問題發展出了自己的回應，而且因為長期有默觀修行，它們非常專注於直接探查注意力和經驗本身。
他點了兩個名字：龍樹和世親。他說這兩個人在那些傳統裡的地位，大致相當於柏拉圖和亞里士多德。
他們的全部哲學、邏輯和論證，都從一個前提出發：我有這個經驗，我出不去，那我該怎麼從這裡推理？所以有大量其他哲學傳統可以借鑑。不必照搬，不是說要大家都變成佛教徒才能做這件事。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他也承認現實的困難：在經驗之上建立邏輯體系很難，在經驗之上建立科學的嚴格性很難。他只是不認為這不可能，只是說這是下一代科學的活兒。
他還補充了一個對“客觀性”的重新理解。通常人們說科學給出第三人稱的客觀視角。客觀性還有另一種版本：我做這個實驗，你做這個實驗，我們互相討論，對方法達成一致，各自得到相同的結果。這個版本的客觀性本身就承認了能動者、承認了交流，而且它承認個體性是流動的。
他引了 David Krakauer 在聖塔菲研究所的一篇論文，用資訊理論的辦法測量個體性，結果發現它是流動的。他的肝細胞是個體，但它其實是肝臟的一部分。肝臟是獨立系統，但它其實是他的一部分。他是獨立的，但沒有整個語言使用者共同體，他連一個問題都提不出來。而這個共同體又嵌在活的生態系統裡，生態系統又嵌在生物圈裡。
他說，這跟那種原子化的科學視角正相反，那種視角最後會把你帶到“缸中之腦”，或者“玻爾茲曼大腦”，一個漂浮在太空裡的腦子。
他還提到康德。人們普遍認為是康德造了“有機體”這個詞，而他注意到生命有一種奇怪的 organization，這種東西跟機器有本質區別。弗蘭克說這可能是條出路：組織、架構、資訊流的關係，本身需要被當作研究物件。它必須實現在物理之中，但它多出來的那一層，是約束與資訊流之間的關係。
機器能有能動性嗎
話題轉到機器。弗蘭克說他不會排除這個可能性。沒有理由認為，那個自創生的怪圈不能在矽裡發生。但他強調，那會和我們非常不同，不會是科幻片裡那種“它跟我們一樣，只是被造出來了”。它會有一套很不一樣的體驗性質。
他對現在的大語言模型態度保留。他引的是認知科學的 4E 理論：具身（embodied）、嵌入（embedded）、生成（enacted）、延展（extended）。核心意思是，認知不只發生在頭顱裡，它必須有身體，身體必須在環境裡，還必須與其他生命系統延展耦合。
他講了一個故事。還原論的大生物學家 Jonas Salk 和控制論學者 Gregory Bateson 對話。Bateson 愛挑事，他問 Salk：“你的心智在哪兒？”Salk 指指腦袋，說：“這兒。”Bateson 說：“不不不，在外面。”
經驗在某種意義上不是你擁有的東西，是你做的事情。你幾乎是在表演它。這就是為什麼有一個身體、而且這個身體處在一個有其他身體的世界裡，從這個角度看是至關重要的。（亞當·弗蘭克）
有一個關於“缸中之腦”的論證，他的轉述大意是：要讓一個缸中之腦真的成立，你最終必須給它一個身體。可以是機器身體，但仍然得有身體。純粹懸空的認知，在他看來不成立。
主持人在這裡提了一個很有分量的反駁：人類嬰兒本質上也是模仿機器，從出生開始就在學別人，靠模仿和模仿之間的張力長出人格和視角。弗蘭克承認有可能，但他的立場是，光靠模仿拿不到那個怪圈。你必須嵌在一個世界裡。
三十年的默觀：我其實沒那麼重要
訪談走到這裡，氣氛變了。弗蘭克主動交底：他在禪宗傳統裡做了三十年默觀修行。他的原話是“我對著一堵牆看了三十年”。
主持人問他，作為一個觀察者，你只有有限的時間存在於這個世界上，這件事會讓你難過嗎？
他說不會。
修行教給我的一件事是，我其實沒那麼重要。這個叫亞當·弗蘭克的東西，很大程度上是一個構造。有一個過程在發生，我根本上屬於它，這很酷，但它會過去。我不知道它從哪兒來，它會走，我並不真的需要它留下，然後天知道會怎樣。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他說禪宗裡有個說法叫“超越生死”，意思跟輪迴無關。意思是：老兄，你連生命是什麼都沒搞明白。在最核心的那層經驗上，你對死亡的看法和那個一樣，是不成形的。
他描述了一次完整禪七的體驗。從早上七點坐到晚上九點，中間有休息。頭半個小時，腦子裡全是雜念：稅、待辦事項、那個人為什麼穿那雙鞋。他講了一個特別具體的細節：第一次參加兩天禪七，他腦子裡從頭到尾完整播放了一遍 Bruce Springsteen 的《Born to Run》專輯，連當年黑膠唱片上的停頓都放出來了。他說那一刻他真的看見了自己心智的運作方式。
然後他說，他曾經非常討厭打坐，但還是坐著。坐上很久之後，心智會累，那層屋頂上的喋喋不休終於沒東西可說了，人就無聊了。他說，那才是真正有意思的事情要開始的地方。
再往下，修行變得非常身體化。你做的只是跟著呼吸，騎著呼吸，變得非常安靜。佛教的文獻一直在說“不要思考”，但他們寫了那麼多東西，那些是指月的手指。
他描述了三個階段。先是散亂，念頭依然在，但你不在唸頭裡，你甚至不去管它。然後是心的統一，自我脫落，只剩下一種原始的在場。那種喜悅常常從這兒湧出來。你也可能坐上整整一小時，只是沉浸在母親去世的悲傷裡。你就是在跟出現的任何東西一起坐著。
這就是為什麼坐著這個動作本身很重要。你在做一個承諾：我要坐在這兒，不管出現什麼，我不動。（亞當·弗蘭克）
他說這真的會改變一個人。他的說法很自嘲：“我還是當年那個新澤西的混蛋，只是現在心裡空間更大了。”
他講公案的時候更來勁。公案是一千年前建立的禪宗教學方法，一本一本的題庫。他舉了一個例子：“讓遠處寺廟的鐘聲停下來。”他說每次老師給他這個，他都在想“你在說什麼”。
公案的關鍵是你不能給答案。第一次參公案，老師說：“別告訴我答案，做給我看。”他當時懵了。但做了幾年之後，他學會了那套語言。答案不在文字裡。你給一百個人講答案，他們都會一臉茫然。真正的東西是經驗。
他說，隨著修行年復一年地加深，那種關於“一切都在流動”的理解不再是嘴上說說，而是真的能感覺到，一呼一吸之間都能感覺到。
有時候會有一種感覺，這麼說有點奇怪，就是純粹的喜悅，它不依附於任何東西。那種一刻接一刻的、無限的流逝，那確實是事物本來的樣子。而它是可以的。並非因為我希望它可以，它就是可以。（亞當·弗蘭克）
主持人回應說，他也有那種無名的喜悅，但旁邊總坐著一點憂鬱，可能來自東歐的血統。喜悅關於經驗的美，憂鬱關於經驗的有限，兩者糾纏在一起，像一對分不開的兄弟。
弗蘭克說他祖上也是東歐，他懂。“那就是它本來的樣子。你不必去做什麼，不必去操縱它，不必挪動它。”
最後那個問題：為什麼我們在這兒
主持人問了最後那個問題。弗蘭克說，幸好剛聊完上一段，因為他要給出的答案非常俗氣。
是愛。
他馬上補了一句：“我不是在開玩笑。”
他解釋，佛教裡有菩薩原則：你在這兒是為了幫忙，只是為了幫忙，這就是慈悲。他坦白自己剛開始修行的時候完全不買賬，他的原話是：“我不在乎慈悲，我來是為了求知識。”他修行是因為痛苦，這是所有人走上這條路的常規理由，生活難，他當時正在經歷一些事。但他也想要知識，想理解現實的根本性質。慈悲什麼的，先放一邊。
然後他發現，你拿不到那個東西。你走不到那個深度，除非有慈悲。不知道為什麼，在這個過程裡你會意識到，它真的是關於幫助一切有情眾生。他說這聽起來很老套，尤其對一個來自新澤西的人來說，那兒的人生第一要務是“混出頭”。但那就是他找到的東西。
他描述了一種從修行裡帶出來的體驗：對世界的一種感激，因為世界把一切都給你了。藍天、呼吸，世界毫無保留地把自己完全交出來，什麼都不留。
然後你會有一種感覺：我得幫上忙。因為有人沒有得到這個。（亞當·弗蘭克）
主持人問：所以就是對世界本然樣子的愛？
弗蘭克說：對世界，以及對所有正在受苦的眾生。每個人都在受苦，包括你最難纏的政治對手，他們也在受苦。我們的任務就是放下自己的偏見和故事，去看生命發生的那個最底層的層面。
主持人收尾說，希望宇宙中那些外星文明也在走同樣的旅程，從苦走向愛。
弗蘭克說：“希望如此。要麼就是他們來吃我們。”
主持人補了一句：“尤其是如果他們三級文明的話。”
弗蘭克說：“對，而且他們槍還特別大。”
這三句玩笑收在整場對話的末尾，其實是有講究的。前面三個小時聊的是機率、光譜、板塊運動、禪七，最後落回到一個無法用望遠鏡驗證的分岔：宇宙深處那些存在，究竟是在學著愛，還是在學著吃。弗蘭克沒有假裝自己知道答案，他只是把兩個可能性並排放在桌上，然後笑了。
如果這些討論對你有點用
這期對話跨度從行星形成一路走到禪宗公案，資訊密度很高。如果要挑出幾件普通人真的能上手做的事，大概是這些。
- 下次看到“科學家發現外星文明”的標題，先看兩件事：這是同行評議的論文，還是會議摘要或預印本；這個結論的統計顯著性是多少。弗蘭克反覆提到的五個 sigma，能當一把尺子用。
- 理解費米悖論時，把“直接的”和“間接的”分開。間接那一半站不住腳，人類舀了一浴缸的海水就說海里沒魚。真正的謎題只在“他們現在為什麼不在”，而這個問題有七十多種解法。
- 記住那個數字：一萬億億顆宜居帶行星。它證明不了附近有人，但它把“人類是宇宙唯一”這個主張的舉證責任，推到了持孤獨論的那一邊。
- 聽到“意識只是神經元的放電”這類說法時，可以追問一句：這個判斷是從哪個視角做出的？弗蘭克的立場並非反對科學，他要指出的是科學有一個自己看不見的盲點，那個盲點就是經驗本身。
- 練習區分地圖和地形。GDP、KPI、論文影響因子、手機上的氣溫數字，全是地圖。地圖極其有用，但地圖不是地形。弗蘭克說我們對溫度犯的那個錯，我們在別的領域天天都在犯。
- 關於氣候和技術圈，他的框架可以直接借用：問題不在技術太多，而在於技術圈還處在未成年階段，正在拆自己腳下的地板。成熟的標誌是自創生，不製造摧毀自身的條件。
- 如果對冥想好奇，可以從他描述的那個順序入手：先接受前半小時腦子裡全是廢話，這很正常。真正有意思的事情，發生在心智終於累得沒詞兒了、你開始覺得無聊的那一刻。
- 最後一條，也是最不像建議的一條。他花三十年對著一堵牆，最後想說的並非什麼玄妙洞見，只是：你其實沒那麼重要，而這件事並不令人難過。世界的每一刻都在毫無保留地把自己交給你。剩下的，是想辦法幫上別人的忙。
文稿來自 Lex Fridman 官網公開發布的官方 Transcript（含說話人與時間戳）。
Adam Frank (00:00:00): If we don’t ask how long they last, but instead ask what’s the probability that there have been any civilizations at all, now matter how long they lasted. I’m not asking whether they exist now or not, I’m just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the university. That, we’re able to constrain. What we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. What that means is those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. The only way that we’re the only time that this whole process from abiogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if everyone one of those experiments failed.
Adam Frank (00:00:51): Therefore, you could put a probability, we called it the Pessimism Line. We don’t really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, but we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus-22, one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we’re alone. If it’s anywhere larger than that, then we’re not the first. It’s happened somewhere else. To me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn’t tell me there’s anybody nearby, the galaxy could be sterile. It just told me that unless nature’s really has some bias against civilizations, we’re not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
Lex Fridman (00:01:36): 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.
Lex Fridman (00:01:58): You wrote a book about aliens. The big question, how many alien civilizations are out there?
Adam Frank (00:02:04): 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.
Adam Frank (00:02:38): 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.
Adam Frank (00:03:14): 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.
Lex Fridman (00:03:42): 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.
Adam Frank (00:04:01): That, actually, we’re able to do now. You can run simulations of the formation of planetary system. If you run the simulation, really where you want to start is a cloud of gas, these giant interstellar clouds of gas that may have a million times the mass of the Sun in them. You run a simulation of that, it’s turbulent. Gas is roiling and tumbling. Every now and then, you get a place where the gas is dense enough that gravity gets hold of it and it can pull it downward, so you’ll start to form a proto-star.
Adam Frank (00:04:32): A proto-star is basically the young star, this ball of gas where nuclear reactions are getting started. But it’s also a disc. As material falls inward because everything’s rotating, as it falls inward, it’ll spin up and then it’ll form a disc. The material will collect in what’s called an accretion disc or a proto-planetary disc. You can simulate all of that.
Adam Frank (00:04:56): Once you get into the disc itself and you want to do planets, things get a little bit more complicated because the physics gets more complicated. Now you got to start worrying about dust, because actually dust … Dust is the wrong word. It’s smoke, really. These are the tiniest bits of solids. They will coagulate in the disc to form pebbles, and then the pebbles will collide to form rocks. And then the rocks will form boulders, et cetera, et cetera. That process is super complicated. But we’ve been able to simulate enough of it to begin to get a handle on how planets form. How you accrete enough material to get the first proto-planets, or planetary embryos as we call them.
Adam Frank (00:05:37): The next step is those things start slamming into each other to form planetary-sized bodies. Then the planetary bodies slam into each other. Earth, the Moon came about because there was a Mars-sized body that slammed into the Earth and basically blew off all the material. Then eventually formed the Moon.
Lex Fridman (00:05:54): And all of them have different chemical compositions, different temperatures?
Adam Frank (00:06:00): Yeah. The temperature of the material in the disc depends on how far away you are from the star.
Lex Fridman (00:06:07): Got it.
Adam Frank (00:06:07): It decreases.
Adam Frank (00:06:08): There’s a really interesting point. Close to the star, temperatures are really high. The only thing that can condense, that can freeze out, is going to be stuff like metals. That’s why you find Mercury is this giant ball of iron, basically. Then as you go further out, stuff, the gas gets cooler. And now you can start getting things like water to freeze. There’s something we call the Snow Line, which is somewhere in our solar system, out around between Mars and Jupiter. That’s the reason why the giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all have huge amounts of ice in them, or water and ice.
Adam Frank (00:06:47): Actually, Jupiter and Saturn don’t have so much, but the moons do. The moons have so much water in them that there’s oceans. We’ve got a number of those moons have got more water on them than there’s water on Earth.
Lex Fridman (00:06:58): Do you think it’s possible to do that kind of simulation to have a stronger and stronger estimate of how likely an Earth-like planet is? Can we get the physics simulation done well enough to where we can start estimating what are the possible Earth-like things that could be generated?
Adam Frank (00:07:17): Yeah, I think we can. I think we’re learning how to do that now. One part is trying to just figure out how planets form themselves in doing the simulations. That cascade from dust grains up to planetary embryos, that’s hard to simulate because you got to do both the gas, and you got to do the dust and the dust colliding, and all that physics.
Adam Frank (00:07:40): Once you get up to a planet-sized body, then you have to switch over to almost a different kind of simulation. Often what you’re doing is you’re assuming the planet this this spherical ball, and then you’re doing a 1D, a radial calculation. You’re just asking, “All right, what is the structure of it going to be? Am I going to have a solid iron core, or am I going to get a solid iron core with a liquid iron core out around it?” Like we have on Earth. Then you get a silicate, rocky mantle, and then a crust. All those details, those are beyond being able to do full 3D simulations from Ab Initio, from scratch. We’re not there yet.
Lex Fridman (00:08:20): How important are those details, like the crust and the atmosphere, do you think?
Adam Frank (00:08:24): Hugely important. I’m part of a collaboration at the University of Rochester, where we’re using the giant laser. Literally, this is called the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. We got a huge grant from the NSF to use that laser to slam tiny pieces of silica to understand what conditions are like at the center of the Earth. Or even more importantly, the center of Super-Earths.
Adam Frank (00:08:47): This is what’s wild. The most common kind of planet in the universe, we don’t have in our solar system. Which is amazing, right? We’ve been able to study or observe enough planets now to get a census. We have an idea of whose average, whose weird. Our solar system’s weird, because the average planet has a mass somewhere between a few times the mass of the Earth, to maybe 10 times the mass of the Earth. That’s exactly where there are no planets in our solar system.
Adam Frank (00:09:20): The smaller ones of those we call Super-Earths, the larger ones we call Sub-Neptunes. They’re anybody’s guess. We don’t really know what happens to material when you’re squeezed to those pressures, which is millions, tens of millions of times the pressure on the surface of the Earth. Those details really will matter of what’s on in there, because that will determine whether or not you have, say for example, plate tectonics.
Adam Frank (00:09:44): We think plate tectonics may have been really important for life on Earth, for the evolution of complex life on Earth. It turns out, and this is the next generation where we’re going with the understanding the evolution of planets and life. It turns out that you actually have to think hard about the planetary context for life. You can just be like, “Oh, there’s a warm pond,” and then some interesting chemistry happens in the warm pond. You actually have to think about the planet as a whole and what it’s gone through in order to really understand whether a planet is a good place for life or not.
Lex Fridman (00:10:16): Why do you think plate tectonics might be useful for the formation of complex life?
Adam Frank (00:10:21): There’s a bunch of different things. One is that the Earth went through a couple of phases of being a snowball planet. We went into a period of glaciation where pretty much the entire planet was under ice. The oceans were frozen.
Adam Frank (00:10:36): Early on in Earth’s history, there was barely any land. We were actually a water world, with just a couple of Australia-sized cratons they called them, proto-continents.
Adam Frank (00:10:48): We went through these snowball Earth phases. If it wasn’t for the fact that we had an active plate tectonics, which had a lot of vulcanism on it, we could have been locked in that forever. Once you get into a snowball state, a planet can be trapped there forever. Which is maybe you already had life formed, but then because it’s so cold, you may never get anything more than just microbes.
Adam Frank (00:11:10): What plate tectonics does, because it fosters more vulcanism, is that you’re going to get carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, which warms the planet up and gets you out of the snowball Earth phase. But even more, there’s even more really important things.
Adam Frank (00:11:26): I just finished a paper where we were looking at something called the Hard Steps Model, which is this model that’s been out there for a long time that purports to say intelligent life in the universe will be really rare. It made all these assumptions about the Earth’s history, particularly about the history of life and the history of the planet have nothing to do with each other. It turns out, and as I was doing the reading for this, that Earth probably, early on, had a more mild form of plate tectonics, and then somewhere about a billion years ago, it ramped up.
Adam Frank (00:11:54): That ramping up changed everything on the planet, because here’s a funny thing. The Earth used to be flat. All the Flat Earthers out there can get excited for one second.
Lex Fridman (00:12:04): Clip it. It still is.
Adam Frank (00:12:08): What I mean by that is that there really weren’t many mountain ranges. The beginning of, I think the term is orogenesis, mountain building, the true Himalayan-style giant mountains, didn’t happen until this more robust form of plate tectonics, where the plates are really being driven around the planet. That is when you get the crusts hitting each other, and they start pushing into these Himalayan- style mountains.
Adam Frank (00:12:30): The weathering of that, the erosion of that puts huge amounts of nutrients, things that microbes want to use, into the oceans. And then what we call the net primary productivity, the bottom of the food chain, how much sugars they are producing, how much photosynthesis they are doing shot up by a factor of almost 1000. The fact that you had plate tectonics supercharged evolution in some sense. We’re not exactly sure how it happened, but it’s clear that the amount of life, the amount of living activity that was happening really got a boost from the fact that something there was this new vigorous form of plate tectonics.
Lex Fridman (00:13:10): It’s nice to have turmoil. In terms of temperature, in terms of surface geometries, in terms of the chemistry of the planet, turmoil.
Adam Frank (00:13:20): Yeah, that’s actually really true. Because what happens is, if you look at the history of life … That’s an excellent point that you’re bringing up. If you look at the history of life on Earth, we get abiogenesis somewhere around at least 3.8 billion years ago. That’s the first microbes. They take over enough that they really do, you get a biosphere. You get a biosphere that is actively changing the planet.
Adam Frank (00:13:40): But then you go through this period they called the Boring Billion, where it’s a billion years and it’s just microbes. Nothing’s happening, it’s just microbes. The microbes are doing amazing things. They’re inventing fermentation. Thank you very much, we appreciate that. But it’s not until you get probably these continents slamming into each other, you really get the beginning of continents forming and driving changes that evolution has to respond to. That on a planetary scale, this turmoil, this chaos is creating new niches, as well as closing other ones. Biology, evolution has to respond to that.
Adam Frank (00:14:15): Somewhere around there is when you get the Cambrian Explosion. It’s when suddenly every body plan … Evolution goes on an orgy, essentially. Yeah. It does look like that chaos or that turmoil was actually very helpful to evolution.
Lex Fridman (00:14:31): I wonder if there is some extremely elevated levels of chaos, almost like catastrophes behind every leap of evolution. You’re not going to have leaps. In human societies, we have an Einstein that comes up with a good idea. But it feels like on an evolutionary timescale, you need some real big drama going on for the evolutionary system to have to come up with a solution to that drama. An extra complex solution to that drama.
Adam Frank (00:15:01): Well, I’m not sure if that’s true. I don’t know if it needs to be an almost extinction event.
Lex Fridman (00:15:05): Right.
Adam Frank (00:15:05): Because it’s certainly true that we have gone through almost extinction events. We’ve had five mass extinctions. But you don’t necessarily see that there was this giant evolutionary leap happening after those.
Adam Frank (00:15:18): With the comet impact, the K-T Boundary, certainly lots of niches opened up. That’s why we’re here, because our ancestors were little basically rodents, rats living under the footsteps of the dinosaurs. It was that comet impact that opened the route for us. That still took another 65 million years. It was like this thing immediately happened.
Adam Frank (00:15:42): But what we found with this Hard Steps Paper, because the whole idea of the Hard Steps Paper was it was one of these anthropic reasoning kinds of things. Where Brandon Carter said, “Oh, look. The intelligence doesn’t show up on Earth until about almost close to when the end of the Sun’s lifetime.” He’s like, “Well, there should be no reason why the Sun’s lifetime and the time for evolution to produce intelligence should be the same.” He goes through all this reasoning, anthropic reasoning. He ends up with the idea that, “Oh, it must be that the odds of getting intelligence are super-low, and so that’s the hard step.”
Adam Frank (00:16:21): There was a series of steps in evolution that were very, very hard. Because of that, you can calculate some probability distributions. Everybody loves a good probability distribution, and they went a long way with this. But it turns out that the whole thing is flawed because, when you look at it, of course the timescale for the Sun’s evolution and the timescale for the evolution on life are coupled, because the timescale for evolution of the Earth is coupled, is about the same timescale as the evolution of the Sun. It’s billions of years. The Earth evolves over billions of years.
Adam Frank (00:16:53): Life and the Earth co-evolve. That’s what Brandon Carter didn’t see is that actually, the fate of the Earth the fate of life are inextricably combined. This is really important for astrobiology, too. Life doesn’t happen on a planet, it happens to a planet. This is something that David Grinspoon and Sara Walker both say, and I agree with this. It’s a really nice way of putting it.
Adam Frank (00:17:19): Plate tectonics, the evolution of oxygen, of an oxygen atmosphere, which only happened because of life. These things, these are things that are happening where life and the planet are sloshing back-and-forth. Rather than, to your point about do you need giant catastrophes, maybe not giant catastrophes. But what happens is, as the Earth and life are evolving together, windows are opening up, evolutionary windows.
Adam Frank (00:17:46): For example, life put oxygen into the atmosphere. When life invented this new form of photosynthesis about 2.5 billion years ago, that broke water apart to work to do its chemical shenanigans. It broke water apart and pushed oxygen into the atmosphere. That’s why there’s oxygen in the atmosphere. It’s only because of life.
Adam Frank (00:18:07): That opened up huge possibilities, new spaces for evolution to happen. But it also changed the chemistry of the planet forever. The introduction of oxygen photosynthesis changed the planet forever, and it opened up a bunch of windows for evolution that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Like for example, you and I, we need that amount of oxygen. Big-brained creatures need an oxygen-rich atmosphere because oxygen is so potent for metabolism. You couldn’t get intelligent creatures 100 million years after the planet formed.
Lex Fridman (00:18:41): So really, on a scale of a planet when there’s billions and trillions of organisms on a planet, they can actually have planetary scale impact.
Adam Frank (00:18:53): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:18:53): The chemical shenanigans of an individual organism when scaled out to trillions can actually change a planet.
Adam Frank (00:18:59): Yeah. We know this for a fact now.
Adam Frank (00:19:00): There was this thing, Gaia Theory, which James Lovelock introduced in the ’70s. And then, Lynn Margulis, the Biologist Lynn Margulis together. This Gaia Theory was the idea that life takes over a planet, life hijacks a planet in a way that the sum total of life creates these feedbacks between the planet and the life, such that it keeps the planet habitable. It’s kind of a homeostasis.
Adam Frank (00:19:29): I can go out … Right now outside, it’s 100-degrees. And I go outside, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. I can go back to Rochester, New York in the winter, and it’s going to be zero-degrees, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. That’s homeostasis.
Adam Frank (00:19:42): The idea of Gaia Theory was that life, the biosphere exerts this pressure on the planet or these feedbacks on the planet, that even as other things are changing, the planet will always stay in the right kinds of conditions for life. Now when this theory came out, it was very controversial. People were like, “Oh my God, what are you, smoking weed?” There were all these Gaian Festivals with Gaian dances. It became very popular in the New Age community.
Adam Frank (00:20:09): But Lovelock actually, they were able to show that no, this has nothing to do with the planet being conscious or anything. It was about these feedbacks, that the biology, the biosphere can exert these feedbacks. We’re still unclear whether there are true Gaian feedbacks, in the sense that the planet can really exert complete control. But it is absolutely true that the biosphere is a major player in Earth’s history.
Lex Fridman (00:20:35): The biosphere fights for homeostasis on Earth.
Adam Frank (00:20:39): Okay. What I would say right now is I don’t know if I can say that scientifically. I can certainly say that the biosphere does a huge amount of the regulation of the planetary state. And over billions of years, has strongly modified the evolution of the planet. A true Gaian feedback would be exactly what you said.
Adam Frank (00:20:57): The biosphere is somewhere … Sara Walker, and David Grinspoon, and I actually did a paper on this about the idea of planetary intelligence, or cognition across a planetary scale. I think that actually is possible. It’s not conscious, but there is a cognitive activity going on. The biosphere, in some sense, knows what is happening because of these feedbacks. It’s still unclear whether we have these full Gaian feedbacks, but we certainly have semi-Gaian feedbacks.
Adam Frank (00:21:24): If there’s a perturbation on the planetary scale, temperature, insulation, how much sunlight’s coming in, the biosphere will start to have feedbacks that will damp that perturbation. Temperature goes up, the biosphere starts doing something, temperature comes down.
Lex Fridman (00:21:39): Now I wonder if the technosphere also has a Gaian feedback or elements of a Gaian feedback? Such that the technosphere will also fight to some degree for homeostasis. Open question, I guess.
Adam Frank (00:21:51): Well, I’m glad you asked that question. Because that paper that David, and Sara, and I wrote, what we were arguing was is that over the history of a planet … When life first forms, 3.8 billion years ago, it’s thin on the ground. You’ve got the first species, these are all microbes. There are not enough of them to exert any kind of these Gaian feedbacks. We call that an immature biosphere. But then as time goes on, as life becomes more robust and it begins to exert these feedbacks keeping the planet in the place where it needs to be for life, we call that a mature biosphere. I’m sure later on, we’re going to talk about definitions of life and such. There’s this great term called autopoiesis that Francisco Varela, the Neurobiologist Francisco Varela came up with. He said, “One of the defining things about life is this property of autopoiesis,” which means self-creating and self-maintaining. Life does not create the conditions which will destroy itself. It’s always trying to keep itself in a place where it can stay alive. The biosphere, from this Gaian perspective, has been autopoietic for billions of years.
Adam Frank (00:23:02): Now we just invented this technosphere in the last couple of hundred years. What we were arguing in that paper is that it’s an immature technosphere. Because right now, with climate change and all the other things we’re doing, the technosphere right now is destroying the conditions under which it needs to maintain itself. The real job for us if we’re going to last over geological timescales, if we want a technosphere that’s going to last tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, then we’ve got to become mature. Which means to not undermine the conditions, to not subvert the conditions that you need to stay alive. As of right now, I’d say we’re not autopoietic.
Lex Fridman (00:23:44): Wow. I wonder if we look across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, that the technosphere should create perturbations as a way for developing greater and greater defenses against perturbations. Which sounds like a ridiculous statement. But basically, go out and play in the yard and hurt yourself, to strengthen. Or drink water from the pond.
Adam Frank (00:24:13): From the pond. Yeah, right. Get sick a few times.
Lex Fridman (00:24:16): To strengthen the immune system.
Adam Frank (00:24:18): Yeah. Well, you know it’s interesting with the technosphere, we can talk about this more. We’re just emerging as a technosphere, in terms of as an interplanetary technosphere. That’s really the next step for us. David Grinspoon talks about it. I love this idea of anti-accretion. This amazing thing that, for the first time over the entire history of the planet, stuff is coming off the planet. It used to be everything just fell down, all the meteorites fell down. But now we’re starting to push stuff out. The idea of planetary defense or such, we are actually going to start exerting perturbations on the solar system as a whole. We’re going to start engineering, if we make it. I always like to say that if we can get through climate change, the prize at the end is the solar system. We’ll be literally engineering the solar system.
Adam Frank (00:25:06): But what you can think of right now with what’s happening with the Anthropocene, the great acceleration that is the technosphere, is the creation of it, that is a giant perturbation on the biosphere. The technosphere sits on top of the biosphere, and if the technosphere undermines the biosphere for its own conditions of habitability, then you’re in trouble. The biosphere is not going away. There’s nothing we could do. The idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous. The Earth is not a furry little bunny that we need to protect. But it’s the conditions for us. Humanity emerged out of the Holocene, the last 10,000 years interglacial period. We can’t tolerate very different kinds of Earths. That’s what I mean about a perturbation.
Lex Fridman (00:25:53): Before we forget, I got to ask you about this paper.
Adam Frank (00:25:55): Right.
Lex Fridman (00:25:56): It’s pretty interesting. There’s an interesting table here about hard steps. Abiogenesis, glucose fermentation to propionic acid, all kinds of steps, all the way to homo sapiens, animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons. Eye precursor, so formation of the eye.
Adam Frank (00:26:13): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:26:13): Complex multicellularity.
Adam Frank (00:26:17): That’s definitely one of the big ones.
Lex Fridman (00:26:18): Yeah. Interesting. What can you say about this chart? There are all kinds of papers talking about, what, the difficulty of these steps?
Adam Frank (00:26:26): Right. This was the idea. What Carter said was, “We’re using anthropic reasoning.” He said, “There must be a few very hard steps for evolution to get through to make it to intelligence.” Some steps are going to be easy, so every generation, you roll the dice. Yeah, it won’t take long for you to get that step. But there must be a few of them, and he said you could even calculate how many there were, five, six, in order to get to intelligence.
Adam Frank (00:26:54): This paper here, this plot is all these different people who’ve written all these papers. This is the point, actually. You can see all these papers that were written on the hard steps. Each one proposing a different set of what those steps should be. There’s this other idea from biology of the major transitions in evolution, MTEs, that those were the hard steps.
Adam Frank (00:27:13): But what we actually found was that none of those are actually hard. The whole idea of hard steps, that there are hard steps, is actually suspect. What’s amazing about this model is it shows how important it is to actually work with people who are in the field. Brandon Carter was a brilliant physicist, the guy who came up with this. And then lots of physicists and astrophysicists like me have used this. But the people who actually study evolution and the planet were never involved.
Adam Frank (00:27:43): If you went and talked to an evolutionary biologist or a bio-geophysicist, they’d look at you when you explained this to them and they’d be like, “What? What are you guys doing?” It turns out, none of the details, or none of the conceptual structure of this matches with what the people who actually study the planet and its evolution.
Lex Fridman (00:28:06): Is it mostly about the fact that there’s not really discrete, big steps? Is this a gradual, continual kind of process?
Adam Frank (00:28:12): Well, there’s two things. The first most important one was that the planet and the biosphere have evolved together.
Lex Fridman (00:28:16): Together.
Adam Frank (00:28:17): That’s something that most bio-geophysicists completely accept. It was the first thing that Carter rejected. He said, “No, that’s probably not possible.” And yet, if he’d only had more discussions with this other community, he would have seen, no, there are actually windows that open up.
Adam Frank (00:28:34): Then the next thing is this idea of whether a step is hard or not. Because for hard, what we mean by a hard step is, like I said, every time there’s a generation, every time there’s a next generation born, you’re rolling the dice on whether this mutation will happen. The idea of something being a hard step, there’s two ways in which something might even appear as a hard step and not be. Or actually not be a hard step at all.
Adam Frank (00:28:56): One is that you see something that has occurred in evolution that has only happened once. Let’s take the opposite, we see something that’s happened multiple times. Like wings, lots of examples of wings over lots of different evolutionary lineages. Making wings is not a hard step.
Adam Frank (00:29:12): There’s certain other things that people say, “No, that’s a hard step.” Oxygen, the oxygen photosynthesis. But they tend to be so long ago that we’ve lost all the information. There could be other things in the fossil record that made this innovation, but they’re just gone now so you can’t tell, so there’s information loss.
Adam Frank (00:29:32): The other thing is the idea of pulling up the ladder. That somebody, some species makes the innovation, but then it fills the niche and nobody else can do it again. Yeah, it only happened once but it happened once because basically, the creature was so successful it took over, and there was no space for anybody else to evolve it.
Adam Frank (00:29:49): Yeah. The interesting thing about this was seeing how much, once you look at the details of life’s history on Earth, how it really shifts you away from this hard steps model. It shows you that those details, as we were talking about with do you have to know about the planet, do you have to know about plate tectonics? Yeah, you’re going to have to.
Lex Fridman (00:30:07): To be fair to Carter on the first point, it makes it much more complicated if life and the planet are co-evolving. Because it would be nice to consider the planet as a static thing that sets the initial conditions.
Adam Frank (00:30:23): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:30:24): And then we can, from an outside perspective, analyze planets based on the initial conditions they create. Then there’s a binary yes or no at will it create life. But if they co-evolve, it’s a really complex dynamical system, the way everything is … Because it’s much more difficult from the perspective of settee. Of looking out there and trying to figure out which ones are actually producing life.
Adam Frank (00:30:50): But I think we’re at the point now, now there may be other kinds of principles that actually … Co-evolution actually has its own. Not deterministic, you’re done with determinism.
Lex Fridman (00:30:59): Yeah.
Adam Frank (00:31:00): But complex systems have patterns.
Lex Fridman (00:31:03): Yeah.
Adam Frank (00:31:03): Complex systems have constraints. That’s actually what we’re going to be looking for, are constraints on them.
Adam Frank (00:31:10): Again, nothing against Carter. It was a brilliant idea. But it just goes to show you … I’m a theoretical physicist. Give me a simplified model, with dynamical equations and some initial conditions, I’m very happy. But there’s this great XTC comic, where somebody’s working something out on the board, and this physicist is looking over and saying, ” Oh, oh, I just wrote down an equation for that. I solved your problem. Do you guys even have a journal for this?” The subtitle is Why Everybody Hates Physicists.
Lex Fridman (00:31:37): Yeah.
Adam Frank (00:31:38): Sometimes that approach totally works.
Lex Fridman (00:31:40): Yeah.
Adam Frank (00:31:40): Sometimes physicists, we can be very good at zooming in on what is important and casting the details aside so you can get to the heart of an issue. That’s very useful sometimes. Other times, it obfuscates. Other times, it clouds over actually what you needed to focus on, especially when it comes to complexity.
Lex Fridman (00:32:02): Speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation, let’s return back to the question of how many alien civilizations are out there and talk about the Drake Equation.
Adam Frank (00:32:12): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:32:12): Can you explain the Drake Equation?
Adam Frank (00:32:15): People have various feelings about the Drake Equation. It can be abused. The story actually is really interesting.
Adam Frank (00:32:23): Frank Drake in 1960 does the first ever astrobiological experiment. He gets a radio telescope, points it at a couple of stars, and listens for signals. That was the first time anybody had done any experiment about any kind of life in the history of humanity. He does it, and he’s waiting for everybody to make fun of him. Instead, he gets a phone call from the government and says, “Hey, we want you to do a meeting on interstellar communications.” He’s like, “Okay.”
Adam Frank (00:32:51): They organized a meeting with just eight people. A young Carl Sagan is going to be there as well. The night before, Drake has to come up with an agenda. How do you come up with an agenda for a meeting on a topic that no one’s ever talked about before? What he does, what’s so brilliant about the Drake Equation, is he breaks the problem of how many civilizations are there out there into a bunch of sub-problems. He breaks it into seven sub-problems. Each one of them is a factor in an equation that, when you multiply them all together, you get the number of civilizations out there that we could communicate with.
Adam Frank (00:33:28): The first term is the rate at which stars form. The second term is the fraction of those stars that have plants, F-sub-P. The next term is the number of planets in the habitable zone, the place where we think life could form. The next term after that is the fraction of those planets where actually an abiogenesis event, life forms, occurs. The next one is the fraction of planets on which you start to get intelligence. After that, it’s the fraction of planets where that intelligence goes on to create a civilization. Then finally, the last term, which is the one that we really care about, is the lifetime, have a civilization and how long does it last.
Lex Fridman (00:34:08): When you say we, we humans?
Adam Frank (00:34:09): We humans, because we’re staring at multiple guns pointing at us.
Lex Fridman (00:34:13): Yeah.
Adam Frank (00:34:14): Nuclear war, climate change, AI. How long in general does civilizations last?
Adam Frank (00:34:20): Now each one of these terms, what was brilliant about what he did was, what he was doing was he was quantifying our ignorance. By breaking the problem up into these seven sub-problems, he gave astronomers something to do. This is always with a new research field, you need a research program or else you just have a bunch of vague questions. You don’t even know really what you’re trying to do.
Adam Frank (00:34:41): The star people could figure out how many stars were forming per year. The people who were interested in planets could go out and find techniques to discover planets, et cetera, et cetera.
Lex Fridman (00:34:50): These are their own fields. Essentially by creating this equation, he’s launching new fields.
Adam Frank (00:34:56): Yeah. That’s exactly … He gave astrobiology, which wasn’t even a term then, a roadmap. “Okay, you guys go do this, you go do that.”
Adam Frank (00:35:03): And then, a roadmap like, “Okay, you guys go do this, you go do that, you go do that.” And it had such far-reaching effect on astrobiology because it did break the problem up in a way that gave useful marching orders for all these different groups. For example, it’s because of the Drake equation in some sense that people who were involved in SETI pushed NASA to develop the technologies for planet hunting. There was this amazing meeting in 1978, two meetings, 1978 and 1979, that were driven in some part by the people who were involved in SETI getting NASA together to say, “Look, okay, look, what’s the roadmap for us to develop technologies to find planets?”
Adam Frank (00:35:45): So, the Drake equation is absolutely foundational for astrobiology, but we should remember that it’s not a law of nature. It’s not equal to MC squared. And so, you can see it being abused in some sense. Yeah, it’s generated a trillion papers. Some of those papers are good, I’ve written some of those. And some of those papers are bad, I’m not sure where my paper fits in on those. I’m saying one should be careful about what you’re using it for. But in terms of understanding the problem that astrobiology faces, this really broke it up in a useful way.
Lex Fridman (00:36:20): We could talk about each one of these, but let’s just look at exoplanets.
Adam Frank (00:36:24): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:36:25): So, that’s a really interesting one. I think when you look back hundreds of years from now, was it in the 90s when they first detected the first-
Adam Frank (00:36:32): Yeah. ’92 and ’95. ’95 to me was really, that was the discovery of the first planet orbiting a sun-like star. To me, that was the water, the dam being broken.
Lex Fridman (00:36:40): I think that’s one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.
Adam Frank (00:36:45): I agree. I agree.
Lex Fridman (00:36:46): Right now, I guess nobody’s celebrating it too much because you don’t know what it really means. But I think once we almost certainly will find life out there, it will obviously allow us to generalize across the entire galaxy of the entire universe. So, if you can find life on a planet, even in the solar system, you can now start generalizing across the entire universe.
Adam Frank (00:37:12): You can, all you need is one. Right now, our understanding of life, we have one example. We have N equals one example of life. So, that means we could be an accident. It could be that we’re the only place in the entire universe where this weird thing called life has occurred. Get one more example and now you’re done, because if you have one more example, now you don’t have to find all the other examples. You just know that it’s happened more than once, and now you are from a Bayesian perspective, you can start thinking like, “Yeah. Life is not something that’s hard to make.”
Lex Fridman (00:37:43): Well, let me get your sense of estimates for the Drake equation. You’ve also written a paper expanding on the Drake equation, but what do you think is the answer?
Adam Frank (00:37:51): So, there was this paper we wrote, Woody Sullivan and I in 2016, where we said, “Look, we have all this exoplanet data now.” So, the thing that exoplanet science and the exoplanet census I was talking about before have nailed is F sub P, the fraction of stars that have planets, it’s one. Every fricking star that you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds. I mean, it’s mind-boggling because those are all places, right? They’re either gas giants, probably with moons, so the moons are places you can stand and look out. Or they’re like terrestrial worlds where even if there’s not life, there’s still snow falling and there’s oceans washing up on shorelines.
Adam Frank (00:38:33): It’s incredible to think how many places and stories there are out there. So, the first term was F sub P, which is how many stars have planets. The next term is how many planets are in the habitable zone on average, and it turns out to be one over five, so around 0.2. So, that means you just count five of them go out at night and go one, two, three, four, five. One of them has an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, like, whoa.
Lex Fridman (00:39:00): So, what defines a habitable zone?
Adam Frank (00:39:02): Habitable zone is an idea that was developed in the 1958 by the Chinese American astronomer, Xu Sheng, and it was a brilliant idea. It said, “Look, I can do the simple calculation. If I take a planet and just stick it at some distance from a star of what’s the temperature of the planet? What’s the temperature of the surface?” So now, give it a standard Earth-like atmosphere and ask, “Could there be liquid water on the surface?” We believe that liquid water is really important for life. There could be other things that’s happening fine, but if you were to start off trying to make life, you’d probably choose water as your solvent for it.
Adam Frank (00:39:41): So basically, the habitable zone is the band of orbits around a star where you can have liquid water on the surface. You could take a glass of water, pour it on the surface, and it would just pull up. It wouldn’t freeze immediately, which would happen if your planet is too far out and it wouldn’t just boil away if your planet’s too close in. So, that’s the formal definition of the habitable zone. So, it’s a nice strict definition, there’s probably way more going on than that, but this is a place to start.
Lex Fridman (00:40:07): Well, we should say it’s a place to start, I do think it’s too strict of a constraint.
Adam Frank (00:40:11): I would agree.
Lex Fridman (00:40:12): We’re talking about temperature where water can be on the surface. There’s so many other ways to get the aforementioned turmoil where the temperature varies, whether it’s volcanic, so interaction of volcanoes and ice and all of this on the moons of planets that are much farther away, all this kind of stuff.
Adam Frank (00:40:33): Yeah. Well, for example, we know in our own solar system we have, say Europa, the moon of Jupiter, which has got a hundred-mile-deep ocean under 10 miles of ice. That’s not in the habitable zone, that is outside the habitable zone, and that may be the best place. It’s got more water than Earth does, all of its oceans. It’s twice as much water on Europa than there is on Earth. So, that may be a really great for life to form, and it’s outside the habitable zone. So, the habitable zone is a good place to start and it helps us. And there’s reasons why you do want to focus on the habitable zone, because like Europa, I won’t be able to see from across telescopic distances across light years.
Adam Frank (00:41:12): I wouldn’t be able to see life on Europa because it’s under 10 miles of ice. So, with the important thing about planets in the habitable zone is that we’re thinking they have atmospheres. Atmospheres are the things we can characterize across 10, 50 light years and we can see biosignatures as we’re going to talk about. So, there is a reason why the habitable zone becomes important for the detection of extra solar life.
Lex Fridman (00:41:37): But for me, when I look up at the stars, it’s very likely that there’s a habitable planet or moon in each of the stars, habitable defined broadly.
Adam Frank (00:41:47): Yeah, I think that’s not unreasonable to say, especially since the formal definition, you get one in five, right? One in five is a lot, there’s a lot of stars in the sky. So yeah, saying that in general, when I look at a star, there’s a pretty good chance that there’s something habitable orbiting it. It is not a unreasonable scientific claim.
Lex Fridman (00:42:06): To me, it seems like there should be alien civilizations everywhere. Why the Fermi paradox? Why haven’t we seen them?
Adam Frank (00:42:17): 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.
Adam Frank (00:42:55): 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.
Adam Frank (00:43:34): 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.
Adam Frank (00:44:12): 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.
Adam Frank (00:44:49): 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.
Adam Frank (00:45:25): 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.
Adam Frank (00:46:39): 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.
Lex Fridman (00:47:09): So, if there was an alien camp here, an alien village, a small civilization, maybe even large civilizations?
Adam Frank (00:47:17): Even a large civilization, even if it was-
Lex Fridman (00:47:19): 100 million years ago?
Adam Frank (00:47:20): And it lasted 10,000 years, fossil record’s not going to have it. Yeah, the fossil record is too sparse, most things don’t fossilize.
Lex Fridman (00:47:28): Yeah.
Adam Frank (00:47:28): And 10,000 years is a blink in the eye of geological time. So, Gavin called this the Silurian Hypothesis after the Doctor who episode with the lizard creatures, the Silurians. And so, that paper got a lot of press, but it was an important idea, and this was really Gavin’s, I was just helping with the astrobiology. That to recognize that like, “Yeah, we could have been visited a long time ago there just would be no record.” Yeah, it’s mind-blowing.
Lex Fridman (00:47:56): It’s really mind-blowing.
Adam Frank (00:47:57): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:47:57): And it’s also a good reminder that intelligent species have been here for a very short amount of time.
Adam Frank (00:48:05): Very short amount of time. Yeah. This is not to say that there was, so I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper, and I had to always emphasize, we’re not saying there was a Silurian, but we’re just saying that if there was, that’s why I love Gavin’s question. Gavin’s question was just like, “How could you tell”? It was a very beautifully scientific question. That’s what we were really showing is that unless you did a very specific kind of search, which nobody’s done so far, there’s not an obvious way to tell that there could have been civilizations here earlier on.
Lex Fridman (00:48:40): I’ve actually been reading a lot about ancient civilizations, and it just makes me sad how much of the wisdom of that time is lost and how much guessing is going on, whether it’s in South America, what happened in the jungle.
Adam Frank (00:48:57): Like the Amazon, that was the conquistadors came and wiped everybody out, and especially just even the plague may have decimated. So yeah, how much of that civilization.
Lex Fridman (00:49:09): And there’s a lot of theories, and because of archaeology only looks at cities, they don’t really know the origins of humans.
Adam Frank (00:49:19): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:49:19): And there’s a lot of really interesting theories, and there are of course controversial and there’s a lot of controversial people in every discipline, but archaeology is a fascinating one because we know so little. They’re basically storytellers, you’re assembling the picture from just very few puzzle pieces, and it’s fascinating. It’s humbling and it’s sad that there could be entire civilizations, ancient civilizations that are either almost entirely or entirely lost.
Adam Frank (00:49:48): Yeah. Well, the indigenous peoples of North America, there could have been millions and millions. We get this idea that like, oh, the Europeans came and it was empty. But it may have only been empty because the plague gets swept up from what happened in Mesoamerica, and they didn’t really build cities. They didn’t build wooden or stone cities, they built wooden cities.
Lex Fridman (00:50:13): Everybody seems to be building pyramids and they’re really damn good at it. I don’t know-
Adam Frank (00:50:17): What it is up with a pyramid. Why does that apply? What archetype in our brain is that?
Lex Fridman (00:50:22): And it is also really interesting, speaking of archetypes, is that independent civilizations formed and they had a lot of similar dynamics like human nature when it builds up hierarchies in a certain way, it builds up myths and religions in a certain way, it builds pyramids in a certain way. It goes to war, all this kind of stuff independently, which is fascinating.
Adam Frank (00:50:48): Santa Fe Institute, the stuff the Santa Fe Institute does on these as complex systems, the origin of hierarchies and such. Very cool.
Lex Fridman (00:50:55): Yeah, Santa Fe folks, complexity in general is really cool.
Adam Frank (00:50:59): Really cool.
Lex Fridman (00:51:00): What phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things get together and interact? Going back to this paper, a new empirical constraint on the prevalence of technological species in the universe. This paper that expands on the Drake equation, what are some interesting things in this paper?
Adam Frank (00:51:16): Well, so the main thing we were trying to do with this paper is say, “Look, we have all of this exoplanet data.” It’s got to be good for something, especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down empirically are two terms in the Drake equation. So, F sub P, that’s the second term, fraction of stars that have planets, and then N sub E, the average number of planets in the habitable zone. Those are the second and third term in the Drake equation. So, what that means is all the astronomical terms have been nailed. And so, we said, “Okay, how do we use this to do something with the Drake equation?”
Adam Frank (00:51:46): And so, we realized is, “Well, okay, we got to get rid of time.” The lifetime thing, we can’t say anything about that, but if we don’t ask how long do they last but instead ask, “What’s the probability that there have been any civilizations at all?” No matter how long they lasted, I’m not asking whether they exist now or not, I’m just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe and that we were able to constrain. And so, what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run.
Adam Frank (00:52:35): And the only way that we’re this whole process from a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed. So therefore, you could put a probability, we called it the pessimism line. We don’t really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, but we could set a limit using this. We could say, “Look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22, 1 in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we’re alone.” If it’s anywhere larger than that, then we’re not the first, it’s happened somewhere else. And to me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn’t tell me there’s anybody nearby, the galaxy could be sterile.
Adam Frank (00:53:17): It just told me that unless nature’s really has some bias against civilizations, we’re not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
Lex Fridman (00:53:29): 10 billion trillion experiments.
Adam Frank (00:53:33): Yeah, that’s a lot of experiments.
Lex Fridman (00:53:35): That’s a lot.
Adam Frank (00:53:35): Right.
Lex Fridman (00:53:35): 1,000 is a lot.
Adam Frank (00:53:36): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:53:36): 100 is a lot.
Adam Frank (00:53:39): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:53:40): If we, normal humans saw 100 experiments, and we knew that at least one time there was a successful human civilization built we would say for sure, in 100 you’ll get another one.
Adam Frank (00:53:55): Yeah. So, that’s why these kinds of arguments you have to be careful of what they can do. But I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists. So, that’s why we called it the pessimism line. Throughout history, there’s been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they’ve been yelling at each other, that’s all they had to go with. And with Giordano Bruno in 1600, they burned the guy at the stake for being an alien optimist. But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant. We thought this was like the plank length, this was the plank length of astrobiology.
Adam Frank (00:54:27): Gave you an actual number that if you could somehow calculate what the probability of forming a technological civilization was, this thing shows you where the limit is. As long as you’re above 10 to the minus 22, then you actually absolutely, it has occurred in the history. Other civilizations have occurred in the history of the universe.
Lex Fridman (00:54:47): So, to me, at least, the big question is FE, which is basically a biogenesis. How hard is it for life to originate in a planet? Because all the other ones seem very likely, everything seems very likely. The only open question to me is how hard is it for life to originate?
Adam Frank (00:55:03): There’s lots of ways to, again, we don’t know unless we look, and you had Sarah Walker around not too long ago, she’s very interested in origins of life. So, lots of people are working on this. But I think it’s hard looking at the history of the Earth, and again, you can do Bayesian arguments on this. But yeah, forming life I don’t think is hard. Getting basic biology started, I don’t think is hard. It’s still wild, it’s an amazing process that actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is and what life isn’t. That’s one of the things I like about Sarah’s work, we’re pursuing on a different level about life as the only system that uses information. But still, regardless of all those kinds of details, life is probably easy to make. That’s my gut feeling.
Lex Fridman (00:55:55): Day by day, this changes for me, but I just see that once you create bacteria, it is off to the races. You’re going to get complex life as long as you have enough time. That boring billion, but I just can’t imagine a habitable planet not having a couple of billion to spare.
Adam Frank (00:56:15): Yeah, a couple billion years to spare. There is a mystery there about why did it take so long with the Cambrian explosion, but that may be again, about these windows. That it couldn’t happen until the window, the planet and the life had evolved together enough that they together opened the window for the next step. Intelligent life and how long intelligent, technological civilizations, I think there’s a big question about how long those last. And I’m hopeful, but in terms of just, I think life is absolutely going to be common, pretty common in the universe.
Lex Fridman (00:56:52): Yeah. I think, again, if I were to bet everything, even in advanced civilizations are common. So, to me then the only explanation is the L. Our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations.
Adam Frank (00:57:09): Yeah. You think about it, we’ve only been around, truly when we think about in Drake’s definition, you had to have radio telescopes, that’s been 100 years. And if we got another 10,000, 100,000 years of history, for us, it’d be pretty amazing. But that still, that wouldn’t be long enough to really pop up the number of civilizations in the galaxy. So, you really need it to be hundreds of millions of years. And that raises a question, which I am very interested in, which is how do we even talk about, I call it the billion-year civilization. How do we even begin to hypothesize or think about in any kind of systematic way, what happens to a technological civilization across hundreds of millions to a billion years?
Lex Fridman (00:57:52): Yeah. How do you even simulate the trajectories as civilizations can take across that kind of timescale?
Adam Frank (00:57:58): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:57:58): When all the data we have is just for the 10,000 years or so, 20,000 years that humans have been building civilizations.
Adam Frank (00:58:06): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:58:08): And I don’t know what you put it at, but maybe 100 years that we’ve been technological?
Adam Frank (00:58:12): And we’re ready to blow ourselves to bits or drive ourselves off the planet. Yeah, no, it’s really interesting. But there’s got to be a way that I think that’s really a frontier. So, you had David Kipping on not too long ago, and David and I did a paper and Caleb Scharf, David really drove this. Where it was a Bayesian calculation to ask the question, “If you were to find a detection, if you were to find a signal or a techno signature, would that come from a civilization that was younger your age or older?” And you could see, this is not hard to do, but it was great. The formalism, the formalism was hard. It’s intuitive, but the formalism was hard to show that, yeah, they’re older, probably much older.
Adam Frank (00:58:49): So, that means you really do need to think about like, “Okay, how do billion-year civilizations manifest themselves? What signatures will they leave?” And yeah, what’s so cool about it, it’s so much fun because you have to imagine the unimaginable. Obviously biological evolution can happen on those kinds of timescales, so you wouldn’t even really be the same thing you started out as. But social forms, what kind of social forms can you imagine that would be continuous over that? Or maybe they wouldn’t be continuous, should get they drop out, they destroy themselves, and then they come back. So, maybe it’s a punctuated evolution, but this is the fun part we have to work this out.
Lex Fridman (00:59:31): Well, one way to approach that question is what are the different ways to achieve homeostasis is you get greater and greater technological innovation. So, if you expand out into the universe and you have up to Kardashev scale, what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself? Just achieve stability while still growing. That’s an interesting question, I think it’s probably simulatable?
Adam Frank (01:00:00): Could be, agent-based modeling you could do it with. So, our group has used agent-based modeling to do something like the Fermi paradox that was agent-based modeling. But you can also do this. People at Santa Fe have done this, other groups have done this to do use agent-based modeling to track the formation of hierarchies, the formation of stable hierarchies. So, I think it’s actually very doable, but understanding the assumptions and principles that are going into it and what you can extract from those, that is what is the frontier.
Lex Fridman (01:00:32): Do you think if humans colonize Mars, the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars will be fundamentally different than the dynamic between individual nations on Earth right now? That’s a thing to load into the agent-based simulation we’re talking about.
Adam Frank (01:00:50): Yeah. If we settle it, Mars will very quickly want to become its own nation.
Lex Fridman (01:00:53): Well, no, there’s already going to be nations on Mars that’s guaranteed-
Adam Frank (01:00:58): Yeah. And they’re there on-
Lex Fridman (01:00:59): 2 million people. The moment you have 1 million people, there’s going to be two tribes.
Adam Frank (01:01:03): Right.
Lex Fridman (01:01:04): And then they’re going to start fighting.
Adam Frank (01:01:06): Right.
Lex Fridman (01:01:06): And the question is, interplanetary fighting. How quickly does that happen and does it have a different nature to it because of the distances?
Adam Frank (01:01:14): Are you a fan of The Expanse? Have you watched The Expanse? Great show, I highly recommend to everybody. It’s based on a series of books that are excellent. It’s on Prime, six seasons, and it’s basically about the settled solar system. It takes place about 300 years from now, and the entire solar system is settled, and it is the best show about interplanetary politics. The first season, actually, the journal, what was it? Foreign Affairs said the best show on TV about politics it takes place is interplanetary. So yeah, I think human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict.
Adam Frank (01:01:49): And I don’t think it’ll be necessarily all that different because really I think within a few hundred years we will have lots of people in the solar system, and it doesn’t even have to be on Mars. We did a paper where we look based on, because I always wanted to know about whether an idea in The Expanse was really possible. In The Expanse, the asteroid belt, what they’ve done is they have colonized the asteroid belt by hollowing out the asteroids and spinning them up and living on the inside because they have the Coriolis force. And I thought like, “Wow, what a cool idea.”
Adam Frank (01:02:17): And when I ran the blog for NPR, actually talked to the guys and said, “Did you guys calculate this to see whether it’s possible?” Sadly, it’s not possible. The rock is just not strong enough that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one third gravity, which is what I think the minimum you need for human beings. The rock would just fall apart, it would break. But we came up with another idea, which was that if you could take small asteroids, put a giant bag around them, a nanofiber bag and spin those up, it would inflate the bag. And then even a small couple of kilometer wide asteroid would expand out to, you could get a Manhattan’s worth of material inside.
Adam Frank (01:02:54): So, forget about even colonizing Mars space stations or space habitats with millions of people in them. So anyway, the point is that I think within a few hundred years, it is not unimaginable that there will be millions, if not billions of people living in the solar system.
Lex Fridman (01:03:11): You think most of them will be in space habitats versus on Mars on the planetary surface?
Adam Frank (01:03:16): It’s a lot easier on some level. It depends on how with nanofabrication and such, but getting down to gravity well is hard. So, there’s a certain way in which it’s a lot easier to build real estate out of the asteroids, but we’ll probably do both. I think what’ll happen is the next, should we make it through climate change and nuclear war and all the other, and AI? The next 1,000 years of human history is the solar system. And so, I think we’ll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can, and what I love about, what’s hopeful about it is this idea you’re going to have all of these pockets, and I’m sure there’s going to be a Mormon space habitat.
Adam Frank (01:03:57): Whatever you want, a libertarian space habitat, everybody’s going to be able to create, there’ll be lots of experiments in human flourishing. And those kinds of experiments will be really useful for us to figure out better ways for us to interact and have maximum flourishing, maximum wellness, maximum democracy, maximum freedom.
Lex Fridman (01:04:15): Do you think that’s a good backup solution to go out into space, so to avoid the possibility of humans destroying themselves completely here on Earth?
Adam Frank (01:04:24): Well, I think I want to be always careful with that, because like I said, it’s centuries that we’re talking about. So, the problem with climate change, and same thing with nuclear war, it’s breathing down our necks now. So, trying to establish a base on Mars it’s going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple a century at least. So, it’s not like a backup plan now, we have to solve the problem of climate change, we have to deal with that. There’s still enough nuclear weapons to really do horrific things to the planet for human beings.
Adam Frank (01:04:59): So, I don’t think it’s a backup plan in that way, but I do think, like I said, it’s the prize. If we get through this, then we get the entire solar system to play around and experiment with and do really cool things with.
Lex Fridman (01:05:11): Well, I think it could be a lot less than a couple of centuries if there’s a urgency, a real urgency, like a catastrophe. Maybe a small nuclear war breaks out where it’s like, holy shit, this is for sure a bigger one is looming. Maybe if geopolitically the war between China and the United States escalates where there’s this tension that builds and builds and builds and it becomes more obvious that we need to really, really [inaudible 01:05:39].
Adam Frank (01:05:39): Yeah. I think my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a self-sufficient base is so far away. That say you start doing that and then there is a full-scale nuclear exchange that base is, it’s not going to last because the self-sufficiency requires a kind of economy. Literally a material economy that we are so far from with Mars that we are centuries from. Like I said, three centuries, which is not that long, two to three centuries. Look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster than 60 miles an hour unless they were falling off a cliff. And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour, but it is centuries long.
Adam Frank (01:06:17): So, that’s why I think we’d be better off trying to solve these problems than I just think the odds that we’re going to be able to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small. So, we’d have to deal with the threat.
Lex Fridman (01:06:35): That’s an interesting scientific and engineering question of how to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars or out in space as a space habitat where Earth entirely could be destroyed, you could still survive.
Adam Frank (01:06:47): Yeah. Because it’s really what about, thinking about complex systems? A space habitat would have to be as robust as an ecosystem. As the kind of thing, you go out and you see a pond with all the different webs of interactions. That’s why I always think that if this process of going out into space will help us with climate change and with thinking about making a long-term sustainable version of human civilization. Because you really have to think about these webs, the complexity of these webs and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever. The biosphere knows how to do this.
Adam Frank (01:07:23): And so, A, how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere that also doesn’t mess with the biosphere, mess with the biosphere’s capacity to support our technosphere? So, by trying to build space habitats, in some sense, you’re thinking about building a small-scale version of this. So, I think the two problems are going to feedback on each other.
Lex Fridman (01:07:44): Well, there’s also the other possibility of the movie Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth, where we can create this life gun that just shoots as opposed to engineering everything. Basically, seeding life on a bunch of places and letting life do its thing, which is really good at doing it seems like. So, as opposed to with a space habitat, you basically have to build the entire biosphere and technosphere, the whole thing-
Adam Frank (01:08:13): The whole thing.
Lex Fridman (01:08:13): … by yourself. If you just, hey, the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria, place it in Europa, I think you’d be surprised what happens.
Adam Frank (01:08:25): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:08:25): Honestly, if you put a huge amount of bacteria, a giant number of organisms from Earth into on Mars, on some of these moons of the other planets in the solar system, I feel like some of them would actually find a way to survive.
Adam Frank (01:08:45): The moon is hard, the moon may be really hard. But I wonder if somebody must’ve done these experiments. Because we know they’re extremophiles, we know that you can go down 10 miles below the Earth’s surface. And there are things where there’s no sunlight, the conditions are so extreme and there’s lots of microbes having a great time living off the radioactivity in the rocks. But they had lots of time to evolve to those conditions, so I’m not sure if you dumped a bunch of bacteria, so somebody must’ve done these experiments. How fast could microbial evolution occur in under harsh conditions that you maybe get somebody who figures out, ” Okay, I can deal with this.”
Adam Frank (01:09:30): I think the Moon’s too much because it’s so sterile. But Mars, I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know, but it’s an interesting idea.
Lex Fridman (01:09:37): I wonder if somebody has done those experiments.
Adam Frank (01:09:39): Yeah, you think somebody would, let’s take a bunch of microbes-
Lex Fridman (01:09:43): The harshest possible condition of all different kinds, temperature, all this kind of stuff.
Adam Frank (01:09:46): Right, pressure, salinity, and then just dump a bunch of things that are not used to it, and then just see, does everybody just die? That’s it.
Lex Fridman (01:09:55): The thing about life, it flourishes in a non-sterile environment where there’s a bunch of options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh-
Lex Fridman (01:10:03): … Options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh. In the lab, I don’t know if you can reconstruct harsh conditions plus options for survival. You know what I mean? You have to have the huge variety of resources that are always available on a planet somehow, even when it’s a super harsh condition. So that’s actually not a trivial experiment and if somebody did that experiment in the lab, I’d be a little bit skeptical because I could see bacteria doesn’t survive in this kind of temperature. But then I’d be like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Adam Frank (01:10:38): Right. Are there other options? Is the condition rich enough?
Lex Fridman (01:10:41): Rich enough, yeah.
Adam Frank (01:10:42): There’s an alternative view though, which is, there’s this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora. So there’s been 1,000,000 sentry ship stories where Earth sends out a generation ship or sentry ship, and it goes to another planet and they land and they colonize. And on this one, they get all the way there and they think the planet’s going to be habitable. And it turns out that it’s not habitable for earth life. There’s bacteria or prions actually, that just kill people in the simplest way. And the important thing about this book was the idea that life is actually very tied to its planet. It may not be so easy. I just thought it was a really interesting idea. I’m not saying necessarily supporting it, but that actually, life reflects the planetary conditions… Not the planetary, the planet itself, the whole lineage, the whole history of the biosphere. And it may not be so easy to just be like, “Oh, just drop it over here and it’ll…”
Adam Frank (01:11:35): Because the bacteria, even though they’re individual examples of life, and I believe this the true unit of life, it’s not DNA, it’s not a cell, it’s the biosphere. It’s the whole community.
Lex Fridman (01:11:46): Yeah. That’s actually an interesting field of study is how when you arrive from one planet to another… So we humans arrive to a planet that has a biosphere, maybe a technosphere, what is the way to integrate without killing yourself or-
Adam Frank (01:12:06): Or the other one?
Lex Fridman (01:12:06): Or the other one? Let’s stick to biology. That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if we have a rigorous way of investigating that.
Adam Frank (01:12:18): Because everything on life has the same lineage. We all come from LUCA, the last universal common ancestor. And what you see is often in science fiction, people will do things like, “Oh, well, it’s okay,” because that metabolism, that biochemistry is so different from ours that we can coexist because they don’t even know each other.
Lex Fridman (01:12:35): Right.
Adam Frank (01:12:37): And then the other version is you get there, you land, and instantly, the nose bleeds and you’re dead. So it’s-
Lex Fridman (01:12:43): Unfortunately, I think it’s the latter.
Adam Frank (01:12:44): Yeah, it feels like the alien kind of thing.
Lex Fridman (01:12:48): So as we look out there, according to the Drake equations we just discussed, it seems impossible to me that there’s not civilizations everywhere. So how do we look at them, this process of SETI?
Adam Frank (01:12:59): I have to put on my scientist hat and just say, my gut feeling is that dumb life, so to speak, is common. I can see ways in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse, but until… We got to go look, it’s all armchair astronomy.
Lex Fridman (01:13:15): That’s from a rigorous scientific perspective. From my bro science perspective, it seems, again, smoking the aforementioned weed-
Adam Frank (01:13:24): Smoking the weed, yeah. After the bong hit, it seems so.
Lex Fridman (01:13:28): Honestly, it really just seems impossible to me that there’s not potentially dead, but advanced civilizations everywhere in our galaxy.
Adam Frank (01:13:37): Yeah, yeah. The potentially dead part, I think, right. It could be that making civilizations is easy, they just don’t last long. So when we went out there, we’d find a lot of extinct civilizations.
Lex Fridman (01:13:45): Extinct civilizations. Yeah. Apex predators don’t survive. They get better, better, better.
Adam Frank (01:13:51): Right.
Lex Fridman (01:13:51): And they die, kill themselves all somehow. Anyway. So just how do we find them?
Adam Frank (01:13:56): Yeah. So SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Technology is a term that I am not fond of using anymore. Some people in my field are. So I’m sorry folks, but what I really like is the idea of technosignatures because I think to me, SETI is the… First of all, intelligence. We’re not really looking for intelligence. We’re looking for technology, and SETI, the classic idea of SETI is the radio telescopes and contact, Jodie Foster with the headphones. That whole thing is still part, it’s still active, there’s still great things going on with it, but suddenly, this whole new window opened up. When we discovered exoplanets, we now found a new way to look for intelligence civilizations or life in general in a way that doesn’t have any of the assumptions that had to go into the classic radio SETI. And specifically, what I mean is we’re not looking for somebody sending us a beacon. You really needed that with a classic model, for a bunch of different reasons. You have to assume they wanted to be found and they were sending you a super powerful beacon.
Adam Frank (01:14:56): Now, because we know exactly where to look and we know exactly how to look, we can just go about looking for passive signatures of the civilization, going about its civilizationing business, without asking whether they want to be contacted or not. So this is what we call a biosignature or a technosignature. It is an imprint in the light from the planet of the activity of a biosphere or a technosphere, and that’s really important. That is why the whole Gaia idea ends up being astrobiological, that biospheres and technospheres are so potent, they change the entire planet, and you can see that from 20 light years.
Adam Frank (01:15:36): So let’s give an example of a biosignature to start off with, which would be a signature of a biosphere, oxygen. Right? On earth at least, we know that oxygen is only in the atmosphere because life put it there. If life went away, the oxygen, and particularly oxygen and methane, that pair, they would disappear very quickly. They’d react away. They’d all be gone. So if you find a planet with oxygen and methane, that’s a good bet that there’s a biosphere there. Okay, what about technospheres? Technospheres, so I’m the principal investigator on the first grant NASA has ever given to do these exoplanet technosignatures. For reasons we can talk about, NASA had gotten pretty gun-shy about funding anything about intelligent life, but okay. What’s an example of a technosignature? Well, one could be atmospheric, “Pollution.” I’m going to put, “Pollution,” in quotes here because it doesn’t have to be pollution, but gases like chlorofluorocarbons.
Adam Frank (01:16:33): So we dumped a huge amount of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere by mistake. It was affecting the ozone, but we put so much in there that actually, this is one of the things we did, we did a paper where we showed, you could detect it across interstellar distances. You could look at the atmosphere, look at the light coming from a distant planet, pass the light through a spectrograph and see the spectral lines, the fingerprint, the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons in an atmosphere. And that would for sure tell you that there was a technological civilization there, because there’s no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons except through some kind of industrial process.
Lex Fridman (01:17:11): So in the case of the biosphere, you’re looking for anomalies in the spectrograph?
Adam Frank (01:17:17): I wouldn’t necessarily call these anomalies. For biosignature, I’m looking for things that a geosphere, right? That just rock and air wouldn’t produce on its own.
Lex Fridman (01:17:28): What kind of chemicals would life produce?
Adam Frank (01:17:29): Right. And that’s the interesting thing. So we can use earth as an example. We can say, look, oxygen. We know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn’t for dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that phylloplankton dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it, that’s sometimes mentioned. And there was a paper that somebody wrote where it was like, “Well, we’re not saying we see it, but there’s a bunch of noise in the spectra right there.” So there’s a whole list of things that earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be biosignatures, but now we’re reaching an interesting point. The field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with earth’s history, but we think that would still be indications of this weirdness we call life. What is it in general that life does that leaves an imprint?
Adam Frank (01:18:20): So one of these things could be the structure of the network of chemical reactions that biology always produces very different chemical networks, who’s reacting with who, than just rock and water. So there’s been some proposals for networked biosignatures. Information theory, you can try and look at the information that is in the different compounds that you find in the atmosphere, and maybe that information shows you like, “Oh, there’s too much information here. There must’ve been biology happening. It’s not just rock.” Same thing for techno. That’s what we’re working on right now, for technosignatures as well.
Lex Fridman (01:18:58): So how do you detect technosignatures?
Adam Frank (01:19:01): Okay. So with technosignatures, I gave the example of chlorofluorocarbons. So that would be an example of, and again, that one is a non-agnostic one, because we sort of like, “Oh, we produced chlorofluorocarbons. Maybe they will.” And there’s solar panels. The glint off of solar panels will produce the way the light is reflected off of solar panels, no matter what it’s made out of actually. There was a paper that Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb did in… I think it was 2017. We’ve just followed up on it. That actually could act as a technosignature. You’d be able to see in the reflected light this big jump that would occur because of… City lights, artificial illumination. If there’s really large scale cities like Coruscant and Star Wars or Trantor in the foundation, those city lights would be detectable, the spectral imprint of those across 20, 30 light years.
Adam Frank (01:19:55): So our job in this grant is to develop the first ever library of technosignatures. Nobody’s really ever thought about this before. So we’re trying to come up with all the possible ideas for what a civilization might produce that could be visible across interstellar distances. And are these good ones or are these ones going to be hard to detect or such?
Lex Fridman (01:20:17): City lights. So if a planet is all lit up with artificial light across 20 to 30 light years, we can see it.
Adam Frank (01:20:25): Yeah. If you looked at earth at night from a distance, looked at spectra and you had sensitive enough instruments, you’d be able to see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of. They bounce off the ground, the light bounces off the ground. So you’d convolve the sodium lamps with the reflected spectra from the ground. And yeah, you’d be able to see that there’s city lights. Now, increase that by a factor of 1,000 if you had a trantor, and you’d be able to detect that across interstellar distances. Thomas Beatty did this work, who’s now working with us.
Lex Fridman (01:20:56): What do you think is the most detectable thing about earth?
Adam Frank (01:21:01): Wow, this is fun. We just have Sophia Sheikh, who’s part of our collaboration, just did a paper. We did earth from earth. If you were looking at earth with earth technology for a bunch of different technosignatures, how close would you have to be to be able to detect them? And most of them turn out to be… You’d have to be pretty close, at least out to the Oort cloud, but actually, it is our radio signatures still, that is still most detectable.
Lex Fridman (01:21:23): By the way, when you said you had to be pretty close and then you said the Oort cloud, that’s not very close. But you mean from an interstellar perspective.
Adam Frank (01:21:29): Interstellar distance, because we really want to know is I’m sitting here on earth, I’m looking at these exoplanets, the nearest star is four light years away. So that’s the minimum distance. So if I’m looking at exoplanets, what kind of signals could I see?
Lex Fridman (01:21:44): What is detectable about earth with our current technology from our nearest solar system?
Adam Frank (01:21:49): Oh my God, there’s all kinds of stuff. Well, like the chlorofluorocarbons, you can see earth’s pollution, and I think city lights, you had to be within the solar system.
Lex Fridman (01:22:01): If they do direct imaging of earth-
Adam Frank (01:22:04): They’re going to need much more powerful, but let me tell you, let’s talk about direct imaging for a moment because I just have to go on, this is such a cool idea. So what we really want, and the next generation of space telescopes and such is we’re trying to do direct imaging. We’re trying to get an image of a planet separated from its star to be able to see the reflected light or the actual emission from the planet itself.
Lex Fridman (01:22:24): By the way, just to clarify, direct imaging means literally a picture?
Adam Frank (01:22:29): A picture, but the problem is that even with the thing that’s going to come after JWST, it’s going to be a pixel. You’re not going to get any kind of resolution. You’ll be able to get the light from it, which you’ll be able to pass through a spectrograph, but you’re not going to be able to take a picture. But there is this idea called the solar gravity lens telescope, I think that’s what it is. And the idea is insane. So their general relativity says, “Look, massive bodies distort space. They actually curve space-time.” So the sun is a massive body, and so that means that the light passing through the sun gets focused like a lens. So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes out into the Oort cloud, and then look back towards the sun towards an exoplanet that is behind… Not directly behind the sun, but is in the direction of the sun.
Adam Frank (01:23:16): And then let the sun act like a lens and collect, focus the light onto the telescope and you would be able to get, and they’ve done… It’s amazing. This idea is insane. They’d be able to get, if everything works out, 24 kilometer resolution. You’d be able to see Manhattan on an exoplanet. And this thing, it sounds insane, but actually, NASA, the team has already gotten through three levels of NASA… There’s the NASA program for, “Give us your wackiest idea.” And then the ones that survive that are like, “Okay, tell us whether that wacky idea is even feasible?” And they’re marching along. And the idea is that they even have plans for how you’d be able to get these probes out into the Oort cloud on relatively fast time scales. You need to be about 500 times as far from the sun as earth is, but right now, the idea seems to hold together.
Adam Frank (01:24:10): So probably when I’ll be dead, but when you’re an old man, it’s possible that something like this… Could you imagine having that kind of resolution, a picture of an exoplanet down to kilometers? So I’m very excited about that [inaudible 01:24:26].
Lex Fridman (01:24:25): I can only imagine having a picture like that, and then there’s some mysterious artifacts that you’re seeing.
Adam Frank (01:24:33): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:24:34): It’s both inspiring and almost heartbreaking that we can see. I think we would be able to see a civilization where there’s a lot of scientists agree that this is very likely something and then we can’t-
Adam Frank (01:24:49): We can’t get there. But again, this is the thing about being long-lived. We’ve got to get to the point where we’re long-lived enough that… Let’s imagine that we find, say 10 light years away, we find a planet that looks like it’s got technosignatures. Righ? It doesn’t end there. That would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity, and it wouldn’t be like, “Well, okay, we’re done.” The first thing we do is we build bigger telescopes to try and do those imaging. And then the next thing after that, we plan a mission there. We would figure out, with Breakthrough Starshot, there was this idea of trying to use giant lasers to propel small spacecrafts, light sails, almost to the speed of light. So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures. So if we actually made this discovery, there would be the impulse. There would be the effort to actually try and send something to get there.
Adam Frank (01:25:42): Now, we probably couldn’t land, so maybe we take 30 years to build, 10 years to get there, 10 years to get the picture back. Okay, you’re dead, but your kids are… You know what I mean? So it becomes now this multi-generational project. How long did it take to build the pyramids? How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals? Those were multi-generational projects, and I think we’re on the cusp of that kind of project.
Lex Fridman (01:26:07): I think that would probably unite humans.
Adam Frank (01:26:09): I think it would play a big role. I think it would be helpful. Human beings are a mess, let’s face it. That’s why I always say to people, discovery of life, of any kind of life, even if it was microbial life, it wouldn’t matter, that to know that we’re not an accident, to know that there is probably… If we found one example of life, we’d know that we’re not an accident and there’s probably lots of life and that we’re a community. We’re part of a cosmic kind of community of life, and who knows what life has done? All bets are off with life.
Lex Fridman (01:26:36): Since we’re talking about the future of telescopes, let’s talk about our current super sexy, awesome telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, that I still can’t believe actually worked.
Adam Frank (01:26:46): I can’t believe it worked either. I was really skeptical. I was like, “Okay, guys. All right, sure.”
Lex Fridman (01:26:51): We only got one shot for this incredibly complicated piece of hardware to unfold. So what kind of stuff can we see with it? I’ve been just looking through different kinds of announcements that have been detected. There’s been some direct imaging-
Adam Frank (01:27:06): Yes, like a single pixel.
Lex Fridman (01:27:07): The kinds of exoplanets were able to direct image I guess would have to be hot.
Adam Frank (01:27:13): Hot, reasonably far away from the star. I think JWST is really at the hairy edge of being able to do much with this. What’s more important I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there’s not sexy pictures. It’s like, “Hey, look at this wiggly line,” but be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That’s where we are right now. In order to look for life, we need to find planets with atmospheres. And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization, where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what’s in the atmosphere. Is there carbon? Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that’s the most exciting thing.
Adam Frank (01:27:54): For example, there was this planet K2-18b, which they did a beautiful job getting the spectra, and the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind of habitable world called a hycean world, hycean meaning hydrogen ocean world. And that is a kind of planet that it would be in the super earth, sub-Neptune domain we were talking about, maybe eight times the mass of the earth. But it’s got a layer of hydrogen, of an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water, you can get a giant ocean of liquid water, and that’s an entirely different kind of planet. That could be habitable planet. It could be a 60 degree warm ocean.
Adam Frank (01:28:41): So the data that came out of JWST for that planet was good enough to be able to indicate like, “Oh yeah, you know what? From what we understand with the models, this looks like it could be a hycean world.”
Lex Fridman (01:28:54): And it’s 120 light years away from earth.
Adam Frank (01:28:57): And so isn’t that amazing? It’s 120 light years away, but we can see into the atmosphere. We can see to the atmosphere so well that we can be like, “Oh, look, methane.” Methane was a five sigma detection. You knew that the data were so good that it was the gold standard of science.
Lex Fridman (01:29:13): What about detecting maybe through direct imaging or in other ways, megastructures, that the civilizations build?
Adam Frank (01:29:24): You know what’s great about megastructures is first of all, it’s fun to say, who doesn’t want to say megastructure? Alien, megastructure, right? Every morning, I’m looking for an opportunity to say that. So the err example of this is the Dyson sphere, which is amazing because it was literally 1960 that this idea came up.
Lex Fridman (01:29:39): Can you explain the Dyson sphere?
Adam Frank (01:29:40): Yeah, the Dyson sphere. So Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists ever, who was very broad-minded and thought about a lot of different things. He recognized that as civilizations progress, what they’re going to need is ever more energy to do ever more amazing things. And what’s the best energy source in a solar system? It’s the star. Right? So if you surrounded the star with solar collecting machines, sunlight collecting machines… Anyway, the limit of this would actually build a sphere, an actual sphere around your star that had all solar panels on the inside. You could capture every photon the star produced, which is this insane amount of light. You would have enough power now to do anything to re-engineer your solar system. So that was a Dyson sphere.
Adam Frank (01:30:25): It turns out that a Dyson sphere doesn’t really work, it’s unstable, but a Dyson swarm, and that’s really what he meant, this large collection of large orbiting structures that were able to collect light.
Lex Fridman (01:30:37): So he didn’t actually mean a rigid sphere structure.
Adam Frank (01:30:42): Right.
Lex Fridman (01:30:42): He basically meant a swarm. So like you said, then the limit basically starts to look-
Adam Frank (01:30:48): People started to say, “Yeah, it was like a sphere.” And we actually almost thought we might’ve found one of these back with a Bajoyan star. The way we detect planets is through the transit method where the planet passes in front of the star and there’s a dip in the starlight. It’s a little eclipse basically, and we know exactly what they should look like. And then with this one star, there were these really weird transits where it was like this little dragon’s tooth, and then there’d be another one and another one and another one, and then nothing, and then three more. And in the paper that was written about this, they went through the list of, it could be comets, it could be chunks of a broken up planet, and it could also be an alien megastructure. And of course, the news picked up on this and everybody’s newsfeed the next day, “Alien megastructures discovered.”
Adam Frank (01:31:31): Turns out, sadly, they were not alien megastructures. They were probably gas or dust clouds, but it raised the possibility like, “Oh, these are observable.” And people have worked out the details of what they would look like. You don’t really need direct imaging. You can do transits, right? They’re big enough that when they pass in front of the star, they’re going to produce a little blip of light because that’s what they’re supposed to. They’re absorbing starlight. So people have worked out like, “Well, a square one or a triangular one.”
Lex Fridman (01:31:55): But that wouldn’t be a distance sphere. That would be like one object.
Adam Frank (01:31:58): One object, right. If it’s a swarm, you’d expect the light to be blinking in and out as these things pass in front of… If you’ve got thousands of these, much of the time, they’ll be blotting out the star. Sometimes they won’t be. Right? And so you’re going to get an irregular transit signal.
Lex Fridman (01:32:15): One you wouldn’t expect from a star that doesn’t have anything.
Adam Frank (01:32:18): Exactly. Or just a planet or a couple of planets. There’d be so many of these that it would be like, “Beep, beep, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.”
Lex Fridman (01:32:24): And that usually doesn’t happen in a star system because there’s only just a handful of planets.
Adam Frank (01:32:31): That’s exactly what it is. Everything’s coagulant. In a stable solar system, you get a handful of planets, five, 10, that’s it probably, and nothing else. So if now suddenly you see lots of these little micro transits telling you there’s something else that’s big enough to create a transit, but too many of them, and also, within a regular shape, the transit itself, that these could be megastructures.
Lex Fridman (01:32:54): How many people are looking for megastructures now?
Adam Frank (01:32:58): Well, the main groups looking for megastructures are again, Jason Wright at Penn State, and collaborators. The way they’re looking for it though is for infrared light because the second law of thermodynamics says, “Look, if you capture all of this starlight, your thing’s going to warm up and emit an infrared.” It’s going to be waste heat, waste heat and waste light from this.
Lex Fridman (01:33:22): That feels like a louder, clearer way to detect it.
Adam Frank (01:33:25): Right. And that’s actually why Dyson proposed it. He wasn’t really proposing it because he was saying, “This is what civilizations are going to do.” He proposed it because he was like, “Oh, we want to start looking for alien civilizations. Here’s something that would have a detectable signature.” So Jason and company have done pretty good searches, and recently, they made news because they were able to eliminate a lot of places. “No, these are not Dyson Spheres,” but they did have a couple that were anomalous enough that they’re like, “Well, this is what it would look like.” It’s not a detection. They were saying they would never say it’s a detection, but they were not non-detections.
Lex Fridman (01:34:00): And they’re potential candidates.
Adam Frank (01:34:01): Potential candidates, yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:34:02): Love it. We have megastructure candidates. That’s inspiring. What other megastructures do you think that could be? So Dyson Sphere is about capturing the energy of a star.
Adam Frank (01:34:12): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:34:13): There could be other-
Adam Frank (01:34:14): Well, there’s something called the Clark Belt. So we have a bunch of satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit. Nothing naturally is going to end up in geosynchronous orbit. Geosynchronous orbit is one particular orbit that’s really useful if you want to beam things straight down, or if you want to put a space elevator up. Right? So there’s this idea that if a civilization becomes advanced enough that it’s really using geosynchronous orbit, that you actually get a belt, something that would actually be detectable from a distance via a transit. There’s been a couple papers written about the possibility of these Clark Belts, densely occupied Clark Belts being a megastructure. It’s not as mega as a Dyson swarm, but it’s planetary scale.
Lex Fridman (01:34:57): You think it’s detectable, Clark Belt?
Adam Frank (01:34:58): It could be. In our list of technosignatures, it would be down there, but it would be… Again, if you had an advanced enough civilization that did enough of this, you’d have a Clark Belt. And the question is whether or not it’s detectable?
Lex Fridman (01:35:11): Yeah, probably Dyson sphere is the… That’s the more exciting thing too.
Adam Frank (01:35:14): That’s the go-to one. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:35:16): Speaking of the Dyson Sphere, let’s talk through the Kardashev scales.
Adam Frank (01:35:19): Right.
Lex Fridman (01:35:19): What is the Kardashev scale and where are humans on it?
Adam Frank (01:35:24): Right. So the Kardashev scale was at the same time. This is this golden age of SETI, like ’59 to ’65 when it just starts. Frank Drake has done his first experiment. People are like, “Oh my God, this is even possible.” And so people are just throwing out these ideas and as I said in the book, science is conservative. And what I mean by that is it holds onto its best ideas. So Kardashev comes up with this idea that, “Look, if we’re…” Again, it’s always about detectability. “If we’re looking for civilizations, we should think about what are the, “Natural,” stages,” natural in quotes, “That a civilization goes through?” And he was thinking in terms of energy use, like a good physicist. So he said, “Look, the first hurdle in terms of energy or threshold that a civilization will go through is using all the starlight that falls onto a planet.” He called that a type one civilization. In whatever way you’re doing it, some large fraction of the starlight that falls on your planet, you’re using for your own ends.
Adam Frank (01:36:24): The next would be to use all the starlight there is from that star. Right? So that’s the Dyson sphere. So Dyson had already proposed his idea of the swarm and Kardashev was picking up. So that’s a type two civilization. Type three is galactic scale, a civilization that could use all the starlight in a galaxy. So where are we now? Remarkably, on a log scale. We’re at 0.7 of a type one.
Lex Fridman (01:36:49): So we’re not even type one?
Adam Frank (01:36:50): No, no, no. We’re not even type one, but according to… There was a paper written by a group that said, “Can we continue on our path? We’ll be at a type one at around 2300.”
Lex Fridman (01:37:02): 2300. So this is on a log scale?
Adam Frank (01:37:08): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:37:08): So 0.7. So type one is about 10 to the 16th watts. Type two is 10 orders of magnitude larger than that, 10 to the 26th watts, and I think estimate for the galaxy is another 10 orders of magnitude.
Adam Frank (01:37:20): Yeah, because there’s a 100,000,000,000 star of order, 100,000,000 stars.
Lex Fridman (01:37:24): So that’s a lot.
Adam Frank (01:37:25): That’s a lot energy.
Lex Fridman (01:37:27): Do you think humans ever get to type one?
Adam Frank (01:37:30): I think that there’s a problem with type one, which is that we already know about climate change. The effects of our harvesting energy to do the work of civilization is already changing the climate state, and that’s something that Kardashev couldn’t have recognized. There’s the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there’s the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn’t thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don’t get to use it all. Right? Second law tells you that if I have a tank of gasoline, I can only use a certain fraction of the energy in that tank, and the rest is going to go to heating up the engine block. So that second law tells you that you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, “Uh-oh, sorry, it’s going to change on you.”
Adam Frank (01:38:25): So there’s a way in which we probably can’t get to a type one without devastating the earth’s climate. The most important thing actually here is probably, this is why space becomes… So the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we’ve been working on for a while called service worlds, that at some point you probably move a lot of your industry off world. We’ve got Mercury, for example. There’s nothing on Mercury, there’s no life on Mercury. Why don’t you put your energy harvesting there? Because you can’t mess with the biosphere. The biosphere is more powerful than you are. And so there’s limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere.
Lex Fridman (01:39:10): It does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology, but to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects.
Adam Frank (01:39:25): This is the frontier where you are, and that was the topic of my last book, Light of the Stars. It’s like you have to do the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. You have to see the transition that we’re going through now of the Anthropocene on a planetary astrobiological framework. And that paper we were talking about with a 10 billion trillion worlds, that was actually in service of the work I was doing for this other book where I wanted to know how often do you go through an… Does every technological civilization trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate Anthropocene crisis? And the answer we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably. And then the question is, are you smart enough to figure out how to readjust what you’re doing technologically so that all boats rise? You want to figure out how to do this so that the biosphere becomes even more productive and healthy and resilient.
Adam Frank (01:40:15): So yeah, right. It’s the kind of technology. I think there’s probably absolutely limits on how much energy you can use, but how do you use that energy? And then also, getting off planet eventually. If you want to use 10 times more energy than that, you’re going to not going to do it on world.
Lex Fridman (01:40:33): So how do we detect alien type one, two, and three civilizations? So we’ve been kind of talking about basically type one civilization detection.
Adam Frank (01:40:43): Yeah. Right,
Lex Fridman (01:40:44): Maybe with the Dyson sphere, you start to get a little bit more type two, but it feels like if you have a type two civilization, it won’t be just the Dyson sphere.
Adam Frank (01:40:54): Right.
Lex Fridman (01:40:55): It feels like that. Just for the same reason you mentioned climate change, but now at the star system level, they’re probably expanding, right? So how would you detect a type two?
Adam Frank (01:41:08): How about propulsion plumes? Right? If you’re expanding… No, no.
Lex Fridman (01:41:12): Yeah, that’s great. That’s great.
Adam Frank (01:41:12): I literally just put in a NASA proposal now. Thomas Beatty, who’s joined us, he’s at the University of Wisconsin, has an idea to look for plumes. Right? If you have a solar system-wide civilization and you got space truckers going back and forth from Mars to… They’re doing the insettlest run, they’re accelerating and decelerating the whole way there. If you want to get to Mars in a couple of weeks, you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there. You flip and burn and have it on. So you also always have gravity. You have thrust gravity. So would those plumes be detectable? Because now you’ve got spaceships going all over the place and the odds that the plume is going to cross your field of view could become pretty high. So yeah, I think that’s one idea of looking for large-scale interplanetary, which is like when you’re getting to a type two.
Adam Frank (01:42:11): Another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining. This was an idea, it was a group at Harvard Smithsonian, that to be able to look for… If you’re really chewing up asteroids to build space habitats, there’d be dust particles left around and would they look different from just say the dust from just regular collisions?
Lex Fridman (01:42:30): So pollution of all different kinds.
Adam Frank (01:42:32): Pollution of all different kinds
Lex Fridman (01:42:33): And trash also?
Adam Frank (01:42:34): Okay, so trash is an interesting idea when you come to the actual solar system. There’s a whole other field of technosignatures, which are things in the solar system. What if somebody came by 1,000,000 years ago and left some stuff? So the earth has been showing biosignatures for billions of years. A species like us, at our level, looking at earth, would’ve been able to know that earth had life on it, had a biosphere for billions of years. So maybe somebody sent something by a half a billion years ago. So this idea of looking say at the Moon for artifacts that have been there for a long time is something that a number of people are doing. We’re just working on a paper where we just calculated, this was super fun. We calculated how long would the lunar lander exist on the Moon before micrometeorites just chewed it down? How long would you be able to land on the Moon and go, “Oh, look, somebody was here and left some debris.”
Adam Frank (01:43:34): So there’s this process called gardening, which is just the micrometeorite, constant rain of micrometeorites, and that’s where you get the lunar regolith. That fine powder on the Moon is because of this gardening. And it turns out it is literally hundreds of millions to billions of years-
Lex Fridman (01:43:50): Oh, nice.
Adam Frank (01:43:50): That the lunar lander will be visible.
Lex Fridman (01:43:54): Oh, so we should be able to find artifacts.
Adam Frank (01:43:58): If there are artifacts on there, and people have proposed doing this with artificial intelligence. The Moon has been mapped down to a couple of meters with various probes and all that data is sitting there. So why not use machine learning to look through all those things and look for anything that looks not like the lunar surface? And they did a test program where they gave the computer, I don’t know, 50 miles around the Apollo 11 or maybe it was Apollo 17 site, and it instantly was able to pull out the lander.
Lex Fridman (01:44:27): The whole task of looking for anomaly, something that looks not like the lunar surface. You make it sound obvious, but it’s not exactly obvious. Detect something that doesn’t look right about this room?
Adam Frank (01:44:42): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:44:43): It’s actually really difficult.
Adam Frank (01:44:44): Really difficult. It’s really difficult. And what’s cool, it’s a really information theoretic kind of proposal. You really have to use information theory to say, “What’s the background?” How do I define something that I can say, “That looks weird?”
Lex Fridman (01:44:58): Yeah, maybe when you’re looking at a spectrograph or something, it’s still like…
Lex Fridman (01:45:00): [inaudible 01:45:00] or something, it’s going to look really weird potentially. We’re hypothesizing all the things that humans would build and how do we detect that.
Adam Frank (01:45:12): Right.
Lex Fridman (01:45:13): But that could be really weird stuff.
Adam Frank (01:45:15): That’s why there’s this emphasis now on these agnostic signatures. So, actually disequilibrium is a nice one. One way to define life is it is a system that is far from equilibrium, it’s alive, because as soon as it dies, it goes back to equilibrium. And so, you can look at all chemicals in an atmosphere, even if you don’t know whether these could be chemicals that you have no idea whether or not they have anything to do with life. But the degree of disequilibrium, the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not, the chemicals have not all just gone down to, they’ve all reacted away to an equilibrium state. You can actually tell that in very general ways using what’s called the Gibbs free energy, and that’s a signature.
Adam Frank (01:45:56): If you see an atmosphere that is wildly out of equilibrium that indicates that there’s something happening on that planet biosphere or technosphere that is pumping gases into the atmosphere, that is keeping the whole system from relaxing.
Lex Fridman (01:46:13): So, is it possible we can detect anomalies in spacetime?
Adam Frank (01:46:17): Well, you could detect, and there’s been some work on this with the Alcubierre drive, these proposals for warp drives, and we can talk about that later, I’m skeptical of those. Because it may really be possible, you just can’t go faster than the speed of light. But people have done work on what would be the signature of an Alcubierre drive? What would be the signature? Could you detect if you’re using a drive like that, then you certainly are distorting spacetime, which means any light that’s passing by, its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted spacetime.
Adam Frank (01:46:51): So yeah, there are possibilities along with that. One of the funny things, I don’t know if they’ve gotten past this, but somebody calculated the problem with the Alcubierre drive or this warp drive was that if you dropped out of warp, there would be this spray of gamma rays that would sterilize any planet in front of you. So, it’s like, “Well yeah, you probably don’t want to do that,” but that would be a great bios or techno signature, another planet obliterated.
Lex Fridman (01:47:15): So, you think it’s not possible to travel fast than the speed of light?
Adam Frank (01:47:17): I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that, but what I think, if you look at the physics, we understand, every possibility for faster than light travel really relies on something that doesn’t exist. So, the cool thing is Einstein’s field equations, you can actually play with them, the equations are right there. You can add things to the right or left-hand side that allow you to get something like the Alcubierre drive. That was a metric that showed you like, “Oh, it’s a warped bubble.” It’s a warping of spacetime that moves through spacetime faster than the speed of light.
Adam Frank (01:47:52): Because nothing can move across space faster than the speed of light, but spacetime itself can move faster than the speed of light. But here’s the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something. The thing you added, the little fictional term you added into the equations is something called exotic matter and it doesn’t exist. It’s really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do. So, it’s a nice fiction but really right now, we live in this weird moment in history of the great acceleration where the technology we used now is completely different from the technology we used 10 years ago is remarkably different from the technology from 100 years ago.
Adam Frank (01:48:38): But I remember playing Assassin’s Creed where everybody’s like, “What is it, it’s 1200?” And everybody’s like, “Stab, stab, stab.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s a great game.” And then I got Assassin’s Creed II and it was 300 years later and everybody’s like, “Stab, stab, stab.” And it was like 300 years and the technology hadn’t changed and that was actually true for most of human history. You used your great-grandfather’s tools because there was no need to have any other new tools and you probably did his job. So, we could be fooled into thinking like, “Oh, technology’s going to go on forever, we’re always going to find new advances.”
Adam Frank (01:49:14): As opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time. So, you have to be careful about that bias that we have living in this time of great acceleration.
Lex Fridman (01:49:23): Yeah. But also, it is a great acceleration and we also are not good at predicting what that entails if it does keep accelerating. So, for example, somebody like Eric Weinstein often talks about we underinvest in theoretical physics research. Basically, we’re trying too hard for traditional chemical propulsion on rockets versus trying to hack physics, warp drives and so on.
Adam Frank (01:49:53): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:49:54): Because it’s really hard to do space travel, and it seems like in the long arc of human history, if we survive the way to really travel across long distances is going to be some new totally new thing.
Adam Frank (01:50:07): Right.
Lex Fridman (01:50:07): So, it’s not going to be an engineering problem, it’s going to be a physics problem-
Adam Frank (01:50:12): A fundamental physics problem.
Lex Fridman (01:50:14): Fundamental physics problem.
Adam Frank (01:50:15): Yeah. I agree with that in principle, but I think there’s a lot of ideas out there. String theory, people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years, it’s not like there hasn’t been a lot of effort. And again, I’m not going to predict, I think it’s entirely possible that there’s incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be poked through, in which case then all bets are off. Once you get fast interstellar travel, whoa, who knows what can happen? But I tend to be drawn to science fiction stories that take the speed of light seriously. What kind of civilization can you build where it takes 50 years to get to where you’re going and a 50 years back?
Adam Frank (01:50:59): So, I don’t know. Yeah, there’s no way I’m going to say that we won’t get warp drives. But as of right now, it’s all fictional. It’s barely even a coherent concept.
Lex Fridman (01:51:08): Well, it’s also a really exciting possibility of hacking this whole thing by extending human lifespan or extending our notion of time and maybe as dark as to say, but the value of an individual human life versus the value of life from the perspective of generations.
Adam Frank (01:51:27): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:51:27): So, you can have something like a generational ship that travels for hundreds of thousands of years and you’re not sad that you’ll never see the destination because you have the value for the prolonged survival of humanity versus your own individual life.
Adam Frank (01:51:45): Yeah. It’s a wild ethical question, isn’t it? That book I told you about Aurora, I love the book because it was such a inversion of the usual. Because I love science fiction, I’ve read so many generation ship stories. And they get to that planet, the planet turns out to be uninhabitable. It’s inhabited, but it’s uninhabitable for Earth because again, he has this idea of life is particular to their planets. So, they turn around and they come back, and then when they land, the main character goes, there’s still people who are arguing for more generation ships, and she goes, and she punches the guy out because she spent her whole life in a tube with this.
Adam Frank (01:52:20): I thought that was a really interesting inversion. The interesting thing about, we were talking about these space habitats.
Lex Fridman (01:52:26): Yes.
Adam Frank (01:52:26): But if you really had a space habitat, not some super cramped, crappy, usual version of a century ship. But if you had these space habitats that were really like the O’Neill cylinders, they’re actually pretty nice places to live, put a thruster on those. Why keep them in the solar system? Maybe space is full of these traveling space habitats that are in some sense, they’re worlds in and of themselves.
Lex Fridman (01:52:49): There’s the show Silo, which raises the question of basically, if you are putting on a generational ship, what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship? You might want to lie to them.
Adam Frank (01:53:00): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:53:01): You might want to tell them a story that they believe.
Adam Frank (01:53:04): Right.
Lex Fridman (01:53:04): Because there is a society, there’s human nature. It’s like how do you maintain a homeostasis of that little society? That’s a fascinating technical question, the social question, the psychology question
Adam Frank (01:53:17): The generation ship too, which I talked about in the book, the idea of also you talked about the extending human lifetimes or the stasis, the cryostasis, which is a mainstay of science fiction that you can basically put in suspended animation and such. None of these things we know are possible. But what’s so interesting, and this is why I love science fiction, the way it seeds ideas, all these ideas we’re going to talk about because they’ve been staples of science fiction for 50 years.
Lex Fridman (01:53:44): The whole field of cryogenics.
Adam Frank (01:53:45): Yeah. Where are we at with that?
Lex Fridman (01:53:47): Yeah. I wonder what the state of the art is for complex organism. Can you freeze? How long can you freeze? And then unfreeze maybe with bacteria you could do freeze.
Adam Frank (01:53:56): Oh, bacteria can last. This is the thing about panspermia, how long can a bacteria survive in a rock that’s been blasted? If there’s a comet impact across interstellar distances, that does seem to actually be possible. People have done those kinds of calculations, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. But a complex organism or multi-systems, with organs and such.
Lex Fridman (01:54:20): Also, what makes an organism? Which part do you want to preserve? Because maybe for humans, it seems like what makes a personality? It feels like you want to preserve a set of memories. If I woke up in a different body with the same memories, I pretty much, I would feel like I would be the same person.
Adam Frank (01:54:43): Altered Carbon, that’s a great series. I think it’s on Netflix, that’s a really great series where that’s exactly the idea of sleeves. Everybody’s able to, you can re-sleeve in another body, and it raises exactly this question. It’s not the greatest cyberpunk, but it’s pretty good, it’s got some great action sequences too.
Lex Fridman (01:55:01): As we get better and better advancements in large language models that are able to be fine-tuned on you, it raises a question because to me, they’ve already passed the Turing test as we traditionally have defined it. So, if there’s going to be an LLM that’s able to copy you in terms of language extremely well, it’s going to raise ethical and I don’t know, philosophical questions about what makes you, you. If there’s a thing that can talk exactly like you, what is the thing that makes you? It’s going to speak about your memories very effectively.
Adam Frank (01:55:41): This leads us to, if we’re going to get to the blind spot. I am of the opinion, heretical in some camps that the brain is not the minimal structure for consciousness, it’s the whole body. It’s embodied and may actually, in some sense, it’s communities actually. So yeah, I could be wrong, but this is what this whole work that I did with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, the philosophy of science. Which is interesting, because it leads to this question about, “Oh, maybe we should just download ourselves into computers.” That’s another story that one tells. I’m super skeptical about those, but that’s one of the narratives about interstellar travel.
Adam Frank (01:56:20): And that anybody we meet is going to be a machine anyway, whether it’s downloaded bodies or it’s just going to be artificial intelligence. There’s the whole idea of how long does biological evolution last? Maybe it’s a very short period before everybody goes to, or the machines take over and kill you, or it’s some hybrid.
Lex Fridman (01:56:39): What do you think aliens look like? So, we talked about all the different kinds of bio signatures that might leave or techno signatures, but what would they look like when we show up? Are they going to have arms and legs? Are they going to be recognizable at all? Are they going to be carbon-based?
Adam Frank (01:56:57): Yeah. So, great question, and this question gets to the heart of thinking about life, about what life is. And this is the physical part of that, there’s also the informational part of it. But let’s just talk about the physical part of it, which is anything that we’re going to call life is probably going to work on Darwinian evolution. That’s the nice thing about Darwinian evolution, just like we know the laws of physics are general, the laws of Darwinian evolution are this logic, this basic logic that anything we’d reasonably call life probably has to operate under these kinds of principles.
Adam Frank (01:57:32): And so, evolution’s about solving problems to survive that the environment presents. And the environment’s always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms, so that you’d expect a balance between what we call convergence, evolutionary convergence and evolutionary contingency. So, if you’ve got to move along a surface, a hard surface and air, then the idea of some kind of jointed stick legs makes sense that you’re probably going to trigger that. If you look at Earth’s history multiple times, multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other are going to solve the problem of getting towards energy sources using some kind of stick-like apparatus.
Lex Fridman (01:58:18): So, that’s about movement?
Adam Frank (01:58:19): Yeah. So, that’s one problem that has to be solved. The one problem that has to be solved is I got to get to food, right?
Lex Fridman (01:58:22): Yeah.
Adam Frank (01:58:22): Another problem is they got to get away from predators. You’ve seen wings, we’ve seen wings, the line that went through dinosaurs to birds involved wings, insects evolved wings, mammals evolved wings. If the gas is dense enough that a curved surface, if you move through the curved surface, it’s going to produce lift. Yeah, there you go, evolutionary trip on that. So, I think you can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is going to be presented with stay alive, reproduce. But one of the weird things about with the UFO things is that you always see like, “Oh, they all look like humans, they’re just basically humans with triangular heads.” And that’s where we get to contingency.
Adam Frank (01:59:06): So, what we’ve been talking about is convergence. You expect that evolution will converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that wings can solve. But contingency is accidents that you’ve got something that’s evolving a certain kind of wing, a leathery wing. And then the climate changes and they all die out, end of story or an asteroid, total accident, asteroid hits. And so, contingency accidents play also a huge role in evolution. And one of the things that lots of evolutionary biologists have talked about is the idea that if you ran the tape of Earth’s history over again, would you get the same creatures? Now, Stephen Jay Gould was of the opinion that no way, you wouldn’t find anything on Earth that resembled any species today.
Adam Frank (01:59:52): They’ve done experiments actually on this with E. coli. You take a bunch of E. coli, you let them evolve for a while, you take a bunch of them out, freeze them, let one, let that population continue to evolve, the other one’s frozen. Now, started over again with the frozen. And it seems to be that contingency tends to win. At least from what we can tell, that’s not a hard result, but in those experiments, what you find is that accidents really do matter. And this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they’re going to be? Anybody’s guess.
Adam Frank (02:00:27): Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That’s probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
Lex Fridman (02:00:39): I guess what is a brain versus the nervous system? Where is most of the cognition competition going on?
Adam Frank (02:00:46): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:00:47): You could see that in organisms. Actually, I don’t know how the brain evolved. Why does it have to be in one place?
Adam Frank (02:00:56): It doesn’t have to be. So, my favorite word, word of the day is liquid brains. This idea of distributed cognition, which fascinating idea, and we’ve come to understand how much distributed cognition there is. Obviously, you social animals like termites, and ants, that’s an example of distributed cognition, the organism is the whole colony. This is one thing that’s been really interesting in the state of the study for aliens, is that when we’ve come to recognize that human intelligence, the kinds of things that go into intelligence are distributed all across the biosphere. Lots of different examples of things show various pieces of what we have. Jason Wright described it as a deck of cards. The cards are all there, we got the hand that actually led to the technological progress that we see. But the basic idea of using tools, the basic idea of recognizing each other eye to eye, all the things that we define as intelligence. You can find many places in many other places across many other lineages across the earth. So, they could be very, very different with something like, yeah, maybe the hive mind idea or bacterial colonies that actually managed to come to their own version of high cognition.
Lex Fridman (02:02:10): Well, I wonder if we stretch out time across 10s, 20 billion years, whether there’s an Darwinian evolution stops working at some point in terms of the biology or the chemistry of the organisms, and it switches to ideas for example. It’s much more rapidly you’re operating maybe, I guess it’s a kind of Darwinian evolution on the space of memes or whatever, as [inaudible 02:02:36]-
Adam Frank (02:02:35): Technology seems to operate, but certainly markets can operate in ways that look very Darwinian.
Lex Fridman (02:02:43): So, basically a planet is working hard to get to the first kind of organism that’s able to be a nice platform for ideas to compete.
Adam Frank (02:02:53): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:02:53): And then it stops evolving there, and then these ideas that take off.
Adam Frank (02:02:57): Right. Because yeah, cultural Lex it’s true. It’s amazing that cultural evolution totally disconnects from the Darwinian process. But I’d be careful to say that a planet is working hard to do this. Because really looking at us, what we think of as ideas and culture, and it’s quite possible we’re going to make it another 200 years, and this is gone because it actually wasn’t a very good idea long-term, we just don’t know.
Lex Fridman (02:03:22): So, maybe the idea generation organism is actually the thing that destroys.
Adam Frank (02:03:26): Not the biosphere, because again, but it destroys itself. It may not be very long- term, it may be very potent for a short period of time but that it’s not sustainable. It doesn’t become, like we were talking about before, mature. It’s very hard to make it into integrated into a mature bio/technosphere. And of course, evolution that is not working for anything. Well, here’s the actually interesting thing, so people are very much evolutionary biologists will get their hair will stand on end if you start talking about evolution, having a purpose or anything.
Adam Frank (02:03:53): But the very interesting thing about purpose is that once you do get to a idea generating species or collective organism, yeah, then all bets are off and there is goals, there is teleology. Now suddenly, absolutely, there’s a direction implied. So that’s a cool interesting thing that once you get to that, evolution stops being goalless and directionless and suddenly, yeah, we’re the ones who supply or any kind of creature like us has an absolute direction that way they decide on.
Lex Fridman (02:04:26): Although you could argue that from a perspective of the entire human civilization, we’re also directionless. We have a sense that there’s a direction in this cluster of humans.
Adam Frank (02:04:37): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:04:37): And then there’s another cluster has a different sense of direction, there’s all kinds of religions that are competing. There’s different ideologies that are competing.
Adam Frank (02:04:45): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:04:45): And when you just zoom out across, if we survive across thousands of years, it will seem directionless. It will seem like a pinball.
Adam Frank (02:04:55): It’s an unholy mess. But at some point, the expansion into the solar system say, that would be both direction. Depending on how you look at it, it was directional. There was a decision that the collective of human beings made to like anti-accrete, to start spreading out into the solar system. So, that was definitely a goal there that may have been reached in some crazy nonlinear way, but it still a goal was set and it was achieved.
Lex Fridman (02:05:25): If there’s advanced civilizations out there, what do you think is the proper protocol for interacting with them? Do you think they would be peaceful? Do you think they would be warlike? What do we do next? We detect the civilizations through all the technosignatures we’ve been talking about, maybe direct imaging, maybe there’s really strong signal. We come up with a strategy of how to actually get there.
Adam Frank (02:05:49): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:05:50): But then the general says, they always do, the military industrial complex-
Adam Frank (02:05:56): We’ve watched that movie.
Lex Fridman (02:05:58): What kind of rockets and do we bring rockets?
Adam Frank (02:06:02): Right. Well, this general question also leads to many messaging, extraterrestrial intelligence, and I’m definitely of the opinion of you should be very careful. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass. The people who advocate like, “Oh yeah, we should be sending powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space.” I’m like, “Why would you?” Because we just don’t know, I’m not going to say they are warlike. I’m not going to say they’re not warlike, I have no idea. But we sure as hell, well, first of all, who gets to decide that? The idea that a bunch of astronomers who happen to have a radio telescope, Who Speaks for Earth, which I think was a great book somebody wrote.
Adam Frank (02:06:44): So, definitely we should be cautious, I would say, because we just have zero information. And the idea, you used to have this idea of, well, if they’re advanced, they’ve managed to survive. So of course, they’re going to be wearing togas and be singing kumbaya, but I just wouldn’t assume that. It’s also possible though that their cognitive structure is so different that we’re not even living in the same universe in a certain way. I think we have to be prepared for that. We may not even be able to recognize each other in some way as cognizing beings. One of my favorite movies is Arrival, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that one.
Adam Frank (02:07:18): I really love that one because they literally, they have a different language. They have a different cognitive structure in terms of their language, and they’re literally living in a different physics.
Lex Fridman (02:07:25): Different physics, different language, different everything. But in the case of Arrival, it can at least recognize that they’re there.
Adam Frank (02:07:34): And they managed to cross the language barrier. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:07:38): But that’s, both sides have an interest in communicating, which you suppose that an advanced civilization would have a curiosity. Because how do you become advanced without curiosity about the mysteries about the other.
Adam Frank (02:07:54): But also, if they’re long-lived, they may just be like, “We’re not even interested. Say 10 million years ago, we were really interested in this, in communicating with you youngins, but now we’re not at all.” And that’s just one of the beauties of this again, is how to think about this systematically because you’re so far past the hairy edge of our experience of what we know that you want to think about it. You don’t want to be like, “Don’t know, can’t say anything,” because that’s not fun. But you also have to systematically go after your own biases. So, one of the things I loved about Arrival too was Carl Sagan always had this idea, “We’ll teach them math, we’ll teach them our math, then they’ll teach us their math, and then we’ll be telling each other, knock-knock jokes and swapping cures for cancer.”
Adam Frank (02:08:42): And in the movie, they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist, and the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately. And it’s the linguist who understands that language is actually embodied. Language is not just something that happens in your head, it’s actually the whole experience and she’s the one who breaks through. And it just points to the idea that how utterly different the cognitive structures of a different species should be. So somehow, we have to figure out how to think about it, but be so careful of our biases or figure out a systematic way to break through our biases and not just make science fiction movies. You know what I mean?
Lex Fridman (02:09:17): Yeah. Speaking of biases, do you think aliens have visited Earth? You’ve mentioned that they could have visited and started civilizations and we wouldn’t even know about it if it was 100 million years ago. How can we even begin to answer this question, whether-
Adam Frank (02:09:32): Got to look, got to figure out ways to look. So, it’s not high on my list of things that I think are probable, but it certainly, it needs to be explored. And unless you look, you never know. So, looking on the moon, where would we find if aliens had passed through the solar system anytime in the last 3 billion years, where might we find artifacts? Where might artifacts still be around? Earth? Probably not because of weathering and resurfacing. The moon’s a good place. Certain kinds of orbits, maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable. So, you got to figure out which orbits actually you could put something there and it’ll last for a billion years.
Adam Frank (02:10:10): So, those are the kind of questions. Like I said, it’s not high on my list of thinking this could happen, but it could happen. Unless you look, you don’t know.
Lex Fridman (02:10:20): Speaking of biases, what about if aliens visiting Earth is the elephant in the room? Meaning the potential of aliens, say seeding life on earth?
Adam Frank (02:10:30): You mean in that directed panspermia, [inaudible 02:10:33]-
Lex Fridman (02:10:32): Directed panspermia.
Adam Frank (02:10:33): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:10:34): Or seeding some aspect of the evolution.
Adam Frank (02:10:39): Like 2001.
Lex Fridman (02:10:40): Yeah.
Adam Frank (02:10:41): Yeah. It’s a great story, but always with Occam’s razor or whatever with science. If I can answer that question without that extra very detailed hypothesis, then I should. And the idea that evolution is a natural process, that’s what I would go for first. That just seems it’s so much easier to do it that way than adding, because it’s kind of a duo sex machina thing of like, “Oh, then the aliens came down and they solved that problem that you’re trying to solve by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.”
Lex Fridman (02:11:13): So, to you, the origin of life is a pretty simple thing that doesn’t require an alien?
Adam Frank (02:11:19): I wouldn’t say that, it’s not a simple thing. Because all you’re doing is kicking the can down the road. The aliens formed, right? So, you’re just saying like, ” All right, I’m just kicking the can down the road to the aliens. What was their abiogenesis event?
Lex Fridman (02:11:35): Well, so from a different perspective, I’m just saying, it seems to me that there’s obviously advanced civilizations everywhere throughout the galaxy and through the universe from the Drake equation perspective. And then if I was an alien, what would I do? I’ve gotten a chance to learn about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. I recently went to the Amazon, and you get to understand how they function and how the humans in the Amazon, they’re in contact with the civilized world, how they interact with the uncontacted tribes. First of all, the uncontacted tribes are very violent towards the outside world, but everybody else tried to stay away from them. They try to protect them, don’t talk about them, don’t talk about their location and all this kind of stuff.
Lex Fridman (02:12:19): And I’ve begun to internalize and understand that perspective of why you’re doing that. And if I was an alien civilization, I probably would be doing a similar kind of thing. And of course, there’s always the teenager or the troll who’s going to start messing with this stuff or the scientists.
Adam Frank (02:12:34): Yeah, right.
Lex Fridman (02:12:35): And so, from our perspective, yes. And if you’re in the Truman Show like Occam’s razor, but also the Occam’s razor from the perspective of the alien civilization, we have to have the humility to understand that that interaction will be extremely difficult to detect, that it would not be obvious.
Adam Frank (02:12:57): Right. I understand the logic of what you’re saying, but the problem for me with that is that first you have to assume that alien civilizations are common, which I’m not sure about it, that most of them may be dead or they’re not. While I think that life is common, and again, this is just my biases. So now, the problem is how do we sort out the biases we’re bringing or the assumptions we’re bringing in from the causal chain that comes out of that? I would first want to try and do this without, if we’re looking at the origin of life or the evolution of life on Earth. I’d want to do it just on its own without asking for this other layer because it requires a bunch of these other assumptions which also have their own breaking of causal chains.
Adam Frank (02:13:44): Because the idea that when you ask, what would you do if you were an alien? But again, alien minds could be so unbelievably different that they wouldn’t even recognize the question you just posed.
Lex Fridman (02:13:56): Right.
Adam Frank (02:13:56): Because it’s just like we have a very particular cognitive structure or cognitive, and we’re very governed by, even if you went and talked to, this is an interesting thing to think about. If I could suddenly magically appear 100,000 years ago and talked to a hunter-gatherer about their worldview and their motivations, I might find something that, or no resemblance to things that I think are sort of, “Oh, that’s what naturally humans do.”
Lex Fridman (02:14:20): Well, let me ask you this question. Let’s together do the thought experience.
Adam Frank (02:14:23): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:14:23): If we either create a time machine that allows us to travel back and to talk to them.
Adam Frank (02:14:28): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:14:28): Or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization on a nearby star system, what would we do?
Adam Frank (02:14:37): Yeah. I think that’s a great question. It’s interesting how that even brings up the ethical questions. Let’s say that we’d have to first sort out what are the consequences for them and what do we feel our ethical responsibilities are to them?
Lex Fridman (02:14:51): And also, sorry, from a capitalist perspective, what are we to gain from this interaction?
Adam Frank (02:14:56): Right. You look at the way the missionaries, missionaries had these interactions because they thought converting them to whatever religion they were was the most important, that’s what the gain was. So, from our perspective, we’d have to sort that out. I think given if we’re doing this thought experiment, we are curious, and I think eventually we’d want to reach out to them.
Lex Fridman (02:15:19): I think when you say we, let’s start with the people in this room, right?
Adam Frank (02:15:23): Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:15:25): I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world, because I think there’s a lot of people, the military they’ll probably move first so they can steal whatever advantage they can from this new discovery so they can hurt China or China hurt America. That’s one perspective. Then there’s the capitalist school will see how the benefits and the costs here, and how can I make money off of this? There’s opportunity here, there’s gold in them hills. And I wonder, and I think the scientist is just not going to, unlike the movies-
Adam Frank (02:16:00): We’re not going to get much say.
Lex Fridman (02:16:00): They’re going to put them-
Adam Frank (02:16:01): “Hey guys, wait a minute.”
Lex Fridman (02:16:03): They would engage probably. Just as a human society as we are now, we would engage and we would be detectable, I think.
Adam Frank (02:16:12): In our engagement.
Lex Fridman (02:16:13): In our engagement.
Adam Frank (02:16:14): Yeah, probably.
Lex Fridman (02:16:15): So, using that trivial bias logic, it just feels like aliens would need to be engaging in a very obvious way. Just brings up that old direct for me paradox for me. What do you make of all the UFO sightings?
Adam Frank (02:16:32): I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent, scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that there’s any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think the standards, none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence. So, let’s just take a moment on that idea of standards of evidence, because I made a big deal about this both in the book and elsewhere whenever I talk about this. So, what people have to understand about science is we are really, our scientists, we are really mean to each other, we are brutal to each other.
Adam Frank (02:17:10): Because we have this thing that we call standards of evidence, and it’s the idea of you have a piece of evidence that you want to link to a claim. And under what conditions can you say, “Oh, look, I’ve got evidence of this claim X, Y, and Z.” And in science, we are so mean to each other about whether or not that piece of evidence lives up to the standards that we have. And we spent 400 years determining what those standards are, and that is why cell phones work. If you didn’t have super rigorous standards about what you think that’s, “Oh, this little antenna, I’ve invented a new kind of antenna that I can slip into the cell phone and I can show you that it works.”
Adam Frank (02:17:50): If you didn’t have these standards, every cell phone would be a brick. And when it comes to UFOs and UAPs, the evidence you have and the claim that though this shows that we are being visited by non-human, advanced civilization just doesn’t even come close to the same standards. I’m going to have to obey or whatever live under. If my team, the group I work with is one of them says, “Look, we’ve discovered and he wants to announce that, oh, we’ve discovered a technosignature on an alien planet.” We’re going to get shredded as we expect to be, we expect to be beaten up. And the UAP, UFO community should expect the same thing. You don’t get a pass because it’s a really cool topic.
Adam Frank (02:18:32): So, that’s where I am right now. I just don’t think any of the evidence is even close to anything that could support that claim.
Lex Fridman (02:18:39): Well, I generally assign a lot of value to anecdotal evidence from pilots. Not scientific value, but just like it’s always nice to get anecdotal evidence as a first step. Because I was like, “I wonder if there’s something there.” But unfortunately, with this topic, there’s so much excitement around that there’s a lot of people that are basically trying to make money off of it. There’s hoaxes all this kind of stuff. So, even if there’s some signal, there’s just so much noise it’s very difficult to operate with. So, how do we get better signal? So, you’ve talked about if we wanted to really search for UFOs on Earth and maybe detect things like weird physics, what kind of instruments would we be using?
Adam Frank (02:19:23): Yeah, so in the book, I talked about the idea that this is really stupid, but you want to look up, you want to look down and you want to look all around.
Lex Fridman (02:19:31): I think that’s brilliant. It’s simple, not stupid. It’s like literally.
Adam Frank (02:19:35): Yeah, right. So, you want to do ground-based detectors, upward-looking, ground-based detectors of the kind we’re already building for meteors, for tracking meteors. You want to have space-based detectors, put them on satellites, this is what the NASA UAP panel was thinking about. And then probably on, we have lots of people in the sky there should be detectors on the planes, or at least some kind of alert system that if a pilot says, “Oh, look, I’m seeing something I don’t understand.” Boop presses the red button, and that triggers the ground.
Adam Frank (02:20:03): I’m seeing something I don’t understand. Boop. Presses the red button and that triggers the ground-based and space-based data collectors. And then the data collectors themselves, this is something that people really don’t understand and it’s so important. In order to actually do science with anything, the data you have, you have to understand where it came from down to the nth degree. You have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths. You have to have characterized that. You have to know what the software does, what the limits of the software are possible. You have to know what happened to the camera. Was it refurbished recently? In every spectral wavelength in all of its data collection and processing, you have to know all of those steps and have them all characterized because especially if you want to claim like, “Oh my God, I saw something, take a right-hand turn at Mach-500.” Right?
Adam Frank (02:20:51): You better have all of that nailed down before you make that kind of claim. So we have to have characterized detectors looking up, down, and maybe on planes themselves, we need a rational search strategy. So let’s say you want to lay out these ground-based detectors. Where do you put them? Right? There’s only so much money in the world, so do you want to put them near places where you’ve seen a lot of things beforehand or do you want to have them try and do sparse coverage of the entire country?
Adam Frank (02:21:17): And then you need the data analysts analysis, right? You’re going to have so much data, so many false positives or false triggering that you need a way of sorting through enormous amounts of data and figuring out what you’re going to throw out and what you’re going to keep, and all of these things we’re used to doing in other scientific enterprises. And without that, if we don’t do that, we’re going to be having the same damn argument about these things for the next 100 years.
Lex Fridman (02:21:40): But if I asked you, I give you $1 trillion and asked you to allocate to one place looking out, SETI or looking at Earth, should you allocate it?
Adam Frank (02:21:52): Oh God, looking out. Looking out. Because that’s the, as I always like to say, here’s my codification of this. If you said, “Hey, Adam, I’d like to find some Nebraskans.” And I said, “Oh, good, let’s go to the Himalayas.” You’d be like, “Why am I going there?” I’m like, “Well, maybe there’s some Himalayas, some Nebraskans in Himalayas.” You’d say, “No, no. Let’s go to Nebraska.” If we’re looking for aliens, why don’t we look on alien planets where they live? We have that technology now as opposed to the bucket of assumptions that you have to come up with in order to say like, “Oh, they’re here right now. They just happen to be here right now.” And also the very important thing, I called this the high beam argument to deal with the UFO stuff, you have to answer these weird, irrational things that are happening.
Adam Frank (02:22:36): Like, okay, there’s an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly. They don’t want to be detected. They’ve got super powerful technology, but they really suck at using it because we keep seeing them, we keep seeing them, but then they disappear. I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under. So there’s that whole sort of argument. You’ve got to explain why if they want to stay hidden, are they so bad at it? So that’s why I take that level of difficulty and then I put it on top of where should I look? I should look at where they’re from. That makes me want to look at do the telescopic stuff.
Lex Fridman (02:23:17): Yeah, I think the more likely explanation is either the sensors are not working correctly or it’s secret military technology being tested.
Adam Frank (02:23:27): Absolutely. I mean, listen, that’s why again, I think UAP, absolutely UAP should be studied scientifically, but if I had to make a bet and it’s just a bet, I would say this is pure state adversary stuff. When I did, I did a New York Times op-ed for this in 2021, which blew up, and so I had a lot of people talking to me. While I was doing that. I sort of looked at the signals intelligence people, the SIGINT and EINT, electronic intelligence communities, and what they were saying about the New York Times articles and the various videos, and really none of them were talking about UFOs. They were all talking about pure state. That’s why I learned the word pure state adversaries, how even simple drone technologies and you purposely want to do this. You want to fake signals into the electronics of their adversary, so they crank it up so then you can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation and know exactly what those advanced radars can do.
Lex Fridman (02:24:25): That said, I’m not saying that’s what this is. If I was the head of an alien civilization and I chose not to minimize the amount of contact I’m doing, I would try to figure out what would these humans, what would these aliens like to see? That’s why the big heads in the humanoid form, I mean, that’s kind of how I would approach communication. If I was much more intelligent, I would observe them enough. It’s like, all right, if I wanted to communicate with an ant colony, I would observe it long enough to see what are the basic elements of communication. And maybe I would do a trivial thing, do a fake ant in there.
Adam Frank (02:25:07): Right. A robot ant.
Lex Fridman (02:25:08): A robot ant, but then it’s not enough to just do a robot ant. You have to do a robot ant that moves in the way they do, and maybe aliens are just shitty at doing the robot ants. But no, I just wanted to make the case for that,
Adam Frank (02:25:21): This is the plot actually of a great science fiction book called Eon by Greg Baer, and the idea was these sort of, this is actually where my first, I became sort of more than agnostic, anti-medy, because the idea is that yes, our aliens come, they sort of make their arrival and really their point is to get rid of us. It’s the dark forest hypothesis. And what they do is they literally, the way they present themselves is in this sort of classic UFO thing, and they do it and they arrive at, this was during the Soviet Union. They arrive at the USSR, they arrive in China, and they’re kind of faking us out so that we never can organize ourselves against… So it was really, they did exactly what you’re talking about, but for nefarious purposes.
Lex Fridman (02:26:03): Okay, let me ask the pothead question. Yet another pothead-
Adam Frank (02:26:07): Another pothead. The whole conversation-
Lex Fridman (02:26:09): I’m sorry.
Adam Frank (02:26:09): Boggs before breakfast.
Lex Fridman (02:26:11): It’s signs and pothead questions back and forth. Okay, what if aliens take a form that’s unlike what we kind of traditionally envision in analyzing physical objects? What if they take the form of say ideas? What if real pothead, if it’s consciousness itself, like the subjective experience as an alien being, maybe ideas and is an easier one to visualize? Because we can think of ideas as entities traveling from human to human.
Adam Frank (02:26:44): I made the claim that the most important, that finding life any kind of life would be the most important discovery in human history. And one of the reasons is, again, as I said, that life, if we’re not an accident and there’s other life, then there’s probably lots of other life. And because the most significant thing about life is it can innovate, right? If I give you a star and tell you the mass and the composition, you can basically pretty much use the laws of physics, tell exactly what’s going to happen to that star over its entire lifetime. Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall it’s going to be a white dwarf, if it’s going to be a black hole end of story. If I gave you a single cell and said, “What’s going to happen in a few billion years?” You’d never be able to predict a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face, right?
Lex Fridman (02:27:24): Yeah.
Adam Frank (02:27:25): A kangaroo.
Adam Frank (02:27:26): So life has this possibility of innovating, of being creative. So what it means is, and that’s kind of a fundamental definition of what it means to be alive. It goes past itself. So give life enough time and what are the end result? That’s why I love science fiction so much. At some point, does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics itself. It becomes the laws of physics or these sort of lie at the extreme limits of thinking about what we mean by reality, what we mean by experience. But I’m not sure there was much we can do with them scientifically, but they’re open-ended question about the open-ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do.
Lex Fridman (02:28:14): Since you said it’s the biggest question, which is an interesting thought experiment, what is the biggest scientific question we can possibly answer? Some people might say about what happened before the Big Bang, some big physics questions about the universe. I could see the argument for how many alien civilizations or if there’s other life out there? You want to speak to that a little bit? Why is it the biggest question in… Why is it number one in your top five?
Adam Frank (02:28:43): I’ve evolved in this, right? I started off as a theoretical physicist. I went into computational astrophysics, magnetohydrodynamics of star formation, but I always was a philosophy minor. I always had these sort of bigger questions sort of floating around the back of my mind. And what I’ve come to now is the most important question for physics is, what is life? What the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell, fundamentally? And what I really mean by this, this is where I’m going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is agency. What does it mean to be an autonomous agent? How the hell does that happen? I’m not a reductionist. I’m not somebody who’s just like, well, you just put together enough chemicals and bing, bang, boom, and it suddenly appears there’s something that really is going to demand a reconception of what nature itself is.
Adam Frank (02:29:30): And so yeah, black holes are super cool. Cosmology is super cool. But really this question of what is life? Especially, from by viewing it from the inside, because it’s really about the verb to be. Really what is the most impressing philosophical question beyond science? Is the verb to be, what is being? This is what Stephen Hawking said when he talked about, “What puts the fire in the equations? The fire.” The fire is this presence and this is where it touches things like whatever you want to say it, the sacred, spirituality, whatever you want to talk about. My first book was about science and human spirituality. So this question of life, what makes life as a physical system so different is to me much more because that is where being appears. Being doesn’t appear out there. The only place that ever appears to any of us is us. I can do this kind of projection into this third person thing, but nobody ever has that, that God’s eye view. That’s a story we tell. This is where, this between us is where the verb to be, appears.
Lex Fridman (02:30:36): So this is something that you write about in The Blind Spot, why science cannot ignore human experience, sort of trying to pull the fire into the process of science. And it’s a kind of critique of materialism. Can you explain the main thesis of this book?
Adam Frank (02:30:56): Yeah. So the idea of The Blind Spot is that there is this thing that is central to science. So we’re using the blind spot as a metaphor. So the eye has an optic nerve, and the optic nerve is what allows vision to happen. So you can’t have vision without the optic nerve, but actually you’re blind to the optic nerve. There’s a little hole in your vision where the optic nerve is. And what we’re saying is that science has something like this. There’s something that without which science would not be possible, but that science, the way it’s been configured, and actually, when we mean the blind spot, I’ll get into exactly what I mean what it is, but it’s not really science. It is a set of ideas that got glued onto science. It’s a metaphysics that got glued on science. And so what is that thing? What is the blind spot? It’s experience. It is presence. And if I experience, people have to be very careful. I’m not talking about being an observer. There’s lots of words for it. There’s direct experience. There is presence. Being. The life world. Within the philosophy called phenomenology. There’s the life world.
Adam Frank (02:32:00): It’s this sort of raw presence that you can’t get away from until you die. And then who the hell knows that as long as you’re around, it’s there. And what we’re saying is that, that is the way to say this, that is the precondition for the possibility of science and the whole nature of science, the way it has evolved is that it purposely pushed that out. It pushed that out. So it could make progress, and that’s fine for a certain class of problems. But when we try to answer, when we try and go deeper, there’s a whole other class of problems. The nature of consciousness, the nature of time, quantum mechanics, that comes back to bite us. And that if we don’t learn how to take, understand that, that is always the background, that experience is always the background. Then we just end up with these paradoxes and that require this intellectual yoga to get out of.
Lex Fridman (02:32:54): I think you give a bunch of examples of that. Looking at temperature as a number is a very objective, scientific way of looking at that. And then there’s the experience of the temperature.
Adam Frank (02:33:02): And how you build the parable of temperature that we call it. So what is the blind spot? We use the term it’s a constellation. It’s not just materialism. It’s a constellation of ideas that are all really sort of philosophical views. They’re not what science says, but because of the evolution of the history of science and culture got like pin the tail on the donkey, they were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says.
Adam Frank (02:33:25): So what is it? One is reductionism that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but all the way down to quarks. That’s it. So that’s reductionism.
Adam Frank (02:33:36): The objective frame that science gives us this god’s eye view, this third-person view of the world to view the world from the outside. That’s what science bequeaths to us, that view.
Adam Frank (02:33:46): Physicalism, that everything in the world is basically made of stuff. There’s nothing else to talk about that, that’s all there is. And everything can be reduced to that.
Adam Frank (02:33:55): And then also the reification of mathematics, that mathematics is somehow more real than this.
Adam Frank (02:34:01): And there’s a bunch of other things. But all these together, what they all do is they end up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epiphenomena. Consciousness. I tend not to use the word consciousness. I think it leads us in the wrong direction. We should focus on experience because it is a verb kind of in a way. It is verb-like and by being blind to that, we end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science, but also have been detrimental to society as a whole, especially where we’re at right now.
Lex Fridman (02:34:33): So you actually say that, that from a perspective of detrimental society, that there’s a crisis of meaning, and then we respond to that in a way that’s counterproductive to these bigger questions, scientific questions. So the three ways responses you mentioned is scientific triumphalism, and then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right. I think the postmodernist on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right, and then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in-between thing. Can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning?
Adam Frank (02:35:08): Right, right. So the crisis of meaning is that on the one hand, science wants to tell us that we’re insignificant. We’re not important. We’re just biological machines. And so we’re basically an insignificant part of the universe. On the other hand, we also find ourselves being completely significant. In cosmology, we have to figure out how to look from the inside. At cosmology, we’re always the observers. We’re at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. Quantum mechanics, it really comes in, it comes the measurement problem just puts us front and center. And we’ve spent 100… Some people spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem. So on the one hand, we’re insignificant, and on the other hand, we’re central. So which one is it? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience, this inability, we can’t do science without already being present in the world.
Adam Frank (02:36:03): We can’t reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal… A lot of it is about we love our formal systems, our mathematics, and we’re substituting. That’s one of the things that, there’s two philosophers we really like for our heroes. One is Husserl, who is a mathematician, who invented phenomenology. And the other is Whitehead, who’s one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. And Husserl came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution. Part of The Blind Spot is substituting a formal system, a calculus of data for actual experience that that’s more important.
Adam Frank (02:36:39): And so let me just do, before I go to those three responses, let’s just do the parable of temperature because I think people can… It’ll help them understand what we mean. So think about degree Celsius. We have in the modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, degree Celsius. They’re out there. The universe, the molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we’ve forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience. We started off with science by, we had the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot, I feel cold, you feel hot, you feel cold. Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michel Bitbol philosopher calls, “The structural invariance.” The things that we could both kind of agree on. So we figured out like, oh, we could make a gradiated little cylinder that’s got mercury in it and that hot things will be higher in on that gradiated cylinder, cold things will be lower, and we can both kind of figure out what we’re going to agree on are our standards for that. And then we have thermometry, yay. We have a way of having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold.
Adam Frank (02:37:53): And then from that, we can come up with thermodynamics, etc. And then we end up at the bottom of that with this idea of everyday I wake up and I check my phone and I’m like, oh, it’s going to be 60 degrees out. Great. And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from. It required that bodily experience that also, not just me, I have to tell you, it’s part of my communication with you, cold today, isn’t it? That from that basic irreducible experience of being in the world with everything that it involves, I developed degree Celsius, but then I forgot about it. I forgot the experience. So that’s called the amnesia of experience.
Adam Frank (02:38:41): So that’s what we mean by how the blind spot emerges, how we end up, how science purposely pushes experience out of the way so it can make progress, but then it forgets that experience was important. So where does this show up? Why is this? What are the responses to trying to get this back in and where this crisis of meaning emerge? So scientific triumphalism is the idea that the only thing that’s true for us are scientific truths. Unless it can be codified in a formal system and represented as data, captured in some kind of scientific causal network, it doesn’t even exist. And anything else that’s not part of it that can be formalized in that way is an epiphenomenon. It’s not real.
Adam Frank (02:39:25): So scientific triumphalism is this response to the weirdness of, I could call it the mystery, the weirdness of experience by just ignoring it completely. So there’s no other truth. Art, music, human spirituality, it’s all actually reducible it neural correlates. So that’s one way that it’s been dealt with.
Adam Frank (02:39:47): The other way is this sort of, right, you’ve got on the postmodern, the left academic left, you get this thing, science is just a game. It’s just a game from the powerful come up with, which is also not true. Science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening. So that’s another way to push science away or respond to it. The denial, science denial that happens. That’s also another way of not understanding the balance that science is trying, that we need to establish with experience.
Adam Frank (02:40:18): And then there’s just pseudoscience, which wants to sort of say, oh, the new age movement or whatever, which wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this weird pseudo spiritual way or that doesn’t have the rigor of science.
Adam Frank (02:40:33): So all of these ways, all of these responses, we have this difficulty about experience. We need to understand how experience fits into the web of meaning, and we don’t really have a good way of doing it yet. And the point of the book was to identify very clearly how the problem manifests, what the problem is, and what its effects are in the various sciences.
Lex Fridman (02:40:55): And by the way, we should mention that at least the first two responses, they kind of feed each other just to observe the scientific community, those who gravitate a little bit towards the scientific triumphalism, is an arrogance that builds in the human soul. I mean, it has to do with PhDs, it has to do with sitting on an academic throne, all those things. And the human nature with the egos and so on, it builds. And of course, that nobody likes arrogance. And so those that reject science, the arrogance is fuel for the people that reject science.
Adam Frank (02:41:33): I absolutely agree.
Lex Fridman (02:41:34): It just goes back and is this divide that builds.
Adam Frank (02:41:37): Yeah, no, and that was a problem when you saw, so like I said, my first book was about science and human spirituality. So I was trying to say that science is actually, if we look at what happens in human spirituality, not religion. Religion is about politics, but about for the entire history of the species, we’ve had this experience of, for lack of a better word, the sacredness. I’m not connecting this God or anything. I’m just saying this experience of the more, and then with the new atheist movement, you got people saying that, “Anybody who feels that is an idiot.” They just can’t handle the hardcore science. When in fact their views of the world are so denuded of, they can’t even see the role that experience plays in how they came up with their formal systems. And experience fundamentally is weird, mysterious, it’s, it kind of goes down forever in some sense. There is always more. So yeah, that arrogance then just if you’re telling everybody who’s not hardcore enough to do the standard model of cosmology, that they’re idiots, that’s not going to bode well for the advance of your project.
Lex Fridman (02:42:37): So you’re proposing at least to consider the idea that experience is fundamental, experience is not just an illusion that emerges from the set of quirks, that there could be something about the conscious experience of the world that is at the core of reality?
Adam Frank (02:42:56): But I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t because there is panpsychism, right? Which wants to say-
Lex Fridman (02:43:02): Right. So that’s all the way there. So panpsychism is, that’s literally one of the laws of physics is consciousness.
Adam Frank (02:43:04): Right. But see what all those do is just the idea of say, physicalism versus idealism, which are kind of the two philosophical schools you can go with. Physicalism says, “All that exists as physical.” Idealism says, “All that exists is mind.” We’re actually saying, “Look, both of these to take either of those positions is already to project out into that third-person view. And that third-person view we want to really emphasize is a fiction.” It’s a useful fiction when you’re doing science. If I want to do the Newtonian physics of billiard balls on a pool table, great. I don’t want to have to think about experience at all, right? But if I’m asking deeper questions, I can’t ignore the fact that there really is no person view and that any story I tell about the world is coming from, it’s not just first person, but it’s literally because I’m going to argue that experience always involves all of us. Experience always originates out of a community.
Adam Frank (02:43:58): That you are always telling those stories from the perspective of already existing, of already being in experience. So whatever account we want to give of the world is going to have to take that as experience as being irreducible and the irreducible starting point. So ultimately, we don’t have an answer. That’s when people are like, “Well, what are you suggesting is the alternative?” It’s like, look, that’s the good work of the next science to come. Well, our job was to point out the problem with this, but what we would argue with is, and we’re thinking about the next book, is this is really going to require a new conception of nature. That doesn’t sort of jump to that third-person… That fictional third-person view and somehow figures out how to do science. Recognizing that it always starts from experience. It always starts from this field of experience. Or in phenomenology, the word is the life world that you’re embedded in. You can’t un-embed yourself from it.
Adam Frank (02:44:52): So how do you do… So one of the things that Whitehead said was, “We have to avoid the bifurcation of nature.” And what he meant by that is the bifurcation into scientific concepts, wavelength. Think about seeing a sunset. You can say like, “Oh look, it’s just wavelengths and scattering particles.” And your experience of the redness, the actual experience of the redness and all the other things. It’s not just red. There’s no qualia, there’s no pure redness. Everything that’s happening in the experiential part is just an epiphenomena. It’s just brain states, whatever. He said, “You can’t do that. They’re both real. They’re both accounts. They both need to be integrated.” And so that required, I think, really a different of what we mean by nature.
Lex Fridman (02:45:34): Is it something like incorporating in the physics, in the study of nature, the observer, the experiencing observer, or is that still also looking from a third-person?
Adam Frank (02:45:45): I think that that’s what we have to figure out. And so actually a great place to think about this is quantum mechanics, because one of the things we’re arguing is look.. In the chapter that I wrote on, because I wrote on, because I wrote this with Evan Thompson, who’s a wonderful philosopher, and Marcelo Gleiser, who’s a theoretical physicist. When I was writing the chapter on the origin of The Blind Spot, sort of how this emerged out of history, the subheader was like, “Well, it made sense at the time.” Because it did. It really, there was a reason why people adopted this third person, God’s eye deterministic view. This view of sort of like, yeah, the perfect clockwork of the universe. Yeah, totally made sense. But by the time you got to the beginning of the 20th century, science itself was telling you, “Eh-eh.” And no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics, right?
Adam Frank (02:46:29): Quantum mechanics slams you with the idea of the measurement problem. And most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation, the Schrodinger equation, which you put in, like we talked about before, you have initial conditions and now you’ve got a differential equation and you crank out the differential equation and it makes predictions for the future, right? Exactly like Newtonian physics or its higher versions of the Lagrange or Hamiltonians. But then this other thing happens where it’s like, oh, by the way, as soon as you look at it, as soon as the measurement is made, I have a whole nother set of rules for you. That’s what we call the born rule. And it was telling you right from the beginning that measurement matters, right? So when you’re asking, how will we do this? Quantum mechanics is actually pointing to how to do it.
Adam Frank (02:47:17): So there’s been all these different interpretations of the quantum mechanics. Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn’t there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter. And then you get something like QBism, which is I’m going to advocate for, is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, which puts the Born rule at the center. Instead of focusing on the Schrodinger equation and the weird things that come out of it, like Schrodinger’s cat and all that other stuff. It says, “No, no, actually the real mystery is the Born rule. Let’s think about the Born rule.” And like you said, that puts the agent, the agent and information at the center of the whole thing.
Lex Fridman (02:48:01): So that’s not a thing you’re trying to get rid of? That’s the thing you’re trying to integrate at the center of the thing in quantum mechanics, it becomes super obvious, but maybe the same kind of thing should be incorporated in every layer of study of nature.
Adam Frank (02:48:19): Absolutely. That’s exactly it. So one of the things that’s really interesting to me, so we have a project, I’m part of a big project that Chris Fuchs and Jacques Pienaar on QBism. So I’ve been part of that. And what I’ve been amazed by is the language they use. So what’s cool about QBism is it comes from quantum information theory. It’s a pretty modern version of thinking about quantum mechanics. And it’s always about do you have an agent who makes an action on the world? And then the information they get from that action through the experiment, that’s the action on the world. Updates, their priors updates, their Bayesian, that’s why it’s called QBism. Quantum Bayesianism updates how the information they’ve gotten from the world. Now, this turns out to be, it’s kind of the same language that we’re using in a project that’s about the physics of life, where we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information in living systems like cells.
Adam Frank (02:49:16): So we have Shannon information, which is a probability distribution that tells you basically how much surprise there is in a message. Semantic information focuses on meaning, right? Focuses on in a very simple way, just how much of the information that the agent, the critter is getting from the world actually helps it survive. That’s the most basic idea of meaning. We can get all philosophical about meaning, but this is it. Does it help me stay alive or not? And the whole question of agency and autonomy that occurs in this setting of just asking about how do cells move up a chemical gradient to get more food? Kind of has the feel the same sort of architecture as what’s going on in quantum mechanics. So I think what you said is exactly it, how do we bring this sort of recognition? That there’s always us, the agent or life the agent interacting with the world and drawing both giving information and passing information back as a way of doing science, doing hardcore science with experiments, but never forgetting that agency, which also means experience in some sense, is at the center of the whole thing.
Lex Fridman (02:50:27): So you think there could be something like QBism, Quantum Bayesianism that creates a theory, like a Nobel Prize winning theory, sort of hardcore real theories that put the agent at the center.
Adam Frank (02:50:42): Yes. That’s what we’re looking for. I think that is really, that’s the exciting part. And it’s a move, the scientific triumphalist thing says, you understand why people love this? I have these equations. And these equations represent, there’s this platonic ideal that they are, they exist eternally on their own. It’s kind of quasi-religious, right? It’s sort of somehow, look, these equations are the, you’re reading the mind of God, but this other approach to me is just as exciting because what you’re saying is there’s us and the world, they’re inseparable. It’s always us and the world. And what we’re now finding about is this co-creation, this interaction between the agent and the world such that these powerful laws of physics that need an account. In no way am I saying these laws aren’t important. These laws are amazing, but they need an account, but not an account that strips, that turns the experience, turns the agent into just an epiphenomena, that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent’s not the most important part of the story.
Lex Fridman (02:51:45): So if you pull on this thread and say, there’s a whole discipline born of this, putting the agent as the primary thing in a theory, in a physics theory, is it possible it just breaks the whole thing open? So there’s this whole effort of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of coming up with a theory of everything. What if these are the tip of the iceberg? What if the agent thing is really important?
Adam Frank (02:52:18): So listen, that would be kind of my dream. I’m not going to be the one to do it because I’m not smart enough to do it. Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while. With string theory, I’ve spent my whole life listening to talks about, “String theory, real soon.” And it’s gotten ever more disconnected from data, observations. There were people talking for a while that it is post-empirical. I always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like, physicists have been smoking their own stash. There’s this way we’ve gotten used to, you have to out-weird the other person, my theory has 38 dimensions. My theory is 22 dimensions, but it’s got psychedelic squirrels in it. And so there’s a problem. I don’t need to tell you there’s a crisis in physics or there’s a crisis in cosmology. Other people have used that. That’s been the headline on scientific American stories.
Adam Frank (02:53:18): So clearly another direction has to be found, and maybe it has nothing to do with this, but I suspect that because so many times the agent or having to deal with the view from the inside or the role of agency. When it comes to time thinking that you can replace the block universe with the actual experience of time. Clocks don’t tell time. We use clocks to tell time. So maybe that even the fundamental nature of time can’t be viewed from the outside, that there’s a new physics theory that is going to come from, that comes from this agential, informational, computational view. I don’t know. But that’s kind of what I think it would be fertile ground to explore.
Lex Fridman (02:54:05): Yeah, time is really interesting one. Time is really important to us humans. What is time?
Adam Frank (02:54:12): Yeah, right. What is time? So the way we have tended to view it is we’ve taken, this is what, when Husserl talks about the surreptitious substitution, we’ve taken Einstein’s beautiful, powerful, formal system for viewing time, and we substituted that for the actual experience of time. So the block universe, where next Tuesday is already written down in the block universe, the four dimensional universe, all events are already there. Which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the scientific framework. But it is not lived time. And this was pointed out to Einstein, and he eventually recognized it. Very famous meeting between Henri Bergson, who was the most famous philosopher of the early 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity-
Adam Frank (02:55:03): The 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity and Berkson, whose whole thing was about time and it was about duration. He wanted to separate the scientific image of time, the map of time from the actual terrain, which he used the word duration like we humans where duration for us is full. It’s stretched out. It’s got a little bit of the past, a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present. Music is the best example, right? You’re hearing music, you’re both already anticipating what’s going to happen and you are remembering what’s going on.
Adam Frank (02:55:34): There’s a kind of phenomenal structure there, which is different from the representation of time that you have with the formal mathematics. And the way we would look at this is that the problem with the surreptitious substitution, the problem with the blind spot is it says, “Oh, no, no, the formal system is time,” but really the only place time appears is with us, where we’re so having a theory that actually could start with us and then stretch out into the universe rather than imposing this imaginary third-person view back on us. Could, that’s a route towards a different way of approaching the whole problem.
Lex Fridman (02:56:13): I just wonder who is the observer? I mean, define what the agent is in any kind of frame is difficult.
Adam Frank (02:56:20): Is difficult, but that’s the good work of the science ahead of us. So what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about? So we start with experience, which is irreducible. There’s no atoms of experience. It’s a whole, and we go through the whole process, which is a communal process, by the way. There’s a philosopher, Robert Crease, who talks about the workshop that started in the 1700s, 1600s, we developed this communal space to work in, sometimes it was literally a physical space, a laboratory where these ideas would be pulled apart, refined, argued over, and then validated. And we want to the next step.
Adam Frank (02:56:54): So this idea of pulling out from experience, these thinner, abstract, structural invariance, the things that we could actually do science with, and it’s kind of like, we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction. So the problem with the way we do things now is we take those abstractions, which came from experience, and then with something like a computational model of consciousness or experience, we think we can put it back in. You literally pulled out these super thin things, these abstractions neglecting experience because that’s the only way to do science. And then you think somehow, oh, I’m going to jam experience back in and have an explanation for experience.
Lex Fridman (02:57:36): So do you think it’s possible to show that something like free will is quote, unquote real if you integrate experience back into into the physics model of the world?
Adam Frank (02:57:46): What I would say is that free will is a given. And that’s the thing about experience. So one of the things that Whitehead said, I really love this quote. It says, “It’s not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete. It’s the job to account for the abstract.” The concrete, what’s happening between us right now, is just given. It’s presented to us every day. It’s presented to me. If you want an explanation, fine, but the explanation actually doesn’t add anything to it. So that free will in some sense is the nature of being an agent. To be an agent agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are, they’re equivalent. And so in some sense, to be an agent is to be autonomous. And so then the question really to ask is, can you have an account for agency and autonomy that captures aspects of it’s arising in the world or the way it and the world sort of co-arise.
Adam Frank (02:58:41): But the idea why we argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of our equations, which themselves, we treat the equations as if they’re more real than experience. And the equations are a paler… They don’t corral experience. They are a thinner representation. As we like to say, “Don’t confuse the map for the terrain.” What’s happening between us right now and all the weirdness of it. That’s the terrain. The map is what I can write down on equations. And then in the workshop, do experiments on. Super powerful, needs an account, but experience overflows that.
Lex Fridman (02:59:17): What if the experience is an illusion? How do we know what if the agency that we experience is an illusion?
Adam Frank (02:59:26): An illusion looking from where? Because that already requires to take that stance is you’ve already pushed yourself into that third person view. And so what we’re saying is that third person view, which now you’re going to say like, “Oh, I’ve got a whole other set of entities, of ontological entities,” meaning things that I think exist in God’s living room in spite that are independent of me and the community of living things I’m part of.
Lex Fridman (02:59:51): So you’re pushing it elsewhere just like there’s a stack of turtles is probably, if this experience, the human experience is an illusion, maybe there’s an observer for whom it’s not an illusion. So you always have to find an observer somewhere.
Adam Frank (03:00:06): And that’s why fundamentally the blind spot, especially the scientific triumphalist part is following a religious impulse. It’s wanting the god’s eye view. And what’s really interesting, and when we think about this and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly, there’s a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in and it is actually a pretty, it’s only one version of philosophy. So it is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition. But there’s even in Europe or in the Western tradition for Western, what we’ll call western philosophy, there’s phenomenology. And Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which took an entirely different track. They were really interested in the structure of experience. They spent all their time trying to understand, trying to develop a language that could kind of climb into the circle. That is experience, right experience. You’re not going to be able to start with axioms and work your way to it.
Adam Frank (03:01:00): It’s given. So you have to kind of jump in and then try and find a language to account for its structure. But then, so that has not been part of this discussion about you’ll never, good luck finding a YouTube video where someone, a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view, even though it’s a huge branch of philosophy. And then you get the philosophies that occurred from other cores of civilization. So there’s the western core out of which comes the Greeks and the Judeo- Christian Islamic tradition. But then you get India and you get Asia and they developed their own. They were highly complex societies that developed their own responses to these questions. And they, for reasons they had contemplative practice. They were very focused on direct, trying to directly probe attention and experience. They asked questions in ways that the West never really did.
Adam Frank (03:01:52): Phenomenology kind of started it, but there’s philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu. They’re like the Plato and the Aristotle of those philosophies. And they were really focused on experience in the West. I think maybe because we had the Judeo-Christian tradition where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame in the traditions that came from the classical philosophies of India and Asia. They started always with this. They wanted to know about experience. Their whole philosophies and their logic and their argumentation was based on, I’ve got this experience, I can’t get out of this experience. How do I reason from it? So I think there’s a lot of other philosophical traditions that we could draw from. Not slavishly, we don’t all have to become Buddhists to do it, but there are traditions that really tried to work this out in a way that the Western traditions just didn’t.
Lex Fridman (03:02:47): But there’s also the practical fact that it’s difficult to build a logical system on top of experience. It’s difficult to have the rigor of science on top of experience. And so as science advances, we might get better and better. The same is it’s very difficult to have any kind of mathematical or kind of scientific rigor to why complexity emerges from simple rules and simple objects, sort of the Santa Fe questions.
Adam Frank (03:03:16): But I think we can do it. I think there’s aspects of it. I mean, as long as you’re never trying to, “This is what experience is,” I think that’s kind of where you’re never going to have a causal account of experience just given. But you can do lots about, and that’s what the good work is to how do I approach this? How do I approach this in a way that’s rigorous that I can do experiments with also? But so for example, I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about in this is what we’re counting with our semantic information too. Causal closure. Love this idea. The idea that… So we talked about autopoiesis a while back, the idea that living systems, they are self creating and self maintaining. And so the membrane, cell membrane is a great example of this, right? The cell membrane, you can’t have a cell without a cell membrane.
Adam Frank (03:04:02): The cell membrane lets stuff through, keeps other stuff out. But the cell membrane is part of the processes and it’s a product of the processes that the cell membrane needs, right? In some sense, the cell membrane creates itself. So there’s this strange, it’s always with life, there’s always this strange loop. And so somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange loop is the science that’s ahead of us. And so this idea of causal closure accounting for how the, we talk about downward causation. So reductionism says everything only depends on the microstate. Everything just depends on the atoms. That’s it. If you know the Lagrangian for the standard model, you are done. Of course, in principle, you need God’s computer, but fine. In principle, it could be done. Causal closure, and I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this.
Adam Frank (03:04:57): There’s ways in which using Epsilon machines and all this machinery from information theory, that you can see ways in which the system can organize itself so that it decouples from the microstates. Now, the macrostate fundamentally no longer needs the microstate for its own description, its own account of the laws, whether that paper is true or not. It’s an example of heading down that road. There’s also Robert Rosen’s work. He was a theoretical biologist who he talked about closure to efficient cause that living systems are organizationally closed, are causally closed so that they don’t depend anymore on the microstate. And he had a proof, which is very contentious. Nobody knows if it’s some argue it’s true, some argue it’s not. But he said that because of this, living systems are not church-turing complete, they cannot be represented as formal systems. So in that way, they’re not axioms, they’re not living systems will not be axioms.
Adam Frank (03:05:55): They can only be partially captured by algorithms. Now again, people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof is valid or not. But I’m saying them giving you examples of when you see the blind spot, when you acknowledge the blind spot, it opens up a whole other class of kinds of scientific investigations. The book we thought was going to be really heretical. Obviously most public facing scientists are very sort of in that, especially scientific triumphant. So we were just waiting for the fight. Then the review from science came out and it was totally pro… It was very positive. We’re like, “Oh my God.” Then a review came out in Nature Physics and it was totally positive.
Adam Frank (03:06:38): Then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal, kind of criticized, not capitalism, but we criticized all industrial economies for that they had been touched by the blind spots, socialism, communism. It doesn’t matter. These extractive sort of had that sort of view that the is just reducible to resources. The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review. So it feels like there’s actually out there, there is some, among working scientists in particular, there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view and a recognition that we need to shift something in order to jump past these hurdles that we’ve been arguing about forever and we’re sort of stuck in a vortex.
Lex Fridman (03:07:18): Well, it is. I mean, I think there is a hunger to acknowledge that there’s an elephant in the room, that we’re just removing the agent. Everyone is doing it and it’s like, yeah, yeah, there’s the experience and then there’s the third-person perspective on the world. And so, man, science from, applying scientific rigor from a first-person perspective is very difficult. I mean, it’s fascinating.
Adam Frank (03:07:44): I think we can do it. Also, the thing, what’s really interesting is I think it’s not just first-person, first and second, because one idea is that, the idea that, oh, science gives us this objective third-person view. That’s one way of talking about objectivity. There’s a whole other way is that I do the experiment. You do the experiment, we talk to each other, we agree on methods, and we both get the same result. That is a very different way of thinking about objectivity, and it acknowledges that when we talk about agents, agency and individuality are flexible.
Adam Frank (03:08:18): So there’s a great paper, speaking of Santa Fe by David Krakauer, where they looked at sort of information, theoretic measures of individuality. And what you find is it’s actually pretty fluid. My liver cell is an individual, but really it’s part of the liver. And my liver is a separate system, but really it’s part of me. So I’m an individual, yay. But actually I’m part of a society and I couldn’t be me without the entire community of say, language users. I wouldn’t even be able to frame any questions. And my community of language users is part of ecosystems that are alive, that I am a part of, a lineage of. This is like Sarah Walker stuff, and then those ecosystems are part of the biosphere. We’re never separable as opposed to this very atomizing, the triumphal, this science view is wants like Boltzmann brains, you’re just a brain floating in the space.
Lex Fridman (03:09:07): There is a fascinating degree to which agency is fluid. You are an individual, but you and I talking is the kind of individual, and then the person listening to this right now is also an individual. I mean, that’s a weird thing too.
Adam Frank (03:09:24): That’s a weird thing, right?
Lex Fridman (03:09:26): Because there’s a broadcast nature too.
Adam Frank (03:09:29): This is why information theoretic. So the idea that we’re pursuing now, which I get really excited about, is this idea of information architecture or organization. Organizational organization. Because physicalism is like everything’s atoms, but Kant recognized, Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism. He recognized that life has a weird organization that would see specifically different from machines. And so this idea that how do we engage with the idea that organization, which is often I can be cast in information theoretic terms or computational terms even. It’s not really quite physical. It’s embodied in physical, in the physical. It has to instantiate in the physical, but it also has this other realm of design, not design like intelligent design, but there’s a… The organization itself is a relationship of constraints and information flow. And I think again, that’s an entirely new interesting way that we might get a very different kind of science that would flow out of that.
Lex Fridman (03:10:29): So going back to Kant and organism versus machine. So I showed you a couple of legged robots.
Adam Frank (03:10:40): Very cool.
Lex Fridman (03:10:41): Is it possible for machines to have agency?
Adam Frank (03:10:44): I would not discount that possibility. I think there’s no reason I would say that it’s impossible that machines could, whatever it manifests that strange loop that we’re talking about that autopoiesis I don’t think there’s a reason to say it can’t happen in silicon. I think whatever, it would be very different from us, the idea that it would be like, oh, it would be just like us. But now it’s instantiated and I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature. I don’t think what we have now, the LLMs are really there, but yeah, I’m not going to say that it’s not possible.
Lex Fridman (03:11:26): I wonder how far you can get with imitation, which is essentially what LLMs are doing. So imitating humans, and I wouldn’t discount either the possibility that through imitation you can achieve what you would call consciousness or agency or the ability to have experience. I think for most of us humans to think, oh, that’s just fake. That’s copying. But there’s some degree to which us, we humans are just copying each other. We just are really good imitation machines coming from babies. We were born in this world and we’re just learning to imitate each other. And through the imitation and the tension in the disagreements in the imitations. We gain personality, perspective, all that kind of stuff.
Adam Frank (03:12:08): Yeah, it’s possible, right? It’s possible. But I think probably the view I’m advocating would say that one of the most important parts of agency is there’s something called, E-four. The E-four theory of cognition, embodiment, enaction, embedding, and there’s another one, extension. But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the extension with other living systems as well is essential.
Adam Frank (03:12:46): So that’s why I think the LLMs are not going to, it’s not imitation. It’s going to require, this goes to the brain in the VAT thing. I did an article about the brain in the vat, which was really Evans, I was reporting on Evans. Where they did the brain in the VAT argument. But they said, “Look, in the end, actually the only way to actually get a real brain in the VAT is actually to have a brain in a body.” And it could be a robot body, but you still need a brain in the body. So I don’t think LLMs will get there because they can’t. You really need to be embedded in a world, at least that’s the E-four idea.
Lex Fridman (03:13:13): The E-four, the 4E approach to cognition argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. And by way of extra cranial processes and structures, they’re very much in vogue. 4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations. This is a paper, but reflecting on two recent collections, this article reviews the four E paradigm with a view to assessing the strengths and weaknesses. It’s fascinating. I mean, yeah, the branches of what is cognition extends far, and it could go real far.
Adam Frank (03:13:49): Right. There’s a great story about an interaction between Jonas Salk, who was very much a reductionist, the great biologist, and Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist, and Bateson always loved to poke people. And he said to Salk, he said, “Where’s your mind?” And Salk went, “Up here,” and Bateson said, “No, no, no, out here.” And what he really meant was this extended idea. It’s not just within your cranium to have experience. Experience in some sense is not a thing you have. It is a thing you do. Almost perform it in a way, which is why both actually having a body, but having the body itself be in a world with other bodies is, from this perspective, is really important. And it’s very attractive to me. And again, if we’re really going to do science with them, we’re going to have to have these ideas crash up against data, crash up against, we can’t just armchair it or couch quarterbacking it, but I think there’s a lot of possibility here. It’s a very radically different way of looking at what we mean by nature.
Lex Fridman (03:14:53): What do you make of the fact that this individual observer, you as an individual observer only get a finite amount of time to exist in this world? Does it make you sad?
Adam Frank (03:15:04): No, actually it doesn’t make me sad. Okay, so full reveal, I have been doing contemplative practice in the zen tradition for 30 years. I’ve been staring at a wall for 30 years, and it’s taught me a lot. I really value what that practice has given me about the nature of experience. And one of the things it’s taught me is I don’t really matter that very much. This thing I call Adam Frank is really, it’s kind of a construct. There’s this process going on of which I am actually fundamentally, and that’s super cool, but it’s going to go. I don’t know where it came from. It’s going to go, I don’t really need it to, and then who the hell knows? I’m not an advocate for an afterlife, but just that what I love, zen, has this idea of beyond birth and death, and they don’t mean reincarnation. What they mean is, “Dude, you don’t even really understand what life is.” You know what I mean? I’m like this core level of your own experience. So your ideas about what death is are equally ill-formed.
Adam Frank (03:16:07): The contemplative practice really tries to focus on experience itself. Spend five days at a zen session doing contemplative practice from 7:00 AM. until 9:00 PM, obviously with breaks. And you’ll really get a much deeper understanding of what my own experience is. What is it really like? It forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention because attention is kind of like this thing. It’s usually just like, “Oh, over there. Oh, my foot hurts. Oh, I got to do my taxes. Oh, what’s that guy over there? Why is he wearing those stupid shoes?” And with a contemplative practice, you learn how to stabilize it.
Adam Frank (03:16:39): And once you stabilize it, you can now begin to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it. So what I think I’ve learned from that is kind of whatever, I’m not really kind of real to begin with. The Adam Frank part, the identity, the thing, and the part of me that is real is everything’s coming and going. It’s all coming and going. Well, how could I ever not come and go? And the entire world is just, Buddhism has this idea of co-dependent arising. Nothing exists, nothing has self-nature. Nothing exists by itself. It’s an endless, infinitely connected web.
Lex Fridman (03:17:15): But still, there’s a deliciousness to the individual experience. You get attached to it and it ends and it’s good while it last, and it sucks that it ends. You can just be like, “Ah, well, everything comes and goes,” but I was eating ice cream yesterday. I found this awesome low-carb ice cream called, Delights here in Austin, and it ends. And I was staring at the empty container, and it was-
Adam Frank (03:17:42): That’s beautiful, man. I love that.
Lex Fridman (03:17:44): You could say, “Yeah, well, that’s how it all is, but…”
Adam Frank (03:17:47): Can I say that what I’ve learned from, because I love your idea of the deliciousness of it. But what I think happens with contemplative practice when it deepens is that you’re not just saying, this is I do koan practice. So this is a tradition in zen that it was established, it was a teaching method that was established a thousand years ago. They’re these book of koans. And every koan, if you’ve ever read Godel, he’s got a whole chapter on koans. They’re kind of non-logical problems that you have to work on. One of my favorite one was, “Stop the sound of the distant temple bell.”
Adam Frank (03:18:23): You’re like, “What?” Every time my teacher gives it to him, I’m like, “What are you talking about?” This is the whole zen thing of up is down, but down is up. You must understand this. So your job with these koans is to sit with them, is to sit with them until you realize what the thing is trying to teach you what aspect of experience it’s trying to teach you. So there’s no answer. No. And in fact, actually, you don’t give an answer. You actually usually have to demonstrate. The first time when I did a call on and the guy was like, “Don’t tell me the answer, show me the answer.” I was like, what are you talking about? But after doing these for years now, I’ve kind of learned the language of them. So I could never tell you. If I told you the answer, I could give you a call and tell you the answer. You’d be like, “What?”
Adam Frank (03:19:05): It’s not the words, it’s the So your experience of like, yeah, the cup is empty. With a contemplative practice as it deepens over years, it really does take years. Just like anything in math, it took me years to understand the Lagrangians. You kind of come to a deeper understanding with yeah, the words of, it’s not just like, oh, everything changes. You actually feel that movement. You feel it with breath to breath, and it really becomes, sometimes I have this feeling, this is messed up, but of just joy and it’s not connected to anything. That’s what I’ve kind of gotten from practice. It’s just like, yeah, that passage, that infinite passage of moment to moment that is truly the way things are. And it’s okay. It’s not okay because I have a feeling about it. Okay. I want it to be okay. It just is okay. And so really, it’s a pretty awesome thing.
Lex Fridman (03:19:51): Yeah, that’s beautiful. Maybe it’s the genetics, maybe it’s the biochemistry in my brain, but I generally have that joy about experience, amorphous joy. But it seems like, again, maybe it’s my Eastern European roots, but there’s always a melancholy that’s also sitting next to the joy, and I think it always feels like they’re intricately linked. So the melancholy is about, maybe about the finiteness of experience, and the joy is just about the beauty of experience, and they’re just kind of sitting there.
Adam Frank (03:20:22): Which is cool actually, because I’m also, I come from Eastern, my roots are Eastern European as well, going back, and I get it right, but that’s also the cool thing. I think one of the things is, well, that is what it is. That is what it is. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to manipulate it or move it around or yeah, this is the experience.
Lex Fridman (03:20:41): Can you speak to just the practical nature of sitting there from 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM?
Adam Frank (03:20:45): I’m like, what the hell are you doing, bro?
Lex Fridman (03:20:46): What’s powerful? What’s fascinating to you? What have you learned from just the experience of staring at a wall?
Adam Frank (03:20:51): Yeah. Yeah. So not really. I mean, you’re staring. You’re facing a wall, and what you’re doing is you’re just sitting with, there’s different meditative practices, there’s counting breaths. So that’s usually what I do. I sit down and I start counting breaths, and for the first half hour it’s just like, blah, blah, blah. Like I said, I’m thinking about my taxes. I’m thinking about what I got to do later on, yada, yada, yada. First time I ever did a full session, a two-day session, I swear to God, I had Bruce Springsteen’s, Born To Run album track through from the beginning to the end with the pauses. This was back in when there were LPs with the fricking pauses.
Lex Fridman (03:21:22): Nice.
Adam Frank (03:21:24): My mind was just like, I need to do something. So it literally played the whole album in order.
Lex Fridman (03:21:28): That’s pretty cool, actually.
Adam Frank (03:21:29): Yeah, it was pretty amazing to see because you really do, you see the dynamics of your mind. But what happens is, and this took me a while, I used to hate sitting. I do it, but after a while the mind gets exhausted. That part of the mind, the upper level, the roof brain chatter is just like, there’s nothing else to do. And then you get bored. And now I realize that’s when something interesting is going to happen. You drop down and now it’s a very physical practice. People think you’re just sitting there not thinking or thinking about not thinking. Actually, it becomes a very physical process where you’re really just following the breath, you’re kind of riding the breath and it gets very quiet. And within that quietness, there’s a path. Because obviously there’s been, Buddhism is always not about thinking, but there’s a huge literature.
Adam Frank (03:22:18): So these guys are always about, don’t think. I’ve written all this stuff, but they’re guideposts. They’re like the finger pointing at the moon. And there’s the idea of first, your mind is usually scattered. Right now, when I walk out, I’m going to go get the Uber and everything. My mind’s going to be all over the place, but with sitting, first, you concentrate the mind so that there’s no more scatter anymore. The thoughts are still happening, but you’re just not there happening up there. You’re not even paying attention to them. And then as time goes on, you unify the mind, which is this very powerful thing where kind of the self drops away and there’s just this presence.
Adam Frank (03:22:49): It’s kind of like a raw presence, and that’s often where the joy up wells from, but you sit with whatever, maybe you’re going to sit and maybe you’re going to go through an hour of being bummed out about your mom who died or something. You’re just going to sit with whatever comes up you’re going to make. That’s why the sitting part, you’re making the commitment. I’m going to sit here with whatever comes up, I will not be moved. And then what You come away with it actually over time, it actually changes kind of who you are. I’m still the asshole I was from New Jersey growing up, but I just have more space now for things.
Lex Fridman (03:23:24): Once Jersey, always Jersey.
Adam Frank (03:23:26): Always Jersey.
Lex Fridman (03:23:26): But I love the Bruce Springsteen is just blasting in your head.
Adam Frank (03:23:29): Yeah, that was amazing.
Lex Fridman (03:23:30): Why are we here? What do you think is the purpose, the meaning of human existence?
Adam Frank (03:23:35): It’s good that we just had the last conversation because I’m going to give this answer, which is so corny. It’s love, and I’m not messing around. Because really actually, what happens, so within Buddhism, there’s the idea of the Bodhisattva principle. You’re here to help. You’re just here to help, right? Compassion. That’s a really essential part of this path, of the Dharma path. And when I first started, I was like, “I don’t care about compassion. I’m here for knowledge.” I started contemplative practice because of the usual thing I was suffering. The reason everybody comes to things like this, life was hard. I was going through stuff, but I also wanted knowledge. I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality. So it was like compassion or whatever. But then I found out that you can’t get that. You can’t get those. You can’t go to this level without compassion.
Adam Frank (03:24:18): Somehow in this process, you realize that it really is about helping all sentient beings. That’s the way they frame, just being here to help. So I know that sounds cornball, but especially for a guy from Jersey, which is the main thing is to get over. Your job is to get over. But that’s really what I found. It is actually kind… And so that joy, the joy, some of that joy is just, it’s like this. One of the things I have when I have really, there’s a kind of experience I’ll have in contemplative practice, which will carry out into the world, which is just this gratitude for the fact that the world gives you everything, and there’s a certain way, just the blue sky and the breath, the world is just giving you itself completely unhindered. It holds nothing back. And yeah, that’s kind of the experience. And then you kind of like, “Oh, I need to be helpful, because who’s not having this experience.”
Lex Fridman (03:25:09): So just love for the world as it is?
Adam Frank (03:25:10): Love for the, and all the beings who are suffering. Everybody’s suffering, everybody’s suffering. Your worst political opponent, they’re suffering. And our job is just to try and drop our biases and our stories and see this fundamental level at which life is occurring.
Lex Fridman (03:25:26): And hopefully there’s many alien civilizations out there going through the same journey, out of suffering, towards love.
Adam Frank (03:25:33): That may be a universal thing about what it means to be alive.
Lex Fridman (03:25:36): I hope so.
Adam Frank (03:25:37): I hope so too. Either that or they’re coming to eat us.
Lex Fridman (03:25:39): Especially if they’re a type three civilization.
Adam Frank (03:25:41): That’s right. And they got really big guns.
Lex Fridman (03:25:45): Well, this was truly mind-blowing. Fascinating. Just awesome conversation. Adam, thank you for everything you do, and thank you for talking today.
Adam Frank (03:25:52): Oh, thank you. This was a lot of fun.
Lex Fridman (03:25:54): Thanks for listening to this conversation with Adam Frank. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. “The cosmos is all that is or ever was, or ever will be. Our feeblest, contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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