SIO391: Astrophysicist Wet Blankets All The Alien Talk

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:14 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 391. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and it's The Promise Part 2 of Aliens. Is it aliens? No, it's not aliens. But what if it were? Those are the questions I'm going to make Brian, Dr. Brian Gillis, astrophysicist to the stars. I don't know why I wanted to add that, but yeah, astro -physicists to the Stars. I would put that in my business card if I were him. Do you just say like scientist to the the stars.

And then that means you're an astrophysicist. I don't know. That Or could be astronomy as well. Of that is important. But what is important is aliens. Among us? No, they're not. We already covered that. It's definitely not aliens. I'm sorry. But if you're not like me and you're like, Thomas, why are you so dismissive of aliens and the possibility of aliens? We'll clarify. I've got Dr. Brian Gillis, astrophysis on to talk about why it's not not aliens.

And what, if it were, I also make him answer that just for fun. You know, like what if het were aliens, what would he think would be the most reasonable explanation for how that happened? I think is super fun. We also are going? To talk about the limits of space travel. You now, why is it that the aliens can't just zip on over and see us? Uh, so much cool physics there. You laws know, of rocketry that we're going to get into.

So here's part two, all about the the physics of why it's not fucking aliens. It's not aliens. Sorry. Do want to give one more reminder that this podcasting is now a family affair with Lydia Smith having quit her job. I said, I don't know if it was the financially smart decision, but it was the only decision that would enable the show to continue because my hair's on fire. Can't do it anymore. It's too much work for one person. It''s impossible. I've tried.

I can't ever keep up. I always think I'm going to be done with all the work. I always think I'm keeping up and I'm like oh I'm way massively behind again but no longer.

I promise now that Lydia's full we're time with the company uh if any of you are like oh I hope that works out I don't want to you know find out that you can't do that and have lose thomas have to go back to the state or something yeah if you would like to help us not worry about that too please go to patreon.com/seriouspod or you know where there's work or both um and support the show for as little as a dollar hopefully you doesn't hit any individual too much to pledge a dollar uh the support goes a tremendous way when it's fine folks like you banding together to make a show happen.

Is vital to be able to do this. Lydia has been full time for like five seconds. She's already got things running better and an amazing influence. She's also amazing on the mic over on Where There's Woke and as you heard her in part one. So looking forward to a really bright future with that. But once again, please, patreon.com/seriouspod and get the get the September bonus about QED and Good Will Hunting, the seriously awful movies coming up for October. Oh, my gosh. I can't wait for that.

Going to be hilarious. Those are good reasons. Plus us not starving. All right. Oh, not even to mention, you don't have to hear this stupid fucking ads anymore if you sign up over there. That's I mean, do you know that? Hopefully you know That because if you didn't, then I just told you and then you're going to be like, wait, there's a way. I don't have to hear those. Yeah, it's patreon.com/ seriespod. Thank you so much to all who have pledged. Seriously, it means the world to us. And now, here's why it's not aliens with Dr. Brian Gillis.

0:03:27 Thomas: Joined by definitely not an alien dr brian gillis how's it going

0:03:31 Bryan: Hello, Thomas. I am definitely not an alien, unless you count the fact that I immigrated twice. In that case, yes, I AM an alien. But yes, hello. How're you doing?

0:03:36 Thomas: Yeah. You're, I guess you'd be the type of alien that Congress is not interested, or they're interested in. We probably want to give more rights to the fake aliens that don't exist than to the real, like, actual immigrants in our country.

0:03:51 Bryan: One who crossed the border they keep forgetting exists.

0:03:55 Thomas: Excited to talk about this. Mentioned this in the Q &A that we had of kind of the episode that I wanted to do. I wasn't sure I'd be able to snag you for it, but you've been kind enough to us for this. So thanks so much for taking the time. Here's the thing, confession time. I just haven't watched the congressional offerings, I haven't looked at many of them, I've seen some of the videos, but I haven'T looked at really any of them. You know why, Brian? Because it's just not fucking aliens. It's not, I, it's not, it'S NOT aliens. I don'T know what to tell you. I wish it were, it''s probably, it 'S cool, I don't begrudge anyone who's interested in it, but there's supposedly, you new, unexplainable, or not new, but like, newly released, I guess, unexplainable phenomena, and there are people, there are whistleblowers trying to cosplay as X -Files characters, characters. And a of people are actually pretty taken in by this. And I, you know, I get it. But I wanted to ask you as a physicist, as an astrophysicist specifically, why isn't it aliens? When you see something like

0:04:51 Bryan: Oh, God.

0:04:52 Thomas: This, part of you that's like, oh, this could be aliens. Or are you just like, no, the laws of physics dictate. Are you like me? Maybe I'm wrong, but are you like where it's like... I know it's just not. It's just is not fucking aliens. I'm sorry. So I wanted to ask you that question. Why is it not aliens? Dr. Brian Gillis.

0:05:09 Bryan: I also haven't watched those congressional hearings I'm with you. It's not aliens. So I can't comment on the specific reasons there, but I can definitely comment on why it's probably not aliens in general. Do you want to get into that and talk about just basically all the many, many barriers in the way to it actually being aliens?

0:05:29 Thomas: Yes. Yes. Just not going to go through the video. It doesn't work on a podcast anyway. I think there are a lot of really good YouTube channels where people have done that. So make sure to find those if you'd like to get a breakdown like the actual videos and what might be going on. That's not what we're here to do because it's a podcast and someone else has already done that better. So yeah, I would like to ask about the physical constraints. Like also want to note, I wish it were aliens. Like I really, I've been disappointed about this since I've like was 11 or something. Like all movies have made it seem so cool, Brian. You get in your ship, the stars go, you know, And then you're like at aliens all of a sudden. I wish we could do that. Why can't we do it?

0:06:07 Bryan: Yeah. Are there a few things going on. I think we can break this up into two questions. The first question is, are there aliens? Like, any aliens close by? And the second is, how would we get to them or they get to us? So first question, Thomas, are there aliens? Do you think there are aliens nearby?

0:06:26 Thomas: Nearby. Well, define nearby.

0:06:29 Bryan: So let's say nearby means within a human lifetime, you could theoretically take a trip to another planet where there are aliens.

0:06:39 Thomas: With our current technology?

0:06:42 Bryan: Say with any technology.

0:06:42 Thomas: Oh, well, any. So I guess that would put you within, I don't know, what are you saying, 30 light years or something? I have 40 light years.

0:06:48 Bryan: It's actually surprisingly far. Relativity gives you a bit of a hand there due to time dilation, that once you start going fast, time goes slower for you than anyone else. And It turns out that the limiting factor is actually acceleration, that if you accelerate humans too fast, they tend to stop living. So you got to limit the acceleration. Most of the people look at it, they say, okay, if we're doing long-term acceleration for more than a short time, we want it to be approximately Earth gravity. We can maybe go a little bit over for a long time, but let's say, the like, most efficient way we could accelerate to get to somewhere else in the galaxy would be to basically spend half the time accelerating yourself towards it and then the remaining half accelerating back to decelerate down. So you end up at basically

0:06:49 Thomas: Oh, yeah.

0:06:58 Thomas: That's a good point.

0:07:38 Thomas: Oh,

0:07:38 Bryan: The same starting velocity. So that's the most efficient way. And once take into account relativity, do all the complicated math there, it turns out that you can get almost anywhere in the galaxy within a human lifetime.

0:07:38 Thomas: Yes. Jeez.

0:07:53 Thomas: Assuming you could get going that fast.

0:07:55 Bryan: Yeah, that's a big assumption. That's of, kind to give you a grounding for the first answer, how far away it is nearby, the galaxy is potentially nearby. Now, one problem there is that's a lifetime for the people on board the ship. It's not a lifetime für any observers. It is far longer.

0:07:57 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Including the aliens by the way. Oh.

0:08:15 Bryan: Yeah. So, of the galaxy, we measure it in kiloparsecs. A parsec is three and a bit light years. It was a measurement that That was historically useful. It comes from arc second, just basically just how stars moved on the sky relative to Earth's orbit rotation, around the sun, looking at a star from two different positions. If it moved one arc second on the skye, it was one parsec away. And Once we calculated that out, parsec's about three light years, and it's kind of the standard unit for a lot of astrophysics at these large scales and

0:08:54 Thomas: So, Parsec isn't like the King's you or something? Yeah.

0:08:57 Bryan: It's based on the orbit of Earth and the arc second. Okay, so arc second is 160th of 160th of a degree. It's these weird 60th factors that I don't know why they got so common. And yeah, so there, there is arbitrariness there. Um, light year is more physically grounded, um, it's speed of light times year, which is, you know, something, uh, important to Earth, the, uh, an environmental constant if not a physical constant, but for whatever reason we use parsec all the time, except when talking to the public, then we translate it to light years, so

0:09:16 Thomas: Sure. Yeah.

0:09:39 Thomas: Because the whole Star Wars debacle, you don't want to touch that. Oh.

0:09:42 Bryan: Yeah. Okay. The measure size of galaxies, typically in kiloparsecs. Kilo means a thousand, parsec is three-ish light years, so galaxy, yeah, thousand light years across, which means for getting to far places in it, it's going to take minimum thousands of years from the perspective of any observer, you, which if don't you don't know, is a little bit longer than the typical human lifespan. Span, yeah.

0:10:12 Thomas: Oh, spoilers. Then one thing to be like, well, who cares? You know, all we'll live long enough in my spaceship, but like, you don't know what's happening to a, the humans back home, of course, although I feel like this is a suicide mission for the most part and be the aliens. Like, a lot changes in a thousand years. Maybe if we're talking about some super hyper futuristic, whatever that would, you you know, have that kind of long-term stability, but I don't know, a thousand years is a long time for beings, I think.

0:10:38 Bryan: And there's actually one interesting aspect of that is, if a, when you go out, you, you've been traveling 10 years, your time, 500 years for people back home, and they have a breakthrough in technology and develop a better engine and And they're like, oh, no, let's send this one out. And they'll basically be able to catch up to you on the way and pass you. And you'll be like, Oh, this wasn't such a good idea.

0:10:51 Thomas: They catch up to you. Yeah. Yeah, That'd be funny. Oh, that would be a really good, I don't know, maybe not like a Twilight Zone because, yeah, probably too cheery of a topic, but like a funny Twilight Zone would be like, do you, that whole big thing. You go out into your journey, you know. There's the whole bottle breaking ceremony. It's the whole thing, and then like as you are going by your perspective, like a hundred more humans catch up to you, just like what, we keep getting better and better technology constantly, yeah.

0:11:25 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. If somebody catches up to you, then someone catches up to, and, you can predict in advance how well technology is going to progress, you can estimate an idea. Okay, it's not worth going now. And there was actually one guy who did this and said that okay, well, it looks like our propulsion technology improves at about four percent per year, so let's just say it keeps going like that forever. I mean, it's a ridiculous assumption, but, let's say it does, when's the optimal launch date? He plugged in all the numbers and came up with a year of 2653 or something like that, yeah.

0:11:40 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah, Oh, Wow, Oh, Thank god, that, Would have been my excuse too, by the way. No, we shouldn't go, I'm sure somebody will develop a better thing, I don't need to get in this suit and

0:12:07 Bryan: Yeah. Are So, a lot of reasons like that. It sense to go. It's ridiculous to make that trip. And you have to convince everybody behind on the planet that it's worth putting all of this investment into it.

0:12:26 Thomas: You well, started to ask me, do you think there's life in what, the galaxy?

0:12:27 Bryan: Oh, yes. Yeah. We got distracted there. Yes, let's

0:12:29 Thomas: Um, Yeah. Okay, so this is super fascinating. You started asking me, do I think there's alien life within a human lifespan of travel? And then yeah, okay. So there's a little bit of a cheat code because that human lifespan, if you're You're traveling at relativistic speeds, gets you really far. Even then, I have my doubts, but I want to ask first, I remember the closest like thingy I thought was Alpha Centauri. And that, if I remember, I was like within the one to two light year range, I thought. Before even that, so let's pause on that. Why isn't there any life in our solar system? I mean, I think for most of, a lot of like human history, people have thought like, oh yeah, there's probably like Martians or something. And then it just hasn't turned out.

0:13:11 Bryan: Yeah. So the solar system, we haven't completely ruled out every possible planet. There's a remote chance that some of the moons of plants might have it. I think Europa, it has like a remote possibility that it has water under the surface, and geothermal energy could keep it out of liquid and evolve life. But I think that it comes down to that life requires extremely rare circumstances to occur. And in our solar system, that only happened on Earth. Earth, basically, as we understand it, at least for life, it requires liquid water, which can only exist at a certain range of temperatures, which means you have to have a planet at the right orbit around a star. And the Goldilocks zone.

0:14:00 Thomas: Goldilocks zone because life requires porridge that is not too well.

0:14:06 Bryan: And And in our case, that only happened on Earth. Mars is barely within the Goldelocks zone, Zone. Are a lot of other things that come into play, but theoretically there could have been water on Mars in the past. And I think orbitally Venus is, but due to its atmosphere, it ends up being far too hot for there to be any liquid water. So there's a lot of other thing that can go around. Just because it's in the Goldilocks Zone doesn't mean it will be able to support life. It might have an like Venus where basically global global warming is causing it to be ridiculously hot there. Know, things need to be just right, the Goldilocks zone. And in our solar system, that's only on Earth, but there may be other circumstances where it could, like certain moons. Let's look beyond the solar system.

0:14:54 Thomas: Let me ask one question about that because remember I, I held out a little hope, you know, just a little help, that may oh maybe on one of these moons the conditions is could be really cool, but I'm pretty sure that the radiation is insane on there, on, because isn't there just the the natural radiation of those gas giants, isn't it like way higher, plus there's no atmosphere to protect from that radiation, now I don't know if biologically that means life is like impossible, but I thought that was a big, oh maybe I'm misremembering, maybe that's why we can't go live there, but one way or the other, uh, can you talk a little bit about like radiation and what and that might do, yeah?

0:14:56 Bryan: Yeah.

0:15:28 Bryan: So radiation is a problem in general that, you now, out in space, there are a lot of sources of radiation, the sun being the primary one, and also radiation coming off of various planets.

And, you know, for a very rough idea, what it does is, if radiation has enough energy, it's what we call ionizing, and it can knock electrons out of atoms, which causes various things to go wrong and makes organic life difficult, because you need some manner of stability in order to allow something to self -replicate. And if it regularly gets broken apart by radiation, you can't have the necessary processes to go unreliably, or something goes wrong and you get cancer.

Cancer is basically a random bug developing which replicates out of control. Radiation is a huge issue for that. Now, on Earth, one of the things that allows us to have life is we've got a nice, reasonably thick atmosphere that blocks off a lot of the radiation, particularly a lot the ionizing radiation, but isn't thick enough that it holds in too much. It's like it isn't a thick atmosphere like Venus's that holds in so much that it warms up out of control.

0:16:43 Thomas: Well, We're changing that though, we're working on that one, yeah. Yeah, I was just thinking that. That sounds like a really, really, like, I guess I can't compare, but that sounds like a pretty harsh Goldilocks zone as well. You gotta have just enough atmosphere, but not too much.

0:16:48 Bryan: Yeah, yeah, that is a problem. Yeah. So you've got this other type of Goldilocks zone in the atmosphere.

0:17:06 Bryan: Happens that we have that on Earth, and then the question is, do we have or does someone else have that other places in the universe or particularly places close by? Well, that's hard to know. We can more easily measure the other Goldilock zone of the orbit. They basically see if a planet is at the right temperature. So recent years, the last 20-ish years or so, we've started to actually find a lot of exoplanets. And there are hundreds and hundreds now. The is growing exponentially with advances in technology. And for a while, it was an open question. Are solar systems that have planets around them common? Is our solar system an outlier? Like something weird happened just here to cause it to have planets, but yeah, most stars don't have any. As we've been searching, it turns out planets are very common. So that's one of the parts of the equation. Oh, so actually, let me stop there. Have you heard of the Drake equation, Thomas?

0:18:07 Thomas: Oh yeah, I have heard of the Drake equation. It just sounds like an equation someone made up that has so many unknowns that it's virtually useless, but like, you know, it's fun to try.

0:18:16 Bryan: Yeah, Drake the Equation is basically a way to estimate how common intelligent life will be in the universe. And the way it works is it goes back to an old method called Newtonian estimation, where you basically take all the factors that have to work right for something to work out and estimate them and multiply them all together. And this actually works out better than you would think if happens is that you'll have errors in each of your estimates of these factors, but the errors tend to to cancel out. Know, so one example would be if I were to ask you how many piano tuners live in the greater Chicago area, would you think, okay, well, what factors go into it? Well, it's definitely going to be proportional to the total population. Okay, so what's the population of the Chicago area. You make an estimate. I don't know.

0:19:12 Bryan: I forget what it was. Five million, maybe. Up with something like that. And then, okay, what are other factors that are proportional? Like, okay. How many people need,

0:19:12 Thomas: Oh, I love this.

0:19:21 Thomas: The atmosphere's Gotta be not too thick, but thick enough for Piano Tuning Yeah And

0:19:25 Bryan: Yeah. So how many people, how frequently does the piano need to be tuned? How much are you going to pay for somebody to be a piano tuner? Um, put that together, how, how many people can make a full -time living tuning pianos You multiply all Those Factors

0:19:41 Thomas: You're Telling Me This nonsense gets anywhere close to the real number, I want to do this experiment in real life. That would be, yeah.

0:19:49 Bryan: People have done experiments, and surprisingly, it is often pretty accurate. Um, this is basically what the Drake equation does. It's like, okay, start, how many stars are there? And we can actually get a pretty solid number on this in the galaxy. It's a few billion.

0:20:05 Thomas: It's Like The easiest part I think, right? Yeah.

0:20:07 Bryan: That's the easy part. We don't even really need to estimate it. Then how many of these stars have planets around them? Then what's the typical number of planets per star? What's the chance any individual planet is in the Goldilocks zone? What's a chance any Individual Planet Goldilock Zone has the right atmosphere? What is the chance that a planet with all of that will ever develop life? And then, assuming a planet does develop life, what's the chance that it's at the right stage of evolution, that it has intelligent life before it causes global warming and destroys itself?

0:20:38 Thomas: Now Remind me, actually, now I think about it, is the Drake equation simply alien existence, or is it, it, um, intelligent aliens? So, so it's like living long enough To develop Intelligence.

0:20:53 Bryan: I think it's specifically for intelligent for...

0:20:55 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah, but but not for coming over here aliens, right? I don't think it adds that.

0:20:59 Bryan: The Drake equation is just for them existing. And then you can modify it For... yeah.

0:21:03 Thomas: And being intelligent life. So that's why you have to Do the like, they have to live long enough or have the, because like you could find, I imagine you could fine planets in the Goldilocks zone, but like due to circumstances of that star system, maybe it's not going to be there for a long time. It's like, yeah, but it's only going to be there a little bit. It's not stable enough to really, or something like that, right. I mean, you need a lot of time for evolution, we think. Think so, it could be that you need significant time in some of these planets, maybe they're close, but they're just not going to be in that zone or in those conditions for that long, right? Yeah.

0:21:05 Bryan: Yeah.

0:21:33 Bryan: So Drake equation is in a sense valid, the problem is how it's used, and I think think the issue is that for Newtonian estimation, it kind of relies on the assumption that errors at any step will tend to cancel out with errors at other steps, and with the Drape equation, this is something that a lot of people have emotional feelings about. And if a little optimism creeps into every step, that's bias in one direction all the time. Or a little pessimism.

If you've has a religious bias and thinks it can't possibly exist, but grumble, grumble all due to the science anyway, you're going to get biases compounding in either direction. And it's, you can't really know what those biases are, the issue is that these things have such massive scales that, you if you go back 100 years ago and ask people how many stars have planets around them, people, you you know, a value 1%, 10%, 0 .001%, any of those could have been true for All they know. And when you've got that, that many orders of magnitudes of plausibility, errors in just one of those factors can take aliens being right next door to being we're the only intelligent creatures in the the galaxy. No.

0:22:22 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:22:47 Thomas: You're Not getting anywhere close to those piano tuners, there's no way you don't know. Yeah, this is a, maybe I don't know if it'll be the best time, but I do want to say something important, which is I personally believe there is, like, with to a certainty, alien life some fucking where out there, like, because, you know, you and I have talked before, we don't even know, like, it's possible the universe is infinite. It's like, it would be absurd to think that there's no alien life anywhere. I mean, it's impossible, I guess, but like I highly, highly doubt it. I think there's definitely aliens. But the reason I mention it is because I get so tired of, like, if I see people covering this or having this debate or whatever, people will be be like, well, was it aliens? And then they'll be like, well, I mean, it'd be pretty hard to believe there wasn't anything out there. And it's like, yeah, no, I know that's not the question though, like, are they here, could they have somehow gotten all the way to here, and that is a very different question.

0:22:55 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

0:23:44 Thomas: So, like, yeah, there's freaking aliens, don't try to contradict what I'm saying with, it's a big universe, man, it's big. Yeah, okay, but it's, it is a big universe. Exactly, we're too far away. Sure.

0:23:53 Bryan: And that's a good point, that these are two separate questions, but they're not completely unrelated because The probability of aliens visiting us is closely related to how close they are. Like, uh, if are two people on earth, if they happen to be next door neighbors, the probability if I'm running into each other is high, if they live on separate continents, it's low. And so how frequent are aliens, how close are the closest aliens is going to make a difference.

0:23:59 Thomas: Yeah. That's True, because Steal Alien, the the the argument, I guess, if we came to the conclusion that there's just aliens every fucking where, they're just, they're Roy Kent. They're here. They're there. They every fucking way, they're aliens. And we could then hypothesize, like, well, maybe one of them started that project of trying to reach us for some reason. But maybe we'll leave that for the, for the second half of the discussion. Sorry, I won't interrupt.

0:24:21 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

0:24:42 Thomas: Although I do want to just make sure we didn't leave behind Alpha Centauri, because I think you were going to just answer that one real quick.

0:24:46 Bryan: Yeah. So I think the next question is, there's a big unknown on where aliens are, but let's let's imagine the best-case scenario with all the knowledge we have, could it be Alpha, Alpha Centauri? That looks like a bad star system for it. The problem is it's actually a system of, yeah, three stars is the problem. It's, Yeah. There's Alpha Centaury and Beta Centaural in a relatively close orbit. And then Proxima Centaur in a huge distant orbit. There's one known exoplanet, I believe, orbiting Proximal Centaur. Um, the the fact that you've got, uh, rather chaotic system means that you won't have the same stable weather patterns or a climate over the years that you do in a system around one

0:25:05 Thomas: A lot of crime. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

0:25:36 Bryan: Star and

0:25:37 Thomas: Well, plus triple the radiation potentially. Well I guess depending on what kind of star it could already be a zillion times the radiation.

0:25:39 Bryan: Yeah. Uh, It's going to be complicated and that doesn't necessarily necessarily prevent life from forming, but it's an additional hurdle to clear and life seems pretty improbable already. So I'd say it's pretty unlikely there. And I think even the planet we've seen isn't in the Goldilocks zone. So let's eliminate it. And it turns out that if we go to the next most plausible planets, has a catalog of every known exoplanet, which, just pulling it up right now, has 5,514 confirmed exoplanets. So we're up in the thousands now.

0:26:18 Thomas: Wow. Love me some exoplanets. Here's what I want to mention for people who you aren't aren't as obsessed with the space stuff as I was like 10 years ago. Know some people might know that we can't just like pop on our telescope and just look at an exoplanet, right? I mean, we have to use that method of seeing that star does the little bit of twinkling, you know, that it's orbiting or whatever. Are there any exoplanets that are close enough to where you could get like a visual image through a telescope? Or is it just like even the nearest one is so far away that you're just detecting it via those kinds of indirect methods?

0:26:23 Bryan: Oh, yes, there are ones. We call it a imaging method, method, the which is that the light from the star tends to get in the way when you're trying to look at the planet. You can, there are techniques to block out the light of the star. And particularly if you look over a long enough time, you can see a planet moving around it and

0:27:00 Thomas: Exactly. Yeah.

0:27:11 Thomas: Could I find these somewhere? I didn't know we had that. So they're they're like, are they far away? So obviously not in our solar system, but in other systems, we can actually get visual, some sort of visual images of, of hot

0:27:23 Bryan: So I haven't looked this up, but if you just go on the internet, search for exoplanet direct imaging here, let me just do it right now, I'll tell you what I find and

0:27:31 Thomas: Exoplanlets near me. Okay. Looking hot exo planets in your area. Yeah.

0:27:38 Bryan: List of directly imaged exoplanets, go to an image search and you can see the examples of, can see tons of images of what we're showing, which you can basically see that you've got the big blobby thing in the center is the light from the star that's been masked out. They use one of different methods to try to subtract it off, but it leaves a lot of noise behind. But then once that's left out, you can see, um, dots elsewhere in the image, and those are the exoplanets that

0:27:45 Thomas: List Super cool. I will note that to a, like, person I'm thinking, like, oh, we get the, put it on the main view, what do they say in Star Trek, and then you get like a nice zoomed in color amazing thing. It's not that, it's like a few pixels, but it's still cool, like So there's nothing, because of the star's light, you know, in the distance, those two factors, there's nothing where we get like a good look, you know, we're like, oh, cool, we got some, yeah, we see some oceans here, we see some whatever, it's just like, no, we can get some pixels, and then I think, you know, they do a cool renderings of like, all right, here's, based on the science, you, what we think this looks like, because of the things we've detected there, and that's super cool, but like, I point, guess the point I was making is, we really can't just look at any of these to see anything meaningful directly about, like, oh, we see some buildings, I love

0:28:19 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:28:54 Bryan: This stage, but, uh, with space-based observations, this is one of the things the Jelliscope-Wellescope Space Telescope is going to be doing is looking for exoplanets. Be hopefully some even better images. The advantage to a space-based telescope is you don't have the atmosphere getting in the way, which blurs out images.

0:29:02 Thomas: It, yeah

0:29:13 Bryan: If you've got less blurring, you can separate the light from the star out much better from the exoplanet. If you take one of these directly-imaged systems where you already know there are planets, and and look at it with a better telescope, you get a better view of the planet.

0:29:13 Thomas: Love

0:29:28 Bryan: We don't have the best images now, but yeah, come back in a year or two, we might have some amazing ones.

0:29:27 Thomas: It, oh That's really exciting, can't wait, yeah

0:29:36 Bryan: We about what's the best case for aliens existing. So if you've got the exoplanet catalog and you put in the limits for possible life, it turns out that there are some candidates around 10, 12 light years away from us, which on a galactic scale is basically right next door. So it's possible. I mean, they still have to meet all the other factors of The Drake equation. They have to have the right atmosphere. Life has to actually have evolved there. It has to be at the right stage, but we haven't ruled it out, so, you know, it's still supremely unlikely, like we're talking, you know, one in thousands, ten thousands, eight probably at the top, and it's probably much worse than that, but cannot strictly rule out that there is life next door, on an astrophysics scale. But 10 light years, that's still a huge hurdle to clear.

0:29:57 Thomas: Yeah, well, we just have to check the Nextdoor app, I think, and then it'll be like, ah, I heard gunshots from this star system. Anyone else hear gunshots coming from this solar system over here?

0:30:47 Bryan: Yeah, there'll definitely be a...

0:30:49 Thomas: Hey, you're not a parent. The You're Next Door app. It's just racist neighbors complaining that there's gunshots. That's literally all it is. It's like, was there gunshots? Was there gun shots? That's it. That's all it was. Or they'll be, like, I saw a black person walking in our neighborhood, It's really depressing. It's like, are people this racist everywhere? It sucks.

0:31:07 Bryan: Yeah.

0:31:07 Thomas: Right. That aside. Well, that's really cool, though. I didn't know it was, you were even that good for, say good, but like relative to the fucking zero that most of this is, that is kind of cool. Like maybe, I don't know, something. Maybe So you're saying within, what, tens that was? Tens of light years?

0:31:07 Bryan: Well, Yeah yeah. Tens of light years. Yeah there are candidates. Now it's possible that with more investigation we'll rule out all of these candidates. We might find one that looks promising, but we can't uh, it out either way. And you know, of course, you've heard of like SETI, the searches for intelligence, and if there were like an active alien life form on a planet like that, SETI is supposed to have been able to get it.

0:31:22 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Dang.

0:31:46 Bryan: But there's actually kind of a hidden secret of SETI's. They aren't looking specifically for life in general and the random radio communications. They're looking for life that is trying to beam a message directly to us. And

0:31:46 Thomas: Dang.

0:32:02 Thomas: Well, I mean, they're so constrained in what they even can cover, right? Because it's so vast. So they have to, like, choose their battles, I guess.

0:32:06 Bryan: Yeah, the catch is that, um, way radiation fades away very quickly, and if you want to get a a signal that has any chance of covering a long distance, you have to to directly beam it at something, like basically a laser of radio waves.

0:32:20 Thomas: Yeah. So they would have to already know that we were here, essentially. It's not just like, oh, Or suspect.

0:32:27 Bryan: Yeah, or suspect that we could. Like, yeah, they have their own astronomers. They've looked for nearby exoplanets and say, oh, there's one with a terrestrial planet in the Goldilocks zone, or whatever they call it in their language. From what we can tell, it looks like it has a good atmosphere. Let's say a low, and then SETI might pick it up.

0:32:29 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah! Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The way We'll know is eventually we'll get their really bad 70s TV shows, because I want alien 70s TV shows, so yeah.

0:32:52 Bryan: Get a good dose of that old, old-fashioned alien racism, yeah.

0:32:54 Thomas: And Then they'll, they'll send us a new message. "Oh, we're so much better now." I swear, like, well, you know, we're pretty better. We're not, we're not like perfect, but like we're better than that. Okay, come visit. Alien tourism dollars, we feel

0:33:05 Bryan: Yeah. We're not racist anymore, we still do a lot of racist things, but we've, we're decided that.

0:33:11 Thomas: Bad about it, yeah.

0:33:12 Bryan: Racist is a bad thing to be, and that's progress.

0:33:13 Thomas: Yeah. Well, That's Yeah, you don't hear much from SETI. You know, that's kind of a sad sign, actually. And this could be, you know, I may change now in the light of these hearings. I bet we'll get a new wave of maybe like media, like movies or whatever. But I feel like the 90s was a way more optimistic time for this in some ways.

0:33:30 Thomas: There's invasion and disaster and all that. But it just felt like SETI was... Maybe it's because Contact came out, the movie that I know the book's older. But I fucking love that movie. I hope someday we hear the weird radio sound. I want to happen for us. But I haven't heard from SETi in a long time. Do they're still going strong or what?

0:33:14 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I would have to look that up, but I, I think there has been kind of a shift in consciousness. That We went so long without getting anything that people were initially pretty optimistic, like with the numbers they plug into the Drake equation. But it's so susceptible to bias that once we don't hear anything for a while, that optimism turns into pessimism, and we start thinking, "Oh, there's probably nothing out there. I mean, look at these new numbers that I'm completely objective in putting in, and my pessimism isn't affecting at all. They say there's no life in the universe, not even on Earth." So if there is life, I mean we haven't heard from them, we can't completely rule it out. So let's, for now, let's say there is life about 10 light years away. The question then is, how would they get to us? I think actually a better way to look at it is how would we get to them? Because we know a lot about our own technology and capabilities. And it's, you works the same way either direction.

So with what's technologically capable for us will probably be similar for them, and we can make extrapolations with what we know to be physically possible, maybe possible, and then make guesses from there about how plausible it is they would actually make that journey. If you remember what I said before, time dilation does help, but 10 light years, you don't really need that much time dilation. You do need is a ridiculous amount of fuel. And this turns out to be the hardest part of it. Heard of the, oh, I'm probably pronouncing this wrong, the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation?

0:34:23 Thomas: Yeah, that's a tough one. Uh, I think I've heard of that, but I don't know, refresh me. Interesting.

0:35:32 Bryan: So basically what it is, this, this has just got one of those foundational equations of rocket science. And basically what it says is that the amount of mass of fuel you need to accelerate something for a specific change in velocity scales up exponentially with the greater the change in velocity. And it's not hyperbolic. It is a literal mathematical exponential curve.

0:35:55 Thomas: Question, First, this is rocket science. And second, And secondly, um, this, based on a certain type of rocket technology, is, is this on like those set of assumptions? General,

0:36:03 Bryan: Yes. This is actually general for any of technology will follow this and be limited by it. Slope, The how exponential it is, will vary depending on the technology, but everything will be limited by an exponential curve.

0:36:10 Thomas: Okay.

0:36:20 Thomas: Because Because I was going to ask about like, I know there's, you know, or at least I'm pretty sure there's possibilities of like those, those, those propulsion, whatever it is, that they just shoot out tiny little bits of nothing, but for like an extremely long period of time. Um, and does that follow the same rules?

0:36:35 Bryan: Yeah. Yes. Anything that's a rocket follows these rules. Um, there are ways around it if you use something that's not a rocket, but that introduces other problems. So, yeah, the thing you're talking about, that's still a rocket, so

0:36:50 Thomas: It is still a rocket. Okay. Define rocket.

0:36:53 Bryan: A rocket is something that propels itself by shooting out some sort of propellant and using conservation of momentum to move itself in the desired direction.

0:36:58 Thomas: Something else. Okay, yeah. Gotcha.

0:37:04 Bryan: Now, Now, there are a lot of things that can move without being a rocket. Like on Earth, it's easy. A car is not a rocket because it doesn't shoot things out to propel it itself. It

0:37:04 Thomas: Okay yeah.

0:37:13 Thomas: We could also do a solar sail, right? Isn't Not, that's not a rocket. Yeah, could

0:37:16 Bryan: Yes, example. A solar sail is one of the very few things you can do in space to get momentum, which isn't a rocket, the problem is once you get particularly far from the sun, you lose a of light from it, and so you can't really accelerate. Much. If your goal is to get there within a human lifetime, a solar sail is not the best option.

0:37:39 Thomas: We point a big laser pointer at the person in the sale thingy that we send out, yeah.

0:37:44 Bryan: Know, Thomas, that's an idea so ridiculous that people have actually already thought of it. And it has

0:37:48 Thomas: I thought That's why I've heard of it, yeah.

0:37:51 Bryan: A whole Wikipedia article on shooting a laser at our solar solar solar sail.

0:37:53 Thomas: If we We all grab a laser pointer, take shifts, yeah.

0:37:57 Bryan: No, but seriously, that is a serious proposal that people have made, is putting up a solar sail and getting a gigantic, ridiculously powerful laser. An insane amount of power to do this. And an amazing amount of energy anyway. Way. The goal that a of rocket scientists have for interstellar travel is getting to 10 % the speed of light, as that gets you within the realm of somewhat plausible in a lifetime. But even one -tenth, that's still a hundred years. So we're not very plausible, but it's

0:38:05 Thomas: Yeah. Specifically Yeah. For For 10 light years, 100 years, okay, yeah. Much time dilation, roughly, if you could ballpark it, happen Like if I, if I, one percent, oh, okay. I don't know what that means now, I think about it. Oh,

0:38:39 Bryan: One One percent. Yeah, maybe half a percent even. Yeah, not it noticeable at that.

0:38:46 Thomas: Really? Not noticeable at 10, oh,

0:38:48 Bryan: At 10 % the speed of light, it would be like, maybe, practically noticeable. But one percent or so, time dilation, yeah. It

0:38:48 Thomas: Sure. It'd it would be like exercising, you'd be, like, I lived, uh, lived a year longer or so. Something like that.

0:38:59 Bryan: Yeah, say that we decide it's worth it, or maybe you go to double this, but the numbers I have here are for one tenth the speed of light. It turns out that if you want to get one ton of material, which you, really isn't that much when we're talking a spaceship, that would be a very tiny spaceship, you want to accelerate that to one tenth the speed of light, the amount of energy is going to be, um, I'll just put it in terms of the world's energy consumption, it's going to, 1,000, all of the energy the world uses in a single year, so 0.1 percent of, of the world's annual energy consumption.

0:39:39 Thomas: Mean, in some sense, that seems like not as much as I would have thought. I don't know.

0:39:44 Bryan: Yeah, it's actually in the ballpark that we have that energy. Problem is getting that energy to the spacecraft, particularly if we're using liquid fuel. Think about how much oil you would have to burn to use one thousandth world of the oil burnt in a year. And then the problem with the rocket equation, particularly for fuel -based solutions, is you don't just have to accelerate the final payload.

0:39:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:40:10 Bryan: You have to celebrate all the fuel before it gets used up.

0:40:10 Thomas: All the fuel. Yeah and that's one of of those calculus -y things that tends to add up.

0:40:18 Bryan: And why it ends up being exponential. I can can give you an example. Let's say that you have payload a of mass one and you have special type of fuel that if you have mass one of it, it can accelerate itself and something else of mass 1 by velocity 1. Just simple units here. So if you want to get up to velocity 1, you have payload 1 and fuel 1. If you want to get to velocity 2, then you already have a mass of 2, so you're going to need to add 2 units of fuel.

0:40:21 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Right.

0:40:51 Bryan: You want to go to velocity 3, well you already have 4 masses, so your going to add another 4 masses of fuel You want to get up to velocity four? You're at 16 masses of fuel. Is why the rocket equation is exponential. It's like those compound interest problems where if you put a penny in the bank today and double it every day, by the end of the month, you'll have a million dollars or whatever it ends up being. And yeah, that's the same thing with the fuel needed to propel a rocket, it it gets ridiculous. So problem isn't just accelerating one ton to one tenth the speed of light, it's accelerating that plus all the fuel that would be needed to accelerate it at every stage of the journey.

0:41:05 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:41:30 Thomas: And there's no way that we have yet to kind of cheat that. Like if we're just putting out photons or something, something that's like massless or something. Is there any way to kind?

0:41:31 Bryan: Oh, Aren't ways to cheat it, but there are ways to make the equation more in our our favor? Because if you go back to the example, one mass of fuel can accelerate one mass of a payload to one velocity. What if we had a more efficient fuel that we could get more velocity out of, just a better propulsion system? And that's something that we can work on. What what if instead of needing mass of fuel, you only needed 0 .1? Then it still does grow exponentially, but it's a much slower exponential curve. So first you need 0.10, then you'll need another 0.11, then 0.121, and so on. It still grows exponentially, but a lot slower. And so getting to the velocity you want gets more or less achievable. And if we want to get to somewhere else, the best bet to making it practical from a fuel standpoint is to look into better means of propulsion.

We won't be able to get around the final minimum energy of getting the payload up to the desired velocity, but we can decrease the amount of energy we also have to spend on getting the fuel up to that is where all the theoretical ideas come in. And if we think about what could we do even theoretically in known science to get better propulsion, so now burning liquid fuel is the best we can do

0:42:14 Thomas: Yeah. Jeez.

0:43:06 Bryan: So, you know, we've talked about solar sails, that's kind of another issue which has its own problems, like being able to beam the energy that directly and focus it is a, yeah.

0:43:16 Thomas: And I'll ask the stupid question just in case there aren't enough random stars along the way to like, you of rig that up.

0:43:22 Bryan: Already assuming the best case scenario we're going to one of the closest stars to us, so yeah.

0:43:26 Thomas: Oh, yeah, you're right. Jeez. And then so that power, the amount of power you're able to generate just, you know obviously exponentially falls off from distance some that's too bad. And there's no like, well, we're so close to the sun now that we could build up some bunch of energy to take us far. It just doesn't, the math doesn't work.

0:43:27 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. The does work if you allow a long enough time scale, or or if you say yes, we ARE willing to invest that much energy into it.

0:43:46 Thomas: That's important to say. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Actually, yeah, that's important. Important to say, if we wanted to we could send something probably now that would be very slow, but would get there in what, thousands, tens of thousands of years, right? It's just oh, that's

0:43:52 Bryan: Uh, And in fact we have, uh, there have been multiple probes that have left the solar system. The Voyager, uh, series were designed to leave the solar system, they're not going anywhere were close to the speed of light, or even 10%. They're at thousandths of it.

0:44:04 Thomas: True. Yeah, yeah. That's Were They specifically targeted to go somewhere though, like to a specific star system, I didn't think they were yeah just

0:44:19 Bryan: Don't think they were. I think they just wanted to explore the ends of the solar system, and wherever they go, they go.

0:44:26 Thomas: Wanted to deliver some very low quality porn to the nearest aliens, that's those drawings

0:44:31 Bryan: Yeah, Yeah, it's like a porn dead drop. You just leave it somewhere, and some other alien alien comes by to pick it up.

0:44:31 Thomas: Yeah. Some teenage alien somewhere, and another thing's gonna be like, oh, you got me, thank you so much. Well,

0:44:43 Bryan: Yeah, we need to think about if we want to get to somewhere else practically is what better propulsion systems could we come up with? And I think the easiest way to look at that is what energy generation systems do we have? So Thomas, why don't you have at this? Other than burning oil, what better ways are there to get energy, uh, not much, if anything, it's rather neutral, there's going to be a lot of random particles out there that you'll crash into on the way and will slow you down, so can't really rely on winds

0:45:01 Thomas: How much wind is there in space, no, solar I think I've asked this before, but like the whole like, oh, we could charge a battery up there with solar energy, doesn't that end up being like none of that is going to be as as efficient as the solar sail, just like definitionally the the

0:45:25 Bryan: Yeah, the solar sail is just the most direct way of using that yeah.

0:45:29 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Um, so not that, uh, let's see, are there any old dinosaurs up in space that we could turn into more fossil fuels? No, I don't think there's that. I don'T know. What's our next best thing? Batteries.

0:45:41 Bryan: Well, It's also one of the next best things to actually solving the world's energy needs. If we're there you go, yes, uh, and in fact nuclear, talked about this before, there are two different types of nuclear, there's splitting apart high mass atoms, and fusion, yeah, and exactly.

0:45:46 Thomas: Oh, Oh, nuclear. Of course. Nuclear fission and fusion. Fusion, I I remember that from the excellent Q&A hmm.

0:46:01 Bryan: And fusion, we know we can do either of those. In the context of a bomb we can dufission in the contexto of a power plant we're able to to control that well enough. And the technology is maybe just barely coming around to allowing us to use a fusion in a power plant, you know, give it another few decades, we might be able to do that. And so

0:46:20 Thomas: That's power plants are fission right now Oh, I did have a question when I was editing, that I was thinking, like, okay, I've always understood, or I say understood, I've also, you know, grasped the idea that like when you split the atom, quote unquote, you know, that's like some release of energy, whatever, but I, I guess I've never really thought about like the fusion part. Where do you get the energy if you're just combining stuff to To make heavier, a or whatever, bigger thing? Where's the energy come from, from fusion exactly?

0:46:49 Bryan: You do get energy from fusion. The trick is that not all elements are made equal when it comes to their energy state. Some are at intrinsically lower energy states than others. And what ends up being is that iron, you can think of iron as the lowest energy state atom.

0:47:08 Thomas: I know this is, this is going to be a reach, but like, or maybe too much time, but you, yeah, you did say the energy state. What does that mean? What is an energy state exactly? The

0:47:16 Bryan: So just imagine that you have balls on and hydrogen hills are pretty high hills. And if you turn them into balls, balls on hydrogen come together to be one ball on the helium hill. Helium is a lower hill, so you get energy, the balls now have built up kinetic energy

0:47:36 Thomas: Oh, this. This is a really good analogy. Okay. I

0:47:39 Bryan: Yeah, and then as you go to different atoms, you keep going down and down and down until you get to the valley of iron. This is the absolute lowest place, there is no way you can go lower. But if you go past that, you start going up again till you get other elements and those ones are going to be higher up. And so from From there, if you go in the other direction and you split them up a bit, the balls end up going lower as you get closer to iron.

0:48:07 Thomas: Don't think I grabbed that last spot, but okay. So theoretically, I don't know if this is like possible or anything, but like the most powerful bomb or whatever would would change what hydrogen into iron or something, and then there just this be this massive thing can't be done yeah of course yeah but hypothetically, just to understand like the concept that would hypothetically be like amazing to

0:48:09 Bryan: Yeah.

0:48:20 Bryan: Practically speaking, we can't really get it going that far. The Yeah. The fusion bombs that we do use actually turn hydrogen to helium. It's a a bit more common. We actually turn deuterium, which is heavy hydrogen. Nitrogen so

0:48:35 Thomas: Helium oh yeah, yeah, but sorry, I still don't get, so you got the hills right, okay, so we got, I understood that first part, you got the hills, but then so when it goes back up, are are you turning the super heavy ones into the lighter ones? Yeah, I still don't get it. How's how's that? That?

0:48:41 Bryan: So let's say the location of the hill is how many protons are in it and the height of the hill is the energy state and so if you move to a different location, that is changing how many photons per atom, that also moves what your energy state is. And for a while, as you increase the number of protons, you get to a lower energy state. But eventually, the energy state starts increasing again. And so once you're far past that point, like you're over at the ones we normally use for fission bombs, uranium or plutonium, since those are the easiest to break apart, those are up on higher energy states again. So, when we break those apart, it scatters, it splits into a few different things, but if you add up the energies of each of those things, they're on average at a lower point. So, we end up getting energy out of the system.

0:48:59 Thomas: Okay.

0:49:48 Thomas: Okay. So it is, I was just going to ask, that sounds like you're breaking stuff up again, but no, you are in you are adding stuff together to get to a lower energy state. Okay. Is that it? And then you just, the rest comes out in the fucking boom, right? Essentially. Okay. I think I get it, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time.

0:49:58 Bryan: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's the the difference between fission and fusion. And theoretically, we could use either of those to build a rocket. And because we have a better ratio of energy we get out of it to the mass of the system, it would be a better rocket with a less steep exponential curve. And we can get closer to that ideal. It still ends up being pretty tough. People have gone through the equations with it. And it ends up being that with fusion, the best we can do is still almost ridiculously difficult. But we haven't completely exhausted the physically possible alternatives yet. There is one more type of fuel we could use that is technically physically possible. It's just even more ridiculous than a fusion engine. Do you have any idea what that might be, even going into what you think is science fiction for an idea?

0:50:50 Thomas: Yeah.

0:51:07 Thomas: It's not cold fusion, is it? That's the same thing, right? But just, but

0:51:10 Bryan: Fusion is just fusion that they're able to get going without High temperature.

0:51:12 Thomas: Cold. Yeah. It It pretty much would have to be cold fusion. Right. That was the, the, yeah. Shoot. There's something in the, whatever. Dylithium crystals.

0:51:15 Bryan: Yeah Now, dilithium crystals are a different cheat. They change the speed of light. They don't provide propulsion themselves, themselves.

0:51:30 Thomas: Darn. Hmm. I'm not sure I can think of that one.

0:51:33 Bryan: The solution which does show up in science fiction is uh, antimatter reaction. This is another thing we talked about briefly in the Q&A, that any type of normal matter can have in opposite an antimatter component, which uh, charge and reverse other properties, but uh, same mass. So like an electron has its antimatter counterpart called the positron, and these Yeah, and if Link and Shadow Link ever meet, they cancel each other out, and all that's left is energy, and this, as far as we know, is the absolute most efficient way to

0:51:39 Thomas: Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah. And Link has Shadow Link. Meat, yeah. Cancel. Yeah. Really?

0:52:15 Bryan: Get energy out of mass, basically.

0:52:18 Thomas: Why? Why? Why does that get energy? I never knew that. Yeah,

0:52:21 Bryan: The mass is energy, and the mass, the energy can't be destroyed, okay? Conservation of energy and all that. That once you cancel out all the other properties of these things, all that's left is pure energy. Yeah.

0:52:37 Thomas: Makes sense. Me, I thought it was just a clean cancel. It's just like, boop, okay, that's gone. But no, that would violate conservation laws. Okay.

0:52:44 Bryan: Yeah, and so, so this allows us to basically convert 100% of mass into energy. Now, for a rocket, we need something to propel. We could shoot out photons, or we could try to use some sort of solid fuel. But without going into all of the mass, this does end up being a way that makes interstellar travel at least imaginable, even if it's still not quite practical.

0:53:08 Thomas: Hmm. Right. Right. Still but is it still subject to that equation? It's just we've reduced the the fraction so much.

0:53:10 Bryan: Yeah it's just it's such a, it ends up being a shallow enough exponential curve that uh, imaginable at least, yeah. Now the problem is antimatter is really difficult to deal with because if it touches any real matter, it annihilates. It, yeah.

0:53:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, what container are you keeping that in?

0:53:31 Bryan: You just put it in a glass jar and oops, that exploded. No. Yeah. So you have to find some clever way to contain it. And you really have to do like something funny with magnetic fields, I think.

0:53:41 Thomas: Or generating it? OK. Oh, I see.

0:53:46 Bryan: There are ways, like you can make things float in magnetic fields. And if you do that, you can try to contain it in any direction. But that's still hard, as you have to create some form of antimatter that responds to magnetic fields, and so far the best we've been able to create is atoms of anti-hydrogen, which is just basically one positron and one anti-proton orbiting each other. Yeah it's crazy that

0:54:10 Thomas: This is crazy, though. It'S crazy. I think this is like within the realm of possibility.

0:54:12 Bryan: Yeah It, it's something that you, we haven't ruled out as being possible, and there's this thinnest line of possibility that we could figure out how to make it work. It's ridiculous and probably take hundreds of years of development, but you know, if, if we're to meet an alien race and they said, oh, we use an antimatter reactor to get there, I'd say, oh, that's cool, that really is possible, awesome. So along all the steps to figure this out, we're, we're not exactly ruling anything out. We're just relying on best case scenario after best case scenario after best case scenario, assuming that we're willing to put a huge amount of investment into it and accept a lot of time going into it. And there are still a lot of other hazards, like even talked about the issues of being isolated out there, exposed to radiation. Radiation. Yeah.

0:55:05 Thomas: Or space ghosts. Yeah, space ghosts might get you.

0:55:10 Bryan: Yeah Space, one of them around every corner.

0:55:12 Thomas: Sometimes they seduce you, depending on which episode of Next Generation you're watching. They might be... You a danger there.

0:55:18 Bryan: Getting impregnated by a space ghost happens more often than you would think. Yeah.

0:55:22 Thomas: Yep, you got... Look, they have to plan for everything in these space missions. You never know.

0:55:26 Bryan: So if you look into everything going on, it isn't impossible that you can make the trip. It is just extremely ridiculous, and And the thing about why we think it is in aliens is that, adding up all of these factors against it being possible at all, then if it is possible, how much investment you have to put into it.

0:55:34 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:55:47 Bryan: Aliens going to put in all of that investment to do a little drive -by, maybe abduct a farmer and give him a free colonoscopy?

0:55:55 Thomas: Yeah, that's the thing. And that's the basic skepticism that I think a lot of folks, and it's the reason why I, for a thriving skeptical movement, is you, a lot of people I don't think are good at those basic elements of kind of skepticism, which is, okay, which has more likely? All that stuff you just talked about, which is pretty much ironclad physics, so far as we know, which is more likely, we're wrong about all of that, or was there a smudge in the camera? Like, really, I mean, that's really what it comes down to. And even with ones that are particularly hard to explain, you know, like the weight of probability is so far on the side of, yeah, I mean, this is probably just a something, it's probably hallucination, the camera, a random one and zero, zero somewhere in the, like, there's so many possibilities you could think of for why something in a camera or whatever would be not anomalous enough to make us think, like, uh, is it aliens? That's so much more likely than all this being wrong.

0:56:53 Bryan: Yeah, the thing. If you compare the two chains of possibility, like I've given you all of the factors that have to go right to allow aliens, like they have to be close to us, which is unlikely. They have to know we're here. They have the right stage of development. They know we have to want to go here. They have enough technology to make it feasible. They need to be willing to put in all the expenses. They have to be willing to put in the time versus some other possibility.

0:57:09 Thomas: Yeah.

0:57:22 Bryan: Like,

0:57:21 Thomas: By the way, I want to add more to that. And when they did all that, they didn't do it in a way that like, oh, the whole world saw a big flash of light and they announced themselves or something like that. Or Or like, oh, they landed and said hello. No, no, it's one random camera somewhere that, you know, like the odds that all of that was true and they didn't have a, you better plan. Maybe when they got close to us, they sent a radio signal to say, hey, we're coming. Expect us on this day or something, you know?

0:57:50 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, a lot of implausible things versus, you know, even if we've got something hard to explain, there are a lot of somewhat implausable explanations like, oh, that was a bird. It was moving odd because it was sick. So, okay, what are the odds of a sick bird versus what are the odds for all of these things necessary for it to be aliens? It's orders of magnitude difference.

0:58:13 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I want to ask the question, let's pretend just, and this is a hypothetical, so you got to go with it. Let's pretend it is aliens, and you don't have to pick like a particular fucking tic-tac that's alien, like just say, well, shit, it was alien somehow, Brian, and I want to know, this is your team, you know, Bruce Willis, and you get together and you're like, how did this, how, how could it be aliens, what, what would have happened, and I know it's going to depend A little bit on the type of contact it is, but what would b in your mind if you knew you just knew it was aliens, you start to do that astrophysicist math. What happened? How did they get to us? What would be the most likely thing or some of the most unlikely things?

0:58:22 Bryan: Okay. Yeah.

0:58:54 Bryan: So some of this is going to depend on exactly what the contact looks like. Let's say, first of all, let's pretend we have dead aliens. We can't just try to communicate and ask them a question. And We just have to speculate. Uh, one option would be, um, we're wrong about the physics somehow, and you know, particularly the speed of light and difficulty traveling is the biggest barrier, and being wrong there could very difficult to imagine, as we've talked about this before, I get in again that that faster -than -light travel tends to also allow time travel.

0:59:06 Thomas: Okay. Oh, yeah.

0:59:28 Bryan: There are maybe ways around it, like wormholes. So, you, there are some astrophysicists who believe that you could have random wormholes in the universe. So one plausible explanation is that they're right about wormholes possibly existing. And these aliens just got unlucky enough that they had their own alien space program, program, when one end of a wormhole came by, scooped them out, and the other end was near us and spit them out and they fell down to our planet. It's, I mean, it's still ridiculously unlikely, but we're in the hypothetical where it's happened. So that would be one possibility. Wormholes, and even in that possibility, it is they came here by accident and they likely will never come here again Yeah.

1:00:10 Thomas: Oh. Because you couldn't really control it. Yeah.

1:00:13 Bryan: So that's one possibility, but let's say they came here deliberately, the best way I can think of that would happen, because lot of the issues aliens have to exist for that to happen, we, the dice have been rolled on those parts of the equations, they do exist, they are close enough, so the remaining parts are, are willing and able to put in the expense to get here. You able, again, is a kind of a matter of luck.

Are they at the right stage, and state of technological development, and have the resources, the final bits would then be willing, that's something that you have to make a huge justification for doing. So maybe you have a type of alien, which is ridiculously curious by nature and is willing to go on these suicide missions on the chance that they'll see other aliens from their perspective. I can imagine something like that happening.

Thing I can mention is, what if you have a particularly long -lived species of aliens? Like, what if they live tens of thousands of years and they're able to get to another star system and a hundred years? That's 1% % of your life. So for a human, that would be like taking a year trip. Would you be willing to take a trip for a year to potentially see aliens? I'm sure a ton of people would.

1:01:38 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, not me. I'm pretty happier. But yeah, I get it. You know, I'm just thinking through this. Now looking at it from this angle, there are at least a lot of possibilities for how this could happen. Because now I'm I'm thinking like, well, what if we get some sort of artificial intelligence, some one way or another, you we more likely to be visited by the robots, Brian, if they make contact?

1:01:41 Bryan: Yeah.

1:01:54 Bryan: That's actually, I think you're right. It would be more likely to get artificial intelligence as a lot of the issues of biological organisms organisms wouldn't apply to artificial intelligence. Like, for one thing, you have to worry about a limit on acceleration that you have with biological organisms. You can engineer computers to be able to withstand much greater acceleration, which would allow you to get there faster. You don't have to worried about a in the same way. Although, honestly, you still do. Computers still do degrade over time. They just degrade in different ways.

And that's actually one of the issues with space travel and computers is we've talked about the exposure to radiation. And one big problem for computers over a long enough time is exposure to cosmic rays. These are these ridiculously energetic rays of light that are just kind of randomly shooting in space from all sorts of astrophysical events. And they are known to affect computers, even on Earth. After getting through the atmosphere, they hit the computer and knock an electron from one energy state to another, flip a bit from a zero to a one. And yeah, this has been observed doing a lot of things.

And you know, if you have really old files on your computer, you might notice this. Like, I was looking through my old files recently, found one video, um, the, it somehow got incorrupted where the supposed length of it was twice what the actual length was. I don't know if that was a cosmic ray or a copy error, but yeah, some corruption issue. So, you, computers aren't immune to this. And

1:02:00 Thomas: Yeah.

1:02:41 Thomas: But could assume, I mean, they could take they could have ways of protecting themselves, right?

1:03:41 Bryan: Probably the easiest way is just go as fast as possible. So time dilation is in your favor and you have the least time. And if you have computers, you can make them much resilient to acceleration than you can biological organisms. So I think if we have alien contact, is orders of magnitude more likely that we encounter an AI they developed

1:03:54 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. The robots, they're coming. Okay. I guess I would add to that, if we're trying to make the best case scenario for some sort of alien contact, like that, maybe we say Alpha Centauri. Turns out there is maybe something, or maybe that one that's, you know, like you said, 10, 10 or so light years. And they were advanced enough that they either became an artificial intelligence or they made an artificial intelligent, or just robots, even if they're not like sentient, like made them well enough to send to us. And they started a long time ago. You know, they got there pretty rapidly and we're like, hey, let's check this out. That'll be cool. What's interesting is it doesn't seem like it would make much sense for them to do that for any practical reason, right? I mean, because we're dealing with such huge scales, I doubt we're ever dealing with like a movie scenario where it's like they need to extract our blood or something, you know, some nonsense.

1:04:03 Bryan: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:04:54 Bryan: Look, the only thing I can think of would be some form of necessity that you, somehow it's practical for them to get to another planet but not stay on theirs, which you know, it is possible

1:05:05 Thomas: Hmm, yeah. Yeah. They need to find another Goldilocks zone. They ruined their environment as much as we did. Yeah. Okay.

1:05:07 Bryan: Yeah yeah but even, even then, it's probably easier to, you know, keep a planet in the Goldilocks zone than find another and adapt it. I mean, maybe if there were something like they detected that their sun was about to go red giant, or it was just at that stage of light where their star was, well, it doesn't go red giant immediately, it heats up steadily. Um, you know, maybe there's something going on, or you know, they, they have, uh, well, I'm trying to think, maybe like an asteroid impact, but you're moving an asteroid

1:05:17 Thomas: Yeah.

1:05:38 Thomas: Maybe they've lived long enough. Yeah, that they know that their star is not long for this world.

1:05:40 Bryan: Yeah yeah moving an asteroid out of the way. Yeah, so I don't think it would be an asteroid impact, as it would still be easier to move one out of a way than to immigrate. But if they somehow know that their star isn't gonna last long, they would have to be a long-term plan. Like, they, they realize, oh, this, this star is getting hotter, it keeps getting hotter, we have to form a generations -long plan to immigrate somewhere else, because in a few hundreds of thousands of years, we will not be able to live here and we will not beable to fix it.

1:06:15 Thomas: And so that would mean not Robits unless they have become Robits because that would meaning you want to actually move your civilization, your meat bags over here.

1:06:19 Bryan: So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would also mean not at all like humans, as we can't even handle a problem coming within a few years.

1:06:30 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, have to assume they, no matter who it is, they, I don't know if it's in the Drake equation, but they have a better political system than our stupid ones. Yeah

1:06:38 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, that actually is one of the factors is how long do they last at an intelligence stage before they go extinct?

1:06:45 Thomas: Yeah. Um, me crazy, but maybe I'm on the side of the aliens now. I don't know. Like it's possible.

1:06:51 Bryan: Yeah, once you go into it, well, we've spent all of this looking at how it could be possible. But you have to keep in mind, every one of these steps has a ridiculously tiny probability attached to it. And we're combining a lot of those together.

1:06:55 Thomas: Yeah. Yep. Yep, yep. True. True. But if we're talking tic-tacs, it's not impossible, I guess, that like it'd be okay, that's a little droid drone they sent, but it's, again, all that aside, idea what makes me the most skeptical, well, no, I shouldn't say, there's a lot of things, but one of the things that makes me most skeptical of this latest craze, I'll say, or whatever this latest thing is, that that they're adding in all this x -files ask stuff, oh yeah, the government knows and they're the, and they're, you know, blah blah blah, and it's like, all right, like the odds that they're, they're all the way here, you know, and they've got all these things we're already talking about and they can't break through to like everybody. They're only just mysteriously intercepted by, you know, fighter pilots or whatever the hell. And then that's it. And then they keep it. Why is the government keeping it secret? I've never bought any of that. First off, I don't think the government is particularly good at keeping secrets at all.

1:07:12 Bryan: Yeah, Yeah,

1:08:01 Thomas: Secondly, I don'T UNDERSTAND THE MOTIVATION. It government just like went into to like, oh, I've seen this movie. We're supposed to like cover this up, I think for some reason. Yeah, no, I'm sure. I've never seen that movie too. So we just don't tell anybody, right? Yeah, I don't know why, but like, I guess we should cover this Up. They It's always come up with something loose, like, Oh, it caused panic. It would cause pandemonium. Really? I thought a pandemic was going to cause pandemonium. I thought that was going cause, and like, not really. I mean, maybe we were like, whoa, shit for like a couple of weeks. And then a bunch of people were like," Well, fuck this, I am bored." And ridiculous. I, there's no reason that I could possibly think of short of keeping some like good technology for themselves away from other countries or something. But I mean the, the odds of all that lining up perfectly.

1:08:01 Bryan: Yeah But at using it, and to use that good technology and then, yeah, mean, why would you keep it for yourself but not use the technology?

1:08:55 Thomas: Or, or are they, but then also like fucking administrations change, times change politics. I don't, there'S just, I think it requires a lot of creativity to think that this Tacs is aliens, but you know, is there any other observations along those lines that you want to, you let us in on? To ask you too, it's a tough question, but if we were wrong about physics, what's like your favorite way that we could be wrong about something like this that would just make, it would make the universe more cool? Because frankly, I am disappointed by this.

1:09:21 Bryan: I mean faster than light travel, honestly, would make it more cool. Now, we probably do want to avoid time travel for everyone's safety. We've seen enough fiction to know that time travel causes way too much harm. And there are models of physics that allow fast and light travel, but not time travel. Need a preferred frame of reference, which, live with a preferred frame of preference if it gives us faster than light travel.

1:09:24 Thomas: Yeah, no kidding.

1:09:40 Thomas: Yeah. We're gonna argue over which one it is, though. I bet, no, I want it to be my frame of reference. No, it's the average, right? Somehow I don't, I don't t totally see how that works, but

1:09:47 Bryan: So yeah. Maybe, yeah? Just the way the math works. And yeah, it's hard to describe in a podcast form, but that's the one thing we would need to discard in order to have fast and light travel without time travel. And if you do that, then yeah. There are a few theoretical ways it could work, but all of them really rely on something that we don't know exists, like matter with negative mass. So maybe we figure out a way to create that, we find faster than light travel does work with it, like, you know, that's another possible answer to the alien questions, is faster than like travel actually is possible and they figured out how. Oh,

1:09:57 Thomas: Yeah.

1:10:28 Thomas: What, anything else crazy we could think of? What about like teleportation or something? Like, are we anywhere? Is that anything?

1:10:34 Bryan: Well, now let's see, I'm, is a quantum teleportation, but I don't think that's what we think of as macroscopic teleportation. No, got you. I've got you crazy.

1:10:34 Thomas: Oh, Here.

1:10:46 Bryan: Now, let's say we figure out a way to upload our minds into computer. Biologists are going to be happy about prospect, but let's say we figured it out. Then let's say we convert that computer program into binary code. We turn that into light and beam that across the universe to another solar system. We just freeze it in place, beam it across. We have a receptor there that picks up the beam to human mind.

1:10:46 Thomas: We go right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, how do we get the receptor there,

1:11:13 Bryan: Yeah.

1:11:13 Thomas: Though?

1:11:14 Bryan: Well, once you do it once, you can keep using it. So that would be something you'd be willing to invest the time in. Like, have a robot go over, set it up for us. You have to wait a bit for the speed of light limit. But then once you have it there, you're going to have people beam themselves across at the speedoflight. It'll be instantaneous for them.

1:11:33 Bryan: Then download. Load themselves into a new robot body over there, yeah.

1:11:17 Thomas: Okay, okay. Okay. Yeah yeah. And you say themselves, I mean, once we have that, you could copy yourself a bunch of times, that's that that gets really scary actually. Are you gonna have just one person like the Boba verse, but you know, I could imagine that going awry a lot of ways. Yeah. That'd be kind of cool, so we could have some replicants coming over here. You, but it's still, it sounds like, I mean, again, robots, it's got to be the robots, that's the most likely thing, by I mean, they're that just better at living. I know it would be interesting to get somebody more from the like biology angle, that would be interesting to talk about, like what are the limitations, if that's anything you've looked into, you know, of evolution or ways life could be that would make this easier for another species, right?

1:11:41 Bryan: Yeah. Oh. Yes, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:12:08 Bryan: Like Yeah, like there are definitely people who've talked about the question of uploading minds, I know that's something that's come up in the skeptic sphere a lot, is, you know, there's currently a lot of pseudoscience about uploading minds, and it'd be good to get a biologist on who can give some actual on that and what are the actual barriers to it, yeah.

1:12:32 Thomas: But not just that, like what are the conceivable, you could we brainstorm some really interesting ways that life could evolve that don't require perhaps so much Goldilocksing, you know, I'd be interested in what the limits of that might be. That's a tricky one too. Does it, do we need water for some reason? Could you, can you imagine a waterless one or something that's just super super resilient to all these constraints we're talking about? I don't know.

1:12:41 Bryan: Oh. Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't know either, yeah.

1:12:56 Thomas: Well, topic for another show. Well, it's not aliens.

1:13:00 Bryan: Oh, any biologists in the audience, please do reach out to Thomas.

1:13:04 Thomas: Oh, also any aliens in the audience. If you do, you can answer this question pretty quickly for us, I think. If we're like, hi, yeah, first first-timed, I'm an alien. I just wanted to say, here's why we came and how. If you want to go ahead and send me that email, alien, feel free. All right, Brian, well, this was so much fun, I really appreciate you doing this, uh, I would imagine this may generate a question or two, so folks, if you'd like to, uh, some questions about this, feel free, uh, post it on the maybe on the Patreon, um, or whatever the Patreon post for this episode, and we'll, what we can do, because I feel like there's lot here and it's super fun, maybe. Maybe there will be some cool schemes, some cool tricks that the aliens might have that we didn't think of that, you know, someone might want to chime in on. All right, Brian, your channel, as usual. People should check it out. Anything else you want to plug?

1:13:05 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No problem. Uh, Yeah, YouTube channel is Bryan Gillis, B-R-Y-N-G-I-L-I-S, um, by the time you're hearing this, this will probably be about finishing my playthrough of Outer Wilds. Work, unfortunately for me, is picked back up, so I might not be able to do much more with the YouTube channel. But if you haven't checked it out already, I hope you enjoy what's there. I do have some other ideas for things that I hope I'll be able to find the time for and maybe even come on the podcast to talk about. So stay tuned.

1:14:05 Thomas: Oh, Love it. Excellent. Thanks so much again. And we'll see you next time.

1:14:19 Bryan: Yes, thank you.