🛸 "In 300 Years, There Will Be Millions of People Living in Space,"—astrophysicist Adam Frank and Lex Fridman.
In a recent interview with Lex Fridman, Adam Frank, an American astrophysicist and bestselling author, talked about our chances of finding extraterrestrial civilizations, the timeline of the Solar System colonization, and what aliens might look like.
Highlights:
🪐 People said, "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." If the sky is an ocean you are looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, is just a hot tub. Yes, there are no fish there, but that doesn't mean there aren't any in the entire ocean. We just haven't looked. But we're finally starting to look.
🪐 In the 1990s, we found planets orbiting sun-like stars—exoplanets. This is one of the major space discoveries of the last decades and the first step toward finding habitable worlds.
🪐 There are 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the Universe, with liquid water on the surface. Unless nature really has some bias against civilizations, we're not the first time this has happened over the course of cosmic history. 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.
🪐 The search should start with traces of biosphere or technosphere activity. So, if you find a planet with oxygen and methane, that's a good bet that there's a biosphere there. The chlorine, fluorine, and carbon chemicals in the atmosphere are signs of a technological civilization there. We can look for plumes of thermonuclear emissions from spacecraft or the tailings of asteroid mining: If you're chewing up asteroids to build space habitats, dust particles might be left around.
🪐 Within a few hundred years, millions, if not billions, of people will live in the Solar System, and it doesn't even have to be on Mars. The next 1000 years of human history is the Solar System. We'll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can, but only if we meet today's challenges such as climate change, the risks of nuclear war and AI.
🪐 If you look at Earth's history, multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other have been using some stick-like apparatus. So if you've got to move along a hard surface and air, the idea of jointed stick legs makes sense. But aliens can be very, very different. For example, the hive mind idea or bacterial colonies managed to come to their own version of high cognition liquid brains like termites, where the organism is the whole colony. It's also possible their cognitive structure is so different that we're not even living in the same Universe in a certain way. We have to be prepared for that.
📱 You can watch the full interview here
More on the topic:
🔭 AI is Looking for a "Second Earth"
🪐 What Is the Origin of Life? Lex Fridman and Sarah Walker
#interview #future #space @hiaimediaen
