Robin Hanson is a professor at George Mason University and researcher at Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Robin's Twitter: https://twitter.com/robinhanson
Robin's Website: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson
Grabby Aliens (paper): https://grabbyaliens.com/paper
The Elephant in the Brain (book): https://amazon.com/dp/0197551955/ref=nosim?tag=turingmachi08-20
The Age of Em (book): https://amazon.com/dp/0198817827/ref=nosim?tag=turingmachi08-20

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:52 - Grabby aliens
39:36 - War and competition
45:10 - Global government
58:01 - Humanity's future
1:08:02 - Hello aliens
1:35:06 - UFO sightings
1:59:43 - Conspiracy theories
2:08:01 - Elephant in the brain
2:21:32 - Medicine
2:34:01 - Institutions
3:00:54 - Physics
3:05:46 - Artificial intelligence
3:23:35 - Economics
3:26:56 - Political science
3:32:45 - Advice for young people
3:41:36 - Darkest moments
3:44:37 - Love and loss
3:53:59 - Immortality
3:57:56 - Simulation hypothesis
4:08:13 - Meaning of life

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We can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the few things we can see, 1 of which is our current date.

And so now that you have this living cosmology, we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty and then at some point, things like us appear, very primitive, and then some of those stop being quiet and expand and then for a few billion years they expand and then they meet each other and then for the next hundred billion years they commune with each other.

That is the usual models of cosmology say that in roughly a hundred, hundred and 50000000000 years the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have left is some galaxy clusters and that are sort of disconnected from each other.

There will be this community of all the grabby alien civilizations and each 1 of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others.

And we might hope to join them someday and become part of that community.

The following is a conversation with Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and 1 of the most fascinating, wild, fearless and fun minds I've ever gotten a chance to accompany for a time in exploring questions of human nature, human civilization and alien life out there in our impossibly big universe.

He is the co-author of a book titled The Elephant in the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, The Age of M, Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, and a fascinating recent paper I recommend on quote, grabby aliens, titled, If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare.

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And now, dear friends, here's Robin Hanson.

You are working on a book about, quote, grabby aliens.

This is a technical term, like the Big Bang.

Grabby aliens expand fast into the universe and they change stuff.

So if they were out there, we would notice.

So the question is, where are the grabby aliens?

So Fermi's question is, where are the aliens?

And we could vary that in 2 terms, right?

Where are the quiet, hard to see aliens, and where are the big, loud, grabby aliens?

So it's actually hard to say where all the quiet ones are, right?

There could be a lot of them out there, because they're not doing much, they're not making a big difference in the world.

But the grabby aliens, by definition, are the ones you would see.

We don't know exactly what they do with where they went, But the idea is they're in some sort of competitive world where each part of them is trying to grab more stuff and do something with it.

And, you know, almost surely whatever is the most competitive thing to do with all the stuff they grab isn't to leave it alone the way it started, right?

So we humans, when we go around the earth and use stuff, we change it.

We turn a forest into a farmland, turn a harbor into a city.

So the idea is aliens would do something with it and so we're not exactly sure what it would look like but it would look different.

So somewhere in the sky we would see big spheres of different activity where things had been changed because they had been there.

So as you expand you aggressively interact and change the environment.

So the word grabby versus loud, you're using them sometimes synonymously, sometimes not.

Grabby to me is a little bit more aggressive.

Is it some other physical phenomena like gravitational waves?

What, are you using this kind of in a broad philosophical sense?

Or there's a specific thing that it means to be loud in this universe of ours?

My co-authors and I put together a paper with a particular mathematical model, and so we used the term grabby aliens to describe that more particular model.

And the idea is it's a more particular model of the general concept of loud.

So loud would just be the general idea that they would be really obvious.

The title is actually about loud and quiet.

So the idea is you want to distinguish your particular model of things from the general category of things everybody else might talk about.

The paper title is, If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet aliens are also rare.

If life on Earth, God, this is such a good abstract.

If life on Earth had to achieve N hard steps to reach humanity's level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the Nth power.

So we'll talk about power, we'll talk about linear increase.

So what is the technical definition of grabby?

And why are, in contrast with humans, why aren't humans grabby?

We have a mathematical model of the distribution of advanced civilizations, i.e.

That model has 3 parameters and we can set each 1 of those parameters from data and therefore we claim this is actually what we know about where they are in space-time.

So the key idea is they appear at some point in space-time and then after some short delay they start expanding and they expand at some speed.

And the other 2 parameters are about how they appear in time.

That is, they appear at random places, and they appear in time according to a power law, and that power law has 2 parameters, and we can fit each of those parameters to data.

We know the distribution of advanced civilizations in space and time.

So we are right now a new civilization and we have not yet started to expand.

But plausibly we would start to do that within say 10 million years of the current moment.

And 10 million years is a really short duration in the history of the universe.

So we are at the moment a sort of random sample of the kind of times at which an advanced civilization might appear because we may or may not become grabby, but if we do, we'll do it soon.

And so our current date is a sample, and that gives us 1 of the other parameters.

The second parameter is the constant in front of the power law, and that's arrived from our current date.

So power law, what is the N in the power law?

That's the more complicated thing to explain.

Advanced life appeared by going through a sequence of hard steps.

So starting with very simple life, and here we are at the end of this process at pretty advanced life, and so we had to go through some intermediate steps, such as sexual selection, photosynthesis, multicellular animals, and the idea is that each of those steps was hard.

Evolution just took a long time searching in a big space of possibilities to find each of those steps.

And the challenge was to achieve all of those steps by a deadline of when the planets would no longer host simple life.

And so Earth has been really lucky compared to all the other billions of planets out there in that we managed to achieve all these steps in the short time of the 5000000000 years that Earth can support simple life.

So not all steps, but a lot of them, because we don't know how many steps there are before you start the expansion.

the birth of life to the initiation of major expansion.

Right, so we're pretty sure that it would happen really soon so that it couldn't be the same sort of a hard step as the last 1 in terms of taking a long time.

So when we look at the history of Earth, we look at the durations of the major things that have happened, that suggests that there's roughly, say, 6 hard steps that happened, say between 3 and 12, and that we have just achieved the last 1 that would take a long time.

But whatever it is, we've just achieved the last 1.

Are we talking about humans or aliens here?

We don't exactly know the level of specialness.

We don't really know which steps were the hardest or not because we just have a sample of 1.

But you're saying that there's 3 to 12 steps that we have to go through to get to where we are that are hard steps, hard to find by something that took a long time and is unlikely.

There's a lot more ways to fail than to succeed.

The first step would be sort of the very simplest form of life of any sort.

And then we don't know whether that first sort is the first sort that we see in the historical record or not.

But then some other steps are, say the development of photosynthesis, the development of sexual reproduction, there's the development of eukaryote cells, which are certain kind of complicated cells that seem to have only appeared once.

And then there's multicellularity, that is, multiple cells coming together to large organisms like us.

And in this statistical model of trying to fit all these steps into a finite window, the model actually predicts that these steps could be of varying difficulties, that is, they could each take different amounts of time on average.

But if you're lucky enough that they all appear at a very short time, then the durations between them will be roughly equal and the time remaining left over in the rest of the window will also be the same length.

So we at the moment have roughly a billion years left on Earth until simple life like us would no longer be possible.

Life appeared roughly 400 million years after the very first time when life was possible at the very beginning.

So those 2 numbers right there give you the rough estimate of 6 hard steps.

Just to build up an intuition here, so we're trying to create a simple mathematical model of how life emerges and expands in the universe.

And there's a section in this paper, how many hard steps, question mark.

The 2 most plausibly diagnostic earth durations seem to be the 1 remaining after now before Earth becomes uninhabitable for complex life.

So you estimate how long Earth lasts, how many hard steps.

There's windows for doing different hard steps.

And you can sort of, like queuing theory, mathematically estimate of the solution or the passing of the hard steps or the taking of the hard steps.

If life, pre-expansionary life, requires n number of steps, what is the probability of taking those steps on an earth that lasts a billion years, or 2000000000 years, or 5000000000 years, or 10 billion years?

And you say, solving for E using the observed durations of 1.1 and 0.4 then gives E values of 3.9 and 12.5, range 5.7 to

suggesting a middle estimate of at least 6.

We started at the bottom, now we're here.

The key point is, on average, these things on any 1 random planet would take, you know, trillions or trillions of years, just a really long time.

And so we're really lucky that they all happened really fast in a short time before our window closed.

And the chance of that happening in that short window goes as that time period to the power of the number of steps.

And so that was where the power we talked about before came from.

And so that means in the history of the universe, we should overall roughly expect advanced life to appear as a power law in time.

So that very early on, there was very little chance of anything appearing, and then later on, as things appear, other things are appearing somewhat closer to them in time, because they're all going as this power law.

Can we, for people who are not math inclined, can you describe what a power law is?

So, say the function x is linear, and x squared is quadratic, so it's the power of 2.

If we make x to the 3, that's cubic, or the power of 3.

And so, X to the sixth is the power of 6.

And so we'd say life appears in the universe on a planet like Earth in that proportion to the time that it's been ready for life to appear.

And that over the universe in general, it'll appear at roughly a power law like that.

Okay, So it's like if you're gambling and you're doubling up every time, this is the probability you just keep winning.

And so we're the result of this unlikely chain of successes.

So the dominant model of cancer in an organism like each of us is that we have all these cells and in order to become cancerous, a single cell has to go through a number of mutations.

And these are very unlikely mutations, and so any 1 cell is very unlikely to have all these mutations happen by the time your lifespan's over, but we have enough cells in our body that the chance of any 1 cell producing cancer by the end of your life is actually pretty high, more like 40%.

And so the chance of cancer appearing in your lifetime also goes as a power law, this power of the number of mutations that's required for any 1 cell in your body to become cancerous.

The longer you live, the likely you are to have cancer.

That is, the chance of you getting cancer is roughly the power of 6 of the time you've been since you were born.

It is perhaps not lost on people that you're comparing

power laws of the survival or the arrival of the human species to cancerous cells.

The same mathematical model, but of course we might have a different value assumption about the 2 outcomes.

But of course from the point of view of cancer,

From the point of view of cancer, it's a win-win.

It is interesting to take the point of view of all kinds of life forms on Earth, of viruses, of bacteria.

And you know, it's like the Instagram channel, Nature is Metal.

The ethic under which nature operates doesn't often coincide, correlate with human morals.

It seems cold and machine-like in the selection process that it performs.

I am an analyst, I'm a scholar, an intellectual, and I feel I should carefully distinguish predicting what's likely to happen and then evaluating or judging what I think would be better to happen.

And it's a little dangerous to mix those up too closely because then we can have wishful thinking.

And so I try typically to just analyze what seems likely to happen regardless of whether I like it or whether we do anything about it.

And then once you see a rough picture of what's likely to happen if we do nothing, then we can ask, well, what might we prefer?

And ask where could the levers be to move it at least a little toward what we might prefer.

And that's a useful, but often doing that just analysis of what's likely to happen if we do nothing offends many people.

They find that dehumanizing or cold or metal as you say, to just say, well, this is what's likely to happen, and it's not your favorite, sorry, but maybe we can do something, but maybe we can't do that much.

This is very interesting, that the cold analysis, whether it's geopolitics, whether it's medicine, whether it's economics, sometimes misses some very specific aspect of human condition.

Like for example, when you look at a doctor and the act of a doctor helping a single patient, if you do the analysis of that doctor's time and cost of the medicine or the surgery or the transportation of the patient, this is the Paul Farmer question, You know, is it worth spending

When you look at all the people that are suffering in the world, that money could be spent so much better.

And Yet, there's something about human nature that wants to help the person in front of you, and that is actually the right thing to do, despite the analysis.

And sometimes when you do the analysis, there's something about the human mind that allows you to not take that leap, that irrational leap to act in this way, that the analysis explains it away.

Well, it's like, for example, the US government, you know, the DOT, Department of Transportation, puts a value of I think like $9 million on a human life.

And the moment you put that number on a human life, you can start thinking, well, okay, I can start making decisions about this or that and with a sort of cold economic perspective and then you might lose, you might deviate from a deeper truth of what it means to be human somehow.

So you have to dance because then if you put too much weight on the anecdotal evidence on these kinds of human emotions, then you're going to lose, you could also probably more likely deviate from truth.

But there's something about that cold analysis.

Like I've been listening to a lot of people coldly analyze wars, war in Yemen, war in Syria, Israel, Palestine, war in Ukraine, and there's something lost when you do a cold analysis of why something happened.

When you talk about energy, talking about sort of conflict, competition over resources, when you talk about geopolitics, sort of models of geopolitics and why a certain war happened, you lose something about the suffering that happens.

It's an interesting thing because you're both, you're exceptionally good at models in all domains, literally, but also there's a humanity to you.

I don't know if you can comment on that dance.

It's definitely true as you say that for many people if you are accurate in your judgment of say for a medical patient, right?

What's the chance that this treatment might help and what's the cost and compare those to each other and you might say this looks like a lot of cost for a small medical gain and at that point knowing that fact that might take the air out of your sails.

You might not be willing to do the thing that maybe you feel is right anyway, which is still to pay for it.

And then somebody knowing that might want to keep that news from you, not tell you about the low chance of success or the high cost in order to save you this tension, this awkward moment where you might fail to do what they and you think is right.

But I think the higher calling, the higher standard to hold you to, which many people can be held to, is to say, I will look at things accurately, I will know the truth, and then I will also do the right thing with it.

I will be at peace with my judgment about what the right thing is in terms of the truth.

I don't need to be lied to in order to figure out what the right thing to do is.

And I think if you do think you need to be lied to in order to figure out what the right thing to do is, you're at a great disadvantage because then people will be lying to you, you will be lying to yourself and you won't be as effective at achieving whatever good you were trying to achieve.

But getting the data, getting the facts is step 1, not the final step.

So I would say having a good model, getting the good data is step 1, and it's a burden.

Because you can't just use that data to arrive at sort of the easy, convenient thing.

You have to really deeply think about what is the right thing.

You can't use, so the dark aspect of data, of models, is you can use it to excuse away actions that aren't ethical.

You can use data to basically excuse away anything.

But not looking at data lets you excuse yourself to pretend and think that you're doing good when you're not.

It doesn't excuse you from still being human and deeply thinking about what is right.

That very kind of gray area, that very subjective area.

So you started to define sort of the model, the parameters of grabbiness.

There's the rate at which they appear in time, and that rate has a constant and a power.

So we've talked about the history of life on Earth suggests that power is around 6, but maybe 3 to 12.

We can say that constant comes from our current date, sort of sets the overall rate, and the speed, which is the last parameter, comes from the fact that when we look in the sky, we don't see them.

So the model predicts very strongly that if they were expanding slowly, say 1% of the speed of light, our sky would be full of vast spheres that were full of activity.

That is, at a random time when a civilization is first appearing, if it looks out into its sky, it would see many other grabby alien civilizations in the sky, and they would be much bigger than the full moon, they'd be huge spheres in the sky and they would be visibly different.

There's a bunch of hard steps that Earth had to pass to arrive at this place we are currently which we're starting to launch rockets out into space.

If you look at the entirety of the history of Earth, we're now at this precipice of like expansion.

We could, we might not choose to, but if we do, we will do it in the next 10 million years.

10 million is a short time on the cosmological scale, so that is, it might be only a thousand, But the point is, even if it's up to 10 million, that hardly makes any difference to the model.

This makes me feel, I was so stressed about planning what I'm gonna do today,

I just need to be generating some offspring quickly here.

So in this moment, this 10 million year gap or window when we start expanding, and you're saying, okay, so this is an interesting moment where there's a bunch of other alien civilizations that might, at some history of the universe, arrived at this moment where we're here.

There's a model for how likely it is that that happens.

And you think of an expansion as almost like a sphere.

That's when you say speed, we're talking about the speed of the radius growth.

Like the surface, how fast the surface expands.

Okay, and so you're saying that there is some speed for that expansion, average speed, and then we can play with that parameter, and if that speed is super slow, then maybe that explains why we haven't seen anything.

well, it would get- The slow would create the puzzle.

If slow predicts, we would see them, but we don't see them.

the way to explain that is that they're fast.

So the idea is, if they're moving really fast, then we don't see them until they're almost here.

I think this works best when I say a bunch of dumb things.

And then you elucidate the full complexity and the beauty of the dumbness.

So there's these spheres out there in the universe that are made visible because they're sort of using a lot of energy, so they're generating a lot of light and sound.

They're changing things, and change would be visible a long

They would take apart stars, rearrange them, restructure galaxies, they would

Okay, if they're expanding slowly, we would see a lot of them because the universe is old.

It's old enough to where we would see them.

We're assuming we're just typical, maybe at the 50th percentile of them.

So like half of them have appeared so far, the other half will still appear later.

And the math of our best estimate is that they appear roughly once per million galaxies, and we would meet them in roughly a billion years if we expanded out to meet them.

So we're looking at a grabby aliens model, 3D sim.

By the time we get to 13.8 billion years, the fun begins.

Okay, so this is, we're watching a three-dimensional sphere rotating, I presume that's the universe, and then the Grabby aliens are expanding and filling that universe with all kinds of fun.

So that's how the Grabby aliens come in contact, first of all with other aliens, and then with us humans.

The following is a simulation of the Grabby Aliens model of alien civilizations.

Civilizations are born, then expand outwards at constant speed.

By the time we get to 13.8 billion years, this sphere will be about 3,000 times as wide as the distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda.

All right, so why don't we see, We're 1 little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot in that giant, giant sphere.

So you could see that if they expanded at the speed of light, you wouldn't see them until they were here.

So like out there if somebody is destroying the universe with a vacuum decay, there's this doomsday scenario where somebody somewhere could change the vacuum of the universe and that would expand at the speed of light and basically destroy everything it hit.

But you'd never see that until I got here because it's expanding at the speed of light.

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Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #292