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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:38 - The big and the small
8:28 - Aliens
16:42 - The pencil problem
23:27 - Food abundance
25:31 - Extinction of human civilization
30:49 - Future politics of Mars
37:49 - SpaceX
43:49 - Elon Musk
1:09:17 - Nuclear power
1:13:43 - The higher mind
1:18:27 - Echo chambers and idea labs
1:21:39 - How our brain processes film and music
1:24:53 - Neuralink
1:33:07 - Future of physical interactions
1:37:18 - AI
1:44:38 - Free speech
1:48:41 - How to read more
1:55:23 - Spaced repetition
1:59:26 - Procrastination
2:26:18 - Goals for the future
2:31:36 - Meaning of life

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If you read a half hour a night, the calculation I came to is that you can read a thousand books in 50 years.

All of the components are there to engineer intimate experiences.

Extraterrestrial life is a true mystery, the most tantalizing mystery of all.

How many humans need to disappear for us to be completely lost?

The following is a conversation with Tim Urban, author and illustrator of the amazing blog called Wait But Why.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

You wrote a weight but why blog post about the big and the small, from the observable universe to the atom.

What world do you find most mysterious or beautiful?

The very small seems a lot more mysterious.

And the very big I feel like we kind of understand.

I mean, not the very, very big, not the multiverse, if there is a multiverse, not anything outside of the observable universe.

But the very small, I think we really have no idea what's going on, or very, you know, much less idea.

But I find that, so I think the small is more mysterious, but I think the big is sexier.

I just cannot get enough of the bigness of space and the farness of stars, and it just continually blows my mind.

I mean, we still, the vastness of the observable universe has the mystery that we don't know what's out there.

Like, general relativity can tell us how the movement of bodies works, how they're born, all that kind of things.

But like, how many civilizations are out there?

How many, like what are the weird things that are out there?

Oh yeah, life, well extraterrestrial life is a true mystery, the most tantalizing mystery of all.

So that's maybe it's that the actual, the big and the small are really cool, but it's actually the things that are potentially our size that are the most tantalizing.

Potentially our size is probably the key word.

Yeah, I mean, I wonder how small intelligent life could get.

And I assume that there's a limit that you're not gonna, I mean, you might have like a whale, blue whale sized intelligent being, that would be kind of cool.

But I feel like we're in the range of order of magnitude smaller and bigger than us for life.

But maybe not, maybe you could have some giant life form.

Just seems like, I don't know, there's gotta be some reason that anything intelligent between kind of like a little tiny rodent or finger monkey up to a blue whale on this planet.

I don't know, maybe when you change the gravity and other things.

Well, you could think of life as a thing of self-assembling organisms and they just get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Like there's no such thing as a human being.

A human being is made up of a bunch of tiny organisms working together and we somehow envision that as 1 entity because it has consciousness.

But maybe it's just organisms on top of organisms.

Organisms all the way down, turtles all the way down.

So like, Earth can be seen as an organism for alien species that's very different.

Like, why is the human the fundamental entity that is living and then everything else is just either a collection of humans or components of humans?

I think of it kind of as if you think about, I think of like an emergence elevator.

And so you've got an ant is on 1 floor and then the ant colony is a floor above, or maybe there's even units within the colony that's 1 floor above and the full colony is 2 floors above.

And To me, I think that it's the colony that is closest to being the animal.

It's like the individual thing that competes with others, while the individual ants are like cells in the animal's body.

We are more like a colony in that regard.

But the humans are weird, because we kind of, I think of it if emergence happens in an emergence tower, where you've got kind of, as I said, cells, and then humans, and communities, and societies.

You know, The individual ants are always cooperating with each other for the sake of the colony.

So the colony is this unit that is the competitive unit.

Humans can kind of go, we take the elevator up and down Emergence Tower psychologically.

Sometimes we are individuals that are competing with other individuals, And that's where our mindset is.

And then other times, we get in this crazy zone, you know, a protest or a sporting event, and you're just chanting and screaming and doing the same hand motions with all these other people, and you feel like 1.

You feel like 1, you know, and you'd sacrifice yourself.

And so our brains can kind of psychologically go up and down this elevator in an interesting way.

Yeah, I wonder how much of that is just the narrative we tell ourselves.

Maybe we are just like an ant colony, we're just collaborating always.

Even in our stories of individualism, of like the freedom of the individual, like this kind of isolation, lone man on an island kind of thing, we're actually all part of this giant network of maybe 1 of the things that makes humans who we are is probably deeply social, the ability to maintain not just a single human intelligence, but like a collective intelligence.

And so this feeling like individual is just because we woke up at this level of the hierarchy.

So we make it special, but we very well could be just part of the ant colony.

This whole conversation, I'm either going to be doing a Shakespearean analysis of your Twitter, your writing, or very specific statements that you've made.

So you've written answers to a mailbag of questions.

The questions are amazing, the ones you've chosen, and your answers are amazing.

So on this topic of the big and the small, somebody asked, are we bigger than we are small?

Okay, so where do we sit at this level of the very small to the very big?

I think it depends on what we're asking here.

So if we're talking about the biggest thing that we kind of can talk about without just imagining is the observable universe, the Hubble sphere.

And that's about 10 to the 26th meters in diameter.

The smallest thing we talk about is a Planck length.

But you could argue that that's kind of an imaginary thing.

Now we're about, conveniently, about 10 to the 1.

So we're right, so it's easy because you can just look and say, okay, well, For example, atoms are like 10 to the negative 15th or 10 to the negative 16th meters across, right?

If you go 10 to the 15th or 10 to the 16th, which is right, that's now, so an atom to us is us to this, you get to like nebulas.

Smaller than a galaxy and bigger than the biggest star.

So we're right in between a nebula and an atom.

Now if you want to go down to quark level, you might be able to get up to galaxy

When you go up to the observable universe, you're getting down on the small side to things that we, I think, are mostly theoretically imagining are there and hypothesizing are there.

So I think as far as real world objects that we really know a lot about, I would say we are smaller than we are big.

But if you wanna go down to the Planck length, we're very quickly, we're bigger than we are small.

Yeah, string, exactly, string theory and so on.

But I think like you answered, no matter what, we're kinda middle-ish.

If a human is a neutrino, and again, neutrino, the size doesn't really make sense.

It's not really a size, but when we talk about some of these neutrinos, I mean, if a neutrino is a human, a proton is the sun.

So that's like, I mean, a proton's real small, like really small.

And so, yeah, the small gets like crazy small very quickly.

Let's start just by with the basic, what's your intuition as of today?

This is a thing that could change day by day, but how many alien civilizations out there?

Is it 0, is it a handful, is it almost endless?

Like the observable universe, or the universe is teeming with life?

If I had a gun to my head, I have to take a guess.

I think running a Monte Carlo simulation, this paper by Anders Sandberg and Drexler and a few others a couple years ago, I think you probably know about it.

I think the mean, you know, using different, using different, you know, running through a randomized rate equation multiplication, you ended up with 27 million as the mean of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, in the Milky Way alone.

And so then if you go outside the Milky Way, that would turn into trillions.

Now what's interesting is that there's a long tail, because they believe some of these multipliers in the Drake equation, so for example, the probability that life starts in the first place, they think that the kind of range that we use for that variable is way too small.

And that's constraining our possibilities.

And if you actually extend it to some crazy number of orders of magnitude, like 200, they think, that variable should be.

You get this long tail where, I forget the exact number, but it's like a third or a quarter of the total outcomes have us alone.

Like, you know, I think it's a sizable percentage has us as the only intelligent life in the galaxy.

I think there's a non-zero legitimate amount of outcomes there that have us as the only life in the observable universe at all is on earth.

I mean, it seems incredibly counterintuitive.

It seems like, you know, you mentioned that people think you must be an idiot because if you picked up 1 grain of sand on a beach and examined it and you found all these little things on it, It's like saying, well, maybe this is the only 1 that happened.

They're probably most of the sand, probably.

So and then the other hand, we don't see anything.

We don't see any evidence, which of course, people would say that the people who scoff at the concept that we're potentially alone, they say, well, of course, there's lots of reasons we wouldn't have seen anything.

And the truth is, if this were a freak thing, I mean, if this were a completely freak thing that happened here, whether it's life at all or just getting to this level intelligence, that species, whoever it was, would think there must be lots of us out there and they'd be wrong.

So just being, Again, using the same intuition that most people would use, I'd say there's probably lots of other things out there.

Yeah, and you wrote a great blog post about it.

But to me, the 2 interesting reasons that we haven't been in contact, I too have an intuition that the universe is teaming up in life.

So 1 interesting is around the great filter.

So we either, the great filter is either behind us or in front of us.

So the reason that's interesting is you get to think about what kind of things ensure or ensure the survival of an intelligent civilization or lead to the destruction of intelligent civilization?

That's a very pragmatic, very important question to always be asking.

And then the other 1 is, I'm saddened by the possibility that there could be aliens communicating with us all the time.

And we're just too dumb to hear it, to see it.

Like The idea that the kind of life that can evolve is just the range of life that can evolve is so large that our narrow view of what is life and what is intelligent life is preventing us from having communication with them.

But then they don't seem very smart because if they were trying to communicate with us, they would surely, if they were super intelligent, they would be very, I'm sure if there's lots of life, we're not that rare, we're not some crazy weird species that hears and has different kinds of ways of perceiving signals.

So they would probably be able to, if you really wanted to communicate with an Earth-like species, with a human-like species, you would send out all kinds of things.

You'd send out radio waves, and you send out gravity waves, and lots of things.

So if they're communicating in a way, they're trying to communicate with us and it's just we're too dumb to perceive the signals, it's like, well, they're not doing a great job of considering the primitive species we might be.

So I don't know, I think if a super intelligent species wanted to get in touch with us and had the capability of, I think probably they would.

They may be getting in touch with us, they're just getting in touch with the thing that we humans are not understanding that they're getting in touch with us with.

I guess that's what I was trying to say is there could be something about Earth that's much more special than us humans.

Like the nature of the intelligence that's on Earth, or the thing that's of value and that's curious and that's complicated and fascinating and beautiful might be something that's not just like tweets, okay?

Like English language that's interpretable or any kind of language or any kind of signal, whether it's gravity or radio signal that humans seem to appreciate.

Why not the actual, it could be the process of evolution itself.

There could be something about the way that Earth is breathing, essentially, through the creation of life and this complex growth of life.

It's a whole different way to view organisms and view life that could be getting communicated with.

And we humans are just a tiny fingertip on top of that intelligence, and the communication is happening with the main mothership of Earth, versus us humans that seem to treat ourselves as super important, and we're missing the big picture.

I mean, it sounds crazy, but our understanding of what is intelligence, of what is life, what is consciousness is very limited.

And it seems to be, and just being very suspicious, it seems to be awfully human-centric.

Like, This story, it seems like the progress of science is constantly putting humans down on the importance, like on the cosmic importance, the ranking of how big we are, how important we are.

That seems to be the more we discover that's what's happening, and I think science is very young.

And so I think eventually we might figure out that there's something much, much bigger going on, that humans are just a curious little side effect of the much bigger thing.

That's what, I mean, that, as I'm saying, it just sounds insane, but.

Well, it just, it sounds a little, like, religious.

It, you know, it gets to that realm where there's something that more than meets the eye.

yeah, but not, so religious and spiritual often have this kind of woo-woo characteristic, like when people write books about them and then go to wars over whatever the heck is written in those books.

I mean more like it's possible that collective intelligence is more important than individual intelligence, right?

It's the ant colony, what's the primal organism?

Yeah, I mean humans, just like any individual ant can't do shit, but the colony can make these incredible structures and has this intelligence.

I mean, you know the famous thing that no human knows how to make a pencil.

A single human out there has absolutely no idea how to make a pencil.

So you have to think about you have to get the wood, the paint, the different chemicals that make up the yellow paint.

The metal has to be mined from somewhere and then the graphite, whatever that is.

And there's not 1 person on Earth who knows how to kind of collect all those materials and create a pencil.

So the other thing I like to think about, I actually put this as a question on the blog once.

There's a thought experiment, and I actually wanna hear what you think.

So if a witch, kind of a dickish witch comes around and she says, I'm going to cast a spell on all of humanity, and all material things that you've invented are going to disappear all at once.

So suddenly, we're all standing there naked.

There's no cars and boats and ships and no mines, nothing, right?

It's just a stone age earth and a bunch of naked humans, but we're all the same.

We have the same brain, so we all know what's going on.

And we all got a note from her, so we understand the deal.

And she says, she communicated to every human, here's the deal.

You guys need to make 1 working iPhone 13.

And you make 1 working iPhone 13 that could pass in the Apple store today, you know, in your previous world, for an iPhone 13, then I will restore everything.

How long do you think, and so everyone knows, this is the mission, we're all aware of the mission, everyone, all humans.

So obviously if you do a random selection of 100 or 1,000 humans within the population, I think you're screwed to make that iPhone.

I tend to believe that there's fascinating specialization among the human civilization.

Like there's a few hackers out there that can like solo build an iPhone.

It has to, I mean, it's virtually, I mean, okay.

You have to build factories, I mean, to fabricate.

You know, you gotta mine the materials where you don't have any cranes, you don't have any, you know.

Okay, you 100% have to have the, everybody's naked?

Everyone's naked and everyone's where they are.

So you and I would currently be naked on the ground in what used to be Manhattan.

So you need a naked Elon Musk type character to then start building a company.

He doesn't even know where he, where is everyone?

You know, shit, how am I gonna find other people I need to talk to?

Yeah, everyone has the knowledge that's in their current brains.

Yeah, but the actual labor of, because you said, it's like The original Mac, like the Apple II, that can be built.

Well, I think part of it is a communication problem.

If you could suddenly have, you know, if everyone had a walkie-talkie and there was, you know, a couple, you know, 10 really smart people who were designated the leaders, they could say, okay, I want, you know, everyone who can do this to walk west until you get to this little hub.

And everyone else, and they could actually coordinate, but we don't have that.

So it's like people just, you know, and then what I think about is, so you've got some people that are trying to organize.

And you'll have a little community where a couple hundred people have come together, and maybe a couple thousand have organized, and they designated 1 person as the leader, and then they have sub-leaders.

You're also going to have some people that say, good, humans were a scourge upon the Earth, and this is good.

They're going to try to murder the people who know what they're talking about.

Well, and so maybe everyone's hopeful, we're all civilized and hopeful for the first 30 days or something.

And there's new kinds of governments popping up, new kinds of societies.

And they don't play nicely with the other ones.

And I think very quickly, I think a lot of people will just give up and say, you know what?

There's like, even the farmers, a lot of them are relying on their machines.

And so we also, there's gonna be a lot of mass starvation.

And that, when you're trying to organize, a lot of people are coming in with spears they fashioned and trying to murder everyone who has food.

Given today's society, how much violence would that be?

But we have, and also we have a kind of ethics where murder is bad.

We used to be less, like human life was less valued.

In the past, so murder was more okay, like ethically.

But in the past, they also were really good at figuring out how to have sustenance.

They knew how to get food and water because they, so we have no idea.

Like the ancient hunter-gatherer societies would laugh at what's going on here.

They'd say, you guys, you don't know what you're, none of you know what you're doing.

And also the amount of people, feeding this amount of people in a very, in a Stone Age civilization, that's not gonna happen.

So New York and San Francisco are screwed?

Well, whoever's not near water is really screwed.

Anyway, it's a very interesting question, and what it does, this and the pencil, it makes me feel so grateful and excited about, man, our civilization is so cool.

And this is, talk about collective intelligence.

It's collective humans, Super, collective humans is a super intelligent being that can do absolutely, especially over long periods of time, can do such magical things.

When I'm working and I'm hungry, I just go click, click, click, and like a salad's coming.

If you think about the incredible infrastructure that's in place for that quickly, it's just the internet, the electricity, first of all, that's just powering the things.

The amount of structures that have to be created for that electricity to be there.

And then you've got, of course, the internet.

And then you have this system where delivery drivers, and they're riding bikes that were made by someone else.

And all those ingredients came from all over the place.

I mean, it's just so I think it's like I like thinking about these things because it makes me feel like just so grateful.

I'm like, man, it would be so awful if we didn't have this and people who didn't have it would think this was such magic we live in and we do.

Yeah, 1 of the most amazing things when I showed up, I came here at 13 from the Soviet Union and the supermarket was, people don't really realize that, but the abundance of food, it's not even, so bananas was the thing I was obsessed about.

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Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #264