In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm continuing last week's discussion with Robin Hanson, professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the Overcoming Bias blog. His books include The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth and The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.
(Be sure to check out last week’s episode for the first part of my conversation with Robin. We discussed futurism, innovation, and economic growth over the very long run, among other topics. Definitely worth the listen!)
In part two, Robin and I talk about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives held a hearing on what Washington now calls "unexplained aerial phenomena." While the hearing didn't unveil high-def, close-up footage of little green men or flying saucers, it did signal that Washington is taking UAPs more seriously. But what if we really are being visited by extraterrestrials? What would contact with an advanced alien civilization mean for humanity? It's exactly the kind of out-there question Robin considers seriously and then applies rigorous, economic thinking.
In This Episode:
The case for extraterrestrial life (1:34)
A model to explain UFOs (6:49)
Could aliens be domesticating us right now? (13:23)
Would advanced alien civilization renew our interest in progress? (17:01)
Is America on the verge of a pro-progress renaissance? (18:49)
Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
The case for extraterrestrial life
James Pethokoukis: In the past few years there have been a lot of interesting developments on the UFO — now UAP — front. The government seems to be taking these sightings far more seriously. Navy pilots are testifying. What is your take on all this?
Robin Hanson: There are two very different discussions and topics here. One topic is, “There are these weird sightings. What's with that? And could those be aliens?” Another more standard, conservative topic is just, “Here's this vast empty universe. Are there aliens out there? If so, where?” So that second topic is where I've recently done some work and where I feel most authoritative, although I'm happy to also talk about the other subject as well. But I think we should talk first about the more conservative subject.
The more conservative subject, I think, is — and I probably have this maybe 50 percent correct — once civilizations progress far enough, they expand. When they expand, they change things. If there were a lot of these civilizations out there, we should be able to, at this point, detect the changes they've made. Either we've come so early that there aren't a lot of these kinds of civilizations out there … let me stop there and then you can begin to correct me.
The key question is: it looks like we soon could go out expanding and we don't see limits to how far we could go. We could fill the universe. Yet, we look out and it's an empty universe. So there seems to be a conflict there.
Where are the giant Dyson spheres?
One explanation is, we are so rare that in the entire observable universe, we're the only ones. And therefore, that's why there's nobody else out there. That's not a crazy position, except for the fact that we're early. The median star will last five trillion years. We're here on our star after only five billion years, a factor of 1000. Our standard best theory of when advanced life like us should appear, if the universe would stay empty and wait for it, would be near the end of a long-lived planet. That's when it would be most likely to appear.
There's this power of the number of hard steps, which we could go into, but basically, the chance of appearing should go as the power of this time. If there are, say, six hard steps, which is a middle estimate, then the chance of appearing 1000 times later would go as 1000 to the power of six. Which would be 10 to the 18th. We are just crazy early with respect to that analysis. There is a key assumption of the analysis, which is the universe would sit and wait empty until we showed up. The simplest way to resolve this is to deny that assumption is to say, “The universe is not sitting and waiting empty. In fact, it's filling up right now. And in a billion years or two, it'll be all full. And we had to show up before that deadline.” And then you might say, “If the universe is filling up right now, if right now the universe is half full of aliens, why don't we see any?”
We should be detecting signals, seeing things. We have this brand new telescope out there sitting a million miles away.
If we were sitting at a random place in the universe, that would be true. But we are the subject of a selection effect. Here's the key story: We have to be at a place where the aliens haven't gotten to yet. Because otherwise, they would be here instead of us. That's the key problem. If aliens expand at almost the speed of light, then you won’t see them until they’re almost here. And that means if you look backwards in our light cone — from our point, all the way backwards — almost all that light cone is excluded. Aliens couldn’t be there because, again, if they had arisen there, they would be here now instead of us. The only places aliens could appear that we could see now would have to be just at the edge of that cone.
Therefore, the key explanation is aliens are out there, but everywhere the aliens are not, we can't see them because the aliens are moving so fast we don't see them until they're almost there. So the day on the clock is the thing telling you aliens are out there right now. That might seem counterintuitive. “How's the clock supposed to tell me about aliens? Shouldn't I see pictures of weird guys with antennae?” Something, right? I'm saying, “No, it's the clock. The clock is telling you that they're out there.” Because the clock is saying you're crazy early, and the best explanation for why you're crazy early is that they're out there right now.
But if we take a simple model of, they’re arising in random places and random times, and we fit it to three key datums we know, we can actually get estimates for this basic model of aliens out there. It has the following key parameter estimates: They're expanding at, say, half the speed of light or faster; they appear roughly once per million galaxies, so pretty rare; and if we expanded out soon and meet them, we'd meet them in a billion years or so. The observable universe has a trillion galaxies in it. So once per million galaxies means there are a lot of them that will appear in our observable universe. But it's not like a few stars over. This is really rare. Once per million galaxies. We're not going to meet them soon. Again, in a billion years. So there's a long time to wait here.
A model to explain UFOs
Based on this answer, I don't think your answer to my first question is “We are making contact with alien intelligence.”
This simple model predicts strongly that there's just no way that UFOs are aliens. If this were the only possible model, that would be my answer. But I have to pause and ask, “Can I change the model to make it more plausible?” I tried to do this exercise; I tried to say, “How could I most plausibly make a set of assumptions that would have as their implication UFOs are aliens and they’re really here?”
Is this a different model or are you just changing something key in that model?
I’m going to change some things in this model, I'll have to change several things. I'm going to make some assumptions so that I get the implication that some UFOs are aliens and they're doing the weird things we see. And the key question is going to be, “How many assumptions do you have to make, and how unlikely are they?” This is the argument about the prior on this theory. Think of a murder trial. In a murder trial, somebody says A killed B. You know that the prior probability of that is like one in a million: One in 1000 people are killed in a murder and they each know 1000 people. The idea that any one of those people killed them would be one in a million. So you might say, “Let's just dismiss this murder trial, because the prior is so low.” But we don't do that. Why? Because it's actually possible in a typical murder trial to get concrete, physical evidence that overcomes a one-in-a-million prior. So the analogy for UFOs would be, people say they see weird stuff. They say you should maybe think that's aliens. The first question you have to ask is, how a priori unlikely is that? If it was one in 10 to the 20 unlikely, you'd say, “There's nothing you could tell me to make me believe this. I'm just not going to look, because it's just so crazy.”
There are a lot of pretty crazy explanations that aren't as crazy as that.
Exactly. But my guess is the prior is roughly one in a thousand. And with a one-in-thousand prior, you’ve got to look at the evidence. You don't just draw the conclusion on one in a thousand, because that's still low. But you’ve got to be willing to look at the evidence if it’s one in a thousand. That’s where I’d say we are.
Then the question is, how do I get one in a thousand [odds]? I'm going to try to generate a scenario that is as plausible as possible and consistent with the key datums we have about UFOs. Here are the key datums. One is, the universe looks empty. Two is, they're here now. Three is, they didn't kill us. We’re still alive. And four is, they didn’t do the two obvious things they could do. They could have come right out and been really obvious and just slapped us on the face and said, “Here we are.” That would’ve been easy. Or they could have been completely invisible. And they didn’t do either of those. What they do is hang out at the edge of visibility. What’s with that? Why do that weird intermediate thing? We have to come up with a hypothesis that explains these things, because those are the things that are weird here.
The first thing I need to do is correlate aliens and us in space-time. Because if it was once randomly per million galaxies, that doesn’t work. The way to do that is panspermia. Panspermia siblings, in fact. That is, Earth life didn't start on Earth. It started somewhere else. And that somewhere else seeded our stellar nursery. Our star was born with a thousand other stars, all in one place at the same time, with lots of rocks flying back and forth. If life was seeded in that stellar nursery, it would've seeded not just our Earth, but seeded life on many of those other thousand stars. And then they would've drifted apart over the last four billion years. And now they're in a ring around the galaxy. The scenario would be one of those other planets developed advanced life before us.
The way we get it is we assume panspermia happened. We assume there are siblings, and that one of them came to our level before us. If that happened, the average time duration would be maybe 100 million years. It wouldn't have happened in the last thousand years or even million years. It would be a long time. Given this, we have to say, “Okay, they reached our level of advancement a hundred million years ago. And they're in the same galaxy as us; they're not too far away. We know that they could find us. We can all find the rest of the stellar siblings by just the spectra. We all were in the same gas with the same mixture of chemicals. We just find the same mixture of chemicals, and we’ve found the siblings. They could look out and find our siblings.
We have this next piece of data: The universe is empty. The galaxy is empty. They've been around for 100 million years, if they wanted to take over the galaxy, they could have. Easy, in 100 million years. But they didn't. To explain that, I think we have to postulate that they have some rule against expansion. They decided that they did not want to lose their community and central governance and allow their descendants to change and be strange and compete with them. They chose to keep their civilization local and, therefore, to ban or prohibit, effectively, any colonists from leaving. And we have to assume not only that was their plan, they succeeded … for 100 million years. That's really hard.
They didn't allow their generation ships to come floating through our solar system.
No, they did not allow any substantial colonization away from their home world for a hundred million years. That's quite a capability. They may have stagnated in many ways, but they have maintained order in this thing. Then they realize that they have siblings. They look out and they can see them. And now they have to realize we are at risk of breaking the rule. If they just let us evolve without any constraints, then we might well expand out. Their rule they maintain for a hundred million years to try to maintain their precious coherence, it would be for naught. Because we would violate it. We would become the competitors they didn't want.
That creates an obvious motive for them to be here. A motive to allow an exception. Again, they haven't allowed pretty much any expansion. But they're going to travel thousands of light-years from there to here to allow an expedition here, which risks their rule. If this expedition goes rogue, the whole game is over. So we are important enough that they're going to allow this expedition here to come here to try to convince us not to break the rule. But not just to kill us, because they could have just killed us. Clearly, they feel enough of an affiliation or a sibling connection of some sort that they didn't just kill us. They want us to follow their rule, and that's why they're here. So that all makes sense.
Could aliens be sort of “domesticating” us right now?
But then we still have the last part to explain. How, exactly, do they expect to convince us? And how does hanging out at the edge of our visibility do that? You have to realize whoever from home sent out this expedition, they didn't trust this expedition very much. They had to keep them pretty constrained. So they had to prove some strategy early on that they thought would be pretty robust, that could plausibly work, that isn't going to allow these travelers to have much freedom to go break their rules. Very simple, clean strategy. What's that strategy? The idea is, pretty much all social animals we know have a status hierarchy. The way we humans domesticate other animals is … what we usually do is swap in and sit at the top of their status hierarchy. We are the top dog, the top horse, whatever it is. That's how we do it. That's a very robust way that animals have domesticated other animals. So that's their plan. They're going to be at the top of the status hierarchy. How do they do that? They just show up and be the most impressive. They just fly around and say, “Look at me. I’m better.”
You don’t need to land on the National Mall. You just need to go 20 times faster than our fastest jet. That says something right there.
Once we're convinced they exist, we're damn impressed. In order to be at the top of our status hierarchy, they need to be impressive. But they also need to be here and relatively peaceful. If they were doing it from light-years away, then we'd be scared and threatened. They need to be here at the top of our status hierarchy, being very impressive. Now it would be very impressive, of course, if they landed on the White House lawn and started talking to us, too. But that's going to risk us not liking something. As you know, we humans have often disliked other humans for pretty minor things: just because they don't eat the kind of foods we do or marry the way we do or things like that.
If they landed on the White House lawn, someone would say, “We need to plan for an invasion.”
The risk is that if they told if they showed up and they told a lot about them, they gave us their whole history and videos of their home world and everything else, we're going to find something we hate. We might like nine things out of 10. But that one thing we hate, we're going to hate a lot. And unfortunately, humans are not very forgiving of that, right? Or most creatures. This is their fear scenario. If they showed too much, then game over. We're not going to defer to them as the top of our status hierarchy, because they're just going to be these weird aliens. They need to be here, but not show very much to us. The main thing they need to show is how impressive they are and that they're peaceful. And their agenda — but we can figure out the agenda. Just right now, we can see why they're here: because the universe is empty, so they didn't fill it; they must have a rule against that, and we'd be violating the rule. Ta-da. They can be patient. They’re in no particular rush. They can wait for us to figure out what we believe or not. Because they just have to hang around and be there until we decide we believe it. And then everything else follows from that.
As you were describing that, it reminded me of the television show, The Young Pope. We have a young Pope, and he starts off by not appearing because he thinks part of his power comes from an air of mystery and this mystique. In a way, what you're saying is that’s what these aliens would be doing.
Think of an ancient emperor. The ancient emperor was pretty weird. Typically, an emperor came from a whole different place and was a different ethnicity or something from the local people. How does an emperor in the ancient world get the local people to obey them? They don't show them a lot of personal details, of course. They just have a really impressive palace and impressive parades and an army. And then everybody goes, “I guess they're the top dog.” Right. And that's worked consistently through history.
I like “top dog” better than apex predator, by the way.
Would advanced alien civilization renew our interest in progress?
I wrote about this, and the scenario I came up with is kind of what you just described: We know they're here, and we know they have advanced technology. But that’s it. We don't meet them. I would like to think that we would find it really aspirational. That we would think, “Wow. We are nowhere near the end. We haven't figured it all out. We haven't solved all we need to know about physics or anything else.” What do you think of that idea? And what do you think would be the impact of that kind of scenario where they didn't give us their gadgets, we just know they're there and advanced. What does that do to us?
All through history, humans haven't quite dared to think that they could rule their fate. They had gods above them who were more in control. It's only in the last few centuries where we've taken on ourselves this sense that we're in charge of ourselves and we get to decide our future. If real aliens show up and they really are much more powerful, then we have to revise that back to the older stance of, “Okay, there are gods. They have opinions, and I guess we should pay attention.” But if these are gods who once were us, that's a different kind of god. And that wasn't the ancient god. That's a different kind of god that we could then aspire to. We can say “These gods were once like us. We could become like them. And look how possible it is.”
Now, of course, we will be suspicious of whether we can trust them and whether we should admire them. And that's where not saying very much will help. They just show up and they are just really powerful. They just don't tell us much. And they say, “We're going to let you guys work that out. You get the basics.” I think we would be inspired, but also deflated a bit that we aren't in charge of ourselves. If they have an agenda and it's contradicting ours, they're going to win. We lose. It's going to be pretty hard.
Is America on the verge of a pro-progress renaissance?
We've had this stagnation relative to what our expectations were in the immediate postwar decades. I would like to think I'm seeing some signs that maybe that's changing. Maybe our attitude is changing. Maybe we're getting to more of a pro-progress, progress-embracing phase of our existence. Maybe 50 years of this after 50 years of that.
There are two distinctions here that are importantly different. One is the distinction between caution and risk. The other is between fear and hope. Unfortunately, it just seems that fear and hate are just much stronger motives for most humans than hope. We've had this caution, due to fear. I think the best hope for aggression or risk is also fear or hate. That is, if we can find a reason, say, “We don't want those Russians to win the war, and therefore we're going to do more innovation.” Or those people tell us we can't do it, and therefore you can. Many people recently have entered the labor force and then been motivated by, “Those people don't think we're good enough, and we're going to show we're good enough and what we can do.”
If you're frightened enough about climate change, then at some point you'll think, “We need all of the above. If that’s nuclear, that’s fine. If it’s digging super deep into the Earth…”
If you could make strong enough fear. I fear that's just actually showing that people aren't really that afraid yet. If they were more afraid, they would be willing to go more for nuclear. But they're not actually very afraid. Back in 2003, I was part of this media scandal about the policy analysis market. Basically, we had these prediction markets that were going to make estimates about Middle Eastern geopolitical events. And people thought that was a terrible sort of thing to do. It didn't fit their ideals of how foreign policy estimates should be produced. And one of the things I concluded from that event was that they just weren't actually very scared of bad things happening in the Middle East. Because if so, they wouldn’t have minded this, if this was really going to help them make those things go better.
And we actually saw that in the pandemic. I don't think we ever got so scared in the pandemic that we did what we did in World War II. As you may know, in the beginning of World War II we were losing. We were losing badly, and we consistently were losing. And we got scared and we fired people and fired contractors and changed things until we stopped losing. And then we eventually won. We never fired anybody in the pandemic. Nobody lost their job. We never reorganized anything and said, “You guys are doing crap, and we're going to hand the job to this group.” We were never scared enough to do that. That's part of why it didn't go so well. The one thing that went well is when we said, “Let's set aside the usual rules and let you guys go for something.”
We got scared of Sputnik and 10 years later there’s an American flag on the Moon.
Right. And that was quite an impressive spurt, initially driven by fear.
Perhaps if we're scared enough of shortages or scared enough of climate change or scared enough that the Chinese are going to come up with a super weapon, then that would be a catalyst for a more dynamic, innovative America, maybe.
I'm sorry for this to be a negative sign, but I think the best you can hope for optimism is that some sort of negative emotion would drive for more openness and more risk taking.
Innovation is a fantastic free lunch, it seems like. And we don't seem to value it enough until we have to.
For each one of us, it risks these changes. And we'd rather play it safe. You might know about development in the US. We have far too little housing in the US. The main reason we have far too little housing is we've empowered a lot of local individual critics to complain about various proposals. They basically pick just all sorts of little tiny things that could go wrong. And they say, “You have to fix this and fix that.” And that's what takes years. And that's why we don't have enough housing and building, because we empower those sorts of very safety-oriented, tiny, “if any little things go wrong, then you’ve got to deal with it” sort of thinking. We have to be scared enough of something else. Otherwise those fears dominate.
🚀 Faster, Please! — The Podcast #7