Could We Be Domesticated by Aliens? The Statistical Odds of How AI & Aliens Are Connected and What It Means for Your Future
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The fact is, there's something out there that is much more sophisticated than we can even comprehend. And one of your only options is that they're watching us and waiting.

When we look at where we are in our developmental history, we've come a long way. We've advanced a lot. And when we look into our near future, say the next million years, we think we've got enormous potential to become much bigger and more impactful and much more visible and obvious. People have estimated you could colonize the whole galaxy in less than a million years. And the universe is 14 billion years old. So subterranean.

Something's weird because if life were everywhere else and all those other places could easily have done what we did then... Why haven't they done it? So there's this question: Where is everybody? For most things, there are explanations. But there does remain a category of things for which there are no explanations we yet have. After a billion years of expansion, these would be like huge volumes in space that would be just really obvious.

If something originated elsewhere and got here, that means it also got other places. Which is a problem. Tell me. The key thing is why hang out at the edge of visibility? They are domesticating us. Hold on one second. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. Welcome to our breakdown. Today, I feel broken down by what's about to happen.

Let's just not bury the lead. It's possible that aliens are here observing us for the purpose of domesticating us so that we don't leave the planet and go explore the solar system.

That's not necessarily the way that I would lead into today's episode, but that's not untrue. We have on a professor today who was a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He's got a doctorate from Caltech. He's a physicist, also a social scientist, and spent nine years as a research programmer at Lockheed and NASA. And his specialty that we're going to be talking about today is

is a fascinating exploration into not just the possibility that aliens exist, but the statistical analysis and theoretical conceptual framework that we all need to have in order to understand how we got here, how our planet has produced life, and

and the very, very real statistical possibility that we are not alone in the universe. And the question is, what do we do differently now that we know that? How do we interact with each other? How do we understand our motives? And how do we wrap our heads around the fact that we are likely currently either being observed or existing alongside

an artificial intelligence-driven alien universe. That might all sound wild, but... It's wild. Also fairly grounded in the way that he explains it,

Our guest is Robin Hanson. He's a professor at George Mason University in Washington, D.C. He has a blog, overcomingbias.com, with 8 million visits. He's a speaker. He's a writer. His books include The Age of M, Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, and his most recent book, The Elephant in the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life that he co-authored with Kevin Simler. Um,

which is a really, really great read, which we're not going to touch on in detail today because we really, really want to get to what is going on with this new framework for understanding our place in the universe and how that can change how we view our current life. The other part of the episode that really stuck out to me is thinking about the trends in the

advancement and evolution of humankind as it relates to artificial intelligence and really how we

I guess, move along the spectrum of advancement. And he thinks about it not in terms of the specifics, but in terms of the macro trends. And when you think about the macro trends, you're able to zoom out a little bit and get a picture of where we might go in a few hundred years and then even a few thousand years. And I find that to be truly fascinating. It's a pleasure to welcome to The Breakdown, Robin Hanson. Break it down.

Robin Hanson, welcome to The Breakdown. Great to be here. Your book, The Elephant in the Brain, in particular, is dealing with so many aspects of what it means to be human. But one of your...

main areas of expertise is about something really outside of our normal human understanding. You believe that we have found already alien life in the solar system. I've seen studies of asteroids and the microfossils seen inside asteroids, and they seem convincing to me. When people say, why don't they believe that? The usual answers I hear is, oh, we just need a really high standard of evidence for this.

And I go, why? Because it's important. Well, yeah, but that doesn't mean you should hold an extra high standard of evidence. It seems like what's going on is that this topic of is there life off of Earth that is really high status and whole large organizations like NASA, much of their funding is justified on the basis of we're going to go out there answering this question.

and so it seems like people have agreed well we aren't going to say that somebody's answered the question unless they are a really prestigious person who spent a lot of money with a big organization behind them to do a really big impressive thing and then we're maybe we'll give them the crown of the person who discovered life off of earth

That's not how evidence works. How does evidence work? Well, you have different hypotheses. Bayesian analysis of evidence is you have different hypotheses. They get a prior based on a background analysis of what seems how likely. And then each new piece of evidence weighs for one hypothesis or another a little bit if it's a small evidence and more if it's big evidence.

And then just slowly over time, the weight of evidence accumulates on different hypotheses and your beliefs slowly change. And there's no magic threshold where all of a sudden it's officially true. You just slowly get more evidence. So that's how you should approach even a really important question. And I did some analysis on what the prior should be because I did this analysis of what I call grabby aliens and aliens in the universe. And so

I think the prior is actually pretty plausible that there would be life off of Earth. And so then it's about, well, each piece of evidence, what happens? So, you know, a standard story is, look, even if life started in the solar system, which, you know, is a relatively conservative hypothesis, it would have more chances to form where things cool down first.

So, you know, the sun was really hot, stuff near the sun was hot, then it cooled with time and asteroids were flying around, but they were flying around more near the center than far away. So on both temperature and asteroid smashing things, grounds, things farther away from the center of the solar system would have been when life could have started first.

And so if life started somewhere, then the question is, well, where would it move? So early on, there were all these rocks flying around. So there's lots of chances for life to move from any one part of the solar system to other parts. So if you think, well, pretty high chance life starting anywhere in the solar system would have spread around elsewhere early on. Then you have to say, well, the place where it could have started first is more likely to be the first place it was.

And so outside of Earth, farther away from the sun is actually more plausible. Your prior should be life started there and came to Earth rather than life started here and went to there. So I got to say my prior for life in the solar system is pretty high that there's life elsewhere in the solar system just because

So many rocks have been flying around and we can see that life could plausibly survive on a rock. Now you say, yeah, but you need evidence, but you don't need to like have this huge weight against the hypothesis that there's life elsewhere in the solar system because your prior was, look, it's more likely it was elsewhere than here. I think we found a...

in the last year or two, some chunk of rock on Earth that was sealed in the sense of, like, on the outside of the rock was just sealed with some way the rock had been formed. But inside, there were these life from 300 million years ago, and it was still alive. So life can survive inside a rock for 300 million years. So that means in the solar system, rocks could be

flying off a planet and then circling around for a really long time before landing on some other place and giving life there. Not only that, I mean, interestingly, our star was formed as part of a stellar nursery, which roughly had 10,000 stars all close to each other, formed at the same time and place with lots of rocks flying back between them too. It also raises the prior that, okay, one of these other siblings of our star,

of which the roughly 10,000 formed 4 billion years ago, one of them plausibly could have had life seeding it. Anyway.

this is a long answer to like the prior is pretty high so when i looked at the stuff of the actual guy saying here's my micrographs look i got some earth life and i did the micrographs and here's what they look like and here's the stuff in the asteroids and here's what it looked like and looks pretty similar i go yeah i guess he did i guess he showed but this guy said somebody published this in 1962 in a top science magazine that they had apparently seen life in asteroids and then the

the academic world just crushed them and like got him fired and everything else by saying, no, no, no. We insist that that's not true, but apparently like this has been going on for a long time. Even the asteroid he's, you know, one of the asteroids he found, like the very first time they found this asteroid in the 1880s, they opened it up and they go, this is kind of squishy bio stuff. This is looks different than the other asteroids. This is what the carbonaceous asteroids are. They're more carbony stuff. When you hear a murder accusation,

you're hearing a one in a million prior accusation. You could say, that's so crazy unlikely. I'm not going to listen to your evidence. How could it possibly be that this person murdered that one? That's just crazy unlikely. I'm not going to listen, right? But of course we don't. We say, no, ordinary evidence that you can supply at trials can in fact overcome a one in a million prior. That's the sort of thing typical court evidence can do. And so I think if you have a prior that's much better than one in a million, you're

you've got to look at the evidence and take it seriously. But people are often tempted to just wave their hands and go, either that's so crazy, unlikely, I'm not going to look at it. Or they say, this is so very important, we couldn't possibly draw this conclusion on the basis of some low status person's evidence. I've been in a lot of biology classes in my life. And we learn all about the primordial stew and the electrical charge that activates some slushy pond that we have to imagine existed.

To me, I was taught that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that as a theory of life on this planet. Why do I need to think that life originated elsewhere if it can originate here? It presumably had to originate somewhere. So we're not denying that something like that must have happened somewhere. We're asking what happened after that. Did that happen here or did it happen somewhere else?

Okay. You know, because if it happened here, you don't have to add a transport part of the scenario. I see. Well, and I think also, I mean, for me, this notion of could life have originated elsewhere is also...

also more intriguing to engage with because it allows you to then not think of Earth as the center of all existence in the galaxy, which is what we're supposed to do. Meaning if something originated elsewhere and got here, that means it also originated elsewhere and got other places besides here. Which is a problem, really. Tell me. So the key thing is we're special somehow.

When we look at where we are in our developmental history, right, we've come a long way, we've advanced a lot. And when we look into our near future, say the next million years, we think we've got enormous potential to become much bigger and more impactful than we are now, and much more visible and obvious. If we think about, you know, people have estimated you could colonize the whole galaxy in less than a million years, maybe even 100,000 years, and the universe is 14 billion years old. So

It seems like within a relatively short time cosmologically, we could from this point on just get really big and obvious in the universe. We could make a splash. But we look out and there are no splashes like that that we see. That's the puzzle. That's what makes us now special or wrong. Either we're just wrong about our potential and no way do we have this chance of being really visible in the future. Or if we do, then something's weird because

If life were everywhere else and all those other places could easily have done what we did, then why haven't they done it? Right. So that means we're special somehow. Now, one of the ways we could have been special is life only appeared on Earth and nowhere else. And, you know, that's why I find that highly unlikely. But we have to be special somewhere along the path. So that's I have this phrase, the great filter that I introduced.

where I talk about the idea that there's this long path from simple dad matter to where we hope to become. And the basic data is that has to be a really hard path to go down because look around, we don't see anything that's gotten to the end of that path. And so the question is where on that path is the filter? The easiest place to put it would have been at the very beginning of the path because that's the thing we understand least. And honestly, if you look at it, it looks really damn hard. That's just the easiest place to put it if you have to put it somewhere, right?

But if we actually see life coming from elsewhere, then we have to maybe back off on that and put it elsewhere on the path.

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Two distinctions maybe to make clear. One is we right now are aliens to somebody else maybe, and we're not very loud.

That is, you'd have to look really carefully at us to see us. We're not doing that much. We haven't. I mean, we've destroyed the ozone, which is apparently detectable from space. If we dumped nuclear waste into our star, it would change the spectrum. People could see that from a really long way away. So there are some things we could have done by now that would have made our star really visible from really far away. But we haven't done them yet. So mostly we're pretty small. We're keeping all of the chaos to the planet.

Plausibly, the other extreme is an alien civilization that leaves its home world, spreads out to other worlds nearby, and then keeps spreading. And there's a competitive process that would make that spreading happen as fast as possible. That is, there are people at the front edge of this colonization ways. Whoever could get to the front first would have an advantage. So they would compete to go fast. And so the colonization ways would plausibly expand as fast as it possibly could.

And then people behind the front of the wave, they can't go out to the wave, but they've got a bunch of stuff they could use and they would in say a million years or two start to use a lot of it and change it. Right. And so the image here is of a cone in space time of expanding usage of this big volume of space time and that using it would change it somehow. And so the image here of a loud alien civilization is one that you see this big expanding sphere and

of stuff and it looks different somehow. We don't know exactly how it would look different, but the point is if they're just using their stuff, it would look different. And certainly that's true on Earth. When humans use an area of the Earth's surface, we make it look different, right?

especially at night, say, but other times in other ways, it just looks different. So a loud civilization would be one that's expanding and makes something look different. And there's a sense in which that shouldn't be that hard to find. Look, maybe in the first, I don't know, hundred years, it would be hard to find. But after a billion years of expansion, these would be like huge volumes in space that would be just really obvious. And so

That's part of the reason for making this distinction between loud and quiet aliens. So we don't see those. We don't see those in the visible spectrum with the technology we have. Right, but that's the point. We can confront loud aliens with our evidence. Quiet ones, it's hard to confront. Like, are they there or not? Well, it'd be really hard to tell. But loud ones, we go, look, if they were there, they would not be hard to see. So then we can use that datum as part of an analysis to figure out the distributions of aliens in space-time, actually.

And that's part of what we did in our grabby aliens analysis is to focus on the loud aliens. We had a three parameter model of the aliens and we fit each of those parameters to a data point. And so we say, look, we've roughly got the model of where loud aliens are in space time. And then we could talk about the quiet ones as a, you know, addendum, but the loud ones are the simplest ones to analyze. The second distinction might be between sort of independently visualized

evolved or aliens versus siblings. So what happens if aliens are correlated in space time, that is they have a common ancestry, then the distribution changes.

Why? The simple analysis I said of loud aliens, we take the three data points, we take our current date, we take a certain data about the history of life on Earth, and we take the fact that we don't see any in the sky. Each of those three data has let us fit a particular parameter in the three parameter model. And that gives us a model of where aliens are in space time. And that basically tells us that loud aliens appear once per million galaxies, and that we'd meet them in a billion years if we were to head out to meet them like they meet each other. So

then they're really rare, but we know roughly how common loud aliens are in the universe. But that's based on this assumption that they appear separately independently. There's four possibilities that you talk about that aliens arise so rarely that the nearest ones are too far to see, right? That's a possibility. Aliens are common but can't travel between stars or make big visible changes.

Aliens are common and travel everywhere, but enforce rules against visible changes. And they arise rarely but in clumps. The first in clump to appear can, in theory, control the others. What are these four different perspectives on the possibility of alien life? So there's this puzzle, the Fermi question, where is everybody? That is, in principle, there could be advanced aliens out there we don't see anywhere is everybody, right?

Now that puzzle gets worse if they can actually travel faster than the speed of light, because then they could have come from anywhere in space-time to here. And now the question of why isn't anybody here is the question, why didn't anybody anywhere in space-time choose to come here? Then the simplest story is the one I described to you, the statistical model of where they arise in space-time and they're expanding, but people look for others because, of course, that's what you should do. Try to find some other story that you could possibly make sense of. And so...

One story is that, you know, they are here, but we still can't see them because they don't want to be seen. And the stuff we would think they would mess with for some reason, they don't want to mess with. Another story people like is this used to be called the Berserker story, but now people call it the Dark Forest story after the three body problem science fiction novel that gave it that name. Um,

which is everybody's hiding from everybody else. So that's a decentralized story. There's not a central power controlling everything. Everybody's hiding from everybody else. I don't think that story works very well. It's a nice basis for dramatic fiction, but I just don't think that equilibrium could last very long, not 14 billion years. But the story where there's a power out there that's hiding and controlling things and then doesn't want to do anything and doesn't want anybody else to do anything, that story...

works best with the sibling story. That is, like I told you, the simple story is independent ones would arrive once per million galaxies and be really far away, in which case they wouldn't be here controlling stuff, most likely. So the chance that they would have appeared before us here and we independently appeared a bit later after them is just really unlikely because of the independent statistics. But if they were siblings...

Now it can make more sense that we and they have appeared closer in time and space than random things would appear. Then you want to think through the sibling story to work out scenarios of what if they're here, but they're hiding. And that's an exercise I tried to do as a follow up to my grabby aliens analysis is to try to figure out, well, how could that make sense?

We had Adam Frank on, and I know you've written a bit about his little book of aliens. And one of the things that Jonathan and I found so interesting and significant about our conversation with Adam Frank, and I feel it in the conversation with you as well, is how much the conversation about aliens does not revolve around aliens.

the stories of abductions that we hear. It doesn't revolve around the comic books of my childhood and Star Trek and Star Wars and things like that. We're in kind of a whole different universe, for lack of a better word, of talking about aliens. So I wonder if you could speak a little bit about what your perception is of

What people interpret as aliens are here, they're visiting me, they're taking me away in spaceships, you can't tell me otherwise, I don't need evidence because it happened. How is that conversation different from the one that we're having about aliens right now? All right. I have this other book I'll pitch here called The Age of M, Worked Love and Life and Robots Rule the Earth.

It's about a future AI scenario. And the thing I would say is it's like science fiction, except it has no plot and no characters and it all makes sense. And that last part is the hard part, having it all make sense. So much of science fiction, including alien science fiction, just goes for the emotional juggler of finding a scenario that would just, you would feel emotionally, that would grab you, and then piling on details to make that story seem compelling and pull you through into it.

without actually having it make sense, if you thought through the details. Most consumers of science fiction don't really think these things through, so they don't really need them to actually make sense. So when we're talking about, well, are there really aliens and what they're like, we have to be focusing on scenarios that actually make sense when you think them all the way through. And that's the thing that's just going to pull you into a whole different world of scenarios. So just like my book, The Age of M, has little to do with all the robot AI movies you've ever seen,

It's strange, but it's not strange in the ways that most of those stories are strange. It's more alien, in fact. That's what you should expect. You should expect the stories we tell to be, at a certain level, familiar and relatable because that's what grabs us emotionally. A really weird world is just hard to relate to and hard to tell stories about. But you should expect the real world to actually be weirder than your stories. And that's true for aliens as well.

The challenge here is to find any scenario that makes sense, honestly, just starting from scratch. That's where we're working at, right? So the simplest story that makes some degree of sense is we are completely alone in the universe. There have never been anything else. There will never be anything more. At least we can make sense of that scenario. At least we can picture it in some sense. But

How believable is it? How plausible is it? You go, well, the universe is pretty damn huge. How come we're so special? Okay, fine. Let me add some aliens to the scenario. But then as soon as I do that, it has consequences. Like, well, the aliens aren't just going to sit there. They're going to do things and then grow and then become visible. And now that messes with my observations in ways that's hard to explain. So the challenge with talking about aliens is to find scenarios that make any sense, right?

with respect just the basic things we understand about the universe. That's why they sound so different from fiction and even most UFO stories. Like, it's really hard to look. I've tried to work out if UFOs were aliens, how could that make sense?

But even then, I'm going to go with the most basic facts we know about UFOs. But if you try to throw on the, you know, the abductions and stuff like that, I go, oh, for God's sake, how am I supposed to make any sense of that? It just gets weirder and weirder, right? I mean, I can start to pile on more and more assumptions to explain weirder and weirder scenarios, but I should be conscious of how I'm diving into a more and more unlikely corner of scenario space. So I'd rather start at the most likely corners of scenario space and like work out what we know there and

you know, go the arse places more slowly. And with all due respect, the likely corner of the universe we are inhabiting is a centralized alien government enforcing a rule against large visible changes. I'm going to tell you the degree to which I agree and don't agree with that. I did this analysis of grabby aliens at, again, three data points, made a statistical model where they are in space-time. That model says the big loud ones that you should see from a long way off, those are pretty rare, once per million galaxies, we'll see them in a billion years, okay?

Then I thought, look, I'm a world expert on aliens now because I have our world's best model of where aliens are in space time. There's all these UFO people who say there are aliens around now. I should apply what I know to that and see what I can do with it. And the simplest way to set it up is there are these reported sightings and we want to do a Bayesian analysis. We want a prior of how likely they are and then a likelihood of each datum. And I'm an expert on the prior, not the likelihood. So you need to go talk to Navy pilots or whatever.

to analyze the particular scenarios they've seen and what other explanations they could have for those, that's not my area of expertise. But many people I know have said, "Look, if you told me you saw aliens, I'm just not going to believe it because that scenario is so crazy unlikely. I'm just more likely to believe you are delusional than that you actually saw what you said you saw." That's based on saying the prior here is crazy low. And if the prior were crazy low, that would be appropriate, really, honestly.

How unlikely is it that UFOs could be aliens? Develop a scenario in which the main features of UFOs are explained and you didn't have to pay too much in terms of the assumptions you made to construct that scenario. Every assumption you make, you have to penalize the scenario for it in the prior. And you're trying to make the highest prior scenario you can to explain these key facts. And that I took my task. And so I'd say my summary is,

I found there's two main sort of puzzles about UFOs as aliens. I found a way to explain those two main puzzles with a prior of, say, one in a thousand, one in ten thousand. I say that's good enough that you should be looking at the evidence. OK, that's not enough that if you didn't see any evidence, you'd believe it. Just like with a murder accusation, if nobody's accused somebody of murder, you don't actually believe they murdered somebody and that somebody was killed by murder. But if there's an accusation on the table.

you should look at the evidence because the prior isn't crazy low. If this UFO is aliens evidence actually plays out, then that's the scenario I'm going to have to go with as the most likely scenario to explain.

And I appreciate your humility. You know, you can just be like, I'm just the Bayesian analysis guy. Like, don't ask me. But I can't help but ask you about, you know, all of the satellite conversations that come from opening up the door to a conversation about aliens, about UFOs. I mean, the thing that's so challenging for me is...

When we have all of these reports, we have people testifying, right? We have people saying that they have video, right, of craft that are moving in ways that we cannot calculate. Right. But they say a lot of stuff. And even if we're going to believe some of them, we can't believe all of them, really. So we are going to need some theoretical structure to try to pin on these observations to make sense of them. And that may force us to believe some of them about some of it.

So that's still why we need to do this theory analysis. Of course. And I appreciate it and I want it. And we had Lou Elizondo on and, you know, it's mind-blowing. And the fact is so much...

of what he reports he did not see, we cannot have access to, right? And the U.S. government has admitted there are things that they have been looking into for decades and decades and decades that they were not transparent about, they were not clear about. I'm always a fan of not causing hysteria, and if there are things that the government can't explain, they're just going to pretend like they can explain it or they're going to keep it a secret. I actually don't mind causing hysteria.

There's actually a whole literature on what happens when you tell people extreme things and they tend to do very well. The Titanic, people were pretty orderly. Lots of other big disasters of ships sinking. People are...

Movies and TV love this idea that if you tell people dire things, you know, there's riots in the streets and everybody's burning everything down and killing everybody. And that's just not how humans behave. It's not true. It's not true. People do pretty well with pretty extreme information. OK, so hold on. There are things that the government has kept from the American public regarding things that they can't explain. Is that true? Certainly seems to be.

Their main motivation just seems to be pride and embarrassment at apparent incompetence or lack of capacity to manage and understand these things. That seems to be the primary motive.

We can go down the Grush rabbit hole because Jonathan and I have. What do we make of reports of things like materials not created on Earth that we can't explain that are creating spaceships that no one has been able to produce evidence of? At this point, it is its hearsay.

In my mind, there's this huge chasm between are there any aliens visiting us at all lately and like which particular ones have which particular materials and which particular devices and all that sort of thing. Right. So I think the overwhelming first question, like, is there any are there any aliens visiting us at all lately? Right. And for that thing, I need to sort of, again, go to the very basics of what we know about the universe to say what scenarios could even make any sense.

And then what are the most, you know, the simplest, most obvious facts about if UFOs were aliens that we need to explain and come up with a theory to make sense of that. And I think I have a best shot at that. But that theory doesn't work very well tacking on lots of other assumptions you might make. That is, the more weird things you need this theory to explain, the weirder it's going to get and the more likely it's going to get right. So that's why I want to sort of start at the beginning.

the things we could have the most confidence in if we're going to have confidence in anything and then from that go down the list to like if that made sense what else could make sense so with that framework the notion that and just like i'm gonna just say it out loud and you're gonna tell me if it's right or wrong the notion that the way that

an alien species might make contact with us by accidentally being seen flying over bodies of water is not likely. So let's talk about if UFOs were aliens, what are the hard things to explain about that scenario? Okay. They could be non-alien. They could be government doing research and they just don't want us to know. It could be like things from China that we didn't want to know about, right? It doesn't have to be aliens.

The four major categories of explanations that you should be thinking in terms of are one, just mistakes and hallucinations first, right? People are just

drunk on LSD, misremember, you know, that's one category of explanations. But hold on, United States Air Force pilots, I'm assuming, are not in that category. There are many cases that that doesn't seem very plausible. I'm happy to agree with, but I would just logically want to separate out the scenarios here, okay? Got it. The first, because a lot of people, this is their first, this is where people want to go first, mistakes and generalizations, right? The second category, which should be taken seriously, is purposeful lies and hoaxes.

Like governments through history have actually had a lot of times where they made stuff up, say, to convince an enemy at war for various purposes, and they can put a lot of resources into that. And if you can get people to lie, you can, you know, fool a lot of people and you can make up pictures and videos and all sorts of things. So.

Hoaxes and lies deserve consideration as a second category of explanation. The third category is some more familiar nearby organization, like some country, some secret military project, you know, some, you know, I don't know, billionaire's pet project, whatever.

Something close to us in a world of social causation that we could have some idea of, you know, why it would do things and why it would be there and what capacities it would have. That's category number three. And category number four is, well, aliens. Like something really far from our near categories of organizations and actors in terms of

what they could do, their capacities and their inclinations and their history with respect to our history. Those are the four categories of explanations. And I took my job, having done this Graviadians work, as working out a prior for that last category. Yeah. I mean, as we talked about with Adam, for most things, there are explanations, but there does remain a category of things for which there are no explanations we yet have.

And yeah, for me as a person thinking about the things that I know, you know, on a very basic level about the universe life, you know, they would like accidentally be seen flying and then like disappear. Like, I don't know. I don't know how to get my head around that. Like I'm trying hard. So if you want to go for.

Again, we can take any of these categories and dive into them. I want aliens. Okay, let's go for aliens. I want to go for aliens. So if we want to say, like, what are the most basic things you need to explain about aliens if you're going to explain them? If UFOs is aliens, you know, so the most basic thing is, by assumption, they are here now, but you look up and they aren't there then. Okay. Why here now, but not there then? That's the first puzzle. Okay. Okay.

Maybe they are not detectable. They're not detectable in the visible spectrum. They're not detectable with our technology. I don't know. They like slide into like a magic envelope pocket in the universe. Like if we're talking about aliens, can't that be true? If they arose at some place in space time and they have some internal competitive evolutionary process, that process tends to make them go everywhere they can.

Using all resources available, using all space available, and then doing whatever is most competitive locally without much regard to how it looks from a long distance. What we would expect, because that's what happened on Earth, right? To humans and the rest of biology. Here in our history, biology basically has gone everywhere it can. All sources of energy and material that it can find a way to make use to, it does.

And then it does that the most efficient way it can, regardless really of how it looks for a long distance, unless it's purposely trying to hide.

So if they were sophisticated enough to exist and have some sort of supersonic, amazing intergalactic aircraft, they probably wouldn't be super concerned about not being seen by some pilots over the water. So there may be like lots of resources in the universe we don't understand and can't see, but there are resources we do understand and can see. And why wouldn't they use those? Just like just in general, when you own resources here on Earth, you use them every way you can.

Within the scope of your control, you use all the things available there, right? So if aliens are out there, why aren't they using the stuff we can see? Because we do know that stuff has a lot of potential for making stuff out of it and for energy and resources. So the puzzle is the stuff we can see, why aren't they using it? Of course, they might be using other stuff we don't see, but why would they not also use the stuff we can see? That's the puzzle about why are they not there then, but here now.

I feel like you just burst my alien bubble. Now, like, if you just look at individual actors, they can have a wide range of weird and idiosyncratic preferences or habits. But if you look at a whole civilization, unless it's controlled by some central power, then you expect it to contain just a lot of different parts that go a lot of different directions and use lots of different things. So just like here on Earth, any one animal, like a squirrel or something...

It might ignore some nuts that were nearby because it liked the other nuts or something else. But if you look at the set of all squirrels or the set of all life, it's using everything it can, basically. So the puzzle of the first puzzle of UFOs as aliens is by assumption they're here now, but they're not there then.

like so almost surely they would be at least 100 million years more advanced than us if we look at like what's the coincidence they could have arisen at exactly the same time we did it would be kind of crazy for them to be a thousand years in front of us only they would be millions of years in front of us which meant they could have done they could have remade the whole galaxy for example if they had wanted to that would be completely within their capacity if they had been so inclined or even just

refuse to stop it. If they had a diverse population of parts that had different inclinations and abilities, we just expect everything that anyone could have got to be used somehow by some way some of them wanted to. And so for them not to do that requires some pretty special assumptions. But that's the assumption we're going to have to make to explain this, right? So if we say

We need to find a scenario that explains aliens here now, but not out there. We're going to have to go there. We're going to have to say, let's think of what scenarios could in fact induce them to not go out and use all this stuff. And the scenario that makes sense to me is that they have chosen a civilization wide policy of not using the universe.

of not taking it over. And there are several reasons that could be. One is just a simple religious or environmental sort of respect, and they don't want it touched. But a more basic one is they don't want to split and diverge. So

A basic fact about the world today is that the world is a unified culture, especially among elites. And we are today making many decisions as a world culture together. And a lot of regulation and policy around the world is really quite convergent. We don't have a world government, but we have a convergent world culture. That means we do a lot of things the same in banking regulation and airline regulation and nuclear power and pandemics and medical ethics and all.

a wide range of things. Our whole world does things pretty much the same because we share this world culture and that's an achievement. In the past, this was a dream people had and we finally achieved this dream. In the past, people said the world is always fighting with each other and has all these divergent parts and all we ever do is fight and disagree. But now we have created this unified world. That means when we face new technologies, if we think it's too weird or strange, we can say no and the whole world can say no. And that's a thing we've actually done several times so far.

With nuclear power in particular, the world kind of said no to nuclear power, and it's regulated heavily at most everywhere. And that's a thing we're kind of proud of. So if there were some way which competition or AI or something would make us strange, we feel like we could say no to that. We have a world culture that could say no. And that'll continue to be true when we spread out into the solar system.

Because even across the solar system, we're close to each other, enough to each other to have rapid communication and to basically punish any deviants. Everybody in the solar system is really susceptible to rocks being thrown from a distance to smash them. And so just like everybody in the world is susceptible for retaliation if they piss off the rest of the world, everybody in the solar system will continue to be susceptible to that. But as soon as colonists leave the solar system for other stars, that era ends.

It's just not going to be possible to maintain control over a civilization spread across hundreds of light years and to collectively make decisions and prevent people from getting weird. You know, if the star system, you know, 10 light years away wants to do nuclear power, well, it can't. Nobody can stop it. And if they want to evolve into strange creatures who have three wings and claws, they can do that, too. That is, once we leave the solar system, we can diverge.

Not only that, if we let anybody leave the solar system, after a while, their descendants could come back and contend for us for control over the center. There's no particular reason to expect we could beat them. How far off is expanding outside of the solar system? Within a thousand years. Hold on one second. Hold on. Just hang on a second. In half the time between Jesus living and me living...

we're going to be living outside of the solar system? If we continue it at our current growth rates, yes. Now, I have some doubts about that, so it might put it off for a few thousand years, but certainly within 10,000 years, I'm pretty confident that. And that's 10,000 years is just a really tiny time on the cosmological scale, so it hardly matters. Of course, people do talk about the extinction of us. Is that on the docket?

There are scenarios in which we could go extinct, yes. But that's a pretty different discussion here. So clearly, if UFOs are aliens, they didn't go extinct, right? So we need to assume they didn't go extinct. So that's one of the things we have to assume about, right? I also wanted to get into AI and sort of the AI and the robot of it. Of course, they're AI. I mean, that's just, yes, of course, they're AI. They're all artificial. They have been for millions of years. That's just the obvious thing about them. So don't even doubt it.

It would be really hard for them to retain any bio squishy, you know, parts or things like that. I mean, they may have done that out of some, you know, respect or museum sort of reverence or some zoo or something where they retain old things, but mostly, yeah, they're all like that.

Let's expand on this point because when people think about alien life, they're thinking in terms of the images that they've seen, little green people or gray people, and they think maybe they don't bleed exactly like us, but they think of some sort of biologic form. Again, the most basic thing we would know about aliens is...

It would be crazy unlikely for them to have arisen at exactly the same moment as us in a really old universe. OK, so they're either they appear after us in which we don't see them yet or they appeared before us, in which case they appeared a long time before us, hundreds of millions of years, possibly. That's how much more advanced they are than us. And so you have to ask how what would happen in that hundred million years?

And one of the most obvious things that will happen is, of course, they will go artificial. That's what we've been doing. We've been going artificial as fast as we can for 100,000 years. I don't want to. I don't want a cell phone. I don't want a television. Now we are a collective civilization, all in one star system together, where we do have a shared culture and we do talk together about what we want to happen. And now you do have a vote. But as soon as you let colonists leave, that's over. So that's a reason why.

advanced civilizations might decide to not allow colonists as part of the strategy to not allow change or to control change, to have a collective vision of who we are and what we choose together and what we'll allow.

That appeals to many people. It doesn't appeal to me so much, but it definitely appeals to a lot of people. And I think once letting colonists go from here, once people understand the consequences of that, I could understand they might well want to hold off on that for a while. And the longer they held off, the more they might get used to that being okay. What appeals to you more? Because it seems hard for me to believe that they could restrict those people who are really hell-bent on heading out into the galaxy. There are several implications right off the bat for that. One is...

They lasted a long time. Like they lasted hundreds of millions. That's that's pretty impressive. Good job. Another is they enforce this rule successfully for a really long time. Right from the bat, we got to say they have a pretty impressive capability here to have made this choice and enforced it successfully for a really, really long time. Because anyone, any one failure of enforcing this rule and it's all over. Right.

And they knew that, of course, and so that would motivate them to really be trying to enforce this rule well, but still pretty impressive they managed to do that. Another implication we have is this gives a clear agenda for why they're here. Once you know that they were obsessed for 100 million years with preventing anybody from leaving and colonizing the universe, and they would know they have these panspermia siblings...

other life that came from the same origin as them that could eventually reach their level and go expanding. Now, either they let them break their rules or they go out there and enforce the rules on them. That's the only choice. So that's a reason why they would be here now is to enforce this rule. Furthermore, we can draw the conclusion that a simple way to enforce this rule would have just been to exterminate us. And they chose not to do that. So from just one assumption, we have drawn a whole bunch of conclusions here.

So plausibly, some other motives they might have had would be to say, help us out, raise us up, teach us their ways. And clearly that wasn't so important because they're not doing that. But they are here basically to make us follow their rule. Now, the second other thing to explain about aliens being here now, the way they are, is this thing you mentioned before, which is.

If they're 100 million years more advanced, they could have either been completely invisible and seen everything they wanted to or been completely obvious. Those were just clear options they had. And apparently they did not choose either of these two extreme plausible options to be completely invisible or completely obvious. What are they doing instead? They're hanging out at the edge of visibility.

We need an explanation for that because that's pretty weird. As you know, we can understand the two extremes here being completely invisible because wanting to hide, not taking any chances, being completely obvious, taking over, ruling us and telling us what to do. Those all make sense. Why hang out at the edge of visibility? That's the more puzzling thing we have to explain. But still, why hang out at the edge of visibility? And for that, my simple explanation is that they are domesticating us.

So the way we make other animals do what we want is to domesticate them. In fact, we domesticate each other. And how do you domesticate an animal? You slot into their status hierarchy and you be at the top. You be impressive. You be local. You be not too mean.

And then you are the top dog, top horse, whatever it is. That's how we've domesticated other animals. So their strategy is to come here and domesticate us by being the most impressive thing around, being local, not being too harsh punishment. And then we will naturally see them as top dog, want to follow their lead, and we can figure out their agenda. So we'll just do it that way.

And a lot of people who believe in UFOs, in fact, typically believe that they are good guys, better than our governments, and that we should follow their leads. So that seems to be working. Why couldn't they do that by just being really visible? But the key problem is, even on Earth, when humans have tried to domesticate other humans, if we're different enough that it doesn't work, we find even little things that we hate about foreign humans to put us off. So they knew that they're actually much more different from us than we are from each other.

And so we are much more likely to actually hate something about them. Maybe they eat babies, who knows? But they got to know there's something that if they told us about them, we would hate it. And that would sort of break the spell of this domestication. So that's why they can't reveal too much. They just need to be visible, be impressive and not say very much.

And another consideration here is that for 100 million years, they enforced this rule against expansion, right? And any expedition to the sibling stars is threatening to break that. If this expedition goes rogue, it's all over. So they cannot give this expedition a lot of discretionary powers. They have to approve a strategy from home that's very simple, only give them the tools necessary to implement that strategy, and then send them off that way. Do not give them a lot of discretion and freedom and powers to figure things out for themselves. Nope.

And so the question is, what simple strategy could you have approved from home that would robustly work for any social species out there to make them do what we want? And domestication is just the obvious thing that we've always done to make other animals do what we want. And so they would have figured that out. And so they figure out the obvious thing is to just send them over with the ability to hang out at the edge of visibility and just be impressive and not too mean.

So that's my hypothesis. Again, I said a roughly one in 10,000 to 1,000 prior. It doesn't explain abductions and a whole bunch of other weird stuff.

I'm glad you tackled the simple things like we're possibly being domesticated by overlord aliens. Right. Now, this is not a pretty picture. That's the thing to be really clear here. These are not kumbaya aliens here to save us from, you know, give us world peace and eternal life. And they're not in any rush here. Like their deadline is whenever we would actually be able of leaving the solar system. And they can pretty clearly tell we're just we're not close. OK.

So they're not at a deadline where they need to start doing desperate things to like, you know, convince us at the last minute. We're not at the last minute. Can I just repeat some of this in the most general terms, just as a reflection for anyone who's listening? So if they're possibly domesticating us, they're hanging out on the edge of visibility to

monitor us to make sure that we don't get the capability to... No. They're just hanging out. They don't need to be seen at all to monitor us. They could just be completely invisible. They're just to impress us. To impress us, to make us sort of curious. And the goal is just to make sure we don't evolve too far that we can leap off this planet and go cause havoc elsewhere? Is there another form of domestication that... How would they be influencing us? So...

Basically, when you domesticate an animal, you convince them that you are superior to them and that you can be supportive enough that they should submit to you. And then they look to you for what to do and you tell them. So this is a slow roll. So revealing themselves in these very small moments is a slow path to getting a larger awareness that they exist and they have superior capabilities. So it's like it's a narrative that they're building.

To domesticate us, they just need us to see them, to see that they're impressive and that they're not too hostile, and then to figure out what their agenda is. That's all they need from the whole story. They don't need anything else to happen. The first step is that we see them and see they're impressive. And plausibly, they've already done this tens of thousands of times.

So their simple strategy to impress us is to go around the world and impress individuals. And apparently, like, they might even be surprised we haven't been convinced yet. But, you know, but they've got lots of time. They're in no particular rush. And maybe they plausibly know that this is a hard thing to convince people of, but they're just going to slowly repeat the strategy of showing up and being impressive and then waiting till we figure it out because they don't need to tell us anything. They should be able to figure out their agenda right now. Right.

We can just we've already done this here. We can figure out why they're here and what they want. And as soon as we are convinced they're there and figure out what they want, then plausibly we will do what they want. And in fact, most that they could take centuries more if that's what it takes. There are no particular rush.

you know, different groups will be in control of the evidence and drawing conclusions about this and having different fights. And at any one time, they might not convince us, but they don't need to convince us at any one time. They just need, eventually we decide, yeah, I guess we believe it. I mean, you probably know there have been things like UFOs that were just dismissed out of hand in the past that we now accept, right? Like meteors, the pink, high level pink lightning, like ball lightning,

There are some things that even today we have poor evidence on, but we believe they exist because over time we just got strong enough evidence that we changed our mind. So it's not crazy. We will eventually change our mind about UFOs. What do you think the upside for humanity would be if we were not domesticated? If we chose to defy them, almost surely they have a button that will deal with that problem.

That's the simple thing to do with this expedition you can't give much discretion to, right? The one decision it has is, are they obeying us? No? Push the button. If yes, success. That's it. That's the only decision they have to make. And it doesn't need a lot of infrastructure, probably.

So if we defy them, this is the obvious implication is they win. You lose the defiance. So now you might ask, well, could we sneakily defy them somehow and trick them? Probably not. So that they didn't know we were defying them. It doesn't seem like it if they had that level of intelligence. Also, it's plausible that they could just destroy the technology that we're using to make those advancements instead of destroying all of us, depending on their attitude towards us. Right. Now...

Here's another side of the story, though, which is on Earth, we consistently see old organizations rotting, just like we see old organisms rotting. There's just a consistent way up until now in human history and all of biological history, things rot. And the main way we've ever solved rot is to replace old things with new things. So our bodies, your and my body, our bodies rot over time and decay. And we just replace old bodies with young bodies.

Civilizations rise and fall. Companies rise and fall and get replaced by new companies. Software actually rots consistently and is thrown away and replaced with new software. But it's also a thing about a civilization that's managed to keep some structure going for hundreds of millions of years that's prevented it from expanding. That structure would plausibly suffer rot over a long period.

And so there's this open question. They've managed to maintain some capabilities, like to get here, and to enforce their rule. But what capabilities have they lost? That's not crazy to think they could have lost a lot of capabilities through this obsession with maintaining this structure for that long a period. We don't know. So maybe they found ways to avoid rot that we don't understand. And maybe they just have enormous capabilities. Maybe their capabilities are much weaker than we think. But that's another reason for them not to show much.

Well, seemingly, if our objective is not to leave the planet, then we kind of have free reign and it's not that negative for the future of humanity. If you're willing to limit your ambitions in a way compatible with their hopes and expectations for you, yeah.

The other consideration is that they may have some information about how the rest of the universe functions that we do not. They haven't at all seem inclined to share it with us. And again, according to this theory, there's just no point in time where it really makes sense for them to do that either, right? A hundred percent. And I'm kind of addressing the fatalistic, you know, they're here watching us sort of suppressing our advancement. It may be that

They know that going out there doesn't yield great benefit and they sort of have taken those follied steps in the past, given they're advanced and they're just trying to say, hey, if you go down this path, it's going to lead to bad things beyond what you can understand.

That's exactly the domestication effect. Once you believe they are superior and they are wiser, then you want to follow what they do under the presumption that they know better. Yes, that's how that works. So you would say that we need to go and make those explorative journeys to figure this out for ourselves.

Again, you know, if they fear that we are about to defy them, they may have, they just have another plan. If you remove their control just for a moment to say that there's no cap on our ability to explore and go out into the universe, how do you think that would work?

That would be the better trajectory for humanity. Almost surely we can see into the universe without making ourselves much more visible than we are now. So those are separate choices. We could just grow because we want to grow and we want to be bigger and do more things, or we could want to see farther, but we can make telescopes and other sorts of things that see a really long way without being much more visible at all. So for example, there's this way to use the sun as a gravitational lens and

And you put a telescope like 600 AU, which is the distance from the sun out from the sun. And then you can see on the opposite side of the sun with really, really high resolution. How visible we make ourselves is somewhat separate from how far we see. The book is The Elephant in the Brain. Robin Hanson, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much for talking about the wide variety of things that we consider you an expert in. And really just such a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for having me.

I have a lot of respect for this man. I have a lot of respect for the way he uses statistics and theories and true scientific rigor to explore things on a level that I did not expect we were going to explore. But I did not realize what we were going to talk about today. And yeah, we're talking about if we exist, and as Adam Frank said, we cannot be the only things to exist.

The fact is, there's something out there that is much more sophisticated than we can even comprehend. And one of your only options is that they're watching us and waiting. I love how my little summary led him to say, that's exactly what they want you to think. Yeah.

Yeah, we're being domesticated that whatever's out there is far more intelligent than we are because, again, the probability that they, whoever they are, were created at exactly the same second that we were is pretty unlikely. This is like not how it works, meaning they're made of something different, which means they would need an entire other environment in which to thrive. Yeah.

Like their Petri dish was real different and likely a long, long, long, long, long, long time ago so that they are at a level of sophistication where they can, in theory, visit if they wanted to. And if they haven't, why haven't they? Because they're likely observing. And yes, the best way to observe something is to subtly or secretly, um,

control or make you think that you're having this conversation right now talking about them existing? I'm either short-sighted in the arc of human development or I'm being domesticated in my thinking, but I don't really want to leave the planet. Well, a lot of people do. Enough people do. I mean, Katy Perry just got to go away for 10 seconds. That's just the start of it. And she has such a cute suit on. I just think that there's a lot we could do here still.

And this planet's pretty good. Maybe it's because I haven't been anywhere else and I haven't seen anything else, but I kind of like it here. We didn't get to talk about it here, but we'll be talking about elsewhere, The Elephant in the Brain, which is Robin Hansen's most recent book, which also we highly recommend. Much more the social science kind of component, but so grateful that Robin engaged with us today. And from our breakdown to the one we hope we never have, we will see you next time.

It's my B.R.L.X. breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience Ph.D. or she was. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.