I grew up in a very working-class outer
suburb of Melbourne Australia no one in
my family had ever been to University
it’s actually statistically very
improbable that I’m standing here right
now in Vienna about to talk about well
really the future of humanity with some
extremely new scientific results about
the psychology of galactic empires so
mine’s no sob story
although working-class my parents
understood the importance of perspective
of example they wanted us to know what
was possible myself and my five siblings
they exposed us to things they for
example Sunday afternoons were spent
listening to BBC science shows on the
radio
lots of dignified old British voices
talking about the magnificence of the
universe there really instilled in
myself and my siblings this sense of
curiosity that we helped each other to
maintain and has carried us through our
lives and for me in particular it showed
me something that I didn’t really know
at that point and that was that it was
possible to have a career talking about
and doing science knowing what is
possible helps make things possible
that’s also true of populations so
communities nations and back in the day
tribes inspire each other influence each
other by sharing art and science and
wisdom and a feedback process propagates
them all forward with humanity this took
a long time we spent 200,000 years as
hunter-gatherers on the savanna of
Africa before a degree of mutual
airing the feedback propagated us to
this elbow of the exponential where we
find ourselves today we are now on the
verge of taking command of our own
genome of creating artificial
intelligences of understanding the very
origin of our universe and by the gods
we have Rocketship’s as a civilization
who is more than ever
acting in a unified way as a species who
do we look to next where is our example
where is they that came before us
reaching down their hand to show us the
way to whatever that next transition is
and this is a question which we’ve been
asking ever since we thought it might be
that there were others well that there
were others out there it seems like a
great time for a famous quote ah see
Clark said that two possibilities exist
either we are alone in the universe or
we are not both are equally terrifying
and when you said this in the 60s we had
never seen a planet around another star
system our surveys of the galaxy were in
their infancy as were SETI programs
searches for extraterrestrial
intelligence we didn’t know whether
there are aliens but we hadn’t really
looked for all we knew the galaxy could
have been terrifyingly full of
technological civilizations but now now
we have surveyed large chunks of our
galaxy the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has
taken spectroscopic observations of more
than two and a half million stars those
stars almost all have planetary systems
as discovered by the Kepler space
telescope watching the
municipal dimming of light as distant
alien worlds pass in front of their
parents star
we’ve now determined that almost every
star in the Milky Way has a planetary
system and there are tens of billions of
terrestrial so earth-like planets with
the potential to have life loving liquid
water and then there’s the Trappist one
system the Trappist telescope found a
star only 10 light-years away which is
our most immediate cosmic neighborhood
that has seventh terrestrial worlds many
of which are potentially habitable the
number of potential places for life in
our galaxy has skyrocketed over the past
few years many of them may have life and
in fact when we turn our science inward
when we look at the earth and what he
can tell us about life we know now that
many of them probably do so we peer
further and further back into Earth’s
history this is a fossil of layers of
slimy algae dated at 3.7 billion years
ago okay this is a stromatolite found in
Greenland there are similarly old
stromatolites at 3.5 billion years found
in my hometown well my home country
Australia and even more intriguingly
this is an Aussie zircon crystal those
little patches a little pieces of carbon
with a strikingly biogenic isotopic
ratio it looks like that carbon came
from life and this thing dated it up to
4.1 billion years old
the latest only this year hematite
formations that look for all the world
like the types of little hematite tubes
built by bacteria in deep sea
hydrothermal vents
this thing 4.2 billion years old with in
a cosmic eyeblink of Earth’s coalescence
from space dust four-and-a-half billion
years ago it seems that life happens
quickly and with great probability when
the conditions are right it certainly
did on earth and there’s no reason to
believe that it wouldn’t do the same
elsewhere from what we know the universe
the galaxy should be full of at the very
least slime-covered planets why
shouldn’t some of them also followed our
developmental path and produced
technological species before us well we
only don’t see them
we’ve been looking with our best radio
telescopes for half a century now but
the galaxy is silent the Sloan spectra
of stars slavishly obey the known laws
of stellar physics galactic radio
chatter is non-existent and everything
just looks eerily natural there are a
couple of exceptions there’s this one
start a B star in the Kepler sample that
appears to be dimming in strange ways
people talk about it being an alien
mega-structure it almost certainly is
not an alien mega-structure although
almost as I was flying here the
announcement came that it had started
dimming again after a two-year break and
so we will know very soon whether we
need to redact this entire talk it’s
probably not an alien mega-structure
regardless it’s very clear that if
anything like us exists out there they
are stunningly and surprisingly rare so
this tension between the apparent
abundance of potential places for life
to begin and the
fleet absence of any evidence that
anything like us has ever come before is
of course termed the Fermi paradox after
the great physicist Enrico Fermi who
famously asked you in 1950 where is
everybody the Fermi paradox is only more
paradoxical today knowing what we now
know so the food paradox is about time
scales our Sun is about 5 billion years
old but the Milky Way galaxy is more
than twice that age there are countless
stars just like our Suns just like our
Sun countless solar systems just like
our solar system out there many of them
with billions of years lead on us but a
cosmic a blink of a lead in development
is countless generations for a
civilization that managed to come ahead
of us what could they do with those
generations
I don’t know fill their part of the
galaxy with light collecting Dyson
spheres send exponentially multiply in
colonization waves or maybe interstellar
travel is actually almost impossible
still self-replicating automated probes
proposed by von Neumann in the 50s could
fill our galaxy in that cosmic eyeblink
any fuel to stay at home type
vast beacons if sending electromagnetic
radiation for us to detect powered by
cosmic power sources we see none of this
obviously but it would only take a small
number of them for them to be very very
apparent in the absence of evidence of a
mental race of anyone coming before us
can we at least take that absence as
some sort of guidance the answer to that
question well to answer it is to solve
the Fermi paradox this
to the paradox is often framed in terms
of a great filter some stage in
development that is so difficult or so
improbable to get past that almost no
one ever does and the interesting
question becomes is that stage behind us
or is it ahead of us are we lucky and
are we unique in the galaxy yet having
somehow got through a very difficult
developmental adolescence to reach our
current space or civilizations like us
super common it’s happened many times in
the past a civilization build some
cities has a fledgling space program
throws a few nice conferences and then
BAM with stunning efficiency in fact a
perfect deficiency they all wipe
themselves out down to the one well
that’s a compelling question I think
even arthur c clarke would agree that
that is the more terrifying potential
option and the good thing about our
current position is that we actually do
have some information now finally we
have a single data point that’s going to
allow us to make an educated guess about
where that great filter is and what that
means for our next step so if that
filter is a catastrophe that’s bad but
it’s not necessarily a catastrophe it
may be that in the future advanced
civilizations become let’s say
inscrutable right now Humanity is all
about unfettered expansion epic acts of
galactic graffiti sounds fun but surely
with godlike technological advancement
also comes a similar measure of cultural
sociological psychological evolution
perhaps once you have the technology to
reach the Stars you are immediately
inclined to enter a galaxy-wide state of
harmony in which with perfect efficiency
you enforce a prime directive stay
hidden until we worthy of seeing you or
perhaps to a civilization they all turn
inwards into impossibly complex virtual
worlds and lose complete interest in the
stars in the galaxy or perhaps our ants
like intellects can’t even hope to
fathom the motives of an advanced
civilization perhaps I’ll add like
capacity to sense can’t sense their
godlike technologies how does an ant
like intellect attempt to understand the
motives of an advanced civilization how
do we guess at a Galactic Empire
psychology and that’s the new piece of
information that we have developed over
the past 10 years we have not ever found
a Galactic Empire we haven’t seen any
aliens but we have located one proto
galactic civilization that seems to be
within a handful of generations of being
able to make the sort of mark on at
least one system that could be
detectable from a large distance it
might not but the probability is
increasing that it should be able to I’m
talking about us of course ok to clarify
the Kepler program ok the kepler
Observatory was a collaboration between
thousands of scientists under the
auspices of a enormous national space
program I’m talking about NASA of course
in a sense we could say that Kepler was
the will of the people it was subject to
the budgetary approval of
elected officials in the past giants
science programs like the Sloan survey
were conducted by hundreds or thousands
of scientists dozens of research
institutions big science was always very
collaborative very collective very
egalitarian the biggest science like the
Apollo program which put the first
person on another world took Nations JFK
said we choose to go to the moon will we
choose to go to Mars to mine the
asteroids will we choose to engage in
large-scale Astro engineering projects
will we choose to send probes to other
worlds no we won’t choose these things
are almost certainly going to be
initiated by individuals right now there
are a handful of companies private
companies that are currently operating
spacecraft to low-earth orbit and many
more with both craft and other space
programs and developments yuri milner
provided the seed funding for the
breakthrough starshot program which has
every chance of placing a probe
admittedly a tiny one in the nearest
star system within half a century we
don’t choose to do these things you
choose and by you I mean anyone with the
talent and the passion and all the
billions to bring enough people along
for the ride there are currently a
handful of people with levels of
autocratic control over entire space
programs that numbers only going to
increase within generations it’ll be
hundreds at a million at a minimum and
the bar is now getting solo
technological advances in the future
reusable rocketry advances in propulsion
systems our capacity to engineer in
space 3d printing on the Moon or Mars of
entire structures the unlimited and
almost unthinkable resources of the
asteroid belt will propel projects that
we can’t even conceive of today these
things seem very likely to happen we are
at the shadow at thieve we are at the
elbow of the exponential things like
dyson sphere’s and von neumann probes
are not the far future of humanity
they’re the near to medium future of
humanity
they might not happen and we don’t know
where we’ll proceed beyond that elbow
maybe nothing will come of it but we now
know what the chances are and there’s
certainly not zero there are many paths
past that elbow which leave an indelible
mark on our solar system if not our part
of the galaxy and that mark answers
Fermi’s question where is everybody hey
guys we’re right here so our technology
is fast outpacing our ability to choose
collectively whether or not to use it
whether or not for example to go to the
Stars there’s really no reason to
believe that other civilizations who
reach our state will do so uniformly
with less individualistic motives that
we present in this current state we are
a perfectly good model for the
psychology of an advanced civilization
assuming we’re a perfectly good model
for the psychology of ourselves in a
hundred years or 200 years so you give a
civilization like ours or
you know any one of the many that came
before us just a handful of generations
doing what we can do with our current
pace and honestly some crazy stuff is
going to be tried so why is the galaxy
so quiet well if we do take ourself as a
model then it means that no one else
survives to our state and it’s a little
bit hard to escape that conclusion given
the numbers that’s a little bit gloomy
but I think also our exponential
progress gives us some hope if we’re
going to wipe ourselves out okay
we’re going to have to do it quick
the clock is ticking
we only have a small number of
generations to obliterate our
civilization back to the Stone Age
perhaps before we’re capable of making
that mark and even if we do so we know
that we might not so by that model
someone before us one in a hundred even
one in a thousand would need to get
through our current teething state to
make that mark okay and yet we don’t see
it for that reason I think the answer is
a little more cheery I think the more
probable solution to the Fermi paradox
given the latest information about how
we will proceed forward or at least try
to is that the filter although it exists
it’s behind us
there is something special about
humanity don’t get cocky it could have
been way back in the evolutionary tree
maybe that chance fusion of proto
eukaryote proto mode mitochondria to
forge the modern complex cell is one in
trillion
or perhaps it is humanity perhaps there
was every wiring back on the plains of
Africa Homo sapiens suddenly learned how
to think in different ways
Yuval Harare would say that we learned
to believe fictions we learned to
believe in things like a destiny
galactic empires but imagined futures
and it set our eyes first on the world
and then on the Stars so we look at the
galaxy and it appears like an untamed
natural wilderness trackless but I
really think that we can take some
incredible inspiration from that fact
there may not be anyone to show us the
path and that means that we find that
ourselves that we make the track ourself
whatever
lucky chance led us to here whatever it
is that’s slowing down every other
possible incidence of something like us
it’s placed us in a position to
potentially be early
what if we’re early to the galaxy and
what our destiny that we could choose is
that we become the ones to forge that
path to lend that helping hand to anyone
who happens to come after thank you
[Applause]
you
suburb of Melbourne Australia no one in
my family had ever been to University
it’s actually statistically very
improbable that I’m standing here right
now in Vienna about to talk about well
really the future of humanity with some
extremely new scientific results about
the psychology of galactic empires so
mine’s no sob story
although working-class my parents
understood the importance of perspective
of example they wanted us to know what
was possible myself and my five siblings
they exposed us to things they for
example Sunday afternoons were spent
listening to BBC science shows on the
radio
lots of dignified old British voices
talking about the magnificence of the
universe there really instilled in
myself and my siblings this sense of
curiosity that we helped each other to
maintain and has carried us through our
lives and for me in particular it showed
me something that I didn’t really know
at that point and that was that it was
possible to have a career talking about
and doing science knowing what is
possible helps make things possible
that’s also true of populations so
communities nations and back in the day
tribes inspire each other influence each
other by sharing art and science and
wisdom and a feedback process propagates
them all forward with humanity this took
a long time we spent 200,000 years as
hunter-gatherers on the savanna of
Africa before a degree of mutual
airing the feedback propagated us to
this elbow of the exponential where we
find ourselves today we are now on the
verge of taking command of our own
genome of creating artificial
intelligences of understanding the very
origin of our universe and by the gods
we have Rocketship’s as a civilization
who is more than ever
acting in a unified way as a species who
do we look to next where is our example
where is they that came before us
reaching down their hand to show us the
way to whatever that next transition is
and this is a question which we’ve been
asking ever since we thought it might be
that there were others well that there
were others out there it seems like a
great time for a famous quote ah see
Clark said that two possibilities exist
either we are alone in the universe or
we are not both are equally terrifying
and when you said this in the 60s we had
never seen a planet around another star
system our surveys of the galaxy were in
their infancy as were SETI programs
searches for extraterrestrial
intelligence we didn’t know whether
there are aliens but we hadn’t really
looked for all we knew the galaxy could
have been terrifyingly full of
technological civilizations but now now
we have surveyed large chunks of our
galaxy the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has
taken spectroscopic observations of more
than two and a half million stars those
stars almost all have planetary systems
as discovered by the Kepler space
telescope watching the
municipal dimming of light as distant
alien worlds pass in front of their
parents star
we’ve now determined that almost every
star in the Milky Way has a planetary
system and there are tens of billions of
terrestrial so earth-like planets with
the potential to have life loving liquid
water and then there’s the Trappist one
system the Trappist telescope found a
star only 10 light-years away which is
our most immediate cosmic neighborhood
that has seventh terrestrial worlds many
of which are potentially habitable the
number of potential places for life in
our galaxy has skyrocketed over the past
few years many of them may have life and
in fact when we turn our science inward
when we look at the earth and what he
can tell us about life we know now that
many of them probably do so we peer
further and further back into Earth’s
history this is a fossil of layers of
slimy algae dated at 3.7 billion years
ago okay this is a stromatolite found in
Greenland there are similarly old
stromatolites at 3.5 billion years found
in my hometown well my home country
Australia and even more intriguingly
this is an Aussie zircon crystal those
little patches a little pieces of carbon
with a strikingly biogenic isotopic
ratio it looks like that carbon came
from life and this thing dated it up to
4.1 billion years old
the latest only this year hematite
formations that look for all the world
like the types of little hematite tubes
built by bacteria in deep sea
hydrothermal vents
this thing 4.2 billion years old with in
a cosmic eyeblink of Earth’s coalescence
from space dust four-and-a-half billion
years ago it seems that life happens
quickly and with great probability when
the conditions are right it certainly
did on earth and there’s no reason to
believe that it wouldn’t do the same
elsewhere from what we know the universe
the galaxy should be full of at the very
least slime-covered planets why
shouldn’t some of them also followed our
developmental path and produced
technological species before us well we
only don’t see them
we’ve been looking with our best radio
telescopes for half a century now but
the galaxy is silent the Sloan spectra
of stars slavishly obey the known laws
of stellar physics galactic radio
chatter is non-existent and everything
just looks eerily natural there are a
couple of exceptions there’s this one
start a B star in the Kepler sample that
appears to be dimming in strange ways
people talk about it being an alien
mega-structure it almost certainly is
not an alien mega-structure although
almost as I was flying here the
announcement came that it had started
dimming again after a two-year break and
so we will know very soon whether we
need to redact this entire talk it’s
probably not an alien mega-structure
regardless it’s very clear that if
anything like us exists out there they
are stunningly and surprisingly rare so
this tension between the apparent
abundance of potential places for life
to begin and the
fleet absence of any evidence that
anything like us has ever come before is
of course termed the Fermi paradox after
the great physicist Enrico Fermi who
famously asked you in 1950 where is
everybody the Fermi paradox is only more
paradoxical today knowing what we now
know so the food paradox is about time
scales our Sun is about 5 billion years
old but the Milky Way galaxy is more
than twice that age there are countless
stars just like our Suns just like our
Sun countless solar systems just like
our solar system out there many of them
with billions of years lead on us but a
cosmic a blink of a lead in development
is countless generations for a
civilization that managed to come ahead
of us what could they do with those
generations
I don’t know fill their part of the
galaxy with light collecting Dyson
spheres send exponentially multiply in
colonization waves or maybe interstellar
travel is actually almost impossible
still self-replicating automated probes
proposed by von Neumann in the 50s could
fill our galaxy in that cosmic eyeblink
any fuel to stay at home type
vast beacons if sending electromagnetic
radiation for us to detect powered by
cosmic power sources we see none of this
obviously but it would only take a small
number of them for them to be very very
apparent in the absence of evidence of a
mental race of anyone coming before us
can we at least take that absence as
some sort of guidance the answer to that
question well to answer it is to solve
the Fermi paradox this
to the paradox is often framed in terms
of a great filter some stage in
development that is so difficult or so
improbable to get past that almost no
one ever does and the interesting
question becomes is that stage behind us
or is it ahead of us are we lucky and
are we unique in the galaxy yet having
somehow got through a very difficult
developmental adolescence to reach our
current space or civilizations like us
super common it’s happened many times in
the past a civilization build some
cities has a fledgling space program
throws a few nice conferences and then
BAM with stunning efficiency in fact a
perfect deficiency they all wipe
themselves out down to the one well
that’s a compelling question I think
even arthur c clarke would agree that
that is the more terrifying potential
option and the good thing about our
current position is that we actually do
have some information now finally we
have a single data point that’s going to
allow us to make an educated guess about
where that great filter is and what that
means for our next step so if that
filter is a catastrophe that’s bad but
it’s not necessarily a catastrophe it
may be that in the future advanced
civilizations become let’s say
inscrutable right now Humanity is all
about unfettered expansion epic acts of
galactic graffiti sounds fun but surely
with godlike technological advancement
also comes a similar measure of cultural
sociological psychological evolution
perhaps once you have the technology to
reach the Stars you are immediately
inclined to enter a galaxy-wide state of
harmony in which with perfect efficiency
you enforce a prime directive stay
hidden until we worthy of seeing you or
perhaps to a civilization they all turn
inwards into impossibly complex virtual
worlds and lose complete interest in the
stars in the galaxy or perhaps our ants
like intellects can’t even hope to
fathom the motives of an advanced
civilization perhaps I’ll add like
capacity to sense can’t sense their
godlike technologies how does an ant
like intellect attempt to understand the
motives of an advanced civilization how
do we guess at a Galactic Empire
psychology and that’s the new piece of
information that we have developed over
the past 10 years we have not ever found
a Galactic Empire we haven’t seen any
aliens but we have located one proto
galactic civilization that seems to be
within a handful of generations of being
able to make the sort of mark on at
least one system that could be
detectable from a large distance it
might not but the probability is
increasing that it should be able to I’m
talking about us of course ok to clarify
the Kepler program ok the kepler
Observatory was a collaboration between
thousands of scientists under the
auspices of a enormous national space
program I’m talking about NASA of course
in a sense we could say that Kepler was
the will of the people it was subject to
the budgetary approval of
elected officials in the past giants
science programs like the Sloan survey
were conducted by hundreds or thousands
of scientists dozens of research
institutions big science was always very
collaborative very collective very
egalitarian the biggest science like the
Apollo program which put the first
person on another world took Nations JFK
said we choose to go to the moon will we
choose to go to Mars to mine the
asteroids will we choose to engage in
large-scale Astro engineering projects
will we choose to send probes to other
worlds no we won’t choose these things
are almost certainly going to be
initiated by individuals right now there
are a handful of companies private
companies that are currently operating
spacecraft to low-earth orbit and many
more with both craft and other space
programs and developments yuri milner
provided the seed funding for the
breakthrough starshot program which has
every chance of placing a probe
admittedly a tiny one in the nearest
star system within half a century we
don’t choose to do these things you
choose and by you I mean anyone with the
talent and the passion and all the
billions to bring enough people along
for the ride there are currently a
handful of people with levels of
autocratic control over entire space
programs that numbers only going to
increase within generations it’ll be
hundreds at a million at a minimum and
the bar is now getting solo
technological advances in the future
reusable rocketry advances in propulsion
systems our capacity to engineer in
space 3d printing on the Moon or Mars of
entire structures the unlimited and
almost unthinkable resources of the
asteroid belt will propel projects that
we can’t even conceive of today these
things seem very likely to happen we are
at the shadow at thieve we are at the
elbow of the exponential things like
dyson sphere’s and von neumann probes
are not the far future of humanity
they’re the near to medium future of
humanity
they might not happen and we don’t know
where we’ll proceed beyond that elbow
maybe nothing will come of it but we now
know what the chances are and there’s
certainly not zero there are many paths
past that elbow which leave an indelible
mark on our solar system if not our part
of the galaxy and that mark answers
Fermi’s question where is everybody hey
guys we’re right here so our technology
is fast outpacing our ability to choose
collectively whether or not to use it
whether or not for example to go to the
Stars there’s really no reason to
believe that other civilizations who
reach our state will do so uniformly
with less individualistic motives that
we present in this current state we are
a perfectly good model for the
psychology of an advanced civilization
assuming we’re a perfectly good model
for the psychology of ourselves in a
hundred years or 200 years so you give a
civilization like ours or
you know any one of the many that came
before us just a handful of generations
doing what we can do with our current
pace and honestly some crazy stuff is
going to be tried so why is the galaxy
so quiet well if we do take ourself as a
model then it means that no one else
survives to our state and it’s a little
bit hard to escape that conclusion given
the numbers that’s a little bit gloomy
but I think also our exponential
progress gives us some hope if we’re
going to wipe ourselves out okay
we’re going to have to do it quick
the clock is ticking
we only have a small number of
generations to obliterate our
civilization back to the Stone Age
perhaps before we’re capable of making
that mark and even if we do so we know
that we might not so by that model
someone before us one in a hundred even
one in a thousand would need to get
through our current teething state to
make that mark okay and yet we don’t see
it for that reason I think the answer is
a little more cheery I think the more
probable solution to the Fermi paradox
given the latest information about how
we will proceed forward or at least try
to is that the filter although it exists
it’s behind us
there is something special about
humanity don’t get cocky it could have
been way back in the evolutionary tree
maybe that chance fusion of proto
eukaryote proto mode mitochondria to
forge the modern complex cell is one in
trillion
or perhaps it is humanity perhaps there
was every wiring back on the plains of
Africa Homo sapiens suddenly learned how
to think in different ways
Yuval Harare would say that we learned
to believe fictions we learned to
believe in things like a destiny
galactic empires but imagined futures
and it set our eyes first on the world
and then on the Stars so we look at the
galaxy and it appears like an untamed
natural wilderness trackless but I
really think that we can take some
incredible inspiration from that fact
there may not be anyone to show us the
path and that means that we find that
ourselves that we make the track ourself
whatever
lucky chance led us to here whatever it
is that’s slowing down every other
possible incidence of something like us
it’s placed us in a position to
potentially be early
what if we’re early to the galaxy and
what our destiny that we could choose is
that we become the ones to forge that
path to lend that helping hand to anyone
who happens to come after thank you
[Applause]
you
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