Speaker 1: Daniel, how's our podcast doing these days? Are you number
Speaker 1: one in any territories right now? Unfortunately we are only
Speaker 1: number three in natural science in the US, behind some
Speaker 1: like paranormal and bigfoot podcasts. Maybe we should do those
Speaker 1: topics then we can be number one. Daniel and Jorge
Speaker 1: explained Bigfoot. How are those considered natural science? Doesn't seem
Speaker 1: very natural to me. I don't know, but the folks
Speaker 1: in the UK actually have us as number one in
Speaker 1: natural science, ahead of the big Foot podcast. So shout
Speaker 1: out to the UK science listeners. Maybe they don't have
Speaker 1: sasquatch in the UK, or maybe they call it something
Speaker 1: different like lockness or be for a guy. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but it makes me hopeful that will be number one
Speaker 1: in natural science in other places. Are you thinking globally
Speaker 1: or are you thinking like solar system? Why? Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: go into planetary I want to become the top podcast
Speaker 1: of Martian colonists. Why stop there? Why not go all
Speaker 1: the way to Jupiter or Uranus? I mean Uranus? Sure?
Speaker 1: I want to also be number one podcast among aliens
Speaker 1: eavesdropping on human technology? Do you think we have alien fans?
Speaker 1: I just wonder if that's going to change who buys
Speaker 1: ads for the show? What kind of products do you
Speaker 1: think they would be trying to sell to humans? I
Speaker 1: don't know, but thanks to cryptocurrency and Venmo, they can
Speaker 1: actually send their funds interplanetary lee to us on Earth.
Speaker 1: You think they have Venmo and other galaxies or other planets? Also,
Speaker 1: how do they do the exchange tree? Don't you need
Speaker 1: like a central bank or something. We'll figure that out
Speaker 1: when we build our Daniel and Jorge Galactic Empire, which
Speaker 1: will include cryptocurrency. I don't know, Man, sounds kind of risky. Well,
Speaker 1: if we're not going to do crypto zoology, we gotta
Speaker 1: do crypto something, crypto economics, exo crypto economics, exo crypto
Speaker 1: podcast comics. I'll be the first person with a PhD
Speaker 1: in that field. Hi am Jorhammer, cartoonists and the creator
Speaker 1: of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle of
Speaker 1: physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I own
Speaker 1: zero cryptocurrency. Oh how do you know? I mean, isn't
Speaker 1: it all virtual? Couldn't you virtually own it too? I
Speaker 1: mean I checked my pockets and I didn't find any.
Speaker 1: So that's what I mean you wouldn't find it in
Speaker 1: your pockets, I mean my digital pockets. Man. No, I'm
Speaker 1: not invested in cryptocurrency, have not bought any cryptocurrency. I
Speaker 1: don't think that anything I own owns any cryptocurrency. To
Speaker 1: the best of my knowledge, as my lawyer's advised me
Speaker 1: to say, I am not in the crypto universe. It
Speaker 1: might be hard to tell the these days. I wonder
Speaker 1: like if some mutual fund you buy, buy some other
Speaker 1: fund that buys another fund that maybe has a little
Speaker 1: bit of crypto in it. We probably all have a
Speaker 1: little bit of crypto in us. Humans are pretty cryptic,
Speaker 1: I guess. But welcome their podcast. Daniel and Jorge explained,
Speaker 1: do you know a production of our heart Radio in
Speaker 1: which we attempt to do our best to decrypt the
Speaker 1: universe and explain all of its mysteries to you. We
Speaker 1: want to unscramble the craziness that is our cosmos and
Speaker 1: explain to you how it can be understood in terms
Speaker 1: of a set of basic physical laws. It seems like
Speaker 1: so far everything out there can be made sense of.
Speaker 1: It's possible to assemble simple mathematical stories that describe how
Speaker 1: balls bounce against each other. How galaxies form, and maybe
Speaker 1: even what's inside black holes or the fundamental underpinnings of
Speaker 1: alien economics. It's right because it is a pretty rich
Speaker 1: universe full of amazing and incredible treasures that you can
Speaker 1: invest in in order to grow your mind, I guess,
Speaker 1: And so that's what we do here. We like to
Speaker 1: talk about it so we can have a pretty good
Speaker 1: exchange with all of you about it. All we ask
Speaker 1: for is your time and a slice of your brain
Speaker 1: to sit with us and enjoy the crazy mysteries of
Speaker 1: the universe as we try to unravel them. While we
Speaker 1: are here on this tiny rock, we are able to
Speaker 1: cast our minds across the cosmos and wonder what's going
Speaker 1: on out there in other solar systems. Are there aliens
Speaker 1: looking up at their night skies wondering what we are
Speaker 1: thinking about and whether we would be interested in buying
Speaker 1: their n f T s. Yeah, because it's a pretty
Speaker 1: big universe, and as they said in the movie Contact,
Speaker 1: it would be kind of a shame if we were
Speaker 1: the only living Sentien beings in it. It would be
Speaker 1: a pretty amazing thing to be the only ones in
Speaker 1: this vast universe that we have some kind of intelligence
Speaker 1: or podcasts. It would be pretty amazing to be alone,
Speaker 1: and it would be pretty amazing to not be alone. Either.
Speaker 1: Answer to this famous question is mind blowing. Does it
Speaker 1: depend you think on whether you're an extrovert species or
Speaker 1: an introvert species. I think it's nice to know that
Speaker 1: they're out there. If you're an introvert species, you might
Speaker 1: not want to give them a call, but you still
Speaker 1: want to know that they exist. You know, I think
Speaker 1: everybody is probably curious about the universe, but there's an
Speaker 1: insumption there. Right we're extrapolating our experience to the experience
Speaker 1: of aliens. We're hoping that the is other intelligence out
Speaker 1: there in the universe because we know that we are
Speaker 1: capable of joy and love and beauty, and we hope
Speaker 1: that aliens out there are also having a good time.
Speaker 1: We hope that they aren't floating in their slime pits
Speaker 1: and just totally suffering. Would that makes you, I guess,
Speaker 1: more of an ex overt because you like exceplanetary life.
Speaker 1: I am more of an ex overt than an extrovert,
Speaker 1: that's true. I'm more interested in talking to aliens than
Speaker 1: humans sometimes and learning from them. I guess because if
Speaker 1: there are aliens out there, there's a lot that we
Speaker 1: can learn from them, right, there's a lot that we
Speaker 1: can learn about how to travel through stars, or even
Speaker 1: just how to make it past our point intilisation to
Speaker 1: greater things, or just how to be alive in this universe.
Speaker 1: When you travel, even just here on Earth and experience
Speaker 1: different human cultures, you learn so much about the basic
Speaker 1: questions they ask about life, the approach they take. It
Speaker 1: makes you realize how much of your life and the
Speaker 1: way you think is kind of arbitrary and cultural. It
Speaker 1: opens your minds, it shows you the box that you
Speaker 1: have been thinking in, and so talking to aliens would
Speaker 1: be the ultimate version of that. Experience could help us
Speaker 1: understand our context in ways we can't even imagine today,
Speaker 1: and of course, perhaps help us crack some of the
Speaker 1: long standing physics problems we're being in our heads against.
Speaker 1: I feel like maybe we could do that on our own, Daniel,
Speaker 1: what do humans need help? Can we figure it all
Speaker 1: out eventually on our own? It's certainly possible that we
Speaker 1: could figure it all out eventually, But we might not
Speaker 1: be the smartest species out there, right, I think humans
Speaker 1: are pretty clever, But it's possible we have a limitation
Speaker 1: to our fundamental neural capacity that makes it impossible for
Speaker 1: us to grasp the mathematics that underlie the universe. Is
Speaker 1: also the possibility of false starts. You know, human science
Speaker 1: is fairly diverse, but it also has collapsed along a
Speaker 1: few pathways, choices we made early on, being influenced by
Speaker 1: geniuses who came along. It's just interesting to think about
Speaker 1: other paths and intelligent species might have taken that might
Speaker 1: be more or less fruitful in terms of understanding the universe.
Speaker 1: I wonder how we would react if one of your
Speaker 1: students said that to you, like, Hey, Dr Whiteson, I
Speaker 1: don't think I'm the smartest person in the class. I
Speaker 1: just don't have the neural processes for it. Can I
Speaker 1: copy that person next to me for our test? You
Speaker 1: would have to say yes, Daniel. I think the ultimate
Speaker 1: exam for an intelligent species is working together to figure
Speaker 1: out the mystery of the universe. So we're all getting
Speaker 1: graded on a group project. That's how I see it. Well,
Speaker 1: it is an interesting topic to think about whether aliens
Speaker 1: exist out there, And just to be clear, Daniel, nobody
Speaker 1: has seen or talked to any aliens as far as
Speaker 1: physicists know. Right, as far as this physicists, no, we
Speaker 1: have no confirmed communications with aliens. Absolutely, that's a different
Speaker 1: podcast in the natural sciences. Maybe the Luckness Monster is
Speaker 1: actually an alien come to Earth to talk to its
Speaker 1: long lost brother Bigfoot. I think you just found our
Speaker 1: new gold mine here, fun fan fiction about human fiction cryptozoology.
Speaker 1: But instead of thinking about what other weird kinds of
Speaker 1: life might exist in the lakes of Scotland or the
Speaker 1: deep forests of Alaska, we like to think about what
Speaker 1: kind of life might exists on other planets and whether
Speaker 1: it would be possible to communicate with them. If we're
Speaker 1: going to hear messages from distant civilizations on the other
Speaker 1: side of the galaxy, will of course need to receive
Speaker 1: those messages. They'll need to be capable of sending us
Speaker 1: those messages, so we have to think a little bit
Speaker 1: about what their civilizations might be capable of. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: all those this might seem like baseless extrapolation or speculation,
Speaker 1: it is something that physicists have been engaging for a while,
Speaker 1: have polished papers on these ideas about aliens and what
Speaker 1: aliens could look like, and even Carl saying I was
Speaker 1: sort of famous for chiming in a lot about aliens.
Speaker 1: You say baseless extrapolation like it's a bad thing. I
Speaker 1: don't get it usually when maybe in physics the bar
Speaker 1: is lower. Is that what you're saying? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: in physics were often tackling problems that are basically impossible.
Speaker 1: We don't know how to get started, and so what
Speaker 1: we usually do is we begin with the simplest, dumbest thing,
Speaker 1: which often involves baseless extrapolation, Like we don't know how
Speaker 1: to tackle this, Let's just assume a spherical cow and
Speaker 1: start from there. And we're going to talk about alien civilizations.
Speaker 1: The only example we have is our own, and so
Speaker 1: we have to begin at least by making some assumptions
Speaker 1: about alien civilizations and their similarity to civilization on Earth,
Speaker 1: knowing all the time, keeping in the back of our
Speaker 1: heads that we are making these assumptions and that maybe
Speaker 1: one day we'll figure out how to relax them or
Speaker 1: break them or get out of that box. And then
Speaker 1: I guess the point would be that once we meet aliens,
Speaker 1: you can be like, Hi, I told you so, or WHOA,
Speaker 1: I was totally wrong? Is that the whole point of it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you think this through and you come to some conclusions,
Speaker 1: and then you meet aliens and discover they're totally different
Speaker 1: from what you expected. It helps you think through what
Speaker 1: you might have misunderstood, which aspect of your assumptions, which
Speaker 1: step in your line of thinking might have gone wrong.
Speaker 1: How much of your time did you waste? Well, it's
Speaker 1: that or just don't think about it. You know that's right.
Speaker 1: It's do physics or just don't think about it. Those
Speaker 1: are the two only two options. Do physics or do nothing? Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, is there anything else on the menu that's right? Well,
Speaker 1: what else would there be in life to do? No?
Speaker 1: But when you are tackling really big, hard questions about
Speaker 1: the nature of the universe and alien civilizations, you don't
Speaker 1: often have first principles to start from, so you just
Speaker 1: sort of explore the space using some assumptions to get
Speaker 1: yourself oriented. Yeah, so this is something physicists have been
Speaker 1: thinking about, and in fact, there's an interesting framework to
Speaker 1: think about it. And the question here is what would
Speaker 1: an alien civilization look like? Can we extrapolate from human civilization?
Speaker 1: So to be on the podcast, we'll be tackling how
Speaker 1: powerful can a civilization get? Now? Daniel is as powerful
Speaker 1: as in like awesome, or powerful as in like will
Speaker 1: come and kill us? Powerful as in what is there
Speaker 1: in number one podcast? In the natural sciences in certain
Speaker 1: countries clearly a leading indicator of cultural value and progress, right,
Speaker 1: and handsomeness as well. Don't forget there's a clear correlation
Speaker 1: if you look at a certain data set. There's lots
Speaker 1: of ways to think about the power of a civilization.
Speaker 1: But in a very practical sense, if we are going
Speaker 1: to discover an alien civilization without going there, they need
Speaker 1: to be pretty powerful because we have to receive their signals,
Speaker 1: right if they are far far away around another star
Speaker 1: for us to hear their messages, their messages have to
Speaker 1: arrive on Earth, which means they need a certain power
Speaker 1: in their broadcast. And so we can think about, like, fundamentally,
Speaker 1: what is the energy available to those civilizations? Would they
Speaker 1: even have enough energy to beam us a message from
Speaker 1: the other side of the galaxy? You mean sort of
Speaker 1: like what's their footprint, Like what's their energy footprint? I
Speaker 1: physicist tends to think about things as like simple black boxes, right,
Speaker 1: like energy in, energy out. But if physicist things about nutrition,
Speaker 1: for example, it's just like calories in calories burned, right,
Speaker 1: physicists model humans as like simple bomb calorimeters, and so
Speaker 1: here we're modeling like the entire complexity of an alien
Speaker 1: civilization in terms of like how much energy to have
Speaker 1: access to and how much energy can they afford to
Speaker 1: put it to their signal? I see. So today we're
Speaker 1: serve asking like how much energy and alien civilization might
Speaker 1: be able to consume I guess so spend or hardness
Speaker 1: or channel into one signal exactly. It's a way of
Speaker 1: thinking through our possible future for our civilization. What does
Speaker 1: that hold? What technology might we develop in the future
Speaker 1: that gives us access to stars or many stars or
Speaker 1: many universes. And so physicists have come up with or
Speaker 1: at least some physicists have come up with a scale
Speaker 1: to measure how much energy and alien civilization might be
Speaker 1: able to tap into around them in where they live.
Speaker 1: It's called the kar dash Off scale. It's not related
Speaker 1: to the Kardashian Yeah. The scale is how many Kardashians
Speaker 1: do you have on your social media? And so we've
Speaker 1: currently maxed that out. We're leading the galaxy. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think one is maybe too many on that scale.
Speaker 1: But it's a kardas chef kardash If how do you
Speaker 1: pronounce it? I've heard it pronounced kardas chef. And it's
Speaker 1: a popular trope inside it's fiction also because it's a
Speaker 1: fun way of thinking about very powerful alien civilizations, and
Speaker 1: so it crops up everywhere. And a bunch of listeners
Speaker 1: wrote in and asked us to talk about the Cardassip scale.
Speaker 1: And are you sure they weren't asking us to talk
Speaker 1: to a Kardashian on the podcast because that would probably
Speaker 1: put put us in the number one spot. I reached
Speaker 1: out to all of them. None of them have responded,
Speaker 1: all right, So then let's talk about this Cardaship scale
Speaker 1: here on today's episode. And so, as usual, we were
Speaker 1: wondering how many people out there had heard of this
Speaker 1: scale and how it measures an alien civilizations possible energy use.
Speaker 1: So thank you very much to everybody out there who
Speaker 1: participates in these questions and answers. It's really fun for
Speaker 1: us to hear what people are thinking. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to participate for future episodes of the podcast, please don't
Speaker 1: be shy right to us two questions at Daniel and
Speaker 1: Jorge dot com. So think about it for a second,
Speaker 1: what do you think a Cardiship scale is. Here's what
Speaker 1: people have to say. I'm pretty sure I've heard of
Speaker 1: the Cardassi of scale, but I am blanking on what
Speaker 1: it is. Something in the back of my mind is
Speaker 1: saying it's something about the size of stars or something
Speaker 1: like that. I have no idea. I don't know, no
Speaker 1: have any idea Kardashi of scale. No, I don't know
Speaker 1: what the kardashi of scale is. But if I had
Speaker 1: to take a kiss, I would say it is some
Speaker 1: sort of high energy scale at which quantum effects become important,
Speaker 1: like in a black hole or something because of the
Speaker 1: or the very high energy density and also quantum property
Speaker 1: has become important. All right, maybe we need a we
Speaker 1: have no idea scale here, because everyone seemed to max
Speaker 1: it out on the idol no scale. There really was
Speaker 1: no recognition. I'm sort of amazed. It's given the number
Speaker 1: of listeners who asked us to talk about this. The
Speaker 1: listeners a happy example here had never heard of it. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what we're here for, to talk about the Kardashians
Speaker 1: and obscue or alien scales that measure their energy. I
Speaker 1: wonder what the alien Kardashians are like, Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I kind of hope they don't have Kardashians. Maybe the
Speaker 1: Kardashian scale is how much your civilization has jumped the shark. Well,
Speaker 1: we have jumped the shark and the Bigfoot and the
Speaker 1: Lockness monsters. So I think we're in big trouble. We're
Speaker 1: due for cancelation any moment, the galactic Netflix is going
Speaker 1: to pull our budget. Huh right, yeah, no, I want
Speaker 1: to see what happens in season five thousand of Humanity.
Speaker 1: Which season are we on? Now? I haven't been binging Humans.
Speaker 1: I'm not cut up. Everyone's talking about it. Everyone's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you gotta watch this, you gotta see these kids. But
Speaker 1: who has the time? You know? Spoiler alert, a lot
Speaker 1: of people die. Sounds like a depressing show. Well, let's
Speaker 1: jump into Daniel. What is the Cardaship scale? So the
Speaker 1: Cardassia scale was suggested by a physicist Cardassian, of course,
Speaker 1: that tries to imagine how civilizations will grow, specifically in
Speaker 1: their energy use, in order to understand how much energy
Speaker 1: they might have available to pump into signals to beam
Speaker 1: to Earth so that we can discus robbed them. The
Speaker 1: original Cardaship scale has a few stages. But in the
Speaker 1: meantime people have built on this and expanded on it
Speaker 1: and taken in all sorts of new directions. So sort
Speaker 1: of fun framework for understanding how a civilization might grow
Speaker 1: to tap into the natural energy available to us in
Speaker 1: the universe. I see. Is it more like a scale
Speaker 1: that measures how much energy a civilization uses or just
Speaker 1: kind of keeps tab of where they would get this energy.
Speaker 1: It's both. It's an accounting of how much energy is
Speaker 1: available to a civilization, but of course there aren't infinite
Speaker 1: arbitrary energy sources in the universe, and so it imagines
Speaker 1: how they might find those sources of energy. And it's
Speaker 1: broken into three categories. One where you think about all
Speaker 1: the energy available on a planet, another way you think
Speaker 1: about all the energy available in the solar system, and
Speaker 1: then a third where you think about all of the
Speaker 1: energy available in the galaxy. I see, So like a
Speaker 1: stage one civilization is one that only has the energy
Speaker 1: of a planet available to them, or alternatively, you assume
Speaker 1: that they have access to all the energy that a
Speaker 1: planet they can have. Yes, precisely, All right, well, let's
Speaker 1: get into each of these stages and see where humans
Speaker 1: are and where aliens might be at But first let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break. All right, welcome back to our
Speaker 1: podcast Baseless Speculation with Daniel and Jorge about Aliens The
Speaker 1: first steps in understanding the universe with Daniel and Jorge.
Speaker 1: I thought the first step was always observation. Daniel insights, well,
Speaker 1: we've been trying to observe aliens, but we have zero data,
Speaker 1: and so that's one thing we haven't tried to understand.
Speaker 1: I see, step one is observed. Step two a is
Speaker 1: if you don't observe anything, start making stuff up. Is
Speaker 1: that what you're saying? Yeah, well, also if you don't
Speaker 1: observe anything, try to understand why you didn't see something.
Speaker 1: One thing that motivated Cardasi's paper was the famous Fermi paradox,
Speaker 1: the idea that the galaxy is quite old, certainly old
Speaker 1: enough for alien civilizations to have developed and beamed US signals,
Speaker 1: and yet we haven't heard from any of them. So
Speaker 1: Cardassian was motivated to think about, like, well, how would
Speaker 1: they send us messages, would they actually have enough energy,
Speaker 1: and how would they do it? So it's a way
Speaker 1: of thinking about also why we haven't heard from aliens.
Speaker 1: Nice see, it's kind of like we they haven't come visited.
Speaker 1: Why would that be? And we can't see them why
Speaker 1: would that be? And if you think about different scenarios,
Speaker 1: maybe you can come up with a way that you
Speaker 1: could see them exactly. And it might make the problem
Speaker 1: harder because maybe you discover, oh, it's quite trivial for
Speaker 1: aliens to have enough energy to beamas messages, and or
Speaker 1: maybe you discover that in order for aliens to send
Speaker 1: us messages from across the galaxy, they would have to
Speaker 1: harness all the power of the entire galaxy. And that
Speaker 1: might explain why we can't see Kardashians from other worlds,
Speaker 1: which is a bad thing. No value judgements here, man,
Speaker 1: this is just science. Well apparently this idea of how
Speaker 1: much energy and alien species might be consuming or have
Speaker 1: avail to them is all measured on something called the
Speaker 1: Kardashi of scale, which, as you said, has three stages.
Speaker 1: So let's step through these stages. What's stage number one?
Speaker 1: And is that something we're at or are we pass
Speaker 1: stage one? Where are we in this stage system? So?
Speaker 1: Stage number one is a civilization that uses all of
Speaker 1: the energy available on its planet, meaning all of the
Speaker 1: solar energy for example, that hits the surface of the Earth.
Speaker 1: We are not even at stage one. I mean we
Speaker 1: are capturing some fraction of the solar energy, for example,
Speaker 1: and digging up fossil fuels that have effectively stored solar
Speaker 1: energy from the past. But on the Earth, what's available
Speaker 1: to us is something like ten to the seventeen watts.
Speaker 1: Watts is a unit of power, so it's energy per second.
Speaker 1: Is that the kind of watt? It's like, if you
Speaker 1: had a solar panel the size of the Earth, that's
Speaker 1: how much energy we would be getting from the sun.
Speaker 1: If yes, if you can cover the entire Earth with
Speaker 1: solar panels, so you built like a solar panel that
Speaker 1: completely made the Earth in shadow, that's how much energy
Speaker 1: you could theoretically capture, or that's how much energy is
Speaker 1: falling onto those solar pan Solar panels, of course not efficient,
Speaker 1: but that's sort of like how much energy you have
Speaker 1: access to m M And that's interesting how you said that. Basically,
Speaker 1: like fossil fuels, even what we have here, maybe even
Speaker 1: wind energy, it all comes from the Sun eventually, right,
Speaker 1: All that energy originally does come from the sun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: wind also comes from the sun because it involves heating
Speaker 1: of pockets of air by the Sun, so all of
Speaker 1: that originally does come from the Sun. There are, of course,
Speaker 1: other sources of energy we could tap into on Earth
Speaker 1: that are not directly from our Sun. Like when you
Speaker 1: do fission, you're breaking apart uranium. That uranium was formed
Speaker 1: in some other process, maybe the supernova or collisions of
Speaker 1: neutron stars, well before our solar system was even birth.
Speaker 1: So you're tapping into energy sources that have been stored
Speaker 1: there for a long time. But you're saying all energy
Speaker 1: solar energy. So when I'm at the gas station actually
Speaker 1: pouring solar energy into my car, yeah, well, gas is
Speaker 1: sort of like a solar battery. The idea of the
Speaker 1: Cardaschef scale is not to argue that the maximum energy
Speaker 1: you could get on Earth is just to cover it
Speaker 1: with solar panels. It's just a way to sort of
Speaker 1: set a level to fix the standard. There's actually more
Speaker 1: energy available than that. If you could like take the
Speaker 1: components of the Earth and you fission and fusion, you
Speaker 1: could release even more energy than the sort of stage
Speaker 1: one cardassief standard. But it's just sort of like how
Speaker 1: to define a threshold, all right, So then is the
Speaker 1: threshold defined by the solar energy we get from the Sun,
Speaker 1: or like all the energy in all of the uranium
Speaker 1: and heavy atoms, and maybe even the water, because if
Speaker 1: you can figure out fusion, you could also fuse water
Speaker 1: to make energy. Is that how you define how much
Speaker 1: energy is available on planet Earth? No, it's just the
Speaker 1: amount of solar energy that falls on planet Earth defines
Speaker 1: the Cardassie of scale, so you can im principle exceed
Speaker 1: it without leaving your planet. Right. For example, you could
Speaker 1: achieve this by doing matter antimatter annihilation, right, Like two
Speaker 1: kilograms of matter antimatter annihilation every second would achieve kardashef
Speaker 1: Stage one energy levels even without doing any solar power.
Speaker 1: But I wonder if maybe in his scale he was
Speaker 1: more thinking about like long term sustainable energy sources, right, Like,
Speaker 1: maybe we can figure out fission and fusion, but eventually
Speaker 1: we're going to run out of these fuel elements in
Speaker 1: on a single planet. But the Sun is going to
Speaker 1: be burning for billions of years. That's true, although a
Speaker 1: lot of these sources would last a really long time.
Speaker 1: If for example, we could do fusion, you know, we'd
Speaker 1: need like three ms of hydrogen fused per second to
Speaker 1: reach Kardashiev stage one. That sounds like a lot, but
Speaker 1: there's a lot of hydrogen out there on the planet.
Speaker 1: You know, like a cubic kilometer of water has like
Speaker 1: a hundred billion kilograms of hydrogen. So a cubic kilometer
Speaker 1: of water is like hundreds of years of energy at
Speaker 1: the kardashi of stage one. And there's a lot of
Speaker 1: cubic kilometers of water out there, So even if you
Speaker 1: were ignoring solar power, you could achieve this level and
Speaker 1: do it for a long long time even without solar power.
Speaker 1: I feel like you're trying to convince me that this
Speaker 1: Cardashians scale is not really valid, are so I guess
Speaker 1: what are you saying like or what is the scale
Speaker 1: supposed to be measuring? Then the scale is just to
Speaker 1: set a standard to say what could you achieve using
Speaker 1: the energy of a planet. Obviously, how much energy you
Speaker 1: could actually extract from a planet over billions of years
Speaker 1: depends on what's in that planet, for example, how big
Speaker 1: is that planet, how much mass is there. But this
Speaker 1: is just like to set a standard in the end.
Speaker 1: Of course it's arbitrary, but it's also a useful measure.
Speaker 1: It's an approximate value just to sort of guide your thinking.
Speaker 1: And you know, one thing to realize is that we
Speaker 1: are far from that threshold here on Earth. If the
Speaker 1: standard is two times ten of the seventeen watts, we're
Speaker 1: about a factor of ten thousand below that. Human civilization
Speaker 1: uses like ten to the thirteen watts, so we're well
Speaker 1: below a stage one civilization. Okay, So these stages are
Speaker 1: defined by wattage. So a stage one civilization is one
Speaker 1: that uses approximately ten to the seventeen watts of energy.
Speaker 1: Is that kind of how the scale works. It's like,
Speaker 1: if you're a sialization and you're using about ten to
Speaker 1: the seventeen wats of energy, then we'll categorize you as
Speaker 1: a stage one and usually that made that will probably
Speaker 1: mean you're an a range of like still stuck in
Speaker 1: your planet exactly, that's what you're capable of, even if
Speaker 1: you're stuck on your planet, right, your cable is something
Speaker 1: of that order. Maybe you figured out matter and to
Speaker 1: matter annihilation, maybe you figured out fusion. Maybe you've covered
Speaker 1: your planet and solar panels. Maybe you've build space based
Speaker 1: solar panels that then beam the energy down to Earth.
Speaker 1: But if you're a very advancedabilization, but you're still on
Speaker 1: your planet. That's sort of the order of magnitude of
Speaker 1: energy that you have available to you. All right, So
Speaker 1: then where are we You said we're below that maximum usage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're about a factor of ten thousand below officially being
Speaker 1: stage one crowned by the Galactic Empire as a baby civilization,
Speaker 1: age one, Carl Stagan estimated they were like a type
Speaker 1: zero point seven civilization on the carda chef scale, you like,
Speaker 1: try to make it continuous instead of just having like
Speaker 1: one to three. And the estimates that were around zero
Speaker 1: point seven. And it's kind of like a logarithmic scale, right,
Speaker 1: like difference between point seven and point it is. It's
Speaker 1: partly like an order of magnitude or something. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: was using a logarithmic extrapolation. And the reason is that
Speaker 1: we tend to increase the consumption of energy bio civilization
Speaker 1: fairly exponentially. Like in the last decade, energy use has
Speaker 1: gone up by two point three percent every year. Every year,
Speaker 1: that's a larger increase because it's two of a bigger number,
Speaker 1: And so people estimate that if we increase our energy
Speaker 1: use every year by three percent, then in a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty or two hundred years, we would be at
Speaker 1: type one civilization. I wonder if this scale also depends
Speaker 1: on how many people there are, or how many individuals
Speaker 1: of a certain species there are. Like you know, if
Speaker 1: one person was using ten to the seventeen, watch must
Speaker 1: be a super duper advanced civilization, right with you know,
Speaker 1: one person being a control all this energy. But as
Speaker 1: you know, there's like a trillion or trillion trillion people
Speaker 1: then and each person is using a little bit of energy,
Speaker 1: then maybe it's not that impressive a thing. Maybe alien
Speaker 1: Kardashians are dominating the alien energy market. It's a good
Speaker 1: question how they use is their energy? And I think
Speaker 1: for a Kardashiv, the goal was to think about what
Speaker 1: fraction of their energy they might devote to sending a
Speaker 1: signal to outer space. If they have access to tend
Speaker 1: to the seventeen watts of energy, maybe they would devote
Speaker 1: one percent of it to pumping messages to the stars
Speaker 1: or point oh one percent of it. But it just
Speaker 1: sort of gives you a scale for what they have
Speaker 1: access to. M all right, let's talk about what they
Speaker 1: might use all this energy for. But I guess let's
Speaker 1: step through the the rest of these stages. So if
Speaker 1: we're like almost up stage one civilization, what would be
Speaker 1: a stage to a civilization. Stage two would be too
Speaker 1: unshackle yourself from your planet and then take advantage of
Speaker 1: all the energy put out by your star. Now here
Speaker 1: we are on Earth. Even if we gobbled up all
Speaker 1: of the photons that come to the Earth from the Sun,
Speaker 1: that's a tiny fraction of the Sun's energy. The Sun
Speaker 1: is also shooting out photons that don't hit the Earth,
Speaker 1: of course, and all sorts of directions, and so the
Speaker 1: idea is capture all of the energy of your star,
Speaker 1: not just the fraction that falls on your planet. So
Speaker 1: stage two is like we've left the Earth and we're
Speaker 1: living in space. Basically, you don't even have to leave
Speaker 1: the Earth, and you don't have to live in space necessarily,
Speaker 1: but you have to have somehow have the technology to
Speaker 1: harness the energy of that star, which probably means building
Speaker 1: some mega structure, like a bunch of solar panels that
Speaker 1: envelope your star to gather all of that energy. Right,
Speaker 1: But that would be a pretty big construction project. I mean,
Speaker 1: you would need people living out there just to build
Speaker 1: something so big or at least have the ability to like,
Speaker 1: you know, move around space pretty easily, which is a
Speaker 1: lot more than what we can do now. We definitely
Speaker 1: are nowhere close to doing that, and you probably would
Speaker 1: need people out there, but you also might be able
Speaker 1: to automate a lot of it. You could have robots,
Speaker 1: for example, that build more robots and then build this
Speaker 1: massive structure. It's hard to get your mind around the
Speaker 1: sort of the size of this thing. This would be
Speaker 1: the biggest thing anybody ever built. If you make it
Speaker 1: really close to the Sun, it can be smaller, but
Speaker 1: then it's subject to a lot of solar radiation. If
Speaker 1: you make it further away from the Sun, then it's
Speaker 1: got to be like ridiculously massive. Like for example, if
Speaker 1: you build this thing at one a U, so you
Speaker 1: have like now a sphere whose radius is the radius
Speaker 1: of the Earth's orbit, then the inside of this thing
Speaker 1: is going to be five hundred and fifty million times
Speaker 1: the surface area of the Earth. So imagine a construction
Speaker 1: project that rebuilds the service that area of the Earth
Speaker 1: five hundred and fifty million times. That's definitely not going
Speaker 1: to be on budget or on schedule, right, Although the
Speaker 1: positive thing is that it will always be sunny inside
Speaker 1: of that sphere, right, just like here in southern California, yeah,
Speaker 1: or Philadelphia. But I mean this is sort of like
Speaker 1: one way that you could harness the power of the Sun,
Speaker 1: which is to build a giant solar panel that basically
Speaker 1: like envelops the Sun so you can capture all of
Speaker 1: its energy. And what does that take us up to
Speaker 1: in terms of watta? So Stage one, remember was ten
Speaker 1: to the seventeen watts. Stage two using all the energy
Speaker 1: available from the Sun is like four times ten to
Speaker 1: the twenty six watts. So that's like a billion times
Speaker 1: or two billion times more energy than Stage one. Really
Speaker 1: only a billion times to go from the Earth to
Speaker 1: the Sun. Only a billion times more energy. Wow, you
Speaker 1: don't seem impressed. Well, as in the Earth super tiny
Speaker 1: compared to the Sun. The Earth is certainly super tiny
Speaker 1: compared to the Sun. But the sort of cross sectional
Speaker 1: area of the Earth, which is the fraction of the
Speaker 1: Sun's energy that it captures, is approximately one billion of
Speaker 1: the surface area of a sphere whose radius is the
Speaker 1: orbit of the Earth. That's why if you built the
Speaker 1: Dicen sphere, it had to be like many hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of times the surface area of the Earth to
Speaker 1: cover the inside of that sphere. So a fact of
Speaker 1: a billion is about right. But again, this is just
Speaker 1: solar energy. Like, we could probably maybe get to that
Speaker 1: level of wattage if we figure a fusion or fission
Speaker 1: more efficiently right here on Earth. It's conceptionally possible to
Speaker 1: achieve a stage to civilization to get that same level
Speaker 1: of energy without building the dicensphere, developing some other way
Speaker 1: to extract energy from within the Earth, you know, antimatter
Speaker 1: or fusion or something else. Crazy. Again, this is just
Speaker 1: sort of like a scale. The Sun is the cheapest,
Speaker 1: most abundant, easiest to identify source of energy in the
Speaker 1: solar system, So what could you do if you could
Speaker 1: capture all of the energy that it produces? Right? All right, Well,
Speaker 1: let's step through quickly. What are some of these other stages?
Speaker 1: If you use all the energy in the Sun, where
Speaker 1: do you go from there? All the energy in the galaxy? Yes,
Speaker 1: exactly where else could you go except from our star
Speaker 1: to all the other stars? So Kardashian's stage three says,
Speaker 1: use all the energy in the galaxy, which basically is
Speaker 1: like all the energy in each individual star, and that
Speaker 1: takes you up another eleven orders of magnitude. Another factor
Speaker 1: of a hundred billion to four times tend to the
Speaker 1: thirty seven watts. Member Stage one, which we're not even
Speaker 1: at is tend to the seventeen watts. So now we're
Speaker 1: talking about twenty orders of magnitude more energy than the
Speaker 1: Stage one. Like somehow, if you have solar panels around
Speaker 1: every star in the galaxy, then you could harness all
Speaker 1: of the light that is coming out of a particular galaxy.
Speaker 1: Right in principle, if you didn't think building a dicen
Speaker 1: sphere was a big enough construction project, you could build
Speaker 1: one around every single star in the galaxy. I can't
Speaker 1: even say it without laughing at such a ridiculous idea.
Speaker 1: But in principle, if you develop the machines to build
Speaker 1: more machines to complete your dicensphere project, they could just
Speaker 1: go off to the rest of the galaxy and keep working.
Speaker 1: Maybe your robots are like a virus. Once they start
Speaker 1: building dicen spheres, they just don't stop. That sounds like
Speaker 1: a negative thing to snuff out the whole galaxy basically, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it depends on what you do with that, you know,
Speaker 1: if the robots developed these dicen spears and then channel
Speaker 1: the energy to you for you to use for good
Speaker 1: for building your civilization and feeding your people, etcetera. Awesome.
Speaker 1: If they just harness the energy the galaxy and snuff
Speaker 1: it out, then yeah, the galaxy is going to go dark, right,
Speaker 1: All the stars would be burning inside these dice in spheres.
Speaker 1: There'll be no more light being released for like astronomy
Speaker 1: and star gazing and romantic dinners. Well, you can imagine
Speaker 1: maybe an alien civilization doing this, and we haven't meagined
Speaker 1: then apparently, and we I think we've talked about this
Speaker 1: also in our podcast about this possibility, but maybe let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about why this is kind of
Speaker 1: relevant right to our question of aliens and do they
Speaker 1: exist and could we see them out there? Because the
Speaker 1: ideas and not just that there's an alien realization using
Speaker 1: all this energy, but maybe they're using it in a
Speaker 1: way that would allow us to communicate with them or
Speaker 1: at least see them, right exactly, having aliens out there
Speaker 1: in the universe is not enough for us to discover them.
Speaker 1: We need to get signals from them and at least
Speaker 1: up till now we've relied on messages from electromagnetic radiation.
Speaker 1: That's what we're looking for. You know, the search for
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial intelligence is scanning the sky for messages essentially in
Speaker 1: the radio waves, and to produce those radio waves takes energy.
Speaker 1: When you're a radio station is pumping out music that
Speaker 1: you like over the airwaves, they're doing so by running
Speaker 1: an antenna, by sending electricity up and down that antenna,
Speaker 1: by wiggling those electrons so that they radiate the photons
Speaker 1: that you pick up. You know how some radio stations
Speaker 1: are very powerful and other radio stations you can't really
Speaker 1: pick up in some areas. That's because some have more
Speaker 1: powerful broadcast antennas because they spend more money to build
Speaker 1: more antennas and use more energy. So in order to
Speaker 1: be heard a further distance, you need more energy. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess maybe I don't understand the scenario that you're
Speaker 1: imagining here. Are you imagining like there's an alien civilization
Speaker 1: using all this energy, maybe all the energy in a
Speaker 1: galaxy and somehow we can pick up on that, or
Speaker 1: is this scenario more specific where you're imagining like, all right,
Speaker 1: if there are aliens broadcasting out like hey we're here, signal.
Speaker 1: How much energy would they have available to put into
Speaker 1: that so that we could hope to see it? I
Speaker 1: think Cardiship is imagining the second one, that if aliens
Speaker 1: are intentionally sending out messages in the cosmos, how powerful
Speaker 1: could they make those messages? And what kind of civilizations
Speaker 1: could support ridiculously powerful messages that we could even hear
Speaker 1: from across the galaxy or from other galaxies. I mean,
Speaker 1: a civilization that harnessed the entire energy of their galaxy
Speaker 1: could do incredible things, probably including sending very powerful messages
Speaker 1: across the millions of light years between galaxies. But also,
Speaker 1: you know, like galactic engineering projects, and you have that
Speaker 1: much energy available, you can almost do anything, right. I
Speaker 1: guess that's a whole separate question is like, would they
Speaker 1: use some of that energy to send out a signal
Speaker 1: to other people saying, hey, come check out our awesome engineering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, would we write we're currently using a very
Speaker 1: very tiny fraction of our energy budget to even listen
Speaker 1: to messages from outer space. We're not even really sending
Speaker 1: very many, at least not intentionally. You know, as you
Speaker 1: said before, our use of energy makes us visible from
Speaker 1: other planets, but not from very far away, because those
Speaker 1: messages are not broadcast in like a tight beam that
Speaker 1: sort of generally diffused, and so you have to be
Speaker 1: pretty close to Earth or have very very sensitive antennas
Speaker 1: to even pick up our messages. And I guess you're
Speaker 1: also imagining, or Cardachip was imagining the scenario where you're
Speaker 1: broadcasting blindly, right, Like, if you're broadcasting blindly in all
Speaker 1: possible directions and your hope that somebody listens to it,
Speaker 1: how much energy would you need for that? But if
Speaker 1: you want a more focused communication, then you wouldn't need that, right,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. If you don't know where people are,
Speaker 1: you need to broadcast in every direction, and so the
Speaker 1: power of your message falls very quickly. It goes like
Speaker 1: one over distance squared, just like the brightness of the
Speaker 1: sun falls as you get further and further away from it,
Speaker 1: because the sun is not like focused like a laser
Speaker 1: beam on your eyeball. And a good thing too, So
Speaker 1: if you're broadcasting your message indiscriminately in every direction, then
Speaker 1: it has to be super powerful for anybody to pick
Speaker 1: it up. And it's a concrete example. The signals that
Speaker 1: we sent from a recibo could only be received by
Speaker 1: an Arecibo like telescope if it was less than one
Speaker 1: light year away. And we know that there aren't any
Speaker 1: other solar systems less than a light year away, so
Speaker 1: aliens with our level of technology could not pick up
Speaker 1: our signals even if they were around the closest star.
Speaker 1: M interesting. All right, Well, let's get into what this
Speaker 1: could mean for our search for extraterrestrial life and whether
Speaker 1: or not there are chartsians in other galaxies. That's a
Speaker 1: very important question. But first let's take another quick break.
Speaker 1: All right, we're talking about the Cardashian scale, which is
Speaker 1: a scale that physicists have invented as a way to
Speaker 1: think about how much energy alien civilizations might be consuming
Speaker 1: or have available to them to send out, Hey, we're
Speaker 1: here a signal which we might be able to pick up,
Speaker 1: which I guess is important, right because if we have
Speaker 1: a whole project called set to explore or to look
Speaker 1: for alien signals, it would be good to know if
Speaker 1: we even have a chance of seeing signals from other
Speaker 1: alien civilizations, right exactly. And it's a kind of thought
Speaker 1: experiment that physicists like to think about. Let's make some
Speaker 1: simple assumptions about the trajectory of civilizations and think about
Speaker 1: who we're looking for. Are we looking for a fairly
Speaker 1: young civilization like our own. Are we more likely to
Speaker 1: only be able to spot very advanced civilizations. So let's
Speaker 1: try to spend a minute or so thinking about what
Speaker 1: they might look like, how they might communicate, and what
Speaker 1: technology they might have available to them. Right, And like
Speaker 1: you said, like if we were to send a signal
Speaker 1: out to another story, we would need a ton of
Speaker 1: energy because the nearest star system is more than a
Speaker 1: light year way, which means we would need a lot
Speaker 1: of energy. So I guess to see an alien civilization
Speaker 1: in another galaxy, or to hope to see an Asian
Speaker 1: civilization in another galaxy sending out a signal that they're there,
Speaker 1: we would need to imagine an alien civilization pretty advanced, right,
Speaker 1: with an access to an enormous amount of energy. That's right,
Speaker 1: unless we were extraordinarily lucky and we happen to resolve
Speaker 1: a single star in their galaxy and see them do
Speaker 1: some crazy construction project on it, or they were manipulating
Speaker 1: the star itself to pulse with messages that we could resolve.
Speaker 1: That would require crazy advanced technology and access to energy
Speaker 1: that we can't even imagine. Yeah, some fraction of all
Speaker 1: the energy of a galaxy. And so that's where the
Speaker 1: Kardaship scale would say. It's like that's another stage in
Speaker 1: that scale, which is like, if you can harness all
Speaker 1: of the energy in the galaxy, then maybe you might
Speaker 1: put some of that energy to putting out a signal
Speaker 1: which would make you visible to aliens or to humans
Speaker 1: in other galaxies. Right, Yeah, maybe you have a prison
Speaker 1: planet where you put all of your Kardashians and you
Speaker 1: just want big flash and warning signs like do not
Speaker 1: go here, young civilizations. I feel like you just took
Speaker 1: it to another level against the Cardashians there. Now you're
Speaker 1: talking about jailing them in planets. Remember we want them
Speaker 1: on the podcast on Yeah, sorry, I'm talking about a
Speaker 1: luxurious island just for alien Kardashians, private planet. Yes, and
Speaker 1: you get to hang out with the Lockness Monster and
Speaker 1: pick Foot also future guests on our podcast. Yeah, that's right,
Speaker 1: stay tuned, keep listening. But this kind of thinking lets
Speaker 1: you imagine the kinds of things that aliens might be
Speaker 1: able to do if you have access to all the
Speaker 1: energy of your solar system or at your galaxy, you
Speaker 1: could like move stars around, you could like obliterate planets.
Speaker 1: You can build new kinds of stars nobody had ever
Speaker 1: seen before. You could have a whole new branch of engineering,
Speaker 1: you know, galaxy engineering. Yeah, and so that takes us
Speaker 1: to about stage three in the Cardaship scale. Right, that's
Speaker 1: where you may be built toller panels around every star
Speaker 1: in your galaxy. Is there a stage four? Can you
Speaker 1: go bigger than that? Let's keep basically speculating. You want
Speaker 1: to extrapolate our extrapolation, Sure, let's do it well. Cardasship
Speaker 1: have ended his extrapolation at stage three, imagining only use
Speaker 1: of the entire galaxy. But that was the nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: and it's been a popular topic for people to think about,
Speaker 1: and so there have been extensions to the Kardaship scale.
Speaker 1: Stage four says, what if you could use all the
Speaker 1: energy in the universe? What is in the universe potentially infinite?
Speaker 1: It is potentially infinite, absolutely, And this stage imagines not
Speaker 1: just capturing all of the energy from all the stars
Speaker 1: in each galaxy, but also somehow tapping into that mysterious
Speaker 1: form of energy, dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion
Speaker 1: of the universe and has a much bigger slice of
Speaker 1: the universe's energy budget than just the paltry matter in stars,
Speaker 1: which you might remember accounts for less than five percent
Speaker 1: of the energy in the universe. Right, All the matter
Speaker 1: in our universe only counts for five percent. Right, And
Speaker 1: there's also dark matter and dark energy. Are you saying, like,
Speaker 1: even if we harness all the energy coming out of
Speaker 1: the stars of a galaxy, and even if you take
Speaker 1: all of the energy in the matter of that galaxy,
Speaker 1: that's still only five percent of all the energy available
Speaker 1: to you someone, Right, Yeah, And so if you want
Speaker 1: to think big, right, then let's attack the biggest slice
Speaker 1: of the pie. And most of the energy of the
Speaker 1: universe is in dark energy. Sevent of all the energy
Speaker 1: in the universe is now devoted to accelerating the expansion
Speaker 1: of the universe. If you want to build a really
Speaker 1: big engineering project, you might as well start with the
Speaker 1: biggest slice. I wonder if maybe dark energy isn't engineering project, Daniel,
Speaker 1: I mean, if a Slies were basically speculating, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: speculated dark energy is just aliens making the universe bigger. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a really clear idea, but you're not actually the
Speaker 1: first one to have it. One physicist Zoltan Gallantaie argued
Speaker 1: that if there are civilizations that can do that, they
Speaker 1: could not be detected because their activities would be indistinguishable
Speaker 1: from the workings of the universe. We have no baseline
Speaker 1: to compare them. To write, we are assuming that the
Speaker 1: universe is driven mostly by natural processes. But if there
Speaker 1: are civilizations out there that are type four and they've
Speaker 1: been playing games with the universe, then that's what we've
Speaker 1: been observing this entire your time. Are you saying that
Speaker 1: the laws of physics are indistinguishable from the workings of
Speaker 1: a mysterious being. You're making the case for God basically, well,
Speaker 1: these civilizations would have almost godlike powers. We think they
Speaker 1: would still be constrained by the laws of physics. But remember,
Speaker 1: we don't know what those laws are. We have no
Speaker 1: understanding of dark energy. Really, we see that this is happening,
Speaker 1: but we do not understand the mechanism for it or
Speaker 1: what is controlling it. So it is potentially possible that
Speaker 1: there's an alien civilization out there with some knob and
Speaker 1: they are driving the expansion of the universe. I mean
Speaker 1: This is speculation on speculation, absolutely, but yes, we don't
Speaker 1: understand the mechanism of it, so it could be down
Speaker 1: to some alien civilization. This is a reduction of speculations
Speaker 1: that what you're saying, we're going deep. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: are more levels. What what could be more powerful than
Speaker 1: all the energy in the universe? Well, Stage five says,
Speaker 1: use all the energy in the multiverse? Right, Why be
Speaker 1: limited to a single universe when apparently there's an infinite
Speaker 1: number of possible universes out there for you to harness
Speaker 1: and manipulate. Yeah, why not, let's go there. So this
Speaker 1: is a saving that the multiverse exists and that somehow
Speaker 1: some alien cilvercision has access to all of these different
Speaker 1: universes and also have the ability to harness their energy.
Speaker 1: You sound incredulous, and that's for a good reason, because
Speaker 1: it's a pretty ridiculous idea. You're right, we don't even
Speaker 1: know if the multiverse exists, Like, are there other universes
Speaker 1: out there? If the multiverse does exist, is it the
Speaker 1: flavor of multiverse that would allow us to communicate with
Speaker 1: other universes? There are some in which these universes are
Speaker 1: forever separate and can never communicate with each other, and
Speaker 1: so that would prevent any alien civilization from harness and them.
Speaker 1: For example, the quantum multiverse from the Many Worlds interpretation
Speaker 1: of quantum mechanics says that the universe splits every time
Speaker 1: a quantum object has to make a decision. But you
Speaker 1: can't ever access those other universes. But in principle there
Speaker 1: are versions of the multiverse, or the other universes could
Speaker 1: interact with ours, and so in principle, some aliens might
Speaker 1: figure out how to manipulate those portals and somehow have
Speaker 1: a cross universe civilization. I guess, though, well two things.
Speaker 1: First of all, I guess if you're using all the
Speaker 1: energy that in the universe, wouldn't you be taking away
Speaker 1: that energy? Like if you're somehow using the dark energy
Speaker 1: in our universe, wouldn't that stop the expansion of the
Speaker 1: universe potentially? Or maybe the dark energy is just like
Speaker 1: a waste product of something else they're doing. Maybe this
Speaker 1: is just like the crumbs on their table. I mean,
Speaker 1: let's think really big. I said, you're saying the expansion
Speaker 1: of the universe is a byproduct of whatever nefarious or
Speaker 1: maybe or I guess we can't judge pre judge, but whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, thing it is they're doing with the inherent
Speaker 1: energy of the universe. Is that what you're saying, like,
Speaker 1: maybe there's something deeper than dark energy, and dark energy
Speaker 1: is just like the smog of whatever process they're using
Speaker 1: to to steal the use the energy of the universe.
Speaker 1: M I'm just trying to anticipate what's going to happen
Speaker 1: in season sixty million when we're only on season five thousand,
Speaker 1: so obviously there's a lot of dot dot dot happening.
Speaker 1: But yeah, potentially, are you equating us to like online
Speaker 1: forums where people are posting fan theories. Is that all
Speaker 1: physics is fan theories? I think I saw that in
Speaker 1: a comic strip somewhere. Yeah, exactly, that's x ca CD.
Speaker 1: All theories are just fan fiction about the universe, And
Speaker 1: in some sense, yes, that's what's happening here. We're trying
Speaker 1: to imagine what an alien statilization might be, like, what
Speaker 1: are the limits on it? Essentially, we're not suggesting that
Speaker 1: there are aliens out there manipulating the universe and controlling
Speaker 1: it and that dark energy is just their pollution, but
Speaker 1: we're just trying to push up against the boundaries of
Speaker 1: our thinking and wondering what is possible in the end,
Speaker 1: Do we have arguments that suggest that that would be impossible?
Speaker 1: Because if not, let's keep an open mind to what
Speaker 1: might be happening out there. The second thing I want
Speaker 1: to say was that I feel like that would have
Speaker 1: been a fun sequel to the matrix to find out
Speaker 1: that actually our universe is just like a battery for
Speaker 1: somebody else's universe. Oh, the meta matrix. Yeah, the multi matrix,
Speaker 1: the multi meta matrix. I like it. It's that one,
Speaker 1: all right. Well, this cardiship scale is a pretty interesting
Speaker 1: way to think about aliens, what they might be doing,
Speaker 1: how big they can get, or I guess, you know,
Speaker 1: just pushing the idea of what can a sentient species
Speaker 1: do in the universe, like what's possible for a sentient
Speaker 1: entity or entities? Yeah, and it leaves completely aside the
Speaker 1: very important question of what a sentient entity should do
Speaker 1: with the universe. If you are capable of building Dyson
Speaker 1: spheres that completely blot out every star in the sky,
Speaker 1: should you is that the right use for your technology?
Speaker 1: Should you be measuring your civilization by how much energy
Speaker 1: of the universe you can capture for your own purposes.
Speaker 1: Maybe alien civilizations have taken another route, trying to live
Speaker 1: harmoniously with the universe rather than trying to manipulate it
Speaker 1: for their own ends. Wait, are you calling God an alien? Technically? Um,
Speaker 1: God would be an alien right unless they were born
Speaker 1: on Earth. I don't know how you can have the
Speaker 1: word technically god an alien in the same sentence. I
Speaker 1: just don't get into I don't get it either. But
Speaker 1: this is a natural sciences podcast, so I think that's allowed. Technically,
Speaker 1: Bigfoot is a lockness monster. That's right. Technically it's all
Speaker 1: natural science because it's being talked about naturally by scientists,
Speaker 1: so therefore it is natural science. Yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: sort of the way that physicists think about civilizations. How
Speaker 1: much energy do we have? How much energy is available
Speaker 1: to us? It's of course not the only way to
Speaker 1: think about civilizations. And one thing we're trying to do
Speaker 1: in our civilization is actually tamped down our energy use. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: we talked earlier about how every year we increase our
Speaker 1: energy used by three percent, and that might take us
Speaker 1: to stage one civilization. Don't think about that like a goal.
Speaker 1: It's not like a bad We're gonna put on our civilization. Hey, look,
Speaker 1: we increased our energy used by ten thousand. Yeah. Right,
Speaker 1: that would probably be a bad thing for life on
Speaker 1: Earth if we were using so much energy. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: be bad if we were using all the energy in
Speaker 1: the universe and then stopping expansion and then accidentally, oops,
Speaker 1: we caused the universe to contract and crunch down. Was
Speaker 1: that us who made the whole universe collapse into the
Speaker 1: black hole? Our apologies. Please take this voucher and try
Speaker 1: civilization in another one of our multiverses. We should have
Speaker 1: gone green much sooner. All right. Well, it's definitely fun
Speaker 1: and interesting to think about these wild and crazy scenarios.
Speaker 1: But as you said, it is a little bit part
Speaker 1: of science to imagine what could be possible, because you
Speaker 1: might come up with something that you didn't think about
Speaker 1: before that maybe shapes the future experiment or how you
Speaker 1: look for answers in the universe. Yeah. And while we
Speaker 1: sometimes think about natural science as very rigorous and found
Speaker 1: it in experiments and high precision, an important part of
Speaker 1: it which is just creative and exploratory and wondering about
Speaker 1: what is possible. Sometimes the most fun parts of science
Speaker 1: are when you're tackling a really big question that nobody
Speaker 1: has tackled before, and so you have to begin with
Speaker 1: a few crazy, fairly simple ideas. Many things just fun
Speaker 1: to talk about Indians, which I think, let's be honest, Dan,
Speaker 1: is really the main point of your choosing your topic. Yes,
Speaker 1: I always do enjoy talking about aliens, and I hope
Speaker 1: that the aliens listening to this podcast enjoy our baselist
Speaker 1: speculation about their lives and motives. That's right, And if
Speaker 1: the Kardashians are aliens, they're also welcome to come on
Speaker 1: the podcast. Open invitation to any Kardashian or Alien and
Speaker 1: or alien. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. Or more podcast from
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio. Visit the I Heart Radio, Apple Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H