Are We Alone? Cosmic Loneliness and the Longing to Believe (with Adam Kirsch)

0:02 Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econ.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. Today is june twenty seventh, twenty twenty six, and my guest is Adam Kirsch. A senior editor at The Atlantic magazine. Adam was last here in January of twenty twenty five. Discussing his book on settler colonialism.

0:50 Our topic for today is his latest book, We Want. When mainstream and why it matters Adam, welcome back to Econ Talk. Thanks so much. I'm really glad to be back with you.

1:02 Now I have to confess I wasn't interested in the topic of this book, so if you're listening, don't don't don't hang up. Don't don't don't switch off. Because If does it excite you, I think this will be a very interesting conversation. It isn't a very It's a lovely book. It's full of uh things I didn't know.

1:19 And it's also very provocative. So I'm I'm excited about our conversation. Despite the topic. of the book my faith in the author was rewarded Now the first part of the book Is about the chain.

1:35 Hundred and thirty uh short pages. The first part of the book is it Is about to change In the public conversation about Aliens. And by aliens we're talking about

1:47 Would be visitors from Outer space. Um it's a hard phrase to actually. Explain non humans. Sentient non humans. From a different place. Um

1:58 You're right. In the last decade. However, the way we talk about E Ts and UFOs has undergone a significant change. Actually Two complimentary changes. First, the government and the media

2:11 begin to treat the subject much more seriously. For reasons this book will explore UFO sightings that would once Have been dismissed as hoaxes. Are relegated to the pages of supermarket tabloids are now respectfully discussed. in the mainstream press and on the floor of Congress.

2:27 As a direct result, public opinion on the subjects has changed significantly. With more Americans ever saying they believe the earth has been visited by aliens. Now, Adam, I miss this. Uh it's Am I first? Reactions What the heck?

2:41 What is going on? Well uh it your reaction is a common one. In fact, I say in the introduction to the book that in while I was writing this book, when I told people I'm writing a book about aliens and UFOs, a lot of people were like, okay, check, please. I don't want to talk about this. I don't want to hear about this. Um And I just to be clear, I'm not saying that there are

2:59 have been aliens or UFOs on earth. In fact, I'm quite sure that there haven't been. But as you say, the thing that made me want to write about this was that in 2017 there was a a really Um sort of significant shift in the way that this subject is covered and talked about in the media and it can be Pinpointed pretty closely. So in December 2017, the New York Times and the Washington Post both published front page stories about the so-called Pentagon UFO videos. And these were videos that had circulated um online in a sort of leaked or or rumored clandestine fashion, but now we're being officially reported that they were videos taken by

3:39 Um Navy fighter planes showing strange things in the air, uh hovering orbs, uh one thing that was described as looking like a tic tac. Um and they moved and they looked like things that weren't conventional aircraft. And what was significant about these videos was that the Pentagon took any notice of UFO reports. So going back to the 1960s, the the official Pentagon stance was there are no UFOs. And now it turned out that in fact there were these these videos, people within the military had seen things like this. There had been reports of them.

4:22 And That fed into this idea, which has always been important for the sort of UFO believer community, that the government is hiding things that it knows. At the same time, these reports showed that there had been a Defense Department program Um called ATIP, which are the which was uh a sort of short lived five year program that had a budget of twenty two million dollars to Uh

4:47 collect and analyze reports of UFOs by military personnel. And again, that was something that the Pentagon had always officially denied, which said did not exist. And then it turned out that there was this sort of small program, more or less buried in the enormous bureaucracy of the Pentagon, with a few people working on it. So these two things were reported for the first time in December 2017. And it really changed the way that mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post and and then others Talked about this story because before then I think anyone who talked about UFO sightings was sort of the presumption was that they were a crank or a hoaxer or something like that. And now for the first time it seemed like well, maybe there is a story here. Maybe there's something that we could get to the bottom to and report maybe there's more to this than meets the eye. And I think that that change, which I saw happening as a journalist, you know, working uh at the time at the Wall Street Journal and seeing how other publications were covering this story.

5:42 Uh was really interesting to me because after all, the idea that there might be UFOs is pretty interesting if it's true, right? It's big if true, as people say. Um the book starts with that. That's the first chapter, but then it goes on to talk in more In broader terms about Why people are interested in UFOs, why people want to believe in them, and how it it demonstrates some of the same dynamics that we've seen over the last 10 years going on in politics about other issues. And then it looks at the science of well, what actually is the state of science about life outside of Earth. What do scientists think about it? What are they doing to to find it?

6:18 So You talk. Many, many books have been written about this, and you talk about this community of of of Believers. Um

6:30 Yeah, it's As is your want, very respectfully. Um But Fundamentally what what it comes down to is despite this surge of interest, despite this Openness on the part of

6:44 of the government say to Admit to certain things that have been going on. There's really no evidence. None. Like Not like Weak evidence or

6:54 All the evidence is what we would call um The fancy name would be Testimonials. The other name for it would be stories. Um There are things that happen to a single Person, uh a pilot.

7:08 Could be credible. In some dimension because he he's Seems to lead a normal life. And there are other people who maybe, you know, are a little more troubled and who make claims about And being sucked into

7:20 Into spaceships and so on. Um Summarized The lack of evidence, just to be blunt about it. Sure.

7:29 After This sort of initial Revelations, these revelations in twenty seventeen. Um There was a lot of interest in finding out, you know, are there actually secret videos or artifacts or um things that could be revealed or disclosed that would really clinch

7:48 the case that there have been UFOs on earth and that the government knows about it and has been hiding it. There have been a number of of people, not a number, but let's say about half a dozen people who, as you say, are credentials, who have histories working for the Defense Department or the State Department. military officers who have made these claims pretty vocally, including in twenty twenty three in front of Congress. There was a House hearing in which three people who were military pilots testified about things that they had seen. And so There have been people promoting the idea that Um

8:22 that military pilots have encountered UFOs, or more provocatively, that the government has alien spacecraft in a warehouse somewhere, or even corpses of aliens that have been retrieved from crash sites. And there have been people who have said Um Yeah, you know, it's quite a bit. Seriously, I know that this is true, but I can't tell you exactly where they are, or someone who know who I know knows, but they won't tell me exactly where they are. So there's always like one step removed of I can't actually point it point it out to you myself, but trust me, because I've I'm sure that this exists. And so when it comes down to it

8:58 There is no evidence. Um On social media where a lot of this discussion takes place where someone was quoting something that I had written in this book about how there's still no evidence, and someone said that's not true. There might not be proof, but there is evidence. So to me what that gets to is one of the main things I write about in the book, which is what does it mean for some for there to be evidence of something? What's the difference between evidence and testimony? And to get into the to sort of deeper questions of

9:28 What does it mean to think scientifically about the world? How to evaluate we evaluate scientific claims, especially for someone like me who's not a scientist, I'm a a humanist, if if anything, um, with the my sort of interests are in literature and religion. And so I am not an astronomer or anything like that. So putting myself in the position of someone who, like most of us, is is hearing scientific claims. How do we think about these claims? How do we um evaluate them not being experts, right? Um and I think that that's an important question that gets that we have to deal with in lots of ways in a democracy, most uh recent example might be public health. There are a lot of public health claims where s people who are scientists and experts say one thing and then there's a large number of lay people who disagree with them or won't listen to them and believe something else is true. And how do you reconcile those two uh sort of claims in a democracy where Yeah, on most issues the majority rules.

10:22 And it's fascinating to me because There's been no time in human history Where we have as much access to information as we have right now. It's really at a An exhilarating time for a curious person. I've said this many times on the program. And yet

10:41 There is this nagging uh suspicion that Many of us have that Um Even though information is plentiful. Very few people are well informed.

10:53 And their willingness The willingness of So many people To believe in conspiracies, to believe in something because the experts believe the opposite. And they must be being exploited, the the citizen is

11:08 Is um There uh It's a bad It seems like a crazy thing to say, but Certain medieval

11:15 uh level of uh Of knowledge and misinformation, uh disinformation Something akin to witch hunts and uh demons in in the Middle Ages in the medieval times, and I it's just kind of extraordinary, and in and in this particular case. Um

11:36 If we really were being visited by Uh Alien. Bangs.

11:44 Do you think there'd be quite a bit of that? It's not the kinda first of all, it'd be really hard to cover it up. The second thing is. Uh it wouldn't be like you know, I saw something, I wasn't sure what it was. And that would be that seems to be like the main Evidence, um

11:59 It's not like there were a group of people say at a seven eleven And a person with four heads came in and spoke in a language no one understood. And they were all swept up into the spaceship together. And um they gave them a piece of uh metal that isn't available in in on earth. I mean, these are the things that we would normally call Evidence.

12:19 And there's nothing. Not a plausible Not a plausible hypothesis on the surface. It's not plausible for for a couple of reasons. One is

12:30 Um, just looking at the question of images, right? There have been There are billions and billions of people all the time with a camera in their hand, um, walking around all over earth with cameras in their hands. It's and no one has ever taken a a picture of what's really clearly a an alien or an alien spaceship. Whenever these images are proposed, it's always something that's sort of uh an infrared radar image that looks like a blurry circle or a light in the sky, something like that. There's never a clear image of anything to look at. And in fact that's always been true. And one one thing I quote in the book is that in the 1950s, Carl Jung, the uh psychologist um wrote about UFO signings in the 1950s where he talked about, you know, well what's what's really going on when people say that they're seeing UFOs. And he said

13:15 Um one thing about UFOs is that they're not photogenic. Meaning that like even people who say I've seen a UFO can never actually seem to take a picture of one. He talks about a friend of his who's like I saw UFO was in the sky above my head for an hour, and Jung says, Well then why didn't you take a picture of it? And he says, well, I just forgot. I was so absorbed with it, I never I didn't even think occur to me to take my camera out and take a picture. That kind of thing's always a reason why an actual image is never produced. And then the other kinds of of evidence that you might expect if there was an alien spacecraft would be something that would show up on a space telescope or a radar. Radar. facility or a radioastronomy observatory. There are lots of people who study space and the atmosphere who are we're monitoring it all the time and who would be able to tell us if something came

14:01 to our planet from somewhere else. And Certainly nothing like an artifact, like here's something you can hold in your hands. You can analyze, for example, the isotopes in it and say, well, this is a kind of metal that isn't found on Earth, or something like that. Those are all the kinds of things that you would expect if we were talking about normal scientific evidence. And so there's a a famous Um phrase upon this subject that Carl Sagan said. Um because Carl Sagan, who was a a real astronomer who uh was very interested in the idea of extraterrestrial life and wrote about it and thought about it.

14:33 said uh extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So if you're going to claim that something as extraordinary as a UFO or an alien has come to Earth, then you have to have some piece of extraordinary evidence to back up that claim. And that's something that has never been produced. So I think the the the sort of obvious answer is this evidence doesn't exist because these things haven't happened. And this is sort of the reason why I found this interesting subject, because that in and of itself is not that interesting of a statement. It's like yes, that is sort of the the obvious thing to say. The real interesting part is, well, why do people believe things for which there's no evidence? And that's a question that isn't That m you can ask about UFOs, you could also ask it about God or the Bible or religion or a whole lot of other things that people a lot more people believe in and take a lot more seriously than UFOs. So if you s if you say I've seen I had an experience of, you know, in communion with God, um, or I saw an angel or something like that. Um those are the kinds of things that religions are built on. Um but for that too, there's never any evidence. There's never a a photograph, right? There's never uh an artifact. So

15:37 One question that this leads to is, well, how do you distinguish between different kinds of claims for which there are no evidence? What Do when presented by someone with a claim, something happened to me. For example, some of these people, as you mentioned, say I was taken aboard a UFO and I saw an alien or an alien perform an experiment on me. That is a claim for which there's no evidence. Another kind of claim for which there's no evidence is I saw the face of God or God spoke to me. Um how do you evaluate these kinds of claims? What do you do when someone brings a claim into the public sphere like that for which you it can't be rationally discussed because it can't be falsified? There's no way to prove that it's wrong. Um what kind of authority does that kind of claim have if you say to people, well, all the scientists t say There's no UFOs, but I know because it happened to me that there is a UFO. How do you respond to that? How can you say to that person, well, you're wrong about what happened to you. What you think happened to you didn't happen? Those are all

16:37 uh questions that go beyond the issue of just UFOs, which ultimately, you know, I think Still are in the category of no one really believes it except people who are quite quite convinced. Um And then the sort of further question is Well, if there aren't any UFOs, why aren't there? Because that raises a whole other set of cosmological uh questions, which I get into in the second half of the book. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about that in i in a minute. I I wanna stick with what you just said.

17:04 Um First couple of footnotes. You said it's something that looked like a tic tac. You mean the breath mint? Yes, the breath middle. Yeah, you can think of it as like a little oval or tube with rounded edges, with no wings and no visible.

17:26 uh engine. So if you see something like that and it's it's zooming across the sky, it doesn't seem to make sense as a human made Aeronautical device. And then you also said uh You've used UFO to mean flying saucer, but of course Technically UFO means an unidentified flying object, which could include

17:46 would include things that are just Yeah, visual. illusions uh explicable through it's a balloon or a Some atmospheric event or s a drone or some other things, right? But definitely.

18:02 Aliens in a spaceship or UFO. Yes. And then it's a good example of of How language changes around this subject. So now people don't say UFO anymore. They say UAP. UAP is sort of the new Um It's what the government uses, for example, and it's what people who discuss the subject

18:21 usually say no. And that change happened about ten years ago, around the same time as this surge of new reporting on the subject. And UAP stands for Unidentified anomalous phenomenon. And originally it stood for unidentified um aerial phenomenon, but then it was expanded from aerial to anomalous because some people said, well, maybe these are things that aren't coming from the air, but they're coming from under the surface of the earth or under the ocean, or another time dimension, like they're coming from the future. So anything that doesn't seem to make sense is a UAP. It essentially it means the same thing as UFO. And one thing I say in the book is that as you say, UFO now it connotes a flying saucer and sort of uh uh something we would think of as science fiction. But in fact, unidentified flying object was created to be a term exactly like

19:08 UAP it was supposed to be a neutral term. It was supposed to sound neutral and scientific, and it it was invented by the Air Force in the early nineteen fifties because people were talking about flying saucers and they said well the no one takes flying saucers seriously. That sounds like a comes from a comic book. Let's call it UFOs. That's the neutral descriptive term. The problem is that the phenomenon itself is what's the problem, not the way we talk about it. So it's what uh What people sometimes call a euphemism treadmill, where the y the name keeps changing, but the because there's a problem with the thing that's being named. So you don't call it a flank software, you call it UFO, you don't call a UFO, you call it a UAP. But the problem is not what you call it. The problem is the thing you're talking about. I just wanna say one thing about defense of believing in God.

19:52 Believing in God. It I I agree does not have the scientific evidence uh behind it that we would use to I don't know. Show that the dinosaurs were killed by a

20:05 comment and not by something else. uh a meteor landing, a large meteor Uh Making uh impact with the earth and darkening the Atmosphere for a long time.

20:15 But but people who believe in God. I would just make a distinction between People who think God has spoken to them, which is unverifiable. Uh And

20:24 Even with recording. and people who have intellectual reasons for willing God. I I I just want to Make up A smaller absolutely vote for the uh the the Belief in God is not uh the same level of

20:38 Um Uh an angel picked me up and and did XYZ to me. That's definitely definitely true. A good thing to emphasize. And there there's actually I think two Important distinctions. One is people mean a lot of different things when they say believing in God. They mean a lot of different things by God, um, not just in the sense of different religions, but different ways of thinking about that religion. You know, the way that uh the Rambom believes in God is very different from the way that, you know, uh Charmi might experience God. Those are all

21:08 They're all talking about the same God, but they mean different things by it. So that's one thing. But then the other thing is that the reason why UFOs or UAPs are Interesting is that Um If they exist, they're not supernatural, right? They're not

21:22 Something that you're supposed to be miraculous, that you have to have faith to understand. They are supposed to be physical objects that exist in the physical universe in three dimensions like everything else. So they are something that should be uh susceptible to empirical proof, which is sort of by definition, religious faith is not supposed to be susceptible to empirical proof, and that's why you say it's faith rather than evidence. Faith is the evidence of things not seen is is what the New Testament says. So UFOs are not supposed to be that kind of category. What I'm really talking about more is And this is an example I use in the book. Um

21:58 Lourdes is a Catholic holy site because in the 19th century there was a young girl named Bernadette who said that she saw the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary appeared to her on a number of occasions and spoke to her. And at first, uh the local priest and Lourdes in France and in southern France, um didn't believe her and said, this is, you know, uh this is a girl making stuff up. And then as the word spread and more and more people heard about it, uh the church changed its mind and said, uh we recognize that this is true, we believe it happened, and Lures became an official pilgrimage site and sort of a this became a recognized part of Catholic belief. Um So That's an example of how

22:37 The same kind of that that original claim is the same kind of claim as I saw a flying saucer. I can't prove it, but I'm telling you this happened to me. So then uh really the question is how do you get from I'm telling you this happened to me to You're a crank versus you are a revered figure because we believe you. Yeah, I I would say it is evidence. for that person, but not for me,'cause I didn't experience it and Certainly. religious believers have

23:05 Uh not necessarily hearing voices. uh of God or angels, but have emotional whatever we want to qual yeah, experiences of Of the divine that are evidence for their own personal set of beliefs.

23:18 But I would make a distinction between that and say A claim of say you know, mass revelation for the Jewish Bible or You know, someone who on the road to somewhere sees something unique. I think there the there's gradations of different kinds of what

23:33 would convince a non believer. But Coming back to aliens for a second. You write the following. You say some people claim to know for certain that aliens exist because they've encountered one. seen an alien spaceship close up or even been taken aboard, but the majority of UFO enthusiasts are not true believers. They are Want to believers.

23:52 Hoping that they will live long enough. To see conclusive proof That human beings are not the only intelligent species in the universe. End of quote.

24:02 Are you in that group? I would say yes, um although And I'd say I yes, and that's why I got interested in this story when I first started to to follow it and read about it. Um and over the course of reading about it, I'd say that I've become Uh More uh less of a want to believe or at least more reconciled to the idea that we will not see that um in in my lifetime or maybe ever. Um but I'd say that the basic instinct of wanting to believe, yes, I think that and that's something that I think m a lot of people share, both lay people and scientists, is it would be truly amazing if

24:37 we could find evidence that there's intelligent life not on earth in some other part of uh the cosmos um It would change the way we think about, you know, the universe, about life, about intelligence, about ourselves and our destiny. Um Carl, this is again something that Carl Sagan writes about in a pretty uh moving way. So the i I think that wanting to believe that is a very natural Um

25:00 instinct and desire uh and The question is what would justify that belief? Um what kind of what would we need to find to justify that belief? And just one last thought on Yeah, revelation and a feeling of something's happened to you personally that you cannot communicate. I always thought that

25:19 One of the most magnificent And I've spoken about this before, one of the most magnificent aspects of close encounters of the third kind. The Spielberg movie is You know, um Planking on his name, Richard.

25:33 Richard Dreyfus, thank you. Richard Dreyfus Is uh has been visited. Uh there's been a revelation to him, only to him, uh and maybe some others, but no one else around him. has experienced it so

25:47 He of course becomes um Obsessed. And I I love the scene where he's He has a vision in his head of the mountain he's supposed to find where the

25:56 The aliens are gonna come visit him. And his family suddenly stops in silence to see that he's shaped his mashed potatoes. In the form of the mountain and You know, if you're a

26:09 If you've had a religious revelation, or you've had a Experience with aliens that is meaningful to you. Uh it would not be a small thing. It would not be like oh yeah, by the way, did I mention It would become an obsession and the people you talk about, it's not a big part of the book. But the community of people who feel that this is true.

26:30 have obviously um They're a they feel very much like a oppressed minority. That that they they've been they have not been given The credence that their personal experience demands. Yes, and and one of the things I talk about in the book is

26:49 Um There's a a scholar who writes about the subject named D.W. Posulka, an American uh academic, Diane Posulka. And she has uh she writes about something called a book experience. The book experience is people who have had things that happen to them and they don't understand what they were read a book about UFOs. And then they understand that what happened to them was they saw a UFO. So it's like you have an experience that you can't interpret, and then the concept of UFOs and aliens allows you to interpret it. It gives you the vocabulary to interpret it. Other people might find the vocabulary to interpret things that happen to them in religion or Mysticism. Um

27:29 Th these people say uh now I realize that what happened to me was I saw a UFO, I saw an alien, I was taken aboard a spaceship. Um And It gives you It gives you clarity. It gives you a a way to make meaning out of out of your experiences, which is something that we all want and need. Um So if someone you

27:48 incorporates that idea very deeply into their sense of self and into their worldview. But it's an idea that most people think is ridiculous. Um, it puts them in a a sort of strange position where most people don't take them seriously or don't listen to them. And I think that that's why For a lot of people who do believe in UFOs, the idea of disclosure is so important. So you mentioned Um Close Encounters. The most recent Steven Spielberg movie, which is also about aliens, is called Disclosure Day. And it's about It's not as good as Close Encounters, I don't think, but uh it's about the idea that the government has a bunch of evidence, like video evidence of the U.S.

28:27 UFOs and aliens dating back to the nineteen forties, and uh a couple of brave uh whistleblowers are trying to leak this videos and get them out into public. And that's the something that in the UFO world is called disclosure. Disclosure is the government has hiding these secrets. One day they will be disclosed, they will be revealed, and everyone will see all along that the believers were right and the skeptics were wrong. So the idea that you want some evidence, some vindication, um is a big part of I think what feeds this This uh UFO discourse. And the last thing I'll say about this and then we'll turn to the Scientific community, which is

29:03 In a way. much more disturbing and fascinating than the lay person's beliefs in this. Um Again, I'm you know, I'm a religious person. I have a lot of respect for religion, but

29:16 What what strikes me in reading your summary Which is very artfully done. Again, it's very respectful of the people who have had experiences like this Yeah, and despite the fact that there's no quote real evidence, um, the persistence of that. Is just for me

29:35 Another brick in the wall of of My view that Human beings aren't so interested in the truth. The truth is Truth won't set you free. The truth is

29:46 Truth is depressing a lot of the time and it's more pleasant Think about other things. Now you confessed earlier The you would love It would be amazing and extraordinary and World changing if if we're going to be able to do

29:59 Aliens visited. humans or we could get direct evidence of some confirmable kind. Of their presence, but You looked it into it, you spent some time doing research for this book and

30:11 You have to confess that well. It's just isn't the evidence isn't there. Most people don't want to dig. Uh and and I I I just think about this moment, coming back to what I said earlier about Yeah, the extraordinary amount of information we have.

30:25 And And yet how uninformed we are. One of the reasons we're uninformed, it's really hard to know what information's reliable and what information is not. In the old days, the gatekeepers were the experts of that information. Uh they were sometimes reliable and often not. Uh, and we've now come to this place where

30:43 They're no really credible gatekeepers anymore. Um I I'm sure some people look to you. Uh sometimes people I I'm I'm embarrassed by it, but people look to me, they trust me because They've they've heard me talk about things and they assume I'm I'm a person of you know, good faith in in examining things.

31:01 And we're all flawed as as human beings. There's there's no You know. reliable uh source that that can be perfectly trusted.

31:10 'Cause they were all human. And I just think this moment is so uh extraordinary in that way. Uh yes, there have been times in the past Where we struggle always where we didn't know what was true and what was untrue. But I feel that we've become unmoored in a certain way in the in twenty twenty six.

31:28 Where Uh Yeah, the amount of effort it takes Just to take a you know, you can pick any almost any example in in the modern

31:38 Yeah, just because I'll pick something that's not controversial. Whether Argentina behaved well. Or badly in the world cup. Well, there's a whole bunch of people who want you to think they'd behave badly and then it's a bunch of people who who want to defend Argentina. And as an outsider who's not deeply immersed in football

31:56 You know Uh I'm sort of interested in it. But I don't really have any idea what's true. And uh that's true of so many things these days. And it's It's troubling. I think that's yeah, that's definitely true. And it's one of the reasons why I think it's not a coincidence that

32:11 UFO had UFO's had this upsurge of interest at at just the same moment as a lot of populist movements um in politics, in economics. I talk a little bit about Brexit, because Brexit was an example where every I mean, I think that's a very important th Uh Every economist or or ninety-eight percent of economists said this is gonna be very bad for us, we shouldn't do this in Britain. So this is gonna be bad for us to leave the European Union, we shouldn't do it. And yet voters approved it anyway. They didn't leave believe or want to listen to they didn't care about what the experts said. They said we're we wanna do this. Similarly with with COVID, um Experts said, take this vaccine, it'll stop you from getting COVID, and a surprising number of people said, I don't believe you, I'm not going to take it. I would rather take a horse deworming medicine, which is also a medicine, right? It's just that uh it's not the medicine you, the expert, told me to take. It's a medicine that someone on social media told me to take. So What's it seems to me that sort of what's at the bottom of this is

33:13 Who has the right to tell me what to do? Who has the right to make up my mind for me? And I think that people don't like the idea that someone else is telling them what to do or telling them what they should think and not think. And just the very fact of being told this is what you must think, this is what you must do, for a lot of us. um provokes a reaction, well I'm not gonna do it just because you told me to do it. I wanna do what I wanna do. And if that's something that you would think is wrong, I don't care. Um so yes, I I mean there are still I think trustworthy gatekeepers about the news. It's just that, for example, you know, like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or uh as a journalist, of course, I would say that. Um but having worked in some of these places, I've can s I can sort of seen from the inside and can say that people who work at these places really do take quite seriously the idea that they're telling the truth, that they're finding out what really happened.

33:59 People outside who don't trust the mainstream media have no faith in that. And they say that you're serving some kind of agenda, you're trying to serve someone's interest. So there I think there are uh tr some at least gatekeepers out there. The problem is people don't believe in gatekeeping or gatekeepers. And then another problem is just the convenience of it. Like by far the most convenient way to find out what's going on in the world is for especially for young people, you open TikTok, scroll through it, and you'll find dozens of people sort of giving you a little spiel about what's happening in the world. The problem is those people don't necessarily know. They could be completely ignorant. They could be telling you lies out of some self-interested reason. So if you don't have any standard for evaluating the claims that you're getting, um it it does create a pretty bad situation. I think people are uh uninformed about a lot of things that they need ought to know better about uh that it would be better if we all could agree at least on some guides to reality.

34:54 Yeah, I'll just Finish this with a observation that When I think about the lessons that we um We should have learned. Uh it's one thing to learn a lesson and then forget it. That that's very human and it's very true of of humanity writ large. I've I've just become

35:13 Very aware of the fact that that certain fads and trends just come back over and over and over again because Um Yeah, I interviewed Milton Friedman in two thousand and six and I actually made this Claim that

35:26 Because there was no demand for price controls at that time when Gas prices have gone up a lot. That showed that economic education was effective and he laughed at me and said, No, no, no, it's because There are a lot of people alive. Who were alive in the nineteen seventies.

35:39 And remember how horrible they were. And when they die off, there'll be a demand for price control. So now we have, you know, a demand for rent control and New York City and and with great popularity and so on. Uh, you know, the other example would be the Great Depression. My father was born In nineteen thirty, he never bought a stock. He only bought bonds.

35:56 a a terrible decision, in my view. But it was impossible for him. Stocks were dangerous. He he had his parents had been Trouble yeah. challenges his relatives. because of this crash in the stock market and and it they talked about it all the time.

36:09 So I get that. I get that we forget things, but that we don't learn things. To start with. It's a different level of failure. So if you said, you know, what are the lessons of the financial crisis of two thousand and eight.

36:24 Uh most people would pick whatever their ideological bent is and wave it around like a hammer. Uh if you ask people what's our lesson from the covet virus, uh it's the same thing. It now I do think The people who live through ковид во би скептикал. of the idea, say, of closing schools.

36:43 Uh and keeping kids at home. But it very well could be the case that that's the wrong lesson to learn about the next virus because it actually could be really bad for kids. was relatively safe for kids. I just think it's fascinating to me how hard it is For us as a

36:57 as a species To uh learn lessons. And uh remember them. Yeah, no, definitely. And Part of the problem is maybe the distinction between

37:09 Facts and and and interpretations or facts and how we respond to facts. Um it's one thing to say. Yeah, Covid We shouldn't have closed schools or there should have been mask mandates, which I think at the at the time

37:22 Um Experts said we have to close schools, we have to have mass mandates, and now in retrospect, I think there's a lot of evidence that we didn't need to do those things. But the idea that you know Covid was caused by a certain coronavirus is a fact. So

37:36 the distinguishing between facts and how you respond to facts. Uh There's always going to be disagreements of opinions about actions and policies, but if people can't even agree on the basic facts of of what happened, of reality of existence, um then you can't even have those discussions. And and one thing that I sort of realized on a deeper level in in thinking about the subject of UFOs is that Most I mean I think of myself as a s as a scientifically, you know

38:02 literate and rational person. But When I thought about well, how do we know how did people discover that the earth rotates around the sun and not vice versa? And I started to look into to read about, you know, what did Copernicus, what did Galileo It in fact it's an extremely complicated idea. And the proof of it is not not at all clear. So you have to really do a lot of thinking even to understand that level of scientific fact. So basically when most of us say The earth revolves around the sun, but we mean is we've always been taught the earth revolves around the sun and we trust the people who taught us that. So if you don't trust the people who are teaching you things, then you have almost no basis for understanding reality. I would just say one thing about that, which is

38:43 Usually it's a little more complicated than this, but usually the people who are telling you that the earth goes around the sun and I not vice versa are not gonna profit. Right. From misleading you. So you have a certain Perhaps naive. uh trust in them. The reason it's a little naive is that While they don't profit from it, they might have a worldview or not an ideology, but a a a scientific framework

39:06 that they've become accustomed to that that is part of their sense of self, their prestige and their profession. So It's it's just really hard. Uh you know, let's leave it at that. Uh yeah, well bring them back to UFOs. One of the um

39:23 that UFO believers say is Uh one of the sort of rhetorical strategies is we are actually more scientific than the scientists because the definition of They would say of of science is you keep an open mind and evaluate the evidence, and whenever we come to the scientists and say, I saw a UFO, they won't listen to us at all. They won't consider the evidence. So in by dismissing the evidence out of hand by saying that couldn't possibly be a UFO

39:47 um they're not being scientific. So the the the anti-scientific people are the more scientific than the actual scientists. And I I write about this in the book as to wh where that idea comes from and the idea of a paradigm shift that um Everyone believes that the world operates one way and So you get this sort of anomaly, and the anomaly shows that the existing framework has to be changed. There are a lot of people who would say, well, UFOs are a paradigm shift like that. We have to go beyond sort of Western scientific rationalism and acknowledge that there are dimensions of reality that can't be explained that way. Um that's part of the appeal of it for a lot of people is to say there are things that science doesn't know that we know better. Yeah, I would not go that far personally.

40:29 And yet. I I have a certain respect for that viewpoint. I think it's a rhetorical position to some extent, but the idea that We should be open minded about it. Obviously Again, as a religious person, I've confronted so many people who just assume they're not interested in hearing anything talking to you about at all. They just know you're a crank. By definition, you're an irrational moron.

40:48 And and it's been You know, we don't have to go into the details, but the examples we've been talking about, COVID and the response to COVID and the both the medical and the social response to it. Uh a lot of people were pretty close minded about it. And um And we found out later that they knew that. Yeah.

41:05 that they were protecting either themselves or their reputation or They wanted power. It's um As again, it's a complicated thing. I I want to go to the scientists because it's um In a way, as I said or a minute ago, it

41:20 In a way it's more fascinating. And disturbing that the scientific community has become more open. So while they do not accept uh the person who And maybe perhaps or disrespectful of a person who was claimed to have been

41:34 Whisked into a a spaceship and and experimented on for For length of time. They have their own need, like the lay people we've been talking about, to believe that There is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. So let's talk about that first. Where where does that come from?

41:55 Uh wh why do they why do why do scientists And when I say scientists, the one most prominent one in your book is is Avi Loeb, who's an astrophysicist at Harvard. Those are two. That that's a that's about as good as you get. You know, astrophysics at Harvard is not a small thing. And yet he wrote a book and and

42:14 Talks about uh a UAP, an an anomalous uh phenomenon that he made the case for it being Uh coming from an intelligent So somewhere else. What's going on? W what's there first talk about sort of the philosophical questions we're dealing with.

42:30 And how is it possible that scientists have become uh evangelists to pick a deliberately Pointed word for this this viewpoint. Well Avi Lob is definitely an outlier and and I'll I'll talk about him. Uh but first I'll talk about the the wider question. So

42:47 Um until say Like the mid twentieth century. The assumption of scientifically minded free thinking progressive people in the West was there must be intelligent life on other planets. Um and that was a sort of Deductive process which is

43:06 The only reason to think that earth is special is if you believe that God created earth for special reasons. And that's sort of the traditional religious or biblical idea that God uh created our planet to be the home of humanity, has a special interest in our planet. Starting with the scientific revolution, scientifically minded people started to say, well What Copernicus taught us is that Earth is just another planet, right? There's Earth is not the center of the universe. It's one of many planets, one of uh one of uh eight planets we now say, um revolving around the sun. And so if there's nothing special about Earth, there's no special reason why there should be life on Earth and nowhere else. So if you look at

43:44 And don't forget Darwin. And don't forget Darwin. So if you look at philosophers and natural scientists in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, the sign of being a sort of Uh. Being a smart progressive thinker was to say There are definitely intelligent life on other planets. Uh Emmanuel Kant said that. He wrote about it. Um

44:06 Yeah. I've got to talk about other philosophers um who who wrote about this in in the Enlightenment. Um Alfred Russell Wallace. Um in the early 20th century who is known as the rival to Darwin or the sort of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin, was one of the first people to say, well, actually maybe it's not that simple. Maybe there maybe we could have a scientific universe and still there might only be life on Earth. But for most people would say uh by the logic of

44:36 Copernicanism or pr or perspectivism. Um There's nothing special about Earth. There's no reason why life can only be on Earth. And if we could only see other planets, we would find people like us or intelligent beings like us on other planets. That was sort of like a a a common idea. And so in the mid-20th century, when it became possible for the first time to actually observe other planets using radio astronomy and then space probes and spacecraft and deep space observatories. And we found that in fact there isn't intelligent life on any of the planets in our solar system. And in as far as we can tell, we have never found evidence of intelligent life outside of our solar system either, or even of any kind of life yet.

45:18 That upset Uh the standard. Scientific worldview which was There's nothing special about life on Earth. So now it turns out that as far as we know in the year 2026, it actually there is something special about life on Earth, which is that there's no life anywhere else that we know of. We have yet to find evidence of life anywhere else. What I what I say in the book is that for n for lay people

45:39 The problem is that UFOs have been seen and for scientists the problem is that UFOs haven't been seen because there's no real reason to explain why that is. So Uh what I talk about in the second half of the book is the attempt, the scientific attempt to understand why is life, why is intelligent life seemingly much more rare than we once thought that it was. And and and Avi Loeb uh who became sort of prominent and maybe among scientists notorious for saying that

46:09 Uh. Some of the things that have come into our solar system from outside of our solar system might be technological, that they're not just rocks, but they might be his example is a light sail, um, a sail from an alien spacecraft. designed to capture the force of light to propel it. Even Avi Lobe doesn't say That's definitely what this is. What he says is in an inter So to go back to the parallel to religion, uh there's a famous idea known as Pascal's Wager. Uh the the Christian thinker Pascal said, We should believe in God.

46:43 Uh just on the logic of a bet, because if you if God exists and you believe in him, you win eternal life, and if he doesn't exist and you believe in him, you haven't really lost anything. So just on the like calculating what's of your benefit to you, what are the best odds you should believe in God. There was this thing that came into our solar system called Umuamua, which was the first object that was ever sort of confirmed to come from outside of our solar system. It was the first thing that we that scientists said, based on its orbit and trajectory, we know this thing is not orbiting the sun. It must have come from somewhere else. He says we should make Umu's wager. We should say Uh even if this thing isn't alien technology, we should act as if it is alien technology, because then we'll take seriously the idea of aliens. We will um develop tools to detect aliens and alien technology so that the next time, if there really is alien technology, we'll be able to find it. Um the thing about Avi Lobe that I think has made him suspicious to a lot of astronomers and other scientists is that he has since found like two or three more examples of this.

47:46 Um and he's he's starting to say that like lots of things are alien technology or could be alien technology. Again, he never comes right down and says, This is definitely an alien spaceship. What he says is, Well, this other interstellar object could also be for an alien technology or anomalous. It's anomalous, right. Or that it could have this other explanation. And that annoys other scientists because in fact there isn't sufficient reason to say that, but he wants to keep open um this possibility. He wants to to allow us to keep thinking about it. And just to come back to this question of uh This belief, this presumption that that

48:22 There's life everywhere, by the way, not just There might be one other Sunshin. creature in the universe that there must be Frequent.

48:31 You know, it's the law of large numbers. There there's You know, one with twenty two zeros after it's roughly stars, uh many of them will have Planets around them, so the denominator's very large And presumably there's no reason they wouldn't have some kind of life. And we'll come back in a minute. We'll talk about how you might think about what the odds of that are and and so on. But the other of course.

48:53 Uh it's very much like religion or an hypothesis that cannot be refuted. is if people say, Well why haven why haven't they visited us? Or why haven't we found the evidence? the answer is Well, it's far away. Uh and and it is far away. Which is a fascinating reality as far as we understand science.

49:11 In in primitive times, the stars looked like maybe some kind of uh circle, a sphere that it was around the earth that had points of light and When we start to realize them the distances um Yeah, you quote Pascal. La silence eternal des espace

49:29 And we name Mefre. So I think I got it right. The most pretentious thing I know. Sorry, I had to get it in there. The the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. When people start and that was then That was Pascal.

49:43 Sixteen hundreds maybe. Um when we think about What we do now that not only is the universe so vast Not only is every piece of it. sort of moving away from from any kind of center. There's there's a cosmic sense of of loneliness and despair.

50:00 So on the one hand Oh, they're out there, but We just can't communicate with them because they're really far away. But in another sense

50:09 If they're that far away it almost doesn't matter because We're gonna be alone. And it's really hard for people to deal with that, which is fascinating in and of itself. So talk about that'cause I have I have my own view on it. I'd love to hear what you have to say. Yeah. No, well so what you say about the the number of planets or or our knowledge of how big the universe is.

50:28 And and So w when in You know, medieval times or early modern times is when people thought the number of planets is five, um, because those are the ones that you can see with an unaided eye. So there are five planets and then when telescopes were developed. you people's discovered, you know, planets beyond Jupiter and and Saturn, and that there are actually eight or nine, as we used to say now, eight. And then as time goes on, and we get a better sense that the universe is so large and potentially infinite, um, that there are is a truly staggering number of potential planets. So If the number of planets goes from five to, you know, something like a sextillion or septilian, which is what current estimates are.

51:10 then the odds of there being life on one of those planets seem to be enormous. However The number of planets where we actually know that there's life is exactly the same, one. So then that's ours. So if the denominator gets really huge and the numerator is still one, then you start to think, well, maybe life is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly rare. It's it's inconceivably rare. And so that changes the way that we think about ourselves as a species, that what if we're this lonely outpost of life and intelligence in a completely dead universe that goes on infinitely in every direction? What if and so then that's one possibility. Another possibility is what if life does exist elsewhere, but it's so rare that It's basically it's effectively alone in time or space.

51:55 Uh it happens so infrequently in time. civilization, one intelligent being will never encounter another one. First of all, how would you know the difference between those two things? How because y if you can't see or contact something, how do you know it exists, what would be the proof of it? And then what does that mean for us and our sense of our future? Um one of the big

52:19 revelations or transformations of modern science in the way that humanity thinks about itself in the 19th century was the idea of extinction, the idea that there are species that have lived on earth before us that went extinct, and that the same thing is going to happen to us. One day our species will go extinct. If we're the only species that has mind, if we're the only species that thinks that explores the universe that's capable of of science or or religion or all the things that we think of as distinctively human, and then we're gonna go extinct, that means all those things are gonna disappear. And that's a conclusion that I think all of us Uh see with dread and want to resist. So How can we escape that conclusion? Is there a way around it? Are there ways that we could think about life and intelligence that would keep us from being the only outpost of it in the entire universe? That's one of the things that I think motivates scientists. That's one of the reasons why scientists really dislike the idea that we are alone in the universe and want to find some

53:16 uh way around that conclusion. Two basic ways around that conclusion are to find life somewhere else. And I talk a bit about the attempts that are going on to do that. The other is to become the life somewhere else, to leave our planet, to spread ourselves across the galaxy. And that's something that motivates someone like Elon Musk. Uh Elon Musk quite quite um explicitly has always said the reason why I want to develop all these space technologies is so that Earth won't be bound to one planet uh humanity won't be bound to one planet. We'll put ourselves on Mars and from there we'll go elsewhere and eventually we'll colonize the universe. So it I've never understood this and maybe it's just my blind spot. Um

53:56 There are many religious scientists. Uh but but let's take the ones who purport to not believe in in any kind of God or purely materialist There's no mysteries in the universe that we will not eventually plumb except for maybe the first plunk. time. Uh you know, otherwise we're we're gonna find everything out eventually. Uh why does it matter?

54:18 If we're alone. Why does it matter? I mean really, who cares? If you're a believer, if you think God has a purpose for the universe or for human beings Which even as a believer I think is a bit presumptuous. But but there is uh A certain feeling that that

54:32 That there's There's something to appeal to. If there's nothing to appeal to, if we are alone. Why does it matter that we spread ourselves? Why does it matter that we're the only Uh sentient. Creature.

54:46 that is aware of its place in the universe. From Oslas' theorem. I mean what's the point? And why is it why is the point Redeemed If if there's some other

54:58 randomly, again, if you're not a believer, it's just another piece of random Uh carbon or not carbon based life. A zillion light years away that we can't talk to or can Doesn't matter I mean, again, w why why not just take comfort that they're there and you can't reach'em? Would that make you feel better if you're not a if you're not a if you're if you're a material a pure materialist?

55:17 Explain that. I don't get it. Because I I think that it actually matters more if you don't believe in God, if you don't believe in a transcendent dimension, if everything is is material or or natural in some way. And As far as we know, n there's nothing that thinks except us.

55:35 Um if you believe that thought is important and understanding is important, then it's up to us. to preserve it, right? That there is no divine understanding, there's no transcendent understanding, there's only human understanding. So if understanding matters, it's up to us to make sure that it survives. So then the question is, does anything matter at all? Does the idea of mattering come from? And there are definitely people who say that Uh it would only it it only makes sense for something to truly matter if it matters. Only God can be the source of of meaning. Um But if you don't believe in God, you still have an instinct for meaning. So then the question is where does that meaning come from? It can only come from us. Meaning only comes from human beings. We decide if things have meaning.

56:16 And we have decided, and especially for people like uh scientists or technology people who uh for whom intelligence and mind is how they think about themselves and there that's what matters most to them. Um the idea that the universe could exist and there would be no mind in it, no one to see it or understand it, it would just be dead, dead matter uh for eternity, is is uh sort of terrifying. It would be like uh An eternity of meaninglessness. So that isn't but isn't that the legacy of the Judeo Christian Traditional. Isn't that because these people have have, for better or for worse, grown up in a culture in a civilization that

56:54 Who why should that matter? I don't get it. I think that you're not going to be able to do it Why should mean matter? Why why should we care about meaning? It seems silly. It comes from our religious, you know, heritage. We should just If you don't believe a religion, you should just push that aside and and w wh why would why would it matter whether whether thinking is preserved?

57:12 How would you justify that? I think the answer is mattering is something that only happens with human beings. And so it's the same answer as morality. Why is it important to to do what's good instead of what's evil? One answer is because God told us to. But if God didn't tell us to, then what are the other answers? People who don't believe God told us to still believe in good and evil. They still want the things to happen and other things not to happen. But they would say that the basis of that is us. It's not it's not God, it's us. We are the ones who decide. for whom it matters that there's good rather than evil. We're the ones for whom it matters whether there's mind in the universe or not. And in fact Um

57:51 On a sort of Materialist. uh view, it that's always been the case. I mean that there's never really been any other point of view except ours. There's no a human being can have no point of view except a human point of view. And so if something matters it means it matters for us. And that I think that's the answer. It matters for us because it matters for us. And we are are sort of the kind of creature for whom it matters or we have decided that it matters, but that there's no better explanation than that. Yeah, I don't I don't find that persuasive, but

58:22 Mm. For a topic for another conversation. Yes. Uh l I wanna move on to two other parts of the scientific uh response to this question, which I thought were extremely interesting. The first is we spent When have spent, maybe we're still spending you'll you'll know and I've forgotten.

58:36 We write about it. We spent a lot of time on radio transmission. Uh sending out radio signals, receiving radio signals. You know, we sent out uh I think it was Voyage was it Voyager we sent out into the Out into the I forget which which mission it was.

58:52 Yeah, one and two. With with all kinds of things that we thought if someone found them they would understand that we were Trying to That we cared, uh, which w obviously we do, by the way, regardless of whether It's rational or not. I think we do care. I don't mean to suggest that that's Uh I was you know, doing a reductio at absurdum there.

59:09 Um But you make the fantastic point that which I just never thought about, which is You know, a civilization that's capable of communicating over enormous uh light numbers of light years and breachha You know, if if if

59:23 If human beings were able to avoid extinction for a million years. Presumably we'll be able to do a bunch of things a million years from now. that we can't do now. Extraordinary things that we can't, of course, imagine. But we probably wouldn't be using radio waves, so So

59:39 The the window for detecting radio transmissions Uh I i is something akin to, you know, finding uh A horse turn carriage. You know, th there's a period where they exist, but

59:53 After that, it's left behind and it's not gonna be the fingerprint of intelligence anymore. Fascinating to me. I never thought about it. Yeah, and and one thing I say In the book is that um When people are going to be able to do it.

1:00:07 Aliens But non human intelligence. We're always talking about ourselves. We're always drawing our own self-portrait because it w until and unless we actually find an alien, um, there's absolutely nothing for us to talk about except our own experience, what comes out of our own experience. One thing that you see is uh over the last seventy five years as In this in the so called space age is that

1:00:29 Our ideas about what the future looks like, what an advanced civilization might look like is based on changes in our own civilization, our own ideas about technology. So in the nineteen fifties when radio astronomy was first uh invented and developed. Um people thought well of course Uh aliens. out there will be so advanced that they'll also have radio astronomy and will be able to pick up their signals. Then as time went on and we didn't hear any radio signals and we still haven't, although there are some people listening for them, um people sort of say, well actually Uh if you look at what's happening on Earth, we're using fewer radio signals, radio transmissions, and everything is fiber optic cables. Um maybe in the future.

1:01:09 a really advanced technology would basically be invisible because they would be so advanced, their technology would be so shrunk down and so dense and every bit would contain meaning that it would essentially disappear from the sky. Instead of being bigger, it would be smaller. That's that's a reflection of the way our technology has developed. And one of the sort of unknowable things about this is as long as you have a a sample of one, you don't know whether what's happened to humanity is a rule or an exception. There are all kinds of reasons to think that the development of advanced intelligence on earth was extremely, extremely unlikely. This is something that's going to happen everywhere at some point, you know, just by the odds because there are so many planets. You could you could also argue the contrary case, which is this is something that almost never happens. And it's so rare that we will never come across another example of it because there are there are so many prerequisites for intelligent life to evolve that The quote that all of them aren't going to come together except on very, very rare occasions.

1:02:12 And you talk about The Drake equation, which is an attempt to try to v vaguely quantify some of these things. I found this fascinating, you know, the idea that Life on Earth probably needed a moon. Something like our moon.

1:02:26 Meaning Sh eventually became roundish. very close to something more li sphere like rather than just some kind of crazy rock uh oblong thing. Uh the idea that plate tectonics

1:02:39 might be important to the development of life. Um it's just Uh things that Yeah. We've thought about and and but people are increasingly thinking about them and realizing that it's a little more complicated than it seemed.

1:02:52 Yes, and there's this whole field called astrobiology, which is again a sort of a uh contradiction in terms because we have never encountered any biology among the stars. We've only encountered biology on Earth, but astrobiology is really an attempt to think about that. Question of what are the prerequisites of life and under what conditions could life exist? So right now the sort of general rule of thumb is We know that on earth there's no life without liquid water. So the places we should look are planets where there could be liquid water. And that means they have to be the so-called Goldilocks planets. If they're too close to a star, the water all dissolves and evaporates. If they're too far from a star, the water all freezes and becomes ice. So you want to look for planets that are within a certain distance range from a star.

1:03:35 So there could be liquid water. And that is just sort of the the most basic rule of thumb, no liquid water, no life. But that doesn't mean that where there's liquid water, there is life. It doesn't go the other way around. It's it's a necessary but not a sufficient condition. And as we come to learn more about biology and about the history of life on earth, all kinds of things that you would never intuitively think of as Necessary for life. people are s are trying to say, well, maybe we need not just liquid water, but a moon, and maybe we don't just need a moon, but we need Jupiter. Because if it weren't for Jupiter, Earth would be constantly bombarded by asteroids and comets and things from outer space, and it would keep destroying life on Earth. The fact that that only happens if rarely in the history of Earth is because we have this big planet that's outside and has a big gravitational pull that's taking these things away from us. So if you had a planet just like Earth but it didn't have a Jupiter near it, that planet would just be destroyed repeatedly by

1:04:30 impacts and then life couldn't evolve there. So there are all kinds of of interesting Ways to think about that that uh as science progresses um makes life actually seem rarer and more unique rather than more common. Yeah, it's um One thing that's beautiful about this whole field.

1:04:48 Yeah. mainly from the scientific perspective is it it forces you to think about uh how limited our knowledge is and and We learn more and more in trying to this to give Bobby Loeb his due. Uh when we start to think about what it

1:05:04 If we're open to it. There are certain Things we might uh not otherwise We might not otherwise learn. And of course the other part of it is w we're so limited by our

1:05:14 The one data point. Yeah. When we when we Think about Aliens, you know, we you pointed out there's there's an alien emoji.

1:05:22 It's a long head with with weird little black Slit slitted eyes and We assume it would look something like us. Yeah, maybe have extra fingers or maybe it's Of you know, be tall or really tall or really short or But that's kinda the best we can do. We we're so our understanding of

1:05:41 Of consciousness is so primitive and of intelligence is so primitive We really can't even think I think It's hard to think carefully about what Form it might take. If it weren't

1:05:52 Developed on Earth. Definitely. We're we're always the model for what we're imagining. And and it's hard to see how it could be otherwise, right? We are thinking from a position of We're humans on earth, we don't know about anything else, any other kind of experience for life except that of of humans or maybe animals or other living things on Earth. So when we think about what does it mean to be an intelligent being, we think it's something like us. Um and how could we imagine something that's not like us, that's very different from us. It's extremely challenging because it's so different. It's hard to imagine something totally different from what we know. So let's uh

1:06:25 Wanna close with the Well, one other thing I'm for sorry, one other thing I'll make it. Get in, which is so interesting. This twenty fifteen speech by Stephen Hawking. That uh communicating with aliens, which I think

1:06:38 Yeah, there's an enormous Obviously um Bifurcated. Uh sci fi. Literature of

1:06:47 Aliens come to Earth and kill us and aliens come to Earth and s cure cancer and do other and do good things. Uh people like to be scared, so I think most of them are on the on the negative side. But you know, they um And coming back to uh Steven Spielberg. uh E T

1:07:04 i is a is a love story. E. T. is about how glorious it would be to have any kind of communion with uh an alien creature And um Hawking said that's probably not the that's probably shouldn't be our default. What was this argument? It's fascinating.

1:07:22 Yes, I mean there's definitely uh an argument which says that I think what Hawking said specifically is that it could be more like Europe discovering uh the new world and Conquering it and invading it and destroying it. Um so if we invite the attention of a technologically advanced species and it comes to Earth and it's much more technically advanced technologically advanced than we are, it could just wipe us out and there would be nothing we could do about it. That's one way of looking at it. And and then in H G Wells and The War of the Worlds.

1:07:53 uh thought of it even more as as sort of like the way we think about germs. Aliens might think about us the way we think about germs or bacteria, like they wouldn't even think of us as something to to s spare or have any concern for at all. They would they would just go on their way, do what they want to do, and we would pay the price for it. So the idea of Would aliens be benevolent is something that We always sort of think about but until we actually meet an alien, there's no way to know. And I I would just add it it reminds me of your point about We're limited by our own understanding of ourselves.

1:08:26 Using the Stephen Hong's a very smart man, IQ, but Using the European destruction of the Aztecs, eh, which was horrific. Uh Is maybe not the best it's a data point.

1:08:38 For sure. But something that was so technologically advanced had survived extinction. Uh maybe they'll have a different maybe they won't think of us as bacteria. Maybe they'll think about us the way vegans think about dogs, you know? Right. It's completely impossible to know. It all depends on what metaphor you you want to use. Okay, so There's okay.

1:08:57 Close with a quote. Um Perhaps that is what humanity really needs from extraterrestrials not conclusive proof of their existence, but a sense of possibility. In an age when scientific knowledge has banished naive belief in divine and demonic beings, and Aliens are the last remaining candidate for other minds to share the universe with us. They are imminent.

1:09:20 Existing in the real physical world, but also transcendent. Experiencing reality in ways We can hardly imagine. They relieve us. for single handed responsibility. For the survival of mind. And so of the universe's meaning and value.

1:09:34 They preserve a horizon of genuine mystery. In a cosmos increasingly laid bare. to scientific explanation. Close quote. Uh just

1:09:44 Reflect on that. Yeah. gets to this question of why do we want to believe In aliens that There's a a place in our

1:09:54 map of the universe that we want there to be something there. We want there to be something other than us there. And for people who for whom that space is not occupied by God or anything supernatural. It can only be occupied by something natural. Um aliens is a way to answer that question. It's a way of saying here's something that doesn't require religious belief, but it sort of does for us a lot of what religious belief would do. It opens up the universe, it gives us something to hope for and to to communicate with and another kind of mind. And I think that that's why it appeals to a lot of people, a lot of thoughtful people. Who would like to for there to be something like that in the universe. Um

1:10:34 who want that horizon of mystery, right? Who want the sense that we don't know everything. There's things we don't know. There's another step for us to take. Um and so I think in the end I I come I came away from writing this book with a a sort of respect for the desire So Aliens. The respect for the desire to believe in aliens. We have nothing to do with the grounds for proving, I mean there i I would say we would still have to believe because we haven't don't have evidence. But

1:11:03 I understand why people want to believe in that and I think uh it's it's a worthy belief. My guest today has been Adam Kirsch. His book is We Want to Believe. Adam, thanks for being part of Econ Talk. Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it. This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more econ talk, go to econal.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast.

1:11:31 and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks. Talk to you on Monday.

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