Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1130 - Adam Frank
Uploaded: 2018-06-13T01:00:35.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1130 - Adam Frank' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-06-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1130 - Adam Frank' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-06-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1130 - Adam Frank

Five, four, three, two, one.
Boom.
Boom.
Adam, what's up, man?
How you doing?
It's good to be here today.
It's good to be here, too, with you and to talk.
Whoa.
I'm already knocking shit over.
Can't be trusted.
Your book, Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.
Yeah.
All about it.
That's deep shit, man.
Just the title alone, you're like, whoa.
I love aliens.
Everybody loves aliens.
Everybody does, but what are your thoughts on actual aliens and whether or not
they've
ever visited here?
Yeah, it's interesting because it's sort of two things.
So, first of all...
We should tell everybody you have a background in science.
I do.
I'm an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester.
I run a research group that studies stars and planets.
So you're not a crazy person I brought on here.
No, no, no.
I'm a card-carrying scientist.
I got my card in everything.
So, yeah, I've been doing research on astronomy, astrophysics for a long time.
But I also do all this popular writing, like for NPR and New York Times.
And the genesis of this book came, A, because I love science fiction.
I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid.
But also, I do a lot of work on climate change.
And so I deal with a lot of climate change denial.
And what I realized was that, like, there's this way we talk about it that is,
like, completely forgets about the fact that, like, we're probably not the
first, you know?
And that led me to a whole bunch of research that eventually led to this book,
you know, including one paper that we did that showed that the odds that were
the only time it's ever happened, the only civilization in the entire history
of the universe, the only way that that could be true is if the odds per planet
are one in 10 billion trillion, right?
That's pretty low, right?
So, you know, the odds of anything being one in 10 billion trillion, that's
pretty freaking low.
So it's probably happened before, you know?
There's been other civilizations before ours.
And once you realize that, man, that is like, you know, it changes everything
about how we think about ourselves, you know, and what's happening to us right
now.
So other civilizations before ours that have fucked things up.
Well, that's kind of the premise, right?
So that's what, you know, when you look at climate change, right, basically
what we, it is, is civilizations are giant machines for turning energy into
work, right?
You know, New York City, right?
You sit over and you look at Manhattan, you're like, holy shit, right?
There's all this energy flowing into it.
And then there's all this work being done, you know, to keep everything moving.
And, you know, there's no way not to have an impact.
If you build a world-girdling civilization, which, you know, that's what a
civilization is, there's going to be impact.
So the whole point of my doing this book was to start looking at ourselves as
just one of, you know, we're not alone.
We're not the only time this has ever happened.
It doesn't mean anybody's around now.
Like, that's a different question.
But the idea that, like, it's never happened before, it meaning, like, you know,
you know, civilization, what's happening around us, like this machinery and
everything.
That, you know, that just in the new world of what we understand about planets
and shit, that is just like, you know, it's not tenable anymore.
We got to wake up.
The idea that some civilization has to be the first one, that's what, the only
way you could ever think that we're the only ones is that some civilization has
to be the first one, even in a universe that's infinite.
Yeah.
It has to happen one time.
Right.
But the idea is, are the conditions ideal in, you know, a trillion different
spots all over the infinite spans of the universe?
Yeah.
And that's the thing, right?
So what we've learned, so, you know, one of my trips right now is like, this is
not your grandfather's SETI anymore, right?
Our understanding, we went through this major revolution in our understanding
of planets about 20 years ago.
So you look back at the Greeks, right, and you can see them arguing about
whether any other stars had planets other than, you know, the sun.
And, you know, it goes back and forth.
You know, some of the Greeks were like, yeah, it's definitely happening.
And then, like, Aristotle was like, no, we're the only world in the whole
universe, you know, that has life.
And then as time goes on, it kind of goes back and forth.
And even at the turn of the 19th century, people thought planets were
incredibly rare.
Like, they thought the only way you could get a planet was if two stars passed
really close to each other.
And they kind of, like, taffy pulled out stuff that would eventually form a
planet.
And the odds of those kinds of collisions are so small that people are like,
you know what, there's just no planets.
And no planets, no life, you know, unless something really freaky is going on.
But then 20 years ago, we discovered our first planet.
Isn't that crazy when you really think about that 20 years is such a short
amount of time?
1998.
Yeah, yeah.
And nobody knew before that, like, nobody knew whether there were any planets,
right?
You know, when I was starting in astronomy, people were like, well, we don't
know whether there's going to be any other planets.
And we went from, so the first one was actually 96, I think, 95, 96.
From that to now, where we know that every freaking star in the sky has a
planet, at least one, you know, pretty much every one.
The big, the giant ones, maybe not, but they're so rare that, you know, pretty
much every star you see in the sky has a family of planets around it.
That is so nuts.
It's so nuts.
It's so nuts that this is such a new discovery.
Yeah.
I mean, when we think about what we know about the universe, we think that we've
had a pretty good understanding of it for a long time.
Right.
But the fact that we didn't even know for sure that there are planets.
Right, right.
In my own lifetime, you know, people were teaching me when I was starting, like,
you know, we just don't know.
Maybe they're rare.
And now we know for certain that they're everywhere.
And the thing people have to realize is every one of those planets is a place.
You know what I mean?
It's a place you could walk around.
Some of them, for sure, are going to have oceans.
There's going to be mountains.
There's going to be rain falling.
You know?
I mean, like, they're all freaking places.
And they're all places where things can happen.
You know?
Planets are basically like nature's way of taking sunlight and doing something
interesting with it.
So, you have 10 billion, trillion planets in the universe.
Right?
And every one of them is an experiment that's being run.
So, you know, the idea that, like, we're the first time it's ever – now that
we know that.
Right?
Now that we've gone through that revolution and understand that planets are,
like, dime a dozen.
Planets – we're not only talking about planets here.
We're talking about planets that are in the right place for life to form.
So, there's the idea of the habitable zone.
Right?
So, you know, Mercury sucks.
You cannot – you know, Mercury's so hot that there's no way anything's going
to happen.
And, you know, planets that are far enough out, they're going to be so cold –
you know, they're so far away from their star that they're going to be so cold
that, you know, it's hard to get liquid water on the surface.
So, we define the habitable or Goldilocks zone as the place where you can have
– you can pour, you know, water onto the surface and it'll just sit there.
It won't freeze and it won't, you know, sort of just evaporate away.
So, all these 10 billion, trillion planets I'm talking about are all in the
right place for life to form.
You know, and so, like, with that many numbers, that many experiments being run,
like, you've got to be a psychotic pessimist to say that, like, this is the
only time a civilization's ever happened.
Right.
But there's still no evidence yet.
Obviously, we didn't even know there really absolutely were planets until 20
years ago.
Right.
But we don't know for sure that there's something else out there.
No.
No.
This is an argument by – I call it, like, an argument by exhaustion.
You know, if I gave you a bag of 10 billion, trillion planets and you have to
sort through all of them, right, the odds that you're going to – you're never
going to find another one that built a civilization is – you know, like I
said, you're really asking for really serious pessimism.
But, you know, we're just getting started with this game, right, of looking for
life.
That's why I keep saying it's not – this is not your grandfather's SETI where
you, like, you point, you know, a radio telescope at a star and you kind of
wait to see whether somebody's signaling you.
Who knows whether they are signaling?
Who knows what they'd be using?
Now what we can do, because we've got all these planets to stare at, is, you
know, we're going to be able to, like, stare at them as they pass in front of
their star and get the light that passes through their atmosphere.
So we're going to, like – who knows what we're going to find?
You know, we're not waiting for them to signal us anymore over the next – I
swear to God, man, in the next 30 years, we're going to have data relevant to
the question of life.
Maybe not civilizations.
That could happen too.
But just life on other worlds, you know.
And we've never had that before.
All the arguments for the entire history of humanity have just been two dudes
yelling at each other, right?
But in the next 30 years, because the stuff we're building, and now that we
know there's planets, we're going to have real data to argue over with.
So, man, it's like this is – we're in a whole other ballgame now.
I think the big fear for a lot of people is what happens when we find out for
sure that there's something else out there.
Yeah.
If we really do find, like, some other Manhattan on some Goldilocks planet that's
hovering some similarly sized star a billion light years away or whatever the
hell it is, that's going to be very, very, very strange.
It will be.
It will be a game changer, right?
Because for religions, for, you know, I mean, wow, you know, what do you do if
you find other intelligent creatures who are building civilizations?
You start making them pay taxes.
That's what you do.
That's right.
So, you fucks.
You go get pissed off that they're not doing what you want them to do.
You should be believing this one, you know?
So – but I think, you know, for me, the thing is, like, it's about climate
change because what it means is, like, there's no way –
Well, from my perspective, you know, that if you have a civilization, you push
your planet.
You know, you can't stop it in some sense.
If you build a civilization, it's kind of –
Well, the only way around it is if you have, like, a subsistence culture,
indigenous Native American culture.
Right.
Which – it seems impossible, but it existed here 200 years ago, which is a
blink of an eye.
Right, right.
I know.
It's amazing it's only 200 years since, like, this – the ramp up.
You know, that the world population only crossed up the billion mark in, like,
1850, you know?
I mean, it's – there were so few of us on the planet for most of the time
that even we've been around.
Forget the planet's history.
So, you know, I think, like, there is, you know, the discovery – if we were
to get any evidence, you know, and I think the way it's going to happen is
going to be more by accident than by, like, signaling, you know?
Like, so – but if we had any evidence of another technological – if we had
any evidence of just life, right?
If we just find a biosphere, evidence that, you know – and we can do that
from a distance, right?
Even if the star is, you know, 30 light years away, if we get – if we see –
as the light passes through the star's atmosphere for those few moments, if we
see oxygen in the atmosphere, you know, we'll be able to dete