Mindscape 259 | Adam Frank on What Aliens Might Be Like

Thank you, Sean, for your tireless efforts to advance the education of the common man. I am so disheartened by the negative comments and sarcastic snipes on your channel, and wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude for your selflessness, extraordinary humility and devotion to the intellectual development and well-being of millions of people you will never know - now and in the future - whose lives are immeasurably improved by the existence of people like you. You are a standard bearer for all of us, and inspire so much hope in the collective group of us assembling around you and your work.

Carroll: "With enough years of practice, I could figure it out." Right on.

Love this channel , love this episode and I love Sean. Keep up the good work 👍✌️

I was a bit surprised you guys did not discuss the grabby aliens conjecture. A brief mention of filters and some of Seans questions are addressed by that statistical model. For example at 36:36 or so, the concept of expansive aliens (grabby) implies we would actually see these engineering constructs in the sky. At least the size of the full moon, etc. Obvious from our point of view now….only if we are behind the times a bit and the Aliens expand slower than light speed. The grabby thing shows that based on simple time data (evolution of universe and stars) we are here 10 to power 18 too early to be alone. Otherwise right on time for grabby statistics. If they expand at light speed we can’t see them until 1 billion years from now as we expand ourselves (or remain quiet). This countdown of time moves down the SLOWER they expand, such that we SHOULD see them now if they are pretty slow. At 37:28 he says engineering of structuring stars and galaxies “moving them around”, no one has taken these survey. Sean rightly pushed back at 38:36… we HAVE this data. Dark matter is the engineering of galactic structure, not understood however not “natural” either, so far it seems. Sean talks about anomalies in the data at 39:33….The anomalies have been collected already….galaxies that obey Einstein with zero dark matter have not been “engineered” (there are a bunch observed already), and structures that have few visible stars (Dark matter galaxies), have been “over engineered” (again a bunch of these weird things too). This interpretation falls within the statistical model that, they move slow and yes are HERE all around us already.. we just don’t understand the observations yet, only the gravitational signals or “movement” of structure. Further more, the grabby model states that as the universe expands we have limited time to stay connected and “grabby” on large scales…ie, the structures will be isolated. Taken with the vacuum decay conjecture (speed of light bubble of universe destruction will not be visible until it arrives, too late), it is further possible that this very real, scary, possibility, could be delt with by engineering an accelerated expansion…exactly as the one we have observed kicking in at a likely opportune moment in cosmic history where the engineers realized the potential problem. Again how is this achieved? Correlation to supmassive black holes increasing in mass was observed, could be a clue, as well as the Hubble tension likely contains a clue. For sure, the bottom line is this process is happening already, and the future will “protect” the galactic structure isolated “projects” from any vacuum decay.

It would be interesting to see Sean meeting an alien, Imagine the difficult conversation between an alien and a super smart human. 🤔🤓

1:06:05 hahaha. Good one Sean. It's the most accurate line in this entire interview.

Awesome show.

Fantastic episode

Clear thinking Sean. Thanks you

Gonna catch it on Spotify ❤

I found it interesting that the guests' releuctance to consider extremely long-lived creatures/beings/machines. If we are, in fact, limited to light speed in traveling the cosmos, that would be the logcial solution. He made many good points and understand he focuses on exoplanets. But with so much talk about astrobiology, near immortal lifetimes seem much more reality than fiction. Good talk, but I wasn't expecting to disagree?! with so much that said.

A fun one. Thanks again!

The whole premise of Dyson spheres is questionable: assuming that an advanced civilization would have the need or desire to harvest so much energy. Maybe in the far, far future when the universe is experiencing heat death.

this was fun. this was well done. perhaps he could be the first repeat repeat guest.

24:00 If you want to decrease your waste heat all the way down to near the temperature of the background radiation, doesn't your sphere need to be VERY large, as you still have to dissipate the entire output of your star?

Interesting talk. I find it really hard to believe that an advanced civilization that visited Earth would not be detectable… glad you pushed back on that point.

I have to disagree on the "no evidence in the fossil record" point. Thomas Holtz did a great lecture on this which I recommend, available on youtube.

They might be Monsters?

Don’t forget to search in the really low frequency bands for alien bass players!

I just want to hear their music.