EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,018 words- 0:01 – 3:27
Aliens, astrophysics credentials, and why the book ties ETs to climate change
- JRJoe Rogan
Five, four, three, two, one. (audio cuts out)
- AFAdam Frank
Boom.
- JRJoe Rogan
Boom.
- AFAdam Frank
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Adam, what's up, man? How you doing?
- AFAdam Frank
Hey. It's good to be here today.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's good to be here too, uh, with you and to talk- (glass clinks) Ooh. Whoa. Look, I'm already knocking shit over.
- AFAdam Frank
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Can't be trusted. Um, your book, Alien Worlds-
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... And The Fate of the Earth.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. All about it.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's deep shit, man. Just the, just the title alone, you're like, "Whoa."
- AFAdam Frank
I love aliens. Everybody loves aliens.
- JRJoe Rogan
Everybody does, but what are your thoughts on actual aliens and whether or not they've ever visited here?
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah, it's interesting because, uh, you know, sorta two things. So first of all, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
We should tell everybody, you have a background in science.
- AFAdam Frank
I do.
- JRJoe Rogan
An actual scientist.
- AFAdam Frank
I'm an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you're not-
- AFAdam Frank
I run a research group that studies like stars and planets and shit.
- JRJoe Rogan
So you're not a crazy person I brought on here?
- AFAdam Frank
No, no, no.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- AFAdam Frank
I'm a card-carrying scientist. I got my card and everything. Um, so yeah, I've been doing research on, you know, astronomy, astrophysics for a long time, but I also do all this popular writing, like for NPR and New York Times. Uh, and the genesis of this book came, A, because I love science fiction. I've been reading science fiction since I was a kid. Uh, 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 ab- about the fact that like we're probably not the first, you know? And, uh, 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, uh, that the odds that we're the only time it's ever happened, on- only, you know, the only civilization in the entire history of the universe, uh, the only way that that could be true is if, uh, the odds per planet are one in 10 billion trillion, right? That's pretty low, right? So, you know, the, you know, uh, the odds of anything being one in 10 billion trillion, that's pretty fricking low. So, um, 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
So oth- other civilizations before ours that have fucked things up?
- AFAdam Frank
Well, that's kinda the premise, right? So that's what-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AFAdam Frank
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?
- 3:27 – 5:48
The exoplanet revolution: planets everywhere, ‘not your grandfather’s SETI’
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. And that's the thing, right? So what we've learned, so, you know, one of my, 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 when he, whether any other stars had planets other than, you know, the sun.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
Um, 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 this whole, in the whole universe, you know, that has life." Um, and then as time goes on, it kinda goes back and forth. And even at the turn of the la- of this, uh, the 19th century, people thought planets were incredibly rare. That like the on- they thought the only way you could get a planet was if two stars passed really close to each other and they kinda like taffy pulled out stuff that would eventually form a planet. And the odds of those kinds of collisions are so small that people were like, "You know what? There's just no planets." And no planets, no life, you know, unless something really freaky is going on. Uh, but then 20 years ago, we discovered our first planet orbiting a star.
- JRJoe Rogan
Isn't that crazy when you really think about, that 20 years is such a short amount of time.
- AFAdam Frank
Just, right. Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
1998.
- AFAdam Frank
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 gonna be any other planets." And we went from, uh, so the first one was actually '96, I think, '95, '96. Uh, 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, pretty ... I mean, the big, the giant ones maybe not, but pre- they're, they're so rare that, you know, pretty much every star you see in the sky has a family of planets around it.
- JRJoe Rogan
That is so nuts.
- AFAdam Frank
It's so nuts.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so nuts that this is such a new discovery.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
But the fact that we didn't even know for sure that there are planets.
- AFAdam Frank
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
It's a place you could walk around. Some of them for sure are gonna have oceans. There's gonna be mountains. There's gonna 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
- 5:48 – 10:05
Habitability and biosignatures: how we might detect life remotely
- AFAdam Frank
that planets are like dime a dozen. Planets, and not, and 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 gonna happen. And, you know, planets that are far, far enough out, they're gonna be so cold, you know, they're so far away from their star that they're gonna be so cold that they'll, you know, it's hard to get wa- liquid water on the surface. So we define the habitable or Goldilocks zone as the place where, um-... you can have, you can pour l- w- you know, water onto the surface and it'll just sit there. It won't freeze and it won't, uh, you know, sort of just evaporate away. So, uh, 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 gotta be a psychotic pessimist to say that, like, this is the only time a civilization's ever happened.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. But there's still no evidence yet. Obviously, we didn't even know that there really absolutely were planets until 20 years ago.
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
But we don't know for sure that there's something else out there. What-
- AFAdam Frank
No, no. This is an argument by, uh, I call it, like, an argument by exhaustion.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
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 gonna, you're never gonna find another one that, that built a civilization is pretty ... It's, now, you know, like I've said, you're really asking for really serious pessimism. But, you know, we're just getting started with this game, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
Of looking for life. That's why I keep saying it's not ... This is not your grandfather's SETI where you're like, you point, you know, a- a- a- a radio telescope at a star and you kinda wait to see whether somebody's signaling you. Who knows whether they are signaling?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
Who knows what they'd be using? Now what we can do, 'cause we got all these planets to stare at, is, you know, we're gonna 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 gonna like ... Who knows what we're gonna 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 gonna have data relevant to the question of life. Maybe not civilizations, or 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
Right? But in the next 30 years, 'cause the stuff we're building and now that we have ... No, there's, there's, uh, uh, planets, we're gonna have real data to argue over with. So man, it's like, this is ... We're, we're in a whole nother ballgame now.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
If we really do find, like, some other Manhattan on some Goldilocks planet-
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... that's hovering some similarly sized star a billion light years away or whatever the hell it is, that's, that's gonna be very, very, very strange.
- AFAdam Frank
It will be. It'll be a game changer, right? 'Cause for religions, for, you know, I mean, wow, you know? What do you do if you find other intelligent creatures who are building civilizations? For me, it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
You start making them pay taxes. That's what you do.
- AFAdam Frank
(laughs) That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Those fucks.
- AFAdam Frank
You go, 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, uh, but I think, you know, for me, the thing is, like, it's about climate change, 'cause what it means is, like, there's no way ... Well, from my perspective, you know, that, that if you have a civilization, you push your planet.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
You, you know, you can't stop it in some sense. If you build a civilization, it's gonna happen.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, the only way around it is if you have, like, a subsistence culture, uh, indigenous-
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... Native American culture.
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which i- ... It seems impossible, but it existed here 200 years ago.
- 10:05 – 11:58
Life beyond the surface: Europa, subsurface oceans, and limits on tech civilizations
- JRJoe Rogan
What are the possibilities of life that exists in a completely different environment than we expect? Like, I know that they found life at the bottom of the ocean-
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... in these volcanic vents.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
At extreme heats, boiling water, they didn't expect to see this.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And this is fairly recent as well.
- AFAdam Frank
That is. That, yeah. The idea that the, um ... 'Cause right, this whole definition of a habitable zone-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AFAdam Frank
... was based on the idea like, oh, you gotta have a surface and it's gotta be-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
You know? But now with the e- ev- you know, not every, but like a bunch of the moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn and the gas giants, they have oceans under them. Like, big oceans.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there's thoughts that Europa might have something below the surface, right?
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah, yeah, because the, um, Europa is, uh, you know, it's, it's this pretty big moon and we know it's covered in ice, right? You can see it's covered in it, you know? And we think that layer of ice is maybe like, I don't know, 10 kilometers thick, and then below that there may be 100 kilometers of ocean. And because as it moves around Jupiter, it's con- the gravity of Jupiter is always squishing the insides, so there's probably volcanic activity happening at the surface. So you have hydrothermal vents, you know? Heat escaping out of the ... And chemicals escaping out of the, at the surface into the ocean. And that's how we think life formed on, uh, on Earth. That's one of the arguments for how life formed, if fir- formed first in the hydrothermal vents. So yeah, you know, it- it- it's a new d- that's another game changer, right? So then we should also be thinking not just about the, the classic, uh, the habitable zone, but now we gotta think about, like, life, and can you get civilizations in an underwater civiliza- you know, in an underwater ... Maybe you have a-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
... really rich ecosystem. But, you know, with the problem with, uh, uh, you know, an underwater f- uh, uh, life or forming civilization is that you can't really do fire, right? Fire was pretty important for us for metallurgy. You know, to build advanced technology, you kind of need combustion.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AFAdam Frank
So, you know, that's kind of the open question with that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh, yeah, we are not really concerned with animals. We're concerned with things that think and change their environment.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Isn't that weird? Like, we are concerned with life, but we're only concerned with life that's at least similar or comparable to us.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. Microbes don't, like ... Yeah. We don't, we don't, yeah, we, they don't, don't get too excited, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
We're not gonna like go to Jupiter for some microbes.
- AFAdam Frank
(laughs) Yeah, right.
- 11:58 – 15:40
Mars discoveries and what ‘organic chemistry’ really means
- JRJoe Rogan
But we, we, we are excited about the things that they've recently found on Mars, right? I mean there's-
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah, last week.
- JRJoe Rogan
... very recent discovery.
- AFAdam Frank
Right, right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AFAdam Frank
So, you know, the thing is actually from the, you know, so I'm gonna ... I- I work in a lot of fields but I would also consider myself an astrobiologist, right? Which is a pretty-... kind of wild idea that you can do astrobiology, even though you only have one example, which is the Earth. But we've learned so much that now we can start asking ourselves about the possibility of life elsewhere. So finding even a microbe, like even a frigging, you know, amoeba on Mars would be com-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
Or even evidence that there used to be amoebas on Mars.
- JRJoe Rogan
And what is the evidence that they discovered on Mars?
- AFAdam Frank
What they found was, um, organic chemistry, right? And so, but organic chemistry ... Man, I hated chemistry when I was growing up. Uh, and I hated organic chem (laughs) was, that's just basically chemistry involving carbon, you know? So you can have non or, you know, it doesn't, organic chemistry doesn't mean organisms.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- AFAdam Frank
But it's the kind of chemistry that organisms love, right? So finding evidence that there was like, they drilled, amazingly we sent a frigging robot to Mars-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AFAdam Frank
... that could drill through a rock-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- AFAdam Frank
... you know, and then ingest the rock. And, you know, it's like ...
- JRJoe Rogan
And then send the data back across space.
- AFAdam Frank
And send the data back, man. We're, you know, pretty good for a bunch of hairless apes, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AFAdam Frank
Um, so what, what they found was evidence for, you know, fairly complex, um, uh, you know, uh, organic chemistry. Which meant that way back when Mars, and this we know for sure, right, Mars had water on it. We know that for sure now. Mars was a blue planet for at least a while.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did they think that Mars was hit by, uh, an asteroid or a comet or something along those lines?
- AFAdam Frank
Well, everything got hit by comets. That's how we have, you know, we have chunks of Mars here, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
That, you know, the thing in '96 or whatever, when they were like, "Oh, we found life on Mars." You know, they thought what they found was, uh, a fossil bacteria-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
... in a chunk of, uh, Mars that they found in Antarctica. So the planets have been swapping spit for like the entire history of the solar system.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's fossilized bacteria that they found, has that been confirmed that that's what it was?
- AFAdam Frank
No. No. Uh, most people now think that the, uh, Allan Hills, uh, meteorite, that probably, you know, it's inconclusive and it's not conclusive enough to be like, "Yeah, we found life."
- JRJoe Rogan
It's like a tiny little squiggly worm looking thing, right?
- AFAdam Frank
That's what it was, yeah.
- 15:40 – 21:39
Megastructures, Dyson spheres, and why SETI’s reputation got weird
- AFAdam Frank
Well, you know, it's interesting, like how much would that, that change? You know, even if we found like evidence for ... This, because this is a debate, like if we found evidence of a technological civilization, we saw like alien mega structures, like that star they thought about.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. What was that nonsense?
- AFAdam Frank
Uh, it wasn't really nonsense. It was, I, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
It was something floating around, right?
- AFAdam Frank
Right. So here's what they saw. So that, you know, the way we discover planets is we look for when the s- the planet passes in front of the star, you get a little dip in the light, right? It blocks out a little bit of light.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
It's like a little eclipse. Um, and so, you know, we've now, that's how we know that every star in the sky has planets. But there's like, they found one that just made no sense. Like, the light would dip, then it would stop dipping, then it would dip again three times, then it would stop dipping. Sometimes it was lower, sometimes it was higher. Um, and, you know, for a year or so, people were like, "What the fuck is this?" (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
You know? And so, you know, um, uh, Jason Wright and others, uh, Jason's a friend of mine, you know, they wrote a paper where they were like, "Hey, you know, at least ... Because this is what the future's gonna look like. We can't say, we can't ... We have to at least consider the possibility that these are artificial structures that are like orbiting the star or, you know, and it's a-"
- JRJoe Rogan
It would have to be ungodly huge.
- AFAdam Frank
Ungodly huge. Alien mega structures. Like, that's the best word ever.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Like, like the size of a country, right?
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah, yeah. These things would be huge, right? But that's what people think, like, you know, when people think about advanced alien civilizations, the idea of building large scale structures is, you think that may be the next thing you do once you reach a certain point. Like, um, you know, the Dyson sphere, the idea that you could collect all of the sun's energy and use it for yourself by building a giant sphere around the sun with solar panels on the inside. People think like, that goes back to Kardashev, the idea of this Kardashev scale back in the '60s where he is like, "Look, there's gonna be a natural progression of civilizations that goes first you collect all the energy you can from your planet, and then you use that to do amazing things. And then you collect all the energy from your star, and then you do that amaz- you know, you do amazing shit with that. And then, you know, the whole galaxy." So he, you know, Kardashev thought there was a scale that, that civilizations naturally progress through. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
And you hopefully don't blow yourself up along the way.
- AFAdam Frank
Well, I think that's the question. I mean, I've criticized the Kar- the Kardashev scale in one of the papers I recently did, because what it fails to take into account is the fact that like, you know, on your way up to the type one. Type one is when you harvest all the energy from your planet, which basically means somehow covering your planet in, in, uh, uh, you know, solar panels or something. That neglects what we've learned since Kardashev wrote his paper in '64 is that, you know, planets don't like that shit. Like, planets, the planet's gonna feedback. You try and build-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
... you know, massive shit on your planet, the planet has its own, you know, biosphere is pretty powerful and you gotta take the biosphere into account or you get climate change, you get, you know, the, the planet being pushed off in another direction. So, but whatever. So for the, um, for the alien mega structures, people thought like, oh, maybe this is like a piece of a, uh, of a Dyson sphere, right? This is like, you know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
And so, you know, when he proposed this, people went bonkers over this, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AFAdam Frank
He was just saying, he's like, "Look, here's the 15 different things could be, and I'm gonna have to at least consider the possibility that it's artificial."Um, but for me, and some people got really angry and everything, but I thought like, "This is ... look-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Why'd they get angry?
- AFAdam Frank
Because there's been a thing in the community over the years, you know, SETI got a bad name, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
SETI for a bunch of ... SETI was sort of thought as being like, oh, only whack-a-doodles do that and, you know.
- JRJoe Rogan
But why? Why is that? Just because there was no results?
- AFAdam Frank
Uh, I just think, you know, (sighs) there was, uh, you know what it is? It's because of shitty TV. (laughs) You know? I mean, I real ... In some ways, right? It's all, you know, it's prosthetic foreheads, right? It's the whole, we've had so much kinda crappy, you know, speculation about aliens, that trying to do anything scientific always had this whiff of sort of being a little, you know. And then there's the UFO stuff, you know, which is completely separate, has nothing to do with it.
- JRJoe Rogan
But SET- SETI never really achieved any results, right? There was that one big blip that was highly popularized.
- AFAdam Frank
The Wow! Signal.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 21:39 – 25:39
Beyond radio: technosignatures like city lights, rockets, and ancient artifacts
- JRJoe Rogan
Well it's also, we don't even use radio anymore.
- AFAdam Frank
Right. Right. Cable and ...
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, ra- radio is dying-
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... slowly but surely.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Local radio is ...
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, it's, it's kind of a, a thing of the past.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. Right. The only thing that's really we're beaming out l- large scale is, uh, military radars.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
You know? That's the main thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
So there'd be some kind of signal, it wouldn't necessarily have to be radar or, or radio. It would just have to be something that we could detect.
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Some form of anomaly that seemed to be artificial.
- AFAdam Frank
Right. Right. So here's like, here's some of the suggestions that people are talking about. So Avi Loeb at Harvard talks about the idea that, you know, maybe what you need, and you're gonna need the sensitivity for this. You're gonna see like rocket engines going back and forth between, you know, uh, but you have a planet, you have an, uh, a multi-planet civilization on in some-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
And you're gonna see little flares as rockets decelerate and accelerate back and forth. People have talked about seeing city lights. You know? The telescopes are getting (laughs) you know, we're, we're, we're building these giant telescopes that are like 30 meters across.
- JRJoe Rogan
Where there may be potential one day to see a city light.
- AFAdam Frank
You could see city lights when the, you know, the, you're gonna see the planet come around. Like, this is all like, you know, we're, we're not-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
We're not there yet.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
But, um, people talk-
- JRJoe Rogan
20 years, 30 years.
- AFAdam Frank
30 years, 40 years. You know, this is a long game.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
And you gotta be playing the long game. At some point, we're gonna need to build stuff in space that's even larger so we can collect more light. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
And won't the issue also be that if we do see these city lights, we're seeing city lights from millions of years ago?
- AFAdam Frank
Well, it depends. Like you ten- you know, a planet's at, that's, uh, in a star 10 light years ago, that's 10 years ago. So it's not like, you know, these things could still be around.
- 25:39 – 30:04
Science fiction as forecasting: The Expanse, space societies, and climate as the gatekeeper
- JRJoe Rogan
But there's, you know, a bunch of science fiction films that do speculate of what, what's going to be possible in the future and one of 'em was, uh, what was that recent one with, um, what's his name? All right, all right. What's his name? The fuck's his name?
- AFAdam Frank
Matthew McConaughey? (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Matthew McConaughey. (laughs)
- AFAdam Frank
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
That guy. Um, the one where they go through the wormholes, you know?
- AFAdam Frank
Right, right.
- JRJoe Rogan
How much do those movies piss you off?
- AFAdam Frank
They don't. I don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
They don't at all?
- AFAdam Frank
I, I do not... I mean-
- JRJoe Rogan
But they get sub-
- AFAdam Frank
So, science fiction. So, you know, I mean, I do not need my science fiction-
- JRJoe Rogan
To be correct?
- AFAdam Frank
... to be correct. I mean-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
... it's, you know, if they wanna make it, you know? So I love The Expanse. The Expanse is my favorite show ever. I will talk about it forever.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is The Expanse?
- AFAdam Frank
The Expanse, yeah, The Expanse.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't even know.
- AFAdam Frank
Yes, it's Expanse.
- JRJoe Rogan
Thank you. Help me.
- AFAdam Frank
Um, so The Expanse, it's a series of books, first of all, that I think are the best science fiction books in the last 15 years.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- AFAdam Frank
Um, and then they made 'em into, made it into a show, uh, on Syfy. And then they had three years of it and, you know, at first people were like, "Oh, this is kinda hard to follow," 'cause, you know, it's a lot of stories coming together.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
And then, um, you know, uh, this year it got 100%, uh, uh, uh, uh, ratings or- uh, it's- um, um, what is it?
- JRJoe Rogan
Rotten Tomatoes?
- AFAdam Frank
Rotten Tomatoes, 100% or 95%. Like, it- people love the show.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- AFAdam Frank
And then frigging Syfy canceled it, you know? And so then Jeff Bezos just- yeah, Jeff Bezos just picked it up.
- 30:04 – 42:12
Climate denial, polarization, and science as ‘public knowledge’
- JRJoe Rogan
Is this what your number one concern is, climate change?
- AFAdam Frank
My cli- I'm a single voter, yeah, climate change. 'Cause it's like, it is an existential dilemma, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
And I- because of all the writing I did for NPR and The New York Times, I have dealt with a lot of climate change denialists, man, and it drives me bananas.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is their big... What's the big... 'Cause I, I recently had a discussion with someone on the podcast that didn't believe in climate change.
- AFAdam Frank
Ugh.
- JRJoe Rogan
And it was, it was a weird thing. It's- 'cause I kept pulling up all the different scientific consensus studies, all the different studies that show that we were having an impact. It's an undeniable impact.
- AFAdam Frank
Undeniable.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AFAdam Frank
I mean, 30 years of science. Uh, yeah. No, I saw that. And she was-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- AFAdam Frank
... like, you know, "Well, that's what you say."
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I don't think that she's really thinking about the... In her case it was, uh-I don't think she really thinks about it. I think she-
- AFAdam Frank
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
... just has this stance that she believes that that group that she's a part of-
- AFAdam Frank
That's what it is.
- JRJoe Rogan
... subscribes to, so there's an ideological-
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... uh, b- aspect of it-
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... where you, you kinda... You have a predetermined pattern that you're supposed to follow-
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... when you're on one side.
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
You have to be pro-life. You have to be pro-S-
- AFAdam Frank
All this whole-
- JRJoe Rogan
... Second Amendment.
- AFAdam Frank
... bucket of stuff that you gotta-
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a bucket of stuff.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. Yeah.
- 42:12 – 48:10
Infrastructure, incentives, and ‘Merchants of Doubt’: why denial gets funded
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, where is the argument coming that we, uh, 'cause, uh, there are people that just adopt the, the party line, the party line that, you know, human, climates always change and human beings barely affect it and it's not something to concentrate on. Where's that coming from?
- AFAdam Frank
Again, I think it's the, you know, the gradual political polo- polarization of everything. You know, 'cause if you look at in the, um-Uh, we're now at the f- uh, what is it? 30-year anniversary of, um, Jim Hansen, who was, you know, the famous climate scientist, giving his testimony in front of Congress in 1988 on a hot sweltering summer day. We said, "Climate change is already happening," you know. And that made news everywhere and that was the first, like, public awakening that this was happening. And if you look at the first Bush administration, they were like, "Oh, yeah. We're ready to do something about this. Sure, we can do it." You know? Um, and then, it just gradually over time, as the whole political polarization thing happened, you can actually see the, uh, the, the very purposeful denial, right? They took a page out of the cigarette companies. You know, it's... For years, right? Cigarettes were like, "Ugh," and the cigarette companies were like, "No, it's not a problem." So, they were purposefully... You know, there were people who had money invested, right? You know, who, like, didn't want this change to happen.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, there's a, there's a documentary that, that goes into that. Um, what is the name of that? Merchants of Doubt?
- AFAdam Frank
Merchants of Doubt.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. That's a good-
- AFAdam Frank
That's a great book, man.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's a-
- AFAdam Frank
That's a really good book, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um-
- AFAdam Frank
And the, and the documentary's really good too.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but-
- AFAdam Frank
So, it was purposeful, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
But it's... That's... It's also confusing. It's like, why are they doing that? Like, who's paying them to do that? Obviously, the cigarette companies would be paying the same people-
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... to, um, put doubt into the idea that cigarettes are addictive or cigarettes cause cancer.
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
And this is what had been done in the past.
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, the same people are involved in doing it with climate change.
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
But why?
- AFAdam Frank
Uh, well, you know, uh, one time, I wrote a piece for the NPR that was kind of positive about like, "Yeah, we can switch infrastructures," like I'm saying. And some guy wrote me back very angry and he said, "You know, the proven reserves," you know, the stuff, the oil that's in the ground, "has a wealth," you know? Has a val- monetary value, like, you know, that's in their, in their, the oil company's banks, you know? The... In their bank accounts, of like $1.5 trillion. And the guy said, "Dude, you know, people have gone to war for a lot less than $1.5 trillion."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
So, you know, i- i- if, if we were to really be like, "Hey, man. We can't burn that," you know? "You're gonna have to leave that in the ground," that's like th- their bank accounts going like (imitates cash register) you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
Down to zero pretty fast. So, what I don't get-
- JRJoe Rogan
So, it's those industries?
- AFAdam Frank
I think that's part of it, and then it gets... You get linked to other things and then it becomes this sort of like mass, uh... You know, becomes the political pol-... They use the political polarization to sort of, you know, sort of make this happen. It doesn't ha-... And, and you look... Other countries aren't doing this, right? That's the important thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
You know, other countries, there's always a little bit of climate denial going on, but we're like the only country that's got... As you can see 'cause we're the only ones who are not part of the, the Paris Accord.
- 48:10 – 56:39
Anthropocene ethics: saving ‘us’ vs saving ‘the planet,’ ice ages, and biodiversity tradeoffs
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, w- who was it that was on the podcast that was talking about climate stabilization techniques and that this is probably the future? Was it Boyan? Maybe. I don't know. Um, anyway. What people are really worried about when, when you talk to people that understand the history of the human race and the history of the earth is climate cooling. They think that climate cooling is far more terrifying than climate warming 'cause if we go into a giant ice age again-
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... I mean, way more people are gonna die, a terrible loss of resources, and it could be devastating to the human race.But that is ... Is, is that, does, is that something you agree with?
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. No, I don't think so. I mean, it's, it's true. You know, and here's inter- something interesting. We're kinda overdue for an ice age, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Well, that was the thing in the '70s. They were saying that we're in the verge of an ice age.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. I mean that, you know, there, there was just a couple of guy ... I mean that whole th- You know, 'cause that, that's often something that climate deniers will throw at you, "In the '70s, every-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm. Right.
- AFAdam Frank
You know, it was like, there was like one or two guys who said that, and then it got picked up on the news. But the climate community at that time was not like, "Oh my God, it's cooling."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
But here's the interesting thing for me, and it fits into this whole idea, is that like we're holding off an ice age. Like, there may never be ... If human- humanity is successful and we navigate the, uh, Anthropocene ... You know that term, the Anthropocene, that we've now entered, we've now entered the human-dominated era. We've been, for the last 10,000 years, the geological epoch has been what they call the Holocene. That's all of human civilization happened in the Holocene. You know, it's pretty warm, it's pretty wet, moist. You know, everything's not locked up in ice. Um, and it's an interglacial period. And if we weren't around, yeah, in another 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 years there'd be another, uh, ice age. But the Anthropocene that we're triggering, um, could hold off ice ages forever, right? As long as we're around, there won't be another ice age 'cause we've already added enough warmth to the planet that it overcomes the effects that trigger an ice age. So like, what are the ethical responsibilities of that? That's what I try and tell the, you know, the environmentalists. Like, you know, you got this image like, oh, we gotta save the Earth. But they're thinking of like the Holocene. And it's like, well, you know, the, the planet, even with us, even if we successfully keep biodiversity rich and ... It's not gonna be the Earth we started with, you know, 'cause we're here. So yeah, what about the species that never form because we held off the ice age? You know? I mean, forever. Like, what about the ethical responsibility to those? So like, it opens-
- JRJoe Rogan
Boy, that is a long equation though, isn't it?
- AFAdam Frank
Uh, in what way?
- JRJoe Rogan
T- to try to contemplate what species would've existed if we allowed the Earth to cool, and our responsibility for allowing the Earth to cool so that the potential for new species to advance.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's like, fuck those species. Let's keep, let's keep this place warm so we can stay alive.
- AFAdam Frank
(laughs) Well, all I'm saying, and the only reason I'm raising that ... I'm not, you know, I'm raising that because-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
... we don't ... When we talk about climate change, what you get sometimes with the environmental movement is this sort of like, "The polar bear, the polar bear."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
And it's like, what I'm trying to say is look, I love polar bears. Kinda funny that polar bears are always a thing because polar bears will rip your head off and drink your blood.
- JRJoe Rogan
They're fucking ruthless.
- AFAdam Frank
In a second. (laughs) Yeah, right.
- JRJoe Rogan
The most ruthless.
- AFAdam Frank
Apex predator, man. But-
- JRJoe Rogan
Not only that, they're one of the rare bears that doesn't eat anything but meat.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. Right, right. And so it's so funny that we're like, "Oh, polar bears." Like, uh, polar bear-
- JRJoe Rogan
My friend Kevin is a biologist and he said like when you get polar bear babies, like right out of the womb, he said they're like the p- like the alien from the chest, you know, the chest burster scene.
- AFAdam Frank
(laughs) Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
He said they're literally like (chattering)
- AFAdam Frank
(laughs)
- 56:39 – 59:13
Modeling civilization lifetimes: steady states, die-offs, collapse, and planetary feedbacks
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. So, you know, I mean, these are all the kinds of things that we're gonna have to work out. I, I'm hopeful. People are like, "Are you hopeful or not hopeful?" 'Cause, you know, I mean, I ran these... I did these models. One of the pieces of research we did was we modeled planets and civilizations, like alien civilizations.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
We, you know, developed a simple mathematical model about, you know, how a civilization will use a planet's resources to make more babies, alien babies, and then how the... You know, by using those resources, you feed back on the planet, right? And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to model the possible outcomes, like what is the generic outcome, you know? If I've got 100,000 civilizations all being born in different places, what's the... You know, in general, what happens? And what we found is, like, basically four different possibilities. One was good news. Like, in these models, there was like, you know, the, the population shoots up, the planet's temperature shoots up, but they come to a nice steady state. Like, you know, you know, the population's stable, everything's good. So there, in those models, was hope. We also saw die-off, where, like, the population, you know, skyrockets, the planet, uh... They overshoot the carrying capacity of their planet, and then you get something like 70% of the population dying off. So, like, o- you know, seven out of every 10 people you know is gone. So, you know... But then you come to a steady state. So lo- maybe if you can survive the disaster, you can... You're still there. But we also-
- JRJoe Rogan
And the real problem with surviving the disaster is how much of the information gets restored.
- AFAdam Frank
Right, right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Because you think about if you're killing seven out of ten people, how many of those seven people are the ones who know how to make cell phones?
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah, exactly. That's a dark age, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AFAdam Frank
That's what happens in the Dark Age. I remember the first time I went to Europe and I saw those Roman, you know, the aqueducts, man, like five stories tall carrying water. You know, and by the, uh, 900 AD, nobody knew how they got built, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. There's a few of those dips in human civilization.
- AFAdam Frank
Right, right. And so it's not clear, especially with a society as complex as ours, right? If, like, the food doesn't arrive in my grocery store, what do I do?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
Right? You know, I garden, but, you know, (laughs) I'm not, you know...
- JRJoe Rogan
It's not enough.
- AFAdam Frank
Not enough, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
It's not gonna keep you alive.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah. So for a complex civilization like ours, even if you don't go extinct, you may not be able to have this kind of civilization.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
But we did find collapse. We did find complete, like, extinction curves as well, where, you know, the, uh, population went way up and then boom, dropped like a stone. And when even... We've found those... We built into the models the possibility for the civilization to switch from a high impact resource to a low impact resource, like fossil to solar.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AFAdam Frank
And sometimes... 'Cause, you know, planets have minds of their own, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AFAdam Frank
There's an internal dynamics to planets and you push them far enough and they're just gonna roll off. So we'd have ones where the, the population went way up, they made the switch, and then the population started to come down, the planet started to cool down and then...
- JRJoe Rogan
Did you factor in random geological events, random-
- AFAdam Frank
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
... solar events, random-
- AFAdam Frank
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
... asteroid events?
- AFAdam Frank
This was just... Yeah. This was really all about just planet, uh, civilization and its feedback on the planet.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm. Right.
- 59:13 – 1:08:48
Planetary hazards: asteroids, impact prevention, and living on a volatile Earth
- JRJoe Rogan
That would be one of the major issues with any advanced civilizations. It's a matter of time before something happens.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right? As we said, you know, we know that Mars has been hit before.
- AFAdam Frank
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
We know Earth's been hit, the moon's been hit.
- AFAdam Frank
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Everything... I mean, the moon is one of our best roo- uh, examples.
Episode duration: 2:23:49
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Transcript of episode MfHk_93x8_0
