Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #292

Robin Hanson 0:00 We can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the few things we can see, one of which is our current date. And so now that you have this living cosmology, we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty, and then at some point, things like us appear, very primitive, and then some of those, uh, stop being quiet and expand. And then for a few billion years they expand and then they meet each other, and then for the next 100 billion years, they commune with each other. (laughs) That is, the usual models of cosmology say that in roughly a 100, 150 billion years, the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have, uh, left is some galaxy clusters and they... that are sort of disconnected from each other. But before then, they will interact. There will be this community of all the grabby alien civilizations, and each one of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others. And we might hope to join them someday and become part of that community.

Lex Fridman 0:59 The following is a conversation with Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, and one of the most fascinating, wild, fearless, and fun minds I've ever gotten to accompany for a time in exploring questions of human nature, human civilization, and alien life out there in our impossibly big universe. He is the co-author of a book titled The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, and a fascinating recent paper I recommend on, quote, "Grabby Aliens," titled, "If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens are also Rare." This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Robin Hanson.

Lex Fridman 1:52 You are working on a book about, quote, "grabby aliens." This is a technical term, like the Big Bang. Uh-

Robin Hanson 1:59 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:59 ... so what are grabby aliens?

Robin Hanson 2:02 Grabby aliens expand fast into the universe and they change stuff. (laughs) That's the key concept. So if they are out there, we would notice. That's the key idea. (laughs) So the question is, where are the grabby aliens? So Fermi's question is, where are the aliens? And we could vary that in two terms, right? Where are the quiet, hard-to-see aliens and where are the big, loud, grabby aliens?

Lex Fridman 2:29 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 2:30 So it's actually hard to say where all the quiet ones are, right? (laughs) There could be a lot of them out there, uh, 'cause they're not doing much, they're not making a big difference in the world. But the grabby aliens, by definition, are the ones you would see. We don't know exactly what they do with where they went, but the idea is they're in some sort of competitive world where each part of them is trying to, uh, grab more stuff- (laughs)

Lex Fridman 2:54 Mm.

Robin Hanson 2:54 ... and do something with it. And, you know, almost surely whatever is the most competitive thing to do with all the stuff they grab isn't to leave it alone the way it started, right? So we humans, when we go around the earth and, and use stuff, we change it. We, we turn a forest into a farmland, turn a harbor into a city. So the idea is aliens would do something with it, and so we're not sh- exactly sure what it would look like, but it would look different. So somewhere in the sky, we would see big spheres of different activity where things had been changed because they had been there.

Lex Fridman 3:29 Expanding spheres.

Robin Hanson 3:30 Right.

Lex Fridman 3:30 So as you expand, you aggressively interact and change the environment. And so the word grabby versus loud, you're using them sometimes synonymously, sometimes not. Grabby to me is a little bit more aggressive. What does it mean to be loud? What does it mean to be grabby? What's the difference? And loud in what way? Is it visual? Is it sound? Is it some other physical phenomena like gravitational waves? What... Are you using this kind of in a broad, philosophical sense, or there's a specific thing that it means to be loud in this universe of ours?

Robin Hanson 4:07 My co-authors and I put together a paper with a particular mathematical model, and so we used the term grabby aliens to describe that more particular model, and the idea is it's a more particular model of the general concept of loud. So loud would just be the general idea that they would be really obvious.

Lex Fridman 4:25 Yeah. So grabby is the technical term. Is it in the title of the paper?

Robin Hanson 4:29 It's in the body. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 4:30 (laughs)

Robin Hanson 4:30 The title is actually about loud-

Lex Fridman 4:32 Okay.

Robin Hanson 4:32 ... and quiet. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 4:33 Right. Well, I like grabby.

Robin Hanson 4:33 And so the idea is there's, there's... You know, y- you wanna distinguish your particular model of things from the general category of things everybody else might talk about, so that's how we distinguished.

Lex Fridman 4:41 The paper title is "If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens are also Rare." "If life on Earth..." God, that's such a good abstract. "If life on Earth had to achieve-"

Robin Hanson 4:53 N hard steps-

Lex Fridman 4:54 "... N hard steps to reach humanity's level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the Nth power." So we'll talk about power, we'll talk about linear increase. So what is the technical definition of grabby? W- How do you envision grabbiness, and why are, uh, in contrast with humans, why aren't humans grabby? So, like, where's that line? Is it well definable? What is grabby, and what is non-grabby?

Robin Hanson 5:23 We have a mathematical model of the distribution of advanced civilizations, i.e. aliens, in space and time. That model has three parameters, and we can set each one of those parameters from data, and therefore we claim this is actually what we know about where they are in space time. (laughs) So the key idea is they appear at some point in space time, and then after some short delay, they start expanding, and they expand at some speed, and the speed is one of those parameters. That's one of the three. (laughs) And the other two parameters are about how they appear in time, that is they appear at random places.... and they appear in time according to a power law, and that power law has two parameters, and we can fit each of those parameters to data. And so then we can say, "Now we know."

Lex Fridman 6:12 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 6:13 We know the distribution of advanced civilizations in space and time. So, we are right now, a new civilization, and we have not yet started to expand. But plausibly, we would start to do that within say 10 million years of the mo- current moment.

Lex Fridman 6:26 (laughs)

Robin Hanson 6:26 That's plenty of time. And 10 million years is a really short duration in the history of the universe. So, we are at the moment a sort of random sample of the kind of times at which an advanced civilization might appear, because we may or may not become grabby, but if we do, we'll do it soon. And so our current date is a sample, and that gives us one of the other parameters. (laughs) The second parameter is the constant in front of the power law, and that's arrived from our current date.

Lex Fridman 6:52 Mm-hmm. And so power law, what is the N in the, in the power law?

Robin Hanson 6:59 So that's the more-

Lex Fridman 6:59 What is the constant?

Robin Hanson 7:00 ... complicated thing to explain, right?

Lex Fridman 7:01 Okay.

Robin Hanson 7:01 Advanced life appeared by going through a sequence of hard steps.

Lex Fridman 7:07 Right.

Robin Hanson 7:07 So starting with very simple life, and here we are at the end of this process at pretty advanced life, and so we had to go through some intermediate steps, such as, you know, sexual selection, photosynthesis-

Lex Fridman 7:18 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 7:18 ... multicellular animals, and the idea is that each of those steps was hard. Uh, evolution just took a long time searching in a big space of possibilities to find each of those steps, and the challenge was to achieve all of those steps by a deadline of when the planets would no longer host, uh, simple life. And so Earth has been really lucky compared to all the other billions of planets out there, (laughs) in that we managed to achieve all these steps in the short time of the five billion years that Earth is, can support simple life.

Lex Fridman 7:53 So not all steps, but a lot of them 'cause we don't know how many steps there are before you start to expand. So these are all the steps from-

Robin Hanson 8:00 Right.

Lex Fridman 8:00 ... the birth of life to the initiation of major expansion.

Robin Hanson 8:05 Right. So we're pretty sure that it would happen really soon so that it couldn't be the same sort of a hard step as the last one in terms of taking a long time. So, when we look at the history of Earth, we look at the durations of the major things that have happened, that suggests that there's roughly, say, six hard steps that happened, say, between three and 12, and that we have just achieved the last one that would take a long time.

Lex Fridman 8:32 Which is?

Robin Hanson 8:33 Um, well, we don't know. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 8:35 Oh, okay.

Robin Hanson 8:36 But whatever it is, we've just achieved the last one.

Lex Fridman 8:38 Are we talking about humans or aliens here? So l- let-

Robin Hanson 8:40 On Earth.

Lex Fridman 8:40 ... let's talk about some of these steps.

Robin Hanson 8:42 Humans, right. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 8:42 So, uh, Earth is really special in some way. We don't exactly know the level of specialness.

Robin Hanson 8:47 Right.

Lex Fridman 8:47 We don't really know which steps were the hardest or not because we just have a sample of one, but you're saying that there's three to 12 steps that we had to go through to get to where we are that are hard steps, hard to find by something that took, uh, a long time and is unlikely.

Robin Hanson 9:05 Right.

Lex Fridman 9:05 There's a lot of f- there's a lot of ways to fail. There's a lot more ways to fail than to succeed.

Robin Hanson 9:10 The first step would be sort of the very simplest form of life of any sort. (laughs) And then, um, we don't know whether that first sort is the s- first sort that we see in the historical record or not. Uh, but then some other steps are, say, the development of photosynthesis, the development of sexual reproduction. There's the development of eukaryote cells, which are a certain kind of complicated cell that seems to have only appeared once. And then there's multicellularity, that is multiple cells coming together into large organisms like us. And in this statistical model of trying to fit all these steps into a finite window, the model actually predicts that these steps could be of varying difficulties, that is they could each take different amounts of time on average. But if you're lucky enough that they all appear in a very short time, then the durations between them will be roughly equal. (laughs) And the time remaining left over in the rest of the window will also be the same length. So, we at the moment have roughly a billion years left on Earth until l- simple life like us would no longer be possible. Life appeared roughly 400 million years after the very first time when life was possible at the very beginning. So those two numbers right there give you the rough estimate of six hard steps.

Lex Fridman 10:27 Just to build up an intuition here, so we're trying to create a simple mathematical model of how life emerges and expands in the universe. And, uh, there's a section in this paper, "How many hard steps?" Right. Uh, "The two most plausibly diagnostic Earth durations seem to be the one remaining after now before Earth becomes uninhabitable for complex life." So you estimate how long Earth lasts, how many hard steps. There's windows for doing different hard steps, and you can sort of, uh, like queuing theory, mathematically estimate of, like, uh, the, uh, solution or the passing of the hard steps, or the taking of the hard steps. Sort of, like, coldly mathematical look. If life, pre-expansionary life, requires a number of steps, what is the probability of taking those steps on an Earth that lasts a billion years, or two billion years, or five billion years, or 10 billion years? And you say, "Solving for E using the observed durations of 1.1 and 0.4 then gives E values of 3.9 and 12.5, range 5.7 to 26, suggesting a middle estimate of at least six." That's where you said six-

Robin Hanson 11:48 Right.

Lex Fridman 11:48 ... hard steps.

Robin Hanson 11:50 Right.

Lex Fridman 11:50 Just to get to where we are.

Robin Hanson 11:53 Right.

Lex Fridman 11:53 We started at the bottom, now we're here, and that took six steps on average.

Robin Hanson 11:57 The key point is, on average, these things on any one random planet would take, you know, trillions or trillions of tri- you know, of years. Just a really long time.

Lex Fridman 12:07 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 12:07 And so we're really lucky that they all happened really fast, in a short time, before our window closed.... and the chance of that happening in that short window goes as that time period to the power of the number of steps, and so that was where the power we talked about before came from. And so, that means in the history of the universe, we should overall roughly expect advanced life to appear as a power law in time.

Lex Fridman 12:32 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 12:33 So that very early on, there was very little chance of anything appearing, and then later on, as things appear, other things are appearing somewhat closer to them in time because they're all going as this power law.

Lex Fridman 12:44 What is a power law? Can we, for people who are not-

Robin Hanson 12:47 Sure. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 12:47 ... math inclined-

Robin Hanson 12:48 Right.

Lex Fridman 12:48 ... can you describe what a power law is?

Robin Hanson 12:50 So, say the function x is linear and x squared is quadratic, so it's the power of two. If we make x to the three, that's cubic or the power of three. And so x to the sixth is the power of six. And so we'd say, uh, life appears in the universe on a planet like Earth in that proportion to the time that it's been, you know, uh, ready for life to appear, and that over the universe in general, it'll appear at roughly a power law like that.

Lex Fridman 13:24 What is the exponent? What is n? Uh, is it the number of hard steps?

Robin Hanson 13:27 Yes. The number of hard steps.

Lex Fridman 13:29 Okay. So-

Robin Hanson 13:29 So, that's the idea.

Lex Fridman 13:30 ... it's like if you're gambling and you're doubling up every time, this is the probability that you just keep winning.

Robin Hanson 13:37 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 13:38 Uh, so it gets very unlikely very quickly, and so we're the result of this unlikely chain of successes.

Robin Hanson 13:46 It's actually a lot like cancer. So the dominant model of cancer in an organism like each of us-

Lex Fridman 13:52 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 13:52 ... is that we have all these cells, and in order to become cancerous, a single cell has to go through a number of mutations, and these are very unlikely mutations, and so any one cell is very unlikely to have any... have all these mutations happen by the time your lifespan's over. But we have enough cells in our body that the chance of any one cell producing cancer by the end of your life is actually pretty high, more like 40%. And so the chance of cancer appearing in l- your lifetime also goes as a power law, as power of the number of mutations that's required for any one cell in your body to become cancerous.

Lex Fridman 14:24 So the longer you live, the likely-

Robin Hanson 14:27 Right.

Lex Fridman 14:27 ... you are to have cancer. So-

Robin Hanson 14:28 And it's, and its power is also roughly six. That is the chance of you getting cancer is the roughly the power of six of the time you've been since you were born.

Lex Fridman 14:37 It is perhaps not lost on people that you're, (laughs) that you're comparing-

Robin Hanson 14:43 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 14:43 ... power laws of the, uh, survival or the arrival of the human species to cancerous cells.

Robin Hanson 14:50 The same mathematical model, but of course we might have a different value- (laughs)

Lex Fridman 14:54 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 14:54 ... assumption about the two outcomes.

Lex Fridman 14:56 Oh-

Robin Hanson 14:56 But of course, from the point of view of cancer- (laughs)

Lex Fridman 14:59 (laughs)

Robin Hanson 15:00 ... somewhat similar.

Lex Fridman 15:01 Uh, from the point of view of cancer, it's a win-win. Uh, we both get to... We- we both get to thrive, I suppose. Um, it is interesting to take the point of view of all kinds of life forms on Earth, of viruses, of bacteria. They have a very different view. And, and, you know, it's like the Instagram channel, um, Nature As Metal.

Robin Hanson 15:22 Right.

Lex Fridman 15:22 The ethic under which, uh, nature operates doesn't often coincide, correlate with human morals. It seems cold and, um, machine-like in the selection process that it performs.

Robin Hanson 15:39 I am an analyst, I'm a scholar, an intellectual, and I feel I should carefully distinguish predicting what's likely to happen and then evaluating or judging what I think would be better to happen. (laughs) And it's a little dangerous to mix those up too closely, because then we can have wishful thinking. (laughs) And so I try typically to just analyze what seems likely to happen regardless of whether I like it or whether we do anything about it, and then once you see a rough picture of what's likely to happen if we do nothing, then we can ask, "Well, what might we prefer?" And ask, "Where could the levers be to, to move it at least a little toward what we might prefer?"

Lex Fridman 16:17 It's kinda-

Robin Hanson 16:18 And that's a, you know, useful a- but often, doing that just analysis of what's likely to happen if we do nothing offends many people. (laughs) They find that, you know, dehumanizing or cold or metal, as you say, (laughs) uh, to just say, "Well, this is what's likely to happen, and, you know, it's not your favorite, sorry, but, um, maybe we can do something, but maybe we can't do that much."

Lex Fridman 16:41 This is very interesting, that the, the cold analysis, whether it's geopolitics, whether it's medicine, whether it's economics, sometimes misses some very specific aspect of, um, human condition. Like for example, when you look at a doctor, and the act of a doctor helping a, a single patient, if you do the analysis of that doctor's time and cost of the medicine or the surgery or the transportation of the patient, this is the Paul Farmer question. You know, is it worth spending 10, 20, $30,000 on this one patient? When you look at all the people that are suffering in the world, that money could be spent so much better. And yet, there's something about human nature that wants to help the person in front of you, and that is actually the right thing to do, despite the analysis. And sometimes when you do the analysis, you, um... there's something about the human mind that allows you to not take that leap, that irrational leap, uh, to act in this way, that the analysis explains it away. Well, it's like, uh, for example, uh, the US government, you know, the DOT, Department of Transportation, puts a value of I think like $9 million on a human life. And the moment you put that number on a human life, you can start thinking, "Well, okay, I can start making decisions about this or that and w- with a sort of cold economic perspective," and then you might lose...... you might deviate from a deeper truth of what it means to be human, somehow. So you have to dance, because, uh, then if you put too much weight on the anec- anecdotal evidence on, on these kinds of human emotions, then you're going to lose... Uh, you could also probably more likely deviate from truth. But there's something about that cold analysis. Like I've been listening to a lot of people coldly analyze wars, war in Yemen, war in Syria, uh, Israel-Palestine, war in Ukraine, and there's something lost when you do a cold analysis of why something happened, when you talk about energy, uh, y- uh, uh, talking about sort of conflict, competition over resources. When you, uh, talk about geopolitics, sort of models of geopolitics and why a certain war happened, you lose something about the suffering that happens. I don't know. It's an interesting thing because you're both, you're exceptionally good at, uh, models in all domains (laughs) literally, um, but also there's a humanity to you. Uh, so it's an interesting dance. I don't know if you can comment on that dance.

Robin Hanson 19:34 Sure. It's definitely true as you say that for many people, if you are accurate in your judgment of, say, for a medical patient, right? What's the chance that this treatment might help and what's the cost? And compare those to each other, and you might say, "This looks like a lot of cost for a small medical gain." And at that point, knowing that fact, that might take the wing, you know, the, the air out of your sails. (laughs) You might not be willing to do the thing that maybe you feel is right anyway, which is still to pay for it. Um, and then somebody knowing that might wanna keep that news from you and not tell you about the low chance of success or the high cost in order to save you this tension, this, this awkward moment where you might fail to do what they and you think is right. But I think the higher calling, the, the, the higher standard to hold you to, which many people can be held to is to say, "I will look at things accurately, I will know the truth, and then I will also do the right thing with it. (laughs) I will be at peace with my judgment about what the right thing is in terms of the truth. I don't need to be lied to (laughs) in order to figure out what the right thing to do is."

Lex Fridman 20:54 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 20:54 And I think if you do think you need to be lied to in order to figure out what the right thing to do is, you're at a great disadvantage because then people will be lying to you, you will be lying to yourself, and you won't be as effective- (laughs)

Lex Fridman 21:08 Yes.

Robin Hanson 21:08 ... at achieving whatever good you were trying to achieve.

Lex Fridman 21:11 But getting the data, getting the facts is step one.

Robin Hanson 21:14 Yes.

Lex Fridman 21:15 Not the final step.

Robin Hanson 21:15 Absolutely.

Lex Fridman 21:17 So it's, uh, I would say having a good model, getting the good data is step one and it's a burden. Because you can't just use that data to, um, arrive at sort of the easy convenient thing. You have to really deeply think about what is the right thing. You can't use the... So the n- the, the dark aspect of data, uh, of models is you can use it to excuse away actions that are unethical. You can use data to basically excuse away anything.

Robin Hanson 21:52 But not looking at data lets you excuse yourself-

Lex Fridman 21:55 It works.

Robin Hanson 21:56 ... to pretend and think that you're doing good-

Lex Fridman 21:58 Exactly.

Robin Hanson 21:58 ... when you're not.

Lex Fridman 21:59 Exactly. Uh, but it e- it is a burden. It doesn't excuse you from still being human and deeply thinking about what is right, that very kind of gray area, that very subjective area. Um, that's part of the human condition. But let us return for a time to aliens. So you started to define sort of the, the model, the parameters of, uh, grabby-ness.

Robin Hanson 22:25 Right.

Lex Fridman 22:25 Or the, uh, as we approach grabby-ness. So what happens?

Robin Hanson 22:29 So the... Again, there is three parameters.

Lex Fridman 22:31 Yes.

Robin Hanson 22:32 There's the speed at which they expand, there's the rate at which they appear in time, and that rate has a constant and a power. So we've talked about the history of life on Earth suggests that power is around six, but maybe three to 12. We can say that constant comes from our current date, it sort of sets the overall rate. And the speed, which is the last parameter, comes from the fact that when we look in the sky, we don't see them. So the model predicts very strongly that if they were expanding slowly, say, 1% of the speed of light, our sky would be full of vast spheres that were full of activity. That is, at a random time when a civilization is first appearing, if it looks out into its sky, it would see many other grabby alien civilizations in the sky. And they would be much bigger than the full moon. They'd be huge spheres in the sky.

Lex Fridman 23:18 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 23:18 And they would be visibly different. We don't see them.

Lex Fridman 23:21 Can we pause for a second? Okay. There's a bunch of hard steps that earth had to pass to arrive at this place we are currently, which we're starting to launch rockets out into space.

Robin Hanson 23:33 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 23:33 We're kind of starting to expand.

Robin Hanson 23:34 A bit. Right.

Lex Fridman 23:35 Very slowly. Okay. But this is like the birth. I- I- if you look at the entirety of the history of earth, we're now at this precipice of, like, expansion.

Robin Hanson 23:46 W- we could. We might not choose to. But if we do, we will do it in the next 10 million years.

Lex Fridman 23:51 10 million? Wow.

Robin Hanson 23:53 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 23:53 Time flies when you're having fun. Uh, I was thinking more like a thou-

Robin Hanson 23:56 And 10 million is a short time on the, on the cosmological scale. So that, that is it might be only 1,000. But the point is if it's, even if it's up to 10 million, that hardly makes any difference to the model. So I might as well give you 10 million.

Lex Fridman 24:05 This, this... (laughs)

Robin Hanson 24:06 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 24:06 This makes me feel... I was, I was so stressed about planning what I'm gonna do today, and now-

Robin Hanson 24:11 Right. You got plenty of time.

Lex Fridman 24:12 (laughs) Plenty of time. Oh, I just need to be generating some offspring quickly here. Okay.

Robin Hanson 24:18 There you go.

Lex Fridman 24:18 Um, so, and there's this moment, this... (laughs) This 10 million, uh, year gap, uh, or window when we start expanding, and you're saying, "Okay, so this is an interesting moment where there's a bunch of other alien civilizations that might, at some history of the universe, arrived at this moment we're here, they passed all the hard steps." There's a s- there's a model for how...... likely it is that that happens, and then they start expanding. And you think of an expansion as almost like a f- a sphere.

Robin Hanson 24:48 Right.

Lex Fridman 24:49 That's, uh, when you say speed, we're talking about the speed of the radius growth.

Robin Hanson 24:53 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 24:54 Something like the surface, how fast the surface expands.

Robin Hanson 24:56 How fast, okay. And so you're saying that there is some speed for that expansion, average speed, and then we can play with that parameter, and if that speed is super slow, then maybe that explains why we haven't seen anything. If it's super fast, well, it would-

Lex Fridman 25:12 Well, the slow would create the puzzle. If slow predicts we would see them, but we don't see them.

Robin Hanson 25:16 Okay, how so?

Lex Fridman 25:16 And so the way to explain that is that they're fast. So the idea is-

Robin Hanson 25:20 Uh-oh.

Lex Fridman 25:20 ... if they're moving really fast, then we don't see them until they're almost here. And- Okay, this is counterintuitive. All right, hold on a second. So s- it, I think this works best when I say a bunch of dumb things.

Robin Hanson 25:31 Okay. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 25:33 Um, (laughs) and then, uh, you, uh, elucidate, uh, the full complexity and the beauty of the dumbness. Okay. So there's these spheres out there in the universe that are made visible because they're sort of, uh, using a lot of energy, so they're generating a lot of light and sound ............................

Robin Hanson 25:51 They're changing things.

Lex Fridman 25:51 They're changing things, and change would be visible-

Robin Hanson 25:55 A long way off.

Lex Fridman 25:56 Yes.

Robin Hanson 25:56 They, they would take apart stars, rearrange them, restructure galaxies. They, they would just-

Lex Fridman 26:00 All kinds of fun.

Robin Hanson 26:01 ... big, big, huge stuff.

Lex Fridman 26:02 Okay. If they're expanding slowly, we would see a lot of them because the universe is old, is relative-

Robin Hanson 26:10 Right.

Lex Fridman 26:10 Is old enough to where we would see the expansion.

Robin Hanson 26:12 That is, we're assuming we're just typical in, you know, maybe at the 50th percentile of them, so like half of them have appeared so far. The other half will still appear later.

Lex Fridman 26:21 Hm.

Robin Hanson 26:22 And, um, the, the math of our best estimate is that they appear roughly once per million galaxies. (laughs) And we would meet them in roughly a billion years if, uh, we expanded out to meet them.

Lex Fridman 26:35 So we're looking at a Grabby Aliens model 3D sim, right? What's, what's, this, that's the actual name of the video. What, uh, "By the time we get to 13.8 billion years, the fun begins." Okay, so this is, this is, um-

Robin Hanson 26:51 Right.

Lex Fridman 26:51 We're watching a three-dimensional sphere rotating. I presume that's the universe, and then-

Robin Hanson 26:57 Right.

Lex Fridman 26:58 ... Grabby Aliens are expanding and filling that universe-

Robin Hanson 27:00 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 27:01 ... with all kinds of, uh, fun.

Robin Hanson 27:03 And then pretty soon, it's all full.

Lex Fridman 27:05 It's full. So that's how the Grabby Aliens come in contact, first of all, with other aliens, and then, um, with us humans. "The following is a simulation of the Grabby Aliens model of alien civilizations. Civilizations are born, then expand outwards at constant speed. A spherical region of space as shown. By the time we get to 13.8 billion years, this sphere will be about 3,000 times as wide as the distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda." Okay, this is fun.

Robin Hanson 27:38 It's huge.

Lex Fridman 27:39 Okay, it's huge. Um, all right. So why don't we see, uh, we're, we're one little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot in that giant, giant sphere.

Robin Hanson 27:50 Right.

Lex Fridman 27:51 Uh, why don't we see any of the Grabby Aliens?

Robin Hanson 27:55 It depends on how fast they expand. So you could see that if they expanded at the speed of light, you wouldn't see them until they were here. Uh, so like out there, if somebody is destroying the universe with a, uh, vacuum decay, there's this, there's this, you know, doomsday scenario where somebody somewhere could change the vacuum of the universe, and that would expand at the speed of light and basically destroy everything it hit. But you'd never see that until it got here 'cause it's expanding at the speed of light. If you're expanding really slow, then you see it from a long way off. So the fact we don't see anything in the sky tells us they're expanding fast, say over a third the speed of light, and that's really, really fast. But that's what you have to believe if we look out and you don't see anything. Now, you might say, "Well, how, maybe I just don't wanna believe this whole model. Why should I believe this whole model at all?" And our best evidence why you should believe this model is our early date. We are right now almost 14 billion years into the universe on a planet around a star that's roughly five billion years old, but the average star out there will last roughly five trillion years. (laughs) That is a thousand times longer. And remember that power law, it says that the chance of advanced life appearing on a planet goes as the power of sixth of the time. So (laughs) if a planet lasts a thousand times longer, then the chance of it appearing on that planet, if everything would stay empty at least, is a thousand to the sixth power, or 10 to the 18th.

Lex Fridman 29:24 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 29:25 So (laughs) enormous, overwhelming chance that if the universe would just stay sit, and empty, and waiting for advanced life to appear, when it would appear would be way at the end of all these planet lifetimes. That is the long planets near the end of the lifetime, trillions of years into the future. So, but we're really early compared to that, and our explanation is, at the moment, as you saw in the video, the universe is filling up. In roughly a billion years, it'll all be full.

Lex Fridman 29:53 Hm.

Robin Hanson 29:53 And at that point, it's too late for advanced life to show up. (laughs) So you had to show up now before that deadline.

Lex Fridman 29:58 Okay, can, can we break that apart a little bit? Okay, or linger on some of the things you said. So with the power law, the things we've done on Earth, the model you have says that it's very unlikely, like we're lucky SOBs. Is that-

Robin Hanson 30:13 Right.

Lex Fridman 30:13 ... is that mathematically correct to say?

Robin Hanson 30:16 We, we're crazy early, that is-

Lex Fridman 30:18 When early means like-

Robin Hanson 30:20 In the history of the universe.

Lex Fridman 30:21 In the history, okay, so given this model, how do we make sense of that? If we're super, can we just be the lucky ones?

Robin Hanson 30:31 Well-

Lex Fridman 30:32 Okay.

Robin Hanson 30:32 ... 10 to the 18 lucky, you know?

Lex Fridman 30:33 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 30:34 How, how lucky do you feel? (laughs)

Lex Fridman 30:35 Uh-

Robin Hanson 30:36 So you know, (laughs) -

Lex Fridman 30:38 That's, that's a

Narrator 30:38 (laughs)

Robin Hanson 30:38 ... pretty lucky, right? You know, and 10 to the 18 is, is a billion billion.

Lex Fridman 30:42 So then, if you were just being honest and humble, that that means... What does that mean? Uh-

Robin Hanson 30:49 It means one of the assumptions that calculated this crazy early must be wrong.

Lex Fridman 30:52 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 30:52 That's what it means. So the key assumption we suggest is that the universe would stay empty, so most life would appear like a thousand times longer, later than now-

Lex Fridman 31:03 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 31:03 ... if everything would stay empty waiting for it to appear.

Lex Fridman 31:05 What, what is... So what does non-empty mean exactly?

Robin Hanson 31:08 So the grabby aliens are filling the universe right now. Roughly at the moment they filled half of the universe, and they've changed it, and when they fill everything, it's too late for stuff like us to appear.

Lex Fridman 31:17 But wait, hold on a second. (sighs) Did anyone help us get lucky? If it's so difficult, what, how do, uh, like wha-

Robin Hanson 31:26 So it's like cancer, right? (laughs) There's all these cells, each of which randomly does or doesn't get cancer, and eventually some cell gets cancer and, you know, we were one of those. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 31:37 But hold on a second. Okay, but we got it early. We got it-

Robin Hanson 31:41 Early compared to the prediction with an assumption that's wrong. That's, so that's how we do a lot of, you know, theoretical analysis. You have a model that makes a prediction that's wrong, then that helps you reject that model.

Lex Fridman 31:53 Okay. Let's try to understand exactly where the wrong is. So the assumption is that the universe is empty.

Robin Hanson 31:59 Stays empty.

Lex Fridman 32:00 Stays empty.

Robin Hanson 32:01 L- and, and waits until this advanced life appears in trillions of years. That is, if the universe would just stay empty, if there was just, you know, nobody else out there-

Lex Fridman 32:10 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 32:10 ... then when you should expect advanced life to appear? If you're the only one in the universe, when should you expect to appear? You should expect to appear trillions of years in the future.

Lex Fridman 32:19 I see. Right, right. So this is a very sort of nuanced mathematical, uh, assumption, and I don't think we can intuit it cl- cleanly with words. Uh, but if you assume that you're just wa- the universe stays empty and you're waiting for one life, uh, civilization to pop up, then it's gonna, it should happen very late. Much later-

Robin Hanson 32:44 Right.

Lex Fridman 32:44 ... than now. And if, uh, if you look at earth, uh, the way things happened on earth, it happened much, much, much, much, much earlier than it was supposed to according to this model, if you take the initial assumption. Therefore, you can say, well the initial assumption of the universe staying empty is very unlikely.

Robin Hanson 33:00 Right.

Lex Fridman 33:01 Okay.

Robin Hanson 33:02 And the other, the other alternative theory is the universe is filling up and will fill up soon-

Lex Fridman 33:07 Okay.

Robin Hanson 33:07 ... and so we are typical for the origin data of things that can appear before the deadline.

Lex Fridman 33:12 Before the dead- okay, it's filling up, so why don't we see anything if it's filling up?

Robin Hanson 33:16 Because they're expanding really fast.

Lex Fridman 33:19 Close to the speed of light.

Robin Hanson 33:19 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 33:20 So we will only see it when it's here.

Robin Hanson 33:22 Almost here.

Lex Fridman 33:23 Okay. Uh, what are the ways in which we might see a quickly expanding... (laughs) This, this is both exciting and terrifying.

Robin Hanson 33:32 It is terrifying.

Lex Fridman 33:33 It's like watching a truck, like driving at you at 100 miles an hour, and uh-

Robin Hanson 33:39 Right. So we would see spheres in the sky, at least one sphere in the sky-

Lex Fridman 33:43 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 33:43 ... growing very rapidly and-

Lex Fridman 33:46 Like very rapidly.

Robin Hanson 33:48 Right.

Lex Fridman 33:48 (laughs)

Robin Hanson 33:49 Yes, very rapidly.

Lex Fridman 33:51 So, so we're not... So there's, there's, you know, different def- 'cause we were just talking about 10 million years-

Robin Hanson 33:56 Right.

Lex Fridman 33:56 ... this would be-

Robin Hanson 33:57 You might see it 10 million years in advance coming. I mean, you still might have a long warning, or again-

Lex Fridman 34:03 Oh, this-

Robin Hanson 34:03 ... the universe is 14 billion years old. (laughs) The typical origin times of these things are spread over several billion years, so the chance of one originating at a, you know, very close to you in time is very low. So th- it still might take millions of years from the time you see it, from the time it gets here. You'll have a million years of your years to be terrified (laughs) of this fast sphere-

Lex Fridman 34:24 Hold on a second.

Robin Hanson 34:24 ... coming at you.

Lex Fridman 34:25 But, but, but coming at you very fast, so if they're traveling-

Robin Hanson 34:28 Yes.

Lex Fridman 34:28 ... close to the speed of light-

Robin Hanson 34:29 But they're coming from a long way away. So remember, the rate at which they appear is one per million galaxies.

Lex Fridman 34:36 Right.

Robin Hanson 34:36 So they're, they're roughly 100 galaxies away.

Lex Fridman 34:40 I see. So the delta between the speed of light and their actual travel speed is very important? So-

Robin Hanson 34:46 Right. So even, if they're going at, say, half the speed of light-

Lex Fridman 34:49 We'll have a long time to-

Robin Hanson 34:50 Then-

Lex Fridman 34:51 Yeah. But what if they're traveling exactly the speed of light?

Robin Hanson 34:54 N-

Lex Fridman 34:54 Then we'd see 'em like-

Robin Hanson 34:55 Then we, then we wouldn't have much warning, but that's less likely, but we, we can't exclude it.

Lex Fridman 35:00 And they could also be somehow traveling faster than the speed of light. Or-

Robin Hanson 35:05 That I think we can't exclude, because if they could go faster than the speed of light, then they would just already be everywhere. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 35:11 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 35:11 So in a, in a universe where you can travel faster than the speed of light, you can go backwards in spacetime. So any time you appeared anywhere in spacetime, you could just fill up everything.

Lex Fridman 35:19 Yeah. And-

Robin Hanson 35:21 So anybody in the future who ever appeared, they, they would have been here by now.

Lex Fridman 35:24 Can you exclude the possibility that those kinds of aliens aren't already here?

Robin Hanson 35:29 Uh, well-

Lex Fridman 35:31 You have just a model-

Robin Hanson 35:31 ... we should have a different discussion of that. Right. So, so-

Lex Fridman 35:33 Okay. Well let's actually leave that, let's leave that discussion aside-

Robin Hanson 35:36 Okay.

Lex Fridman 35:36 ... just to linger and understand the grabby alien expansion which is beautiful and fascinating. Okay. So there's these giant expanding-

Robin Hanson 35:46 Spheres.

Lex Fridman 35:47 ... spheres of alien civilizations. Now, um, when those spheres, spheres collide, mathematically, it would, it's very likely that we're not the first collision of grabby a- alien civilizations, I suppose is one way to say it. So there's-

Robin Hanson 36:09 W-

Lex Fridman 36:10 ... like the first time the spheres touch each other, recognize each other-

Robin Hanson 36:13 Right.

Lex Fridman 36:14 ... they meet. Um, they, they recognize each other first before they meet, um-

Robin Hanson 36:20 They see each other coming.

Lex Fridman 36:21 They see each other coming, and then, so there's a bunch of them, there's a, there's a combinatorial thing where they start seeing each other coming, and then there's a, a third neighbor who's like, "What the hell?" And then there's a fourth one.

Robin Hanson 36:30 Right.

Lex Fridman 36:30 Okay. So what does that, you think, look like? Um, what lessons from human nature, that's the only data we have-

Robin Hanson 36:40 Well-

Lex Fridman 36:40 ... uh, can you draw about meeting us?

Robin Hanson 36:41 So, so the story of the history of the universe here-

Lex Fridman 36:43 Yes.

Robin Hanson 36:43 ... is what I would call a living cosmology. So what I'm...... excited about, in part, by this model, is that it lets us tell a story of cosmology where there are actors who have agendas. So most ancient peoples, they had cosmologies, the stories they told about where the universe came from and where it's going and what's happening out there, and their stories, they like to have agents and actors, gods or something out there doing things. And lately, our favorite cosmology is dead, kind of boring. (laughs) You know, we're the only activity we know about or see, and everything else just looks dead and, and empty.

Lex Fridman 37:15 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 37:15 But this is now telling us, no, that's not quite right. (laughs) At the moment, the universe is filling up, and in a few billion years, it'll be all full. And from then on, the history of the universe will be the universe full of aliens.

Lex Fridman 37:30 Yeah, so that's a, that's a really good reminder and a really good way to think about cosmologies. We're surrounded by a vast darkness, and we don't know what's going on in that darkness until the light from whatever generate lights arrives here. So we kind of, yeah, we look up at the sky, okay, there's stars. Oh, they're pretty, but you don't think about the giant expanding spheres of aliens. (laughs)

Robin Hanson 37:56 Right, 'cause you don't see them, but-

Lex Fridman 37:58 That are qui- that are quickly approaching.

Robin Hanson 37:59 ... but now our date, the, looking at the clock, if you're clever, the clock tells you. So I like the analogy with the ancient Greeks. So-

Lex Fridman 38:04 Yes.

Robin Hanson 38:05 ... you, you might think that an ancient Greek, you know, staring at the universe couldn't possibly tell how far away the sun was or how far away the moon is or how big the earth is, that all you can see is just big things in the sky, you can't tell. But they were clever enough actually to be able to figure out the size of the earth and the distance to the moon and the sun and the size of the moon and sun. That is, they could figure those things out actually by being clever enough. And so similarly, we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in spacetime by being clever about the few things we can see, one of which is our current date. And so now that you have this living cosmology, we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty, and then at some point, things like us appear, very primitive, and then some of those, uh, stop being quiet and expand, and then for a few billion years, they expand and then they meet each other, and then for the next 100 billion years, they commune with each other. That is, the usual models of cosmology say that in roughly 100, 150 billion years, the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have left is some galaxy clusters and they, that are sort of disconnected from each other. But before then, for the next 100 million years, 100 billion years, excuse me, um, they will interact. There will be this community of all the grabby alien civilizations, and each one of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others. And we might hope to join them someday and become part of that community. That's an interesting thing to aspire to.

Lex Fridman 39:32 Yes. Interesting is an interesting word.

Lex Fridman 39:36 Is the universe of alien civilizations defined by war as much or more than, uh, war defined human history?

Robin Hanson 39:49 I would say it's defined by competition, and then the question is how much competition implies war. So, uh, up until recently, competition defined life on earth. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 40:03 Yes.

Robin Hanson 40:04 Um, competition between species and organisms and among humans, competitions among individuals and communities, and that competition often took the form of war in the last 10,000 years. Um, many people now are hoping or even expecting to sort of suppress and end competition in human affairs. Uh, they regulate business competition, they prevent military competition, and that's a future I think a lot of people will like to continue and strengthen. People will like to have something close to world government or world governance, or at least a world community, and they will like to suppress war and any forms of business and personal competition over the coming centuries. And they may like that so much that they prevent interstellar colonization, which would become the end of that era. That is, inter- interstellar colonization would just return severe competition to human or our descendant affairs. And many civilizations may prefer that, and ours may prefer that. But if they choose to allow interstellar colonization, they will have chosen to allow competition to return with great force. That is, there's really not much of a way to centrally govern a rapidly expanding sphere of civilization. And so I think the, one of the most, you know, solid things we can predict about grabby aliens is they have accepted competition, and they have internal competition, and therefore, they have the potential for competition when they meet each other at the borders. But whether that's military competition is more of an open question.

Lex Fridman 41:38 So military meaning destr- physically destructive.

Robin Hanson 41:41 Right. Um, hmm. So there, there's a lot to say there. So one i- idea that you kind of proposed is progress might be maximized through competition, through some kind of healthy competition, some definition of healthy. So like constructive, not destructive competition. So like we would likely... Grabby alien civilizations would be likely defined by competition because they can expand faster because they, competition allows innovation and sort of the battle of ideas with them. So the way I would take the logic is to say, you know, competition just happens if you can't coordinate to stop it. And you probably can't coordinate to stop it in an expanding interstellar wave.

Lex Fridman 42:32 So, so competition is a f- is a fundamental force in the universe?

Robin Hanson 42:37 It has been so far, and it would be within an expanding grabby alien civilization, but we today have the chance, many people think and hope, of greatly controlling and limiting competition within our civilization for a while. And that's an interesting choice. (laughs) ... whether to allow competition to re- to sort of regain its full force, or whether to suppress and manage it.

Lex Fridman 43:04 Well, one of the open questions that has been raised in the past, um, less than 100 years is whether our desire to lessen the destructive nature of competition, or the destructive kind of competition, will be outpaced by the destructive power of our weapons. Sort of, uh, if nuclear weapons and weapons of that kind, um, become more destructive than our desire for peace, then it all- all it takes is one asshole at the party to ruin the party.

Robin Hanson 43:45 It takes one asshole to make a delay, but not that much of a delay on the cosmological scales we're talking about.

Lex Fridman 43:52 I see.

Robin Hanson 43:52 So even at vast-

Lex Fridman 43:53 You could still party on. (laughs)

Robin Hanson 43:54 Even a vast nuclear war, if it happened here right now on earth-

Lex Fridman 43:58 Oh, that's dark. Yeah.

Robin Hanson 43:59 ... it would not kill all humans.

Lex Fridman 44:02 Yes.

Robin Hanson 44:03 It certainly wouldn't kill all life. And so human civilization would ret- turn within 100,000 years.

Lex Fridman 44:10 So all the history of atrocities, and, um, if you look at, uh, uh, the, the Black Plague-

Robin Hanson 44:22 Right.

Lex Fridman 44:23 ... which is not human-caused atrocities or whatever.

Robin Hanson 44:26 There are a lot of military-

Lex Fridman 44:28 Military.

Robin Hanson 44:28 ... atrocities in history, absolutely.

Lex Fridman 44:29 In the 20th century. Those are, um, those challenge us to think about human nature but the cosmic scale of time and space, they do not stop the human spirit, essentially. The hu- humanity goes on. Through all the atrocities-

Robin Hanson 44:48 Right.

Lex Fridman 44:48 ... it goes on. Life goes on.

Robin Hanson 44:49 Most likely. So even a nuclear war isn't enough to destroy us or to stop our potential from expanding. But we could institute a- a s- regime of global governance that limited competition, including military and business competition, of sorts, and that could prevent our expansion.

Lex Fridman 45:09 Of course,

Lex Fridman 45:10 to play devil's advocate, um, global governance is centralized power, and power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. One of the aspects of competition that's been very productive is not letting any one person, any one country, any one center of power become absolutely powerful. Because that's another lesson is it seems to corrupt. There's something about ego in the human mind that seems to be corrupted by power. So when you say global governance, that terrifies me more than the possibility of war, because it's, uh, it ter-

Robin Hanson 45:57 I- I think people will be less terrified than you are right now, and let me try to paint the picture from their point of view. This isn't my point of view-

Lex Fridman 46:05 Yes.

Robin Hanson 46:05 ... but I think it's going to be a widely shared point of view.

Lex Fridman 46:08 Yes. This is two devil's advocates arguing, two devils.

Robin Hanson 46:11 Okay? So for the last half century and into the continuing future, we actually have had a strong elite global community that shares a lot of values and beliefs and has created a lot of convergence in global policy. So if you look at electromagnetic spectrum or, uh, medical experiments or pandemic policy or nuclear power energy or regulating airplanes or just in a wide range of area, in fact the world has very similar regulations and rules everywhere. And it's not a coincidence because they are part of a world community where people get together at places like Davos, et cetera, where world elites want to be respected by other world elites, and they have a, you know, convergence of opinion, and that produces something like global governance, but without a global center. And this is sort of what human mobs or communities have done for a long time. That is, humans can coordinate together on shared behavior without a center by having gossip and reputation within a community of elites. And that is what we have been doing and are likely to do a lot more of. So for example, you know, one of the things that's happening, say, with the war in Ukraine is that this world community of elites has decided that they disapprove of the Russian invasion, and they are coordinating to pull resources together from all around the world in order to oppose it. And they are proud of that, (laughs) sharing that opinion, and they're- and they are, feel that they are morally justified in their stance there. And, um, that's this kind of event that actually brings world elite communities together, where they- they come together and they push a particular policy and p- position that they share and that they achieve successes. And the same sort of passion animates global elites with respect to, say, global warming or global poverty and other sorts of things. And they are in fact making progress on those sorts of things through shared global community of elites. And in some sense, they are slowly walking toward global governance, slowly strengthening various world institutions of governance, but cautiously, carefully watching out for the possibility of a single power that might corrupt it. I think a lot of people over the coming centuries will look at that history and like it. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 48:38 It's a interesting thought, and thank you for playing that devil's advocate there, but I think the elites too easily lose touch of-

Robin Hanson 48:51 Of course.

Lex Fridman 48:51 ... of the morals that, uh, the best of human nature and power corrupts-

Robin Hanson 48:57 Sure, but th-

Lex Fridman 48:57 ... and everything you just said.

Robin Hanson 48:58 ... if their view is the one that determines what happens, their view may still end up there even if-... you or I might criticize it from that point of view, so.

Lex Fridman 49:07 From a perspective of minimizing human suffering, elites can use topics of the war in Ukraine, and climate change, and all of those things to sell an idea to the world. And, uh, with disregard to the amount of suffering it causes, their actual actions. So like-

Robin Hanson 49:32 Right.

Lex Fridman 49:32 ... you can tell all kinds of narratives. That's the way propaganda works.

Robin Hanson 49:36 Right.

Lex Fridman 49:36 Hitler, uh, really sold the idea that everything Germany is doing is either it's the victim, it's defending itself against the cruelty of the world, and it's actually trying to bring out a- about a better world. So, every power center thinks they're doing good. And so th- this is-

Robin Hanson 49:55 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 49:57 ... uh, this is the positive of competition of not, of having multiple power centers. This kind of gathering of elites makes me very, very, very nervous. The dinners, the- the meetings in the closed rooms. I don't know. I, another-

Robin Hanson 50:17 But remember we talked about separating our cold analysis of what's likely or possible from what we prefer, and so that's, this isn't exactly enough time for that. We might say, "I would recommend we don't go this route of a world, strong world governance." And, um, because I would say it'll preclude this possibility of becoming grabby aliens, of filling the next mi- nearest million galaxies for the next billion years with vast amounts of activity and interest and, and value of, of life out there. That's the thing we would lose by deciding that we wouldn't expand. That we would stay here and keep our comfortable shared governance.

Lex Fridman 50:56 So you, wait, you think that global governance, um, is l- makes it more likely or less likely that we expand out into the universe?

Robin Hanson 51:08 Less.

Lex Fridman 51:10 Okay.

Robin Hanson 51:10 So this is the key, this is the key point.

Lex Fridman 51:12 Right.

Robin Hanson 51:13 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 51:13 Right. So screw the elites. (laughs)

Robin Hanson 51:16 Right.

Lex Fridman 51:16 So first we want to expa- wait, do we want to expand?

Robin Hanson 51:19 So again, I want to separate my neutral analysis-

Lex Fridman 51:23 Right.

Robin Hanson 51:23 ... from my-

Lex Fridman 51:23 Sure.

Robin Hanson 51:24 ... evaluation and say, "First of all, I have an analysis that tells us this is a key choice that we will face."

Lex Fridman 51:30 Yes.

Robin Hanson 51:30 And that it's a key choice other aliens have faced out there. And it could be that only one in 10 or only one in 100 civilizations chooses to expand, and the rest of them stay quiet, and that's how it goes out there. And we face that choice too. And it'll happen sometime in the next 10 million years, maybe the next 1,000, but the key thing to notice from our point of view is that, uh, even though you might like our global governance, you might like the fact that we've come together and we no, we no longer have massive wars, and we no longer have destructive competition, um, and that we could continue that, the cost of continuing that would be to prevent interstellar colonization. That is, once you allow interstellar colonization, then you've lost control of those colonies. And whatever they change into, they could come back here and compete with you back here as a result of having lost control. And I think if people value that global governance, and the c- global community, and regulation, and all the things it can do enough, they would then want to prevent interstellar colonization.

Lex Fridman 52:31 I, I want to have a conversation with those people. I believe that both for, uh, humanity, for the good of humanity, for what I believe is good in humanity, and for expansion, exploration, um, innovation, distributing the centers of power is very beneficial. So this whole meeting of elites, and I've met, I've gotten, I've been very fortunate to meet, uh, quite a large number of elites. They make me nervous-

Robin Hanson 52:59 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 53:00 ... because it's easy to lose touch of reality. I'm nervous about that in myself, to make sure that you never lose touch, um, as you get sort of older, wiser. You know how you generally get, like, disrespectful of kids, "Kids these days." No, the kids are b-

Robin Hanson 53:23 So, okay-

Lex Fridman 53:23 Their culture is beautiful.

Robin Hanson 53:23 ... but I think you should hear a stronger case for their position.

Lex Fridman 53:26 Sure.

Robin Hanson 53:26 So I'm, I'm gonna play that one.

Lex Fridman 53:27 For the, for the, uh, for the elites?

Robin Hanson 53:29 Yes. Well, for the-

Lex Fridman 53:30 Let's go.

Robin Hanson 53:30 ... for the, for the limiting of expansion and for the regulation of, of, um, behavior. So-

Lex Fridman 53:37 Just get, if, okay, can I linger on that?

Robin Hanson 53:38 Sure.

Lex Fridman 53:39 So you're saying those two are connected.

Robin Hanson 53:41 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 53:41 So w- the human civilization and alien civilizations come to a c- uh, a crossroads. They have to decide, do we want to expand or not? And connected to that, do we want to give a lot of power to a central elite?

Robin Hanson 53:56 Right.

Lex Fridman 53:56 Or do we want to, um, distribute the, the, the power centers which is naturally connected to the expansion? When you expand-

Robin Hanson 54:06 Well-

Lex Fridman 54:06 ... you distribute the power.

Robin Hanson 54:09 If, say, over the next 1,000 years, we fill up the solar system, right? We go out from Earth and we colonize Mars and we change a lot of things. Within a solar system, still everything is within reach. That is, if there's a rebellious colony around Neptune, you can throw rocks at it and smash it, and-

Lex Fridman 54:24 Yes.

Robin Hanson 54:24 ... and teach them discipline. Okay? (laughs) A, a central-

Lex Fridman 54:28 How does that work for the British Empire?

Robin Hanson 54:29 ... a central control over the solar system is feasible.

Lex Fridman 54:32 Yes.

Robin Hanson 54:32 Um, but once you let it escape the solar system, it's no longer feasible. But if you have a solar system that doesn't have a central control, maybe broken into 1,000 different political units in the solar system, then any one part of that that allows interstellar colonization, and it happens, that is, interstellar colonization happens when only one party chooses to do it and is able to do it, and that's what it, they're for. So we can just say, in a world of competition, if interstellar colonization is possible, it will happen, and then competition will continue. And that will sort of ensure the continuation of competition into the indefinite future.

Lex Fridman 55:06 Yeah. That's, and competition...We don't know, but competition could take violent forms or-

Robin Hanson 55:12 In many forms.

Lex Fridman 55:12 ...productive forms.

Robin Hanson 55:13 And the case I was going to make is that I think one of the things that most scares people about competition is not just that it creates holocausts and death on massive scales, is that it's likely to change who we are and what we value.

Lex Fridman 55:28 Yes.

Robin Hanson 55:29 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 55:29 So th- this is the other thing with power. As we grow, as human civilization grows, becomes multi-planetary, multi-solar system potentially, how does that change us, do you think?

Robin Hanson 55:44 I think the more you think about it, the more you realize it can change us a lot. So, first of all, I would say-

Lex Fridman 55:49 This is pretty dark, by the way.

Robin Hanson 55:50 Well, uh, i- depending on what you-

Lex Fridman 55:52 It's just honest. (laughs)

Robin Hanson 55:53 Right.

Lex Fridman 55:53 Supposed-

Robin Hanson 55:53 Well, I'm trying to ............................ But fir- I think the first thing you should say, if you look at history, just human history over the last 10,000 years, if you really understood what people were like a long time ago, you'd realize they were really quite different. Ancient cultures m- created people who are really quite different. Most historical fiction lies to you about that. (laughs) It often offers you modern characters in an ancient world, but if you actually study history, you will see just how different they were and how differently they thought. And that's, they've changed a lot, many times, and they've changed a lot across time. So I think the most obvious prediction about the future is even if the, you only have the mechanisms of change we've seen in the past, you should still expect a lot of change in the future. But we have a lot bigger mechanisms for change in the future than we had in the past. So, um, I have this book called The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, and it's about what happens if brain emulations become possible? So a brain emulation is where you take a actual human brain and you scan it in fine spatial and chemical detail to create a computer simulation of that brain, and then those computer simulations of brains are basically citizens in a new world. They work and they vote and they fall in love and they get mad and they lie to each other, (laughs) and this is a whole new world. And my book is about analyzing how that world is different than our world, basically using competition as my key lever of analysis. That is, if that world remains competitive, then I can figure out how they change in that world, what they do differently than we do, and it's very different, (laughs) and it's different in ways that are shocking sometimes to many people, uh, in ways some people don't like. I think it's an okay world, but I have to admit, it's quite different. And that's just one technology. (laughs) If we add, you know, dozens more technologies, changes into the future, you know, we should just expect it's possible to become very different than who we are. I mean, in the space of all possible minds, our minds are a particular architecture, a particular structure, a particular set of habits, and they are only, you know, one piece in a vast space of possibilities. The space of possible minds is really huge.

Lex Fridman 58:02 So, yeah, let's linger on the space of possible minds for a moment just to sort of humble ourselves of how peculiar our peculiarities are, like the fact that we like a particular kind of sex, and the fact that we eat food through one hole and poop through another hole. And that seems to be a fundamental aspect of life, v- is very important to us, (laughs) uh, and that life is finite in a certain kinda way with a meat vehicle, so death is very important to us. I wonder which aspects are fundamental or would be common throughout human history and also throughout th-, sorry, throughout history of life on Earth, and throughout other kinds of lives. Like, what is really useful? You mentioned competition-

Robin Hanson 58:56 Right.

Lex Fridman 58:56 ...seems to be a one fundamental thing.

Robin Hanson 58:57 So I've tried to do analysis of where our distant descendants might go in terms of what are robust features we could predict about our descendants.

Lex Fridman 59:05 Yes, yes.

Robin Hanson 59:05 Is that... So, again, I have this analysis of sort of the next generation aft-, th- so the next era after ours, that if you think of human history as having three eras so far, right? There was the forager era, the farmer era, and the industry era, then my attempt in Age of Em is to analyze the next era after that. And, and it's very different, but, of course, there could be (laughs) more and more eras after that. So, you know, analyzing a particular scenario and thinking it through is one way to try to see how different the future could be, but that doesn't give you some sort of, like, sense of what's typical. Um, but I have tried to analyze what's typical, and so I, I have two predictions I think I, I can make pretty solidly. One thing is that we know at the moment that humans discount the future rapidly. So, uh, we discount the future in terms of caring about consequences roughly a factor of two per generation, and there's a solid evolutionary analysis why sexual creatures would do that, 'cause basically your, your descendants only share half of your genes, and your descendants are a generation away. So-

Lex Fridman 1:00:05 So we only care about our gr- grandchildren.

Robin Hanson 1:00:08 Oh, you know, basically that a factor of four, (laughs) later-

Lex Fridman 1:00:11 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 1:00:12 ...uh, because, you know, it's later. So this actually explains typical interest rates in the economy. That is, interest rates are greatly influenced by our discount rates, and, uh, we basically discount the future by a factor of two per generation. Um, but that's a side effect of the way our preferences evolved as sexually selected creatures. We should expect that in the longer run, creatures will evolve who don't discount the future. They will care about the long run, and they will therefore not neglect the long run. So, for example, for things like global warming or things like, you know, that, at the moment, many co- commenters, y- are sad that basically ordinary people don't seem to care much, market prices don't seem to care much, and ordinary people, it doesn't really impact them much because humans don't care much about the long-term future. (laughs) But, uh, and futurists find it hard to motivate people and to engage people about the long-term future because they just don't care that much. But that's a side effect of this particular way that our...... you know, preferences evolved about the future. And so, in the future, they will neglect the future less (laughs) . And that's an interesting thing that we'll, that we can predict robustly. Eventually, you know, maybe a few centuries, maybe longer, eventually our descendants will care about the future.

Lex Fridman 1:01:25 Can you, uh, speak to the intuition behind that? Is it, is it useful to think more about the future?

Robin Hanson 1:01:32 Right. If, if evolution rewards creatures for having many descendants, then, uh, if you have decisions that influence how many descendants you have, then that would be good if you made those decisions. But in order to do that, you'll have to care about them, you'll have to care about that future, that is-

Lex Fridman 1:01:47 So, to push back, if, that's if you're trying to maximize the number of descendants. But, the nice thing about not caring too much about the long-term future is you're more likely to take big risks, or you're more, you're less risk averse. And it's possible that the evo- both evolution and just life in this, in, in the universe is rewarded, rewards the risk-takers.

Robin Hanson 1:02:11 Well, we actually have analysis of the ideal risk preferences (laughs) too. So there's, uh, literature on ideal preferences, uh, that evolutions to promote. And, for example, there's literature on competing investment funds and what the managers of those funds should care about in terms of risk, various kinds of risks-

Lex Fridman 1:02:29 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 1:02:29 ... and in terms of discounting. So, uh, managers of investment funds should basically have logarithmic risk, i.e., in collect- in shared risk, in correlated risk, but be very risk take, risk-neutral with respect to uncorrelated risks. So, um, that's a feature that's predicted to happen about individual pers- personal choices in biology, and also for investment funds. So that's other things, that's also something we can say about the long run.

Lex Fridman 1:02:58 What's correlated and uncorrelated risk?

Robin Hanson 1:03:02 If there's something that would affect all of your descendants-

Lex Fridman 1:03:04 (laughs)

Robin Hanson 1:03:06 ... then, uh, if you take that risk, you might have more descendants, but you might have zero (laughs) , and that's just really bad, to have zero descendants. But an uncorrelated risk would be a risk that some of your descendants would suffer but others wouldn't.

Lex Fridman 1:03:19 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 1:03:19 And then you have a portfolio of descendants, and so that portfolio insures you against problems with any one of them.

Lex Fridman 1:03:26 I like the idea of portfolio of descendants. And we'll talk about portfolios with, with your idea of, that you briefly mentioned, we'll return there with EM, E-M, The Age of E.M.: work, love, and life when robots rule the Earth. EM, by the way, is emulated minds. So this-

Robin Hanson 1:03:42 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:03:42 ... one of the...

Robin Hanson 1:03:44 EM is short for emulations.

Lex Fridman 1:03:46 EM is short for emulations, and it's kind of an idea of how we might create artificial minds, artificial copies of minds, or human-like intelligences.

Robin Hanson 1:03:57 I have another dramatic prediction I can make about long-term preferences.

Lex Fridman 1:04:00 Let's go. Yes.

Robin Hanson 1:04:01 Which is, at the moment, we reproduce as the result of a hodgepodge of preferences that aren't very well integrated, but sort of in our ancestral environment, induced us to reproduce. So we have preferences over being, you know, sleepy, and hungry, and thirsty, and wanting to have sex, and wanting to, you know, be exci- excitement, etc., right?

Lex Fridman 1:04:21 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 1:04:21 And so, in our ancestral environment, the packages of preferences that we evolved to have did induce us to have more descendants.

Lex Fridman 1:04:29 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 1:04:29 That's why we're here (laughs) . But, those packages of preferences are not a robust way to promote having more descendants. They, they were tied to our ancestral environment, which is no longer true. So that's one of the reasons we are now having a big fertility decline, because in our current environment, our ancestral preferences are not inducing us to have a lot of kids, which is, from evolution's point of view, a big mistake. We can predict that, in the longer run, there will arise creatures who just abstractly know that what they want is more descendants (laughs) . That's, that's a very robust way to have more descendants is to have that as your direct preference.

Lex Fridman 1:05:06 First of all, your thinking is so clear. I love it. It's so mathematical. And thank you for, for thinking so clearly with me, and bearing with my interruptions, and, and going on the tangents when we go there. So you're just clearly saying that successful long-term civilizations will prefer to have descendants, more descendants?

Robin Hanson 1:05:30 Not just prefer, consciously and abstractly prefer. That is, it won't-

Lex Fridman 1:05:34 Deliberate-

Robin Hanson 1:05:34 ... be the indirect consequence of other preference. It will just be the thing they a- know they want.

Lex Fridman 1:05:40 There'll be a president in the future that says, "We must have more sex."

Robin Hanson 1:05:44 "We must have more descendants and do-"

Lex Fridman 1:05:46 Descendants.

Robin Hanson 1:05:46 "... whatever it takes to do that."

Lex Fridman 1:05:47 Takes, whatever. (laughs) "We must go to the moon and do the other things-"

Robin Hanson 1:05:51 Right. When you-

Lex Fridman 1:05:51 "... not because they're easy, b- because they're hard. But instead of the moon, let's have lots of sex." Okay. But there's a lot of ways to have descendants, right?

Robin Hanson 1:05:59 Right. But, so that's the whole point.

Lex Fridman 1:06:00 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 1:06:00 When the world gets more complicated and there are many possible strategies, it's having that as your abstract preference that will en- force you to think through those possibilities and pick the one that's most effective.

Lex Fridman 1:06:10 So just to clarify, descendants doesn't necessarily mean the narrow definition of descendants, meaning-

Robin Hanson 1:06:16 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:06:16 ... humans having sex and then having babies.

Robin Hanson 1:06:18 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:06:19 You can have artificial intelligence systems-

Robin Hanson 1:06:21 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:06:21 ... that, uh, would, in whom you instill some capability of cognition and perhaps even consciousness. You can also create, through genetics and biology, clones of yourself, or, um, slightly mod- modified clones, thousands of them.

Robin Hanson 1:06:36 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:06:37 Um, so it's, so all kinds of descendants. It could be-

Robin Hanson 1:06:40 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:06:41 ... descendants in the space of ideas too. For somehow we, we no longer exist in this meat vehicle. It's now just like, uh, whatever the definition of a life form is, you have descendants of those life forms.

Robin Hanson 1:06:54 Yes. And, and they will have, be thoughtful about that. They will have-

Lex Fridman 1:06:57 (laughs)

Robin Hanson 1:06:57 ... thought about what counts as a descendant.

Lex Fridman 1:06:59 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 1:07:00 And that'll be important to them to, to have the right concept.

Lex Fridman 1:07:02 So the they there is very, is very interesting, who the-

Robin Hanson 1:07:05 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:07:05 ... they are.

Robin Hanson 1:07:06 But a key thing is, we're making predictions that are, I think are somewhat robust about what our distant descendants will be like. Another thing I think that you would automatically accept is they will almost entirely be artificial.... and I think that would be the obvious prediction about any aliens we would meet. That is, they would long since have given up, you know, reproducing biologically, and-

Lex Fridman 1:07:24 Well, it's all, it's like, uh, organic or something. It's all real, and it's-

Robin Hanson 1:07:28 Right. Well, it might be squishy-

Lex Fridman 1:07:29 ... or it's all artificial.

Robin Hanson 1:07:29 ... and, and made out of hydrocarbons-

Lex Fridman 1:07:31 Right.

Robin Hanson 1:07:31 ... but it would be artificial in the sense of made in factories with designs on CAD things, right? Factories with scale economy. So that factories we have made on Earth today have much larger scale economies than the factories in our cells. So the factories in our cells are, they're marvels-

Lex Fridman 1:07:44 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 1:07:44 ... but they don't achieve very many scale economies. They're tiny little factories.

Lex Fridman 1:07:48 But they're all factories.

Robin Hanson 1:07:49 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:07:49 Factories on top of factories. So everything, uh, the, the factories on top of-

Robin Hanson 1:07:53 The factories that are designed is different than sort of the factories that have evolved.

Lex Fridman 1:07:58 I think the nature of the word design is very interesting, uh-

Robin Hanson 1:08:01 Yep.

Lex Fridman 1:08:01 ... to uncover

Lex Fridman 1:08:02 there. But let me, in terms of, uh, aliens, let me go, let, let me analyze your Twitter like it's Shakespeare.

Robin Hanson 1:08:09 (laughs) Okay.

Lex Fridman 1:08:10 There's a tweet that says, uh, "Define 'hello," in quotes, "alien civilizations as one that might, in the next million years, identify humans as intelligent and civilized, travel to Earth, and say hello by making their presence and advanced abilities known to us." The next 15 polls... This is a Twitter thread. The next 15 polls ask about such hello aliens, and what these polls ask is, uh, your Twitter followers, what they think those aliens would be like, certain particular qualities. So, uh, poll number one is, "What percent of hello aliens evolved from biological species with two main genders?" And, uh, you know, the, the popular vote is, uh, above 80%. So most of them have two genders. What do you think about that? I'll ask you about some of these 'cause they're so interesting. It's such an interesting question.

Robin Hanson 1:09:02 Well, it, it is a fun set of questions.

Lex Fridman 1:09:03 Yes.

Robin Hanson 1:09:03 I, I like that.

Lex Fridman 1:09:04 It's a fun set of questions. So the genders as we look through evolutionary history, uh, what's the usefulness of that as opposed to having just one or, like, millions?

Robin Hanson 1:09:13 So there's a question in, in evolution to life on Earth, there are very few species that have more than two genders. There are some, but there are, they aren't very many. But there's an enormous number of species that do have two genders, much more than one. (laughs) And so there's a literature on why did multiple genders evolve, and then sort of what's the point of having males and females versus hermaphrodites. Um, so most plants are hermaphrodites. That is, they have, they're, they, they would mate male/female, but each plant can be either role. (laughs) And then most animals have chosen to split into males and females, uh, and then they're differentiating the two genders, and, you know, there's a interesting set of questions about why that happens.

Lex Fridman 1:09:56 'Cause you can do selection. You, you basically have, um, like, one gender competes for, for the affection of other, and there's sexual partnership that creates the offspring so there's sexual selection, and it's nice to have, uh, a, like a, uh, to a party, it's nice to have dance partners, and then-

Robin Hanson 1:10:14 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:10:14 ... you g- they, each one get to choose based on certain characteristics, and that's an efficient mechanism for adapting to the environment, being successfully adaptive to the environment.

Robin Hanson 1:10:24 It does look like there's an advantage in L- if you have males, then the males can take higher variance, and so there can be stronger selection among the males in terms of weeding out genetic mutations because the males have higher variance in their mating success.

Lex Fridman 1:10:39 Sure, okay.

Robin Hanson 1:10:40 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:10:40 Uh, question number two, "What percent of hello aliens evolved from land animals as opposed to plants or ocean/air organisms?" By the way, I did, um, recently see that there's, uh, only 10% of species on Earth are on the ocean. So there's a lot more-

Robin Hanson 1:11:02 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:11:02 ... variety on land.

Robin Hanson 1:11:04 There is.

Lex Fridman 1:11:05 It's, it's interesting. So why is that? I don't even, I can't even intuit exactly why that would be. Maybe survival on land is harder, and so you get a lot more-

Robin Hanson 1:11:15 So the story that I understand is it's about small niches. So speciation, uh, can be promoted by having multiple different species. So in the ocean, species are larger. That is, there are more creatures in each species because the ocean environments don't vary as much. So if you're good in one place, you're good in many other places. But, you know, on land and especially in rivers, rivers contain an enormous percentage of the kinds of species on land, you see, because they vary so much- (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:11:45 Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson 1:11:45 ... uh, from place to place. And so s- a species can be good in one place, and then other species can't really compete because, uh, they came from a different place where things are different. So, um, it's, uh, a remarkable fact actually that, uh, speciation promotes evolution in the long run. That is, more evolution has happened on land because there have been more species on land because each species has been smaller. And that's actually a warning about something, or something called rot that I've, I've thought a lot about, which is one of the problems with a, even a world government, which is, large systems of software today just consistently rot (laughs) and decay with time, and have to be replaced, and that plausibly also is a problem for other large systems, including biological systems, legal systems, regulatory systems. And, um, it seems like large species actually don't evolve as effectively as small ones do, (laughs) and that's a important thing to notice about. And so, and that's actually indif- that's different from ordinary sort of, um, evolution in economies on Earth in the last few centuries, say. Um, you know, on Earth, ev- the more technical evolution and economic growth happens in larger integrated cities and nations, (laughs) but in biology, it's the other way around. More evolution happened in the fragmented species.

Lex Fridman 1:12:59 Yeah, it, it, it's such a nuanced discussion 'cause you can also push back in terms of nations and, and at least companies. It's like large companies seems to evolve less effectively. There is something that, you know, they have more resources, more, um-They don't even have better resilience in, when you look at the scale of decades and centuries. It seems like a lot of large companies die.

Robin Hanson 1:13:25 But still large economies do better. Like large cities grow better than small cities. Lar- large integrated economies like the United States or the European Union do better than small fragmented ones. So-

Lex Fridman 1:13:35 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 1:13:36 ... even...

Lex Fridman 1:13:36 Sure. It's, it's, that's a very interesting long discussion. But so most of the people, and obviously votes on Twitter, um, represent the absolute, uh, objective truth of things, so most-

Robin Hanson 1:13:49 But an interesting question about oceans is that, okay, remember I told you about how most planets would last for trillions of years.

Lex Fridman 1:13:54 Yes.

Robin Hanson 1:13:55 And, and be later, right? So people have tried to explain why life appeared on Earth by saying, "Oh, all those planets are gonna be unqualified for life because of various problems." That is, they're around smaller stars which last longer, and smaller stars have some things like more solar flares, maybe more tidal locking. But almost all these problems with longer to live planets aren't problems for ocean worlds. And there are a large fraction of planets out there are o- ocean worlds. So if life can appear on an ocean world, then, uh, that pretty much ensures that these, these planets that last a very long time could have advanced life because most, you know, there's a huge fraction of ocean worlds.

Lex Fridman 1:14:33 So that's actually an open question. Uh, so when you say, sorry, when you say life appear, you're kind of saying life and intelligent life. So like, uh, so that's, that's an open question. Is land, and as I, I suppose the question behind the, the Twitter poll, which is a grabby alien civilization that comes to say hello, what's the chance that they first began their early steps, the difficult steps they took on, on land? Hmm. What do you think? Well, 80% th- uh, mo- most people on Twitter think it's very likely on land.

Robin Hanson 1:15:14 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:15:14 What do you think?

Robin Hanson 1:15:15 I think people are discounting ocean worlds too much. That is, I think people tend to assume that whatever we did must be the only way it's possible, and I think people aren't giving enough credit for other possible paths, but-

Lex Fridman 1:15:26 Dolphins. Waterworld, by the way, people criticize that movie. I love that movie.

Robin Hanson 1:15:31 (laughs) .

Lex Fridman 1:15:31 Kevin Costner can do me no wrong. Okay, next question. What percent of hello aliens once had a nuclear war with greater than 10 nukes fired in anger? So not in, uh, incompetence and as-

Robin Hanson 1:15:45 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:15:45 ... an accident. Intentional firing of nukes. And, um, less than 20% was the most popular vote. So-

Robin Hanson 1:15:54 That just seems wrong to me. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:15:56 So like, I, I wonder what, so most people think, uh, once you get nukes-

Robin Hanson 1:16:01 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:16:01 ... we're not gonna fire them. They believe in the power of the game theory.

Robin Hanson 1:16:05 I, I, I think they're assuming that if you had a nuclear war, then that would just end civilization for good. I think that's the thinking here.

Lex Fridman 1:16:10 That's the main thing.

Robin Hanson 1:16:11 Right, and I think that's just wrong. I think you could rise again after a nuclear war. It might take 10,000 years or 100,000 years but it could rise again.

Lex Fridman 1:16:19 So what do you think about mutually assured destruction as a force to prevent people from, uh, firing nuclear weapons? That's a question that's anew to a terrifying degree has been raised now in what's going on.

Robin Hanson 1:16:32 Well, I mean, clearly, it has had an effect. (laughs) . The question is just how strong of an effect and for how long? Clear- I mean, clearly, we have not gone wild with nuclear war, and clearly the, the devastation that you would get if you initiated a nuclear war is part of the reasons people have been reluctant to start a war.

Lex Fridman 1:16:48 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 1:16:48 The question is h- just how reliably will that ensure the absence of a war?

Lex Fridman 1:16:53 Yeah, the night is still young.

Robin Hanson 1:16:54 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:16:55 This has been 70 years or whatever it's been. Uh, I mean, but what do you think?

Robin Hanson 1:17:02 So-

Lex Fridman 1:17:02 Do you think we'll see nuclear war in the-

Robin Hanson 1:17:05 Yeah, I think-

Lex Fridman 1:17:05 ... in this century?

Robin Hanson 1:17:07 I don't know if in this century, but at like, it, it's the sort of thing that's likely to happen eventually, you know-

Lex Fridman 1:17:12 Well, that's a very loose statement. Okay, I understand. Now, this is where I pull you out of your mathematical model-

Robin Hanson 1:17:18 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:17:18 ... and ask a human question. Do you think, this, this particular human question.

Robin Hanson 1:17:22 I think we, we've been lucky that it hasn't happened so far.

Lex Fridman 1:17:25 But what is the nature of nuclear war? Let's think about this. There is, uh, dictators. There's democracies. Uh, miscommunication. How do wars start? World War I, World War II. There's-

Robin Hanson 1:17:41 So, so the, the biggest datum here is that we've had an enormous decline in major war over the last century. So that, that has to be taken into account. Now, the, so, the problem is, is war is a process that has a very long tail. (laughs) . That is, there are rare very large wars, so the average war is much worse than the median war-

Lex Fridman 1:18:02 Yes.

Robin Hanson 1:18:02 ... because of this long tail. And that makes it hard to identify trends over time. So the median war has clearly gone way down in the last century, that a median rated war, but it could be that's because the tail has gotten thicker, and in fact the average war is just as bad but, you know, most wars are gonna be big wars. We, so that's the thing we're not so sure about.

Lex Fridman 1:18:21 There's no strong data on, on, um, wars with one, because of the destructive nature of the weapons, kill hundreds of millions of people. There's no data on this.

Robin Hanson 1:18:35 Right, but, but-

Lex Fridman 1:18:36 So, but we can start intuiting-

Robin Hanson 1:18:37 But we can see the, the power law, we can do a power law fit to the rate of wars and it's a power law with a thick tail.

Lex Fridman 1:18:43 Yeah.

Robin Hanson 1:18:43 So it's one of those things that you should expect most of the damage to be in the few biggest ones. So that's also, say, true for pandemics and some, a few other things. For pandemics, most of the damage is in the few biggest ones.

Lex Fridman 1:18:53 Right.

Robin Hanson 1:18:53 So the median pandemics of war is less than the average that you should expect in the future.

Lex Fridman 1:18:57 But those, that fitting of data is very questionable because, uh, yet what, everything you said is correct. The question is like what can we infer about the future of civilization-threatening pandemics or nuclear war?... from studying the history of the 20th century. So, like, you can't just fit it to the data, the rate of wars and the destructiveness of war-

Robin Hanson 1:19:25 Mm.

Lex Fridman 1:19:25 Like, that's not, that's not how nuclear war will happen.

Robin Hanson 1:19:28 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:19:28 Nuclear war happens with two assholes or idiots-

Robin Hanson 1:19:33 Well...

Lex Fridman 1:19:33 ... that- that have access to a button.

Robin Hanson 1:19:35 S- small wars happen that way too. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:19:37 No, I- I understand that, but that's, it's very important, small wars aside, it's very important to understand the dynamics, the human dynamics, and the geopolitics of-

Robin Hanson 1:19:45 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:19:45 ... of the way nuclear war happens in order to predict how we can minimize the chance of, uh, of-

Robin Hanson 1:19:52 But it is a common and useful intellectual strategy to take something that could be really big or- but is often very small and fit the distribution of the data to small things, which you have a lot of them, and then ask, "Do I believe the big things are really that different," right?

Lex Fridman 1:20:06 I see.

Robin Hanson 1:20:06 So sometimes it's reasonable to say like, say, with tornadoes or even pandemics or something, the- the underlying process might not be that different for some small ones-

Lex Fridman 1:20:16 With that big hypothesis-

Robin Hanson 1:20:16 ... right?

Lex Fridman 1:20:16 ... it might not be. There- there is-

Robin Hanson 1:20:19 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:20:19 There, the fact that mutual assured destruction seems to work to some degree shows you that, to some degrees, different-

Robin Hanson 1:20:26 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:20:26 ... than the small wars. Uh, that- that (laughs) ... So it's, uh, it's a really important question to understand is are humans capable, one human, like how many humans on earth, if I give them a button now, say, "You pressing this button will kill everyone on earth. Everyone."

Robin Hanson 1:20:48 Right?

Lex Fridman 1:20:49 How many humans will press that button? I wanna know those numbers, like day-to-day, minute to minute-

Robin Hanson 1:20:55 There-

Lex Fridman 1:20:55 ... how many people have that much irresponsibility, evil, uh, incompetence, ignorance, whatever word you wanna assign. There's a lot of dynamics to the psychology that leads you to press that button, but how many? My intuition is the number... Uh, the more destructive the- that press of a button, the fewer humans you find, and that number gets very close to zero very quickly, especially people who have access to such a button. But that's perhaps a- a hope than a reality? I- unfortunately, we don't have good data on this, um, whi- which is like, how destructive are humans willing to be?

Robin Hanson 1:21:35 So I think part of this just has to think about- ask what your timescales you're looking at, right?

Lex Fridman 1:21:40 Right.

Robin Hanson 1:21:40 So if you say, "If you look at the history of war," you know, we've had a lot of wars pretty consistently over many centuries. So if I ask, if you ask, "Will we have a nuclear war in the next 50 years?" I might say, "Well, probably not." If I say, "500 or 5,000 years," like if the same sort of risks are underlying and they just continue, then you have to add that up over time and think the risk is getting a lot larger the longer a timescale we're looking at.

Lex Fridman 1:22:04 But, uh, okay let's generalize nuclear war because what I was m- more referring to is something that kills more than, um, 20% of humans on earth and injures or makes, um, makes the other 80% suffer horribly. Uh, survive but suffer. That's what I was referring to. So when you look at 500 years from now, that might not be nuclear war, that might be something else-

Robin Hanson 1:22:35 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:22:35 ... that's that kind of- has that destructive effect. And I don't know, I- e- th- these feels like- these feel like novel questions in the history of humanity. I- I just don't know. I think f- since nuclear weapons, this has been, you know, engineering pandemics, for example, uh, robotics, so nanobots, um, b- you know?

Robin Hanson 1:23:00 Here's how I- I'd phrase the question.

Lex Fridman 1:23:01 It just seems like a r- real new possibility that we have to contend with and we don't have good models, or from my- from my perspective.

Robin Hanson 1:23:08 So if you look on, say, the last 1,000 years or 10,000 years, we could say we've seen a certain rate at which people are willing to make big destruction in terms of war.

Lex Fridman 1:23:17 Yes.

Robin Hanson 1:23:18 Okay? And the- if you're willing to project that data forward, that I think, like, if you're a- wanna ask over periods of thousands or tens of thousands of years, you- you would have a reasonable data set. So the- the key question is what's changed lately?

Lex Fridman 1:23:30 Yes.