Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about aliens.
Speaker: Could extraterrestrial life help solve the problem of evil?
Speaker: Why do only Americans get abducted?
Speaker: And if Martians could talk, would we be able to understand them?
Speaker: Hi and welcome back.
Speaker: We are on our sixth episode.
Speaker: We're going to be talking about aliens today, extraterrestrial life.
Speaker: This episode is actually one that we have had planned out since kind of the inception of the podcast.
Speaker: This is one of the first episodes we planned out.
Speaker: And I think we planned to record it earlier.
Speaker: It was intended to be episode five.
Speaker: So this is episode six, right?
Speaker: So we're largely on schedule.
Speaker: We're still pretty much on track.
Speaker: So this topic is pretty fringe for academic philosophy, but it's not really fringe for like a general topic, I guess, because aliens have kind of been in the news.
Speaker: Yet there have been a lot of headlines regarding aliens, Megan.
Speaker: So what are some of these headlines?
Speaker: Well, I mean, yeah, this has just kind of been like a constant thing since I want to say the end of 2020, but I think it might have been the beginning of 2021.
Speaker: Somewhere in there, it started making the news that there were all of these military reports on UFO encounters, or I guess they're calling them UAP now, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Coming out of the military, and I guess they always have been, but reports have kind of had ramped up enough to the point where I guess they just thought it was time to declassify this and like release the report.
Speaker: And then in 2022, Congress formed this task force to investigate all these reports.
Speaker: And I guess the latest update is since forming the task force, there has been like well over 500 military reports just from the U.S. military.
Speaker: Yeah, I remember during the pandemic, no one was really talking about this, I guess because they were concerned about the pandemic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it was kind of surprising.
Speaker: Like, maybe there's aliens.
Speaker: I think at some point, some people consider that maybe this was just a way to distract us from the pandemic.
Speaker: They, the ominous they.
Speaker: The none in black.
Speaker: Were trying to distract us.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: We were all like really just concerned about not getting COVID.
Speaker: And we were sort of like, I can't mentally deal with aliens right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: But it is it was strange to me at the time.
Speaker: And I guess it's still strange.
Speaker: I mentioned this to you, Frank, that it didn't really seem like people cared that much.
Speaker: And in fact, you might think, well, maybe people didn't care that much because you
Speaker: whatever, there's unidentified aerial phenomena all the time.
Speaker: But the interesting thing about these reports that you have people from like the Pentagon coming out and making statements in official press conferences like this technology does not appear to be of this world.
Speaker: And in fact, in the task force, they specifically defined a UFO.
Speaker: So like the subject of these investigations,
Speaker: as so you can't be counted as a UFO or like a subject of this investigation if you appear to be manmade.
Speaker: So it excludes apparently manmade things.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I remember thinking in the pandemic like why people might not care.
Speaker: And I guess it's just like, well, you still have to go to work and everything.
Speaker: How does it affect my practical life if there are aliens?
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: We should not have to go to work if there are aliens.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or at least I shouldn't have to go to work if there is like, I mean, maybe if the aliens are like little bugs or something, I probably then still have to go to work.
Speaker: But if the aliens are like, you know, like the things in E.T.
Speaker: or something, I do feel like we should at least get some days off.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess in this conversation, we care more about extraterrestrial intelligence, right?
Speaker: Intelligent life, not merely microbes or something, right?
Speaker: Yeah, because they're the things that could build the ships that could blow us up.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So moving past all that.
Speaker: So aliens have been in the news and that's kind of new for like our time period, but it's not new in the history of the human race.
Speaker: People have been thinking about extraterrestrial life pretty much as long as we have recorded human history.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, so it's interesting that you can find arguments for the existence of aliens, intelligent life, not just merely microbes in the ancient world.
Speaker: So one unlikely source for one of these arguments is the Greek philosopher and biographer Plutarch, so Plutarch's most famous author.
Speaker: for writing this biography, biographies of famous Greeks and Romans.
Speaker: But he has a book about the possibility of life on the moon, and he gives a kind of argument that where we can still see remnants of this argument today.
Speaker: So here's what he says for why we should think there's life on the moon, why it's pretty plausible.
Speaker: So he adopts this view that the Earth is not special.
Speaker: The Earth is just one celestial body among many.
Speaker: And he thinks, well, also, the universe is clearly intelligently designed.
Speaker: He believes in some kind of supreme deity, like most educated citizens of the Roman world did.
Speaker: And so we should expect that this intelligent designer didn't just create all these celestial bodies for no reason.
Speaker: It's weird to refer to these planets inhabitable and not have any inhabitants.
Speaker: So he says, look, the moon h as a lot of similarities to the Earth.
Speaker: It's analogous in many ways.
Speaker: We should expect there to be life there.
Speaker: Why not?
Speaker: It would be wasteful if there were not any life on the moon.
Speaker: So that's one source for early arguments for there being intelligent life in the universe besides human beings.
Speaker: And another famous source in the Roman world is this philosopher named Lucretius.
Speaker: So Lucretius was an Epicurean, so he followed the philosophy of Epicurus.
Speaker: Pretty radical philosophy for the time and also, I'd say, pretty radical throughout history whenever it was discussed.
Speaker: So the Epicureans thought that the world was materialistic, so they didn't believe in any immaterial souls or anything like that.
Speaker: They thought everything was just atoms in the void, moving around randomly due to chance.
Speaker: They also thought that the world was infinite in extent and eternal.
Speaker: And they reasoned that if the world is infinite in extent and eternal, and all these atoms are moving around randomly,
Speaker: Well, you should expect every combination of atoms to at one point arise.
Speaker: And so you should expect there to be a combination of atoms really far away where there's another planet and there's inhabitants on that planet.
Speaker: Maybe they look like human beings, maybe they don't.
Speaker: But we should expect this just due to purely natural mechanical causes.
Speaker: So we have two kinds of arguments, both rather different in character.
Speaker: Plutarch's relying on what we might call the purposeful nature of the universe, teleology.
Speaker: He gives a teleological argument that the universe looks designed, it looks purposeful.
Speaker: Clearly, the creator wants there to be life.
Speaker: We should expect more life in the universe, else all the space is wasted.
Speaker: So that's Plutarch's perspective, this teleological perspective.
Speaker: And Lucretius' perspective is more like mechanistic.
Speaker: It's more, hey, we should expect there to be intelligent life because of purely natural law.
Speaker: So it's sort of like a, one could form an argument from this.
Speaker: Like, hey, either the universe is purposefully designed or it's not.
Speaker: It's random.
Speaker: If it's purposefully designed, there'd be alien life.
Speaker: If it's random, there would be alien life.
Speaker: So either way, there's probably alien life.
Speaker: Yeah, I think the most interesting thing about this is like one of them's a naturalist, or at least quasi-naturalist.
Speaker: I mean, the Epicureans still believe in some kind of gods, but they don't really do anything.
Speaker: So one of them's pretty much a naturalist.
Speaker: Everything is just matter in motion.
Speaker: And one of them is more coming at this from a kind of theological point of view, Plutarch.
Speaker: And from both perspectives, we get arguments for the existence of intelligent life scattered throughout the universe.
Speaker: So these two arguments remain pretty influential throughout history.
Speaker: We can find similar sorts of arguments in the early modern period, so roughly the 16th to the 19th century.
Speaker: And we can see similar sorts of arguments like this today.
Speaker: What's the standard argument that there is intelligent life somewhere in the universe, Megan?
Speaker: You've given this argument before.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I guess the standard argument is just that the universe is really, really big.
Speaker: There are more stars than we have any conception of how many there are and planets around those stars.
Speaker: And so it's likely that a lot of those planets have conditions for life.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Somewhere, at least somewhere, there's going to be intelligent life.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So people give this kind of statistical argument.
Speaker: It's very similar to the sort of thing that Lucretia says.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I guess in some ways, you know, the time has not been a friend to either of these arguments in the sense that, you know, we now know much more.
Speaker: The observable universe is much bigger.
Speaker: And so we know that there's actually not any light as far as we can see in it.
Speaker: So maybe that's like a strike against Plutarch, at least from what we have observed, there is actually a lot of lifeless, empty space, even if there is life out there somewhere.
Speaker: And for Lucretius, we know that the universe probably isn't infinite.
Speaker: So maybe neither of these arguments fared that well in their form.
Speaker: Okay, good.
Speaker: So we've covered the ancient aliens, but there's also a lot of interest, as Frank said earlier, I think, in aliens in the early modern period of philosophy.
Speaker: And actually, very helpfully for us, there is a blog post by the scholar Dr. Kenny Pierce
Speaker: This was written like three years ago, but it was very helpfully retweeted a few days ago by someone that we follow on Twitter and made us aware of it.
Speaker: So Dr. Pierce is writing this blog post on space aliens, discussion of space aliens in early modern philosophy, especially as it applies to theodicies, which are like responses to the problem of evil.
Speaker: And I guess he's writing this kind of like right at the beginning of the pandemic.
Speaker: So just like a few months before the alien stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he really anticipated that.
Speaker: That's kind of cool.
Speaker: So anyway, in this blog post, what he's doing is he's sort of just picking out a bunch of passages from different early modern philosophers.
Speaker: So we have Damaris Cudworth Maysham.
Speaker: We have Barclay.
Speaker: We have Leibniz.
Speaker: We have Samuel Clark.
Speaker: And all of these early modern philosophers, who we don't really think of as talking about anything like extraterrestrial life, are all kind of invoking aliens as a way of responding to the problem of evil that's in line with a school of thought called skeptical theism.
Speaker: So the skeptical theist basically thinks, well, God is so...
Speaker: unlike us in a way, and so like unknowable, that we can't really know his reasons for doing things.
Speaker: And so they think in response to the problem of evil, this problem that says like, well, God probably doesn't exist because it seems like he'd be able to prevent all this evil and suffering if he could.
Speaker: The skeptical theist says, well, you can't really know that.
Speaker: He could have any number of reasons for allowing these evils.
Speaker: So all we need to do is show that there are like possible reasons
Speaker: that these evils could exist and we've done all we need to do kind of to get God off the hook.
Speaker: So anyway, so all of these early modern philosophers are talking about the problem of evil.
Speaker: They're, I guess, some brand of skeptical theists, at least according to Kenny Pierce.
Speaker: And they invoke aliens in their response to the problem of evil.
Speaker: So I have some quotes here that I think are funny.
Speaker: So Leibniz argues that the universe is so big that it's probably full of other kinds of life, right?
Speaker: This is the theme throughout the ancient philosophers, the early modern philosophers, that God is a thing that likes life.
Speaker: And so God would create lots of life in the universe.
Speaker: So Leibniz says, well, look, we don't have any reason to think that we're that us humans on Earth are even like a large percentage of the life that exists.
Speaker: We could be just like an unbelievably small percentage of the life that exists.
Speaker: And moreover, all of this other life that's out there might be like extremely happy.
Speaker: Yeah, so even though things are bad here, says the skeptic, things might be really, really, really good over there, and the happiness of the aliens outweighs all the suffering on Earth, so probably it will be solved.
Speaker: Right, he says, thus, since the proportion of that part of the universe which we know is almost lost in nothingness compared to that which is unknown, and which we yet have cause to assume, and since all the evils that may be raised in objection before us are in this near nothingness, happily may it be that all evils are almost nothingness in comparison with the good things which are in the universe.
Speaker: So he's raising the possibility not only that life on Earth may be a tiny percentage of all life, but also that maybe life on Earth is the only kind of life that's subject to like suffering due to whatever sin or the fall that these other communities of life out in the universe all kind of live in this like Edenic bliss.
Speaker: And so their happiness so far outweighs ours that we can't help but say, yeah, the universe is really good.
Speaker: This is my new favorite theodicy.
Speaker: I hope I hope some contemporary philosophy religion picks this up and tries to like rehabilitate it, make it super strong.
Speaker: I think it's super cool.
Speaker: And then I found one other interesting quote.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: OK, so so so the blog post goes on this collection of quotes from early modern philosophers doing similar things with the hypothesis of extraterrestrial life.
Speaker: And Barclay has his own kind of spin on this.
Speaker: It's a little bit darker, I think.
Speaker: He invites us to think of Earth not as kind of the norm of existence in terms of suffering and pain and sorrow, but maybe as a kind of penal colony compared to the rest of the universe.
Speaker: He says, would you argue that a state was ill administered or judge of the manners of its citizens by the disorders committed in the jail or dungeon?
Speaker: For ought we know this spot with the few sinners on it bears no greater proportion to the universe of intelligences than a dungeon does to a kingdom.
Speaker: It seems we're led not only by revelation but by common sense, observing and inferring from the analogy of things to conclude that there are innumerable orders of intelligent beings more happy and more perfect than man, whose life is but a span and whose place this earthly globe is but a point in respect to the whole system of God's creation.
Speaker: So Barkley's proposal there is kind of cool because it's like, all right, maybe Earth is just like the place where bad people galactic prison.
Speaker: It's a galactic prison.
Speaker: And in fact, it seems like he's kind of using this as an argument, not only like an argument against the problem of evil, but also like an argument for aliens.
Speaker: Like, here's a reason to think that they are out there because obviously the good would need to swamp the bad.
Speaker: And it's pretty bad here.
Speaker: The good does want the bad, right?
Speaker: Obviously.
Speaker: So how do I get that?
Speaker: Well, they have to be happy aliens, good happy aliens living in the Garden of Eden still.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that is really interesting.
Speaker: It reminds me of an old South Park episode where Earth is not a galactic prison, but it's actually a reality show.
Speaker: I love that one.
Speaker: All the other aliens watch and that brings them joy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then the show gets canceled, right?
Speaker: The aliens are about to destroy the Earth.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, right.
Speaker: So this is pretty interesting.
Speaker: And I can see versions of the problem is evil where, I mean, I guess one maybe could use this as, I mean, you know, I guess as far as we know, there aren't any aliens, but say like we didn't, the observable universe wasn't as big as it is now.
Speaker: I can see this kind of being like a good objection to a version of the problem of evil.
Speaker: That's kind of like, um, Paul Draper's.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: where Draper's version of the problem of evil is based on like the overabundance of evidence.
Speaker: Like there's so much pain and suffering.
Speaker: We have like that, you know, we're just swamped with all this data.
Speaker: There's just like so much that it seems implausible to conclude anything but atheism.
Speaker: So if your version of the problem of evil is like that, it's like an evidence swamping kind of argument, then this theodicy where it's like, well, maybe this is only a tiny percentage of actual conscious experiences.
Speaker: Maybe that would be kind of compelling.
Speaker: But there are versions of the problem of evil where even one unjustifiable instance of evil is enough to raise the problem.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There's versions of the problem of evil where it's like, well, it's not the amount of suffering, but it's really just if there's any gratuitous suffering, any suffering that didn't need to happen for some other good thing to happen, then that's really good evidence against the existence of an all-powerful, all-good God.
Speaker: And it seems like, you know, even if Earth was this tiny penal colony in the huge universe of bliss, a lot of the suffering does seem like it still would be gratuitous.
Speaker: So maybe...
Speaker: You might think, well, I don't really care how many other things are happy.
Speaker: We are really suffering and that's still bad.
Speaker: I think this is the third episode we've talked about the problem of evil and so we should try to keep this up.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it comes up in a lot of discussions somehow.
Speaker: We don't even try.
Speaker: This is just in philosophy when people bring up aliens, they're often talking about this.
Speaker: Now, you might just think it's weird philosophers who were really into aliens during this period, but actually, most scientists, most astronomers were also really into aliens too during this time.
Speaker: So Kepler, for instance, Johannes Kepler, one of the most important astronomers of the 17th century, he's famous for the idea that planets don't move in perfect circles but move in ellipses.
Speaker: He wrote a lot about the possibility of life on the moon,
Speaker: Another important instance is this guy, James Ferguson, who's a Scottish astronomer.
Speaker: So he's influential because he wrote a popular textbook explaining astronomy on Isaac Newton's theory.
Speaker: And here's what he says about aliens.
Speaker: He says that,
Speaker: The Earth's similarities to the moon and the planets leave us no room to doubt but that all the planets and moons in the system are designed as commodious habitations for creatures endowed with capacities of knowing and adoring their beneficent creator.
Speaker: So this book was very influential on another important astronomer,
Speaker: In the modern period, my favorite astronomer, William Herschel, he's most famous for discovering Uranus, did a bunch of other stuff too, made the best telescopes during the period, discovered a thousand nebula, right?
Speaker: Those like clouds of gas in the sky and in space.
Speaker: So he thought this was right, too.
Speaker: He was super into coming up with evidence for life on other planets, evidence for life on the moon.
Speaker: He himself was personally certain of it through these kinds of analogical arguments.
Speaker: These other celestial bodies are relevantly similar to the Earth, so we should expect them to have life, too.
Speaker: He went so far, though, as to hypothesize that there was even life on the sun.
Speaker: So he has this famous, he has this paper that was famous at the time, it was published in the best journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, where he argues that it's plausible that there is life on the sun.
Speaker: He says, he does the same sort of move, he says, the similarities of the sun to other globes of the solar system leads us to suppose that it is most probably also inhabited, like the rest of the planets,
Speaker: by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe.
Speaker: So Megan, what do you think about that?
Speaker: I find that unbelievable.
Speaker: So we, Frank and I went on a walk two days ago and it was a whopping 74 degrees.
Speaker: And we went on like a two mile walk and I got the worst sunburn.
Speaker: And I just have to think, I mean, people knew, they knew the sun was far away.
Speaker: They also got sun, like, the sun is hot.
Speaker: Don't, so, okay, so yeah, so obvious objection, why don't they just burn up?
Speaker: So he had, I can't get into his rebuttal to this, but he has some arguments for why this is not a problem.
Speaker: He has a particular view about how heat works, and he thought that the rays would send the heat outward, but because of the way the sun was restructured, the heat wouldn't go toward the surface of the sun.
Speaker: So he thought the sun was like a rocky body, not a gaseous thing, as we know now.
Speaker: But yeah, he had a story about that, don't worry.
Speaker: And as he says, why should we assume at the outset that there can't be beings who have the perfectly adapted organs for living on the sun?
Speaker: So Herschel was one of these guys, too, that really liked this teleological argument that we discussed earlier, the one that Plutarch gave.
Speaker: The universe is created by a beneficent creator.
Speaker: He likes life.
Speaker: Of course, he put life in as many places as he could.
Speaker: So he was really, that was a kind of guiding principle for a lot of his investigations.
Speaker: So yeah, this is obviously a kind of wacky idea.
Speaker: Some of his contemporaries consider it pretty wacky too.
Speaker: But I think it's, you know, it led to people trying to refute him.
Speaker: It led to people coming up with better theories about how heat worked.
Speaker: And it was a fruitful speculation.
Speaker: So there you go.
Speaker: Even wacky ideas that don't go anywhere can play an important role in the history of science.
Speaker: So Herschel was motivated by this kind of metaphysical principle that life is good, creator would want life in the universe.
Speaker: But it's important to note that a lot of these astronomers that found the idea of life on other planets plausible, they were also motivated by heliocentrism.
Speaker: The idea of the sun is the center of the solar system and the earth isn't special.
Speaker: It's just another globe orbiting the sun like the other planets.
Speaker: So this sort of went hand in hand with the idea that there could be other worlds, that these other celestial bodies are like the Earth, right?
Speaker: And they're like the Earth, maybe they have, there's life on their planets too.
Speaker: This idea of a plurality of worlds that has other life, that kind of went hand in hand with the newly discovered heliocentrism.
Speaker: Well, if the Earth isn't like the center of the whole universe, you know, there's less reason to think that like all these celestial bodies are kind of like in service to the Earth.
Speaker: Like maybe they're also in service to other things with life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, think back also to the old Aristotelian cosmology, that there's a sharp distinction between the terrestrial realm.
Speaker: and the celestial realm.
Speaker: Earth is different than the planets that are held on the crystalline spheres.
Speaker: The planets are made of the quintessence, the fifth element.
Speaker: It's perfect.
Speaker: There's no imperfections in the heavens, whereas Earth is full of imperfections.
Speaker: So this sort of view is also put into doubt by scientific revolution.
Speaker: And that also opened up the door to the idea there could be life on other planets.
Speaker: I'm wondering
Speaker: if a remnant of that idea is influencing these early modern philosophers in hypothesizing that the aliens are kind of are more likely to be happy or blissful than we are sort of just like a remnant of this idea that like the celestial realm is more perfect that's that's a very good thought I don't know that that seems pretty plausible to me
Speaker: We always say that, you know, the early moderns wanted to distinguish themselves from from old Aristotle.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But they always had one foot in the past that always influenced them in various ways.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Even Copernicus thought that the orbits of the planets were perfect circles or that's an old Aristotelian inheritance.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Well, Kenny Pierce, if you're listening to this, let me know what you think of that.
Speaker: Okay, so I have this nagging objection thing that's, I guess, kind of been bothering me since the Lucretius argument.
Speaker: And I guess it kind of applies to the more contemporary argument for extraterrestrial intelligence, too.
Speaker: That argument being that it's probable there's some life somewhere out there.
Speaker: It's probable there's some like- 100 billion stars, 100 billion galaxies, really, really big universe.
Speaker: Maybe it's improbable on its face, but give me so much space, give me so many planets, at least one of them is going to have intelligence.
Speaker: Yeah, you add up the low probabilities of there being life on any given planet by however many millions, billions, whatever planets there are, and you get a high probability there's intelligent life on some of them.
Speaker: So that seems fine.
Speaker: I mean, on the face of it, that's how probabilities work.
Speaker: But it has like weird implications, right?
Speaker: Take something else that has a really low probability, like that there is intelligent life on other planets and they speak English or they are good at basketball or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess we got to say that it's really low probability, but it's non-zero, right?
Speaker: We speak English and we play basketball.
Speaker: There's a non-zero probability that for any given planet that's not Earth, there is intelligent life that is really good at basketball.
Speaker: It's really maybe close to zero, but it's non-zero.
Speaker: And if you add all those really, really small probabilities up by the however million, billions, whatever, probably more than billions of planets are out there, it seems like you're going to get a higher probability than you would want.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this shows, I think, that we can't just sort of, we're being a little sloppy with our probability talk.
Speaker: We need more scientific data, right?
Speaker: How probable is life really?
Speaker: We can't just rely on our intuitions.
Speaker: Like, well, it's low.
Speaker: In any given place in the universe, it's low.
Speaker: But it's high enough that because the universe is so big, there's going to be at least one other creature out there that's intelligent like us.
Speaker: So we can't really just reason this out from the orange.
Speaker: We need scientific data.
Speaker: We need to ask these tough questions about how likely is it that there can be life?
Speaker: What do you need for life?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's the million dollar question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's that is a million dollar.
Speaker: Well, actually, you don't get paid for philosophy, but that if you did, that would be a million dollar question in philosophy.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because defining life is like notoriously difficult.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: When we think about life, maybe like intuitively, I guess we think of things like carbon based.
Speaker: They have like at least some of these processes that we associate with life processes like metabolism, circulation, respiration.
Speaker: Reproduction.
Speaker: Reproduction.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that all those are all seem like essential features of like life on Earth.
Speaker: But we might think that there's like we might want to have a conception of something we'd want to count as life that because it wasn't Earth based looked different than that.
Speaker: Well, yeah, scientists do consider the possibility of non-carbon based life.
Speaker: So they've considered the possibility that maybe there's methane based life on Saturn's moon Titan.
Speaker: They've considered the possibility of silicon based life.
Speaker: I mean, Herschel considered the possibility of sun based life, you know, so it's made out of sun particles.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, this is sort of just like life is just kind of a weird concept.
Speaker: I mean, think about like, we can go back to like philosophy of religion.
Speaker: Like if you're a theist, you want to say like God is like alive.
Speaker: It's like a disembodied mind or something like that.
Speaker: Is that alive?
Speaker: Doesn't really seem to fit most of the characteristics that biologists give us when they want to try to make a stab at a definition of life.
Speaker: So, yeah, so if you have like things that look to us to be like rocks or something, had no circulation, respiration, maybe no reproduction, maybe they were, you know, they're produced by something else, but they don't reproduce.
Speaker: But like they thought, they had thoughts.
Speaker: I feel like we treat them like they're alive, I would think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would hope.
Speaker: Yeah, so this definitional question is an obstacle to coming up with any objectively estimated probability of how likely life is, right?
Speaker: But putting that aside, there's also just increasingly there's discoveries about how fragile life is on Earth, like how special it is that we live here and that the conditions are such that we are alive.
Speaker: Yeah, so I think people got excited in the 90s when these exoplanets were discovered, planets outside our solar system.
Speaker: So this was pretty much assumed for a while, and we've been discussing this throughout the podcast episode.
Speaker: But we finally discovered some of these things in the early 90s, and I checked NASA's website earlier, apparently there's about 5,000 exoplanets.
Speaker: So the natural question is how many of those planets are similar enough to Earth?
Speaker: And in addition to the definitional question that we just raised, it seemed like we're discovering more and more that you need a lot of special features in order to have life.
Speaker: So it's not just a matter of being in the Goldilocks zone, being near a star that's not too hot, not too cool, and we're not too far away.
Speaker: The Earth has a lot of special features.
Speaker: So for instance, it has a moon that's a quarter of its size.
Speaker: That's pretty rare, according to astronomers.
Speaker: That serves a lot of functions.
Speaker: It helps stabilize the axis of the Earth.
Speaker: So now the Earth is not spinning all over the place on its axis.
Speaker: That would be really disruptive, right?
Speaker: If suddenly the axial tilt spun around, that'd be really bad.
Speaker: Perfect temperature for liquid water.
Speaker: Good temperature for liquid water.
Speaker: Jupiter plays an important role.
Speaker: So Jupiter acts like this kind of cosmic bouncer.
Speaker: It's the Dalton of Roadhouse of our solar system.
Speaker: It attracts cosmic debris.
Speaker: It ensures that things don't hit us.
Speaker: So there's a lot of things like this, a lot of contingencies that need to be in place that astronomers are discovering more and more.
Speaker: that make it seem like the Earth is very, very rare.
Speaker: So there's a thing called the rare Earth hypothesis, that the Earth is really, really rare.
Speaker: So we discovered all these exoplanets, but it may be the case that, like, none of them are Earth-like enough to support life.
Speaker: So I've seen some estimates by proponents of this view, the so-called rare Earth hypothesis.
Speaker: So some of its proponents say in our galaxy, there may be only three to 30, our entire galaxy, three to 30 planets that are Earth-like enough, right?
Speaker: So that's also Earth like enough to even possibly support life.
Speaker: So yes.
Speaker: And then you have all these like evolutionary contingencies on top of that.
Speaker: So if the Earth if the rare Earth hypothesis is true, then what's the upshot?
Speaker: Then the probability of life looks a lot more like the probability that there's intelligent aliens that speak English.
Speaker: or good at basketball basketball yeah okay so um just moving on jarringly to another topic because it's one that i find interesting um so we have these i'm not going to call them projects because i'm sure they're not really funded but you know we're supposed to have these like national like initiatives to kind of like
Speaker: listen for radio waves from outer space or you know i guess there's this new task force looking for like ufos or whatever but for a while we've been like basically making some kind of attempt to pick up any potential like alien communication that might be coming at us and we i think you know the us government does stupid stuff like plays like billy joel songs out into the
Speaker: You know, whatever.
Speaker: To communicate with anyone who might be out there who would pick up these radio signals or microwave signals or whatever signals they are on.
Speaker: I'm not a scientist, obviously.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, you kind of see this in the book and or movie Contact, the movie made based off the Carl Sagan book, Contact.
Speaker: Can I interrupt you for a second?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Because Carl Sagan, right, I wanted to mention this.
Speaker: So he weirdly, you know, he's probably a scientific materialist, right?
Speaker: He gives the teleological argument at one point.
Speaker: He says, if it'd be so weird for there to be no life, it'd be a lot of wasted space, he says.
Speaker: That kind of sounds like a teleological argument.
Speaker: Everyone's a teleologist somewhere deep, deep under their turtleneck.
Speaker: Anyway, sorry.
Speaker: So, okay.
Speaker: So in the movie Contact, right, this person's job, the main character's job.
Speaker: What's her name?
Speaker: What's her name?
Speaker: The actress?
Speaker: Jodie Foster.
Speaker: Yeah, Jodie Foster.
Speaker: So her job is to listen to these satellites that are trying to pick up whatever, any kind of radio signal from outer space.
Speaker: Sounds like a pretty boring job.
Speaker: I guess, you know, for the most part, she doesn't really do much.
Speaker: This is like kind of her pet project.
Speaker: But then she does pick something up.
Speaker: And it's like plans for a spaceship.
Speaker: And anyway, if you haven't seen the movie or read the book, you should.
Speaker: But it's like plans for a spaceship and then they build the spaceship.
Speaker: But the weird, what I always thought, and then this was sort of also captured in the later movie called Arrival, is that it just doesn't seem like communication with an entirely different non-terrestrial species would be maybe even possible.
Speaker: Like we might not even recognize it as communication.
Speaker: There's a great line in Wittgenstein where Wittgenstein is talking about
Speaker: how communication is completely dependent on the type of life form you are or how you go about living, not life form in the biological sense, but a form of life.
Speaker: So whatever kind of thing you are, whatever mode of activity you have, that's going to determine how you communicate.
Speaker: And that's why he says if a lion could talk, we would not be able to understand him.
Speaker: Great lion.
Speaker: It's a great line.
Speaker: And I think the same applies tenfold to non-terrestrial species such that, you know, if they could talk and try to communicate with us in some way, not only would we probably not be able to understand them, but like we may not even recognize it as communication, which is kind of more or less the plot of this Arrival, this movie called Arrival.
Speaker: So I don't know, Frank, do you have any thoughts on this?
Speaker: Yeah, I think I so you lean toward the idea that we would not be able to communicate with aliens.
Speaker: I think that there's like a really strong possibility.
Speaker: Yeah, I think I agree with that.
Speaker: I guess I should mention I was reminded of the Voyager spacecraft, right?
Speaker: So the Voyager spacecraft was a sort of spacecraft we sent off into the deep reaches of space and they put the kind of like time capsule on there.
Speaker: It was like a gold record, like a vinyl record, a phonograph record.
Speaker: So goofy.
Speaker: Yeah, it's pretty goofy.
Speaker: The aliens can be able to play a phonograph record.
Speaker: But anyway, on the record, it has like a bunch of things about humanity and included in it is our scientific knowledge.
Speaker: I think they put, you know, our chemical knowledge, the periodic table of elements and stuff.
Speaker: I guess the idea is that the aliens, if they're intelligent, will understand the language of math, right, and the universal language, and that is a way we'll communicate or something like that.
Speaker: Maybe math will solve our problems.
Speaker: That's very hand-wavy, but I think that is what the idea was in including that on the time capsule.
Speaker: I think then the assumption is like intelligent life out there would be as or more intelligent than us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because what if it's like intelligent life, but they're like, you know, chimpanzees or something like that level.
Speaker: That's like intelligent life, but they're not like doing trigonometry.
Speaker: Flying or the apes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, well, yeah, maybe that would work, assuming they were as or more intelligent than humans.
Speaker: Maybe, you know, math works as this universal language and we communicate that way.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: I wonder what Wittgenstein would say about that.
Speaker: Any Wittgensteinians listening to this, let me know what you think.
Speaker: I think a wrench in this idea, though, is that some philosophers of science argue that you could do science without math.
Speaker: So Hartree Field, the philosopher Hartree Field is famous for this.
Speaker: He has a book called Science Without Numbers, where he tries to show that you could do science without mathematics.
Speaker: It'd be kind of clunky and inconvenient, maybe, but it is possible.
Speaker: So I'm not sure we should really even assume that math is this sort of universal thing.
Speaker: Maybe math is just a human-centric tool.
Speaker: See, if they were actually smarter than us, they would have figured out how to get out of having to ever do math in your whole life.
Speaker: Back to the movie Contact.
Speaker: So Jodie Foster, whatever character's name is in the movie, she is engaged in the project of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, right?
Speaker: SETI.
Speaker: That's a project that some scientists engage in.
Speaker: Non-scientists can also contribute to this project too, right?
Speaker: It's collaborative.
Speaker: Like Fox Mulder.
Speaker: Yeah, Fox Mulder.
Speaker: I want to believe, right?
Speaker: From The X-Files.
Speaker: So interesting question here.
Speaker: I think the SETI thing is pretty interesting from a philosophy of science standpoint because it kind of puts pressure on the very idea of what is science, right?
Speaker: So what is science is a key question that philosophers of science want to answer.
Speaker: It's called the demarcation problem.
Speaker: We want to know, like, what is science?
Speaker: What distinguishes it from pseudoscience?
Speaker: So yeah, I guess a cool question to ask in this debate is, is what Jodie Foster's doing in this movie?
Speaker: Is that science?
Speaker: Is SETI science or is it something else?
Speaker: Well, I'm a philosopher of science generally, do a lot of other stuff, but I'm not teaching philosophy science this semester.
Speaker: Megan is.
Speaker: So I'm going to throw this question to her.
Speaker: Megan, what do you think?
Speaker: Would you count SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
Speaker: Is that science or is it something else?
Speaker: Is it pseudoscience even?
Speaker: Should we stop funding it?
Speaker: I mean, it has the veneer of science, right?
Speaker: Like Jodie Foster uses all of these like scientific tools.
Speaker: You know, she uses computers.
Speaker: She uses radio things.
Speaker: You know, she doesn't use like test tubes or whatever, but it has like this veneer of science.
Speaker: She's not, you know, you can search, like you were saying, you can search for extraterrestrial life in more or less seemingly scientific ways.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Fox Mulder, you know, kind of just goes on like his gut feeling and, you know, the fact that he has childhood trauma or whatever.
Speaker: And so that's maybe like a less scientific way of doing it.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, right.
Speaker: This is a hard question.
Speaker: So you have different philosophers of science who kind of give different criteria for what makes something a science.
Speaker: Popper wants to say that something, some theory or scientific pursuit is, you know, it needs to be falsifiable in some way.
Speaker: You need to be able to falsify it.
Speaker: And that seems hard to do with this.
Speaker: It seems hard to, like, conclude there's no extraterrestrial life, just given, like, the vastness of the universe.
Speaker: It's, I mean, I guess in principle, maybe it's falsifiable, but...
Speaker: In actuality, it really isn't at all.
Speaker: I guess if the universe is finite, then you could in principle.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, principle.
Speaker: You could check every square millimeter of the space.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: But that's pretty meaningless, kind of falsifiable to be.
Speaker: Popperin and Kuhn, Thomas Kuhn, they both agree that it's pretty important that for something to be a scientific theory, that it makes novel predictions that you can look for.
Speaker: And it's not, it's also not clear to me that the hypothesis there's extraterrestrial life gives any kind of specific predictions that we could test for or even look for just because we just have no idea what this kind of life would be or what it would do.
Speaker: Maybe some things like, you know, it's more likely that there's life on planets with these particular features, but that's, they're kind of vague predictions.
Speaker: They're not particularly novel.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: What do you think?
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I didn't think about it.
Speaker: That's a pretty good answer.
Speaker: Pretty good answer.
Speaker: I think maybe I'd want to say SETI is kind of like a proto-science.
Speaker: There's no general theory.
Speaker: We don't have a theory of whereby we can answer these sorts of questions.
Speaker: How people investigate this stuff, they draw from a variety of different scientific disciplines.
Speaker: That makes it kind of cool.
Speaker: It makes it kind of fun.
Speaker: But yeah, it's not like a general theory really here.
Speaker: You have some work where you write about string theory as a kind of proto-science.
Speaker: Would you say that, like, SETI is in a similar category to string theory?
Speaker: Yeah, I don't call it a proto-science, but I say it's like, even if it's not up to snuff, it still might be, like, worthy of pursuit.
Speaker: So maybe I'd say something like that, right?
Speaker: Regardless of whether it's, like, a science or whatever, maybe it's a proto-science, something in between a pseudo-science and a genuine science, it might still be worthy of pursuit, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's one thing we haven't talked about yet, perhaps the most fun part of discussion of extraterrestrials, alien abductions.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You would think that we would have gotten to the sooner because this is like the main probably main reason that your average person believes in aliens is because they've like heard stories about encounters with aliens and or abductions.
Speaker: So that seems like it should be a pretty good source of evidence for something weird being out there.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, but as it happens, and there's not a lot of data on this, but I did my best to confirm this, and I think it's true.
Speaker: As it happens, the overall majority of people who report being abducted are like relatively well-off Americans.
Speaker: Like this sort of alien abduction thing is a largely uniquely American phenomenon.
Speaker: So other countries report seeing UFOs, or Japan reports seeing UFOs.
Speaker: But being abducted by aliens is something that a very small subpopulation of the entire human race experiences.
Speaker: And that's really, really fishy.
Speaker: Yeah, it's really strange.
Speaker: The U.S. certainly does not have a monopoly on alien or UFO sightings.
Speaker: Like he was saying, as of right now, actually, the place with the most alien sightings is a place called, I'm probably going to butcher this pronunciation, but a place called Linomachi, which is a town in the Fukushima district of Japan.
Speaker: And they have almost 500 UFO sightings by lay people just this year.
Speaker: Yeah, literally.
Speaker: So that's a lot.
Speaker: And it's more than like any other place that is at least as far as we know.
Speaker: But other so lots of other countries report alien sightings.
Speaker: Almost none report alien abductions.
Speaker: But this these are innumerable in the United States.
Speaker: So what's going on?
Speaker: I don't know that I have any theories about this.
Speaker: Well, did you know I actually wrote a little bit about this in my dissertation?
Speaker: Did you know this?
Speaker: No, you really you don't genuinely say that for this moment.
Speaker: You didn't read my dissertation.
Speaker: Your dissertation is almost 300 pages long.
Speaker: I did not read it.
Speaker: Whatever.
Speaker: But I did write a tiny bit about this in my dissertation.
Speaker: It was a small paragraph.
Speaker: So there are some psychological explanations for this.
Speaker: Like the psychologists try to explain this, assuming that the reports are not true.
Speaker: We don't take them at face value.
Speaker: What's going on?
Speaker: Well, some say it's like sleep paralysis or sleep paralysis.
Speaker: If you've ever had that, I've had that a few times.
Speaker: It's actually pretty, pretty scary.
Speaker: Mine hasn't involved me experiencing any visitors, but I often feel like I'm falling.
Speaker: I can't move.
Speaker: Only Americans have sleep paralysis?
Speaker: No, but maybe Americans are confusing sleep paralysis with aliens.
Speaker: I don't know why Americans would do that, but...
Speaker: Is that the various sorts of psychological traumas?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But they don't try to offer like psychological explanations for this.
Speaker: So I don't really know.
Speaker: I really investigated it too much.
Speaker: But it's there's at least a psychological literature on this.
Speaker: It seems like, though, if you're trying to offer a psychological explanation of this to
Speaker: Like, why does the U.S. have so many reports of abductions?
Speaker: Japan has none, even though Japan arguably has more actual reports of sightings.
Speaker: You need a psychological explanation that's unique to the United States.
Speaker: And that seems, I don't know, it seems kind of hard to do.
Speaker: People everywhere experience sleep paralysis.
Speaker: You know, people from lots of places have aliens as part of their pop culture.
Speaker: People everywhere have, you know, unfortunately, trauma.
Speaker: And so it does seem strange that, I mean, I guess, like, maybe you could chalk it up to just sort of like a bandwagon effect or like, you know, what's that term, like a social contagion?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One person reports an alien abduction and people in their social circle are much more likely to report one, just statistically speaking, or something like that.
Speaker: I don't even know if that's true, though.
Speaker: I don't know if relatives of abductees are more likely to report also being an abductee.
Speaker: But that would be interesting to know.
Speaker: Well, here's one armchair sociological explanation.
Speaker: So do you remember, Megan, back in the day, I forget when this was, it was like the 30s or the 40s or something.
Speaker: They did this radio broadcast of H.G.
Speaker: Wells' War of the Worlds.
Speaker: And a lot of people thought it was real.
Speaker: They thought that New Jersey was being invaded by Martians.
Speaker: And maybe this just traumatized a generation of people.
Speaker: A lot of people thought that the United States was being invaded in this radio broadcast of H.G.
Speaker: Wells' fictional history.
Speaker: story about Martians being nice things like during World War II II I I I had to look it up it might have been like I think it was a little before world war two but they thought this was they thought this was real right so maybe this sort of traumatized people and they passed down this intergenerational trauma
Speaker: to their their you they're the children oh wow and here we are wow that's really good is there do i guess there's probably data on when abduction reports starting at least the 50s and 60s so we could confirm this good but we haven't yet so this is just a hypothesis yeah all right so that's all the time we have for this episode please join us next time for episode seven where we will be talking about children
