Our continually expanding, 14 billion-year-old universe is riddled with planets that could potentially sustain life; so, where is it? Economist, prolific author, and founder of "The Great Filter," Professor Robin Hanson, offers a possible explanation. In today's episode, we take a deep dive into understand “Grabby Aliens,” and the future of humanity.

There are two kinds of alien civilizations. “Quiet” aliens don’t expand or change much, and then they die. We have little data on them, and so must mostly speculate, via methods like the Drake equation.

“Loud” aliens, in contrast, visibly change the volumes they control, and just keep expanding fast until they meet each other. As they should be easy to see, we can fit theories about loud aliens to our data, and say much about them.

Using these parameter estimates, we can estimate distributions over their origin times, distances, and when we will meet or see them. While we don’t know the ratio of quiet to loud alien civilizations out there, we need this to be ten thousand to expect even one alien civilization ever in our galaxy. Alas as we are now quiet, our chance to become grabby goes as the inverse of this ratio.

*Warning: Slight audio quality decrease early on

Shortened Bio: Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a doctorate in social science from California Institute of Technology, master's degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA. Professor Hanson has 5173 citations, a citation h-index of 35, and over ninety academic publications. 

Professor Hanson has 1100 media mentions, given 400 invited talks, and his blog OvercomingBias.com has had eight million visits. He coined the phrase "The Great Filter", and has recently numerically estimated it via a model of "Grabby Aliens".

Website - http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/home.html

Artwork by Phillip Thor - https://linktr.ee/Philipthor_art

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Thank you Don Grant for the Intro/Outro. Check out his podcast - https://threeinterestingthings.captivate.fm

Intro guitar from Aiden Ayers at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UiB9FMOP5s

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*There's a hidden clever pun in the title*