How do astronomers detect the conditions for life and techno-signatures on exoplanets many lightyears away? What conditions on earth give us clues to how life might have formed elsewhere? How do intelligent civilisations evolve to technomaturity before they destroy themselves?

So in this episode we have the mysterious arising of life and eventually intelligent life on our planet to try and explain, to then apply that to our search for other intelligent life in the cosmos. So to explain that we’re going to be getting into the co-evolution of the geosphere and the biosphere on earth and their corresponding feedback loops; the possibility of planetary level intelligence; the difficulty of laying a technosphere on top of the geo and biosphere, and the risk of civilisations wiping themselves out before learning how to harmonise the technosphere with the biosphere; We’ll be looking at the changes in the field of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Terrestrial Intelligence), since we can now identify potentially life sustaining exo-planets in nearer parts of the galaxy; we’re going to get into the newly funded search for techno signatures from advanced civilisations, and potential space junk from the many civilisations that presumably didn’t make it; lastly we’re going to discuss recent claims of ancient and alleged present visitations to earth by extra terrestrial intelligence.

Fortunately to face these tough and complex issues, our guest is a world specialist in astrobiology, with a talent for making these topics fun and imaginative, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, Professor Adam Frank. He’s the author of over 200 scientific papers and 6 books for the general public including, “The Blind Spot: why science cannot ignore human experience” and “The Little book of Aliens” which we’ll be focussing on today. He’s also an award winning science communicator, on a mission to raise public awareness about existential risk and science in general.

What we discussed:

00:00 Intro.

05:20 The importance of experience.

07:00 The limits between the expressible and the inexpressible.

09:10 Semantic Information: life as self organising, autonomous agents.

15:00 There’s stuff you can’t talk about - there’s only the silence

16:20 The Basian probability of other life in the universe.

20:00 The ingredients for life on this earth.

22:30 The codependence between Geo and Biosphere.

22:60 Gaian feedback loops. 

27:00 The earth is not conscious but it is an agent.

29:45 Mind is a process, it’s not just in the head.

33:25 The fluidity of individuality.

34:30 Distributed Cognition - bacteria, fungal networks etc.

38:30 A fundamental reimagining of what we mean by ‘Nature’.

39:30 There is no disembodied perspective.

41:00 Geosphere to Biosphere to technosphere maturity.

47:30 The biosphere offers a model for what planetary intelligence looks like.

48:00 The history of search for extra terrestrial Intelligence, SETI

49:00 The Drake equation - 7 requirements for intelligence life.

53:45 We’ve never looked - a tiny amount of the sky has been studied.

54:00 Exoplanets: searching for biosgnatures and techno signatures.

56:00 Technospheres: Kardeshev scale and Dyson Spheres.

59:00 Techno junk from dead civilisations.

01:02:30 UFO’s need more data to be taken seriously.

01:08:20 UFO’s could be surveilling their spy tech.

01:10:00 Pros and Cons of solar system settlement.

References:

Adam Frank, Evan Thompson, Marcelo Gleiser, “The Blind Spot: Why science cannot ignore human experience”.

Adam Frank, “The Little Book of Aliens”

Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, Sarah Walker - Intelligence as a planetary scale process.

Lynn Margulis - Evolutionary Biologist.

David Krakauer et al, An information theory view of individuality

Frank Drake - ⁠Project Ozma⁠

Jason Wright - SETI meta-analysis

Exoplantets.org

Adam Frank - New York Times ‘I’m a Physicist Who Searches for Aliens. U.F.O.s Don’t Impress Me’ article

"The Expanse", Apple TV series