Are We The Only Intelligent Life in the Universe?? | Joe Rogan & Brian Cox

Right. Do you think that it's possible? Do you ever entertain the idea that it's possible that we are the only intelligent life in the known universe? I tend to restrict myself to the galaxy. So I do think it's possible that at the moment there's one civilization in the Milky Way and that's us. And I think that's important actually. And it goes back to what I was saying at the start about the astronomy and cosmology being part of the framework within which you have to think. If you're looking for meaning or you're looking for how we should behave even politically, you know, that has a bearing to me. I mean, imagine that we're the only place where there is intelligence in this galaxy. And how should we behave? Should we actually not withstand in the fact that we're tiny and fragile things and insignificant physically, should we consider ourselves extremely valuable in that respect? Because there's nowhere elsewhere, you know, I would go as far as to say there would be nowhere else where meaning exists in the Milky Way. Meaning. Because meaning is one of those things that scientists don't talk about very much. Although Richard Feynman, one of my great heroes, did talk about it. There's a quote where he says, what is the meaning of it all? It's a great essay called The Value of Science. And so what is self-evidently true is that meaning exists here because it means something to us. So that's kind of an obvious statement. Your life means something to you and me. And so meaning exists. But I think it is a local and temporary phenomenon. I think it emerges. Meaning emerges from configurations of atoms, which is what we are. We are simply that we're nothing more than that. We're very, very rare configurations of atoms, I think. And so that means that we are, if you go all the way down that line of logic, we are the only island of meaning in the galaxy. I'm meaning only to ourselves. Yeah. It means something to us, because we're the only ones who can grasp the concept and we are finite. We are a finite organism. We have this temporary existence while we're here. And to us, there is meaning. Yeah. And that's, I don't know any other way to define it. Right. So I'll define it like that. Yes. I don't think there's globe, you know, otherwise you have to believe there's some kind of global meaning and that's a God type thing. And I don't think that's, I think it's more wonderful and more challenging to us because we have to take responsibility for it to say we should operate such that we are it in this galaxy. There's nothing else. I'm sure, I'm just, I'm sure there are other civilizations out there in the universe, because two trillion galaxies. I just can't believe this hasn't happened in other places. The question is how often does it happen and how widely spaced are the civilizations? And I think they're very widely spaced. And I think there may be one or two per galaxy on the average. I could, but that, as you said, that what you said it beautifully, that what else can we think? Right. What else do you want? I mean, I think what it says is you have to take responsibility for all those things, the spiritual things that you think about and the emotional things you think about it. You, you are, you are responsible for that. You are that, right? That's whatever that is. It exists in you and it will only exist for a short amount of time. And so what, you know, make the best of it would be my view. It's so unbelievably compelling though, to consider the idea that somewhere out there, there's another civilization that may be even more advanced than us. And this, this thought of it is just so attractive. It's, it's, it's incredible. There should, there should be. If, if civilizations are common or even slightly common, then there should be civilizations ahead of us. Yes. Because there's been so much time. But wouldn't you want to see what that's like? Yeah. I mean, we've been so compelling. You imagine the timescales we've been around as a civilization. Let's, let's give say 40,000 years. I don't know how long our civilization has been around. Let's say that the, the, the galaxy is pretty much as old as the universe. It's 13 billion years worth of time. So the idea that there are no civilizations arose, you know, a hundred million years ago, 200 million years ago, one billion years ago. And imagine what they'd be like if they'd survived. I mean, we've been, we've been around, we've had science for let's say, since Newton or Copernicus, 500 years at most we've had some look what we've done. We've gone beyond the solar system with Voyager. We've walked on the moon. And we're about to go to Mars, I would think. So we're about to begin colonizing our own solar system. And so we've done that in 500 years. So imagine a million years in the future. So I would, it's one of the arguments often used to say there aren't any civilizations out there in the galaxy. It's called the Fermi paradox. Because if you imagine a civilization that's a million years ahead of us, they should have written their presence across the sky by now. They should use to see them. I mean, you'll see us, if we survive a million years into the future, actually even a few thousand years into the future, we will be exploring the galaxy. We will have spacecraft that are going to other stars. We will be doing it. So our signature will become visible, I'm sure, if we last into the medium term. Would we choose to not do that? Here's my thought on that is uncontacted tribes. Like do you know about the gentleman who was the missionary who visited North Sentinel Island, who was killed by the natives? North Sentinel Island, which is a really unusual place because they branched off from Africa 60,000 years ago, and they've been living on this one small island the size of Manhattan. And as well as we know, there's only about 39 of them left somewhere around there. And we're not supposed to contact them. We're supposed to leave them alone. And they're a rare tribe. When they find them in the Amazon, the uncontacted tribes, our initial instinct is back off, back off, leave them alone. Do you think that perhaps the universe, like if there is a civilization that's a million times more advanced than us, been around here for millions of years of life as opposed to quarter million? Why would they let us know? Like, would they look at us dropping bombs on each other and polluting the ocean and sucking all the fish out and putting clouds into the skies of dirt and particles? And why would they look at these crude monkeys? Look at there. They're so far beyond where they need to be before they could join the galactic civilization network or whatever. It is true. It's an argument that there is an argument as well that technology so advanced would be difficult for us to detect. I mean, we tend to think of, you know, when you say written across the sky, I suppose it's true. I'm thinking of starships and things like Star Wars, right? Big energy things that you can see the signature of. But actually maybe the civilization just becomes a nano civilization, tiny little nanobot, because that's more efficient. It's a better way to do things. So it's possible, I suppose, that there are space probes all over the place that are so small and it's so efficient and you sell little energy that we just don't see them. I suppose that is possible.