Higgs Particle (Harry Cliff) | AI Podcast Clips

I mean, wasn't the Higgs called the God particle at some point? It was by a guy trying to sell popular science books, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, I remember because when I was hearing it, I thought it would, I mean, that would solve a lot of, unify a lot of our ideas of physics, was my notion. But maybe you can speak to that. Is it as big of a leap? Is it a God particle or is it a Jesus particle? Which, you know, what's the big contribution of Higgs in terms of this unification power? Yeah, I mean, to understand that, it maybe helps to know the history a little bit. So when the, what we call electro weak theory was put together, which is where you unify electromagnetism with the weak force, and the Higgs is involved in all of that. So that theory, which was written in the mid seventies, predicted the existence of four new particles, the W plus boson, the W minus boson, the Z boson, and the Higgs boson. So there were these four particles that came with the theory that were predicted by the theory. In 1983, 84, the W's and the Z particles were discovered at an accelerator at CERN called the super proton synchrotron, which was a seven kilometer particle collider. So three of the bits of this theory had already been found. So people were pretty confident from the eighties that the Higgs must exist because it was a part of this family of particles that this theoretical structure only works if the Higgs is there. So what then happens, so this question about why is the LHC the size it is? Well, actually the tunnel that the LHC is in was not built for the LHC. It was built for a previous accelerator called the large electron positron collider. So that began operation in the late eighties, early nineties. They basically, that's when they dug the 27 kilometer tunnel. They put this accelerator into it, the collider that fires electrons and anti electrons at each other, electrons and positrons. So the purpose of that machine was, well, it was actually to look for the Higgs. That was one of the things it was trying to do, but it didn't have enough energy to do it in the end. But the main thing it achieved was it studied the W and the Z particles at very high precision. So it made loads of these things. Previously you can only make a few of them at the previous accelerator. So you could study these really, really precisely. And by studying their properties, you could really test this electroweak theory that had been invented in the seventies and really make sure that it worked. So actually by 1999, when this machine turned off, people knew, well, okay, you never know until you find the thing. But people were really confident this electroweak theory was right and that the Higgs or something very like the Higgs had to exist because otherwise the whole thing doesn't work. It'd be really weird if you could discover these particles. They all behave exactly as your theory tells you they should, but somehow this key piece of the picture is not there. So in a way, it depends how you look at it. The discovery of the Higgs on its own is obviously a huge achievement in many, both experimentally and theoretically. On the other hand, it's like having a jigsaw puzzle where every piece has been filled in. You've this beautiful image, there's one gap and you kind of know that that piece must be there somewhere. So the discovery in itself, although it's important, is not so interesting. It's like a confirmation of the obvious at that point. But what makes it interesting is not that it just completes the Standard Model, which is a theory that we've known had the basic layout of for 40 years or more now. It's that the Higgs actually is a unique particle. It's very different to any of the other particles in the Standard Model. And it's a theoretically very troublesome particle. There are a lot of nasty things to do with the Higgs, but also opportunities. So we don't really understand how such an object can exist in the form that it does. So there are lots of reasons for thinking that the Higgs must come with a bunch of other particles or that it's perhaps made of other things. So it's not a fundamental particle, that it's made of smaller things. I can talk about that if you like a bit. But that's still a notion, so the Higgs might not be a fundamental particle, there might be some, oh man. So that is an idea, it's not been demonstrated to be true. But I mean, all of these ideas basically come from the fact that this is a problem that motivated a lot of development in physics in the last 30 years or so. And it's this basic fact that the Higgs field, which is this field that's everywhere in the universe, this is the thing that gives mass to the particles. The Higgs field is different from all the other fields in that, let's say you take the electromagnetic field, which is, if we actually were to measure the electromagnetic field in this room, we would measure all kinds of stuff going on because there's light, there's going to be microwaves and radio waves and stuff. But let's say we could go to a really, really remote part of empty space and shield it and put a big box around it and then measure the electromagnetic field in that box, the field would be almost zero, apart from some little quantum fluctuations. But basically it goes to naught. The Higgs field has a value everywhere. So it's a bit like the whole, it's like the entire space has got this energy stored in the Higgs field, which is not zero, it's finite. It's a bit like having the temperature of space raised to some background temperature. And it's that energy that gives mass to the particles. So the reason that electrons and quarks have mass is through the interaction with this energy that's stored in the Higgs field. Now it turns out that the precise value this energy has, has to be very carefully tuned if you want a universe where interesting stuff can happen. So if you push the Higgs field down, it has a tendency to collapse to... If you do your sort of naive calculations, there are basically two possible likely configurations for the Higgs field, which is either it's zero everywhere, in which case you have a universe which is just particles with no mass that can't form atoms and just fly about at the speed of light. Or it explodes to an enormous value, what we call the Planck scale, which is the scale of quantum gravity. And at that point, if the Higgs field was that strong, even an electron would become so massive that it would collapse into a black hole. And then you have a universe made of black holes and nothing, like us. So it seems that the strength of the Higgs field is to achieve the value that we see requires what we call fine-tuning of the laws of physics. You have to fiddle around with the other fields in the Standard Model and their properties to just get it to this right sort of Goldilocks value that allows atoms to exist. This is deeply fishy. People really dislike this. LRW Well yeah, I guess, so what would be... So two explanations. One, there's a God that designed this perfectly, and two is there's an infinite number of alternate universes and we just happen to be in the one in which life is possible. Complexity. So when you say, I mean, life, any kind of complexity, that's not either complete chaos or black holes. I mean, how does that make you feel? What do you make of that? That's such a fascinating notion that this perfectly tuned field that's the same everywhere is there. What do you make of that? Yeah, what do you make of that? PYM Yeah, so you laid out two of the possible explanations. LRW Really? Is this a spoof? PYM Yeah, I mean, well, some cosmic creator went, yeah, let's fix that to be at the right level. That's one possibility, I guess. It's not a scientifically testable one, but theoretically, I guess, it's possible. LRW Sorry to interrupt, but there could also be, not a designer, but couldn't there be just, I guess, I'm not sure what that would be, but some kind of force that, some kind of mechanism by which this kind of field is enforced in order to create complexity. Basically forces that pull the universe towards an interesting complexity. PYM I mean, yeah, I mean, there are people who have those ideas. I don't really subscribe to them. LRW As I'm saying, it sounds really stupid. PYM No, I mean, there are definitely people that make those kind of arguments. There's ideas that, I think it's Lee Smolin's idea, I think, that universes are born inside black holes. And so universes, they basically have like Darwinian evolution of the universe, where universes give birth to other universes. And if universes where black holes can form are more likely to give birth to more universes, so you end up with universes which have similar laws. I mean, I don't know, whatever. LRW I talked to Lee recently on this podcast, and he's a reminder to me that the physics community has like so many interesting characters. It's fascinating. Anyway, sorry. PYM I mean, as an experimentalist, I tend to sort of think these are interesting ideas, but they're not really testable. So I tend not to think about it very much. So I mean, going back to the science of this, there is an explanation, there is a possible solution to this problem of the Higgs, which doesn't involve multiverses or creators fiddling about with the laws of physics. If the most popular solution was something called super symmetry, which is a theory which involves a new type of symmetry of the universe. In fact, it's one of the last types of symmetries that is possible to have that we haven't already seen in nature, which is a symmetry between force particles and matter particles. So what we call fermions, which are the matter particles and bosons, which are force particles. And if you have super symmetry, then there is a super partner for every particle in the standard model. And without going into the details, the effect of this basically is that you have a whole bunch of other fields. And these fields cancel out the effect of the standard model fields, and they stabilize the Higgs field at a nice sensible value. So in super symmetry, you naturally, without any tinkering about with the constants of nature or anything, you get a Higgs field with a nice value, which is the one we see. So this is one of the reasons, and super symmetry has also got lots of other things going for it. It predicts the existence of a dark matter particle, which would be great. It potentially suggests that the strong force and the electroweak force unify at high energy. So lots of reasons people thought this was a productive idea. And when the LHC was, just before it was turned on, there was a lot of hype, I guess, a lot of an expectation that we would discover these super partners. And particularly the main reason was that if super symmetry stabilizes the Higgs field at this nice Goldilocks value, these super particles should have a mass around the energy that we're probing at the LHC, around the energy of the Higgs. So it was kind of thought you discover the Higgs, you probably discover super partners as well. So once you start creating ripples in this Higgs field, you should be able to see these kinds of, you should be, yeah. So these super fields would be there. When I, at the very beginning I said we're probing the vacuum, what I mean is really that, you know, okay, let's say these super fields exist. The vacuum contains super fields. They're there, these super symmetric fields. If we hit them hard enough, we can make them vibrate. We see super particles come flying out. That's the sort of, that's the idea. That's the whole point. But we haven't. But we haven't. So, so far at least, I mean, we've had now a decade of data taking at the LHC. No signs of super partners have super symmetric particles have been found. In fact, no signs of any physics, any new particles beyond the standard model have been found. So super symmetry is not the only thing that can do this. There are other theories that involve additional dimensions of space or potentially involve the Higgs boson being made of smaller things, being made of other particles. That's an interesting, you know, I haven't heard that before. That's really, that's an interesting, but could you maybe linger on that? Like what, what could be, what could a Higgs particle be made of? So the oldest, I think the original ideas about this was these theories called technicolor, which were basically like an analogy with the strong force. So the idea was the Higgs boson was a bound state of two very strongly interacting particles that were a bit like quarks. So like quarks, but I guess higher energy things with a super strong force. So not the strong force, but a new force that was very strong. And the Higgs was a bound state of these, these objects. And the Higgs would in principle, if that was right, would be the first in a series of technicolor particles. Technicolor, I think not being a theorist, but it's not, it's basically not done very well particularly since the LHC found the Higgs that kind of, it rules out, you know, a lot of these technicolor theories, but there are other things that are a bit like technicolor. So there's a theory called partial compositeness, which is an idea that some of my colleagues at Cambridge have worked on, which is a similar sort of idea that the Higgs is a bound state of some strongly interacting particles and that the standard model particles themselves, the more exotic ones like the top quark are also sort of mixtures of these composite particles. So it's a kind of an extension to the standard model, which explains this problem with the Higgs bosons Goldilocks value, but also helps us understand we have, we're in a situation now again, a bit like the periodic table where we have six quarks, six leptons in this kind of you can arrange in this nice table and there you can see these columns where the patterns repeat and you go, okay, maybe there's something deeper going on here. And so this would potentially be something, this partial compositeness theory could explain a sort of enlarge this picture that allows us to see the whole symmetrical pattern and understand what the ingredients, why do we have, so one of the big questions in particle physics is why are there three copies of the matter particles? So in what we call the first generation, which is what we're made of, there's the electron, the electron neutrino, the up quark and the down quark. They're the most common matter particles in the universe. Then there are copies of these four particles in the second and the third generations. So things like muons and top quarks and other stuff. We don't know why we see these patterns. We have no idea where it comes from. So that's another big question. You know, can we find out the deeper order that explains this particular periodic table of particles that we see? Is it possible that the deeper order includes like almost a single entity? So like something that I guess like string theory dreams about, is this essentially the dream is to discover something simple, beautiful and unifying? Yeah, I mean, that is the dream. And I think for some people, for a lot of people, it still is the dream. So there's a great book by Steven Weinberg, who is one of the theoretical physicists who was instrumental in building the standard model. So he came up with some others with the electroweak theory, the theory that unified electromagnetism and the weak force. And he wrote this book, I think it was towards the end of the 80s, early 90s, called Dreams of a Final Theory, which is a very lovely, quite short book about this idea of a final unifying theory that brings everything together. And I think you get a sense reading his book written at the end of the 80s, early 90s, that there was this feeling that such a theory was coming. And that was the time when string theory was very exciting. So string theory, there's been this thing called the super string revolution and theoretical physicists getting very excited. They discovered these theoretical objects, these little vibrating loops of string that in principle not only was a quantum theory of gravity, but could explain all the particles in the standard model and bring it all together. And as you say, you have one object, the string, and you can pluck it. And the way it vibrates gives you these different notes, each of which is a different particle. So it's a very lovely idea. But the problem is that people discover that mathematics is very difficult. So people have spent three decades or more trying to understand string theory. And I think if you spoke to most string theorists, they would probably freely admit that no one really knows what string theory is yet. I mean, there's been a lot of work, but it's not really understood. And the other problem is that string theory mostly makes predictions about physics that occurs at energies far beyond what we will ever be able to probe in the laboratory. Yeah, probably ever. By the way, so sorry, that'd take a million tangents, but is there room for complete innovation of how to build a particle collider that could give us an order of magnitude increase in the kind of energies? Or do we need to keep just increasing the size of things? I mean, maybe. Yeah, I mean, there are ideas, but to give you a sense of the gulf that has to be bridged. So the LHC collides particles at an energy of what we call 14 tera electron volts. So that's basically the equivalent of you've accelerated a proton through 14 trillion volts. That gets us to the energies where the Higgs and these weak particles live. They're very massive. The scale where strings become manifest is something called the Planck scale, which I think is of the order 10 to the- hang on, get this right. It's 10 to the 18 giga electron volts. So about 10 to the 15 tera electron volts. So you're talking trillions of times more energy. Yeah, 10 to the 15, 10 to the 14th larger. I may be wrong, but it's a very big number. So we're not talking just an order of magnitude increase in energy. We're talking 14 orders of magnitude energy increase. So to give you a sense of what that would look like, were you to build a particle accelerator with today's technology- Bigger or smaller than our solar system? The size of the galaxy. The galaxy. So you'd need to put a particle accelerator that circled the Milky Way to get to the energies where you would see strings if they exist. So that is a fundamental problem, which is that most of the predictions of these unified theories, quantum theories of gravity, only make statements that are testable at energies that we will not be able to probe. And barring some unbelievable, completely unexpected technological or scientific breakthrough, which is almost impossible to imagine. Never say never, but it seems very unlikely. Yeah, I can just see the news story. Elon Musk decides to build a particle collider the size of our- It would have to be, we'd have to get together with all our galactic neighbors to pay for it I think. It'd be like CERN on megasteroids.


How many alien civilizations are out there?

This video is about optimistic, pessimistic, and my own estimates of how many intelligent alien civilizations might be out there. I center this video around the Drake equation that combines a bunch of parameters, multiplies them together, and estimates, based on that, the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, and the observable universe. In general, this video is probably less about the estimates themselves and more about the mysteries behind the very question. Quick thanks to our two sponsors, Brave Browser, good for your privacy, and Neural Gum, good for your brain. Check them out in the description to support the podcast I host. Okay, the Drake equation combines seven parameters, I added an eighth one here. I'm not using the symbols in the equation because it's too easy for people to forget what each one stands for. The variables build on each other, hence the multiplication. Okay, they are the number of new stars born per year, the percent of those stars that have planets, the number of habitable planets per star, the chance of life developing on one of those planets, then the chance of intelligent life developing, and finally the chance of that intelligent civilization advancing far enough to develop the technology to be able to communicate, in our case, through electromagnetic signal. Seventh is the lifetime of that civilization while it's in the communicating stage of its development. And finally, the eighth parameter that wasn't in the original Drake equation is the average number of times that a civilization is born on a planet. That is, one time it's born and it becomes completely extinct and is reborn again. This parameter makes sense since the age of a planet can be billions of years. And then you multiply it all together to get the estimated answer to our question. I list today's estimates for the optimistic and the pessimistic based on the most recent publications that I'm aware of, and today's estimates for me based on how I'm actually feeling today. This estimate probably drastically changes from day to day or from hour to hour within the day, based on my optimism on several of the parameters I'll talk about. I should say that the optimistic and the pessimistic estimates don't reflect the best case and the worst case. They simply reflect a reasonable estimate for a high value for these parameters and a low value for these parameters. Okay, the number of new stars born per year. The pessimistic one is 1.5 and the optimistic is 3. I tend to side with the 3. The 1.5 to 3 stars per year is the latest estimate as of about five years ago from NASA. Most recent relevant paper that I'm aware of is in 2015. Either way, the variability on this parameter is not very large. Let's just wait until later. Okay, the percent of these stars with planets. This is a little bit tricky, but it seems to me as of 2012, just looking at some papers, almost everyone seems to believe that now pretty much all of these star systems have planets around them. Somebody's probably going to argue for the pessimistic one being decreased to like 90% or even the previous one of like 30 or even 20%. I don't think this affects it that much. The evidence seems to indicate that pretty much every star has a planet around it. I like big rocks and I like gravity, so I think this is pretty exciting. The number of habitable planets per star. This is where we start to get into some fun debate. Probably mainly centered around the word habitable. Like what does it mean for a planet to be habitable? The argument for the optimistic view is pretty simple. To be in the habitable zone of a star if it's all just about the range of distances from the star. The more interesting argument for me that I tend to hold is that in order for a planet to be habitable, meaning support life in the broad definition of what life is, the planet doesn't necessarily need to be Earth-like. There could be totally different kinds of planets that are able to support life that we're not even aware of. Those who argue for the low estimate like the general set of ideas behind the rare Earth hypothesis that you should check out, places a lot more constraints on habitability like suitably low radiation, high star metallicity, which by the way from an astronomer perspective a metal is anything that's not hydrogen or helium. So carbon is a metal. There you go. Fun facts with Lex. Okay, continuing the list of constraints, low enough density to avoid excessive asteroid bombardment, and there's much more. There's a long list. I don't know which one of these is most constraining to be honest, but it really centers around the question stated by the rare Earth hypothesis. Does a habitable planet really have to be Earth-like? And exactly how close to the precise conditions of Earth does it have to be? Next parameter is the probability of life developing on a habitable planet. This parameter to me is super exciting, especially because it is one of the biggest open questions within the reach of science. If we discover hard evidence of life on Mars for example, even if it's extinct, or on Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter, and maybe more concrete evidence about life on Venus that was recently discovered in gaseous form, and phosphine I think in the atmosphere. So if there's some good concrete evidence of life on another planet, that shows you that the probability of life developing is quite high. So the day-to-day variability in my estimate has to do with how optimistic I am about us discovering life on the planets or moons in our solar system. Going by recent papers, the optimistic is 13%, the pessimistic is 0.1%. We go somewhere between those all the time, sometimes much closer to 13%. Today it's 1%, we're the 1%ers folks. The argument I think for the high estimate is that life on Earth appears to have started quickly after conditions were right for it. So if it started super quick on Earth, maybe it's pretty easy to start when the conditions are right. And the conditions would be right if we passed the previous parameter of it being a habitable planet. Again, these parameters stack on top of each other, meaning they're conditioned on whatever the thing that the previous parameter represents being true. If we stick just on Earth for our evidence, then the argument for the pessimistic view is that there doesn't seem to be evidence of abiogenesis, or the origination of life occurring more than once on Earth. As far as I could tell, I did not see any good evidence that life sprung up on Earth more than once. Meaning evidence of very different kinds of ancestor organisms. Alright, now we're starting to have some fun. The probability of intelligent life developing. This is of course probably one I talk a lot about in the context of artificial intelligence. Optimistic estimate I've seen is 1%, and the pessimistic one is 0.1%. I tend to actually see this as pretty high probability. In fact, I think that once life starts, intelligence is basically 100%. It's almost inevitable if given enough time. The open question to me is how long do there have to be a range of stable conditions that support the evolution of life? And what precisely that range is once life gets going. In general, the argument for the higher value is that complexity of systems seems to increase effortlessly. And the argument for the lower value is that humans are allegedly the only intelligent species on Earth among a lot of the species that have lived here. So it may be quite difficult even for the evolutionary process to create something like the human brain. Which I do think is quite a special creation. Despite its, in my case, occasional manifestation as dad jokes on Twitter. Okay. Oh, and I don't understand the optimistic estimate 1% that I saw in a few places. So I doubled it to 2%. That's where I stand on the probability of intelligent life developing. There you go. Double it. Okay. Ability to communicate. I kind of think of this as the percent of civilizations that become technologically advanced in the more general context of building advanced technologies. And I tend to see communication as bigger here than maybe the original Drake estimate did. And that it's likely to go beyond electromagnetic communication. Something that we're not even aware of currently. So the argument for the high value here is that, again, systems seem to increase in complexity effortlessly. So it seems to me that tech advancement is inevitable once you have a sufficiently intelligent civilization. The arguments that I find somewhat interesting for the more pessimistic estimate is that civilizations, perhaps in time, tend to isolate themselves. They perhaps lose interest in colonization or just broadly in the whole task of exploration and communication. Another idea is that possibly there is a divergent methodology to the ways that intelligent civilizations might communicate. So there might not be intersection about them being able to communicate with each other. Like totally new ways of information transfer that we're just not even aware of currently. Which does not involve any kind of leakage of signal that would nevertheless still be detectable. So I tend to be on the optimistic side of communication ability developing with the 20% estimate. Next is the lifetime of the civilization once it's already in that communicating advanced technology stage. I think this is one of the more interesting, one of the more open parameters that basically changes the game in the final estimate. This is where the most variability comes from. The previous parameters I find inspiring as a scientist and engineer. This parameter I find inspiring as a human. Because the higher we can get it up as a human civilization, the more likely it is that we make extensive, deep, meaningful contact with other intelligent alien civilizations. So the optimistic values here are very high and they range all over the place. But it centers around the idea that there's one or multiple great filters. And once we get past them as a technological civilization, then we're basically immortal from a civilization perspective. That we will increasingly colonize space, I guess diversifying our use of resources such that it becomes increasingly more difficult to destroy ourselves through the various existential threats that we face. The pessimistic estimate, if we look at human civilization as an average case and assume we destroy ourselves within a couple of years, then for humans, the stage of advanced technology is only lasted about 100 years. When we were able to send out explicit electromagnetic signal. Of course, I don't think we chose to do so explicitly until maybe a few decades ago. I don't remember. I think it was the 70s. Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin era. There you go. My estimate, to be honest, in terms of the survival of human civilization is almost always pretty optimistic. The actual estimate of the lifetime ranges all over the place. I think my current estimate, I just put it 10,000 years. I think even that's really far away. That's 100 centuries from now. We're just in the first 100, 150 years of our advanced technological development. And what's going to happen in the next 100 of those, especially given that the rate of innovation seems to be accelerating, the essentials of my optimism is grounded in the fact that the forces of good will be able to out-innovate the forces of evil. Now, what that looks like 10,000 years from now, it's impossible for me to even imagine. So I'm uncomfortable with an estimate of one billion years from now. So that's why I put my optimistic but not too optimistic estimate of a lifetime of advanced technological civilization at 10,000 years. We're 100 years in, 9,900 years to go to prove me wrong. And finally, this extra parameter of the number of times a civilization is born on a planet, given the age of a planet, and if it is habitable, then I think and some optimistic estimates think that it's possible for intelligent civilizations to be reborn on a planet and put that value at three. The original estimate, of course, it wasn't part of the Drake equation, so it was at one. And so that's the pessimistic estimate. Okay, so we multiply all these together. Of course, the percentages are treated as fractions, so 13% is 0.13, for example. And the result of that multiplication is the estimate of intelligent alien civilizations that are capable of communicating in our galaxy. And so for these three estimates, the result is 468,000 for the optimistic estimate, very, very close to zero for the pessimistic estimate, and 0.7 for my estimate. Now that's for our Milky Way galaxy. Interestingly enough, the estimates for the number of galaxies in the observable universe seems to be changing, and growing, actually, and the current estimate that I'm aware of is actually two trillion galaxies, which is a very high number. So if we look at the number of alien communicating civilizations in the universe, it's 940 quadrillion, which is 1,000 trillion for the optimistic estimate. It's 300,000 for the pessimistic estimate, and 1.4 trillion for my estimate as of this hour today. Obviously, there's quite a bit of variability, and I find it quite entertaining that my estimate landed on very close to one, which aligns well with the idea that if we're pretty average in the Milky Way, it's pretty average that we just may be the only ones in the Milky Way galaxy. But every galaxy's got one. There's a bunch of takeaways I have from this quick thought experiment, and the reason I made the video is I wanted to go through the thought experiment, provide my estimates, and also reason through the very question itself, and some of the open questions around the estimate. So my current view is that we're not alone in terms of communicating alien intelligent civilizations in the universe. But the sense I have in terms of the very concept of communication is that we don't yet have the tools of science to understand what it means to communicate with alien intelligence. I tend to believe that aliens are very unlikely to have the humanoid form, that much more likely the variety of life is greater than we imagine and greater than we can imagine. Some of the variability would perhaps invalidate entirely the very structure of the Drake equation itself, which makes a lot of cosmological assumptions. Life could exist in different dimensions, whatever the heck that would even mean for a physics perspective. As Carl Sagan talked about, it could exist on very different time scales and very different spatial scales, which would make communication to us appear, like I think Sagan said, like noise. Because of our tools, but also because of the human-centric perspective we have on intelligence, that we're just not accustomed to trying to detect signal that operates in a different time scale and even on a different spatial scale. And not just life itself, I think the variety and extent of intelligence and communication methodology is greater than we can imagine and greater than we can imagine. Intelligent beings could operate at different conceptual spaces or layers of abstraction. The nature of communication, I think for humans it's in the space of ideas. It could be in the space of experiences or it could be in the space of whatever lays behind consciousness, for example. Consciousness itself may be aliens communicating with us. I mean, from the current scientific perspective, all of this sounds pretty crazy, but if you step away and just think from first principles of how little we actually understand about the basic nature of the human mind, then you have to think that understanding our mind may unlock some totally new ways of communication and unlock our understanding of what it means to be an intelligent civilization that will totally transform the estimates provided by the Drake equation. And that's why I think it's really inspiring to scientists, engineers, just curious minds, that the pursuits, maybe in my field of AI, and perhaps eventually the field of AI starts to encompassing the concepts of artificial consciousness. I think that provides the opportunity for both the scientists and the engineers to understand the human mind and to build artificial versions of it, you know, artificial general intelligence. And that seems to hold the key. And that is an engineering problem, is a scientific problem, seems to hold the key for us to be able to better understand what kind of other intelligent civilizations might be out there. Again, that's super exciting because in a sense, understanding ourselves is one way to search for intelligent civilizations out there. And in general, as I mentioned, I think all, or at least most, of the parameters in the Drake equation can be illuminated through science and through our engineering pursuit. So if we discover life on Mars, for example, that shows that life is doable elsewhere. If we are able to build artificial general intelligence systems, at least to me, that shows that intelligence is doable elsewhere, other than the human brain. And, you know, as a society, if we're able to avoid existential risks that are before us today, I think that shows that survival is doable elsewhere. Okay, looking at point three, four, and five quickly, let me say that this whole idea of other intelligent alien civilizations out there is really exciting and inspiring to me. So I hope that governments, nation states, will be able to look at the search for intelligent life not as a threat, not as something that you keep as a secret, but as something that can inspire us. I think we're humans first and Americans second. We're curious descendants of apes. And I think the idea of threats and secrecy, I hope, will become an outdated concept. But of course, it's not just about hope. You have to work hard to make it happen. You have to have actual practical ideas how we get there. Because right now, the old systems are stuck in this place where it's nice to have two superpowers fighting against each other. There's the Soviet Union and the United States. Maybe the 21st century will be defined by China versus the United States and so on. I think it's possible, and I think we have to build systems that move us beyond that. I think for point number four, I think doing so is essential for the survival of the human species. Again, that's my current view, but I think about this a lot, and I go back and forth. It mostly has to do about at least my thinking on how much evil there is in the world. And right now, for a time at least, I'm quite optimistic about the fundamental good in human nature. And finally, of course, in terms of increasing the lifetime of human civilization, but in general, finding intelligent life out there, I think space exploration is really exciting. General, this whole topic, the reason I made this video, the reason I have sometimes these conversations about aliens is I do believe that science is the best tool we have, but we can still have an open mind to the mystery of the universe around us. And of course, to me, the most fascinating, the mystery of the human mind itself. So clearly, this particular human mind has to apologize for the probably too long, boring rambling about aliens, but I hope for the few of you still listening that it was at least somewhat interesting. Again, please do check out the Brave browser and NeuroGum sponsors in the description to show support for the podcast that I host. Thanks for tuning in. See you next time.