Robin:

Hello Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi Robin, I hear we’re going to talk about aliens today.

Robin:

I would like to frame it as cosmology.

Agnes:

Oh, that sounds fancier. OK, go ahead, cosmology.

Robin:

So as we hear, most societies through history have framed what they do in the here and the now in a larger context that extended out to everything. A story of where things came from, where they’re going, and who are the other major players in the world and what agenda these players have and what are the major options to take for themselves and their descendants. We today have a cosmology but it’s not entirely satisfactory compared to the cosmology of the ancients. Our cosmology is more true. For example, we talk about how we rose through evolution and how biological evolution gave rise to our species and then cultural evolution gave rise to each of our particular societies and our cosmology says that there’s this vast, vast universe out there, far more than other ancients realized and it’s entirely dead. It has been entirely dead and as far as we know, we’re the only life around and the universe will go on for a vast amount of time or far longer than it has gone on so far. If we die soon which we might well, that will be it and there will be no more and therefore we should try to survive. But we can make the future whatever we want because if we could coordinate together as a world, we could take control of evolution and take control of history and make our society whatever we want to. That’s a big discussion people have. So that’s kind of the modern cosmology.

Agnes:

But just to clarify, so on your view, the modern cosmology is itself informed by this constraint that we can make our society, we can improve our society but either way, we – like we will last only as long as we last and then it will be a big dead world after that.

Robin:

Well, in some sense, there’s this choice. Will we go on for a long time or end soon? Many people fear or even expect we can’t really last that long. We can’t really go that big. But a minority of people, many of whom I have been associated with, are eager and pushing hard for broad expansion and to have a big impact on the universe and then there’s ecological, environmental sort of question people raise is: dare we – should we go out there and make it in our image because our image isn’t so great. Anyway, they might say – and say the science fiction of the 1950s would be say pushing more, expecting a grand expansion out into the universe and the science fiction of the last few decades is more inward-focusing, less approving of this expansion urge and what it would lead to and less expecting a grand future and more hoping we can at least make up for the sins of our past and find some stable, sustainable, pastoral world that we could continue in for a modest duration until we fade away and allow nature to take over again.

Agnes:

Can I just ask about this idea of the big grand impact? I mean so suppose that we did have a big impact at the scale of the universe, right? But then we discovered just as we – at the brink of our success of this giant impact that our universe was actually way bigger than we thought it was.

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

In fact it was bigger by about how much our universe is bigger as compared to like say the people you were referring to as the ancients, whatever size they thought it was.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Would the importance of our achievement suddenly go way down?

Robin:

Well, if you have to think in terms of our relative achievement, then you have to pick some maximum. But if you can just have an unbounded possibility of achievement, then there need be no maximum. You could say every time our vision gets 10 times larger and we do 10 times as much, then we are 10 times grander and there is no upper limit.

Agnes:

So on that picture, there’s not really any such thing as success nor is there really any such thing as failure. Like suppose that we would just continue at this rate. You know, at least we’ve like discovered most of the things on planet earth like that. So expansion from earlier times when they’re – and we’ve gone a little bit beyond earth. So you could think that’s pretty grand. So is the idea though we always want to believe there are grand things in the future? There always needs to be more grandness in the future. So it’s not that there’s an achievable amount of grandness. It’s just that we have to be kind of on a treadmill of …

Robin:

Well, that’s – I mean that’s an interesting thing to ask what exactly is the question of ambition about. So if the question is what does it take for mommy to love me or daddy to love me, right? Then what we want is something achievable at least within a decent chance and then at some point, you could know you’ve achieved it and then you’re done or even what does it take for my wife to love me or my colleagues to respect me, right? If you frame your life in terms of something like that, then you want to pick an achievable ambition and you want to set that in front of people and have that be. But if – you know, the reality of the world doesn’t have to be binary like that. It can just have an upper balance or even for an employee, you could say for most employees at a firm, well, this is what it will take for you to be considered there a reliable, valued employee. But, you know, how high can your career go? Well, in some sense, there’s no upper limit. You could rise in the organization. You could become CEO. You could go start your own new organization. It could become a hundred times bigger.

Agnes:

Right. So like let’s imagine two employees, right? So one of those employees has the goal of just doing well, doing his job, making enough money to support his family and pursue some hobbies that he has, right? And he’s happy to rise to a certain level but then not rise any further. He lives a happy life. The other employee is fueled by a bottomless and unsatisfiable ambition that no matter how high he rises, he wants to rise higher. So he’s never happy or satisfied because his eye is always on the next possible achievement. Now our question is, to which of these two people do we think humanity should try to liken itself? And your view is the second one.

Robin:

Well, I would say if you want to just focus on are you a good person, then we will give you both the credit. But if you want to look outside yourself and say what great things could be achieved, what are the possibilities for doing wonderful things, then there’s no particular reason that should be bounded from above. Now we don’t want to necessarily fault you for not achieving wonderful things. But if you could, you know, why not try? Why not have humanity try to be as grand as it could be?

Agnes:

I mean I feel you could make this exact same argument to the CEO, to the – let’s call him the complacent businessman, right? So the complacent – you’re like, “Why not try? You could rise along high. You could achieve a lot more,” and he’s like, “Well, I don’t feel like it.” So do you have any other argument besides why not? Because right now, you’re in a position, right, where you say even from science fiction a lot of people don’t feel like it. So you’re going to have a better argument than why not. If you’re going to need a positive – the burden of proof is on your side, right? Why, why do we want humanity to look like the sort of bottomlessly ambitious, unsatisfiable businessman? And, you know, your thought is well, there are things to look outside yourself. But I mean in a way, it’s like yeah, I want to look outside myself and do all these great things, so that I can have like this – like glory or wealth or whatever and humanity is going to have to do it for those reasons too, right? So then the question is just like, “Well, will that make us happier?”

Robin:

So the fact of the matter is no one is in charge and there is no substantial sense at least yet at which humanity makes choices. We have seen a history of humanity and we expect to see a future not because we all come together in some way to make a choice about what we will be or should be because we are composed of many parts who will do different things and if there are enough different parts trying enough different things, then most likely some parts of them will be ambitious. Some parts will try to expand and that’s all it takes for the net overall changes to happen. So our best explanation for why humanity has improved, increased, expanded, et cetera, in the past was not a shared ambition for that. It was just because some people tried for that and this is the net effect of that. So we could then predict that unless we all get together to stop them, our descendants will similarly go out there and expand and then each of us could have the choice of which part of humanity do we want to be part of or identify with or devote ourselves to. The part that is doing the most to cause this expansion or an advancement or innovation and the parts that are not.

Agnes:

And like suppose that I – you know, this is – on your view, this will be a matter of like my preferences and my – how do I know which part I belong to? Like – and how do you know which part you belong to? Like I get that you – you know, you say a lot of nice stuff about the expansion people.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

But like I don’t know. You’re an academic. Maybe that’s complacent. Like it’s going to take more than just like some nice words, right? How does one tell which team is in fact on in terms of whether what is in fact promoting this brave, new, innovative world?

Robin:

Is it really that important to tell that precisely? I mean …

Agnes:

Well, you said each of us has to decide which one. So I was trying to figure out how do I even figure out what I’ve decided until now, let alone whether I want to change teams.

Robin:

So for example, attitudes on here will be reflected in say how excited you are about Elon Musk’s Starlink and Starship ventures out into space or by innovation as in computer technology or advances in medical technology. You know, social media, population growth. You know, there’s a basic tradeoff often between taking chances and making investments to try new things and develop new things versus wanting to restrain new things like by regulating them or limiting them. So in that choice, you could see which direction you’re going for or even how much effort you put in. Like so the comfortable – could we tell the difference between the comfortable CEO and the ambitious one? I think we could.

Agnes:

Yes. I think we could tell the difference there. But like – so if I ask myself I don’t feel very excited about the Elon Musk rocket, then I don’t care very much. But I also don’t feel very concerned that I would need to restrict technology either. So I don’t have strong feelings on either side of this. But so maybe let me ask you. You know, you used three words. You said improved, increased, expanded and I think you often tend to equate improvement with expansion or increase. Like – and population growth, right? So I mean in terms of this – you know, the more ambitious approach. Is the main thing behind the ambition just that there are more human beings and they’re spread out over more space and that for you is an improved scenario over fewer human beings taking up less space?

Robin:

Well, there are two sets of contexts in which we can ground this. One is we could look at the past and we can ask which past changes have happened and which are in this direction. Then we could look at future changes we envision and which of them we might want to embrace or not. So in the past, the human population has greatly increased. The human spatial extent has increased. That is we’re spread across more of the globe. We can go into more places. Our energy consumption increased. We have more technological ability to do more things. We have more capacity to make more kinds of things and more materials and energy to draw and to make and do things. In addition, we talk more. We have learned more. We can go – each of us can go learn more by drawing on the best everyone has learned. Collectively we all know more. Collectively we’re learning more, even faster and even inside ourselves, we understand ourselves better in some sense than we once did. These are all ways in which we are improving. We could argue like if picked two of them, which is more important, but I’m not sure that’s terribly important for this conversation. So again I wanted to draw us back to the overall topic of a cosmology. Think in terms of where we sit in a larger framing. So one of the larger framings here is what might we do in the future and where it might be going. Do we approve or not? And I wanted to introduce my recent work in grabby aliens to say that we have a more refined vision of our cosmology that’s a little more active than previous cosmology I described and in this vision, we actually believe that out there in the universe are other alien civilizations like ours in the sense that they started on some planets and slowly evolved and became more and more advanced and then they reached a point where they were at our level and then they continued on past that to become larger and expansive and at some point, stay within million years of where we are. They started expanding out rapidly from their origin of place and as they expanded out, they changed the volumes they were in and started using them to do things and this is the idea of a grabby alien and we won’t go into the details here. But a recent paper saying we can estimate roughly where they are in space/time and that we have a statistical model of them with three parameters that we can estimate each parameter from data. So the bottom line is they are out there. We might become one or not. If we become one, we would meet them out there in roughly a billion years and they appear roughly once per million galaxies, very far away from here and because of that, we know that if we die, that’s not it for the universe. There are these other alien civilizations out there that will go on and will expand and will fill the universe within a billion or two years and then everything will be determined by them. In that cosmology, the key question we have is, “Do we want to become one of them or not? Can we last long enough and become one? Will we allow ourselves to expand out from here to join that group of grabby aliens?” If we don’t do that, will we at least send some messages out to them or leave some ruins that they will discover later as they come past here filling the universe and is that how we will affect the future? If we become grabby and go out there and meet the other grabby aliens, then there will be an era after a billion years, so years from now, which goes on for trillions of years. When we hear about other grabby aliens and we meet them and then there’s this larger community of them who will then influence each other in the sense each will be looking for aspects of the others to copy and to appraise and to criticize. We might want to earn the respect of this larger community of civilizations for something we have that – to offer them of value. That’s different cosmology than the one I described before. Different cosmology from many of the ancients and even if I can’t give you very specific connections, it just seems like if this is in fact the cosmology when you come to believe this, that has to affect how we think about who we are and what our important choices are. So I have just given a long speech. I’m sorry but …

Agnes:

No, that’s fine. That was good because I was going to say we haven’t gotten to the aliens yet. So OK, so your thought is if we last for another billion years, that’s when we might meet the aliens.

Robin:

Right and most likely within a million or 10 million years, we would start to expand out and become grabby. That is we wouldn’t be sitting here waiting for them. We would be rapidly moving out to meet them halfway.

Agnes:

So your calculation of a billion years is predicated on the assumption that we would be moving.

Robin:

Right. If we weren’t moving and waiting for them, we would meet them in a billion and a half years.

Agnes:

Got it, got it. OK, OK. And – OK. Like at some point, isn’t the sun going to like swallow up the earth? When is that going to happen?

Robin:

In five billion years.

Agnes:

Five billion, OK. So it’s going to get pretty hot before then I guess …

Robin:

Right and the earth would become uninhabitable in roughly a billion years. But long before then, we would have taken it apart and done other things with it and moved out there and changed everything. So …

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

A side comment is: most likely within a few thousand years, we and our descendants will just become artificial, i.e. made artificially in factories like robots, et cetera and the biosphere, it’s not clear how much of that will survive and those are interesting things to talk about the future. But those are somewhat independent of these larger framing of we might go out there.

Agnes:

OK. And – but so your view is there’s something that hinges on this namely that as you see it, there are sort of two overall factions. Humanity is divided into two factions. The bad guys, they’re like the complacent billionaire. They want us to just kind of stay the way that we are and they want us to preserve the way of life we already have. The good guys, that’s your team, that would like have a view to this – you know, to innovation and expansion and et cetera and want us to have the chance to stick around long enough to meet the aliens which I have to say of all the incentives here, that one I appreciate because I think it would be really cool to meet them. So – and your thought is that in general, it has been the good guys, which is to say the innovators that have sort of pushed the limits and have led to us expanding this far. But maybe there’s like a small chance that the bad guys now could sort of shut down the innovation in a certain way and lock us on a path that would make it impossible for us to expand. So not only do you have a cosmology but you also have a kind of Star Wars ethos to go with it, right? A kind of war and it almost becomes a cosmic skill war between good guys and bad guys.

Robin:

Well, most ancient cosmologies and most engaging ideologies have not just had a description of what things are and where they came from and where they might be going and what are the main actors and their choices. It had a side of who are the good guys and bad guys.

Agnes:

Yes, right. No, that’s good. That’s why I think it’s a good future view that it has this aspect.

Robin:

Right. Now, you know, I want to carefully distinguish sort of the factual description of the choices from my personal recommendation because, you know, that’s just a general good habit of analysis here. So I don’t want to hide the side I recommend but I don’t want to necessarily make that the center initial – the stage of the description here.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

So the key point is that most people seem to think we’re more likely than not going to last long enough to actually go out and expand and meet the grabby aliens. That is most people think it’s unlikely that we will survive that long in the state that would make that possible. So that means there’s an obstacle here and the question is like, “What is the obstacle? What would get in the way?” Just one of the things could be people would choose not to. People would prefer that we don’t go out and expand. There are many people who have arguments and reasons for that and we can get into that in a minute. The – I’m blanking for a moment, sorry.

Agnes:

Well, can I interrupt you?

Robin:

Sure, please.

Agnes:

Because I have a question about – so this question how likely are we to survive that long is a prediction, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So there are people making this prediction and their answer is like not very long. Not very likely and your answer is that it’s more likely.

Robin:

Not necessarily. I think it might well be unlikely. But it’s a matter of like which thing we’re trying for, how hard.

Agnes:

OK. So a minute ago, your concern was about a prediction. But now, your concern is more like – see, OK. Here’s why – I think it’s pretty hard for you to stick to the descriptive here, right? Like that is – you’re like, well, as an analyst, I don’t want to insert my own view about like what’s good or bad. I’m just going to stand back here and observe and – but on the descriptive front, there’s just some fact of the matter as to whether we will survive that long and then there’s on – yet another set of facts as to what our information is about that, right? And to those – as to the predictions and I would think you would maybe trust your own estimate better than most other people because you have a lot of bases for making such prediction or as much as anyone. So I would be like, “Why even listen to this, people’s predictions?”

Robin:

Well, I mean I’m not disagreeing on the prediction.

Agnes:

OK. So you’re disagreeing on what is desirable.

Robin:

Exactly.

Agnes:

Right. So on the normative question.

Robin:

Exactly.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Or at least a preference or desire question.

Agnes:

Right. So the question is “Who is the good guy team and who is the bad guy team?” So that is the question. It’s not that this is detached analysis but it’s like which team should we be on.

Robin:

So again the key idea is we have a cosmology here of the key things that are in the universe and what’s going to happen. What are the possibilities and what are main actions? Then in that framing, we have to think about what do we think is good or bad

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So there is this key choice. How hard will we try to last long enough and to allow ourselves to expand out to have the chance to become and meet the grabby aliens? And that I think has to be placed in the context of sort of the reasons people will want to not do that. So I want to sort of – again, instead of just preaching on one side, I want to have us hear the other side.

Agnes:

OK. So one of the best reasons not to do it.

Robin:

So the scale of governance in the world has been increasing rapidly over the last few centuries. That is we used to have many, many nations and the nations became bigger and then within each nation, governance has been slowly moving up. That is, any one function like roads has been handled at a local level and then a city level and then on a regional level and a nation level and a sort of international level. So we’ve been seeing larger global governance institutions even over the last century. We have a formal world government in the sense of the United Nations but we have a lot of more informal organizations and we have an increasing convergence of opinion around the world. That is, elites around the world tend to agree more on what are the proper regulations and regulation is more similar around the world. So we are having increasing global governance substantially over time and that’s a trend that seems likely to continue. So within a few centuries, we’re likely to have relatively strong global governance. Maybe not necessarily a single government like a national government now that rules all but a lot stronger global governance, a lot more stronger global coordination. That seems like an obvious trend.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

And there will be many benefits from such global coordination. For example a decline in war, a huge benefit presumably. There might be an increase in civil war resisting this governance. But this government would probably be pretty powerful. There would be an increase in interaction. There would be more trade, more migration, more innovation, sharing, more standardization of weights and measures and travel, all these sorts of things. That is we will have an integrated world that gains many of the benefits that nations now do from being integrated.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

And of course we would then feel this sense of community, that the whole world is a community together and that we are deciding things together. So for example, global warming. You know, much of the world agrees that global warming is a problem and that should be dealt with and the major obstacle is because the world is broken into different countries, the poor countries at the moment basically say, “Sure. We’re willing to help out. But you guys need to transfer us an amount of money for us to go into this deal.” They’ve asked for more money than the other side has been willing to give and that has been the holdup. So a world government would deal with that, right? It’s just like the way the nations do. So people will have a world government and they will see a world that becomes more coordinated on many different dimensions and they will like that and they will look back on our era and the past eras. Is this era of loss and waste because of wars and conflicts? People couldn’t move to the better jobs. People couldn’t transfer innovations, all those sorts of things. That will be the world and then there will come a time in the next few centuries when it would be feasible to send colonists to other star systems at a rapid speed. Say a speed close to the speed of light and at that point, if we allow anyone to leave to do that, we will lose this civilization-wide coordination. Once they leave, they are out of our central control. Now that’s not true of say colonizing the solar system. The solar system is much larger than earth. So for another few centuries, we could fill up the solar system and grow in and do vast spectacular things. But still anyone within the solar system is close enough to be held in control by a central government. That is they would be included in the solar system wide governance. So we would maintain this coordination and coherence of our civilization. But once they go off to another star system at a speed – say at a fraction of the speed of light, then they would be out of our control. We couldn’t really send a missile after them to hit them if they were disobeying us or something. So at that point, we would lose this ability to have the central coordination. We would then move back to a world of competition. All these different people went in different directions. They would compete with each other and they wouldn’t all follow the same rules and then instead of a world where we all get together and talk and decide what we think is the best thing to do, we would be in a world where we compete again, which is the battle world that many people thought that we had tried to escape from and that’s why they might say, “No, you can’t go.” That’s a realistic possibility.

Agnes:

OK. So this is – so what you’ve given is not exactly a case against expansion but a scenario under which expansion might look bad to most humans.

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

Well, let me ask about that. You said the worry is that we’re going to go back to a world of competition. But I mean the whole reason why once we send them off we can’t reach them anymore because they’re too far away, doesn’t that also mean we won’t be competing with them?

Robin:

No, because once they go out there and do something, part of them can come back this way. That is the frontier of expansion keeps going away from us. But the frontier of expansion leaves things along the way which then expand and then those things kind of come back and compete with us and they can compete with each other.

Agnes:

So the thought would be something like …

Robin:

War can return.

Agnes:

War and also – right. Like they might – I mean, you know, they might end up being very innovative or something and then …

Robin:

Right, maybe they have better military weapons. Maybe they will just have more kids and like go fill up things and they come here for resources we’ve been saving but not using as well as they think we could.

Agnes:

Right. So – I mean so let’s say – like let’s assume all those people in the future are going to be like reasonable people, right? And so they will decide whether or not they should let the colonists go on the basis of, well, is there – is it a reasonable prediction that they would like come back and like kill all of us, take us as slaves or whatever later? And if they would, if it’s a reasonable prediction that they would do that, then isn’t it in fact the right thing to do not to send them off?

Robin:

Well, so there’s going to be the judgement about how bad our world of competition has been. That is we’ve been so far living in a world of competition. That is there has been no world government. Different nations have just competed. They fought wars. They have taken each other’s businesses away and that has been the nature of the world for a very long time and many of us have lived there and we don’t think it’s such a terrible place. But every once in a while, pretty terrible things happen and in this future, they will see a world with the world government and they will like that and they will look back on our era and remember the worst parts of our world and they will be afraid and they will also have their ideology and their values and their essence of identity and that becomes the choice. So …

Agnes:

OK. So like one concrete thing we could do in view of this, if we want to be from your point of view on the good guys’ team is we could create like poems and epic poems and stuff glorifying competition and making it look like beautiful and stuff. Like a lot of people are like, “Oh, I wish I could go back to ancient world. I wish I could go back to Napoleonic France,” or whatever. Clearly that kind of nostalgic desire to go back to those things is the product of like good PR among those people in terms of the kinds of cultural products they produce. So like is your – like is one thing you would suggest that like we should be promoting cultural products that glorify our time so that the prospect of return to a similar such time doesn’t strike our descendants as horrifying?

Robin:

Well, obviously for example the past did glorify a war-type competition and they did write a lot of poems.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And they tried very hard to make it seem grand.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

To their local citizens to go fight wars and …

Agnes:

Well, any time they succeeded like locally for a while. So …

Robin:

But we still are today a bit more horrified by war and those poems don’t quite overwhelm us. But those – that would be a sort of thing that you might consider doing. But my story here was just to think about this grand framing at least as the cosmology and just, if we say, “Well, there are these in essence, gods, these grand grabby civilizations that will go out and become these very powerful things,” the temptation to join them might be an aspiration that we could sell. That is – because there might be far more of the ones who never did that. So if in fact, most civilizations never achieved then there will be one per million galaxies of the grabby and then there might, if there’s a thousand times as many of the others, maybe there’s one per thousand galaxies of the ones who never achieved that, and we could be one of those and we might say, “Gosh! We want to be one of the winners.”

Agnes:

That sort of argument of don’t we want to be one of the winners, it’s up to me. It sounds a lot like the argument of like why not? Why not try to achieve something? Like I’m not sure what the argument is supposed to be. Is it a kind of bullying or something like, “Come on, are you a loser? Don’t you want to be a winner?” Like what is actually the value supposed to be?

Robin:

I mean we’ve discussed before, people care about status.

Agnes:

So you want to – so you’ve used it. So in a way, the grabby are the highest status.

Robin:

Yes!

Agnes:

[Laughs]

Robin:

High status aliens. And we want to be one of the high status aliens instead of the low status aliens. That something I think people care about.

Agnes:

Right. Though, status is the thing people care about, but it is also a thing people like to think they don’t care about and people – it’s a thing that people like to tamper their caring about it.

Robin:

Sure.

Agnes:

Like the ambitious CEO …

Robin:

But think about over the last few centuries, there have been the rich nations and the advanced nations and there have been the poor nations. Poor nations have envied the rich and tried to emulate them and tried to become like them. That’s actually a thing that has happened in the last few centuries and is still happening right now. It’s a real power in many poor nations is that they’re eager to emulate the rich. In fact, they’ve done COVID policies a lot like rich nation policies even for example, and it’s not terribly appropriate for them when their, say, risks are so much lower because their population is much younger or it’s much more expensive to do modern policies rich nations have. And this is true in many different policy areas. In fact, I remember this talk given by a world bank president I believe at TED, because I gave a talk at the TED conference, and he said, “Well, my analysts say that cost-effectively, building hospitals in poor countries is not worth the cost because this is a very expensive treatment and much simpler treatments will be useful for them. But the people of the poor countries, they keep saying they want more hospitals because they kind of want that because rich nations have them and they feel like that’s sort of a matter of respect and dignity.” And he said, “And who are we to tell them not to have the dignity they want?” They want hospitals because rich nations have them.

Agnes:

So that would predict that we would be inclined to foolishly try to emulate these grabby aliens even when it is not to our advantage to do so just because we want to be high status. We want to be among the high status aliens.

Robin:

OK. So I have another framing here that I think our listeners will find entertaining, if a little more speculative.

Agnes:

I hope I’ll find it entertaining.

Robin:

I think you will.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

OK. So under this model of grabby aliens like they appear once per million galaxies and so the nearest one is likely very far away.

Agnes:

Yup.

Robin:

We will meet them in a billion years. But there’s another scenario under which they’re already here.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

And so, this is the scenario where the various UFOs that have been seen for a long time, some of them actually are aliens. And I have given some thought to, well, if they actually are aliens, where do they come from and why are they here and what are they doing? And I do have a way to integrate that into my worldview. I want to emphasize that this is speculative in a sense that it’s not obvious that these UFOs are aliens but I would also say it’s not obvious that they aren’t. A lot of these sightings do seem quite surprising and striking and hard to explain. So they might well be aliens as far as I’m concerned. And so my expertise is more in trying to explain things like this and not into the details of these sightings and how to explain them. So I would say there is a way that possibly, UFOs could be aliens, at least with a chance I would say, at least one in a thousand in terms of our prior expectations. But it had some interesting implication for this cosmology view and that’s why I’m telling you.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

So if UFOs were aliens, the most likely explanation would be that life on earth didn’t start on earth. It started on some prior planet, we could call Eden. And this Eden seeded the nursery of earth, that is, earth was born around a star that was born in a nursery where thousands of stars are born all at the same time, in the same place. And if that nursery were seeded then life would have been put near those thousands of stars. And then that happened four and a half billion years ago and then since then, those thousands of stars have drifted into a ring around the galaxy. But we can actually find those stars and see them if we look at the right – they have exactly the same spectrum as our sun because they came in the same nursery. And we have seen some of them. So the idea is, life was seeded on all those thousand stars and then they all went down the path that we went down trying to advance, go through various stages. And one of them got to our level first. And the statistics will be that would have happened millions of years ago. It couldn’t have happened in the last few thousand years. That would be crazy coincidence. And so, if it did happen millions of years ago then they would see that they were the first and they would go out and see their sibling stars and they would say, those are the most likely places more life would appear.

Agnes:

How would they see that they were first? Just because they don’t see activity?

Robin:

Right. They don’t see anybody else.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

So they would – they don’t see anybody else. They assume they are first. They go look out for the sibling stars and then they could travel to the sibling stars and hang around waiting for life to appear there. And then that’s why they would be here, having them waiting for us for a million years. Now, the scenario needs some more details to explain some puzzles. So, there are two big puzzles to explain, that we need to explain. One is, why didn’t they go everywhere else and remake the universe? That is, if they had been one of these grabby aliens, they would have gone all over the place and done all sort of things and then everything would be changed. And since we look out and we don’t see that, we can say, they choose not to do that. That they did not go out and change and colonize and expand everything. And the other thing to explain is, why if they are here and somewhat visible, why are they sort of at the edge of visibility? That is, they could be – they could just land on the White House lawn and just make themselves really obvious or given that they are millions of years more advanced than us, they could be completely invisible. There was no reason that we would see any trace of them whatsoever. But – so they’re hanging at the edge of visibility. OK. So to explain these two puzzles, my assumptions are, one …

Agnes:

Sorry. Can I interrupt for one second?

Robin:

Oh, please. Speak up.

Agnes:

So you’re saying that we are assuming these guys are none grabby but yet, they’re here.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So they were sent out from – so I mean …

Robin:

Yes. That’s part of the thing to explain. Yes. Why did they not go everywhere else? But why did they come here?

Agnes:

I mean, why did they go anywhere at all? Because I know the mark of the grabby is that …

Robin:

Yes, exactly.

Agnes:

OK. OK. You could explain that. All right. Go ahead.

Robin:

Exactly. So the key assumption is say, they have a world government and they decided not to expand. They made this policy not to expand. But then they realized that their policy not to expand throughout the universe would be thwarted by a sibling civilization going out and expanding. So they are here to impose the rule against expanding, and they want us to follow that rule. And so, that’s their main reason to be here, and that’s why they made this exception. They allowed an exceptional expedition where they don’t usually allow to come here to enforce this rule because if they didn’t, then their regime of no expansion would end because we would expand and they would then have to compete with us.

Agnes:

OK. But like isn’t this actually just a general problem for the non-grabby civilizations?

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

And then aren’t they going to meet this problem like noticing – eventually noticing. OK. One thing you might think is, well, they just wouldn’t last that long. But if they do last long enough then they are eventually going to send people out and then the people they send out aren’t necessarily going to be bound by whatever rules, right? Like even the aliens that those people sent out to us, like I mean they’ve been here a long time, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Maybe meanwhile, they’ve kind of …

Robin:

So they would face a very difficult – so first of all, they know the grabby aliens would meet them – would get here in a few billion years. And at that point, the game will be over. They could only maintain their isolation and unification for that few billion years until the real grabby aliens showed up. So that would be a deadline.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

But because they’re already siblings, the deadline is much sooner because aliens are born with these clumps together all in the same place.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And they would know that if within a million years or so, if we start expanding then that’s the end. And so they know that – they could do something about us even if they couldn’t do something about the grabby aliens. But they would also know this one expedition they sent here, they need to keep it under tight control.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Because this is a risk. If it gets out of control, then the game is up. And that’s true for any expedition they sent out.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And so, they would be very careful to limit its choices and what it can do. So they have to pick a strategy of what it’s going to do here to convince us not to expand that would be robust and simple and not give them very much discretion or freedom in its implementation.

Agnes:

I see. OK. And so it could even be for instance, that these siblings of ours, so to speak, like they are the ones really promoting world government among us, right? Because they know that the more we move towards world government …

Robin:

They would want to but the question is, how could they millions of years ago have anticipated enough details about us to approve an expedition here to do that influencing without giving this expedition a lot of discretion? Because if they’re just supposed to sit around here and learn about us and then go fiddle with things, that seems to allow a lot of discretion.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

That maybe home doesn’t want to them that much discretion.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

So they have to pick a strategy that’s pretty safe and simple to anticipate ahead of time. And here’s the strategy I proposed they pick. Pretty much all social species have status hierarchies, so does ours. And so the main way that humans domesticate other animals is by sitting up on top of their status hierarchy. That is, we area the top dog in the pack, and that’s how we domesticate dogs. And so, they would expect that if we were a social species, we would have a status hierarchy. And their strategy is to sit at the top of our status hierarchy. How are they going to do that? Well, they’re going to be in our world and they’re just going to be the best. They’re going to be really impressive. They’re going to hang around here and just be super impressive. So, what do they do? They hang up the periphery of our vision just being really, really impressive. They can go really fast. They can turn on a dime. They are these enormous, crazy abilities. And another thing they would know, you see though, is if we saw these abilities far away, we would look at them as a “them”, not “us”. So they need to be here being impressive and they have to not show very much other stuff about us like we – even with human societies, we can hate each other for pretty trivial things, right? But they’re aliens so they’re just going to be weird in some actual ways, right? So maybe they eat their babies. Who knows? But there’s going to be something about them we hate, and they know that. So they have to not show very much. So they’re going to hang out for a long time, being really impressive, but not showing very much but being here and just over time, we’re convinced they exist, we see they’re really impressive, and then we defer to them more. And we can already calculate their goal. We already have that right now. We know why they’re here. And so – and that we had already kind of want to do it and this would tip us over.

Agnes:

Wouldn’t it be very boring for them if that’s all they’re doing?

Robin:

Well, they could sleep for a long time or whatever. But again, the idea is this civilization has become very stable. It has been around for a very long time and it hasn’t expanded. So it has had a long time to become very stable, probably doesn’t innovate very fast. And so, it’s used to being a very secure and stable society.

Agnes:

So, I mean …

Robin:

In the cosmology term, now we see if this is true, then the power that wants us not to expand are the aliens and they’re here to impose that on us.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And maybe we would resent their imposition or limiting our autonomy. They are here to get us to do that voluntarily. But if we don’t do it voluntarily, they probably have an alternative power.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, clearly, they have some kind of moral sensibility because they’re not just …

Robin:

They didn’t kill us. They could have just killed us all.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And that would be the end of it. Right? So they are clearly reluctant to do that. They have some sort of sibling association with us. They don’t want to do it. But they don’t want us to expand. That seems the obvious thing they would be here for. And maybe we would go along with them because many of us I think would not want to expand either.

Agnes:

So yeah, I mean it seems like there’s something about this – your cosmology that’s almost like it has the kind of strand of paranoia in it in a way. I mean I don’t want to say it’s false paranoia or something. But where it’s like, there are going to be these forces out to stop us from innovating and expanding. Like until now in human history, we’ve been relatively pro-expansion. But we got to be on the look-out for these anti-innovation, anti-expansion forces. Maybe they are coming from inside the house, i.e. the world government or maybe they are coming from the aliens, right? So we’re going to be on the alert against this kind of oppressive anti-innovation force. But supposing that – supposing that our descendants really did expand, I mean it’s not us, it’s our distant descendants, and our distant descendants are very different from us like they’re AI in some way or brain emulations or whatever. They don’t look like us. And – but you’re like, “Yeah, but we want to be on – we want to have the status that we are the winner, grabby aliens, not the loser, quiet aliens.” But I guess I wonder like your prediction is sort of one way or another, the universe is going to be filled up with these grabby aliens sort of competing for space.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

That results in a way is like one thing we can sort of count on.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And like the real question is like, how much of the territory are we going to occupy? Right? And so you have …

Robin:

That’s one of the questions. So first of all, if we go out and join them then we could be part of that and we could sort of make the universe be more like us. But another thing is like in the next billion years, there is this volume of space that will either be dead and empty or full of life that we put there. And we could say, we’d rather that region of space be full of our descendants who would say, find their life worth living. And a utilitarian calculation could just say, count up all those valuable lives as a value. And we could say, that’s a reason to do this is not for the pride or the status or the resentment of the aliens winning, we could just want to make a lot of valuable lives.

Agnes:

Right. Though, in a larger scheme, there’s going to be lots of valuable lives of the grabby aliens, right?

Robin:

Right. But that’s not for another couple of billion years. And between now and then, we could have a lot of lives.

Agnes:

Sure. But like in the overall larger calculus, it seems like the ….

Robin:

It’s going to be a lot anyway.

Agnes:

Yeah, it’s going to be a lot anyway.

Robin:

But we could add more.

Agnes:

But like, is it clear that if we are just going to sum over total lives that our …

Robin:

It’s not clear the percentage increase is large because that depends on how many of us that we will ever be but it’s clear that this – again, the nearest million galaxies over the next billion years is a volume that we could fill with our descendants or not. And if we don’t, it’s empty and not used. So, that’s a thing we could do.

Agnes:

OK. Right. So it’s kind of like the office building where nobody is now. We could be using that space for something. And so, there’s a space and we are not using it and we could fill it with humans …

Robin:

Or whatever we will become.

Agnes:

I mean they might later be all killed by some grabby group, right? But in the meanwhile, lives get lived.

Robin:

Sure.

Agnes:

OK. So I mean – so it seems to me that there are actually sort of two distinct possible ways of thinking about the goal. One way is more local, though, it’s really not very local but it’s about expanding and filling our neighborhood so to speak with humanness.

Robin:

Our manifest destiny.

Agnes:

Yeah, right. Our local manifest destiny. And then there’s a second of becoming grabby where we’re really going to go nuts and we’re going to be one of the final winner groups. It’s almost like a survivor and we’re like, “We’re going to make it all the way until end or something.” And there, it’s like it’s a status thing, right? As opposed to the lives thing. So there are two considerations you’re raising, a utilitarian calculus of the lives that we can fill this extra space with, and the status thing of wanting to be, belong to the grabby club.

Robin:

So I think calling it status might not do it fully justice. But in a community, you can want to earn respect and respect will be kind of the status but there could be real reasons that you deserve respect. You could become something that really does deserve respect and then really gets the respect that you deserve. And that can feel satisfying both because it feels nice to be respected but also knowing that the respect was deserved.

Agnes:

But it feels like that would only – you only get respect if there is a community. And you only get a community if there’s some kind of mutual recognition of some kind, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And so in a way, do you think at the end of the day there’s going to be some kind of really giant universe government in which all of these various …

Robin:

Not a government, but a community.

Agnes:

A community, OK. I mean, because there’s going to be communication issues.

Robin:

Yeah. So roughly, a hundred trillion years from now, the various galaxies will separate so that they can’t communicate anymore. But between a billion years from now and a hundred trillion years from now, or sorry, I think it’s roughly a hundred billion years, not a hundred trillion years. Between one and a hundred billion years from now, all these grabby aliens civilizations can talk to at least their neighbors, and so we would probably have had communication and information about hundreds or thousands of other grabby alien civilizations before the universe makes us all separate. And so, we would have had a chance to hear about them and to be influenced by them and they would have a chance to hear about us and be influenced by us. So we have a chance to earn their respect in a community. And you might think, who else could you want to – most want to earn the respect of than the most virtuous, advanced creatures you can imagine. If there are no real gods, these are the gods that will exist. Aren’t they worthy enough to want the gods to respect you?

Agnes:

So in a way, my question is like, are we – is there a reason to identify with our descendants like as opposed to with the other aliens? Like our descendants are different enough from us that – I’m not sure why it shouldn’t be – you want me to be rooting for them and to be like – for those people to be like well-respected but like maybe I want to root for some of the other alien groups to be like achieve great stuff and …

Robin:

All through the last 10,000 years, history of societies at war, each society has in essence said that it was worth surviving and lasting and if an enemy were to come and then try to wipe it out, it was going to resist that. And the implication there was that it would rather it persisted than that enemy coming in and displaced and it persists. If any one nation lost a war, that didn’t mean the world population was going to be that much different a thousand years later.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

But it would meant which cultures persisted would be different.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And there’s music and there’s dress and there’s myths and everything else would be different. And all through history, people have been willing to fight for that, and that’s what we should predict from cultural selection. Cultural selection would reward the cultures that tried to defend themselves and promote themselves over the other ones. And that’s what we should predict in the long future too.

Agnes:

So – but like – so when we think about the complacent people, the people who are going to push against all this like innovation and expansion, and of course, there are such people not just talking about whatever colonists or other stars, but like people who are resistant to the changes that technology brings, and I mean sometimes sympathetic. Now, I don’t want to say I have no sympathy towards that. I don’t feel an overwhelming position I’m one side or another but, I had – at one point, I had this fantasy of trying to make like a study room where you couldn’t bring any devices into that room. You just have to bring books, which otherwise I’m not such a fan of books but I like the fact that they’re not – they don’t have distractions. And so, let’s call them traditionalists.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

In a way, what the traditionalists are doing is that they are trying to hold on to a distinctive culture, right?

Robin:

Yup.

Agnes:

And you might think that without them and without some of that distinctive traditional culture, there wouldn’t be anything that counted as victory. Like our culture winning – if our culture doesn’t have its own language, its own literature, it’s own cultural positions or whatever, then it doesn’t seem like there’s anything we could be winning in winning, right? And so, don’t these two bad guys and good guys kind of need each other in that part of what it is for like, you are kind of in the extreme of like kind of trans humanist, let’s let go of everything about us just like – it seems like that is allowing for us in a way to be maximally similar to the other aliens and to be losing what might be distinctive about us, which is what would be necessary to have the relevant victory.

Robin:

So in our last podcast, we talked about related issue of cultural evolution so we talked about for example, if you were just going to push pink and purple as a cultural thing to spread, but that was going to come at the expense of the other cultural mechanisms and resources and what allowed you to push the pink and purple and those other cultural mechanisms would be suppressed in terms of evolutionary selection. That is evolution, a package of cultural units that together promotes the whole package. And so, merely holding on to any one element would be a losing strategy if it’s not packaged together with other elements that could help it win out in the long run. So that is exactly the question, so for example, if a species, I don’t know, has a feature and evolution would say, drop the feature and you’re better off, but you say, “feature is of my identity, I don’t want to drop the feature,” then you would be losing out. And so, this is the thing many firms face, for example, they have a sort of corporate culture and they have a set of products and they have to decide how flexible to be to adapt without losing everything that they are. But it is a basic trade-off. But it’s clear that going to either extreme seems to be worse than something in the middle. So …

Agnes:

OK. But supposed, humanity comes to you and they’re like, “Robin, we are convinced by this. We are going to innovate. We are going to expand. We are going to do everything you say to be – to try and become grabby aliens. But we also want to preserve our humanness to the extent of their being some victory there at the end of the day. What should we preserve about ourselves?”

Robin:

So, I’ve given that some thought. And I’ve written some blog posts on it on the topic of legacies.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

So legacies are the sort of thing that you could hope to have last a long time. And so, we might look at the past and say, “Which are the things that have been able to last the longest in the face of evolutionary pressure?” So they tend to be things that sort of get frozen in a point and then last. So for example, locations of cities. Most cities in the modern era could be in many other places but once they are in one place then that place will stay because people want to be near the other people there. So many cities are, say at, where rivers come together which was once a good place for shipping but that reason no longer is relevant. But nevertheless, the cities stay in the same place. Similarly, we could think about, say, computer languages. In computer languages, you have some freedom of choices but then a particular language just gets frozen in because lots of people use it. Similarly, English may well be a legacy. It might be the world will just use English for a long time. There’s certain kind of computer languages that the world may just use for a long time because once everybody starts using something, it becomes this coordination point and it’s hard to switch. And so, we do know a lot about which sorts of things are likely to just get frozen in and stay as a feature and which things will switch. And I’ve given that a lot of thought even to the structure of our minds because I think we can look at the structure of our minds and see which things would last as legacies and be hard to change and which things would more likely be able to change and that we should be more flexible about that. And that is something we can anticipate by thinking about systems. And so, that gives us a sense of the things that if we hold on to those, it would not be so expensive, that would not really come at the expense of being able to be competitive or win out against other competitors, the things that are sort of naturally legacies.

Agnes:

So – and you answered a slightly different question from the one I asked. I said like which things should we pick? But I think that was – which are the things about us. But what you said is, well, there are some things about us that are going to be less expensive to keep. And so, in effect, your eye is on like keeping something but as cheaply as possible so as to maximize our chances for …

Robin:

Lasting.

Agnes:

… for lasting, right. It’s like there’s a trade-off between our chances for lasting and the worth of lasting, right?

Robin:

I agree.

Agnes:

Is there any value to lasting? And you really – even with the trade-off, you want to lean on the side of – because it’s like if we – suppose we keep where the city – I mean who cares where the cities are, like that doesn’t seem that important if you told me like OK, we are going to keep Homer or Shakespeare, I’m like OK, maybe Homer/Shakespeare plays though, like those are things that are genuinely good and if that’s going to be the human brand, I’m kind of into that. But if you’re like, the human brand is the cities are located in these places and English, which is not even our best language by a long shot, then I’m like, “Well, maybe the aliens got something better going than the cities being located in those places and English.”

Robin:

So for example, there are different ways that social species can coordinate and bond with each other. And so for example, we have a certain kind of love that maybe other social species don’t have. And maybe that kind of love could be a legacy.

Agnes:

Maybe she is going to go for that. [Laughs] Let’s throw in the love bomb. [Laughs]

Robin:

Well, I mean – but it’s an open question. That is, it might be that love is in fact easy to displace as a kind of bonding mechanism, in which case, it would be much more expensive to keep it. But in which case, I might say give up. But that was at least the sort of thing that might be high enough in your mind that would be worth trying to keep as opposed to the locations of cities.

Agnes:

On the assumptions that the other aliens don’t have it, right?

Robin:

For example, yes. Or that maybe, if only 10% of alien species, the 10% with love, and like bond with each other.

Agnes:

I love aliens. [Laughs] OK.

Robin:

Did you know how long we’ve been going?

Agnes:

Yeah, we’ve been going for an hour.

Robin:

OK. Then we will say goodbye for now.