How many alien civilizations are out there? | Balaji Srinivasan and Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Balaji Srinivasan: How...
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GUEST BIO:
Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
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[@LexClips]

Full podcast episode: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jJaraKSBj9djjas Lex Fridman podcast channel: kzbin.info Guest bio: Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

[@christosbereris5483]

French Canadian here. For those who want to know, "Au courant" is a french expression that literally translates to "in the current". It means to be aware and up to date on something. The "T" is silent at the end.

[@innateseed]

Je te comprends PARFAITEMENT.

[@christosbereris5483]

@@innateseed 😆

[@metinabim]

...i started off highly interested, then confused, then brain dead.... and now im going home.

[@VARMOT123]

balaji talks about everything under the sun with such confidence like an expert . it is funny sometimes lol

[@SusnataSeal]

he's an expert at everything under the sun. that's how polymaths are. deal with it.

[@Tenderbits]

@@SusnataSeal No, polymaths are dilettantes. Sophisticated dilettantes, but dilettantes nonetheless. This doesn’t mean they don’t hold important value in academia. People with deep focused areas of study often are unable to connect seemingly disparate or abstract ideas together and due to this inability can struggle to break through into new ideas. However, if you want to truly explore the depths of a single topic it is the actual subject matter experts that must be engaged - not the polymaths. This isn’t the Renaissance and our world has already observed the maximal effects on science and technology a DaVinci-like figure may have. The world is just too complicated. No single person in the world holds all the knowledge required to build an iPhone, as an example. In fact, the device is so complicated no single individual ever could. Deal with it.

[@jaredtlucek7498]

@@Tenderbits Thanks for being a winner, Average Loser. 👍

[@JukeboxAlley]

Well, maybe he's actually took a visit under the sun...

[@tomsnow2872]

Who cares if hes an "expert" if you think hes wrong on something you are free to challenge it or correct him, if you dont want to do either then your comment is pointless in regards to the discussion.

[@happysqWid]

Every once in a while Lex will do a 4th wall break and remind us he's human, which I appreciate, cuz he's a terrifying ai

[@kkkkkk-wp5zt]

Human. But a bit different haha

[@paulgallagher2937]

To me, it just seems rather simple. 1. Radio waves cannot be detected once you get out dozens or hundreds of light years. The electrons become way too diluted are too far apart, so just merge together and become random white noise. 2. It is impossible to travel "physically" to another star. It is too far. The journey would take thousands of years, and an infinite amount of energy. So, any race that has figured out how to conquer space/time, is also advanced enough to never let us seem them. They could be here right now, and we would not know. 3. A race that advanced will not be using radio waves to communicate. We don't know what they will use, so there is no way for us to look for it.

[@orlock20]

I believe star to star travel with biological forms is impossible because we live in a low energy environment for starters. We already know the energy requirements and we can't produce that much energy in such a small space such as a space ship. That's where mechanical life could work. We could try to design mechanical life that could survive a multi million year journey.

[@mothothebe5974]

What people must realise is that our knowledge of the universe and exoplanets is still very small. You can’t draw conclusions from the data we have.

[@iyziejane]

At 0:45 he "hasn't look at the math" for the surface of a sphere growing like 4 pi R^2 so that the power area density watts / meter^2 of a point source goes down as 1/R^2 at distance R.

[@brianarsenault8882]

No idea what instruments we could create in the distant future to detect other life forms.

[@kkkkkk-wp5zt]

Damn. Logical anwser: Every life form is biologically coded already. So we know how they look like. We make them on Earth. (Or just search for their location based on codes.)

[@ivannasha5556]

If you go against entropy you're alive. Is that so hard to understand?

[@Anonymous-pm7jf]

Do you believe in alien civilization? Whether you answer "yes" or "no" you're right. Or wrong. Depending on how you want to look at it.

[@123Coffs]

He talks about everything under the sun apart from simply answering lex’s question. Are there alien civilizations out there?

[@jonathanlindsey463]

the odds are that no one knows we r here yet… when i was in ASTR441 “Astrophysics”… we worked out our own version of the drake equation… and came up with 213 civs in the milky way with an avg distance between each one of around 2000 light years and no one outside of 100 lightyears radius from us knows we r here yet… there r exceptions but the odds r incredibly small

[@avilesandres]

Trying to get *au currant* to what they're saying

[@ScribblerDeStebbing]

"something other than carbon-based, like silicone -based." Yes!

[@Tenderbits]

Lex doing yeoman’s work laying the cultural groundwork for disclosure.

[@supamatta9207]

500billion light years divided by 1000 is 500million and 1/50th is 10 million which would be about 3 such spanning civilisations. That would make sense and within extents of physics

[@Hayekenshort]

au courant

[@unstablesun8179]

Man this conversation really went off the rails. Seemed more slanted towards whether there is a "chance" of other life. Of course there is other life in the universe, there's nothing unique about our planet in the scheme of things.

[@waxedthighs8268]

Agreed that our planet is probably not special, but there's no reason why life on other planets would exist at the same time as we do. We will die off long before intelligent life emerges on another planet.

[@unstablesun8179]

@@waxedthighs8268 I agree but consider this. Trillions of galaxies, each galaxy has 100 billion stars. Yes other life will exist at this time BUT the distances are so great and because faster than light travel is not possible we will never encounter alien life.

[@Kami84]

This guy looks and talks a bit like Kendall on succession without the cursing

[@bernardusmuller1109]

Now we don't know, did he fixed the pronunciation or not...

[@lilth501]

From a single cell about 4 billion years ego and the universe as we see maybe 13.7 billion years old, it has taken us a good chunk of that time to get to this point. So the chance of us contacting an intelligent civilisation in the Milky Way lit alone anywhere else is almost mill, but that does not mean somewhere out there lies a lush green planet that we may call habitable.

[@hevenko]

Mabe we dont see them cause we are looking at them like ants are looking at homans. Or in other words we dont see them because we see them as irrelevant.

[@McBillyBoy]

So many big words, so hard to follow along, trust me I tried my best 😆

[@AndrewHedlund100]

The creatures of the bottle of the oceans are pretty much aliens so there you go

[@weirdshibainu]

I hope aliens show up and stop the rambling nature of this conversation

[@tastytesty]

Oh man, what is he talking about now?

[@wps1150]

Yo

[@RancidPrune]

Lex looks high af lol

[@Alienbreed2010]

just say yes easy

[@imsteamboat9774]

What’s up

[@lukethelightbringer3809]

Until humans stop worshipping death, benevolent and elevated beings would never interact with that which would kill them eat them, eviscerate them or all of the above. Segregation is needed, God acts indirectly by working through life to drive it to life, so that life can save itself, not only for life's benefit, also so God isn't cannibalized by its creations, which are meant to co create not purely to consume. This is a reality check.

[@cllgscreative]

There is an assumption that aliens haven't been here and aren't here now. There is an assumption that we haven't seen aliens. There is an assumption that non-human intelligent, advanced life will come from outer space.

[@carefulcarpenter]

This is a typical conversation, much like two unmarried scientists with funding discussing the probability that the perfect woman exists that will marry both of them.

[@carefulcarpenter]

@@kkkkkk-wp5zt 😁😨

[@kkkkkk-wp5zt]

@@carefulcarpenter Can you tell me about the daily life in your city. And also whether I can visit it one day again.

[@carefulcarpenter]

@@kkkkkk-wp5zt Masks are no longer mandatory--- but don't dare to step out of line. A motorcyclist was mad at me because I stopped at the post office crossing out of habit. "SIR--- therevis no stop sign." On my way home I was the last in the lane waiting to ho straight across a busy intersection. Apparently the light changed just before I got to the avenue. I could have stopped quickly, but common sense says that cross traffic must wait for all in that lane to cross. About a dozen cars kept honking thrir horns at me to tell me "you old fart--- you held up traffic." It was worse this summer as they were in construction at that light. 😁 I am a bad, bad person today. People are in such a hurry!

[@kkkkkk-wp5zt]

@@carefulcarpenter And tell me am I at the right place doing the right things? I feel that I miss the city where you live. I wonder what will happen. Will I ever visit there? Or how is it supposed to go after im done here. It feels like a simulation here. Today I had a mental breakdown. I noticed the things are happening automatically here?

[@carefulcarpenter]

@@kkkkkk-wp5zt If you ARE Lex Fridman, then you should visit. We could discuss reality face-to-face downtown. I live near a UC college town, so you can imagine there are many open minds here.

[@strontiumdog8646]

Talking a lot but not saying much

[@rezinrussell1689]

None.

[@SimpreOroNuncaPlata]

Bunch of nonsense

[@Zeropercentliberal]

So, how many are there?? He didn't answer the question!! Or maybe my small brain missed the answer. He has a hard time staying on the topic of conversation. I really wanted to know his answer about Alien civilizations dammit!!!