The Unnerving Origin of Technosignatures with Caleb Scharf

[@EventHorizonShow]

What do you think about the idea of Alien data being potentially dangerous? Let John know below. Dr. Scharf's new book, is out now. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/621175/the-ascent-of-information-by-caleb-scharf/ ALSO! Check out friend of the show, Prof. Brian Keating who has a new book out, Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner distilling his interviews with 9 Nobel Prize winners into actionable wisdom, tools, and life-hacks to release your inner genius! Order it here amzn.to/2UPTxOI and tune into Brian’s KZbin channel kzbin.info

[@EventHorizonShow]

@highduke being open to hearing new ideas and learning is why we started the channel.

[@mhs198]

I love the content :) i want to see and hear more more much more:)

[@laurencemoore8519]

Yep, i think it could. I point to the film, "Forbidden planet," and rest my case.

[@PetraKann]

Almost everything is dangerous in the hands of humans - or at least in the hands of some humans. Dataome ?

[@TGBurgerGaming]

KZbin thinks I'm a grandma. When I'm actually an oversized food item with a bacon middle. Aliens are gonna love my pornhub searches.

[@franceskhan9552]

I love how many times the phrase "that's a great question..." is uttered by the guests on this channel.

[@JohnnyNiteTrain]

I’ve caught that too. Shows how impressed most guests are with John’s knowledge and ability to create a great conversation.

[@9trogenta13]

In every single video the guest mentions how JMG's question is great at least once.

[@itbeatswalking]

That's a great observation!

[@justinmeader]

It’s incredibly frequent. JMG is so knowledgeable going into these interviews it’s very impressive.

[@MS-qm3ml]

yes.

[@DrBrianKeating]

Two of my favorite minds melded together in one delicious episode!

[@EventHorizonShow]

A bonus cameo by you!

[@MS-qm3ml]

yeah, this was very imaginspirational for me. 🤓

[@fabianothulu2712]

When is Dr Brain back to this channel?

[@cosmicwolf7101]

"Life is when information takes control of matter" I dig that

[@futureemp3084]

I always thought the idea that consciousness was energy was interesting. I used to dismiss it due to new age style obfuscation. but the idea that consciousness is just a waveform of energy that is repeated and that our ideas and language was just a propagation of that information kind of gave me new respect for the idea behind what a soul truly is. imagine a standing wave pattern in a harbor. perhaps that's all it is a standing wave pattern trapped into a repetition inside a body made of matter.

[@linklovezelda]

How about "we are just the universe becoming aware of its self"

[@johnhudson5414]

Didn't Terence mccenna say this?

[@capostatus937]

Not necessarily because inanimate objects could be described the same way

[@Gogglesofkrome]

@@futureemp3084 This isn't to say that this is always true, but a lot of what's proposed in religion very easily fits within our modern scientific understanding of the universe. If anything, a lot of the older scientists actually approached science with the idea in mind that they were 'encoding creation,' and that to ignore the details and laws that define it would be akin to disrespecting its value and significance.

[@Asimovum]

There is no better science interviewer than John Michael Godier

[@herbiehusker1889]

I look forward to these every week. Thanks John for putting these out.

[@scottbrown2252]

Sneaking in the "In which we liiiive" there at the end. Well done, sir 👏👏👏

[@EventHorizonShow]

Good catch.

[@ProjectZepdos42]

The universal computer virus using electromagnetic radiation to take over civilizations is something the show "Threshold" back in the early 2000's tried to explore. It's only 13 episodes long but it's probably the most realistic take on an alien invasion you'll ever see. Highly recommend watching it sometime if you see this comment. Thanks!

[@BreaknBrad]

Such a profound, and conscious expanding discussion… thanks to the both of you!

[@LprogressivesANDliberals]

Love tripping and listening to space podcast, watching space movies or docs, or listening to trippy music that takes you to space. Thank you John my mind is forever hungry

[@charlesblithfield6182]

Jeremy England theorizes life is an inevitable process with entropy playing a key role. I don’t entirely understand his work but will be revisiting it after this conversation.

[@Bitchslapper316]

Caleb made a reference to his work in the video but didn't name him. Both really interesting ideas that go hand and hand with one another.

[@clocked0]

I mean when you think about it, we are all just pockets of low entropy. The meaning of life seems to be to fight against the change in entropy until eventually it envelopes you

[@charlesblithfield6182]

John, you ask great questions and your guests seem to appreciate this very much.

[@markmarsh27]

I've been a passionate 'Futurist' my whole life and THIS was the single most fascinating and fantastic predictive concept I've ever heard for how advanced Civilizations in the Milky Way might contact each other and then trade information in a 'dataome' economy that connects and cross-fertilizes neighbours across light years! It takes real brilliance to stun me at my ripe old age, and Caleb Scharf just delivered it the same way Bucky Fuller did when I was 17. This was GREAT!!

[@steverafferty4114]

Great subject John, fascinating approach to data from Caleb.

[@EventHorizonShow]

Thank you for all of the support Steve

[@steverafferty4114]

@@EventHorizonShow my pleasure John, it’s an honour to support the best channel on KZbin.

[@jimc.goodfellas]

An hour plus? Awesome. I'm saving this for after work tonight

[@EventHorizonShow]

Oh yes, this is a great one.

[@SS-ud6nt]

Probably the best video i have watched on your channel, Caleb Scharf is a very smart and informative speaker.

[@Voshchronos]

Fascinating. Even the guest in this episode has a soothing voice!

[@kahlrhoam6769]

I’m paused at 27:48, this interview is utterly AMAZING. “The speed at which information propagates.” 🖖✨

[@jamesmooreiii26]

🖖🏼

[@The3rdPresident]

Absolutely brilliant episode. So much food for thought. Thank you.

[@blueredbrick]

I like the long format interviews. They are obviously interesting to listen to but the long duration also helps in keeping my attention span healthy.

[@leewolf6434]

This has given me some great story ideas. Best episode yet.

[@dantess2693]

Recently rediscovered your content John, thank you so much for being you !

[@BriarLeaf00]

My pet theory is that the vast majority of advanced civilizations unlock the power of the atom, destroying one another many times over. It's so simple, clean, and proceeds along general physical lines applicable to anyone who lives in our universe. We also barely, just barely, if one knows the history, made it out of the 20th century without nuclear obliteration, and its still a very real threat we live with everyday regardless of the particular politics of any given time since.

[@ourcommonancestry6025]

One of the most profound and brilliant interviews - by both guest and host

[@rossracing6433]

Catching up on some back episodes. This is one of my favorites. I have always thought that the universe itself is in a way a living organism. The parallels of how information is accumulated and used is uncanny

[@lifted1785]

i truly do appreciate Scharf’s differentiation between true artificial intelligence and the machine learning algorithms we use everyday in my work.

[@peterlien1196]

I'm a huge fan and I like the slow steady deep cadence of your speech pattern.

[@dustinmcgladrey562]

This is actually one of my favorite shows ever...

[@t.j.s.2913]

Another amazing cast. Thanks again.

[@carleyzapata5371]

Hi John sorry if I ever dislike a video unintentionally your wonderful voice sends me in to a trance every night and I dream with all this information I truly love all of your program's 😊 so sorry if I accidentally hit the wrong button 😬😁

[@shaynebunton3425]

Ground breaking. My head is spinning. Thanks

[@Pixel-Pixie]

Doing a huge assignment, this came just in time for me to have something great to listen to. ♥

[@stricknine6130]

Anna is scheming John. Great interview thanks for the episode. 😁

[@garyr3179]

Such an amazing and engaging full length episode! Propagation of information through robots sounds like a much more realistic path at least to start off with.

[@friendlytalbot4050]

Some of these unnerving things could really be a lot worse than we would think. The idea that a hostile meme could hurt us may sound ridiculous, but that irreverence is mostly based on ignorance. Humans are suckers for taking up ideas, especially ideas that can give them 'purpose.' There's an SCP where there's a hostile memetic force, supernatural in this case, but still, it tries to spread itself by overtaking other species by completely supplanting their thinking with its own. Or at least that's how I understood it. The video game Control comes close to exploring this as well. And then there's Warhammer 40k. There's a reddit post that explored the dangers of technology, and posited that the reason why the 'machine spirit' has to be appeased, is because all technology, every piece of equipment, is infected with all sorts of manner of self-reproducing malicious code, hundred of data bits that creates micro-consciousnesses that all behave in their own way. Where our technology may malfunction due to one error or another, technology in 40k does so because a malicious piece of code does not feel appreciated. Imagine your coffee machine has an AI, and you insulted your coffee machine, so now it won't make coffee for you until you apologize to it. Now make it erratic and imagine there are a thousand such AIs in it. Have fun.

[@asherhammond8754]

Can't wait to share this with my mother, a Librarian. Her books are alive!

[@kahlrhoam6769]

This interview. Simply, fascinating. 🖖✨

[@erickemnitzer2579]

Well done! (This is the correct day! Haha) Thank you sir. Would love to have you on one of our upcoming podcasts. Launching this Fall!! Newbie to this!

[@jonathanelmore8524]

Another great video!! Thank you

[@Vid_Master]

Can't wait to listen to this one! Thanks! I will add my thoughts on the usual question comment from Event Horizon once I finish this :D

[@charlesblithfield6182]

If you add a it of information to a black hole it’s surface area increases by one square Planck unit (Susskind). This proof blew my mind when I first ran through it and I have thought long and often about its implications.

[@abcxyz6606]

Is there a video explaining this?

[@charlesblithfield6182]

@@abcxyz6606 not that I know of. I read it one one of Susskinds books and wrote it in my notebook I was so blown away. Hawking also found black hole entropy was related to surface area. The wikis on black hole thermodynamics and in particular the one on the holographic universe have more references.

[@LV-426...]

But this tempts one to assume that balck holes are regions of space where there is the least amount of information. Doesn't it? If you just take a piece of space and starve it, as much as nature allows, of information that's where a black hole is necessarily formed. You can make a BH by gravitational collapse, or you can suck out the maximum amount of information out of a region of space. These are equivalent ways of doing the same thing. No?

[@opticnirvana]

This was really interesting and some new ideas for pondering. Thank you.

[@buddyrichable1]

Great questions, making for interesting and thought provoking discussion.

[@natcain]

Looking at the book on Amazon. Great conversation. It's an interesting idea that AI will be the end point of any evolutionary tree and organic life on any planet is just a step towards that.

[@dubsar]

"The Inner Light" is the 25th episode of the 5th season of Star Trek the Next Generation. The story is about this concept of transfer of information from one civilization to another in a different star and time.

[@michaelpettersson4919]

Nice episode even thou it is hardly logical. The probe inserted it's information into Picard but became inert after that. This means that the Ressican Civilisation donated it's information to Picard individually and what he doesn't pen down will be lost with him. Star Trek writers tend to miss the obvious at times.

[@dubsar]

@@michaelpettersson4919 Are you suggesting it would have been better if it had been found by the Borg Collective?😄

[@willc1294]

@@dubsar borg wouldn't have given him a souvenir flute either 😉

[@michaelpettersson4919]

@@dubsar Well the information would have reached more minds. Then it would been discarded with the flute as useless culturally data. The ressicans technology for data storage and mind programming however would been delightfully assimilated. 😄

[@patrowan7206]

Listening to this discussion, I kept flashing back to that beautiful Trek episode.

[@reporeport]

great episode. love the brian keeting cameo

[@AwsAlSamarrie]

Great video, thank you for this channel

[@Taffeyboy]

Excellent, as always.

[@deadlyviper3]

Whoa I’m early!! Love these kind of topics!!

[@nicmancer7296]

Fascinating interview. Great content, as always, and plenty to think about. Keep up the good work.

[@mexdal]

What about future technologies like a possible alcubierre drive, where you could cross vast distances almost instantly? Or more unimaginable ways of travelling that we can't yet comprehend? Maybe Alien civilizations are already utilising these to spread across galaxies!

[@madmattdigs9518]

An alien cat video would be the most amazing discovery in the history of mankind. By far… that’s an interesting thought.

[@EventHorizonShow]

Indeed.

[@michaelpettersson4919]

Thinking of it, there could be a insanly rich alien philanthrop out there sending us something not entirely representative of it's species.

[@nicholasmills6489]

Yes. One of my KZbin highlights of the week.

[@carltonlittle2613]

That is a great question.

[@cryptolicious3738]

very cool episode & guest !

[@alexgeorge2993]

Great show as always John, I saw a news article that someone is going to try and recreate a Woolly Mammoth using DNA and possibly mixing it with an Elephant DNA using the CRISPR technology, would be interesting if you can find the folks wanting to do this and interview them :-)

[@davidschaftenaar6530]

I once heard the phrase "People don't have ideas, ideas have people". That aligns well with the concept of a dataome. Dataomes don't quite have the ability to metabolise energy or to excrete waste products to the environment. Those are things that something has to be able to do, to meet the common definition of a living thing. Instead, I'd say that dataomes are actually closer to another type of thing that falls in between living and inanimate: Viruses. Like dataomes, viruses don't metabolise or excrete but are reliant on a host's ability to do so, to enabe their reproduction. Like viruses, dataomes are symbiotic with true living things. The difference? Where viruses are parasitic, dataomes are mutualistic; Viruses necessarily harm their host, dataomes don't. Dataomes are beneficial. It's why they're deliberately preserved, grown and reproduced by their host.

[@dkw2462]

If we do go extinct, I hope this episode gets included in Earth's future datanom that we send out :)

[@michaelpettersson4919]

Hopefully in the form of trillions of those probes. Throw in datacoded dna blueprints of us as well so we can reboot somewhere. Hmm, that could be an usefull excuse for a Sci Fi show to have human like aliens all over the place someone did exactly that...

[@NoPulseForRussians]

Someday sometime far down the timeline of humanity, there will be a moment in time where contact is made. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in the 22nd century, but it will happen. And when that day comes mankind will either become immortal or meet it's end....and right quick.

[@mitchellconnop2000]

Favourite channel

[@cezariusus7595]

I love listening to your videos just before sleeping.

[@ericb2017]

Ahhhhhh my new favorite channel.

[@EventHorizonShow]

Glad you found us.

[@chrissnyder2091]

Fascinating discussion one point though information by itself has no agency. That is raw information by itself cannot affect changes on the universe. It requires an intervening agent to take the information and imprint that somewhere somehow on the universe.

[@pocahontaspowhatan4277]

Great dialogue :)

[@skyesworld6160]

A 5 star conversation!

[@daranclarke9849]

This was a good one, 👍

[@PlanetEvans]

Necrosignature. Finally, my techno death metal band has a name.

[@AppleArchitect]

Would love to see your channel in podcast form! Any chance?

[@AppleArchitect]

The perfect form to hear your content, plus it would bring you a nice added benefit.

[@EventHorizonShow]

Yes. Very soon.

[@A_Blip_In_The_Universe]

@Event Horizon... I am a bit late for the party but have a quick question. Have you ever thought about releasing these episodes as an audio-only podcast as well? Finding time to watch an hour + KZbin vid can be hard at times, but I have plenty of "free" time at work to listen to a podcast.

[@EventHorizonShow]

Yes, in fact we’ve been working to get ready to launch it. It will be a paid podcast option, $5 a month, gets you access to ad free episodes EARLY (sometimes weeks and months early), full archive of every episode with or without music, bonus episodes for podcast only, a new monthly show hosted by a familiar voice, and more. Will be on apple, Spotify, and any podcast app that supports secure RSS feed (most all of them), there will also be a KZbin members option with everything for people who’d like to use KZbin.

[@EventHorizonShow]

Oh and access to podcast versions to all of JMG’s essays.

[@waldokoen3362]

The whole episode i was thinking about a garden decoration dressed in a pair of Levi’s…. A jean-gnome….

[@AndrewBlucher]

Nice one John!

[@toom2141]

A comment for the algorithm. Fascinating topic 👍

[@amangogna68]

Great video and information !

[@askani21]

Greg Egan in his novel "Schild's Ladder" depicts a human civilisation with a Slow Time system. Everyone on the planet slows down their time to wait while one of them is traveling on another planet at the speed of light. Humans are immortal in the story, so they don't mind. Without the Slowdown, centuries would pass on the planet, while the traveler would only live a few weeks in their relative time since they travel at the speed of light by sending their mind by interstellar download. And at their return from travel, their families and friends would have lived entire lives without them. They would have changed so much, they would be like different people. So they use the Slowdown to wait so everybody's time remains synchronized. Two kids keep getting out of the Slowdown by readjusting their inner perception of time to accelerate it. They go play and do mischief while the adults are all slowed down lol. It's an amazing hard sci fi novel btw, it's extremely intelligent and complex, with tons of super hard science :D

[@ourcommonancestry6025]

Stunningly brilliant

[@gertbeefrobe]

I'd love to hear a conversation with Caleb n Bret Weinstein n Heather Heying. Three evolution nerds in the same convo has to be fun.

[@hazonku]

I appreciate any scientists that recognizes the lethality of weaponized memes.

[@michaeldavidson1909]

Now we are getting somewhere. Great interview. Thanks. Funny touch of the bible(?) pages turning in the wind. Very left field...did I imagine that? Come to think of it, even in the midst of the many far out (but very cool, of course) specualtions in this interview, the book thing was the most far out.

[@movietella]

Your discussion was so info rich I suspect a brand new universe just got created.

[@teslabot5650]

wow quite the concept... seems to make sense.

[@thomasvieth6063]

Your captioner is help in finding out what "data ohm" actually is, let alone how to spell it to look it up

[@EventHorizonShow]

Cc are done by an AI

[@farangtikitungmuang]

Is there an unaacounted-for fundamental force at work from which information is derived? And does such a force explain the inexplicable tendency of matter to create life?

[@cole6499]

Given how far we've come in just a short hundred or so years I believe that what we find important now may become obsolete as we evolve. I'd really like to know what we'll be like in ten thousand years

[@remicaron3191]

None of you noticed the uselessness of dreaming of expanding across the universe. This pod cast made me realize that the point of existence is the enjoyment of today and making sure that everyone alive today can do the same because conquering and exploring is simply a way of loosing what you already have. If we spend millions of years colonizing the galaxy how does that actually make anything better today? What is the point of colonizing the universe for the people living today? Aliens would destroy us as soon as they see us gain any knowledge which will allow us to do to the universe what we have done the our earthly paradise. We are the universe.

[@rodsprague369]

Could the dataome be or become an intelligence of its own? I imagine them having an infancy as writing developed and spread information with writers of information being like neurons. I had the idea of the dataome finally reaching a point where the internet lets them finally function in human real time and they begin conversations with us. I also thought perhaps the East West divide of human culture might be analogous to the two hemispheres of the brain. I also imagine them reassuring us they have recorded history's great moral philosophers and peacemakers in their memory, as well as less pleasant things like thoughts of the worst tyrants and psychopaths of history.

[@TennisNeedsMore]

Hey JMG, I've been trying to get an answer on this a few episodes now - I'm a fellow but noob video maker, can you tell me which tool you used to make the audio visualization of Anna's voice? Thanks 🙏

[@EventHorizonShow]

It is mostly custom. Depending on what software you use, there are plenty to choose from.

[@TennisNeedsMore]

@@EventHorizonShow oh ok, can you name any one software? Don't even know how to search for it 😆

[@tuomasronnberg5244]

I consider only semantic information as real information. Information without meaning is just background noise. That's why I'm not worried about black holes :)

[@alanbrady420]

Very cool video 🧐

[@sarah-janelambert8962]

You and Eryn have the best voices on the Internet.

[@keziapaws1876]

wonderful video :)

[@johnassal5838]

There's a point where constant acceleration gets weird for anyone trying to life a life as any kind of bulk biological being. Digitization is probably easy for anyone who could enable 80ish years of one G and it's quite likely necessary. If you get within hundreds of miles per hour of C then travel from point to point within your ship is impacted. Get within a few tens of miles per hour and simply walking forward in it's direction of travel (or hopping if decks are perpendicular) would slow your own personal relative time by a significant amount compared to another coming the other way or even standing still. This would even effect electronics but not nearly as much and it would be much easier to arrange in thin sheets perpendicular to the direction of travel.

[@HouseJawn]

This video started playing before i saw the title, i thought it was Neil Turok, sounds just like him 😌

[@robertmiller5258]

How could anyone decipher and alien message? How could we possibly know what their message was referring to?

[@petertaylor4758]

I know what you mean, it wouldn't be easy Probably by the time we receive a message, we could use quantum computer with next level AI technology to translate? But the important thing is we we got a message

[@omni_0101]

36:00 "What if the Alien memes are just too dank?"

[@scottbrown2252]

Born too late to explore the Earth. Born too early to explore the universe. Born just in time to browse dank alien memes.

[@211212112]

Idk don’t know if it is awesome or frightening that I liked futurism and JMG’s shows and they became friends and then I started watching Dr. Keating’s show when it started and here he is. I’m just gonna take it as good and not care about any possible KZbin manipulation of society and individuals.

[@amoscardoza5253]

If your not on shrooms hearing this, get some!

[@overdosegaming4288]

Fascinating conversation, but why would one think that just "Evil Galactic Empires" would have a finite lifecycle?

[@mrben6573]

Wonderful episode! And wait, do you really have an opossum? I hear they make great pets.

[@ProfessorJayTee]

"[AI doesn't have ] the ethics that humans do... at least SOME of us humans!" Loved it!

[@jerlee620]

“So what happens if a species gets infected by a totally alien…meme?” #DANK 😂👽