The Terrifying Reason We Still Haven’t Found Aliens

How do we know how many technologically advanced civilizations there are in order for us to be able to detect them? Otherwise we can't detect them. We're not going to the other star systems. We will not be able to find aliens unless they send us information or come and visit us. Otherwise you could say the one possibility is they don't exist. Now they might not exist now, but it doesn't mean that they didn't exist in the past. I got a hot question for you. Ready? Here we go. Coming in hot. Back in 1950, Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the fathers of the atomic age, was having lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos when he asked a question that still unsettles science today. Where is everybody? The universe is enormous. It's ancient. And based on the sheer number of stars and planets, it seems like life should exist somewhere else. Yet so far, we have no confirmed signal, no confirmed contact, and no undeniable evidence that another intelligent civilization is out there. Can you break down what Fermi paradox is? Yeah. One of the people he said that was an old friend of mine who's deceased now named Herb York. He's one of the founders of UC San Diego. I miss him a lot. He was a great person. He built the atomic bomb and then spent many years, as many warriors do, advocating for peace afterwards. No one knows more about wanting peace and the goodness of peace, I guess, than you who fight the wars. So he helped develop the atomic bomb and he was at that lunch with Enrico Fermi when he posed this question, kind of a side quest as they're building the atomic bomb. So the concept is that the universe is vast, but let's just restrict ourselves to the galaxy. Our galaxy is maybe 100,000 light years across, meaning light takes 100,000 years to get from one edge of the galaxy to the other edge. There's about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. There's about 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That's 100 billion squared stars in the observable universe. Each one with 10 planets, call it, around it, you get numbers that are incomprehensible. A million, million, million, million planets in the observable universe. 10 to the 24th planets, right? So it just becomes crazy. And then you think, well, if only 1% of them have life on it, that's 10 to the 22nd power. It's an insane number. So the universe is huge. There's a lot of opportunities for life for planets. And yet, as you say, we have no evidence that rises above scientific truth or evidentiary standards. And this is going back 84 years when he said this in Los Alamos. So this kind of shows you that back then they didn't think they had evidence. It was right before Roswell, by the way. And then nowadays, we don't feel like consequential evidence exists at the level of scientific proof. And even those with the most invested in it, like Avi Loeb, will not say, as he didn't tell you, he didn't say, we have definitive proof. He said, he's a careful scientist. He said, we don't have evidence yet, and that's fine. Does that mean they don't exist? Absolutely not. It could exist, and there's many different reasons that could explain why we don't see what we don't see. Some of them come down to reasons, for example, that have to do with, there's an equation called the Drake equation. An astronomer in the 60s said, let's calculate how many different life forms there could be in the universe and what it would take for us to know that they're there. So how many people are there, or how many civilizations are there that we could communicate with? In other words, if there's slime mold, if there's bacteria on a planet that's four light years away, whatever you want, we would never know they exist because they don't have technology to broadcast radio waves and light waves for us to see. Or neutrino tractor beams or gravitational wave generators. They don't have technology, right? So how do we know how many technologically advanced civilizations there are in order for us to be able to detect them? Otherwise, we can't detect them, right? We're not going to the other star systems. The fastest thing that humans have ever made, Voyager, has traveled the farthest away from Earth. It's one light day from the Earth. It was launched 55 years ago before I was born. In that sense, that thing is the farthest we've ever gone. It's only one light day. The nearest star is four light years away. So it's thousands of times closer than that. And so effectively, we will not be able to find aliens unless they send us information or come and visit us. So if you say that they haven't, if Fermi's saying they haven't, we don't have evidence, that has to be some explanation for them. Otherwise, you could say one possibility is they don't exist. Now, they might not exist now, but that doesn't mean that they didn't exist in the past. Right now, there's information from the 1936 Olympics that's getting out. It's about 90 light years away from us. That was the first time humans ever transmitted a globally televised signal, a radio wave that could travel around the world and go into outer space by accident, leak into outer space, right? That is now traveling at the speed of light 90 light years away from us. There's approximately, you know, maybe a thousand stars that live within a 90 light year radius of the planet Earth, right? Each one of them might have tens of planets or something around them. That amount of information for them to know about us, that's just for them to know about us. That's not to send a return signal. That'll be 200 years from now, right? So the quickest we could ever send something is it goes out at the speed of light, reaches a destination, and comes back to us. That light signal left 100 years ago. It's gone almost 100 light years away. For us to hear back from them, we heard you, you exist, that'll take another 100 years. Does that make sense? So there's a sphere, it's a radius 100 light years called, thousand stars plus or minus in them, and there's maybe 10,000 planets in those. So right now, all we can say is we don't know. There could be stars that are half that distance, 50 light years away, maybe there's 300 of those, and there's 3,000 planets on them. So all we can say is that volume of space knows about us and could have returned a signal to us since we started broadcasting information. We don't have any evidence of that. Not for people not looking, but that is such a tiny, microscopic number. That's like a shot glass out of the Pacific Ocean in terms of how much the vastness of the universe is. So one thing is that space is very big, and the speed of light is very slow, even though it's the fastest speed you could possibly travel at. Another solution that people have come up with is that there's lots of life in the universe, but they tend to not live very long because they have these things called wars, and they do battle among themselves. And you see this at every level of speciation from bacteria to Beethoven. I mean, to us, right? I mean, I don't tell you. Bacteria have military campaigns against enemy bacteria cultures. They secrete toxins that preclude other bacteria. They spend their biological resources to create bacteriological trenches, warfare, to prevent other bacteria from encroaching on their precious, you know, goo that they're eating. Every level of, and that's the most primitive life that we know about, all the way up to the most advanced life we know about, namely us. So maybe they only live so long. Maybe there's a paper I read about recently, my friend Sabina Hassenfelder made a video about it, Elon Musk is tweeting about it, and it is, I think Avi Loeb is involved in some way or other. It shows there might be an average lifetime of a civilization in order for us not to have seen anybody of about 5,000 years, which is like barely back to the pyramids, right? So some say you hit this filter and then you get filtered out. The question is, are we past the filter? We're not yet there. So there's a lot explanations. Another one that I like is, I take my kids to the San Diego Zoo, and when I take them there, there's a gorilla exhibit, and I love the gorillas, but it says on the sign, it says, don't knock on the glass, it really bothers them. You know, it just makes them anxious, so don't do that. Of course my kids do that, right? And then they get kicked out. But what if, you know, you went instead of the San Diego Zoo, we go to the wild animal park. Then you're really far away from the gorillas, you're not going to knock on the glass, you don't even need glass, you're really far away, you observe them at a distance. Maybe there are things lurking, observing us at a distance, but an interstellar species that has the ability to come here, or to sense our activity and our presence, has advanced technology, what is it that we're going to learn from? I mean, have we learned that much besides about the species of gorillas and bacteria? We learn about those, but like I always say, you know, ornithologists study birds, right? But an ornithologist needs a bird a lot more than the birds need the ornithologist, right? Birds don't care if you study them or not, right? So they might not be interested in us, we might not be able to do anything for them, we might not provide any resources, they're going to eat us, and that's why I'm skeptical of these things. I don't know if you've heard of cattle mutilation and abductions and things like that, near-death experiences. There's only one near-death experience that I believe in, by the way, 100% documented fact, which has to do with Alfred Nobel. Do you know this story? You know who Alfred Nobel was? He invented dynamite. So he was one of the richest people in the world, kind of like Elon Musk or Tesla of the 1800s, and he was one of the richest people in all of Europe and all of the world. And his family was involved with making sea mines for the Russian and Crimean War of 1840, something like that. And so they were arms dealers, Alfred Nobel and his father, Emmanuel, and they were trying to invent ways to make their methodology more lethal. And one of Alfred's brothers, his baby brother, Emil, started to play around with nitroglycerin, and nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable. And one day he was in the family laboratory, and he dropped it on the floor, and it blew up, like enormous explosion, vaporized him and five other people. Six people killed instantly. And this devastated his father, Emmanuel Nobel, and Alfred as well. And Emmanuel ended up basically getting committed to sanatorium, and then he died eight years to the day of his son. His heart was broken, he had a stroke, and just devastated him. And Alfred set out to do something to make that never happen again. And he took nitroglycerin, and he mixed it with a type of basically like clay, it's called diatomaceous earth, and he mixed it together, like chalk or clay, with nitroglycerin, and it made it stable so you could drop it. And that became known as dynamite. Dynamite in Greek means powerful rock. And he became one of the richest people in the world based on that invention. But it was also used for munitions, and they sold in their arms factory. And reportedly, he had indirectly been responsible for the deaths of more people than any person in human history. So much so that in 1888, he's walking around Paris, and he sees a headline in the Parisian newspaper, and it says, Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death, is dead. The man who committed no benefit to humanity and killed more people than any other person in human history is dead. Now he's reading this, so he knows it's not him. Turns out it was his older brother Ludwig who died. And so he was kind of sad about that. But it was really a wake up call for him. He had no wife, he had no kids. And he decided at that point, if he died then, that's the way the world was going to remember him, like George Bailey in A Wonderful Life. He sees the Ghost of Christmas Present, Ghost of Christmas Past, and Scrooge, same exact story in A Christmas Carol. He got a glimpse of what his own death would be like, and he said, I'm going to change my life from now on. I don't know how much longer I have to live. He took this huge fortune, and he gave 99% of it to the Nobel Prize, and he established it. And its goal was to do what this newspaper said he didn't do, which is to make the greatest benefit to mankind. So he created a prize for peace, for chemistry, for medicine, for literature, and for physics. How could I forget physics? And these things have had tremendous benefit. The first Nobel Prize ever given in physics was for the x-ray. The x-ray machine, which has probably pulled bullets out of people that you know. It's had so much benefit for diagnostic purposes. I had a toothache. The x-rays benefited humankind, and it's a physics invention. It's a technology invention. And then the Nobel Peace Prize, which has a very checkered past. One of all sorts of assorted characters. Obama won it after being in office for like nine days. So it's been politicized. But it still has this noble goal of benefiting all of mankind through science, through peace, and I think it's a wonderful thing. And it wouldn't have happened without this near-death experience that Alfred Nobel encountered. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.