Aliens, AI, and Saving the Planet - EP 43 Will Marshall

**Will Marshall** (0:00)
In the next decade, we'll see three really major things with incredible significance for humanity. One is-

**Ashlee Vance** (0:08)
Next decade.

**Will Marshall** (0:08)
In the next decade. One is AGI, and then second is finding life off Earth, not necessarily intelligent life, but life off Earth, we will discover it. And the third is decoding animal communications, so between gems, between dolphins, between different animals. And I think all three are incredible events, and the fact that they may all happen in one decade is, and I call them Copernican events, because they're nudging us out from being the center of the universe on everything. So obviously AGI is inventing another intelligence alongside us, finding life off Earth, even if it's not intelligent, will give us a bigger probability that there's life everywhere, and it will have got to intelligence stages.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:54)
And why do you think we find?

**Will Marshall** (0:56)
Oh, because telescopes have now got to the stage on the Earth-bound telescopes as well as the JJOST are big enough to do atmospheric spectra on planets. So we have thousands, we've discovered thousands of planets, mainly by the wobbles of the stars. We look at the wobbles of the stars and go, oh, there must be a planet orbiting around that's tugging on it. Sometimes from them going in front of the star and dipping the light a tiny bit. But we don't know much about those planets. We know the basic size and orbit. But we don't know what their composition is. Now we have telescopes that are just big enough to look at the composition of these. And what we will see is you looked at the Earth from the other side of the galaxy with one of these telescopes, or at least these, more like most of these planets, the star systems that we've detected planets within thousands of light years, so the nearby region of our galaxy, you would quickly see that there's about 20% oxygen in our atmosphere. Now, that is highly unusual because oxygen binds with almost anything. That's why we get rust and all the rest of it. If we... the only thing that's keeping up that oxygen here on the Earth is all the life, all the plants.
And so we could look for that signature or other similar signatures where the best explanation we would have is life is producing it. Or more rigorously, if we can eliminate that there's other chemical ways, or geological ways, non-life ways of producing those things.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:34)
So you think we've just had enough advances with the...

**Will Marshall** (2:38)
The size of the telescopes to be able to block out the Sun and just focus on the planet and resolve that and do spectra on it. We've just got to telescopes that are big enough to take spectra of nearby planets.
We've got all the targets lined up. We've got thousands of planets. We know where they are. We now just have to look at them with these next generation of telescopes. And I think we... It's just the chances of us... I think we'll get to the point of having a signature that we say the best explanation by far is life within the next 10 years. It won't be certain. We won't have visited it. We wouldn't have had a little green man wave in the telescope.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:14)
If we can talk to animals, I feel like it's going to go really bad for us. I mean, fascinating, of course, would 100% want, but those first discussions, I don't think humans fare very well in what the animals have to say back.

**Will Marshall** (3:32)
They might be pretty pissed off. Yeah, we just wiped out most of them. But I think it will be fascinating, right? What are they really talking about? What are they, and there's incredible, I mean, whales have been talking, if they've been talking, they've been talking for 70 million years. Wow.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:51)
They know stuff.

**Will Marshall** (3:51)
They know stuff. Like, can you tell us anything about that? Just imagine the culture that we could learn about.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:57)
You think we're gonna know what they say to each other.

**Will Marshall** (3:59)
To each other.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:00)
But we won't be.

**Will Marshall** (4:01)
Well, no, then we can talk to them, for sure. I mean, like, it's an amazing precipice that we could, and then, of course, I hope that it will expand our empathy circles to include them in our, the things we value. Right now, we don't really value life.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:18)
Pretty, it's gonna be a lot harder to eat them one day.