Are We Alone In The Universe? - Adam Frank - #030

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. Are you ready to blast off into outer space? Because this week is nothing short of mind-blowing. professor Adam Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of rochester, an author, and a founder of the NPR blog, 13.7 Cosmos and Culture. Now, you may have heard him recently on Joe Rogan's podcast, and that's where I fell in love with the material that he works on. In short, today, we're going to find out, are we alone in the universe? Or at least, what's the likelihood that we're alone in the universe? This episode honestly ranks as my favourite one that I've recorded so far. It felt like every two minutes, there was some insane new statistic that I'd never heard of, or insight that I'd never thought of before. From how humans could colonise the galaxy in as little as 700,000 years to where the future descendants of the human race are heading and the implications of global warming with an awful lot more thrown in, this episode really is jam-packed. Hopefully you'll love this episode as much as me. And if you do, I'm going to ask a favour for the first time since I started the podcast. If you enjoy it, please share it with a friend. One friend, two friends, fire it in a group chat, screenshot the Apple Podcasts image, or copy the link to listen from Spotify. However you do it, I don't mind. But sharing this podcast and increasing the number of exposures that we get is a real key for me over the coming months. And if you could help me in that way, it would be really appreciated. Coming up soon, we have the long-awaited Lifehacks 105 Me, Jonny and Yusuf back in the hot seat again to give you our favorite tips for a productive and efficient life, along with some slightly more useless tips as well. But we'll leave that for you to make your own mind up about. In the meantime, it's Adam Frank's turn to take the microphone. Here we go.
professor Adam Frank, how are you?

**Adam Frank** (2:27)
It's great to be here. Thanks for having given me the opportunity.

**Chris Williamson** (2:29)
No worries at all. Where in the world are you at the moment?

**Adam Frank** (2:33)
Currently in my office at the University of rochester in beautiful upstate New York.

**Chris Williamson** (2:38)
That sounds lovely. And tomorrow's your birthday, right?

**Adam Frank** (2:40)
Tomorrow's my birthday. Gonna party like it's my birthday. Which at 56 means I'll probably like chill out and play video games.

**Chris Williamson** (2:48)
Yeah, well, you know, 56 or 16, it could be exactly the same thing.

**Adam Frank** (2:53)
Yeah, for me, it's no dip.

**Chris Williamson** (2:55)
Fantastic. Right. Let's get into it. So what is the likelihood that we're the only instance of life in the universe?

**Adam Frank** (3:04)
Yeah, well, so that is a that's a $50 million question. And, you know, depending on how you want to argue it, you can get, you know, different kinds of opinions. But what we did, my collaborator and I did a couple of years ago, is we used the actual empirical data from the Kepler results. The, you know, the basically our studies of exoplanets, we now recognize that there are exoplanets everywhere, pretty much every star you see in the sky has a world, at least one world going around it. And so what we did is we used that data to at least set a limit on the kind of answer you want to give. And so here's, you know, with science, often the most important thing is to what question can you answer with the data you have? So with all of that exoplanet data, this question we could ask was, how bad does the probability per planet have to be for us to be alone, like deeply and truly alone? And it turns out that, given what we now know, the only way that we are, the first, the only time it's ever happened and a civilization has happened in cosmic history is if the probability per planet of making a civilization is one in 10 billion trillion.

**Chris Williamson** (4:19)
That's a pretty big number.

**Adam Frank** (4:21)
Yeah, well, I mean, it's a, well, it's a, the big number is the number of planets, the number of, but it's a pretty small number for inter...
Yeah, the odds of us being alone. So, as you said, you're right to point out that really what's important here is how many habitable zone planets there are, how many planets there are where life has had the chance to run the experiment, right, of forming life and then the life going on to become intelligent and the civilization forming. And that, yeah, that number is 10 billion trillion. There are 10 billion trillion planets in the cosmos that are in the right place for life to form. So the only way that it hasn't happened before is if on every one of those 10 billion, trillion planets, somehow the experiment failed. And, you know, I think those numbers now are so, they're so large that it really falls to the pessimists to tell us, to explain to us, how could nature run the experiment so many times and what's happened here never happen anywhere else?