Lex Fridman has another great talk with another great mind. The
interesting bit here is that the guest offers an actually
plausible solution to the Fermi paradox. Before hearing this, I
was rather convinced by the "Dark Forest" idea by Liu Cixin.
Listen up: Lex Fridman Podcast - Martin Rees: Black Holes, Alien
Life, Dark Matter, and the Big Bang. (2022-07-23)
Most people would say that this civilisation of blood and flesh
creatures may not last more than a few hundred years more. Some
people would say it will kill itself off. I'm more optimistic and
I would say that what we're going to have in future is no longer
the slow darvinian selection, but we're going to have what I call
the secular intelligent design, which would be humans designing
their progeny to be better adapted to where they are[...]
There is a famous argument against there being lots of aliens out
there which is that they would come invade us and eat us and
something like that[...] I think there is an escape clause to
that because these entities would be, say if they were designed
by their predecessors... where as darvinian selection requires
two things, aggression and intelligence, this future intelligent
design may favor intelligence but may not favor aggression.
