Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host

Sean Carroll. As a working scientist one of the things that I've had to do over the

years is apply for grant money and for theoretical physicist this is a funny thing because you're supposed to say not only what you're

interested in the topic you're going to be working on but what achievements you

will have what progress you will make.

This is very difficult to do as a theoretical physicist.

You don't know what's going to happen before you do it.

As an experimenter, you can at least say what experiment you will build and when you will turn it on what you hope to see,

but of course experimenters also don't know exactly what they're going to see.

This is not only for theoretical physicists.

There are kinds of experiments or observations

where you can say what you're going to do,

but the outcome is so unpredictable

that it's actually kind of hard to wrap your brain around what would happen under different circumstances.

One of those examples is the search for extraterrestrial life. I'm one who believes that it is plausible

that we will find life elsewhere in the universe and also we are not ready for that.

Science fiction authors have thought about the discovery

of alien life for a long time.

Mostly, I have to say, mostly in unrealistic ways ways and I don't blame them you know they want to tell

good stories so they very often have structures of intelligence and technology and civilizations amongst the aliens that might be a little bit higher or a little bit lower than ours, but are at least recognizable, right? A Galactic Empire. As soon as you say the

words Galactic Empire, you kind of know what you have in mind. It's not a coincidence that Star Wars

is basically a Western, or basically some kind of samurai film right now

...