Hi, I'm Miami-Ellic. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. David Kipping, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Columbia University and director of the Cool World's Lab. In part one of our conversation with Dr. Kipping, he explained what it looks like to actually search for life on other planets. We also talked about what's so special about Earth and our evolution on this planet. Are we the most primitive life form out there or are we the most advanced? He also talks about the age of disclosure and how it's changing the way we search for life on other planets. In part two, we'll talk about what aliens might want with our DNA, black holes, wormholes,

Havana syndrome, and the impact of AI on the way we view science. We can't wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Dr. David Kipping. Break it down. I'm wearing this t-shirt that Jonathan got me, which I like very much because I like, you know, anthropomorphizing aliens. But, you know, there's a lot of conversation. And we recently had on a man who claims to be channeling an alien hybrid, different story. His name is Boshar and people all over the world listen to the channeling of Boshar. But one of the things that Boshar talks about and one of the things a lot of people talk about is that aliens are wanting our DNA and they are, you know, performing abductions and they are, you know, placing probes and you know, all these things. And it's been the subject of many incredible movies, right? Trying to understand what an interface, right? With aliens might look like, can you imagine a world or a galaxy or a universe where aliens would be at the level of sophistication where they could, for example, fly about undetected, but then selectively drop in. If they were at that level of sophistication, why would they want our DNA that they have to suck through our nose with a probe? I'm asking for a friend, but I'm asking for, you know, for sort of a, I'm not just trying to be, you know, cheeky here. I'm saying that like where is that level of interface? And how do we have conversations? Do we just shut that down and say, guess what? Anything that can fly undetected doesn't need to then suck you into a UFO. Or do we say, all bets are off. And maybe there are beings that are operating on a level that we literally can't understand. Yeah, I mean, I've heard that rash that argument is by some of my colleagues that it doesn't make any sense why UFOs, if they're so advanced, would be undetectable in some data and then trivially detectable by eye with a human eye in other data or with a simple camera in other data. I mean, it is often, by the way, with cameras, I always find it amazing that the best image of a UFO hasn't improved since 1950, right? The camera technology has exploded and yet we still have this grainy crappy photo every time. That's maybe a red flag to some degree. But in terms of the motives, it's impossible to debunk it. I think it's a waste of time to try to debunk motivation because we have no idea of what the motives of an alien would be. Maybe that's a teenager who's drunk

and he's just flying around messing with us.

I don't know.

You can't, whatever you say to someone

who really is a believer about that,

they're not gonna accept that as a counter-argument.

I think when I hear these stories,

I would never tell someone where you're wrong and that didn't happen because I don't know. I wasn't there. There must be some bare minimum who are even fantasizing this or having a waking dream or something. It would be weird if that wasn't true because we have such vivid imaginations. You look at some fraction of time that would be true. And Jill Tata, who's often, you know, the movie contact was about her. And it's Carl Sagan wrote the book contact with her in mind. She's sort of seen as the the mother of Setty, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. She is this beautiful quote where she says that, you know, when we look for aliens, it's like a cosmic mirror. And what we're really looking for is reflection of our own fears and our own dreams and aspirations. And so when we look for a planet that we think is undergone nuclear war, that is a reflection of our own fear of nuclear war. And when we look for a planet that has achieved solar panels covering the planet, that's a reflection of our own dream of achieving this kind of eco-utopia. And, you know, maybe with some of these stories of, you know, medical experiments or whatever, those are, again, reflections of our own internal fears that are just manifesting in these different ways. I do think that's very true that everything we think about aliens is pretty much just, it's coming from us. It's a manifestation of our own aspirations and dreams. And so I think that is, there's a lot of us in these stories more than there is aliens in these stories. I mean, all of our narratives have that aspect to them, whether it's extra sensory abilities, God aliens as well. We're all trying to find our place, right, and how we fit and how the world around us works. What I'm about to say, I don't think contrast that, but in the same regard, it does shed more light and intrigue on the things that we used to think are ridiculous. And recently, the Havana syndrome has come up again as one of the topics that was dismissed over and over again, where these people are experiencing very intense medical issues, headaches, nausea, impacts on their vision. And it was totally dismissed like they're absolutely crazy.

And now 60 minutes through nine years of research has been, uh,

releasing episodes on the fact that there are some crazy,

unpreviously unknown weapons that could shoot wavelengths that

impact people in a way that we could never have imagined. So, I think people hear that and then get to thinking they're like, well, what else really can't we to extrapolate from that? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And again, I agree with you that we need evidence, but it's like sometimes in the absence of enough evidence, people are trying to put those pieces together and say, what else haven't we just figured out yet? Yeah, I mean, I was reading recently about a story that reminds me of is alchemy and Isaac Newton with gold. So, you know, people were convinced at the time you could probably turn base metals into gold, especially lead, which though you could turn to gold. And it seems strange to us, but you know,

at the time it was thought, well, if this was true, this would be great and we could become rich and we really wanted it to be true. And so that's kind of an important bias. And I always think it's amazing that Isaac Newton, we didn't know that until we discovered his writings in the 20th century, but he spent like as much time doing, you know, inventing calculus

and physics as he did try and turn lead into gold. And it seems in hindsight bizarre that he would

do that. But, you know, we, he was, he was motivated by not only this dream of what he wanted to be

true, but just these, these, these, these stories at the time, right, that this could be possible. There

were these people who were saying these charlatans, mostly, who were saying, you know, to kings, I can turn lead into gold. And so I think the less is not the, you know, not to dismiss the Havana syndrome thing at all, but just that we're often wrong. I think that's the lesson that we often hear these rumors. And when we hear, when these rumors originally come out, it's very difficult to say whether or pan out to a yes or a no.

And so that's why I try to mean with UFO stuff, just very open-minded about what the real answer is. But I don't think the lesson to take away is these rumors often end up being true. I think because we've seen time and time again, it goes the complete opposite direction as well. There are many cases where it ends up being true, but there's also a lot of cases where it was complete BS and we kind of, we forget about those cases. And we have that problem in medical journals and nutritional science a lot, where you hear about the positive cases. Oh, eating tomatoes increased your libido by 10% or something like this. But you never hear about the negatives where they do that experiment 10 times, it made no difference, but they couldn't get it published because no one had published that stupid, no result. And so we often don't give as much emphasis as probably we should to all the times that we were wrong. And when you put that all together, you get this balanced picture that we just often make mistakes and we often mess up. That's the nature of how science works. Well, and I think also one of the things that personality people like me get very frustrated about is, yes, it's important and amazing that we can disseminate information and people can look things up about their health and learn things about the world in ways that they previously could not. But many people sort of don't know what to look for or how to read data. And you know, I think we've all learned bits and pieces about how, for example, you know, pharmaceutical companies can selectively publish the data that supports the mass dissemination of medication that actually may not be doing what they say that it does, right? That's astounding and makes me lose faith in humanity, but that's for a different episode. But I think that this is one of those things that when you have, you know, also a political climate for us where we're told not to trust, it sort of grows this sort of notion that my experience is the entire experience. And what I think when I read an article is true, as opposed to what is the data? And you know, I go over this with my mother, God bless her, who will see something on Instagram and say, oh my gosh, I didn't know that, you know, insert, insert the food, the treatment, the celebrity, like whatever it is. And I think that's sort of something that, you know, for people who are kind of trained in the ivory tower of academia, there is a different set of standards, right? And that doesn't necessarily translate well to, you know, popular media. Yeah, for sure. I'd like you to take us down a black hole because one of the other things we wanted to talk to you about was black holes. The simple notion of why black holes don't make sense, can you walk us through? For someone who's like, I really want to, and we've had Jan 11 on, like literally the black hole person, you know. But I wonder if you can try and walk us through a lay person's explanation, because I think a lot of people want to understand this and they want to understand the conflict that happens when we imagine a black hole. And it opens up the possibility, obviously, for conversations about wormholes. But if you can talk a little bit about sort of like energy conservation and mass conservation and things like that, help us understand what we should know about black holes, why they should delight us and confound us, and also what some possible explanations are for the paradox that they present. Yeah, so there's, I think probably the biggest paradox you're leading to there is this thing known as the black hole information paradox. You know, black holes are just incredible. It's actually wild to think they're really out there. And sometimes you just have to like take a step back and think this is not just like an idea, like we know those actually exist, and it's terrifying, there's these things out there, which nothing can escape from. I think it's such a bizarre idea. But I guess the paradox here is that we know that there's plenty of black holes, there's probably a border of like a million or so in our own Milky Way. We only know of maybe dozens in our own Milky Way that have these accretion discs, that's when stuff is falling in, it rubs together, a lot of friction, it gets very hot and we can see it. But there's probably lots of black holes which are almost naked, they're just floating through spaces, nothing really falling into them at the moment, and so we just can't see anything. They are black, of course. That's why you can't see them.

The paradox of them is really about what happens to the stuff that falls in. I'm sorry, Wes, Wes, I had. Did you just say they're floating around? Well, maybe not floating the right word, but they are moving through space. Yeah, with some peculiar velocity. Yeah. Okay, this is something I've never thought about. I've always studied black holes or thought about black holes as sort of like static.

They have the ability to move though. This is a new piece of information for me. Well, it's not like by their own power, person. But everything in the galaxy is made. Right. So I mean, the solar system is orbiting around the center of the galaxy and has a fairly circular orbit. but there are some objects which orbiting on highly elliptical orbits and they're not stable, they will move around. We have, we have an interstellar asteroid three of them, pass through the solar system quite recently. So stuff can hit each other, can go through solar systems. It's a messy, busy place out there. Okay, got it. It's just like it changes a little bit of the computation that I'm doing about them to picture them as a receptacle for potentially everything that never comes back. And we don't know what's happening in there. But also it moves about because then it asks the question, like, what vector are things moving on if it's, anyway, okay, keep going.

Yeah, I mean, there is a chance a black hole

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