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Rationally Speaking Podcast

Rationally Speaking #203 - Stephen Webb on "Where is Everybody? Solutions to the Fermi Paradox."

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6787 Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2018

⏱️ 41 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1950, the great physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question that people have been puzzling over ever since: Where is everybody? The universe has been around for billions of years, so why haven't we seen any signs of alien civilizations? This episode features physicist Stephen Webb, who describes some of the potential solutions to the puzzle. Stephen and Julia also discuss questions such as: What evidence have we gotten so far that helps us answer the Fermi problem? How do we estimate how rare/difficult it is for human-level intelligence to evolve? And why does it matter what the answer to Fermi's question is?

Transcript

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0:00.0

Today's episode of Rationally Speaking is sponsored by Givewell.

0:04.0

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You can read all about their research

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or just check out their short list of top recommended

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that your donations can do.

0:28.6

It's free and available to everyone online.

0:31.1

Check them out at give well.org.

0:33.1

Thank you. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

0:51.8

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm here with today's guest, Stephen Webb.

0:56.4

Stephen is a physicist. He's at the University of Portsmouth, and he's the author of several

1:00.4

books on cosmology, science fiction, and other topics, including Where Is Everybody?

1:06.5

75 solutions to the Fermi paradox and the problem of extraterrestrial life. That's what we're

1:12.0

going to talk about today. Stephen, welcome to rationally speaking. Hi, Julia, and thank you for inviting me.

1:17.8

So I just want to say one of the many things that I really appreciated about your book is this structure

1:24.2

of laying out a taxonomy of different approaches or solutions or I just wish that

1:30.5

more books out there presented taxonomies. I just find it incredibly instructive to have,

1:36.7

you know, this juxtaposition of different ways that people have thought about a problem.

1:41.5

And even sort of the basic structure of that list, the basic categories that

1:46.1

you grouped those solutions into was super helpful in organizing my thinking. So I don't want

...

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