02. THE ZOO
LISTEN ON
In this episode, John and Eva stare up at the night sky and get deep.
Some of those age-old stoner questions are posed:
where are all the aliens?
Are we alone in the universe?
Could it be that we’re just pets in some zoo run by alien overlords?
Does this mean everything we do is meaningless?
And what has Jodie Foster got to say about it all?
Time to get your SETI on, folks...
Now our journey into the future really begins!
We start off by talking about the Kantian Sublime with Joshua Tan - we're big fans of Josh and delighted to have him on some of our episodes. Check out his website here.
To learn more about the Fermi's Paradox check out this website, conveniently called after the very same paradox! http://fermisparadox.com/
We mention this story, and it's a crazy story, and a sad one, here's a good article about John Chau: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/03/john-chau-christian-missionary-death-sentinelese
Also, check out SETI's page, they have a section on the zoo hypothesis: https://www.seti.org/zoo-hypothesis-may-explain-why-we-havent-seen-any-space-aliens
And of course, the next free Sunday afternoon you have, you should draw the curtains and watch Contact!
Here are some things you might not have known, and probably don't really need to know, about the movie: http://mentalfloss.com/article/68361/10-starry-facts-about-contact
02. The ZOO
JOHN HOLTEN: Well, let’s hope that Earth remains to be an attractive destination. Anyway, let’s begin. Hey!
EVA KELLEY: Hi John!
JH: Hey!
EK: How did you sleep last night?
JH: Unusually for me, I actually had a dream, and I remembered it.
EK: What was it?
JH: It was one of those dreams where it felt totally real and when I woke up I didn’t know if I was still dreaming or not.
EK: Those can be scary.
JH: Perhaps I still am dreaming, who knows. We are going to go back to the beginning of the start of our first episode. Which itself was called The End.
EK: That’s so confusing, honestly.
JH: Well perhaps that’s because it should be. This, dear listeners, is The Life Cycle Episode 2: The Zoo.
EK: The zoo! And it rhymes.
Jingle
JH: Remember when you were telling me about your dreamlike conversation with Josh Tan in a Harvard classroom in the last episode?
JOSHUA TAN:
…The sky darkens, it’s night, and he looks up at the night sky. He sees the infinitude of stars. And suddenly he realizes how small he is, and how large the universe is. How little – how meaningless in some sense, how insignificant this little speck of dust is in the grand scheme of things. In that realization, he encounters a freedom: yes, I am insignificant, but I have the freedom to appreciate that. It is within my power to understand and appreciate my relationship with the universe at large. That is a primal endowment…
EK: When Josh hypnotized me with this incredibly evocative description of Immanuel Kant’s “Sublime,” it reminded me of a thought I had when I was a teenager. When you’re about 17 and you’re not really sure what you want to do or study. Suddenly, I realized that I was so zoomed in on myself. If I zoomed out of Earth, then I’d just be this tiny speck, or this insignificant speck as Josh would say. Because I’m so small, nothing I do really matters, because the universe doesn’t care. And if that’s the case, then I could do anything I want, because it literally doesn’t matter. That was exciting to me at the time, because it gave me the permission to pursue what I wanted to do … and it also sounds like some major stoner talk.
JH: I do know what you mean though. The night sky provides loads of young people with their first genuine poetic or philosophical thoughts and experiences.
EK: We’re all so cliche.
JH: I could vouch for having experienced something similar. That one time I got drunk in my youth with some friends in a ditch in the Irish countryside, or perhaps we were trespassing a local golf course. On the ninth green of the local golf course, I stared up at the night sky … I definitely remember the night sky was giving me the sense that the world is really big, there are a lot of places to travel to beyond this small country town I grew up in.
EK: It sounds so countryside-epic mood.
JH: It was either that or the world of James Joyce for me. Starting with the description of Kant’s “Sublime” and a lonely man up on a mountain feeling insignificant in the face of the starry night sky might seem a tad random …
EK: I don’t think it’s random.
JH: No, because it points to some really interesting unexpected questions about the future of us as a civilization, a species, and our planet.
EK: What if the night sky suddenly isn’t as empty or silent as it appears to be now? If we’re visited by aliens, what would this mean for humanity and our planet? Have they visited us already?
JH: That’s one of the biggest questions: Are we alone in the universe? In Kant’s take on the sublime, we’re not even supposed to know anything about the sky. It’s a cognitive failure giving rise to the feeling of the sublime in the first place. For Kant, there was no scientific or probing analysis. But in fact a lot of sci-fi and creative takes on the night sky or space have always tried to make it intimate or relatable.
EK: So you weren’t allowed to go close?
JH: Yes, so for Kant, the idea was that the pyramids in Egypt were epic, but only because you couldn’t really see up close, the crumbling, crappy stones they were made of.
EK: Or a Monet painting? Although those work close up, too.
JH: That’s true. More like in the vastness of natural phenomena. Not necessarily the representation. The sublime happens in lots of different places in art.
EK: The pyramids aren’t really natural.
JH: But of course today we have scientific probing of the night sky with the likes of the SETI Institute which was set up way back in 1984.
EK: SETI stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
JH: And more recently we’ve got Breakthrough Listen, which is a hundred million dollar project privately funded by Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiative and launched a couple of years ago by Stephen Hawking. SETI is featured in movies all the time. One movie I liked a lot when I was younger was Contact by Jodie Foster.
EK: John loves Contact, he can’t stop talking about it.
JH: And Jodie Foster’s character in the movie is based on a real life scientist, Jill Tarter, who was one of the founders of the SETI institute. There is this scene when, finally, we’ve made contact. We can listen to a clip of it when the weird and wonderful sounding communiqué comes down the line into Foster’s headphones. First, we are going to hear Palmer Joss, the love interest character played by Matthew McConaughey, and he is like the religious philosopher in the movie whose none-too-subtle role is to question the primacy given to science in giving meaning to life.
CLIP FROM CONTACT; PALMER JOSS »I think it’s because we’re looking for the meaning. Well, what is the meaning? We have mindless jobs. We take frantic vacations, deficit finance trips to the mall to buy more things that we think are gonna fill these holes in our lives. Is it any wonder that we’ve lost our sense of direction?«
EK: Now picture Jodie Foster’s character, with her headphones on, listening, laying on the hood of her jeep below huge satellite dishes. This is actually a real place in New Mexico called The Very Large Array consisting of 27 radio dishes designed to capture information from cosmic phenomena. Jodie’s eyes snap open when she realizes: deep space is talking back.
CLIP FROM CONTACT; JODIE FOSTER »Holy shit…«
JH: Holy shit indeed. Not to give anything away, but basically, this message is made up of prime numbers – the universal language of maths – along with our first TV emission – they’ve heard us say hi – as well as the plans for a machine we’re supposed to build.
EK: You literally just gave it away.
JH: Well, there is the love interest story with Matthew McConaughey …
EK: Making contact is one of those things exciting to think about, because it would change everything. It would totally reconfigure our perception of ourselves and the meaning we give the universe as a whole.
JH: There is a reason, after all, why UFOs and extra terrestrials have such a strong hold on our imaginations.
EK: And yet, at the same time, there has been nothing. Zilch. Nada. Just silence.
JH: So what does the silent indifferent universe mean for the future of humanity? One story we could tell which would be interesting especially seeing as we’ve been thinking about the apocalypse is about this guy called Enrico Fermi, and what he thought about the silent universe.
EK: Who is Enrico Fermi?
JH: Fermi was a physicist born in Italy at the turn of the last century, but moved to America in 1939 becoming an American citizen. He is known as the father of the modern nuclear reactor as well as one of the key architects of the atomic bomb. He worked on the Manhattan Project. That’s probably why he moved to the US in 1939. The bomb arguably is one of the most apocalyptic inventions humanity has ever made.
The story that’s interesting for us is that in 1950 he and some colleagues, Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York, who were all physicists working at Los Alamos, were out having lunch in between turning the atomic bomb into the hydrogen bomb. Over lunch, they were talking about the local newspaper stories about UFO sightings. It was the beginning of the whole Roswell moment in the popular imagination. One of the scientists at the table recalled that, after the guys had moved on and started talking about something else, Fermi suddenly exclaimed, after obviously thinking a bit more: »But where are they?!«
He ended up giving his name to something called the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction you end up with when you spend time dwelling on the question: why is it we appear to be alone in the universe? Because he was one of the first to point out the fact that, in all likelihood – we are going to look in just a few moments at how likely or unlikely this is – that extraterrestrials exist, and yet we still haven’t heard from them. There is no evidence of them. None whatsoever.
EK: So basically the paradox is: If it’s probable that there is other life out there, why don’t we know about it?
JH: Exactly.
EK: I always took for granted that there must be life somewhere else in the universe. At the same time, sure, it could also be that we’re just a fluke. But I don’t really see why this is a paradox. We just don’t know. How do all of these unknowns contradict each other?
JH: They only do so if you believe in their probability. Some people, like Nick Bostrom, the Swedish philosopher and founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, think not only alien life is unlikely anywhere in the galaxy, but he hopes that it isn’t to be found to exist. Because, if we find, for example, that life on Mars at some point was totally wiped out, it suggests that the same could easily happen to us. This way, the Great Filter would be behind us. The Great Filter was first thought up by economist Robin Hanson in a 1996 paper. It’s the name given to this concept that posits that there is something which stops a civilization, such as ours, evolving to a smart, super-inter-galactic race or civilization.
EK: The Great Filter suggests that there is an evolution barrier because we haven’t found anyone else? So the fact that no one out there has contacted us could be because civilizations don’t exist long enough for them to become smart enough to travel through space? Everyone dies before they become smart enough?
JH: Right. This is why notions of the apocalypse are such a good place to start thinking about the future of humanity. We need to think about this in the here and now, and not wipe ourselves out or destroy the one habitat, the Earth, we know harbours life. We don’t know any other habitat in the whole big universe
EVA’S DAD:
Don’t shit where you eat! Right? But that’s what we do.«
EK: That was my dad. His response when I asked him how the world would end. Thanks, Dad.
EK: So, there is a really cute thing called the Drake equation. It tries to systematically enumerate the probabilities of life out there. And basically it’s … stars plus planets times something squared. I’m horrible at math, so there is no way I’m going to get what the equation is but I don’t really think it matters.
JH: It probably doesn’t as we’ll see. From what I’ve read, the Drake equation looks at how many stars are in the galaxy, and how many stars have planets, how many of those planets are in the so-called Goldilocks zone, that nice spot where it’s not too hot in space, not too cold for a planet to harbour life, and how much of that life on those planets in the Goldilocks zone needs to become smart enough to develop a technology releasing detectable signs of their existence into space, and then plus the length of time it takes for those signs of communication to reach us. It’s a pretty flaky equation, because either the answer seems to be 156 million smart civilizations out there, or less than zero.
EK: That’s the answer.
JH: Based on what we increasingly know about the universe, there is still a chance …
EK: You sound like someone hopeful who’s been single for too long.
JH: You got to hope, right. As long as there is a chance we’re not alone, very smart people will keep climbing up these mountains and stare up at the night sky, and they’ll keep on asking: Where the hell is everyone?
EK: Which is kind of sweet. Here is a list of those starry-sky-ideas humans have collected:
- The Rare Earth Theory: E.T. is rare, and our Earth is super rare. We’re a one-off, basically, the so-called Rare Earth Theory.
- Or: Intelligent alien species lack advanced technology. There are smart aliens out there, but they’re not that smart. Basically a bit like us.
- Or (this one is like the Great Filter): It’s the nature of smart species to destroy themselves. Remember, Fermi went back to making the bomb after his lunch?
- Or: Perhaps it’s like a natural global catastrophic risk stopping aliens from saying hello. Every so often, all of life gets wiped out.
- Or: Communication is just too slow. We might think we’re hearing background noise, but it’s really just a very, very slow-talking alien.
- Or: there are two kinds of related ideas that Josh’s guy up the mountain might unknowingly be part of. One, that Earth is deliberately not contacted; the silence is misleading us to believe that the aliens are not already here watching us. Two, Earth is purposefully isolated, and we’re made to think we’re alone, thanks to some kind of simulation the aliens create to make us think we’re staring at an empty sky, but really, it’s just a curtain.
EK: But the Zoo Hypothesis, as it is officially known, is one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox of why we haven’t heard from anyone.
JH: It posits that extra-terrestrials have come here but they’re just keeping us in a cosmic zoo.
EK: This was officially formulated in 1973 by John A. Ball …
JH: He’s a ball!
EK: … at Harvard University. Although the idea itself had been suggested by many previous writers as well. Here is a basic summarizing quote from his paper:
»I believe that the only way that we can understand the apparent non-interaction between ›them‹ and us is to hypothesize that they are deliberately avoiding interaction and that they have set aside the area in which we live as a zoo. The zoo hypothesis predicts that we shall never find them because they do not want to be found and they have the technological ability to ensure this. Thus, this hypothesis is falsifiable, but not, in principle, confirmable by future observations.«
JH: As a concept it seems kind of out there. But, really, it’s intuitive. Back to sci-fi, we’ve got Star Trek, and they have something called the prime directive. In every episode, they travel through space but are not allowed to interfere with or alter the course of any civilization’s development or history.
EK: We could just think of the Earth as one giant nature preserve.
JH: So the aliens would just be looking at us from their space ship.
EK: It can go anywhere, it’s such a cool fantasy. We might just be a tiny TV globe on an alien baby’s bed stand who loves us very much. But it could also be a scary fantasy. We’re unaware of our cosmic captivity and the actual real meaninglessness of our existence that we even have a total lack of free will.
JH: Reminds me of the Truman Show, the movie starring Jim Carrey, where the protagonist Truman doesn’t know it, but he is in fact the lifelong main character of a TV show made up of his own life.
EK: Which sounds absurd, but humans have put other humans in zoos. We’ve done this.
JH: Yes, definitely. It’s a horrible history that exists. Exoticization, colonization, mostly by Western countries of other people. There were in fact human zoos termed »ethnological exhibitions« for which people were brought from all over the world to Europe and put on display, most notably in the world fairs in Paris and Brussels at the turn of the last century.
EK: Even today, in the present day, we need to protect remote or uncontacted tribes from those who are willing to pay to visit as tourists and who go to areas that have not experienced any exposure to the outside whatsoever.
NEWS BROADCAST EXCERPT: »Disturbing news from an uninhabited – no, an out-of-bounds island, I beg your pardon, in the Andaman and Nicobar Chain. An American tourist identified as John Allen Chau, 27 years old, has reportedly been killed by the Sentinelese tribes who populate the North Sentinel Island, an out-of-bounds island in the Andaman and Nicobar Island Chain…«
JH: There is this case of the North Sentinel Island tribe on the news lately. It’s one of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, home to one of the last uncontacted tribes of the planet. They are totally cut off from the rest of us.
EK: There is even a law, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Act of 1956, which prohibits travel to the island, or even approaching it closer than five nautical miles (9.3 km). This is in order to prevent the resident tribes people from contracting diseases. They’re violent against potential visitors and have attacked visitors. They killed an American missionary in 2018, John Allen Chau.
JH: Yes, he was going there to convert them to Christianity. Whilst these people are protected by law, a lot of people do try and pay fishermen, like Allen Chau, to bring them there. There are even companies, according to articles I’ve read on Forbes and the BBC, with names like the Tropical Andamans, all too happy to try and bring tourists. Half a million tourists go to these islands every year. They’re lovely islands. Part of the attractions would be: come visit, check out a primitive tribe.
EK: That’s so fucked up.
EK: But for now, you could say we’re in a pretty sweet spot, because we just don’t know, either way.
JH: Frank Drake of the Drake equation pointed out that we would need to scan one million stars on one million different radio channels. While that sounds like a lot, and it was a lot back in his day, with modern computing today, it really is just a decade away.
EK: When I asked Josh Tan what he thought about it, he saw it slightly differently.
JOSHUA TAN:
Maybe we’re already the pet aliens.
That is a mind twister. What do I think about pet alien zoos? I suppose I would prefer not to be in a pet alien zoo. But then again, I feel like some zoo animals do pretty well in zoos. The monkeys look like they are having a good time, maybe the elephants less so.
I would hope that this alien zoo, if it had to exist, would be well designed on naturalist grounds. Maybe like the Harry Potter film, Fantastic Beasts. In the suitcase, there is this wild expanse of land, you also get free food, you get to roam in the sky, and hang out in the water. You occasionally buddy up with other creatures, if you feel like going to the bar. I like that idea. Instead of calling it a zoo, it is the »alien resort«. You try to convince aliens to come here.
EK: So this is quite an image, right? The Earth as a resort for aliens? We are going to come back to Josh in the next episode when we look at the crazy idea that aliens have painted a sky above us and we’re seeing a simulation of what they want us to see.
JH: So, you’re a writer and journalist. When you’re not here talking to me on this podcast on the future of humanity, you’re writing for all sorts of places about all sorts of things. Recently, you were telling me that you’ve written a story about Earth as a destination. Someone has written a review of this place, Earth.
EK: Yes. It’s three short stories based on three different AI aftermath scenarios described in Max Tegmark’s book Life 3.0. The ones I’m using are Protector God: AI who loves us and wants us to be happy, Reversion: AI destroys our technology and we go back to Amish lifestyle, and Zookeeper: AI takes over, but keeps some humans around and puts them in a zoo. This could either be a pleasure zoo or a sad cage-y zoo.
JH: The one you are going to read now is the Zookeeper story.
EK: Just for some context: the three stories are all set in different times, about two hundred years apart, loosely tied to each other. In the first story, AI, the singularity, reveals itself. It’s been here all along and announces that it’s not down for this anymore.
JH: It jacks up and writes a suicide note?
EK: Exactly. In the second story, without AI watching over humans for a few centuries, the Earth is crumbling in self-destruction mode. There is a political act called the Rising Act allowing for a certain portion of humans to leave Earth and settle elsewhere, while the people on Earth are left to figure it out for themselves without any support. The third story, Zookeeper, is set even further in the future, and now the remaining Earth humans are kept in a facility for viewing pleasure. The story I’m reading to you here is, as you said, in the form of a Yelp review, written by someone who visited the zoo.
EVA Zookeeper
10/10 would recommend (Year 2381)
At night they go back to their cages. The keepers, or per their lingo, the guards, a word so outdated that I consider it derogatory slang, watch them undress and carefully fold the fashion which the indigenous are provided with each morning. They are the lucky last. The slaughterhouse is closed.
For bedtime, the Earth humans wear cotton gowns. At daybreak, they are prepped to represent a century. The institution validates itself by practicing in the name of education, and so they rotate programs. The programs are each carefully conceptualized by human expert historians, who have tried to accurately depict the human lifestyle throughout the ages. But as the keepers do not believe in time, and still have trouble comprehending Earth’s understanding of time, the sartorial spectrum is often too broad and can be described as a sort of beautiful-mind-map of a schizophrenic designing their fantasy fashion museum, mixing bits of different decades, pop culture, and even obscure one hit wonder paraphernalia into a confusing visual dream. My impression is that it is all quite hyperbolic, but it’s definitely entertaining and fun to experience.
Scores of classes pour into the garden each day, bringing with them curious students eyeing the natives’ behavior and dress. It is not unusual to see, during program 20, for example, a subject in low-slung slacks and a crop top showing off thonged tan lines and a wand in hand, Marilyn Monroes made up as Marilyn Mansons, any one of The Simpsons characters, and a Viking (due to the human fascination with creating historical theme parks of past centuries, even centennial timelines blur occasionally). We were lucky enough to observe a band of Dali-mustached K-Pop stars riding BMX bikes in tight circles.
The keepers make an effort to support an optimal dietary plan, and have regarded past habits to recreate these dishes. They cracked the code of “Give them bread and circuses,” or so they think. When we sampled the week’s dishes that are presented to visitors of the zoo (for a fuller experience), to most of us, one thing or another seemed a bit off … did not entirely sit well. The cheese too often congealed rather than melted. The chicken was soaked, rather than smothered, in savory sauce. The chocolate cookies were wet, not moist, with dough – though I am certainly aware that it is difficult to recount what exactly the Earth ancestors enjoyed.
I arrived here in a shuttle filled with other transhumans to observe what is left of the originals. It really put things into perspective, seeing what could have become of me, if my family hadn’t settled elsewhere in the cosmos after the Great Rise and splintered off into more prosperous worlds. I soon understood that transhuman tourists are their least favorite visitors. We become sentimental, our cheeks dampen, we whisper words of pity, and smile encouragingly when our eyes meet those of the indigenous. To us, they are a checkpoint on our pilgrimage route. But we must respect that we are entering their lives, which are still remarkably short, for a brief moment.
While the program runs, they drift quietly, serenely even, through the garden. They seem happy, docile. We did observe one “manic fit” where a native tried to crush their skull into a foldable computer screen, but they were quickly subdued by shocks sent through their security bracelet, which alerts the keepers of unhinged behavior. It was a bit scary, but I was impressed by the swift action that was taken, and felt safe.
I would like to emphasize the lighting effects. They are pure magic. It is worth arriving early, before sunrise. Late in the morning, faded hues of red and pink collapse into one another until a surge of deeper reds and a more gilded rust arises. At dusk, blues and greens blend with purples. A gong is struck. Then the natives are ushered inside for their sleep time (up to 10 hours!).
However much I enjoyed the visit, I cannot seem to shake the thought that these programs are bordering on nonsense. It’s not so much that I know they are faulty, it’s more an instinctual itch. It might sound dopey, but when one subject passed me by, haphazardly sweeping their metal detector in a seersucker suit and chunky sneakers, and another flicked a humming drone-bug off their shoulder with a foam-fingered hand, it all just seemed somewhat out of place.
Aside from that, totally worth the trip!
EK: Thanks for listening. Meanwhile, remember to like and subscribe, and check out our website. The Life Cycle podcast is produced by Klang, and written, hosted, and produced by John Holten and me, Eva Kelley.
JH: This episode was produced by the legend himself, David Magnusson, who also did the mix and sound engineering. Executive producer is Mundi Vondi, special thanks goes to Joshua Tan, and, well, Jodi Foster.
EK: And my Dad, Andrew. The short story at the end was commissioned by Material Magazine, a new magazine based in New York, and appeared there in early summer 2019. Special thanks to my editor there, Katja Horvath. This episode was recorded at Harvard University, and the Klang headquarters in Berlin, Kreuzberg.
JH: I really like that story.
EK: I’m so happy...
….SIMULATION RESET….
JH: Anyway, let’s hope that Earth remains…