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Searching for Alien Life, the UFO Disclosure Era, the Great Filter & How Much Time Earth Has Left | Dr. David Kipping - Mayim Bialik's Breakdown | Wave AI Podcast Notes

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Searching for Alien Life, the UFO Disclosure Era, the Great Filter & How Much Time Earth Has Left | Dr. David Kipping

Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Tue Apr 07 2026

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown
Episode: Searching for Alien Life, the UFO Disclosure Era, the Great Filter & How Much Time Earth Has Left | Dr. David Kipping
Guest: Dr. David Kipping (Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Columbia University; Director, Cool Worlds Lab)
Date: April 7, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode dives deeply into humanity’s search for life beyond Earth, why scientists both embrace and shy away from UFO discussions, and the humbling nature of our own evolutionary history. Dr. David Kipping brings a rich, clear-eyed perspective to questions about biosignatures, the “Fermi Paradox”, anthropic bias, the technological and psychological limitations of our search for extraterrestrials, and how the “Age of Disclosure” is challenging both science and society. The conversation balances rigorous science with existential wonder and contemplative humility.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Exoplanet Revolution & the Changing Concept of Our Place in the Universe

Technological & Conceptual Leaps:
- We've gone from memorizing "nine planets" (and then eight) to knowing "every star has at least one planet" around it.
- The existence of exoplanets and exomoons is now scientific fact, with new discoveries constantly challenging our solar system-centric assumptions.
- “My daytime job is looking for planets outside the solar system…and ideally, trying to find moons around those planets as well.” — Dr. Kipping (05:00)
Scientific Biases:
- For decades, scientists assumed other planetary systems would resemble ours (“the template”), delaying exoplanet discoveries that were technically possible sooner.
- Breakthroughs were both conceptual (overcoming biases) and technological (CCD camera efficiency).

2. The Difficulty of Detecting Life: Biosignatures, Mars, and False Alarms

Mars & Biosignatures:
- Evidence for ancient microbial Martian life surfaces repeatedly—but always with lingering doubts.
- Dr. Kipping relates scientists' recurring heartbreak over promising-but-ambiguous evidence:
  - "Every time…years pass, and scientists…find out there is another way of producing that signature…So that's always the…recurring tale we've had.” (12:32)
Caution in Claims:
- The desire for confirmatory proof can clash with scientific rigor: “It provides an alternative rational explanation that doesn’t require the aliens to be invoked…We often do get disappointed.” — Dr. Kipping (14:38)

3. Life’s Origins and the Anthropic Principle

Anthropic Bias:
- We are “winners,” but that hardly means life is easy or likely elsewhere:
  - “We are only here because we are here. There is a survivorship bias.” — Dr. Kipping (21:29)
- Life on Earth began quickly, which seems promising, but “if it typically takes 4 billion years,” Earth-like outcomes may be rare as planets become uninhabitable before complex life evolves. (23:05)
- Striking Fact: “We are already in the last chapter of the Earth’s biological history…even on geological timescales.” (23:40)

4. Are We Special? Science, Religion, and the Alien "Hypothesis"

Uniqueness of Earth:
- The Earth’s large moon, two Jupiters, quiet sun, and stable orbits are rare in exoplanet research.
- “All these things are interesting and they raise questions about uniqueness.” — Dr. Kipping (25:55)
Aliens vs. God as Explanations:
- “The problem with aliens…is that…like a God, they can explain any observation.” (28:10)
- There’s a risk in replacing theological ‘miracles’ with equally unfalsifiable “aliens did that” answers.
- “It’s almost intellectually lazy to invoke [aliens].” (29:05)

5. Contemplating Cosmic Solitude and the Fermi Paradox

No Obvious Aliens Detected:
- “There’s zero sign anywhere of…anything as far as we can tell, which is disturbing.” (32:12)
- The lack of “mega-structures” or radio-loud civilizations pushes science toward humbling possibilities:
  - “Everything we know…is totally consistent with it just being us.”
Rare vs. Common Life:
- Microbial life might be common, but complex, intelligent life like ours—much rarer.

6. The Future of Intelligence on Earth: Time Capsules for Future Species

Pet Theory:
- Dr. Kipping suggests our best shot at “alien” contact might be time capsules for future Earth-descended intelligences, not extraterrestrial ones:
  - “Intelligence has an evolutionary advantage that will…persist.” (35:16)
  - “That’s a more likely way of us having a one-way communication with an alien species.” (36:05)

7. Fermi Paradox & Advanced Life

Other Intelligences May Not Communicate:
- Most possible aliens are probably far more advanced or primitive than we are.
- “We should just sort of brace for that in communication…Why would they have any interest in communicating with us? We’d be so simple and primitive.” (43:15)
- Life elsewhere may be so truly alien—not even recognizing us as sentient peers.
- “There might be hyper intelligences out there that have no concept of…mutual understanding with us.” (44:28)

8. The UFO/"Disclosure" Era & Scientific Rigor

Why Scientists Are Wary:
- Professional astronomers, despite looking up all the time, rarely see UFOs, raising questions about reports’ validity and observer bias.
- There’s a crucial methodological problem: we can’t measure true/false positive rates for eyewitness UFO claims, so we can’t fit them into scientific frameworks. (48:02)
- “Why do scientists feel comfortable calling [biosignatures] legitimate science, but we feel uncomfortable talking about UFOs as legitimate ways of looking for aliens?” (48:25)
Potential for Technological Solutions:
- Crowdsourced, instrumented data collection (e.g., using phones as detectors) could bridge anecdote and science.

9. Testimony, Evidence, and the Progress of Science

Extraordinary Claims vs. Evidence:
- Testimony—even by credible professionals—is insufficient; physical evidence is necessary.
- “If there are alien vehicles in some warehouse, just present them and we’ll all be convinced…Science…builds confidence progressively.” (53:31; 64:00)
Historical Humility:
- The story of "canals on Mars" and misidentified meteorites reflects scientific humility:
- “Very often, at least so far in history, it has not been that case. It has just been a lack of our current understanding…” (60:39)
- “I try to remain open minded about the possibilities…we’re often wrong.” (65:05)

Notable Quotes, Moments, and Timestamps

Existential Wonder:
- “There’s an emotional roller coaster involved in all of this, but generally, very exciting time to be alive.” — Dr. Kipping (06:16)
On the Significance of Earth’s Uniqueness:
- “Having eight planets is pretty unusual. Having a star which is as quiet as our star is unusual…If there were aliens looking for us, we’d be really easy to find.” (25:55)
On the Pitfalls of "Aliens Did It" Reasoning:
- “It's almost intellectually lazy to invoke it because you can get away with murder…just, ‘Aliens did it,’ and you’re done.” (29:05)
The Fermi Paradox, Viscerally:
- “Everything we know from an astronomy perspective about the universe is totally consistent with it just being us, which is terrifying.” (32:00)
On the Difficulty of Accepting Testimonial Evidence:
- “Even if Dave’s my best friend and…got a PhD, that’s still not enough…Show me the money, then I’ll believe it.” (53:05)
On Scientific Progress:
- “Science builds confidence progressively through experiments and it takes those kind of windfall detection sometimes…to truly convince everyone that that is real.” (65:00)

Important Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Highlights | |-----------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:35 | Dr. Kipping’s excitement about the search for exoplanets | | 07:59 | Two bridges: conceptual and technological advances in exoplanet science | | 11:53 | Evidence for (and heartbreak about) Martian biosignatures | | 21:27 | The challenge of drawing conclusions from Earth’s life origin | | 25:51 | Uniqueness of Earth and the temptation to invoke “specialness” | | 32:00 | Cosmic solitude and what the lack of signals means | | 34:47 | Evolutionary “time capsule” thought experiment | | 43:00 | Advanced aliens and the communication gap | | 47:38 | Scientific discomfort with UFO testimony and the Age of Disclosure| | 53:05 | Evidence, testimony, and how science demands more | | 60:31 | Humility; history of misattribution in astronomy (Mars “canals”, meteors)| | 65:05 | “We’re often wrong”—remaining open but demanding evidence |

Tone and Final Takeaways

The tone throughout is both rigorous and playful, acknowledging the weirdness, wonder, and humility intrinsic to genuine scientific inquiry. Dr. Kipping emphasizes the need for humility, skepticism, and open-mindedness—reminding listeners that history is marked by premature certainty and the allure of both miracles and monsters. The search for alien life is far from over, but rigor and patience remain our best tools as we push the boundaries of understanding what it means to be human in a vast, mysterious universe.

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Transcript

Mayim Bialik (0:00)

Do we have definitive proof of life on other planets?

Dr. David Kipping (0:04)

That's been the question I've been excited about since I was a little kid looking up at the stars and wondering who else might be out there. A lot of my work also asks that next question of who's living there? Is anyone living there? Could we actually try and find life? And there are many interesting ideas for how life could have begun. It does seem like life started very quickly. But the thing you have to be careful with that is that it took 4 billion years to go from whatever that first creature was all the way to us. And if that's typical, then Earth doesn't have that long left and it's terrifying.

Jonathan Cohen (0:33)

Dr. David Kipping is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Columbia University. He's here to definitively answer the question,

Mayim Bialik (0:40)

is there life on other planets? And what can we be doing to prepare?

Dr. David Kipping (0:45)

I try to remain very open minded about what the real answer is. We have no idea what the motives of an alien would be.

Mayim Bialik (0:51)

We seem to have evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars.

Dr. David Kipping (0:55)

When we talk about biosignatures like the Martian rocks or looking for gases in alien atmospheres, why do scientists feel comfortable calling that legitimate science? But we feel uncomfortable talking about UFOs as legitimate ways of looking for aliens. For astronomers, it's not a question of if. Surely there's someone out there. But it does raise the question, why would they have any interest in communicating with us?

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Dr. David Kipping (3:46)

That's a great question. I mean, that's a very broad question. It's a very fair one. I do so many things that excite me, to be honest. My daytime job is looking for planets outside the solar system and ideally, trying to find moons around those planets as well. So we call these exoplanets. There's just planets outside the solar system. Technically, you could call planets inside the solar system endoplanets. Endo, like inside, but nobody ever calls them that. And then the moons around those planets we call Exomoon. So we've been on this journey for the last 25, 30 years of going from absolutely no information whatsoever about planets outside our solar system. So maybe, you know, for all we know, it could have just been the eight that we have in our backyard, and maybe that was it. I mean, people did seriously speculate about that. They looked at other stars and they said, you know, there could be something special about our own star. And now we know when you look up at the sky that on average, every star has at least one planet around it, often much more than that. So it's totally blown us away with just the. The numbers that are out there, and then yet more the diversity. So we're just discovering every day, you pick up one of the latest astronomy journals and you see what's being found. It blows our mind over and over again. We're Finding so many planets that are in between the size of Earth and Neptune, for instance, and we just don't know what they are. Are they scaled up versions of a rocky Earth, super Earths, or are they scaled down versions of a gas giant, a gas dwarf? And we're still just totally in the dark really about the nature of those. Or maybe there could be something else entirely, like a water world or something. You know, these are the questions that get a lot of exoplanet scientists very excited. And then, of course, a lot of my work also asks that next question of, well, you know, who's living there? Is anyone living there? Could we actually try and find life? And for me, I mean, that's been the question I've been excited about since I was a little kid, was, was looking up at the stars and wondering who else might be out there. So, you know, we could talk about all of those things. But that's a broad brush of all the stuff that gets me excited.

Dr. David Kipping (7:59)

Yeah, you know what? I think there's actually two. There's two bridges. One is conceptual, which is just purely in our own heads, really. We could have found planets much exoplanets much sooner than we did. But it was our. It was us that got on the way. And another was technological, which is the obvious answer. So I'll give you the. The conceptual one first. So the. Even in the 1970s and even arguably in the 60s, we had the capability with our telescopes to measure the wobbles of stars at a level of precision which was enough to detect some existing known exoplanets that we've detected in the recent years. So to be able to do that, you have to be able to see a star move back and forth and see its speed change order of hundreds of meters per second. And the very biggest planets, which are really close to the star because obviously the closer the planet gets to the star and the heavier it is, the more it can tug. It can tug that and make it move around and oscillate very fast. A good example is like if you get a coin drop and you throw a coin down one of those charity worlds and it speeds up as it gets closer and closer and closer and closer. And it's the same thing with plants. The closer in they get, the faster they orbit. And so the faster they took the star that they go around. So some of those speeds were approaching thousands of meters per second. And we could have detected them back in the 60s and 70s. And actually in the 1950s, there was one astronomer, his name was Struve, Otto Struve. And he's. He was completely forgotten about at the time. But now everybody cites him as kind of this genius who had this insight. But he pointed out that, hey, maybe sometimes Jupiter mass planets don't live really far away from their star like Jupiter does and Saturn does. Maybe sometimes they get really close. And of course everybody thought he was crazy. It was like, how? No, that doesn't make any sense. Like, we think we understand how Jupiter forms. You need lots of ices to make these gas giants. And ice would. Would not be stable that close to a star. So, you know, just. It'll be too hot. So you can't possibly make a Jupiter that close. So everybody just kind of dismissed them. But we now know of many, many, many hundreds of these so called hot Jupiters that were lurking in our data for years, even decades, without anybody just looking for them. So I think there's just a conceptual barrier that we grow up, as you say, man, like we grow up reading this textbook. Here's the solar system, here's what it looks like. And I think for a generation or more of astronomers, it became ingrained in our minds that that was the template, like everything else would look like that, more or less. And then when we found it was totally different, we went back and we're like, oh damn, we could have found this stuff a long time ago. And then the big technological breakthrough was just CCDs. So, you know, the same camera technology that we use in our iPhones and in video photography, like my DSLR camera, I'm talking to you right now. That chip technology enabled a much higher quantum efficiency of capture of photons. And so we're able to go from basically maybe capturing 10% of the photons to nearly 100% of the photons. So overnight with that technology, you get basically 10 times more photons and thus square root 10, higher signal to noise in your data. So that was a huge breakthrough as well.

Dr. David Kipping (11:53)

So speaking to my Mars colleagues, because I don't study Mars, you know, I'm not a solar system planetary scientist, but speaking to my colleagues about this, the data is very tantalizing. So you see these kind of speckles which look like the sorts of things that you get from microbial, from bacteria inside rocks. So that's enticing. But of course, we don't have direct evidence of the bacteria in those rocks. We haven't collected a sample, we haven't brought it back to Earth, we haven't dissected it and pulled apart its DNA. And it's been like, okay, now we're 100% sure this is life. So it is another example of a biosignature, I think would be fair to say a very nice biosignature, but still an example of a biosignature. So that means a indirect telltale sign of life. But we've seen that before with Mars. So years ago, there was methane on Mars. That was claimed. It's still there and it's, it's still a very provocative potential signal of life. But a lot of debate has started since then that maybe this is geological. Maybe there are methane traps deep inside underneath the crust that are leaking out sometimes. And it looks like this seasonal biological activity, but in fact, it could just be something geological going on. As, you know, the crust warms up, it releases some of this gas seasonally. We've also seen it most famously, I remember as a kid going back, you have to be old to remember this. Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn and talking about this famous meteor called the Allan Hills meteor. And it had these little worm like fossils on it. And everybody was just so excited. Like, this seemed like the real deal of life on a Martian rock. But yeah, this wasn't actually collected from Mars directly. This was a rock knocked off Mars that then traveled to the Earth, came through the atmosphere, landed in Antarctica, and someone picked it up and put it under a microscope. And that meteor still is very enticing. But in the years that followed, other laboratories were able to show that you could make something that looked very, very similar to those little worm like things without any biology involved. Just kind of passing water and the minerals that you find on Mars together, you can sometimes get things that look like that. So that's always the, it's the story. And he took this, like, broken heart. This is this recurring tale that we've had over and over again where we see something that looks like something we see with life on Earth. And then years pass sometimes, and scientists do all of that due diligence and they find out there is another way of producing that signature. Now, that in itself doesn't prove it's not life, because it could. Just because you can make it without life means it still could be life. But it provides an alternative rational explanation that doesn't require the aliens to be invoked. And normally, as you know, scientists tend to lean on like, the simplest, dumbest idea we can get away with, the least sensational idea we can get away with. And so for these reasons, you know, Allen Hills, Martian methane, and, you know, who knows what will happen with this one. But there has been a recurring story. So we just have to kind of be braced for that. Like the lessons of history teach us that that we often do get disappointed.

Jonathan Cohen (15:28)

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Dr. David Kipping (21:27)

I think the, the most challenging thing about trying to make any inference about life more generally based off us is the, is this anthropic principle. So we are only here because we are here. There is a survivorship bias. So it's kind of like, you know, taking all the lottery winners and putting them in the room and asking them, you know, what, how, how lucky do you feel about playing the lottery again? And they'll be like, oh, yeah, it's easy. Like, you just buy a ticket and after 100 tries, you win the lottery. But that's not representative of most people. Like, most people will play the lottery the whole life and never win. So there's a, there's a enormous bias in just taking win. We are a winner in this game of biological evolution and even the start of life itself. This story of how life started, of course, is, is a big mystery. Because you know, frankly, we don't have a time machine and there's very little relics left over from that long ago. We're talking basically 4.4 billion years ago when the oceans first formed on the Earth. There are very, very, very few rocks left from that time. And of course, if we are really arguing for a very simple microbial life form, perhaps it was the first thing to emerge. That would not leave much of a fossilized imprint for us to detect. So this is, this is why this detective story is so difficult. And there are many interesting ideas for how life could have begun. I think we desperately just need another sample in terms of that origin story. And I've looked at this myself in my own research. I've asked the question, it does seem like life started very quickly. That seems like a good thing. We believe, like within the first few hundred million years, it looks like life was on the Earth. And so it's tempting to lean on that and say, therefore whenever you have Earth like conditions, it must be easy, because otherwise how did it happen so quickly? But the thing you have to be careful with that is that it took 4 billion years to go from whatever that, that first creature was all the way to us. And if that's typical, if it typically takes 4 billion years, then actually surprisingly, the Earth doesn't have that long left. You kind of have to start life quickly in order to get to us. So maybe on most other planets life starts, but it takes 2 billion years, 3 billion years, 4 billion years, that's fine. But those creatures would never have time, at least for a sun like star to develop into a creature like us, because the, the Earth will become uninhabitable to complex life in probably less than a billion years. We are already in the last chapter of the Earth's biological history. I think that's kind of a striking fact that we don't talk about enough. It is, it's shocking. We're at the end of the story, not, not the beginning of Earth's history. It is, even on geological timescales, it's, it is kind of a shocking thing to note. And so perhaps that explains why life started early, is that it was necessity to our existence. And in most places that doesn't happen. So this, this anthropic effect makes it very difficult for us to say anything with firm confidence, except for the fact we know for sure it did happen.

Dr. David Kipping (25:51)

Yeah. There's certainly a lot of things about even our solar system that we can say because of the work we're doing with exoplanets that is unusual. And the question is to how much, to that extent, how far does that rabbit hole go of uniqueness of specialty? The Earth has a large moon, so that's already pretty weird. No other planet in the solar system out of the age 8 planets, if you count Pluto. Maybe this goes out the window because Pluto has a very big moon comparatively as well. But out of the main eight planets, no other planet has such a large moon. And it's thought to influence the tides, it's thought to influence the obliquity of the Earth, so that seems positive. Jupiter's influence has often been invoked as something that appears unusual. Less than 10% of sun like stars have a Jupiter, and we can tell that from the exoplanet work we're doing. That means that just having two Jupiters in your backyard is actually pretty special already. Having nice circular orbits, coplanar orbits is unusual. Having eight planets is pretty unusual. Having a star which is as quiet as our star is unusual. If there was aliens looking for us, we'd be really easy to find. Our star is bizarrely quiet. It's like that's what gets in the way most of the time of us finding other planets is the star misbehaving. Our star is almost like a light bulb. It's very easy to find us for an alien. So all these things are interesting and they raise questions about uniqueness. And I love this connection that you bring up to religion and to theocracy because, you know, we have this tendency in science, and it's one of the things I complain about sometimes amongst my colleagues is that we see anomalies. We see something strange that looks special like the Earth does. Maybe it's an interstellar asteroid, maybe it's a star that's doing something strange. And we see it and it's an anomaly. And so we, like a burning bush, we inject a miracle to explain it, which is aliens. We say, you know, there's this creature which can do anything. And that's kind of the problem with aliens. Like a God. They can explain any observation I give you. Why did your alarm not go off this morning on time? Oh, aliens did that. You know, why did you not feel well last night? Was it the alcohol? No, it was aliens that did that. You could explain everything with aliens. And that's a problem for aliens as a hypothesis because it shares that ability with a God. And so time and time again we talked about Mars earlier on with these anomalies. These, like methane or these, these worm like fossils that were detected. But those are all anomalies that were later explained or explainable with other scientific, rational explanations. And that has been this recurring theme in alien hunting for so long. There have been over a dozen claims and in science of, of aliens out there. And every time it's taken a few years, but other people have come along and said, hey, I think we just don't understand the astrophysics well enough. Here's a, here's a way you can do that. So that is, that is a weakness a little bit of the alien hypothesis that we don't talk about enough. That it's just, it's too malleable as a theory. But it is very rational to think that they, they could be someone out there doing this stuff. It's just that, that it's, it's almost intellectually lazy to invoke it because you can get away with murder when you invoke aliens. You can just, it's just like, oh, aliens did that, and, and you're done. You don't have to think anymore.

Jonathan Cohen (38:03)

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Dr. David Kipping (43:00)

For sure. I mean, yeah, Carl Sagan would often comment on that, that it's very unlikely if there is another intelligence out there, that it would be in technological lockstep with us. Right. It's either are going to be far behind us, in which case there's not really much prospect of communication, or far ahead of us. And in fact, me and Adam Frank actually wrote a paper about that together saying that, you know, if you. If you look at the neighborhood of stars around us and assume there is someone else out there, they're almost certainly going to be far ahead of us. And so we should just sort of brace for that in communication. But it does raise the question would. Maybe that's the explanation to the film paradox. Why would they have any interest in communicating with us? Right. Because we'd be so. So simple and primitive to them that there's. We'd be maybe interesting in the sense of putting us in a test tube and seeing what happens, but not for like an actual sentient communication. Maybe there's some higher plane of consciousness we've not achieved yet. So they just don't even consider us, like, worthy of empathy and all of these things. Maybe that's even an alien concept to them. So you know, that's, that's, that's very worrying. The, the, the case I worry most about is that you can imagine a planet that has a single celled life form that forms a colony on that planet. Like a fungus that just kind of spreads over the whole planet. And like a neural network, it could be very intelligent. You know, we know that, you know, bees collectively and ants collectively have this kind of collective sense of intelligence that can emerge. And so there might be hyper intelligences out there that just have no concept of, of, of mutual understanding with us. Like even the idea of another species to them wouldn't make any sense because they're the only thing they've ever known. So even the, the idea of individuals and, and consciousness wouldn't make any sense to them. And so there might be lots of aliens out there, but they're just so alien that this, this, this science fiction dream we have of like shaking hands and, and talking to each other over a dinner table, that's all B.S. there's no way that's gonna happen. They're not humanoid, they're not, they're probably not even, you know, made of the same stuff of us as you, as you say. So I think we have to change our expectations about what, what that really might look like. And that worries me because then what prospect is there really of this, of this fantasy that we all probably have deep down of that, of that learning from another species?

Dr. David Kipping (47:38)

Yeah, I mean, it's. I get asked this all the time. And the thing I've been thinking a lot about with this growing era of UFO stories and age of disclosure is, is, is how do we pass that as scientists? And I think for a long time the public has been frustrated with scientists because we just kind of dodge the question and we say, well, that's silly, that's ridiculous. You know, I'm not going to even talk about that. And that I don't think that's the right approach. But at the same time, I think a lot of scientists do have this kind of spider sense that something doesn't make sense about this. I mean, as astronomers, for instance, it's hard to find people that look up at the sky more than astronomers, professional astronomers. And yet none of us, very few of us seem to. To see this compared to the bulk population. So what's going. Why is it that trained professionals see UFOs less often than members of the public who are untrained at looking at things? So that, that already might raise some like, red flags, like what. What's going on here? But I don't want to discount it. I think there is, you know, obviously when you see these videos and you see like the Pentagon videos and you hear these reports of like the, the radar operators and the pilots, you know, these are, these are very well trained people as well. Right. And so they're seeing stuff in, in US Airspace or just off the coast of US Airspace that clearly something is going on. And it's totally reasonable, and I support the government trying to figure out what that is because at a minimum, it poses a potential threat to u. S. Defense. Right? If there's, if there's vehicles traveling through our airspace without us knowing about it, we, we probably should find out where they are. Whether they're drones or some alien spacecraft, we probably want to know what they are. So we need, we, we certainly want to pursue it. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be one of those science that said this is so ridiculous. Let's just close that case and forget about it. But I've also been trying to ask myself the question, why is it that when we talk about biosignatures like the Martian rocks or looking for gases and alien atmospheres, we do that with exoplanets? We look for gases that are signatures of life as well. Why do scientists feel comfortable calling that legitimate science? But we feel uncomfortable talking about UFOs as legitimate ways of looking for aliens. It's not like suddenly, as soon as you cross the earth's atmosphere, something stops being science. That doesn't make any sen. There must be, there's no, there's no boundary like that. And I, for me, I've been thinking about this really hard. I think what it comes down to is there's a little bit of a technical explanation, but I think it comes down to knowing how often you're wrong and how often you're right. What in science we would call the true positive rate and your false positive rate. And in any experiment, you have to know those two numbers. If I'm going to do a search for life on exoplanet atmospheres using whatever method I want, I need to know how often do I expect this method to be successful. If all of those plants had life on it, is it 50, is it 100, or is it 1%? So that's the true positive, right? How often you're going to be right, assuming life is there. And you also have to know how often you're going to be wrong. Like assuming none of the planets had life, how often would you erroneously turn around and claim that you found life? You have to know those two numbers. And I think the problem is, problem with these reports I've seen at least, is that there's no way I can think of to measure those two numbers and thus even, even ingest UFOs into the framework of science. I don't even know that it's compatible with science without those two numbers, because you'd have to know, for instance, with pilots Put pilots in an airspace where you knew with certainty there was no aliens and ask how often do they erroneously claim aliens? And you just, you can't do that. It's not, it's not possible. You put in a simulator or something. But even that wouldn't be realistic compared to actually flying the vehicle in, in an atmosphere, in a real physical atmosphere. And likewise, there's no way to know if you put them in an airspace with aliens, how often do they correctly identify them as aliens? There's no way you could do that. So the problem is just from an experimental perspective, it's a, it's a, it's all anecdotal and it's very difficult to have the controlled lab like conditions where we can evaluate those numbers, ask these questions in a meaningful way. It, it could be possible in some cases to ask those things. We could imagine networks of mobile phones tracking these things, everyone's cell phone capturing them in real time, getting trigonometry of their locations, having magnetometers in everyone's phone. And I think the NASA UAP task force advocated for that. They said, look, we could turn everyone's phones into UFO collecting devices and there's even some apps that, on the app store now that you can sort of use to try and do this. But, and that's the kind of level of fidelity you need. You need like lots of data from independent sources and then you'd be able to measure some of these rates in a more controlled set of conditions. But at the moment, just with these kind of one off anecdotes, I just, I just don't know what to make of them.

Dr. David Kipping (53:05)

I don't know. Yeah, I really don't know. I mean I'm not, I, I wouldn't accept personal testimony as evidence for aliens. Personally, I, I think my bar of evidence is higher than, than, than Dave said. So even if Dave, I really believe Dave, even if Dave's my best friend and you know, he's got a PhD in, in whatever, that's still not enough, Just personal. Just because someone Said so. So, you know, it's like Jerry Maguire, show me the money. Like then, then, then I'll believe it. Like if you actually, if there are alien vehicles in some warehouse, some government warehouse, then just present them and we'll, we'll, we'll all be convinced. And I think that's the point of, of not just science, but in society more generally, when you, if you want to convince someone of an idea, then you, for it to be convincing and to become factual, then there has to be no, no room for, for wiggle room, right? There can't be. And that's how scientists work. We always try and find, okay, did you think about this? What about this assumption? What about this? And we, we attack it from all more from all angles, until whatever the idea is, it's like a crucible. You've burnt away all the irrelevances and you've just got this like, pure fact that's left over. And is. It is undeniable that this new gravity is undeniable because we've all done the experiment millions of times and it always falls down to the ground. There's no denying at this point we've tried every way we can to deny it, and we're a long way from that with, with the, the current claims. But I would like us to get there because I, I like everybody else, just want to know the answer. But in terms of like, what's personally going on with these people, I have no idea. I think you need probably a psychologist to figure that out, not an astronomer. But it's also possible they're all right and there is something going on and we just. The evidence, for whatever reason is constantly being withheld from scientists. And yet paradoxically, all these SETI scientists and astronomers doing all this work, for whatever reason, we never see a ufo. Now telescope data, which is, I find that hard to make sense of, but you could imagine some contrived situations where that's true.

Dr. David Kipping (57:03)

Yeah, I mean, I, I always like to, to remind people of, of that. Of human biases and, and this is one of those very difficult situations where a lot of us have strong biases. Most people, I think, tend to favor. They, they would like there to be an alien species out there. But many people feel the opposite way as well. But there's, you know, there's, but there's, there's a polarizing view about what they want to be true. And we've seen, seen time and time again in science. I mean, I can think of. One of the very first claims of alien life was in. It was on the front page of the New York Times in 1908 or 1906, maybe it was. And it said there it was in New York Times. It said, there is life on Mars. That was the headline. There's no, there's no two ways about that headline. That, that's an unambiguous statement of fact. There is life on Mars because this astronomer at the time in the, you know, over 100 years ago, Percival Lowell was looking through a telescope and he saw lines on Mars and he thought those lines were canals. And now we look back and say, that's ridiculous. Like, why would aliens build canals? That's an antiquated technology. But at the time, that was a technology that was, was emerging, and he, he was surrounded by canals because the Erie Canal was just Going up. So to him it made sense that that's what an advanced species would do. But of course this is this idea of like the alien, the alien could be so alien that that's just laughable. Flying vehicles through space might be a joke to a very advanced civilization. Why would they do that, such a thing, when you could just learn everything from a neutron probing telescope from the other side of the universe? Why do you even need to visit them like these if we have to kind of open our mind a little bit about how advanced they really could be? And of course he was wrong. You know, personal law was wrong, but he just didn't know what he didn't know. And what he didn't know was that these psychological effects, it's called gest reconfiguration where if you see, see like three, three dots in a row, you kind of connect a line between them and his brain just filled in the gaps and that just wasn't understood at the time that this was an effect. And so time after time it's the stuff we don't yet know about. And even in our own atmosphere, this stuff we don't know about. During the, the NASA UAP task force led by Dave Sperger, who's an astronomer, they talked about this upside down lightning effect. I think it's called jellyfish or red lightning. And it goes, it shoots up and it's only in the upper, very upper atmosphere. And pilots have been reporting it for years, commercial pilots, they've been saying there's this weird lightning, but it was never recorded. No one had ever had a camera fast enough to capture this inverted red lightning. And then once cameras got fast enough, they, they finally proved that it was real. But nobody thought it was real until, until it was done. And so that's both a case of maybe the aliens are real because we don't have the, the quality of cameras yet. But it's also a case of that there's natural phenomena in our own atmosphere that we're still, still like learning about that we don't understand. So we have to be humble and admit that our understanding of even our atmosphere is, is probably going to advance a lot more in the next century. And there may be stuff going on we just don't understand that we, that we will come to understand because that's how science works or it could be aliens. But I'm, I, I do think we should just be a little bit humble that time and time again through history we've got over excited because we want it to be true. We want it to be aliens. And very often, at least so far in history, it has not been that case. It has been. It's just a lack of our current understanding of what's going on.