The mind bending realities of the universe’s scale and deep time
Today’s quote piece is a long one but well worth it. Everything this week seems to be about exponentials so it fits in very well. It’s from the most recent Rogan podcast episode where he talks with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which investigated UFOs.
There’s a ton of wild stuff in their conversation, which is super interesting because it gives a view into how these things are thought about from inside the establishment. Quite pragmatically actually. In any case Luis is very science and engineering focussed and I thought his view of time and the universe was both mind bending and incredibly well articulated. Enjoy.
[1:19:13] Luis:
Homosapien sapien as a modern species has been around for roughly between 100000 and 200000 years. It was only the Greeks 2000 years ago that introduced the idea that there are only 2 types of life forms on this planet, you are either (a) a plant or (b) you’re an animal. And it was only in the last 300 years, if you look at a 24 hour clock, roughly the last 5 minutes in the 24 hours towards midnight, we discovered another form of life that is neither plant nor animal, that’s been here with us on this planet. And that is the world of fungus: during the renaissance and the days of Newton, we discovered that there was this other life form that we had been sharing the planet with all along.
So we patted ourselves on the shoulder, and it wasn’t until the last 120 years, think about it, the last 10 seconds of our existence on this planet, so to speak, on a 24 hour clock as a modern species, we actually discovered the true dominant life form on this planet. And infact if you take all the biomass of every plant, and the biomass of every animal, and the biomass of every fungus and add it all up together, it’s still not equal to the biomass of this hidden kingdom of life, that’s actually the dominant life form of this planet. And that wasn’t until we were able to curve glass and look through a little steel tube and famously shout "little beasties, little beasties", did we discover the world of micro-organisms, that yes, live inside of you, and yes, live on the skin of the ISS space station, and live miles underneath the artic ice. That is the true dominant life form on this planet, and always had been. In the last 120 years we discovered that.
So is it possible that there is something else that is just as normal to this world? Is it possible? Well the answer is a resounding yes of course it’s possible, cause we are always discovering new new new new ways life can exist.
When I was growing up as a kid, I was told absolutely as a matter of fact all life form is derived from photosynthesis, ultimately when you go all the way down. It turns out that that’s not true. It wasn’t until we discovered in the deepest depths of our oceans, were these things called black smokers. We discovered there are these creatures that thrive with no light, and they thrive off of something called kinosynthesis, a completely different way to metabolise energy to sustain life. Everytime we put Mother Nature in a little box, she always finds a way to wiggle her way out. And so think that’s important when having this conversation because if there’s one thing we know as human beings, it’s that we are usually wrong, at first.
[1:21:46] Rogan:
Well we exist and we do send things to other planets and we do send things into space. It only makes sense that something far more intelligent than us that would be doing that, and if they did, they would probably watch an emerging civilisation, which is essentially what we are. Like you said 200000 years which is nothing, the existence of homosapiens have gone from things that use stones, and flintmap to things that can fly things through the air. If you look at Orvel Wright and Wilbur Wright when they flew the first airplane. You go from that to the first Apollo 11 launch, that’s only like 50 years. That’s nuts.
And you just take that, and everything moved exponentially, and you imagine a civilisation that’s been around 10000 years longer than us, 100000 years longer than us, a million years longer than us.
[1:22:44] Luis:
How about 100 years? We have evolved more in the last 150 years than we have in the last 150000 years. And then you have the other side of it. For me, I find, when people say space is so huge, and is it possible that things are coming from outer space? My response has always been the same. Look I don’t know where they are from, I just know they are here. Could they be from outer space? Sure. They could be from outer space or inner space or even the space in between. And I say that because the universe is far more complex than we give it credit for. Everytime...there was a time we had Newtonian physics, we thought that was the solution, then Einstein came along, and we realised that wait, space and time are actually connected and everything is relative. And then all of a sudden you have Quantum Mechanics, which is this spooky action at a distance, where the whole universe is behaving in a way that it shouldn’t, yet that looks like the real way the universe actually works.
I often tell people that as humans we only have 5 fundamental senses that we can base our reality upon. If you can’t touch it, taste it, hear it, smell it, etc we can’t interact with it. And so where I live in Wyoming we have these beautiful night skies, 300 days of un-occluded night skies per year, and as beautiful as those night skies are, if you were to look at that same portion of the night sky through a radio telescope, you would see a whole different reality around you. You would see nebula and you would see things in different spectra that we can’t pickup. You pick an ultra violet, an infra red, so you would see a whole new reality, just like our cell phones. You would see in cell phone vision, you would see in WiFi, 5G and GPS. You would interact with your environment completely differently. We can only interact with a very small sliver of the reality we can perceive because we are humans. But most of reality is actually beyond that.
And then of course you have scalability issues. The universe is immensely huge. And what scientists are now saying, if you look in any direction, you can see roughly within the visible horizon, which is roughly 13.9 billion light years. So that means I can see 13.9 billion light years with the right equipment. What’s a light year? Well it’s the fastest light can travel in a year. Well light travels pretty fast. In fact it travels at 186000 miles per second. That’s 7.5 times around the planet in a second. So imagine how far you can go in a year. Now multiply that by 13.9 billion. And that is by scientists estimation. So the universe end-to-end, we are stuck in the middle, is roughly 27 billion light years. Scientists are now saying possibly that’s only 10% of the known universe, because the universe is so big, and so vast, and so far, that light will never have time to reach earth. That’s at a minimum 100 billion light years. And we are this little speck in the middle.
As crazy as that is to even try to conceive, if you compare 1 atom, 1 Hydrogen atom, Avogadro’s number, 1 x 10 to the minus 26, it is roughly the same level of scale as we are to the universe. Meaning that atom’s size is to a human, as we humans are in size to the universe. So we as humans can only interact, plus or minus, with one order of magnitude up or down. Otherwise the universe is either too big or too small. Most of the universe and reality lies in those scales. We live in this little tiny tiny sliver.
[1:26:26] Rogan:
[Exhales deeply] You are hurting my head.
[1:26:27] Luis:
Ha ha ha
[1:26:28] Rogan:
Yeah we live in a tiny sliver. And I think the idea we are alone is preposterous, I really do.