EP 258 Stephen Webb on Where Are the Aliens?

Jim talks with Stephen Webb about his book If the Universe Is Teeming With Aliens… Where Is Everybody?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. They discuss Jim’s obsession with the Fermi paradox, the meaning of the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, discounting claims about UFOs, a question that everyone can contribute to, Perplexity AI’s estimates, optimistic scenarios, anthropic principles, Kardashev civilizations, the principle of mediocrity, getting to the bottom of the UAP phenomenon, problems with the zoo scenario & the interdict hypothesis, the simulation hypothesis, Oumuamua, solar chauvinists, Stapledonian thinking, the signaling problem, 3 types of communications, the dark forest scenario, Dyson swarms, types of planets that would make space exploration hard, what might be special about Earth, the idea that Earth was deliberately seeded by aliens, the Great Filter idea & potential causes of extinction, the Carrington Event, previous filters, the co-evolution of tools & intelligence, where Stephen would place his bets, humanity’s huge moral responsibility, and much more.

Stephen Webb has a passion for learning why the world is the way it is and asking whether it could be any different. He worked at several UK universities, being elected a Member of the Institute of Physics, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and was project lead for the UK Advance HE Collaborative Award in Teaching Excellence in 2022. He is also active in science outreach, and his TED Talk “Where are all the aliens?” has been viewed more than 6.5 million times. In 2023, he retired to devote more time to his writing. He has published numerous books, including an undergraduate textbook on distance determination in astronomy as well as several general and popular science books. His best-known book is Where is Everybody?, an exploration of the Fermi paradox.