| 0:37 | Intro. [Recording date: June 27, 2026.] Russ Roberts: Today is June 27th, 2026, and my guest is Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine. Adam was last here in January of 2025 discussing his book, On Settler Colonialism. Our topic for today is his latest book, We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters. Adam, welcome back to EconTalk. Adam Kirsch: Thanks so much. I'm really glad to be back with you. |
| 1:03 | Russ Roberts: Now I have to confess, I wasn't interested in the topic of this book, so if you're listening, don't hang up. Don't switch off because it doesn't excite you. I think this will be a very interesting conversation. It's a lovely book. It's full of things I didn't know. And, it's also very provocative. So, I'm excited about our conversation. Despite the topic of the book, my faith in the author was rewarded. Now, the first part of the book is about the--and it's very short, by the way, listeners, it's 130 short pages--the first part of the book is about the change in the public conversation about aliens. And, by aliens, we're talking about would-be visitors from outer space. It's a hard phrase to actually explain. Sentient, non-humans from a different place. You write: In the last decade, however, the way we talk about ETs and UFOs has undergone a significant change--actually, two complementary changes. First, the government and the media begin to treat the subject much more seriously. For reasons this book will explore, UFO sightings that would once have been dismissed as hoaxes or relegated to the pages of supermarket tabloids are now respectfully discussed in the mainstream press and on the floor of Congress. As a direct result, public opinion on the subject has changed significantly, with more Americans than ever saying they believe the Earth has been visited by aliens. Now, Adam, I missed this. And my first reaction is, what the heck? What is going on? Adam Kirsch: Well, your reaction is a common one. In fact, I say in the introduction to the book that while I was writing this book, when I told people I'm writing a book about aliens and UFOs [unidentied flying objects], a lot of people were, like, 'Okay, check please. I don't want to talk about this. I don't want to hear about this.' And, just to be clear, I'm not saying that there have been aliens or UFOs on Earth. In fact, I'm quite sure that there haven't been. But, as you say, the thing that made me want to write about this was that in 2017, there was a really significant shift in the way that this subject is covered and talked about in the media. And, it can be pinpointed pretty closely. So, in December 2017, the New York Times and the Washington Post both published front page stories about the so-called Pentagon UFO videos. And, these were videos that had circulated online in a sort of leaked or rumored clandestine fashion, but now were being officially reported that they were videos taken by Navy fighter planes showing strange things in the air, hovering orbs. One thing that was described was looking like a Tic Tac. And, they moved, and they looked like things that weren't conventional aircraft. And, what was significant about these videos was that the Pentagon historically had a policy of denying that it took any notice of UFO reports. So, going back to the 1960s, the official Pentagon stance was: 'There are no UFOs. None of our people have seen UFOs, and this is not a subject that we pay any attention to.' And now it turned out that, in fact, there were these videos. People within the military had seen things like this: there had been reports of them. And, that fed into this idea, which has always been important for the UFO-believer community, that the government is hiding things that it knows. At the same time, these reports showed that there had been a Defense Department program called AATIP [Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program], which was a short-lived five-year program that had a budget of $22 million to collect and analyze reports of UFOs by military personnel. And, again, that was something that the Pentagon had always officially denied, said did not exist. And then it turned out that there was this small program, more or less buried in the enormous bureaucracy of the Pentagon, with a few people working on it. So, these two things were reported for the first time in December 2017. And, it really changed the way that mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and then others, talked about this story. Because before then, I think anyone who talked about UFO sightings, the presumption was that they were a crank or a hoax or something like that. And, now, for the first time, it seemed like: Well, maybe there is a story here. Maybe there's something that we could get to the bottom to and report. Maybe there's more to this than meets the eye. And, I think that that change, which I saw happening as a journalist working at the time at the Wall Street Journal and seeing how other publications were covering this story, was really interesting to me because, after all, the idea that there might be UFOs is pretty interesting if it's true. It's big if true, as people say. So, the book starts with that. That's the first chapter. But then, it goes on to talk in broader terms about why people are interested in UFOs, why people want to believe in them, and how it demonstrates some of the same dynamics that we've seen over the last 10 years going on in politics about other issues. And then it looks at the science of, well, what actually is the state of science about life outside of Earth? What do scientists think about it? What are they doing to find it? |
| 6:17 | Russ Roberts: So, you talk--many, many books have been written about this, and you talk about this community of believers. As is your wont, very respectfully. But, fundamentally, what it comes down to is, despite this surge of interest, despite this openness on the part of the government, say, to admit to certain things that have been going on, there's really no evidence. None. Not like weak evidence. All the evidence is what we would call--the fancy name would be testimonials. The other name for it would be stories. They're things that happen to a single person, a pilot, who could be credible in some dimension because he seems to lead a normal life. Then there are other people who maybe are a little more troubled and who make claims about being sucked into spaceships and so on. Summarize the lack of evidence, just to be blunt about it. Adam Kirsch: Sure. So, after this initial revelations, these revelations in 2017, there was a lot of interest in finding out, are there actually secret videos or artifacts or things that could be revealed or disclosed that would really clinch the case that there have been UFOs on Earth and that the government knows about it and has been hiding it? And, there have been a number of people--not a number, but let's say about half a dozen people--who, as you say, are credentialed, who have histories working for the Defense Department or the State Department-- Russ Roberts: Military. Adam Kirsch: military officers, who have made these claims pretty vocally, including in 2023 in front of Congress. There was a House hearing in which three people who were military pilots testified about things that they had seen. And so, there have been people promoting the idea that military pilots have encountered UFOs or, more provocatively, that the government has alien spacecraft in a warehouse somewhere or even corpses of aliens that have been retrieved from crash sites. And, there have been people who have said, quite seriously, 'I know that this is true, but I can't tell you exactly where they are.' Or, 'Someone who I know knows, but they won't tell me exactly where they are.' So, there's always one step removed of, 'I can't actually point it out to you myself, but trust me because I'm sure that this exists.' And, so, when it comes down to it, there is no evidence. And, in fact, I saw a discussion about this on social media--where a lot of this discussion takes place--where someone was quoting something that I had written in this book about how there's still no evidence. And, someone said, 'That's not true. There might not be proof, but there is evidence.' So, to me, what that gets to is one of the main things I write about in the book, which is: What does it mean for there to be evidence of something? What's the difference between evidence and testimony? And, to get into the sort of deeper questions of: What does it mean to think scientifically about the world? How do we evaluate scientific claims? Especially for someone like me who is not a scientist. I'm a humanist, if anything, with--my interests are in literature and religion. And so, I am not an astronomer or anything like that. So, putting myself in the position of someone who, like most of us, is hearing scientific claims, how do we think about these claims? How do we evaluate them, not being experts? And I think that that's an important question that we have to deal with in lots of ways in a democracy. Most recent example might be public health. There are a lot of public health claims where people who are scientists and experts say one thing, and then there's a large number of lay people who disagree with them or won't listen to them and believe something else is true. And, how do you reconcile those two claims in a democracy where, on most issues, the majority rules? |
| 10:22 | Russ Roberts: And, it's fascinating to me because there's been no time in human history where we have as much access to information as we have right now. It's really an exhilarating time for a curious person. I've said this many times on the program. And yet, there is this nagging suspicion that many of us have that even though information is plentiful, very few people are well-informed. And, the willingness of so many people to believe in conspiracies, to believe in something because the experts believe the opposite and they must be being exploited--the citizen is--it seems like a crazy thing to say, but certain medieval level of knowledge and misinformation, disinformation. Something akin to witch hunts and demons in medieval times. It's just kind of extraordinary. And in this particular case, if we really were being visited by alien beings, you'd think there'd be quite a bit of--first of all, it would be really hard to cover it up. The second thing is, it wouldn't be like, 'I saw something. I wasn't sure what it was.' And, that seems to be the main evidence. It's not like there were a group of people, say, at a 7-Eleven, and a person with four heads came in and spoke in a language no one understood, and they were all swept up into the spaceship together, and they gave them a piece of metal that isn't available on Earth. I mean, these are the things that we would normally call evidence. And, there's nothing. It's just not a plausible hypothesis on the surface. Adam Kirsch: It's not plausible for a couple of reasons. One is, just looking at the question of images, there are billions and billions of people all the time with a camera in their hand, walking around all over Earth with cameras in their hands, and no one has ever taken a picture of what's really clearly an alien or an alien spaceship. Whenever these images are proposed, it's always something that's an infrared radar image that looks like a blurry circle or a light in the sky, something like that. There's never a clear image of anything to look at. And in fact, that's always been true. And, one thing I quote in the book is that in the 1950s, Carl Jung, the psychologist, wrote a book about UFO sightings in the 1950s where he talked about, well, what's really going on when people say that they're seeing UFOs? And, he said, 'One thing about UFOs is that they're not photogenic.' Meaning that even people who say, 'I've seen a UFO,' can never actually seem to take a picture of one. He talks about a friend of his who was, like, 'I saw a UFO. It was in the sky above my head for an hour.' And, Jung says, 'Well, then why didn't you take a picture of it?' And he says, 'Well, I just forgot. I was so absorbed with it, I didn't even think--occur to me to take my camera out and take a picture.' That kind of thing. So, there's always a reason why an actual image is never produced. And then, the other kinds of evidence that you might expect if there was an alien spacecraft would be something that would show up on a space telescope or a radar facility or a radio astronomy observatory. There are lots of people who study space and the atmosphere who are monitoring it all the time and who'd be able to tell us if something came to our planet from somewhere else. And, certainly nothing like an artifact--like: Here's something you can hold in your hands. You can analyze, for example, the isotopes in it and say, well, this is a metal that isn't found on Earth or something like that. Those are all the kinds of things that you would expect if we were talking about normal scientific evidence. And so, there's a famous phrase on this subject that Carl Sagan said, because Carl Sagan--who was a real astronomer, who was very interested in the idea of extraterrestrial life and wrote about it and thought about it--said, 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.' So, if you're going to claim that something as extraordinary as a UFO or an alien has come to Earth, then you have to have some piece of extraordinary evidence to back up that claim. And, that's something that has never been produced. So, I think the obvious answer is: This evidence doesn't exist because these things haven't happened. And, this is the reason why I found this an interesting subject. Because, that in and of itself is not that interesting of a statement. It's like, yes, that is the obvious thing to say. The real interesting part is, 'Well, why do people believe things for which there's no evidence?' And, that's a question that you can ask about UFOs. You could also ask it about God or the Bible or religion or a whole lot of other things that a lot more people believe in and take a lot more seriously than UFOs. So, if you say, 'I had an experience of communion with God,' or, 'I saw an angel,' or something like that, those are the kinds of things that religions are built on. But for that, too, there's never any evidence. There's never a photograph. There's never an artifact. So, one question that this leads to is: Well, how do you distinguish between different kinds of claims for which there are no evidence? When presented by someone with a claim: 'Something happened to me.' For example, some of these people, as you mentioned, say, 'I was taken aboard a UFO, and I saw an alien,' or, 'An alien performed an experiment on me.' That is a claim for which there's no evidence. Another kind of claim for which there's no evidence is, 'I saw the face of God,' or, 'God spoke to me.' How do you evaluate these kinds of claims? What do you do when someone brings a claim into the public sphere like that that can't be rationally discussed because it can't be falsified? There's no way to prove that it's wrong. What kind of authority does that kind of claim have, if you say to people, 'Well, all the scientists say there's no UFOs, but I know, because it happened to me, that there is a UFO'? How do you respond to that? How can you say to that person, 'Well, you are wrong about what happened to you. What you think happened to you didn't happen'? Those are all questions that go beyond the issue of just UFOs, which ultimately, I think, still are in the category of: no one really believes it except people who are quite, quite convinced. And then, the sort of further question is: Well, if there aren't any UFOs, why aren't there? Because, that raises a whole other set of cosmological questions, which I get into in the second half of the book, which is-- Russ Roberts: We'll talk about it. We'll talk about that in a minute. |
| 17:02 | Russ Roberts: I want to stick with what you just said. First, a couple of footnotes. You said it's something that looked like a Tic Tac. You mean the breath mint? Adam Kirsch: Yes, the breath mint. So, this is something that-- Russ Roberts: Meaning that it's not aerodynamically shaped like most things that take flight in our atmosphere? Adam Kirsch: Yeah, you can think of it as a little oval or tube with rounded edges, with no wings and no visible engines. So, if you see something like that and it's zooming across the sky, it doesn't seem to make sense as a human-made aeronautical device. Russ Roberts: Yeah. And then, you also said--you've used UFO to mean flying saucer, but of course, technically, UFO means an unidentified flying object, which could include--would include--things that are just visual illusions explicable through it's a balloon or some atmospheric event or a drone or some other things, right? Russ Roberts: But, it's come to mean aliens in a spaceship, a UFO. Adam Kirsch: Yes. And, it's a good example of how language changes around this subject. So, now people don't say UFO anymore. They say UAP. UAP [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon] is the new, approved acronym. It's what the government uses, for example. And, it's what people who discuss the subject usually say now. And, that change happened about 10 years ago, around the same time as this surge of new reporting on the subject. And, UAP stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon. And, originally it stood for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon; but then it was expanded from 'aerial' to 'anomalous' because some people said, 'Well, maybe these are things that aren't coming from the air, but they're coming from under the surface of the Earth or under the ocean or another time dimension--like, they're coming from the future.' So, anything that doesn't seem to make sense is a UAP. Essentially, it means the same thing as UFO. And one thing I say in the book is that, as you say, 'UFO' now connotes a flying saucer and something we would think of as science fiction. But, in fact, 'Unidentified Flying Object' was created to be a term exactly like UAP. It was supposed to be a neutral term. It was supposed to sound neutral and scientific. And, it was invented by the Air Force in the early 1950s because people were talking about flying saucers. And they said, 'Well, no one takes 'flying saucers' seriously. That sounds like it comes from a comic book. Let's call it UFOs. That's a neutral, descriptive term.' The problem is that the phenomenon itself is what's the problem, not the way we talk about it. So, it's what people sometimes call a euphemism treadmill, where the name keeps changing, but because there's a problem with the thing that's being named. So, you don't call it a flying saucer; you call it a UFO. You don't call it a UFO; you call it a UAP. But, the problem is not what you call it: the problem is the thing you're talking about. |
| 19:47 | Russ Roberts: I just want to say one thing about defense and believing in God. Believing in God, I agree, does not have the scientific evidence behind it that we would use to, I don't know, show that the dinosaurs were killed by a comet and not by something else--a meteor landing, a large meteor making an impact with the Earth and darkening the atmosphere for a long time. But, people who believe in God, I would just make a distinction between people who think God has spoken to them--which is unverifiable, and even with recording--and people who have intellectual reasons for believing in God. Adam Kirsch: Sure, absolutely. Russ Roberts: I just want to make a small vote that belief in God is not the same level of, 'An angel picked me up and did X, Y, Z to me.' That's all. Adam Kirsch: That's definitely true. That's a good thing to emphasize. And, there's actually, I think, two important distinctions. One is, people mean a lot of different things when they say believing in God. They mean a lot of different things by God. Not just in the sense of different religions, but different ways of thinking about that religion. The way that Rambam believes in God is very different from the way that the Baba [?Türedi?] might experience God. They're all talking about the same God, but they mean different things by it. So, that's one thing. But then, another thing is that the reason why UFOs or UAPs are interesting is that, if they exist, they're not supernatural. They're not something that are supposed to be miraculous, that you have to have faith to understand. They are supposed to be physical objects that exist in the physical universe in three dimensions like everything else. So, they are something that should be susceptible to empirical proof. Which is--sort of by definition, religious faith is not supposed to be susceptible to empirical proof. And, that's why you say it's faith rather than evidence. 'Faith is the evidence of things not seen,' is what the New Testament says. So, UFOs are not supposed to be in that kind of category. What I'm really talking about more is--and this is an example I use in the book--Lourdes is a Catholic holy site because in the 19th century there was a young girl named Bernadette who said that she saw the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary appeared to her on a number of occasions and spoke to her. And, at first, the local priest in Lourdes in southern France didn't believe her and said, 'This is a girl making stuff up.' And then, as the word spread and more and more people heard about it, the Church changed its mind and said, 'We recognize that this is true. We believe it happened.' And, Lourdes became an official pilgrimage site, and this became a recognized part of Catholic belief. So, that's an example of how--that original claim is the same kind of claim as, 'I saw a flying saucer. I can't prove it, but I'm telling you this happened to me.' So, then, really, the question is, how do you get from, 'I'm telling you this happened to me,' to, 'You're a crank,' versus, 'You are a revered figure because we believe you'? Russ Roberts: I would say, it is evidence for that person, but not for me because I didn't experience it. And, certainly religious believers have, not necessarily hearing voices of God or angels, but have emotional, whatever we want to call the experiences of the divine that are evidence for their own personal set of beliefs. But, I would make a distinction between that and, say, a claim of, say, mass revelation for the Jewish Bible or someone who, on the road to somewhere, sees something unique. I think there's gradations of different kinds of what would convince a non-believer. |
| 23:35 | Russ Roberts: But, coming back to aliens for a second. You write the following. You say: Some people claim to know for certain that aliens exist because they've encountered one, seen an alien spaceship close up, or even been taken aboard, but the majority of UFO enthusiasts are not true believers. They are want-to believers, hoping that they will live long enough to see conclusive proof that human beings are not the only intelligent species in the universe. End of quote. Are you in that group? Adam Kirsch: I would say yes. And, I'd say yes, and that's why I got interested in this story when I first started to follow it and read about it. And, over the course of reading about it, I'd say that I've become less of a want-to believer, or at least more reconciled to the idea that we will not see that in my lifetime or maybe ever. But, I'd say that the basic instinct of wanting to believe, yes. And, that's something that I think a lot of people share, both lay people and scientists, is: it would be truly amazing if we could find evidence that there's intelligent life not on Earth, in some other part of the cosmos. It would change the way we think about the universe, about life, about intelligence, about ourselves, and our destiny. This is, again, something that Carl Sagan writes about in a pretty moving way. So, I think that wanting to believe that is a very natural instinct and desire. And, the question is, what would justify that belief? What would we need to find to justify that belief? Russ Roberts: And, just one last thought on revelation and a feeling of something has happened to you personally that you cannot communicate. I always thought that one of the most magnificent--and I've spoken about this before--one of the most magnificent aspects of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Spielberg movie, is, I'm blanking on his name, Richard-- Russ Roberts: Richard Dreyfuss, thank you. Richard Dreyfuss [?maybe here Russ intended the name of the character, Roy Neary?--Econlib Ed.] has been visited. There's been a revelation to him--only to him, and maybe some others--but no one else around him has experienced it. So, he, of course, becomes obsessed. And I love the scene where he has a vision in his head of the mountain he's supposed to find where the aliens are going to come visit him. And, his family suddenly stops in silence to see that he's shaped his mashed potatoes in the form of the mountain. And, if you've had a religious revelation or you've had a experience with aliens that is meaningful to you, it would not be a small thing. It would not be like, 'Oh yeah, by the way, did I mention--?' It would become an obsession. And the people you talk about--it's not a big part of the book--but the community of people who feel that this is true, obviously they feel very much like a oppressed minority: that they have not been given the credence that their personal experience demands. Adam Kirsch: Yes. And, one of the things I talk about in the book is, there's a scholar who writes about the subject named D. W. Pasulka, an American academic, Diana Pasulka, and she writes about something called a 'book experience.' The 'book experience' is: People who have had things that happened to them and they don't understand what they were, read a book about UFOs. And then, they understand that what happened to them was they saw a UFO. So, it's like: you have an experience that you can't interpret, and then the concept of UFOs and aliens allows you to interpret it. It gives you the vocabulary to interpret it. Other people might find the vocabulary to interpret things that happened to them in religion or mysticism. These people say, 'Now I realize that what happened to me was I saw a UFO. I saw an alien. I was taken aboard a spaceship.' And, it gives you clarity. It gives you a way to make meaning out of your experiences, which is something that we all want and need. So, if someone incorporates that idea very deeply into their sense of self and into their worldview, but it's an idea that most people think is ridiculous, it puts them in a strange position where most people don't take them seriously or don't listen to them. And, I think that that's why, for a lot of people who do believe in UFOs, the idea of disclosure is so important. So, you mentioned Close Encounters. The most recent Steven Spielberg movie, which is also about aliens, is called Disclosure Day. It's not as good as Close Encounters, I don't think. But, it's about the idea that the government has a bunch of evidence, like, video evidence of UFOs and aliens dating back to the 1940s. And, a couple of brave whistleblowers are trying to leak these videos and get them out into public. And, that's something that in the UFO world is called 'disclosure.' Disclosure is: The government is hiding these secrets; one day they will be disclosed, they'll be revealed, and everyone will see all along that the believers were right and the skeptics were wrong. So, the idea that you want some evidence, some vindication, is a big part of, I think, what feeds this UFO discourse. |
| 28:57 | Russ Roberts: And, the last thing I'll say about this, and then we'll turn to the scientific community--which is, in a way, much more disturbing and fascinating than the layperson's beliefs in this. Again, I'm a religious person. I have a lot of respect for religion. But, what strikes me in reading your summary, which is very artfully done--again, it's very respectful of the people who have had experiences like this--and despite the fact that there's no, quote, "real evidence," the persistence of that is just, for me, another brick in the wall of my view that human beings aren't so interested in the truth. The truth won't set you free. The truth is depressing a lot of the time, and it's more pleasant to think about other things. Now, you confessed earlier that it would be amazing and extraordinary and world-changing if aliens visited humans or we could get direct evidence of some confirmable kind of their presence. But, you looked into it, you spent some time doing research for this book, and you have to confess that, well, the evidence isn't there. Most people don't want to dig. And, I just think about this moment, coming back to what I said earlier about the extraordinary amount of information we have and yet how uninformed we are. One of the reasons we're uninformed: it's really hard to know what information's reliable and what information is not. In the old days, the gatekeepers were the experts of that information. They were sometimes reliable and often not. And, we've now come to this place where there are no really credible gatekeepers anymore. I'm sure some people look to you. Sometimes people--I'm embarrassed by it--but people look to me. They trust me because they've heard me talk about things and they assume I'm a person of good faith in examining things. And, we're all flawed as human beings. There's no reliable source that can be perfectly trusted because we're all human. And, I just think this moment is so extraordinary in that way. Yes, there have been times in the past where we struggled--always--where we didn't know what was true and what was untrue. But, I feel that we've become unmoored in a certain way in 2026, where the amount of effort it takes to figure out--just to take a--you can pick almost any example in modern days. I'll pick something that's not controversial: Whether Argentina behaved well or badly in the World Cup. Well, there's a whole bunch of people who want you to think they behaved badly. And then, there's a bunch of people who want to defend Argentina. And, as an outsider who is not deeply immersed in football, I'm sort of interested in it, but I don't really have any idea what's true. And, that's true of so many things these days. And it's troubling. Adam Kirsch: Yeah, that's definitely true. And, it's one of the reasons why I think it's not a coincidence that UFOs had this upsurge of interest at just the same moment as a lot of populist movements in politics, in economics-- Russ Roberts: Conspiracy theories-- Adam Kirsch: conspiracy theories about COVID [Coronavirus Disease] and populist politics. I talk a little bit about Brexit because Brexit was an example where every economist, or 98% of economists, said, 'This is going to be very bad for us. We shouldn't do this,' in Britain said, 'This is going to be bad for us to leave the European Union. We shouldn't do it.' And, yet voters approved it anyway. They didn't believe or want to listen to, they didn't care about what the expert said. They said, 'We want to do this.' Similarly with COVID, experts said, 'Take this vaccine. It'll stop you from getting COVID.' And, a surprising number of people said, 'I don't believe you. I'm not going to take it. I would rather take a horse de-worming medicine. Which is also a medicine. It's just that it's not the medicine you, the expert, told me to take. It's a medicine that someone on social media told me to take.' So, it seems to me that what's at the bottom of this is, who has the right to tell me what to do? Who has the right to make up my mind for me? And, I think that people don't like the idea that someone else is telling them what to do or telling them what they should think and not think. And, just the very fact of being told, 'This is what you must think. This is what you must do,' for a lot of us provokes a reaction: 'Well, I'm not going to do it just because you told me to do it. I want to do what I want to do. And, if that's something that you think is wrong, I don't care.' So, yes, I mean, there are still, I think, trustworthy gatekeepers about the news. It's just that, for example, like, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or--as a journalist, of course I would say that. But, having worked in some of these places, I've seen from the inside and can say that people who work at these places really do take quite seriously the idea that they're telling the truth, that they're finding out what really happened. People outside who don't trust the mainstream media have no faith in that. And they say, you're serving some agenda; you're trying to serve someone's interest. So, I think there are some, at least, gatekeepers out there. The problem is people don't believe in gatekeeping or gatekeepers. And then, another problem is just the convenience of it. By far the most convenient way to find out what's going on in the world is, especially for young people, you open TikTok, scroll through it, and you'll find dozens of people giving you a little spiel about what's happening in the world. The problem is, those people don't necessarily know. They could be completely ignorant. They could be telling you lies out of some self-interested reason. So, if you don't have any standard for evaluating the claims that you're getting, it does create a pretty bad situation. I think people are uninformed about a lot of things that they ought to know better about, that it would be better if we all could agree, at least, on some guides to reality. |
| 34:53 | Russ Roberts: Yeah. I'll just finish this with an observation that when I think about the lessons that we should have learned, it's one thing to learn a lesson and then forget it. That's very human. And, it's very true of humanity writ large. I've just become very aware of the fact that certain fads and trends just come back over and over and over again. Because, I interviewed Milton Friedman in 2006, and I actually made this claim that, because there was no demand for price controls at that time when gas prices had gone up a lot, that showed that economic education was effective. And he laughed at me and said, 'No, no, no. It's because there are a lot of people alive who were alive in the 1970s and remember how horrible they were. And, when they die off, there'll be a demand for price controls.' And, now we have a demand for rent control in New York City with great popularity and so on. The other example would be the Great Depression. My father was born in 1930. He never bought a stock. He only bought bonds. A terrible decision in my view. But, it was impossible for him. Stocks were dangerous. His parents had been troubled, had challenges, his relatives, because of the crash in the stock market, and they talked about it all the time. So, I get that. I get that we forget things. But, that we don't learn things to start with is a different level of failure. So, if you said, what are the lessons of the financial crisis of 2008? Most people would pick whatever their ideological bent is and wave it around like a hammer. If you ask people, what's our lesson from the COVID virus? It's the same thing. Now, I do think that people who lived through COVID will be skeptical of the idea, say, of closing schools and keeping kids at home. But, it very well could be the case that that's the wrong lesson to learn about the next virus--because it actually could be really bad for kids because this one was relatively safe for kids. I just think it's fascinating to me how hard it is for us as a species to learn lessons and remember them. Adam Kirsch: Yeah; no, definitely. And, part of the problem is maybe the distinction between facts and interpretations, or facts and how we respond to facts. It's one thing to say, COVID, we shouldn't have closed schools or there shouldn't have been mask mandates, which I think at the time experts said we have to close schools, we have to have mask mandates. And now, in retrospect, I think there's a lot of evidence that we didn't need to do those things. But, the idea that COVID was caused by a certain coronavirus is a fact. So, distinguishing between facts and how you respond to facts--there's always going to be disagreements of opinions about actions and policies, but if people can't even agree on the basic facts of what happened, of reality, of existence, then you can't even have those discussions. And, one thing that I realized on a deeper level in thinking about the subject of UFOs is that most--I mean, I think of myself as a scientifically literate and rational person--but when I thought about, well, how do we know, how did people discover that the Earth rotates around the sun and not vice versa? And, I started to look into, to read about, what did Copernicus, what did Galileo--in fact, it's an extremely complicated idea, and the proof of it is not at all clear. So, you have to really do a lot of thinking even to understand that level of scientific fact. So, basically, when most of us say the Earth revolves around the sun, what we mean is we've always been taught the Earth revolves around the Sun, and we trust the people who taught us that. So, if you don't trust the people who are teaching you things, then you have almost no basis for understanding reality. Russ Roberts: I would just say one thing about that, which is: Usually--it's a little more complicated than this--but usually the people who are telling you that the Earth goes around the Sun and not vice versa are not going to profit from misleading you. So, you have a certain, perhaps naive, trust in them. The reason it's a little naive is that, while they don't profit from it, they might have a worldview or, not an ideology, but a scientific framework that they've become accustomed to, that is part of their sense of self, their prestige in their profession. So, it's just really hard. Let's leave it at that. Adam Kirsch: Yeah. Well, to bring it back to UFOs. One of the common things that UFO believers say is--one of the rhetorical strategies is--we are actually more scientific than the scientists. Because, the definition of, they would say, of science is you keep an open mind and evaluate the evidence. And, whenever we come to the scientists and say, 'I saw a UFO,' they won't listen to us at all. They won't consider the evidence. So, by dismissing the evidence out of hand, by saying that couldn't possibly be a UFO, they're not being scientific. So, the anti-scientific people are the more scientific than the actual scientists. And, I write about this in the book as to where that idea comes from. And, the idea of a paradigm shift: that everyone believes that the world operates one way until you get this anomaly. And, the anomaly shows that the existing framework has to be changed. There are a lot of people who would say, well, UFOs are a paradigm shift like that. We have to go beyond Western scientific rationalism and acknowledge that there are dimensions of reality that can't be explained that way. That's part of the appeal of it for a lot of people, is to say there are things that science doesn't know that we know better. Russ Roberts: Yeah, I would not go that far, personally. And yet, I have a certain respect for that viewpoint. I think it's a rhetorical position to some extent. But, the idea that we should be open-minded about it--obviously, again as a religious person, I've confronted so many people who just assume--they're not interested in hearing anything, talk to you about it at all, they just know you're a crank. By definition, you're an irrational moron. And, it's been--we don't have to go into the details--but the examples we've been talking about, COVID and the response to COVID, both the medical and the social response to it, a lot of people were pretty close-minded about it. And, we found out later that they knew that, that they were protecting either themselves or their reputation or they wanted power. Again, it's a complicated thing. |
| 41:14 | Russ Roberts: I want to go to the scientists because, in a way, as I said a minute ago, in a way it's more fascinating and disturbing that the scientific community has become more open. So, while they do not accept the person who, and perhaps are disrespectful of a person who has claimed to have been whisked into a spaceship and experimented on for a length of time, they have their own need, like the lay people we've been talking about, to believe that there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. So, let's talk about that first. Where does that come from? Why do scientists--and when I say scientists, the most prominent one in your book is Avi Loeb, who is an astrophysicist at Harvard, those are two--that's about as good as you get. Astrophysicist at Harvard is not a small thing. And yet, he wrote a book and talks about a UAP, an anomalous phenomenon, that he made the case for it coming from an intelligent source somewhere else. What's going on? First, talk about the philosophical questions we're dealing with. And, how is it possible that scientists have become evangelists, to pick a deliberately pointed word for this viewpoint? Adam Kirsch: Well, Avi Loeb is definitely an outlier, and I'll talk about him, but first I'll talk about the wider question. So, until, say, the mid-20th century, the assumption of scientifically minded, free-thinking, progressive people in the West was: there must be intelligent life on other planets. And, that was a deductive process, which is: the only reason to think that Earth is special is if you believe that God created Earth for special reasons. And, that's the traditional religious or biblical idea, that God created our planet to be the home of humanity, has a special interest in our planet. Starting with the scientific revolution, scientifically-minded people started to say, well, what Copernicus taught us is that Earth is just another planet. Earth is not the center of the universe. It's one of many planets. It's one of eight planets, we now say, revolving around the sun. And, so, if there's nothing special about Earth, there's no special reason why there should be life on Earth and nowhere else. So, if you look at philosophers-- Russ Roberts: And, don't forget Darwin. Adam Kirsch: And, don't forget Darwin. So, if you look at philosophers and natural scientists in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, the sign of being a smart, progressive thinker was to say there are definitely intelligent life on other planets. Immanuel Kant said that. He wrote about it. I talk about other philosophers who wrote about this in the Enlightenment. Alfred Russel Wallace, in the early 20th century, who was known as the rival to Darwin or the person who came up with the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin, was one of the first people to say, 'Well, actually, maybe it's not that simple. Maybe we could have a scientific universe, and still there might only be life on Earth.' But, most people would say, by the logic of Copernicanism or perspectivism, there's nothing special about Earth. There's no reason why life can only be on Earth. And, if we could only see other planets, we would find people like us or intelligent beings like us on other planets. That was sort of, like, a common idea. And so, in the mid-20th century, when it became possible for the first time to actually observe other planets using radio astronomy and then space probes and spacecraft and deep-space observatories, and we found that, in fact, there isn't intelligent life on any of the planets in our solar system. And, as far as we can tell, we have never found evidence of intelligent life outside of our solar system either, or even of any kind of life yet. That upset the standard scientific worldview, which was: there's nothing special about life on Earth. So, now it turns out that, as far as we know in the year 2026, it actually--there is something special about life on Earth, which is that there's no life anywhere else that we know of. We have yet to find evidence of life anywhere else. So, what I say in the book is that for lay people, the problem is that UFOs have been seen. And, for scientists, the problem is that UFOs haven't been seen. Because, there's no real reason to explain why that is. So, what I talk about in the second half of the book is the scientific attempt to understand: Why is intelligent life seemingly much more rare than we once thought that it was? And Avi Loeb, who became prominent--and maybe among scientists notorious--for saying that some of the things that have come into our solar system from outside of our solar system might be technological--that they're not just rocks, but they might be--his example is a light sail, a sail from an alien spacecraft designed to capture the force of light to propel it. Even Avi Loeb doesn't say that's definitely what this is. What he says is--so to go back to the parallel to religion, there's a famous idea known as Pascal's wager. The Christian thinker Pascal said, 'We should believe in God just on the logic of a bet, because if God exists and you believe in him, you win eternal life. And if he doesn't exist and you believe in him, you haven't really lost anything.' So, just on calculating what's of benefit to you, what are the best odds, you should believe in God. Avi Loeb says, drawing a direct comparison, there was this thing that came into our solar system called ?Oumuamua, which was the first object that was ever confirmed to come from outside of our solar system. It was the first thing that scientists said, based on its orbit and trajectory, we know this thing is not orbiting the Sun; it must have come from somewhere else. He says: We should make ?Oumuamua's wager. We should say, even if this thing isn't alien technology, we should act as if it is alien technology because then we'll take seriously the idea of aliens. We will develop tools to detect aliens and alien technology so that the next time, if there really is alien technology, we'll be able to find it. The thing about Avi Loeb that I think has made him suspicious to a lot of astronomers and other scientists is that he has since found, like, two or three more examples of this. And, he's starting to say that lots of things are alien technology or could be alien technology. Again, he never comes right down and says this is definitely an alien spaceship. What he says is, well, this other interstellar object could also be alien technology or-- Russ Roberts: It's anomalous-- Adam Kirsch: It's anomalous, right. Or that it have this other explanation. And, that annoys other scientists because, in fact, there isn't sufficient reason to say that. But, he wants to keep open this possibility. He wants to allow us to keep thinking about it. |
| 48:16 | Russ Roberts: And, just to come back to this question of this belief--this presumption--that there's life everywhere, by the way, not just there might be one other sentient creature in the universe. That it must be frequent. You know, it's the Law of Large Numbers. There's 1-with-22-zeros after it, roughly, stars. Many of them will have planets around them. So, the denominator is very large. And, presumably, there's no reason they wouldn't have some kind of life. And, we'll come back in a minute: we'll talk about how you might think about what the odds of that are, and so on. But, the other, of course--it's very much like religion or a hypothesis that cannot be refuted--is if people say, 'Well, why haven't they visited us? Or why haven't we found evidence?' The answer is: 'Well, it's far away.' And, it is far away, which is a fascinating reality as far as we understand science. If you lived in primitive times, the stars looked like maybe some kind of circle, a sphere that was around the Earth that had points of light; and, when we start to realize the distances. You quote Pascal: "Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie." I think I got it right. It's the most pretentious thing I know. Sorry, I had to get it in there. 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.' When people start--and that was then. That was Pascal, 1600s maybe. When we think about what we know now, not only is the universe so vast, not only is every piece of it moving away from any kind of center, there's a cosmic sense of loneliness and despair. So, on the one hand: Oh, they're out there, but we just can't communicate with them because they're really far away. But, in another sense: If they're that far away, it almost doesn't matter because we're going to be alone. And, it's really hard for people to deal with that. Which is fascinating in and of itself. So, talk about that because I have my own view on it. I'd love to hear what you have to say. Adam Kirsch: Yeah. No, well, so what you say about the number of planets or our knowledge of how big the universe is--and so when, in medieval times or early modern times, when people thought the number of planets is five, because those are the ones that you can see with an unaided eye. So, there are five planets. And then, when telescopes were developed, people discovered planets beyond Jupiter and Saturn, and that there are actually eight or nine, as we used to say, now eight. And then, as time goes on and we get a better sense that the universe is so large and potentially infinite, that there is a truly staggering number of potential planets. So, if the number of planets goes from five to something like a sextillion or septillion, which is what current estimates are, then the odds of there being life on one of those planets seem to be enormous. However, the number of planets where we actually know that there's life is exactly the same: One. And that's ours. So, if the denominator gets really huge and the numerator is still one, then you start to think, well, maybe life is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly rare. It's inconceivably rare. And so, that changes the way that we think about ourselves as a species, that: What if we're this lonely outpost of life and intelligence in a completely dead universe that goes on infinitely in every direction? And so, then that's one possibility. Another possibility is: What if life does exist elsewhere, but it's so rare that it's basically, it's effectively alone in time or space? That it happens so infrequently in time or space that one civilization, one intelligent being, will never encounter another one? So, first of all, how would you know the difference between those two things? Because, if you can't see or contact something, how do you know it exists? What would be the proof of it? And then, what does that mean for us in our sense of our future? One of the big revelations or transformations of modern science in the way that humanity thinks about itself in the 19th century was the idea of extinction--the idea that there are species that have lived on Earth before us that went extinct. And, that the same thing is going to happen to us: One day our species will go extinct. If we're the only species that has a mind, if we're the only species that thinks, that explores the universe, that's capable of science or religion or all the things that we think of as distinctively human, and then we're going to go extinct, that means all those things are going to disappear. And that's a conclusion that I think all of us see with dread and want to resist. So, how can we escape that conclusion? Is there a way around it? Are there ways that we could think about life and intelligence that would keep us from being the only outpost of it in the entire universe? That's one of the things that I think motivates scientists. That's one of the reasons why scientists really dislike the idea that we are alone in the universe and want to find some way around that conclusion. Two basic ways around that conclusion are to find life somewhere else. And, I talk a bit about the attempts that are going on to do that. The other is to become the life somewhere else: to leave our planet, to spread ourselves across the galaxy. And, that's something that motivates someone like Elon Musk. Elon Musk quite explicitly has always said, 'The reason why I want to develop all these space technologies is so that humanity won't be bound to one planet. We'll put ourselves on Mars, and from there we'll go elsewhere, and eventually we'll colonize the universe.' |
| 53:50 | Russ Roberts: So, I've never understood this, and maybe it's just my blind spot. There are many religious scientists, but let's take the ones who purport to not believe in any kind of God, who are purely materialist: 'There's no mysteries in the universe that we will not eventually plumb. Except for maybe the first Planck time. Otherwise, we're going to find everything out eventually.' Why does it matter if we're alone? Why does it matter? I mean, really, who cares? If you're a believer, if you think God has a purpose for the universe or for human beings, which even as a believer I think is a bit presumptuous. But, there is a certain feeling that there's something to appeal to. If there's nothing to appeal to, if we are alone, why does it matter that we spread ourselves? Why does it matter that we're the only sentient creature that is aware of its place in the universe, that develops, say, Fermat's Last Theorem? What's the point? And, why is the point redeemed if there's some other randomly--again, if you're not a believer, it's just another piece of random carbon- or not-carbon-based life, a zillion light years away that we can't talk to or can. Doesn't matter. I mean, again, why don't you just take comfort that they're there and you can't reach them? Would that make you feel better if you're a pure materialist? Explain that. I don't get it. Adam Kirsch: Because I think that it actually matters more if you don't believe in God--if you don't believe in a transcendent dimension, if everything is material or natural in some way. And, as far as we know, there's nothing that thinks except us. If you believe that thought is important and understanding is important, then it's up to us to preserve it. That there is no divine understanding, there's no transcendent understanding, there's only human understanding. So, if understanding matters, it's up to us to make sure that it survives. So, then the question is: Does anything matter at all? Where does the idea of mattering come from? And, there are definitely people who say that it only makes sense for something to truly matter if it matters to God. Only God can be the source of meaning. But, if you don't believe in God, you still have an instinct for meaning. So, then the question is, where does that meaning come from? It could only come from us. Meaning only comes from human beings. We decide if things have meaning. And, we have decided--and especially for people like scientists or technology people, for whom intelligence and mind is how they think about themselves and that's what matters most to them--the idea that the universe could exist and there would be no mind in it, no one to see it or understand it, it would just be dead, dead matter for eternity, is terrifying. It would be like an eternity of meaninglessness. So, then-- Russ Roberts: But, isn't that the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition? I mean, isn't that because these people have, for better, for worse, grown up in a culture and a civilization that--why should that matter? I don't get it. Adam Kirsch: I think that you have to-- Russ Roberts: Why should meaning matter? Why should we care about meaning? It seems silly. That comes from our religious heritage. If you don't believe in religion, you should just push that aside. And, why would it matter whether thinking is preserved? How would you justify that? Adam Kirsch: I think the answer is: mattering is something that only happens with human beings. And so, it's the same answer as morality. Why is it important to do what's good instead of what's evil? One answer is because God told us to. But, if God didn't tell us to, then what are the other answers? People who don't believe God told us to still believe in good and evil. They still want things to happen and other things not to happen. But, they would say that the basis of that is us. It's not God: it's us. We are the ones who decide for whom it matters that there's good rather than evil. We're the ones for whom it matters whether there's mind in the universe or not. And, in fact, on a sort of materialist view, that has always been the case. I mean, there's never really been any other point of view except ours. A human being can have no point of view except a human point of view. And so, if something matters, it means it matters for us. And, I think that's the answer. It matters for us because it matters for us. And, we are the kind of creature for whom it matters, or we have decided that it matters, but that there's no better explanation than that. Russ Roberts: Yeah, I don't find that persuasive. But, a topic for another conversation. |
| 58:25 | Russ Roberts: I want to move on to two other parts of the scientific response to this question, which I thought were extremely interesting. The first is: We spent and have spent, maybe we're still spending--you'll know and I've forgotten, but you write about it--we spent a lot of time on radio transmission: sending out radio signals, receiving radio signals. We sent out, I think--was it Voyager we sent out into the--I forget which mission it was-- Adam Kirsch: Yes, Voyager, yeah, One and Two-- Russ Roberts: with all kinds of things that we thought, if someone found them, they would understand that we cared--which obviously we do, by the way, regardless of whether it's rational or not, I think we do care. I don't mean to suggest that that's--I was doing a reductio ad absurdum there. But, you make the fantastic point, which I just never thought about, which is: a civilization that's capable of communicating over enormous numbers of light years and have reached a--if human beings were able to avoid extinction for a million years, presumably we'd be able to do a bunch of things in a million years from now that we can't do now. Extraordinary things that we can't, of course, imagine. But, we probably wouldn't be using radio waves. So, the window for detecting radio transmissions is something akin to finding a horse-drawn carriage. There's a period where they exist, but after that it's left behind, and it's not going to be the fingerprint of intelligence anymore. Fascinating to me. I never thought about it. Adam Kirsch: Yeah. And, one thing I say in the book is that when we talk about aliens--non-human intelligence--we're always talking about ourselves. We're always drawing our own self-portrait. Because until and unless we actually find an alien, there's absolutely nothing for us to talk about except our own experience, what comes out of our own experience. So, one thing that you see over the last 75 years in the so-called space age is that our ideas about what the future looks like, what an advanced civilization might look like, is based on changes in our own civilization, our own ideas about technology. So, in the 1950s, when radio astronomy was first invented and developed, people thought, 'Well, of course aliens out there will be so advanced that they'll also have radio astronomy, and we'll be able to pick up their signals.' Then as time went on and we didn't hear any radio signals--and we still haven't, although there are some people listening for them--people started to say, 'Well, actually, if you look at what's happening on Earth, we're using fewer radio signals, radio transmissions, and everything is fiber optic cables.' Maybe in the future, a really advanced technology would basically be invisible because they would be so advanced, their technology would be so shrunk down and so dense, and every bit would contain meaning, that it would essentially disappear from the sky. Instead of being bigger, it would be smaller. That's a reflection of the way our technology has developed. And, one of the unknowable things about this is, as long as you have a sample of one, you don't know whether what's happened to humanity is a rule or an exception. There are all kinds of reasons to think that the development of advanced intelligence on Earth was extremely, extremely unlikely. So, instead of taking it as, this is something that's going to happen everywhere at some point, just by the odds because there's so many planets, you could also argue the contrary case, which is: this is something that almost never happens. And, it's so rare that we will never come across another example of it because there are so many prerequisites for intelligent life to evolve that all of them aren't going to come together except on very, very rare occasions. Russ Roberts: Yeah. And, you talk about the Drake Equation, which is an attempt to try to vaguely quantify some of these things. I found this fascinating--the idea that life on Earth probably needed a moon, something like our Moon, meaning eventually became roundish, very close to something more sphere-like rather than just some crazy rock or oblong thing. The idea that plate tectonics might be important to the development of life. These are not things that we've thought about, but people are increasingly thinking about them and realizing that it's a little more complicated than it seemed. Adam Kirsch: Yes. And, there's this whole field called astrobiology, which is, again, a contradiction in terms because we have never encountered any biology among the stars. We've only encountered biology on Earth. But, astrobiology is really an attempt to think about that question of what are the prerequisites of life and under what conditions could life exist? So, right now, the general rule of thumb is we know that on Earth there's no life without liquid water. So, the places we should look are planets where there could be liquid water. And, that means they have to be the so-called Goldilocks planets. If they're too close to a star, the water all dissolves and evaporates. If they're too far from a star, the water all freezes and becomes ice. So, you want to look for planets that are within a certain distance range from a star so there could be liquid water. And, that is just the most basic rule of thumb: No liquid water, no life. But, that doesn't mean that where there's liquid water, there is life. It doesn't go the other way around. It's a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. And, as we come to learn more about biology and about the history of life on Earth, all kinds of things that you would never intuitively think of as necessary for life, people are starting to say, well, maybe we need not just liquid water, but a moon. And, maybe we don't just need a moon, but we need Jupiter. Because if it weren't for Jupiter, Earth would be constantly bombarded by asteroids and comets and things from outer space, and it would keep destroying life on Earth. The fact that that only happens, if rarely, in the history of Earth is because we have this big planet that's outside and has a big gravitational pull that's taking these things away from us. So, if you had a planet just like Earth, but it didn't have a Jupiter near it, that planet would just be destroyed repeatedly by impacts, and life couldn't evolve there. So, there are all kinds of interesting ways to think about that, that, as science progresses, makes life actually seem rarer and more unique rather than more common. |
| 1:04:43 | Russ Roberts: Yeah. One thing that's beautiful about this whole field, mainly from the scientific perspective, is it forces you to think about how limited our knowledge is. And, we learn more and more in trying to--this is to give Avi Loeb his due--when we start to think about, if we're open to it, there are certain things we might not otherwise learn. And of course, the other part of it is we're so limited by the one data point. When we think about aliens--you pointed out there's an alien emoji. It's a long head with weird little black, slitted eyes, and we assume it would look something like us. Maybe have extra fingers or maybe it'd be tall or really tall or really short. But that's the best we can do. Our understanding of consciousness is so primitive and of intelligence is so primitive, we really can't even think--I think it's hard to think carefully about what form it might take if it weren't developed on Earth. Adam Kirsch: Definitely. We're always the model for what we're imagining. And, it's hard to see how it could be otherwise. We are thinking from a position of: We're humans on Earth. We don't know about anything else, any other kind of experience or life except that of humans or maybe animals or other living things on Earth. So, when we think about what does it mean to be an intelligent being, we think it's something like us. And, how could we imagine something that's not like us? That's very different from us? It's extremely challenging because it's so different. It's hard to imagine something totally different from what we know. |
| 1:06:28 | Russ Roberts: I want to close with--well, one other thing, sorry, one other thing I want to get in, which is so interesting. This 2015 speech by Stephen Hawking, that communicating with aliens--which I think there's an enormous, obviously bifurcated, sci-fi literature of aliens come to Earth and kill us, and aliens come to Earth and cure cancer and do good things. People like to be scared, so I think most of them are on the negative side. But, coming back to Steven Spielberg, E.T. is a love story. E.T. is about how glorious it would be to have any kind of communion with an alien creature. And, Hawking said, 'That probably shouldn't be our default.' What was his argument? It's fascinating. Adam Kirsch: Yes. I mean, there's definitely an argument which says that--I think what Hawking said specifically is that it could be more like Europe discovering the New World and conquering it and invading it and destroying it. So, if we invite the attention of a technologically advanced species and it comes to Earth, and it's much more technologically advanced than we are, it could just wipe us out, and there would be nothing we could do about it. That's one way of looking at it. And then, in H.G. Wells, in The War of the Worlds, thought of it even more as like the way we think about germs. Aliens might think about us the way we think about germs or bacteria. Like, they wouldn't even think of us as something to spare or have any concern for at all. They would just go on their way, do what they want to do, and we would pay the price for it. So, the idea of, would aliens be benevolent, is something that we always think about, but until we actually meet an alien, there's no way to know. Russ Roberts: And, I would just add, it reminds me of your point about we're limited by our own understanding of ourselves. Using the--Stephen Hawking is a very smart man, high IQ [intelligence quotient]--but using the European destruction of the Aztec, say, which was horrific, is maybe not the best. It's a data point for sure, but something that was so technologically advanced, had survived extinction, maybe they won't think of us as bacteria. Maybe they'll think about us the way vegans think about dogs. Adam Kirsch: Right, no, it's completely impossible to know. It all depends on what metaphor you want to use. |
| 1:08:55 | Russ Roberts: Okay. So, close with a quote. Perhaps that is what humanity really needs from extraterrestrials: not conclusive proof of their existence, but a sense of possibility. In an age when scientific knowledge has banished naive belief in divine and demonic beings, aliens are the last remaining candidate for other minds to share the universe with us. They are immanent, existing in the real physical world, but also transcendent, experiencing reality in ways we can hardly imagine. They relieve us of our single-handed responsibility for the survival of mind and so of the universe's meaning and value. They preserve a horizon of genuine mystery in a cosmos increasingly laid bare to scientific explanation. End of quote. Just reflect on that. Adam Kirsch: Yeah. I think that that gets to this question of why do we want to believe in aliens? That, there's a place in our map of the universe that we want there to be something there. We want there to be something other than us there. And, for people for whom that space is not occupied by God or anything supernatural, it can only be occupied by something natural. Aliens is a way to answer that question. It's a way of saying: Here's something that doesn't require religious belief, but it does for us a lot of what religious belief would do. It opens up the universe. It gives us something to hope for and to communicate with and another kind of mind. And, I think that that's why it appeals to a lot of people--a lot of thoughtful people--who would like for there to be something like that in the universe. Who want that horizon of mystery, who want the sense that we don't know everything. There's things we don't know. There's another step for us to take. And so, I think, in the end, I came away from writing this book with a respect for the desire for aliens, a respect for the desire to believe in aliens. It's something that I think we don't have grounds for proving. I mean, I would say we still have to believe because we don't have evidence. But, I understand why people want to believe in that. And, I think it's a worthy belief. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Adam Kirsch. His book is We Want to Believe. Adam, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Adam Kirsch: Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it. |
Has the earth been visited by extraterrestrials? Are we alone? Despite no formal evidence for conscious life outside of earth, the belief that we are not alone has become more common among both scientists and everyday people. Listen as author Adam Kirsch talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the urge to believe that there are sentient beings elsewhere in the universe and that these aliens want to connect with human beings. Topics discussed include why belief in extraterrestrials has become more mainstream, existential loneliness, religion, extinction, and Elon Musk's desire to get to Mars.
READER COMMENTS
Shalom Freedman
Aug 24 2026 at 9:06am
We are no longer alone in one sense. We have created the aliens who are extremely intelligent and whose future development and meaning for us is uncertain. AI is in many ways more interesting than any aliens we have dreamed of.
However in surpassing us already in so many ways it too may make many of us feel less unique and even more lonely.
I would also add that there is no real replacemet for a personal God Who loves and cares for each one of us.
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