Seth Shostak, Jacques Valet, Jacques discussed on Lex Fridman Podcast
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
And Seth shostak have come out rightfully and have said, when you show up with something really obviously technology that we don't understand, then we'll pay attention. Not just material. Not just material, a piece of metal is interesting, but and several of the things that I've looked at and things that people other things that people have come to me with. We found to be completely banal or we're actually pieces of aircraft that were invented back in the 1940s. And so take them off the table. I think again, I think showing up with technology that humans would find completely novel is actually a really difficult task for aliens because it obviously can't be so novel that we don't recognize it for what it is. For what it is. And so and I would say most of the technology aliens likely have would be something we don't recognize. So it's actually a hard problem how to convince ants like you first have to understand what ants are tweeting about. What they care about in order to inject into their culture because that's why I think it would be the technology that you could present as in the space of ideas is try to influence individual humans with the encounters and try to with this kind of thing that you mentioned about us not taking messages about us not taking care of the world. It's difficult to for them to understand you have to come up with trinkets that impress us. Maybe the very technology the fascination with the development of technology and the development of technology, the actual act of innovation itself is the thing that their communicating. This is kind of what Jacques valet thinks about. It's the role of control system he calls it. The control system. Well, let me ask about Jacques. Who is he, you know him who's Jacques vallee. What have you learned from him? About life about. You if I was about technology, but our role in the universe. Well, I met Jacques, actually, soon after the whole Atacama thing happened. I was visited by those people associated with the government and whatever around the havanas, what ended up mostly being Havana syndrome patients, but also Jacques at the same time. And they were actually working behind the scenes with each other, said, oh, here's this Stanford professor who is willing to talk about this stuff and investigate things. Maybe we should go talk to him. And he reached out through a colleague and I had lunch actually at the rosewood in up on near sandhill. So Jacques is one of the first openly active scientists and he's really a scientist in this area. Going back to the 1960s and he's put forward a number of ideas speculations about what it might be that people are interacting with. And the first thing that I learned from him is this notion of what he called kabuki theater. That many of the things that people have seen are I remember reading his books and thinking, he uses this word absurd a lot. The things that people claim they see are absurd. Right? A ship doesn't land.