I appreciate some of his content but have a few bones to pick: He often fails to articulate how the speed of light affects our visibility to other intelligent life in the galaxy as well as the visibility of other intelligent life to us. He was asked a question about whether intelligent civilizations 1000 light years away would be able to detect us, and he said yes, mentioning radio signals, without clarifying that it would take 1000 years for a radio signal from earth to reach a civilization that was 1000 light years away. We have only been transmitting radio signals for around 100 years, which means that, in terms of radio signals, we wouldn’t be visible to a civilization 1000 light years away. He seems like a very intelligent host, so even if this isn’t a failure of understanding, as a science communicator, he should still do a better job of addressing these common misconceptions. In addition, he often says something akin to “we’ve looked but haven’t found anything,” which again misrepresents the true scope of our search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It’s a failure to acknowledge the minuscule fraction of the universe we’ve actually surveyed and makes assumptions about the technosignatures we should expect to find (Dyson spheres). Lastly his assertion that intelligence is somehow “inevitable” because it’s evolutionarily advantageous, thereby precluding the existence of any other life in the galaxy, is again faulty reasoning. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 160 million years, after all. All in all, he often argues from unexamined assumptions.
