Could you imagine being a fishbowl alien in a crewed scientific mission to find out what is above the ironic 'great wall of ice opposite of gravity' only to finally breach the surface and your instruments seem to indicate that there is an endless hostile void.
They can still do physics experiments and discover that light exists and build telescopes to properly observe things. Space is quite hostile for humans too, so having an off planet hostile void doesn't distinguish us from the fishes.
@tim I think the argument here is that It's a lot less likely for them to develop high functioning brains since as far as we can tell most of our intelligence jumped after we discovered fire. cooking food gave us extra calories to spend on organs like our brain.
@@VladimirZharkov Good point. I wish we knew with confidence what caused intelligence. I have heard that maybe intelligence was a fitness display and we are only differently ridiculous from peacocks, not fundamentally better. I have heard that maybe you need a lot of cooperating neurons to be able to throw an object and hit a target because the randomness of the individual neurons far exceeds the required accuracy of the throwing action. It might also have to do with fire. I can see instincts in myself that want to avoid turning away from active automation that probably came from my ancestors not turning away from a fire and therefore not burning to death in their houses, so fire did clearly drive natural selection.
Somewhere else in the universe Fishbowl Anton talks about a hypothetical rock world with gas atmosphere. They would have difficulty communicating longer distances so they would have problem development technology and probably cant phantom long distance communication. They could see the sky all the time and with no wall, hiding spece, to drive curiosity they would not have any drive to explore further. Also space exploration would be very difficult because they would need to bring the atmosphere made by volatile gases with them.
yeah, all the arguments of the paper are very weak, specially the one about gravity making space travel impossible, how does the author know they wouldn't just use nukes or antimatter as fuel to achieve the scape velocity?
Yeah unless their physics are different or using a completely unknown method of communication that wouldn't happen, we know how sound carries in atmosphere and underwater since we have both and know the mechanics of it. Why would they have eyes if they lived under an ice sheet, what 'wall' hiding space, they would more likely consider their fishbowl to be the entire universe, sonar might work well underwater but if they penetrate the ice with and there is literally nothing beyond it... How exactly would they get their ships filled with water off their planet and then have to heat them constantly to prevent them from becoming giant ice coffins that expand and break apart as the heat quickly dissipates in space, air is a much better insulator than water is. No, what much more likely or probable is that the first species we meet in space would be some kind of bird species or mammals much like us and they will probably have some sort of eyes and the very reason they have the curiousity required to go the space is because many times in their infancy they sat around a campfire or what they have that passes for trees and looked up in the sky and saw comets or meteorites and went "oh what's that! I wonder what's up there....". Is there fishbowl worlds? VERY likely. Is there fishbowl space explorers? VERY unlikely.
@@igoralmeida9136 "hey, we cant use fire and we don't really have reliable source of fuel. Can we skip those and get nukes and hypothetical antimatter engines ?" somehow for me your argument sounds even weaker
We have a really special world. The mass of the Earth and its gravity is just right so we have some atmosphere but it's thin enough that we can see the stars. We have ocean and land and a large nearby moon, so we have tides and tidal zones where amphibians can evolve and eventually migrate onto the land, start building tools, and eventually build telescopes and rockets. We currently don't have permanent storms, or sub-zero surface ice everywhere, we've had a fairly stable and mild climate for many thousands of years, and part of that is due to our stable sun. Things have been just right for us to learn about the universe and go to the stars. We're lucky.
which is was was said an not whatever nonsense fairy tale you probably believe in. Magic isnt real. No one flew to the moon on a horse, came back from the dead after 3 days or gained enlightenment and ascend to nirvana. Grow up
The lucky coincidences are too numerous to count, and all of them are of critical importance. The only valid and sound explanation to Fermi Paradox is the wrong estimation of spontaneous life creation events density throughout the universe. The only lifeforms we will ever find would be the ones we forgot we created ourselves or some isolated distant genetic branches of the ancient colonists. It would certainly look like a typical trash finding in a wild place you've never been, it is not yours but you know there was someone before you. In a very distant future the Milky Way would be populated by a different civilizations, most never seen each other, different in everything except the common prehistoric Earth roots. Funny thing that the most advanced Milky Way civilizations would be not humanoids, but synthetic lifeforms capable to withstand space radiation and naturally adapted for an age-long flight hibernation. Human bodies are not made for a space flights. Best we can hope for is a synthetic pilot to take our DNA to a distant world for adaptation and replication in the new world. Humans are forever bound to the Earth. We are the fishes in the Human-fish bowl. We can in theory construct the artificial pilots for a interstellar flights, but we actually cant travel ourselves.
Difficulties of creating the early building blocks of technology such as combustion, use of the electromagnetic spectrum, etc would be also very difficult if not impossible in true water worlds.
This idea was imagined by Peter Hamilton his novel The Reality Dysfunction. Basically, super intelligent octopi like creatures that trancended physical forms and explored the universe as pockets of separated consciousness. Really cool concept.
I think I found this channel by watching your previous content on Fermi paradox. I love that you keep revisiting the questions with new proposals. Thanks for the great work Anton
One thing that gets often overlooked is the need to be able to have fire. A fishbowl civilization could exist but they would never be able to leave their planet without being able to harness fire and then be able to work metal. Those would be vital for any alien intelligence to have any kind of presence in space.
some animals do not just add calcium to shells, but they also include metals. it is rare but possible, it just does not scale so well, and you suffer mobility for added density. some animals can shot air bubbles at supersonic speeds. an intelligent enough animal may slowly selectively breed itself to specialists within an ant-colony, where we have some ants, where the life-purpose of a few individuals is to use their plug-shaped-head to close up entrances.
We have harnessed the energy which came from the sun millions of years ago to exploit our environment and develop our technologies. Without access to the sun it's hard to imagine where water bound creatures would have access to sufficient energy to develop as we have.
I mean if it has an active core they could use thermal vents as an energy source, I just don't understand how they could go and make anything that is an electronic in water
One thing: Because it is easy (comparatively) for *us* to leave the planet, we have focused our attention there. Worlds for which this is impossible or incredibly difficult may aim their research at things we consider impossible, or nearly so, because there's no other avenues to explore. This type of world would skip right over rockets, and focus on the theoretical (to us) possibilities..teleportation, alternate dimensions..etc. Given enough time and resources, they might go straight from crawling to flying and skip walking entirely, metaphorically speaking. It's impossible to imagine what solutions we would have come up with (or may in the future) if we bypassed the conventional, and easy means of leaving the planet. It'd take thousands upon thousands of years, but much of what we consider impossible, is only impossible because we don't understand the universe and it's laws as well as we will in the future.
They'd probably think of death as a door to space travel and try to communicate with souls using their psychics. In that culture they would worship the great travellers who dared to give up their lives in the laboratory, trying to breach the big barrier of matter. But I believe (from present data available to me), they would never get results in any of these experiments, however much they try to appropriate their weird phenomena to souls communicating from the free void.
These ice encapsulated water worlds would have a problem developing technology. We are lucky to have an atmosphere that allows us to use fire and other chemical methods to refine elements which allows for the production of technology. A water world would have great difficulty at starting to refine and use elements developing tools and such.
Technology (some of which, anyway) is ruining the younger generations as much as I love some of it. I believe my generation was the beginning of the issues born in.80. Feels like 1880. Ngl.
Took the words out of my mouth. An underwater species would have a hell of a time developing anywhere beyond the most primitive equivalent to our stone age technology, as basic metallurgy becomes damn near impossible.
Radio waves generally don't propagate through water. Only very low frequencies for very short distances. The deeper and more conductive the water, the worse it is.
Came here to say this. The bland, almost throwaway remark about radio working in water ignores some unfortunate facts. Like, it doesn't, not really, unless we use extremely low frequency. And that places severe limits on the speed of communication, and hence practical limits on how much use any such technology is to anything evolving in such an environment. I'm not so sure about the "extremely short distances" though. I'm no expert, but I remember many years ago already reading about the use of low frequency communication with submerged submarines. That is, it works, and not just down the street, but it is extremely limited in practice.
@@rjo49And this is just ONE of the reasons I found the plot of "Star Trek 4" so dumb. Also, the whales could somehow talk to aliens a gazillion light years away... but never ONCE thought to ask humans, "Hey guys, could you maybe stop murdering us, m-kay?"
@Alondro77 I could be wrong, but I think the probe in "The Voyage Home" was just checking in on the whales, not that they had a continuous line of communication. Like they stopped by prior to humans , befriended the whales, then came back hoping to see them again. Instead, it found out we caused their extinction and decided to eliminate us. Some theorize the whales might have been related to the probe "manufacturers" in the cinematic universe.
This is the ONLY channel I´m subscribed to which I push the LIKE button at the start of every video. So far, Anton´s videos have a 100% I like rate from me since the days of the Universe Sandbox era so it´s basically a muscle memory by now.
I bet there is life on icy worlds, at least microbes around hydrothermal vents, I actually believe that it is quite common. I also think that there may be intelligent life in systems so far away that both of us will never know of each other's existence sadly.
Why do you think there is none closer? There's easily as many rocky planetoids in our galaxy as there are trees on Earth. Now imagine that only one of those trees has monkeys living in it. That's basically the odds you're describing. I think it's much more likely than anyone could imagine. In fact, we're late to the party. We're the primatives being watched by advanced ancient civilizations. There's almost no way that we're not, statistically speaking.
Additionally, we cannot detect them because we cannot even image Pluto until a close flyby. The famous heart wasn't discovered until New Horizons. We have zero detailed images of any exoplanets, and we have barely birthed AI. We're still using combustion methods for transportation, and we only have two manned space stations orbiting our planet. We're far too primitive to claim that we're alone. It's an asinine assumption.
there could be millions of civs at our level.. the problem is it may be just 1 per galaxy.. and there are hundreds of of millions of galaxies. so yeah, intelligent life is everywhere, but just like you’re saying..so far that we might as well be alone.
It is logical based idea , unfortunately we still lack the data . Hopefully it won't kill all life on earth while discovering microbes on different worlds
@@ideasaboutthings8857 At least 200,000,000,000+ galaxies in the OBSERVABLE universe with the entire universe at a minimum size at about 250x larger, to as large as infinite. Why do you think it's only one civilization per galaxy? There's between about 100,000,000,000 to 400,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy. Each star system is likely full of planetoids from planets to moons to objects like Makemake, Eris, and Pluto. If we go for easy math and conservative figures of 10 rocky bodies per star system on average (with many having many more and some with zero), that's over 1T to 4T large, spherical rocky bodies orbiting star systems. Why do you think there's only one civilization at our industrialized level amongst over one trillion rocky planetoids orbiting star systems? If we need liquid water, and to be in the habitable zone of a star, to undergo evolution, and then for an intelligent species to evolve into developing civilization, and for the timing to be aligned with us, then yes, the numerosity is greatly reduced. Maybe there's only 1 in every 100 star systems where a habitable planet exists with liquid water. Evolution is very likely as long as those conditions exist though. That's probably over one billion planetoids with evolved life and ecosystems on them in just our galaxy. I think the hardest part is the timing of an advanced civilization as well as the emergence of the intelligent species that develops the civilization. And obviously the longevity of the civilization makes a huge impact for any overlap to our current existence. BUT, I doubt that those constraints reduce it to near zero. The evidence on our planet for how long it took for us to arrive and develop doesn't bode well, but if such advanced evolutionary emergence is inevitable, time is the biggest constraint. If we are late to the party, then the galaxy should be very populous. If we are early, then we might be alone. Even if we are average, the population is over one civilization per galaxy. I just find it hard to think that with such numbers we would be alone. Many times, I think most like yourself who say such things are vastly underestimating the size of the cosmos, the numerosity of it all. The numbers are in our favor of not being alone, even in just our galaxy.
The biggest issue I see with life in an ocean world covered by ice, is they would have no reason to develop sight. Everything would be touch and sound. No star light would get through the ice. So even if some intelligent life went through the ice, they aren't going to "see" the universe, and so have any concept of other worlds.
The truth is there's far more reasons for life NOT to be space faring than there is. I mean we barely even do it and we have the means. Our space faring technology has barely grown in any way from what it was originally. It's resource intense, very slow going and what do we do with it? Set up satellites to make life back on earth better lol.
This is also brings up another point: Even animals on land need to have good enough eyesight to see stars. I'd imagine advancing into space would take a lot longer if a species didn't have the ability to see stars with the naked eye for whatever reason. Humans were lucky to have good enough eyesight and even then, you wouldn't have to be badly nearsighted before making out stars would be difficult. Fortunately, it seems other animals do use stars for navigation and such, so it's not like this is unique to humans.
@@MrBottlecapBill Resources are the reason to go to space. There's way more rare material in Solar System asteroids alone than on the entire Earth, or at least in accessible parts of the Earth. Some technological advancements will require us to start mining asteroids, but it's still far from happening.
Haha! This is funny because I've been writing a sci fi novel about exactly this. Very cool that some other people have noticed the greater occurrence of ice shell worlds, compared to Earth like habitable worlds. More to come soon!
I believe your comment about being unable to reach escape velocity on a larger planet is only if you limit yourself to chemical rockets. I believe nuclear powered rockets could still get off even much larger planets.
Re Escape velocity. I'm sure there must be some upper limit, but you could go a long way, especially on planets with thin atmospheres, by using rail-gun, mag-lev type assists.
@@darthvader0219 While we, in contrast, will have no motivation to want antigravity? Need is no guarantee for fulfilment of dreams. Currently there are no indications that this fantasy will ever be feasible.
I think that for bigger planets it wouldn't be the gravity factor and escape velocity that would affect the Drake Equation, but also the incentive. Since the planet is big, there would be a lot more for a civilization to explore, a lot more of variety to the planet and a lot more of resources, so even if they knew about other planets or the entire universe. They won't see the point in trying to build something that will be really expensive and risky for them like a rocket. Like we did when we explored and expanded into the entirety of the planet in the last millenium. I can imagine a super earth filled with hundred if not thousands of Nations that are more busy in doing endless diplomatic affairs and wars who won't never see the stars
"Space is big, really big, you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemists, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams. That's the reason. Or we are alone.
neutrino communication over small star system scale or as a we we're here but now we're gone :) it'll pass right through any pesky stars between you and your target as a bonus @@bryandraughn9830
The universe is bigger than we think and intelligent life capable of interstellar travel and communication is more rare than we think but exists. We are not alone but life capable of communicating with us is beyond our observable universe and our observable universe does not represent the universe. That doesnt mean that intelligent life hasnt attempted to show itself, just that their home is farther away than we can detect.
I completely agree with everything that you have said in this video Anton and I also think there is an underground version of this possible solution to the so-called 'Fermi Paradox' just like your underwater theory.
Ive always wondered how living ships in sci fi evolved, imagine a world where a whale type animal developed, the world has low escape velocity, or geysers that send water into space. The whales would jump out of the water into space or get launched into space by the geysers and over billions of years develop into a space fairing creature the same way fish came onto dry land on earth.
Probably by really advanced genetic engineering, from a species that came to understand it so well that they could design a creature almost from scratch, perhaps based on some stock "parts" in the same way they we design electronics.
Anton says our "planet is super super lucky" that is why we have had dozens of extinction events. That would indicate that a stable environment may not lead to intelligent life. Of course we would not know either way. The fact that intelligent and technological life did evolve on Earth only once and only after 5 billion years would tend to indicate that it is quite difficult.
I think it is likely we live in a fishbowl solar system. I think that the challenges of interstellar travel are too great that few try, believing it not worth the effort and resources, and those that do try just end up frizzling out.
I like this idea even though evidence is against it. A multiplanetary civilization will have ample energy and patience to send out interstellar seeds after a few centuries. If there's an impenetrable wall of debris or another unknown, maybe all that energy can't scratch the surface of the problem.
@@Curry-tan-WE haven't even made a multiplanetary civilization yet. It might not even really be possible, for the long term. We evolved specifically on Earth, and are perfectly adapted to Earth. Being somewhere else would mess with our biology in a lot of uncomfortable ways. I think it's more likely that we have "fish bowl" solar systems. I don't see us doing more than sending probes out there to other systems. And the time it takes even light to travel between systems makes any real communication pointless and impossible. The sender will be long gone before there's even a chance of a response.
Unless aliens figure out how to break physics then they arent going anywhere quickly, and neither are we. Its more than just resources and technology. @@Curry-tan-
That's not really a fishbowl solar system though, uneconomic to leave isn't the same as impossible to leave. I mean, for all we know we be able to master fusion in a century or so making energy dirt cheap with a nigh infinite supply of it in all the subsurface oceans around the solar system, even in the quantities required for interstellar travel. So that it's not economic _now_ doesn't mean it'll forever stay that way. It's also very situational, had our solar system been part of a dense globular cluster or some sorts, we'd have dozens of stars within a few lightyears making the trip far more achievable than the minimum 4 ly to our neighbours, possibly even attainable without dirt cheap energy. Having other systems near by, dramatically lowers the effort needed to travel there, we're just in a quiet outskirt giving us a heftypenalty. But at the same token: maybe planets in a globular clusters are constantly bombarded by debris because the stars perturbate each others Oort clouds & Kuiper Belts far more often, making complex life impossibru and rendering this question completely moot.
I imagine a gravitationally grounded civilization saying 'screw it' and turning their home planet into one gigantic starship somehow. Or maybe coming up with a way to achieve spaceflight without chemical reactions, such as anti gravity or EMP. Or maybe even Stargates... This is a strange Universe that we live in, anything seems possible. Stay Wonderful, Anton!
I read something similar written by either Asimov or A C Clark, where the fact that water planet life could be smart as it likes, but it won't invent fire, so it's unlikely to evolve technologically speaking. I think that's probably a little pessimistic - I mean, chemistry exists - but I can see how it'd be yet another Great Limitation.
It's like asking American Indians 5000 years ago why they haven't seen other people from other places on earth. The universe is inordinately vast and physics is very hard thing to overcome. I'm not surepised at all that we have not seen space aliens. I do, however, believe they do exist.
I don't think escaping our worlds is going to be a problem. I'm more of a subscriber to the petri dish theory that states because of the limits of special relativity and the speed of light, expanding beyond a few star systems is realistically impossible. But then again, nobody seems to be asking the really important question, "Why are we so important that if life exists out there that they would need to find and communicate with us.
@@jackielinde7568Maybe the Aliens look down the ideal of Humanity having Giant Stores and Fast Food spots strewn all over this Star System! 🤨 IT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN! 😂
@@Sonny_McMacsson Relativity does when you're trying to keep a galactic empire on a timely scale. Unless you're using Einstein-Rosen bridges, you're probably doing funky things with Space-Time, and Einstein says that does funky things to things like clocks. And that's the rub that makes most FTL systems impractical. Most people don't want to return to a place where all their friends are dead and their grandkids are older than they are.
A couple of years ago I was discussing this with family members. Icy world inhabitants would not know of stars existance. Also, water would keep the soldering iron from working and assembling circuit cards.
you have a very beautiful outro Anton, and the most wholesome community I've ever seen on RUclips. Thank you for providing us with all this content and information. I really hope you are happy.
Humans escaping Earth's gravity has a base level foundation of humans figuring out tools, fire, tying knots, and storytelling (expression of abstract thought). Are fishbowl ice covered ocean worlds going to have basic survival technologies to build space exploration on?
I've always been of a mind that we're not listening in the right way. We're using an archaic form of communication ill suited towards interstellar distances. It would make more sense for them to use a technology that would make the long delays less of an issue.
Yep, first we have to determine that the speed of light isn't a constant which we have nothing to indicate otherwise. It is entirely possible though, that there IS something other than light, which we just can't detect or even contemplate what it might be.
@@murraymadness4674 Hard thing, considering gravity waves propagate at the speed of light. It's not actually the speed of light, but a limiting speed of spacetime, in my (uninformed) opinion
@@Ferd414I think it'll have something to do with the expansion of the universe. In my completely uninformed opinion, this is where space-time changes. We might find it when we figure out gravity.
The distance between stars in our own galaxy, not to mention the distance between ours and other galaxies, is the main reason that we don't get signals from other intelligent life. The distance to the nearest star to us in our galaxy is about 4(four) light years. A radio signal from a distance of just 1(one) light year away would be nearly invisible in the cosmic background noise. The transmission of electromagnetic radiation from a source to a receiver of that signal, like cell phone signals, is subject to the inverse-square law, which states - The radiation inverse square law specifies that: the intensity of the radiation goes down by the square of the distance from the source. For instance if you move twice as far from the source the intensity of the radiation will decrease by a factor of 4 - which is why the further you get from a cell tower, the worse the reception is. Now imagine that, not in miles, but in light years from the source. Do the math. I knew before the JWST was launched, that when it looked into the deep field, it would see large galaxies as far back as it could see. The whole argument of fine-tuned/not-fine-tuned/multiple-universes, is ridiculous! As demonstrated by the JWST, the universe is infinite and the "Big Bang" never happened. Super-large galaxies exist all the way up to and beyond the edge our observable universe. If you could move the JWST, in any direction, halfway from here to the edge of our observable universe, it would show you the same view that we see from here, and our Milky Way galaxy would appear to be at the far-edge of that observable universe. We exist in a place where we CAN exist and that's all there is to it!
You know, recognizing that space travel is basically impossible because of the physical characteristics of your world is a pretty good incentive to stfu when coupled with the idea of the dark forest. It's one thing to keep quiet because you believe you're in a fight to the death, but the motivation HAS to be higher if you're also basically a sitting duck. Like if I broke both my legs while attempting to run away from a Terminator, I'm definitely going to stfu and crawl my ass into the darkest spot I can find.
Dark forest is really bad solutio...It make zero sense for a lot of reason. The main one is we are already obvious for any one tha can check our atmosphere and this is real easy to do
Why would anyone attack a planet they can't escape from anymore? Imagine a warlike interstellar species... they'd have no use for such a planet, if they cannot exploit it for their empire. Only scenario where any alien species would be a threat is if they wanted to settle for the rest of time, maybe because they destroyed their own planet.
@@FarFromtheSuns @FarFromtheSuns nop your point is invalid... Because is based in a bad idea. And leads to the opposite conclusion! if you are trapped in your planet is far more logical to be visible as possible so you ask for help than to hide for an imaginary enemy
@@devifoxe our own history shows that you are grossly out of touch with reality. Altruism is not and should not be assumed. You aren't going to open your front door for a stranger at 2AM, are you? Foolishness.
I am very curious about planets with an escape velocity factor of 2.2 being inescapable by any means, but I couldn't find more information. Can anyone provide a source or some key search terms?
Rocket equation. The fuel needed to get into orbit would simply weigh to much. However that's only true for chemical rockets we currently use. If these aliens invented some other type of propulsion they could still get into orbit. If their planet has an atmosphere that would change things as well depending on how thick it is. There's a lot of factors at play. But these statements only apply to "super earths" or terrestrial planets. If the aliens are aquatic, living in an ocean under the ice sheet they're essentially never getting out.
This doesn't "explain" the great silence. There are more options than icy and hycean worlds. That's also making assumptions about alien psychology which may vary wildly, and underestimating non-rocket and non-space-elevator launch methods. I'd be more convinced by an article about mining and settlements being selected against in waterworlds. The escape factor is less important than mineral scarcity. Engineers can reach space. The issues are that the rocket equation breaks by EF 2.2, their mesophere is higher, and space elevators would require materials far better than carbon nanotubes. That requires higher energy methods like laser assist and a strato and mesosphere quasi-satellite launch industry. None of that is ruled out. It's all balanced out by the multitude of ice shell moons with very low EF.
Yes, the obvious trouble with the "Fishbowl" proposition is every world has to be a fishbowl, and we already have an example of one that isn't... from a ample size of one!
I starting to think that Anton might be an Alien. I mean, with the volume and consistency of the high quality videos he puts out, he just can't be Human. 👽
I never thought about escape velocity being an issue you'd have to consider if you were to successfully achieve interstellar travel - didn't even cross my mind. Very interesting.
The Fermi Paradox considers timespans of hundreds of millions, or even billions of years, so things like drilling through the ice are just a bump on the road. However, any ocean species will have a hard time developing metallurgy to build the drills.
Wouldn't the fish bowl just be a variation on the Zoo hypothesis? In junior high, I wrote a short story about a planet that was shielded from the stars by a thick dust cloud but discovering there was an Universe outside of this cloud unified the warring nations of the world in so called breaking free of their mutual imprisonment but the astronauts on the current mission dies, according to the telemetry to which the organizers of the mission say it was all for the greater good. The scene then clips to a civilization on a nearby planet that was intentionally keeping the first planet within an isolating dust cloud out of fear of the unhabitants violent tendencies, when it was reported that an attempt to leave the planet had been made and they had to kill the explorers to which the comment that it was all for the greater good was made. Yeah, I wasn't real good with writing stories where actual action was happening so they tended to be retrospectives and flashbacks. I did get a good grade on that one story though, it was 95% with the 5% being docked for being handed in late.
That's kind of similar to the planet Krikkit in Douglas Adams' _Life, The Universe, and Everything_ . The first thing the Krikkiters said as they breached the cloud surrounding their planet and saw the vast universe outside was... "It'll have to go".
I remembered I tripped on salvia so hard once I felt like I was traversing through an endless tunnel and on the side of the tunnels there were multiple portals. One portal showed a world where Humanoid like beings existed, they had similar structure to us and their voice sounded very peaceful. They had broad shoulders, thick wide necks, big eyes and bigger heads. Clothing all matching. Like a one piece. My surroundings was very similar to socotra with multiple buildings with tons of neon signs and high tech automobiles. I looked back at the portal and before I can even reach my hand to it, one of these beings said to me telepathically: we are your neighbors, one day you’ll see where we are. Then my trip was done… this will forever be my idea of aliens.
Thick atmsopheres, iceshields, interstellar dustclouds and maybe even the absence of eyes might hinder the evolvment of "star interested" species at all. Also most likely any kind of alien UFO we may come over is actually a flying Aquarium!
How to escape an icy fishbowl as an intelligent fish. See ice? Melt ice. Reach the top of the ice. Now you are a terrestrial fish. See sky. Try to fly. Invent flight. Reach limit of flight height because of gravity. Build riser until atmosphere and gravity are weaker. Launch off of riser. Congratulations, space fish.
This fishbowl idea says quite a lot about how we see ourselves, not because it isn't plausible, but because it fails to recognize that we are exactly as much fishbowl as anyone out there. It fails to ask, even if they could, why should they? This leads to the next obvious question - why should we, and that's an uncomfortable one. If only we could start with earth, right here and now, things would be better.
Yes, you quickly get problems, as soon as you go above 1,5 earth masses in terms of "it gets too difficult to reach planetary orbit" And in many cases, a geostationary orbit may be too low to be of much use, or it may even within a too dense atmosphere to be possible, but this depends more on length-of-day which may vary a lot. BUT bigger planets also come with denser atmospheres, allowing for small insects to fly much higher and stay up more efficiently. Asteroid impacts may spread it without killing all of it. We have yet to find frozen fish in orbit of frozen moons.
Smelting metals and associated alloys and invensions, becomes so much more unlikely on 'water worlds'... (an obvious 'chicken and the egg' being that aquatic intelligent creatures would need 'breathing apparatus' to operate above ground, to smelt metals to be able to create 'breathing apparatus!' etc. etc.)
There is potential for "growing" organic structures - even containing metallic compounds - using all kind of bacteria around vents and volcanoes. Or they could use other method, chemical or even electrical in nature - which might occur naturally. We are trapped thinking in our own world terms and conditions but an alien mind would find solutions adapted to their environment as we did with our own. As long as the alien life exhibits anything close to what we define as "curiosity", they will find ways.
I wrote a whole novel about just such a civilization back in 2014. _A Darkling Sea_. It's currently out of print but I'm going to get it up on Kindle again in a few weeks. My aliens could tell that the rocky core of their world was denser than the ocean, which in turn was denser than the ice, so they did deduce that the universe beyond the ice was essentially vacuum. The notion that there might be other worlds out there was a great surprise to them. The bad guys in the novel were a spacefaring alien civilization trying to impose a Trekian "Prime Directive" of forbidding contact. The Ilmatarans allied themselves with the humans to drive those other aliens off their world, because once they learned that the rest of the universe exists, they didn't want to remain cut off from it.
One thing I thought of is what if our relatively transparent atmosphere is rare. What if most other life bearing planets have opaque atmospheres similar to Venus. They let light in but don't allow the planet's occupants to see other planets it their system or the stars. They may become quite advanced without even knowing anything exists beyond their planet similar to an ice world.
Imagine chilling on just another balanced temperature day with your atlantis buddies.. suddenly something DRILLS A HOLE INTO THE EDGE OF YOUR WORLD, potentially ruining your eco system.. only to find out it's DAVID GOGGINS.
I once read one of the most impactful change for humans was the development of the opposable thumb... that allows for grasping of tools. As for life on worlds with underground oceans... they would not even nessecarily know what the universe outside the world they know exists. There was actually a Star Trek Next Generation episode covering this, I think it was called macro brain, where the federation accidentally was terraforming a planet that had an intelligent life living in liquid under the surface... and the race only became aware of the outer universe when we breached the layer they lived.
There is a Peter Hamilton novel dedicated to such fishbowl world - I think it was within a nebula or something else that was optically thick and they had never seen the stars outside of whatever surrounds them. They never developed space technologies and well there was a whole story. The point is, it's not hard to imagine what life would be if you cannot see the stars outside of some bubble around you. That will prevent you form understanding distance and star processes etc. So it makes sense to me.
And that issue effects not just water and ice worlds. The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere has to be pretty specific for fire as well which would have a huge effect on whether or not they could develop those technologies
Even if you can't escape with rockets, you can absolutely build mass drivers to put things into orbit, it would take a lot more work than here, but should still be entirely possible. And with a consistent enough mass driver (or some combination of mass driver + rockets) they should be able to put people into space, and likely species from higher gravity planets would have a higher G tolerance aswell.
The communication thing is really good, but the thing with "rockets" is again orthoevolutional extrapolation. If a system is drastically different, it can develop potentially totally different way of space traveling, albeit with a way of communication that is so wastly different from ours that we just unable to see each other as a living organisms, unable to mutually detect ourselves.
Great video - again. It begs the question "Are we in a fish bowl, because we can't see beyond the visible (detectable) Universe?" The other question is "What is the purpose of evolution anyway - and are we (humans) more meaningful than a mold, which will colonize anywhere in the Universe if it hitches a ride?"
This reminded me of "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir, in particular Rocky's homeworld of Erid where the depth of the atmosphere meant they never considered space travel until something went wrong with their sun. Also, when looking at the number and types of exoplanets, there are a lot of superearths and many of those will be impossible to leave using rocket propulsion, and the depth of the atmosphere would likely obscure the stars.
The idea of not being able to escape the larger planets is predicated on using chemical rockets. What if because of this limitation they dismissed this technology and put their effort into the kinds of technologies seen in UAP'S?
Omg. That is mind blowing. Indeed, they're protected. They can develop in relative peace. And if they're around a red dwarf, they can exist for insane amounts of time. Wow.
Not too mention water is heavyer then air... Human are lucky too have evolved in africa and need so little water... 7:45 if only human would do this... 8:55 oh good you mentioned it!! 🌈 ❤
I imagine how hard it would be if we could hear what the entire city is talking about. How do you even know what to pay attention to? In a world like that the form of communication might be mostly through sound but fish can also sense electrical fields, maybe that would be a motivation to develop radio communication.
It is not really a paradox, because we have a very obvious reason for it. We pretty much see exactly what we expect to see based on our current knowledge. It is still fun to think about alternative explanations though…
Super fascinating Anton. Well-presented. You make it sound like the upcoming Icy Moon missions are going to have some drilling and/or submersible component to them. I don’t think that’s in the cards unless I am totally off base. It would be super awesome though.
Imagine living in a vast, pitch-black ocean for eons, developing intelligence, culture, maybe even religion, chit-chatting about the legends of the world, establishing theories about how the unpenetrable, rock-solid skies might have formed, building myths about what's beyond the heavens, arguing about it's possible infinity, when suddelny someone starts banging on your eternal rooftop from the outside, punching a hole in it, and a never-ever seen creature made of an unknown material suddenly starts sinking down from your heavens, shouting HELLO THERE, anyone around?
The reason we don't see other civilizations is actually alot simpler. Simple travel time. When we look at other galaxies and even other sections of our own galaxy we are seeing what they USED to look like millennia ago, not what they currently look like. Any light or signals coming from another civilization has to cross the vast distances of lightyears to reach us, so what we see is not representative of what *is*, but what *was*. It's entirely plausible that Andromeda has it's own civilization going about their business as we speak, but it would take 2.5 million years for that information to reach us. When you also consider how rapidly mankind itself went from discovering electricity to putting boots on the moon (Less than 300 years) then it stands to reason that alien civilizations would not only seem plausible, but LIKELY, and we would have no way of actually seeing whether or not they're there without physically sending a probe or explorer to view it in live, real time.
@@Magnaraptor1836 What would change your mind about the existence of non human sentient species not only existing but occasionally visiting our planet and establishing contact with certain people?
@@steelswarm2721I think you misread. I fully believe aliens exist in the universe. I am also somewhat confident that some have indeed visited us in our past, but nothing short of meeting an alien representative in-person would fully convince me of that being the case. I want it to be true, but being a practical person I'd need to see it with my own eyes.
@@Magnaraptor1836 If your mom or dad saw a spaceship land and some non human beings came out, grabbed a sample of soil, went back in the craft and then that craft disappeared, would you believe their account, or you would automatically say they were lying or that they misrepresented what they saw?
A few things about this topic: 1) I agree that there's a size limit for a planet to allow for intelligent life to leave the surface. To expand on it further I also believe that there's a limit on the other end of the spectrum, a lower size limit due to a lack of heavier elements accumulating to allow for complex chemical reactions required for life to evolve. It's why I don't believe we will find life on Enceladus but we might on Titan. 2) Just because an intelligent lifeform is unable to personally leave its planet that doesn't mean that they will be unable to communicate with other life offworld. There actually was a Next Generation episode on this (only briefly mentioned). In the episode an intelligent life sent the tools necessary to make contact with them. Essentially they sent out probes to explore and establish contact on their behalf without them having to leave their planet. This example is a bit dramatic but I hope the point comes through. 3) I saw someone (Astrum or PBS Spacetime. I forgot which) go through the Drake Equation. They would fill out what we knew in the 70's then checked the odds, did the same thing for the 80's, 90's, etc... And the pattern that emerged is the more data we plug into it the higher the odds are for life, but that Earth life is extremely early. 4) The thing that always bothered me about a lack of evidence for extremely intelligent life is that there should at least be self replicating robots trying to last as long as possible. One lifeform in the billions of years since the big bang should have wanted to leave a legacy even if they themselves couldn't endure or transformed into something beyond this universe. There has to be one.
Secure communications would be an issue. Perhaps with the absence of chance of secure communications they would not even evolve the concept of a need for selective, secure communications. It would be interesting to see if this would mean an open, friendly society without the need for conflict or would the competition for resources mean something else?
This brings about a very interesting problem for humanity to solve before we start to venture to the stars. Some planetary visits may be a once and done trip, with the knowledge that once they land, they will never be able to leave.
Bravo profesor Stern a huge Epiphany. I find myself wandering if we could be living on a "Faraday cage" world. As some of your resent videos have pointed out we seem to be (could be?) crossing through a magnetic tunnel, which means that for any signal to reach us it would have to pass through an Electro-Magnetically charged zone, complete with it's associated "Rip zones"(picture the interfase between the solar winds and the galactic winds). Note I use the plural of zone because presumably there would be one entering the E.M. zone and one exiting it.
You don’t even need ice to change the possibility of intelligent life. A planet with permanent thick clouds would prevent intelligent life from ever knowing that there are stars, planets, moons or a sun.
I find that a lot of people forget that two civilizations would have to have all the usual requirements for life etc. but also overlap in the time of their existence, in order to meet each other. There could be civilizations that have come and gone before our time out there and we wouldn't be able to detect them unless they left some sort of sign that could last a ridiculous amount of time. I suppose the drake equation accounts for this with the last variable L for length of time that a civilization would release signals, but it seems to be forgotten a lot in discussion. Two or more civilizations that happen to exist during the same time within a given area of stars, I wonder how hard it would be to calculate such a variable.
But if the earlier civilization produced robots that could create space craft and duplicate themselves and send these out throughout the universe then the two civilizations would not need to overlap in space and time. The second civilization would end up communicating with the AI produced by the earlier civilization.
As the credits roll, the camera pulls back revealing it is playing on a screen in a large amphitheater. The presenter then speaks: "As you can see in this ground breaking hyper-realistic simulation of life on a much less dense planet, space travel could be possible, and this is but one of many scenarios of how such a species would view us. Thankfully for us, they are trapped in a computer and won't be invading us from space any time soon. Thank you for coming to hear my Ted talk!"
Reminds me of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy book I think it was the third one where- it’s been a long time since I read this, so I might be confusing the details, but I believe a species had a planet, those surrounded by a cloud or just something that blocked the stars but once they first saw the stars, and felt very small, they immediately set out to conquer the galaxy out of fear and anger
Something important to keep in mind is that all it would take would be one civilization to have crossed the great filter, after that, things can get exponential really easily. For this idea you would need to have some explanation for why ALL civilizations with intelectual potential to expand into space ALL happened to be born in fishbowls, and somehow we're the first to have a chance to go interstellar.
Hmm. Last week Fraser Cain (Universe Today) had a guy on his show who worked on how meteors crashing down on Earth helped bring in required molecules for life. A protective shell might get in the way and might make things more difficult. I can easily imagine simple life forming around thermal vents, much like here on Earth... but making progress from that would be incredibly hard.
Maybe we hear thier signals in our souls. Maybe our entire notion of the physical world, matter and distance is our error of observation. What if there is a certain Nothing that permeates everything from a zero point & only those that are in touch internally / spiritually can read the messages and connect.
10:10 - The idea that residents of fishbowl worlds wouldn't try to communicate because they wouldn't know if anyone else even exists is invalidated by humans who don't know that anyone else even exists are desperate to know if they exist, spend vast sums listening for any sign of other civilizations, and are trying to communicate with anyone who might be out there. We don't know but we desperately want to know.
I try to keep up with all the science influencers so I know what the average RUclipsr thinks. Then I come back to you for the rational analysis of the topics in question.
Could you imagine being a fishbowl alien in a crewed scientific mission to find out what is above the ironic 'great wall of ice opposite of gravity' only to finally breach the surface and your instruments seem to indicate that there is an endless hostile void.
Well if our path to technology is anything to go on they would stall right after stone tools and before fire.
A story of mine had similar circumstances. However, the alien race was land based on a planet with clouds thousands of miles high, blocking the stars.
They can still do physics experiments and discover that light exists and build telescopes to properly observe things.
Space is quite hostile for humans too, so having an off planet hostile void doesn't distinguish us from the fishes.
@tim I think the argument here is that It's a lot less likely for them to develop high functioning brains since as far as we can tell most of our intelligence jumped after we discovered fire. cooking food gave us extra calories to spend on organs like our brain.
@@VladimirZharkov Good point. I wish we knew with confidence what caused intelligence. I have heard that maybe intelligence was a fitness display and we are only differently ridiculous from peacocks, not fundamentally better. I have heard that maybe you need a lot of cooperating neurons to be able to throw an object and hit a target because the randomness of the individual neurons far exceeds the required accuracy of the throwing action.
It might also have to do with fire. I can see instincts in myself that want to avoid turning away from active automation that probably came from my ancestors not turning away from a fire and therefore not burning to death in their houses, so fire did clearly drive natural selection.
Somewhere else in the universe Fishbowl Anton talks about a hypothetical rock world with gas atmosphere.
They would have difficulty communicating longer distances so they would have problem development technology and probably cant phantom long distance communication. They could see the sky all the time and with no wall, hiding spece, to drive curiosity they would not have any drive to explore further. Also space exploration would be very difficult because they would need to bring the atmosphere made by volatile gases with them.
yeah, all the arguments of the paper are very weak, specially the one about gravity making space travel impossible, how does the author know they wouldn't just use nukes or antimatter as fuel to achieve the scape velocity?
@@igoralmeida9136 Maybe you should do the same to your own arguments.
Love it bro love it,well said
Yeah unless their physics are different or using a completely unknown method of communication that wouldn't happen, we know how sound carries in atmosphere and underwater since we have both and know the mechanics of it. Why would they have eyes if they lived under an ice sheet, what 'wall' hiding space, they would more likely consider their fishbowl to be the entire universe, sonar might work well underwater but if they penetrate the ice with and there is literally nothing beyond it... How exactly would they get their ships filled with water off their planet and then have to heat them constantly to prevent them from becoming giant ice coffins that expand and break apart as the heat quickly dissipates in space, air is a much better insulator than water is.
No, what much more likely or probable is that the first species we meet in space would be some kind of bird species or mammals much like us and they will probably have some sort of eyes and the very reason they have the curiousity required to go the space is because many times in their infancy they sat around a campfire or what they have that passes for trees and looked up in the sky and saw comets or meteorites and went "oh what's that! I wonder what's up there....".
Is there fishbowl worlds? VERY likely.
Is there fishbowl space explorers? VERY unlikely.
@@igoralmeida9136 "hey, we cant use fire and we don't really have reliable source of fuel. Can we skip those and get nukes and hypothetical antimatter engines ?" somehow for me your argument sounds even weaker
We have a really special world. The mass of the Earth and its gravity is just right so we have some atmosphere but it's thin enough that we can see the stars. We have ocean and land and a large nearby moon, so we have tides and tidal zones where amphibians can evolve and eventually migrate onto the land, start building tools, and eventually build telescopes and rockets. We currently don't have permanent storms, or sub-zero surface ice everywhere, we've had a fairly stable and mild climate for many thousands of years, and part of that is due to our stable sun. Things have been just right for us to learn about the universe and go to the stars. We're lucky.
Then there’s the truth.
which is was was said an not whatever nonsense fairy tale you probably believe in. Magic isnt real. No one flew to the moon on a horse, came back from the dead after 3 days or gained enlightenment and ascend to nirvana. Grow up
The lucky coincidences are too numerous to count, and all of them are of critical importance. The only valid and sound explanation to Fermi Paradox is the wrong estimation of spontaneous life creation events density throughout the universe.
The only lifeforms we will ever find would be the ones we forgot we created ourselves or some isolated distant genetic branches of the ancient colonists. It would certainly look like a typical trash finding in a wild place you've never been, it is not yours but you know there was someone before you. In a very distant future the Milky Way would be populated by a different civilizations, most never seen each other, different in everything except the common prehistoric Earth roots.
Funny thing that the most advanced Milky Way civilizations would be not humanoids, but synthetic lifeforms capable to withstand space radiation and naturally adapted for an age-long flight hibernation. Human bodies are not made for a space flights. Best we can hope for is a synthetic pilot to take our DNA to a distant world for adaptation and replication in the new world. Humans are forever bound to the Earth. We are the fishes in the Human-fish bowl. We can in theory construct the artificial pilots for a interstellar flights, but we actually cant travel ourselves.
@astra6712 Oh I can't wait to hear this ... what is this "truth"?
We're not lucky. We were created.
Difficulties of creating the early building blocks of technology such as combustion, use of the electromagnetic spectrum, etc would be also very difficult if not impossible in true water worlds.
How fo you know there wouldnt be somethjng in it's place?
If they have hot vocano somehow they will get metal tools
This idea was imagined by Peter Hamilton his novel The Reality Dysfunction. Basically, super intelligent octopi like creatures that trancended physical forms and explored the universe as pockets of separated consciousness. Really cool concept.
I love that trilogy and had forgotten about the octopi. Maybe time for a re-read.
how did they transcend their physical form? An octopus meditating legs crossed comes to mind and makes me chuckle
@Jeuka93 i cant remember tbh its been 10+ years since i read that one
@@Pcoakaloid gona keep searching that sounds so cool
"Were just two lost souls living in a fish bowl, year after year"
I smoked crack to this comment
Dude, you're just 'running over the same old ground'...
Beat me to it!
😢
@@Charonupthekuiper I searched the comments beforehand too haha
I think I found this channel by watching your previous content on Fermi paradox. I love that you keep revisiting the questions with new proposals. Thanks for the great work Anton
I nominate Anton Petrov for a Nobel Peace Prize in being a damn good teacher & a Real One ✊
I second that notion
He wins the wonderful person prize
Without being annoying or doing klickbate and the greatest smile :)
I agree, but unfortunately that's not how it works.
Y'all should get the medicine prize, since laughter is the best medicine🤣
One thing that gets often overlooked is the need to be able to have fire. A fishbowl civilization could exist but they would never be able to leave their planet without being able to harness fire and then be able to work metal. Those would be vital for any alien intelligence to have any kind of presence in space.
Batteries made from electric fish + ocean floor metal nuggets = Underwater Welding? If Underwater Welding works for humans...
some animals do not just add calcium to shells, but they also include metals. it is rare but possible, it just does not scale so well, and you suffer mobility for added density.
some animals can shot air bubbles at supersonic speeds.
an intelligent enough animal may slowly selectively breed itself to specialists within an ant-colony, where we have some ants, where the life-purpose of a few individuals is to use their plug-shaped-head to close up entrances.
Magnesium. I suggest that you look it up.
We have harnessed the energy which came from the sun millions of years ago to exploit our environment and develop our technologies. Without access to the sun it's hard to imagine where water bound creatures would have access to sufficient energy to develop as we have.
I mean if it has an active core they could use thermal vents as an energy source, I just don't understand how they could go and make anything that is an electronic in water
One thing: Because it is easy (comparatively) for *us* to leave the planet, we have focused our attention there. Worlds for which this is impossible or incredibly difficult may aim their research at things we consider impossible, or nearly so, because there's no other avenues to explore. This type of world would skip right over rockets, and focus on the theoretical (to us) possibilities..teleportation, alternate dimensions..etc. Given enough time and resources, they might go straight from crawling to flying and skip walking entirely, metaphorically speaking. It's impossible to imagine what solutions we would have come up with (or may in the future) if we bypassed the conventional, and easy means of leaving the planet. It'd take thousands upon thousands of years, but much of what we consider impossible, is only impossible because we don't understand the universe and it's laws as well as we will in the future.
They'd probably think of death as a door to space travel and try to communicate with souls using their psychics. In that culture they would worship the great travellers who dared to give up their lives in the laboratory, trying to breach the big barrier of matter. But I believe (from present data available to me), they would never get results in any of these experiments, however much they try to appropriate their weird phenomena to souls communicating from the free void.
These ice encapsulated water worlds would have a problem developing technology. We are lucky to have an atmosphere that allows us to use fire and other chemical methods to refine elements which allows for the production of technology. A water world would have great difficulty at starting to refine and use elements developing tools and such.
Technology (some of which, anyway) is ruining the younger generations as much as I love some of it. I believe my generation was the beginning of the issues born in.80. Feels like 1880. Ngl.
Took the words out of my mouth. An underwater species would have a hell of a time developing anywhere beyond the most primitive equivalent to our stone age technology, as basic metallurgy becomes damn near impossible.
Up to a certain point.
Even our ancestors made tools without the aid of fire.
@@pedrovergara7594they could develope in ways unfathomable to us. They would still have access to energy, that's the main thing.
That's racist to all the octopus people out there man, come on.
"We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year."-Pink Floyd, _Wish You Were Here_
That is EXACTLY where my brain went.
Saaame!@@antonsimmons8519
yeh, that's why fishbowl sounds not fun, that song is soooo depressing
* fish you were here
Radio waves generally don't propagate through water. Only very low frequencies for very short distances. The deeper and more conductive the water, the worse it is.
Came here to say this. The bland, almost throwaway remark about radio working in water ignores some unfortunate facts. Like, it doesn't, not really, unless we use extremely low frequency. And that places severe limits on the speed of communication, and hence practical limits on how much use any such technology is to anything evolving in such an environment. I'm not so sure about the "extremely short distances" though. I'm no expert, but I remember many years ago already reading about the use of low frequency communication with submerged submarines. That is, it works, and not just down the street, but it is extremely limited in practice.
@@rjo49 aquatic life would have to first reach the surface, develop a desire to communicate above water, and then develop radio.
@@rjo49And this is just ONE of the reasons I found the plot of "Star Trek 4" so dumb. Also, the whales could somehow talk to aliens a gazillion light years away... but never ONCE thought to ask humans, "Hey guys, could you maybe stop murdering us, m-kay?"
@@rjo49Never mind trying to create a radio without controllable fire, and with water and electrical equipment not working well together :P
@Alondro77 I could be wrong, but I think the probe in "The Voyage Home" was just checking in on the whales, not that they had a continuous line of communication. Like they stopped by prior to humans , befriended the whales, then came back hoping to see them again. Instead, it found out we caused their extinction and decided to eliminate us. Some theorize the whales might have been related to the probe "manufacturers" in the cinematic universe.
The best explanation for the Fermi paradox I have seen is, Physicists aren't very good at statistics.
Thank you for staying active and still making videos. Your content is appreciated.
This is the ONLY channel I´m subscribed to which I push the LIKE button at the start of every video. So far, Anton´s videos have a 100% I like rate from me since the days of the Universe Sandbox era so it´s basically a muscle memory by now.
I bet there is life on icy worlds, at least microbes around hydrothermal vents, I actually believe that it is quite common. I also think that there may be intelligent life in systems so far away that both of us will never know of each other's existence sadly.
Why do you think there is none closer?
There's easily as many rocky planetoids in our galaxy as there are trees on Earth.
Now imagine that only one of those trees has monkeys living in it.
That's basically the odds you're describing.
I think it's much more likely than anyone could imagine.
In fact, we're late to the party. We're the primatives being watched by advanced ancient civilizations.
There's almost no way that we're not, statistically speaking.
Additionally, we cannot detect them because we cannot even image Pluto until a close flyby.
The famous heart wasn't discovered until New Horizons.
We have zero detailed images of any exoplanets, and we have barely birthed AI.
We're still using combustion methods for transportation, and we only have two manned space stations orbiting our planet.
We're far too primitive to claim that we're alone. It's an asinine assumption.
there could be millions of civs at our level.. the problem is it may be just 1 per galaxy.. and there are hundreds of of millions of galaxies. so yeah, intelligent life is everywhere, but just like you’re saying..so far that we might as well be alone.
It is logical based idea , unfortunately we still lack the data . Hopefully it won't kill all life on earth while discovering microbes on different worlds
@@ideasaboutthings8857 At least 200,000,000,000+ galaxies in the OBSERVABLE universe with the entire universe at a minimum size at about 250x larger, to as large as infinite.
Why do you think it's only one civilization per galaxy?
There's between about 100,000,000,000 to 400,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy. Each star system is likely full of planetoids from planets to moons to objects like Makemake, Eris, and Pluto. If we go for easy math and conservative figures of 10 rocky bodies per star system on average (with many having many more and some with zero), that's over 1T to 4T large, spherical rocky bodies orbiting star systems.
Why do you think there's only one civilization at our industrialized level amongst over one trillion rocky planetoids orbiting star systems?
If we need liquid water, and to be in the habitable zone of a star, to undergo evolution, and then for an intelligent species to evolve into developing civilization, and for the timing to be aligned with us, then yes, the numerosity is greatly reduced.
Maybe there's only 1 in every 100 star systems where a habitable planet exists with liquid water. Evolution is very likely as long as those conditions exist though. That's probably over one billion planetoids with evolved life and ecosystems on them in just our galaxy.
I think the hardest part is the timing of an advanced civilization as well as the emergence of the intelligent species that develops the civilization. And obviously the longevity of the civilization makes a huge impact for any overlap to our current existence. BUT, I doubt that those constraints reduce it to near zero. The evidence on our planet for how long it took for us to arrive and develop doesn't bode well, but if such advanced evolutionary emergence is inevitable, time is the biggest constraint. If we are late to the party, then the galaxy should be very populous. If we are early, then we might be alone. Even if we are average, the population is over one civilization per galaxy.
I just find it hard to think that with such numbers we would be alone. Many times, I think most like yourself who say such things are vastly underestimating the size of the cosmos, the numerosity of it all. The numbers are in our favor of not being alone, even in just our galaxy.
The biggest issue I see with life in an ocean world covered by ice, is they would have no reason to develop sight. Everything would be touch and sound. No star light would get through the ice.
So even if some intelligent life went through the ice, they aren't going to "see" the universe, and so have any concept of other worlds.
The truth is there's far more reasons for life NOT to be space faring than there is. I mean we barely even do it and we have the means. Our space faring technology has barely grown in any way from what it was originally. It's resource intense, very slow going and what do we do with it? Set up satellites to make life back on earth better lol.
This is also brings up another point: Even animals on land need to have good enough eyesight to see stars. I'd imagine advancing into space would take a lot longer if a species didn't have the ability to see stars with the naked eye for whatever reason. Humans were lucky to have good enough eyesight and even then, you wouldn't have to be badly nearsighted before making out stars would be difficult. Fortunately, it seems other animals do use stars for navigation and such, so it's not like this is unique to humans.
@@MrBottlecapBill Resources are the reason to go to space. There's way more rare material in Solar System asteroids alone than on the entire Earth, or at least in accessible parts of the Earth. Some technological advancements will require us to start mining asteroids, but it's still far from happening.
@@urphakeandgey6308 if there was constant "sun" light on their planet they would never see stars.
@@Kondiqq maybe we can turn an asteroid into a giant battery
To assume that intelligent inhabitants of a fishbowl world would never push up on their ceiling is to seriously underestimate them.
Haha! This is funny because I've been writing a sci fi novel about exactly this. Very cool that some other people have noticed the greater occurrence of ice shell worlds, compared to Earth like habitable worlds. More to come soon!
I believe your comment about being unable to reach escape velocity on a larger planet is only if you limit yourself to chemical rockets. I believe nuclear powered rockets could still get off even much larger planets.
Exactly
Yes, let alone antimatter rockets.
And irradiate the said planet :P
Space elevators and/or rail gun launchers don't seem impossible approaches either.
But I thought space elevators are also achievable.. we can't assume they would restrict themselves to one thing
Yeah, here's the thing Champ... I'm gonna need you to include that dancing alien gif in every video moving forward. Thanks.
Yeeeeaaaaah so if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that'd be great.
I love dancing trolls.
that was the best thing in the episode
They dance worse than I do.😅
I'm in favor of this, whenever possible
Re Escape velocity. I'm sure there must be some upper limit, but you could go a long way, especially on planets with thin atmospheres, by using rail-gun, mag-lev type assists.
or just using nuclear explosions
I had the same thought. Build some kind of accelerator on their icy surface and slingshot objects into space.
I imagine Aliens living under 3Gs of gravity would develop anti-gravity
@@igoralmeida9136
Yeah, no need for environmental concerns if you are leaving the planet anyway 🙄
/s
@@darthvader0219
While we, in contrast, will have no motivation to want antigravity?
Need is no guarantee for fulfilment of dreams.
Currently there are no indications that this fantasy will ever be feasible.
Hopefully Anton will still be here after 10 years to talk about confirmation of the fishbowl worlds theory and tie all of it together!
I think that for bigger planets it wouldn't be the gravity factor and escape velocity that would affect the Drake Equation, but also the incentive.
Since the planet is big, there would be a lot more for a civilization to explore, a lot more of variety to the planet and a lot more of resources, so even if they knew about other planets or the entire universe. They won't see the point in trying to build something that will be really expensive and risky for them like a rocket. Like we did when we explored and expanded into the entirety of the planet in the last millenium.
I can imagine a super earth filled with hundred if not thousands of Nations that are more busy in doing endless diplomatic affairs and wars who won't never see the stars
"Space is big, really big, you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemists, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams. That's the reason. Or we are alone.
The kind of peanuts that look fine from the outside but inside you only find pin needle head sized nodules.
Not only that, but most of that space is empty.
It's even bigger than that.
It's so big, nobody will ever communicate with anyone else, and the really sharp ones won't bother trying.
neutrino communication over small star system scale or as a we we're here but now we're gone :) it'll pass right through any pesky stars between you and your target as a bonus
@@bryandraughn9830
It's because we're alone. Let's take better care of the earth!!
The universe is bigger than we think and intelligent life capable of interstellar travel and communication is more rare than we think but exists. We are not alone but life capable of communicating with us is beyond our observable universe and our observable universe does not represent the universe. That doesnt mean that intelligent life hasnt attempted to show itself, just that their home is farther away than we can detect.
It's why you never hear anything from Sponge Bob.
I completely agree with everything that you have said in this video Anton and I also think there is an underground version of this possible solution to the so-called 'Fermi Paradox' just like your underwater theory.
The Fermi paradox is solved by realizing that the “aliens” see what we are about and aren’t interested in playing with us
Ive always wondered how living ships in sci fi evolved, imagine a world where a whale type animal developed, the world has low escape velocity, or geysers that send water into space. The whales would jump out of the water into space or get launched into space by the geysers and over billions of years develop into a space fairing creature the same way fish came onto dry land on earth.
Probably by really advanced genetic engineering, from a species that came to understand it so well that they could design a creature almost from scratch, perhaps based on some stock "parts" in the same way they we design electronics.
@@TooSlowTube you described Titans.
Fish can’t develop lungs, ever. It’s not possible.
@@astra6712 you might want to run this by the ancient Baghdad murals once more.
@@John-wd5cb that’s the Oannes who came with the Annunaki. That’s where the legend of the mermaid came from.
Anton says our "planet is super super lucky" that is why we have had dozens of extinction events. That would indicate that a stable environment may not lead to intelligent life. Of course we would not know either way. The fact that intelligent and technological life did evolve on Earth only once and only after 5 billion years would tend to indicate that it is quite difficult.
I think it is likely we live in a fishbowl solar system. I think that the challenges of interstellar travel are too great that few try, believing it not worth the effort and resources, and those that do try just end up frizzling out.
I like this idea even though evidence is against it. A multiplanetary civilization will have ample energy and patience to send out interstellar seeds after a few centuries. If there's an impenetrable wall of debris or another unknown, maybe all that energy can't scratch the surface of the problem.
@@Curry-tan-WE haven't even made a multiplanetary civilization yet. It might not even really be possible, for the long term. We evolved specifically on Earth, and are perfectly adapted to Earth. Being somewhere else would mess with our biology in a lot of uncomfortable ways.
I think it's more likely that we have "fish bowl" solar systems. I don't see us doing more than sending probes out there to other systems. And the time it takes even light to travel between systems makes any real communication pointless and impossible. The sender will be long gone before there's even a chance of a response.
Unless aliens figure out how to break physics then they arent going anywhere quickly, and neither are we. Its more than just resources and technology. @@Curry-tan-
@@Curry-tan-I think it’s called the heliopause it’s where the protection the sun gives us from interstellar radiation ends I believe
That's not really a fishbowl solar system though, uneconomic to leave isn't the same as impossible to leave.
I mean, for all we know we be able to master fusion in a century or so making energy dirt cheap with a nigh infinite supply of it in all the subsurface oceans around the solar system, even in the quantities required for interstellar travel. So that it's not economic _now_ doesn't mean it'll forever stay that way.
It's also very situational, had our solar system been part of a dense globular cluster or some sorts, we'd have dozens of stars within a few lightyears making the trip far more achievable than the minimum 4 ly to our neighbours, possibly even attainable without dirt cheap energy. Having other systems near by, dramatically lowers the effort needed to travel there, we're just in a quiet outskirt giving us a heftypenalty. But at the same token: maybe planets in a globular clusters are constantly bombarded by debris because the stars perturbate each others Oort clouds & Kuiper Belts far more often, making complex life impossibru and rendering this question completely moot.
I imagine a gravitationally grounded civilization saying 'screw it' and turning their home planet into one gigantic starship somehow. Or maybe coming up with a way to achieve spaceflight without chemical reactions, such as anti gravity or EMP. Or maybe even Stargates... This is a strange Universe that we live in, anything seems possible. Stay Wonderful, Anton!
I read something similar written by either Asimov or A C Clark, where the fact that water planet life could be smart as it likes, but it won't invent fire, so it's unlikely to evolve technologically speaking.
I think that's probably a little pessimistic - I mean, chemistry exists - but I can see how it'd be yet another Great Limitation.
It's like asking American Indians 5000 years ago why they haven't seen other people from other places on earth.
The universe is inordinately vast and physics is very hard thing to overcome. I'm not surepised at all that we have not seen space aliens.
I do, however, believe they do exist.
Interesting Theory with some valid points - maybe they're why the universe seems so lifeless - life can't escape their worlds
I don't think escaping our worlds is going to be a problem. I'm more of a subscriber to the petri dish theory that states because of the limits of special relativity and the speed of light, expanding beyond a few star systems is realistically impossible.
But then again, nobody seems to be asking the really important question, "Why are we so important that if life exists out there that they would need to find and communicate with us.
@@jackielinde7568Maybe the Aliens look down the ideal of Humanity having Giant Stores and Fast Food spots strewn all over this Star System! 🤨
IT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN! 😂
@@jackielinde7568 Relativity has little to do with interstellar travel being routinely practical or not.
yeah hard radiation and effective superluminal shielding would be 2 really big task's to overcome first@@Sonny_McMacsson
@@Sonny_McMacsson Relativity does when you're trying to keep a galactic empire on a timely scale. Unless you're using Einstein-Rosen bridges, you're probably doing funky things with Space-Time, and Einstein says that does funky things to things like clocks.
And that's the rub that makes most FTL systems impractical. Most people don't want to return to a place where all their friends are dead and their grandkids are older than they are.
A couple of years ago I was discussing this with family members. Icy world inhabitants would not know of stars existance. Also, water would keep the soldering iron from working and assembling circuit cards.
Perhaps it's best that intelligent creatures living under ice never see the outside. Ever heard of Krikkit?
There's the whole creating technology without fire as a starting point.
Careful, you're assuming they have similar senses to us
you have a very beautiful outro Anton, and the most wholesome community I've ever seen on RUclips. Thank you for providing us with all this content and information. I really hope you are happy.
Humans escaping Earth's gravity has a base level foundation of humans figuring out tools, fire, tying knots, and storytelling (expression of abstract thought).
Are fishbowl ice covered ocean worlds going to have basic survival technologies to build space exploration on?
I've always been of a mind that we're not listening in the right way. We're using an archaic form of communication ill suited towards interstellar distances. It would make more sense for them to use a technology that would make the long delays less of an issue.
Good, as far as it goes, but what, precisely, do you think we should be looking/listening for, if not any of the comms tech we currently understand?
Yep, first we have to determine that the speed of light isn't a constant which we have nothing to indicate otherwise. It is entirely possible though, that there IS something other than light, which we just can't detect or even contemplate what it might be.
@@murraymadness4674 Hard thing, considering gravity waves propagate at the speed of light. It's not actually the speed of light, but a limiting speed of spacetime, in my (uninformed) opinion
@@Ferd414I think it'll have something to do with the expansion of the universe. In my completely uninformed opinion, this is where space-time changes. We might find it when we figure out gravity.
The distance between stars in our own galaxy, not to mention the distance between ours and other galaxies, is the main reason that we don't get signals from other intelligent life. The distance to the nearest star to us in our galaxy is about 4(four) light years. A radio signal from a distance of just 1(one) light year away would be nearly invisible in the cosmic background noise. The transmission of electromagnetic radiation from a source to a receiver of that signal, like cell phone signals, is subject to the inverse-square law, which states - The radiation inverse square law specifies that: the intensity of the radiation goes down by the square of the distance from the source. For instance if you move twice as far from the source the intensity of the radiation will decrease by a factor of 4 - which is why the further you get from a cell tower, the worse the reception is. Now imagine that, not in miles, but in light years from the source. Do the math.
I knew before the JWST was launched, that when it looked into the deep field, it would see large galaxies as far back as it could see. The whole argument of fine-tuned/not-fine-tuned/multiple-universes, is ridiculous! As demonstrated by the JWST, the universe is infinite and the "Big Bang" never happened. Super-large galaxies exist all the way up to and beyond the edge our observable universe. If you could move the JWST, in any direction, halfway from here to the edge of our observable universe, it would show you the same view that we see from here, and our Milky Way galaxy would appear to be at the far-edge of that observable universe.
We exist in a place where we CAN exist and that's all there is to it!
You know, recognizing that space travel is basically impossible because of the physical characteristics of your world is a pretty good incentive to stfu when coupled with the idea of the dark forest. It's one thing to keep quiet because you believe you're in a fight to the death, but the motivation HAS to be higher if you're also basically a sitting duck. Like if I broke both my legs while attempting to run away from a Terminator, I'm definitely going to stfu and crawl my ass into the darkest spot I can find.
Dark forest is really bad solutio...It make zero sense for a lot of reason.
The main one is we are already obvious for any one tha can check our atmosphere and this is real easy to do
Why would anyone attack a planet they can't escape from anymore?
Imagine a warlike interstellar species... they'd have no use for such a planet, if they cannot exploit it for their empire.
Only scenario where any alien species would be a threat is if they wanted to settle for the rest of time, maybe because they destroyed their own planet.
@@devifoxe well that's one way to tell someone their point sailed right over your head
@@FarFromtheSuns @FarFromtheSuns nop your point is invalid... Because is based in a bad idea. And leads to the opposite conclusion! if you are trapped in your planet is far more logical to be visible as possible so you ask for help than to hide for an imaginary enemy
@@devifoxe our own history shows that you are grossly out of touch with reality. Altruism is not and should not be assumed. You aren't going to open your front door for a stranger at 2AM, are you? Foolishness.
Those aliens probably sit around all day and do math puzzles and compose music and poetry. My kind of alien!
okay Mr Petrov how come you are not a scientist? wow. I can't believe your videos it's incredible.
I am very curious about planets with an escape velocity factor of 2.2 being inescapable by any means, but I couldn't find more information. Can anyone provide a source or some key search terms?
Rocket equation. The fuel needed to get into orbit would simply weigh to much. However that's only true for chemical rockets we currently use. If these aliens invented some other type of propulsion they could still get into orbit. If their planet has an atmosphere that would change things as well depending on how thick it is. There's a lot of factors at play. But these statements only apply to "super earths" or terrestrial planets. If the aliens are aquatic, living in an ocean under the ice sheet they're essentially never getting out.
This doesn't "explain" the great silence. There are more options than icy and hycean worlds. That's also making assumptions about alien psychology which may vary wildly, and underestimating non-rocket and non-space-elevator launch methods. I'd be more convinced by an article about mining and settlements being selected against in waterworlds.
The escape factor is less important than mineral scarcity. Engineers can reach space. The issues are that the rocket equation breaks by EF 2.2, their mesophere is higher, and space elevators would require materials far better than carbon nanotubes. That requires higher energy methods like laser assist and a strato and mesosphere quasi-satellite launch industry. None of that is ruled out. It's all balanced out by the multitude of ice shell moons with very low EF.
Yes, the obvious trouble with the "Fishbowl" proposition is every world has to be a fishbowl, and we already have an example of one that isn't... from a ample size of one!
I starting to think that Anton might be an Alien.
I mean, with the volume and consistency of the high quality videos he puts out, he just can't be Human. 👽
I never thought about escape velocity being an issue you'd have to consider if you were to successfully achieve interstellar travel - didn't even cross my mind. Very interesting.
The Fermi Paradox considers timespans of hundreds of millions, or even billions of years, so things like drilling through the ice are just a bump on the road. However, any ocean species will have a hard time developing metallurgy to build the drills.
Wouldn't the fish bowl just be a variation on the Zoo hypothesis?
In junior high, I wrote a short story about a planet that was shielded from the stars by a thick dust cloud but discovering there was an Universe outside of this cloud unified the warring nations of the world in so called breaking free of their mutual imprisonment but the astronauts on the current mission dies, according to the telemetry to which the organizers of the mission say it was all for the greater good. The scene then clips to a civilization on a nearby planet that was intentionally keeping the first planet within an isolating dust cloud out of fear of the unhabitants violent tendencies, when it was reported that an attempt to leave the planet had been made and they had to kill the explorers to which the comment that it was all for the greater good was made. Yeah, I wasn't real good with writing stories where actual action was happening so they tended to be retrospectives and flashbacks. I did get a good grade on that one story though, it was 95% with the 5% being docked for being handed in late.
no
Copyright your story and sell it To Star Trek for Billions and the Book rights alone would make you Rich !!!
That's kind of similar to the planet Krikkit in Douglas Adams' _Life, The Universe, and Everything_ . The first thing the Krikkiters said as they breached the cloud surrounding their planet and saw the vast universe outside was... "It'll have to go".
@@MicroClases_Ciencia”no” 🤡 👆
@@jonharrison3114 Let me elaborate... no, it is not
I remembered I tripped on salvia so hard once I felt like I was traversing through an endless tunnel and on the side of the tunnels there were multiple portals. One portal showed a world where Humanoid like beings existed, they had similar structure to us and their voice sounded very peaceful. They had broad shoulders, thick wide necks, big eyes and bigger heads. Clothing all matching. Like a one piece. My surroundings was very similar to socotra with multiple buildings with tons of neon signs and high tech automobiles. I looked back at the portal and before I can even reach my hand to it, one of these beings said to me telepathically: we are your neighbors, one day you’ll see where we are. Then my trip was done… this will forever be my idea of aliens.
Thick atmsopheres, iceshields, interstellar dustclouds and maybe even the absence of eyes might hinder the evolvment of "star interested" species at all. Also most likely any kind of alien UFO we may come over is actually a flying Aquarium!
Intuitively, this sounds like the best explanation so far.
How to escape an icy fishbowl as an intelligent fish. See ice? Melt ice. Reach the top of the ice. Now you are a terrestrial fish. See sky. Try to fly. Invent flight. Reach limit of flight height because of gravity. Build riser until atmosphere and gravity are weaker. Launch off of riser. Congratulations, space fish.
Mountain by Liu Cixin is an amazing description and an intelligent species that developed inside of a planet.
This fishbowl idea says quite a lot about how we see ourselves, not because it isn't plausible, but because it fails to recognize that we are exactly as much fishbowl as anyone out there. It fails to ask, even if they could, why should they? This leads to the next obvious question - why should we, and that's an uncomfortable one. If only we could start with earth, right here and now, things would be better.
Yes, you quickly get problems, as soon as you go above 1,5 earth masses in terms of "it gets too difficult to reach planetary orbit"
And in many cases, a geostationary orbit may be too low to be of much use, or it may even within a too dense atmosphere to be possible, but this depends more on length-of-day which may vary a lot.
BUT bigger planets also come with denser atmospheres, allowing for small insects to fly much higher and stay up more efficiently.
Asteroid impacts may spread it without killing all of it.
We have yet to find frozen fish in orbit of frozen moons.
Smelting metals and associated alloys and invensions, becomes so much more unlikely on 'water worlds'... (an obvious 'chicken and the egg' being that aquatic intelligent creatures would need 'breathing apparatus' to operate above ground, to smelt metals to be able to create 'breathing apparatus!' etc. etc.)
There is potential for "growing" organic structures - even containing metallic compounds - using all kind of bacteria around vents and volcanoes. Or they could use other method, chemical or even electrical in nature - which might occur naturally. We are trapped thinking in our own world terms and conditions but an alien mind would find solutions adapted to their environment as we did with our own. As long as the alien life exhibits anything close to what we define as "curiosity", they will find ways.
Interesting. How would the process start? Do we have any examples on Earth? Not completed but at least a starting point.
I wrote a whole novel about just such a civilization back in 2014. _A Darkling Sea_. It's currently out of print but I'm going to get it up on Kindle again in a few weeks. My aliens could tell that the rocky core of their world was denser than the ocean, which in turn was denser than the ice, so they did deduce that the universe beyond the ice was essentially vacuum. The notion that there might be other worlds out there was a great surprise to them. The bad guys in the novel were a spacefaring alien civilization trying to impose a Trekian "Prime Directive" of forbidding contact. The Ilmatarans allied themselves with the humans to drive those other aliens off their world, because once they learned that the rest of the universe exists, they didn't want to remain cut off from it.
One thing I thought of is what if our relatively transparent atmosphere is rare. What if most other life bearing planets have opaque atmospheres similar to Venus. They let light in but don't allow the planet's occupants to see other planets it their system or the stars. They may become quite advanced without even knowing anything exists beyond their planet similar to an ice world.
They'd probably discover radio then discover radio coming from the sky, boom, radio telescope astronomy.
Imagine chilling on just another balanced temperature day with your atlantis buddies.. suddenly something DRILLS A HOLE INTO THE EDGE OF YOUR WORLD, potentially ruining your eco system.. only to find out it's DAVID GOGGINS.
Another great post Anton, many thanks.
I once read one of the most impactful change for humans was the development of the opposable thumb... that allows for grasping of tools. As for life on worlds with underground oceans... they would not even nessecarily know what the universe outside the world they know exists.
There was actually a Star Trek Next Generation episode covering this, I think it was called macro brain, where the federation accidentally was terraforming a planet that had an intelligent life living in liquid under the surface... and the race only became aware of the outer universe when we breached the layer they lived.
There is a Peter Hamilton novel dedicated to such fishbowl world - I think it was within a nebula or something else that was optically thick and they had never seen the stars outside of whatever surrounds them. They never developed space technologies and well there was a whole story. The point is, it's not hard to imagine what life would be if you cannot see the stars outside of some bubble around you. That will prevent you form understanding distance and star processes etc. So it makes sense to me.
And that issue effects not just water and ice worlds. The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere has to be pretty specific for fire as well which would have a huge effect on whether or not they could develop those technologies
Even if you can't escape with rockets, you can absolutely build mass drivers to put things into orbit, it would take a lot more work than here, but should still be entirely possible.
And with a consistent enough mass driver (or some combination of mass driver + rockets) they should be able to put people into space, and likely species from higher gravity planets would have a higher G tolerance aswell.
The communication thing is really good, but the thing with "rockets" is again orthoevolutional extrapolation. If a system is drastically different, it can develop potentially totally different way of space traveling, albeit with a way of communication that is so wastly different from ours that we just unable to see each other as a living organisms, unable to mutually detect ourselves.
One of the best on RUclips 👍
Great video - again. It begs the question "Are we in a fish bowl, because we can't see beyond the visible (detectable) Universe?"
The other question is "What is the purpose of evolution anyway - and are we (humans) more meaningful than a mold, which will colonize anywhere in the Universe if it hitches a ride?"
This reminded me of "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir, in particular Rocky's homeworld of Erid where the depth of the atmosphere meant they never considered space travel until something went wrong with their sun. Also, when looking at the number and types of exoplanets, there are a lot of superearths and many of those will be impossible to leave using rocket propulsion, and the depth of the atmosphere would likely obscure the stars.
5:36 I had never this Starship HLS concept art. Neat!
Very thought provoking, Anton!
The idea of not being able to escape the larger planets is predicated on using chemical rockets. What if because of this limitation they dismissed this technology and put their effort into the kinds of technologies seen in UAP'S?
Omg. That is mind blowing. Indeed, they're protected. They can develop in relative peace. And if they're around a red dwarf, they can exist for insane amounts of time. Wow.
Not too mention water is heavyer then air... Human are lucky too have evolved in africa and need so little water...
7:45 if only human would do this...
8:55 oh good you mentioned it!! 🌈 ❤
I imagine how hard it would be if we could hear what the entire city is talking about. How do you even know what to pay attention to? In a world like that the form of communication might be mostly through sound but fish can also sense electrical fields, maybe that would be a motivation to develop radio communication.
What I love about the solutions for the paradox is that multiple could be right at once
It is not really a paradox, because we have a very obvious reason for it. We pretty much see exactly what we expect to see based on our current knowledge. It is still fun to think about alternative explanations though…
Super fascinating Anton. Well-presented.
You make it sound like the upcoming Icy Moon missions are going to have some drilling and/or submersible component to them. I don’t think that’s in the cards unless I am totally off base. It would be super awesome though.
Imagine living in a vast, pitch-black ocean for eons, developing intelligence, culture, maybe even religion, chit-chatting about the legends of the world, establishing theories about how the unpenetrable, rock-solid skies might have formed, building myths about what's beyond the heavens, arguing about it's possible infinity, when suddelny someone starts banging on your eternal rooftop from the outside, punching a hole in it, and a never-ever seen creature made of an unknown material suddenly starts sinking down from your heavens, shouting HELLO THERE, anyone around?
What are bugs actually communicating through those antenna-!?
The reason we don't see other civilizations is actually alot simpler. Simple travel time. When we look at other galaxies and even other sections of our own galaxy we are seeing what they USED to look like millennia ago, not what they currently look like. Any light or signals coming from another civilization has to cross the vast distances of lightyears to reach us, so what we see is not representative of what *is*, but what *was*. It's entirely plausible that Andromeda has it's own civilization going about their business as we speak, but it would take 2.5 million years for that information to reach us. When you also consider how rapidly mankind itself went from discovering electricity to putting boots on the moon (Less than 300 years) then it stands to reason that alien civilizations would not only seem plausible, but LIKELY, and we would have no way of actually seeing whether or not they're there without physically sending a probe or explorer to view it in live, real time.
Passive observation with telescopes from Earth is simply not going to reveal anything, regardless of whether or not Aliens are there.
@@Magnaraptor1836 What would change your mind about the existence of non human sentient species not only existing but occasionally visiting our planet and establishing contact with certain people?
@@steelswarm2721I think you misread. I fully believe aliens exist in the universe. I am also somewhat confident that some have indeed visited us in our past, but nothing short of meeting an alien representative in-person would fully convince me of that being the case. I want it to be true, but being a practical person I'd need to see it with my own eyes.
@@Magnaraptor1836 The contacts and experiences of other people all around the world and from all walks of life are something you discard?
@@Magnaraptor1836 If your mom or dad saw a spaceship land and some non human beings came out, grabbed a sample of soil, went back in the craft and then that craft disappeared, would you believe their account, or you would automatically say they were lying or that they misrepresented what they saw?
A few things about this topic:
1) I agree that there's a size limit for a planet to allow for intelligent life to leave the surface. To expand on it further I also believe that there's a limit on the other end of the spectrum, a lower size limit due to a lack of heavier elements accumulating to allow for complex chemical reactions required for life to evolve. It's why I don't believe we will find life on Enceladus but we might on Titan.
2) Just because an intelligent lifeform is unable to personally leave its planet that doesn't mean that they will be unable to communicate with other life offworld. There actually was a Next Generation episode on this (only briefly mentioned). In the episode an intelligent life sent the tools necessary to make contact with them. Essentially they sent out probes to explore and establish contact on their behalf without them having to leave their planet. This example is a bit dramatic but I hope the point comes through.
3) I saw someone (Astrum or PBS Spacetime. I forgot which) go through the Drake Equation. They would fill out what we knew in the 70's then checked the odds, did the same thing for the 80's, 90's, etc... And the pattern that emerged is the more data we plug into it the higher the odds are for life, but that Earth life is extremely early.
4) The thing that always bothered me about a lack of evidence for extremely intelligent life is that there should at least be self replicating robots trying to last as long as possible. One lifeform in the billions of years since the big bang should have wanted to leave a legacy even if they themselves couldn't endure or transformed into something beyond this universe. There has to be one.
Secure communications would be an issue. Perhaps with the absence of chance of secure communications they would not even evolve the concept of a need for selective, secure communications. It would be interesting to see if this would mean an open, friendly society without the need for conflict or would the competition for resources mean something else?
This brings about a very interesting problem for humanity to solve before we start to venture to the stars. Some planetary visits may be a once and done trip, with the knowledge that once they land, they will never be able to leave.
Bravo profesor Stern a huge Epiphany.
I find myself wandering if we could be living on a "Faraday cage" world.
As some of your resent videos have pointed out we seem to be (could be?) crossing through a magnetic tunnel, which means that for any signal to reach us it would have to pass through an Electro-Magnetically charged zone, complete with it's associated "Rip zones"(picture the interfase between the solar winds and the galactic winds).
Note I use the plural of zone because presumably there would be one entering the E.M. zone and one exiting it.
You don’t even need ice to change the possibility of intelligent life. A planet with permanent thick clouds would prevent intelligent life from ever knowing that there are stars, planets, moons or a sun.
Love your work & Would join your Patrion if you did a couple of scooby doo impressions !
I find that a lot of people forget that two civilizations would have to have all the usual requirements for life etc. but also overlap in the time of their existence, in order to meet each other. There could be civilizations that have come and gone before our time out there and we wouldn't be able to detect them unless they left some sort of sign that could last a ridiculous amount of time.
I suppose the drake equation accounts for this with the last variable L for length of time that a civilization would release signals, but it seems to be forgotten a lot in discussion. Two or more civilizations that happen to exist during the same time within a given area of stars, I wonder how hard it would be to calculate such a variable.
But if the earlier civilization produced robots that could create space craft and duplicate themselves and send these out throughout the universe then the two civilizations would not need to overlap in space and time.
The second civilization would end up communicating with the AI produced by the earlier civilization.
As the credits roll, the camera pulls back revealing it is playing on a screen in a large amphitheater. The presenter then speaks:
"As you can see in this ground breaking hyper-realistic simulation of life on a much less dense planet, space travel could be possible, and this is but one of many scenarios of how such a species would view us. Thankfully for us, they are trapped in a computer and won't be invading us from space any time soon. Thank you for coming to hear my Ted talk!"
Reminds me of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy book I think it was the third one where- it’s been a long time since I read this, so I might be confusing the details, but I believe a species had a planet, those surrounded by a cloud or just something that blocked the stars but once they first saw the stars, and felt very small, they immediately set out to conquer the galaxy out of fear and anger
The Krikkiteers. Love, brotherhood, truth, and the obliteration of all other life forms.
@@nathanguyon7620 yes! Haha I really do need to do a reread of his stuff
Something important to keep in mind is that all it would take would be one civilization to have crossed the great filter, after that, things can get exponential really easily. For this idea you would need to have some explanation for why ALL civilizations with intelectual potential to expand into space ALL happened to be born in fishbowls, and somehow we're the first to have a chance to go interstellar.
Hmm. Last week Fraser Cain (Universe Today) had a guy on his show who worked on how meteors crashing down on Earth helped bring in required molecules for life. A protective shell might get in the way and might make things more difficult. I can easily imagine simple life forming around thermal vents, much like here on Earth... but making progress from that would be incredibly hard.
I love the way Anton pronounces Ellyions :)
Very interesting! Love your videos.
Maybe we hear thier signals in our souls.
Maybe our entire notion of the physical world, matter and distance
is our error of observation.
What if there is a certain Nothing
that permeates everything from a zero point
& only those that are in touch internally / spiritually can read the messages
and connect.
10:10 - The idea that residents of fishbowl worlds wouldn't try to communicate because they wouldn't know if anyone else even exists is invalidated by humans who don't know that anyone else even exists are desperate to know if they exist, spend vast sums listening for any sign of other civilizations, and are trying to communicate with anyone who might be out there. We don't know but we desperately want to know.
I try to keep up with all the science influencers so I know what the average RUclipsr thinks.
Then I come back to you for the rational analysis of the topics in question.