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Could you do a video taking into a count the fact that space expands faster than light, and so it is possible for FTL technology to exist? There are already models for FTL, maybe you could work with those to tell us how grabby aliens would expand then, or what would happen if different civilizations didn`t use FTL at All.
@@samueltrusik3251 i think its beyond light. I put it as they breath o2 and compatible with h20 but they are here with us just different frequency. Ive had some beyond pranks in my life growing up with dad on hollywood sets to mom in Air Force and one was having firect speakers as a kid wonder where what how so it freaked out 7 y.o. me than the waves started and random things happen. A lot. Look at my page on the blurry video. I have tons of them but rest have sounds of domestic violence(not gna post that) but look up Tesla whittier los Angeles electric dome. Another level since civid and my hz hits below 20 for hours. Yes its freaky
Imagine spanning thousands of solar systems in your home galaxy in which you thought you had alone and had always wished to find a neighbor, only to discover ancient ruins of that neighbor and learning that they calculated their chances of demise before they advanced to your current stage.
Perhaps not in scheme of things, and with other parameters controlling more and less stringently how large or small the others are. A larger range also gives more confidence that an actual point will lie within those boundaries making it oddly more accurate. In a way. More RELIABLE anyway.
@@prolamer7 ww2 was already incomprehensible. 40,000,000 people died in a span of about 5 years, try comprehending how many bullets where fired, how many rooms where fought over, how many man hours where spend patrolling, advancing, nervously scouting the perimeter. the deeper you dig the more you realize that we have already reached a scale that is incomprehensible
Kurzgesagt meets Isaac Arthur... This is wild, I'm so glad to be here for this channels beginnings. Thanks for the hard work and for blowing my mind ❤️
Sometime in the near future, humanity receives messages from a nearby civilization. Peaceful communication is established, and against all odds it seems that both species are at comparable technological levels. "Weren't you scared to contact us?" say the aliens, "We could have been a grabby civilization." The human ambassador shakes his head and replies, "the odds of two grabby civilizations emerging in the same galaxy are incredibly low."
This approach to Fermi Paradox seems like a real breakthrough. It is somewhat related to "humans are firstborn" solution, but extended to the whole universe as opposed to single galaxy.
Though considering that an estimated 99.9 percent of all species that've ever existed have already vanished just on earth, there's no assurance that a similar percentage of all *_'intelligent'_* species in the galaxy might not suffer the same fate. Heck, even our own species can't get past petty Tribalism yet.
@@miniverse2002 Well, not really, since the firstborn hypothesis merely argues that humanity is first in this galaxy. It’s a pretty logical extension of its argument to assume that all observers are firstborn in their galaxy.
Incredible work. Adorable animation, backed by legitimate research into fascinating subjects. You built a gingerbread house on a foundation of cold hard facts. Love it. Subbed.
First off, amazing videos! I love them! Secondly some food for thought: I think the assumption that the growth is always positive has a massive impact on the results. While parts of this model seem viable, it doesn't seem to account for the "grabbyness of the species involved". Doing so should result in oscillations that shift expected values dramatically. There are economic limits to expansion with any species and rapid expansion generally requires more resources than slow expansion. Rapid expansion of a "greedy" species would be followed by a rapid growth rate in population and infrastructure that depletes resources available in their expansion bubble. Depleting these resources renders an area of the universe un-usable and fuels a greater need to expand. Tracking this need to acquire new resources as the required expansion velocity needed to fuel expansion is exponential. It can surpass the speed of light, and become impossible. Thus, civilizations that are "too grabby" would not be able to achieve sustainable rapid expansion placing an upper limit on expansion below the speed of light. I think this might be called the "light trap" theory. Civilizations could expand if they did not grow as quickly, but these would be less grabby by nature, and would imply less need/desire for rapid expansion. I think this is called the "(ecologically) green alien" theory. The limit on speed, and the impact on available resources available at any time makes this process much more oscillatory than one of steady growth. Oscillation of occupied zones would make our chances of seeing a civilization smaller. Imagine if a cancerous cells could die on it's own. It is just as likely to exist, but less likely to be observed. Factoring in these economic constraints, make us less special, and aliens more likely to exist. It's the cake and eating it, too. :)
Assuming a self replicating Von Neuman probe could be built along with a ship with 100 tons of material, half of Mercury should be enough to colonize all of the visible universe. The theory is to send robots to do the colonizing, so we would not actually go to the other worlds, but new people would be grown on those worlds natively by the machines. Assuming planets are common, we will never run out of resources on any world, because even one planet contains millions of years of material, and we have at least 7 nice piles of material to harness, in our system alone.
Well, you sure are one of the clever ones; and with an informed and smart reply/comment like that, I think you're ready! Ready, that is, for: the Lex Fridman podcast where he interviews Robin Hanson (the author of the paper this theory is based on and who was referenced throughout). You're in for a treat! 😄 I actually saw that first and was like 😳 ...wait; WHAT?! 🤯 (then found these videos for a helpful breakdown!; )
@@sprinkle61 This also means that the inverse is true. It would take nearly the same amount of energy to break a planet apart like mercury as it would take to colonize the known universe. Not to say it can't happen, but all the the energy expended in all the nuclear tests we've ever done as a species has only ever released about an equivalent of 2.5 magnitude 9 Earthquakes. Keep in mind that a planet can withstand orders of magnitude more energy than that before being forced apart. Taking apart half of Mercury seems simple because it's close, but we would likely expend more resources/energy taking it apart than we would get out of it. Sure there is a lot of "mass" energy to be had there, but most of that would be un-usable for fusion or fission, even in a universe where humanity had 100% efficient fusion and fission. The issue is that only certain elements have the potential to generate usable amounts of energy in the first place, and many elements are already stable, requiring more energy to be expended in fusion/fission than we can get out, even at 100% efficiency. This isn't an engineering problem, but a physical constraint. Additionally by removing the mass from Mercury, we are changing the rotational energy in our own solar system. We can't just pick up a planet and move it without slowing down the suns' rotation, or expending a TON of energy speeding up another planet. Sure we might not care about this as Mercury is a tiny fraction of the total rotational energy of the solar system, but we do need to find the energy to move it in the first place. One rocket leaving Mercury's orbit isn't a big deal, but with enough to move the entire planet this energy loss becomes not insignificant. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about the obvious energy to get a rocket into space, but the additional energy to break the orbit as well. The last statement about us "having 7 nice piles of material to harness in our system alone" is language reminiscent of language used in the industrial revolution that legitimized dumping crude oil into rivers, and pumping radioactive coal smoke-stacks into the atmosphere. I get that what you said was a hyperbole about the amount of mass we have in our solar-system, and not condoning the destruction of Earth, but it needs comment. While to us, as a planet bound species, having the entirety of the solar system to work with seems like a lot, it is still finite, and exponential population/resource growth is a tried and true principle. We once thought oil and water reserves would never run out, yet the later could be a very real reason to leave Earth in the first place. This use of resources first, and thought about sustainability isn't solved by introducing more resources: that just leads to more growth. Another question that is asked is why should we move? Either we have run low on resources, and it is a move of desperation, or we see a massive financial incentive, or we are doing it for the sake of 'adventure'. The first reason is not indicative of good planning, or successful recolonization. I mean if we mess up badly enough to need that, we aren't going to work out anywhere else, or do a good job with the transition. The second reason requires two way communication and collection of resources, i.e. trade. In a capitalist society this would benefit from growth and fast growth. They wouldn't set up independent civilizations, but attempt large-scale colonialism, and would want exponential growth to increase the market. The last reason is beautiful, and human, and is the least likely. If it did happen, it wouldn't happen fast, and it couldn't be driven by short-sited colonization profits, and it would struggle with recruitment, resources to get started, etc, and would struggle each time it wanted to travel further. But that last one also has the most potential to spread the farthest. @sprinkle61 I realize this runs the risk of 'internet tone' so just know, none of the above is a personal attack or anything :) I think it's fair to say we both love talking to friends and family about this stuff
I like this comment a lot, but am a bit confused by it. Is the core idea that excessively grabby aliens would not maximize for expansion? Maybe introducing a new term would clarify things. I would assume "maximally grabby" = maximizing for expansion. It seems like your argument is that a more-grabby species would expand less. This is an oxymoron based on the definition I'm using. If what you mean by "grabby" is "species that maximizes for population," I would argue that 100% population maxing would probably get you within in an order of magnitude of 100% expansion maxing (as in, if you 100% max for population, you probably expand to at least 10% of maximum potential). I think this because a larger population would need more resources, and expansion would be a logical way to attain these resources. For example, a swarm of self replicating drones could be built to bring more and more resources from new areas of space to populated areas, or populating new areas would also by definition constitute expansion. If you're arguing that 100% population max would result in less than 10% of max expansion, I would disagree that this is likely. If you're arguing it would result in 50% of max expansion, I find this a lot more plausible. If by "grabby" you mean "competitive/wasteful", then I agree that a competitive/wasteful species would expend resources on internal power struggles rather than expansion, or destroy resources such that they cannot be used/reused on expansion respectively. I agree that these traits could plausibly result in expansion less than 10% of max. For example, an extreme nuclear war could result in far less than 10% of max expansion being achieved. I also agree that a species that maximizes for something other than population or expansion might plausibly attain less than 10% of possible expansion. For example, a "quality over quantity" species might find that for whatever reason space expansion does not increase happiness as much as other competing methods. However, it seems very plausible that a "quality over quantity" species would in fact find expansion to be in alignment with quality of life maximization. For example, self replicating robots could be used to obtain greater and greater quantities of resources from new areas of space, and these resources could be used to improve quality of life. More resources has been very strongly associated with higher quality of life for human history so far, so it seems unlikely to change. Maybe new resources could be spent on researching human or animal psychology, creating new technologies that grant humans access to new, good experiences, prolong human life, and so on. I guess my argument is that unless civilization on earth is destroyed by competition/wastefulness/asteroid/etc or its goals change in an unforeseeable and seemingly unlikely way, there will be probably be a good reason to achieve at least 10% of potential expansion.
I don't think you realize what it means to have resources in a post-scarcity, matrioskha brain-building civilization. Even if you take every planet in our solar system, (a lot of resources from our perspective) that is nothing compared to a single star at the center of it all. To have a thousand stars in your civilization? A million? Resources are not the issue.
So either we become intergalactic dominating spacefarers with little rivalry, or we encounter aliens soon and potentially meet our early end? I see this as an absolute win! Great video.
I think if an intergalactic alien civilization existed anywhere near close enough to us to contact us in the next 10,000 years - we'd have detected their presence by now. Sadly it seems we are the first intelligent race in at least the Milky Way which is really disappointing. I'm sure we'd all love a "The Culture" like Utopian civilization to arrive in their giant ships and save us from ourselves but such a thing is like waiting for the Second Coming of Christ, there's no evidence for it whatsoever :-(
Personally adhere to the Frank Herbert idea; We are the First. From our voyaging into the stars and adapting to many planets, we become the many aliens.
I've spent 40 years as an R&D chemical engineer building mathematical models of systems, wherever doing so generates good to a consumer, and thereby income to me. As such, I've been trained by external reality to know certain principles which would never have been apparent without this abundance of reality checks. Foremost among them, is the observation that *most* *models* *can* *feel* *very* *convincing* *when* *listing* *their* *merits* , *yet* *in* *practice* *completely* *fail* *to* *predict* *nature* . This humbling experience reminds me to not fall in love with the logic on any one line of argumentation, and to bear in mind that models are only as good as their assumptions. In this case, the grabby aliens model assumes -- critically -- that the expansion of one species into proximal systems is inevitable. Now, while I cannot rule this assumption out, I think it is obviously a pretty bold assumption, ... i.e., a wild guess based more on what someone wants the universe to be, than based on any hard evidence or engineering assessment of the possibilities. And, as soon as you raise the barrier for outward expansion, this whole grabby aliens line of argument falls completely apart. It strikes me that a physicist, who builds at most a model or two in their career, and mostly only studies the proven models of others, might not have the same intuitive grasp on this weakness of the grabby aliens model. Any 40-year theoretical physicists here are welcome to debate me on that.
Your general suspicion of pure theory I think is correct. However, I don't think your specific critique of the grabby aliens model holds. One does not need to assume that any particular species will be grabby, only that some will. If any are, it will eat up everything in its sphere of the universe basically. Also, looking at evolution on earth, it seems likely that any life form that survived for long periods of time on any planet would be selected for survival and reproduction. This behavior is, in essence, grabby. Also the only advanced civilization we have evidence for, us, seems to be grabby. That should inform our prior about what the generic advanced civilization would be like. Small sample size obviously, but still it's the only evidence we have and it makes sense to use it.
Does the grabby alien’s expansion model take into consideration the expansion of the universe and that eventually galaxies become so far apart they are unreachable via sublightspeed velocities? Does that even apply? Idk I’m ape. Great video though
It seems to me that the model isn't worrying about expansion. They're just modeling the growth of grabby civilizations for a fixed volume over a given time. They could refine the model to include expansion of the universe, but it feels like the outcome would be roughly the same, no?
@@SamThird I'm pretty sure that it does play a role on the level of galaxies. You can always spread through your galaxy really fast, but more and more galaxies become unreachable all the time. I would have to look up how quickly that happens, though. Btw writing this comment I found out that the wikipedia page on intergalactic travel is really pitiful.
Yes, we explicitly take into account the expansion of the universe. Recall that in the simulation shown, the size of the ball is much smaller at the start than at the end.
These models assume there are only two options for the perveyance of life: grabby or non grabby which, for all we know, are human or at best earthly conceptions at our current understanding/limitations in lifes experience.
this didn't occur to when watching the first video, but this time around seeing the 3D sim of civilizations expanding in the sphere made me realize what you're suggesting. Maybe being grabby is not so good. Maybe it can actually lead to self-destruction of a civilization and takes others down with it. and maybe that's why we haven't met any grabby aliens yet.
@@surviveinc I think the idea is every civilization to exist would technically be grabby, and the ones that aren’t, simply never got to exist. if we assume, alien’s exist, we have to apply what we know about evolution.The traits learned from it, would most likely be replicated in every life form.
@@surviveinc being Grabby leads to you expanding, expansion leads to needing a way to communicate across LIGHT YEARS. Most likely the problem with becoming Grabby is you can splinter your civilization leading to self destruction through competition. If Grabby aliens can still control a galaxy it'd require beating the hard step of communication across absurd distances.
@@logansmith2703 Keep in mind when they say "Human Civilization", they are just referring to humanity and our descendants as a whole. Future Humanity's not going to have any type of unified political, cultural, or economic system. Each colonized star system would be largely independent anyway, only trading with its closest neighbors. The Human race itself is probably going to quickly diverge into countless different species and sub species once we start expanding into space.
Dude, that's where all the valuable content is. I've bee listening to unpopular audio books for months threw lockdown. have you ever seen the top content on an anonymouse browser window? It's horrifying!
@@MrCmon113 absolutely correct! Although to be fair, most of us don't actually who we are going to meet out there, so any ideas are currently " technically valid" until that day comes when we are cable of interacting with said alien people.
You're missing out. My favorite channels are pretty much all sub 100k. That's where the passion is before they find the click driving formula and it becomes for profit instead of a passion project
The production quality of your content is insanely high. The concepts you present are complex yet the explanation is so cleverly crafted, I watched the alien ones them multiple times and each times I gained a new level of understanding. Please, keep doing that.
Been telling people for a while that advanced civilizations were one in thousands of galaxies rare, awesome to now have charts to elaborate further! Amazing work
@@MrMan-np9jg I realize that there could be a thousand in our galaxy and we wouldn't see them easily. But it just doesn't make sense that primitive worlds would be ignored, a prime directive would be near impossible to enforce without filling our system with their military. As for why I take my hypothesis seriously, it's because everyone takes the idea that aliens avoid us like they're elves and we're orcs seriously, and I hate that
Robert Miles? Same name as the musician and producer who wrote "Children", my first love in music when I was a child. Unfortunately, he died in his 30s. Bloody cancer!! Aka, Roberto Concina.
@@willd4686 Not sure if I'm just misunderstanding your comment, but it sounds like you're not fully convinced that it actually *is* him. But I can assure you with 99.8% probability that it is indeed the case.
maybe my favorite takeaway from this video which isn't explicitly mentioned is that observing alien life that has not already figured out interstellar expansion strongly suggests it is either impossible or very, very hard to travel between star systems. very interesting theoretical work!
One thought which occurs to me when considering the grabby alien model is that it seems extremely unlikely that a civilization would be able to maintain coherence and order when expanded over such vast cosmic scales. How might I coordinate and collaborate with my fellow citizens if I won't be alive by the time they have gotten my invitation? And how might I ensure that no competitor civilization is able to spring up in the far flung reaches of my empire? By the time I have been informed of their progress, they will have had time to significantly progress toward becoming a threat, and could even be well on their way to colonize further within the core of my territory. It seems much more likely that grabby aliens would be interested in bringing objects closer to themselves, rather than going to those objects. This process has the further reinforcing effects of de facto denying materials and locations for unobserved non-grabby civilizations, slowing their progress and decreasing the likelihood of successful transition to grabbyness. Additionally, I would significantly reduce the resources required to coordinate within the territories I control, and the snowballing of my territory density would further accelerate my ability to "grab" resources. It seems to me that the incentives of cosmic security are highly aligned with being - not only grabby - but, also pully. I would imagine that a civilization intent on preserving itself would make a mad dash to the center of its galaxy and seek to gravitationally/magnetically manipulate the distribution of matter in the galaxy towards the greatest density possible.
@@corylong5808 I think that to not be a pully civilization, one would find themselves quickly outcompeted in any sort of conflict by a pully civilization which is able to coordinate production and action. An only grabby civilization would quickly find itself outcompeted in resource acquisition and utilization by a pully one. There is some consideration to be made that pure expansion would be a priority for a civilization, as this might maximize the amount of resources the civ is able to access by an increase in the radius of their sphere of influence, but the capacity to increase the radius of influence is strongly limited by the amount of resources contained already within their utilizable zone and the degree to which those resources are put to use in expansion by the implementation of increasing technological capacity and strategic communication. It seems certain to me that a civ which focuses on bringing the most systems possible under its control within the smallest zone possible would one-day outpace the expansion of a grabby civ that doesn't attempt to order the distribution of its holdings. The only challenge to this dynamic would be if the rate of expansion of a grabby civ is great enough to preempt the arrival of that tipping point in pully civ supremacy.
@@corylong5808 but if I can make it to the center of the galaxy, all I have to do is concentrate my waste into the central mass, increase the density of the galactic core, and mother nature takes care of the rest for me. No energy expended, besides the disposal of waste (which is a necessary cost no matter how I go about dispersing my civilization). I guess one does suffer from the power law which diminishes the efficacy of gravity over distance, as opposed to say magnetism. But I stand by the idea that a civilization which has expanded to some significant portion of a galaxy would have massive incentive to manipulate the distribution of the resources and systems within their control. As I am a very stupid being in comparison to these hypothetical beings, I can not imagine what that might look like, but I can imagine that the difficulties of ruling a civilization on the order of a galaxy would suffer from the same organizational challenges which have always plagued our terrestrial civilizations. Entropy is the enemy of all living things.
There is no "far flung reaches". The civilization expands through all of that space and when they built a dyson swarm around each and every star, they can also easily make sure that none of the planets brings forth a civilization independent from theirs. Whether the descendants of such a vast civilization remain coherent is another question. This video seems to focus more about how many people get to experience being a new independent civilization.
The coherence of a civilization has no bearing on their grabbiness. evidence of a constantly civil-warring multi polity empire looks the same at the scales discussed in this video in regards to altering the universe as one that is not. The entire earth has been 'grabbed' by humans and is irrevocably shaped by us. But we are by no means coherently governed or cooperative.
you dont need coherence to be a grabby alien, a couple of mormons may decide they want to colonize trappist system while a couple of martians decide they want to colonize kepler 186. Countries like America was colonized by a small amount of people and from there they expanded to become the America we know of today. Also it doesnt have to be a quick expansion you only colonize if you need to. I see space as an ecosystem with trillions or quadrillions of human descendants or artificial creations(drones, probes, A.I.)
Yeah I don't see interstellar speeds going much higher than 20-30%/c without established laser highway systems as detailed by Issac Arthur in his series on youtube. Going much faster than that makes the interstellar medium much harder to manage. But I'm no expert, so it's just my opinion on the matter.
@Sonic Hedgehog You might be right. There are ways one CAN go faster on paper but it might not be practically possible. Antimatter engines can get you to 70% of c, but how you'd get that much anti matter and how you would safely store it is a major problem with no known solution. The laser highway system is the ONLY way you can do so that WOULD work for sure. It amounts to setting up a bunch of laser batteries on a path toward a star. You shoot them at your ships solar sail as it speeds by. These can get you up to 99% of c. In theory you would use these lasers to clear out dust along the path, because hitting even a grain of dust would would cause the same damage to your ship as a 100 megaton nuke. Also you need to have the system set up already, so you'd have to use nuclear fusion to get to the star first and set it all up along the way for future ships to use.
On the other hand, for colonisation over thousands or even millions of years - our galaxy is 100,000 ly across, so the absolute minimum lifetime of a galaxy-grabbing civilisation is 100,000 years - we can’t make assumptions based on current limits. If warp technology become practical anytime in the next 1000 - 10,000 years, we would still be on track to attain 50%-99% speeds in the relatively ‘early’ stages of growth.
@@michaelhoste_ Agreed. The possibility of new tech in the future can change everything. I'd be frankly amazed if physics allows for ANY faster than light method of space travel, but I can't discount it as a possibility.
@@lastsilhouette85 Are you familiar with the Alcubierre (theoretical) warp drive and several other practical offshoots that require vast amounts of energy to create a bubble of compressed spacetime containing a ship - where space is compressed in front and restored behind - allowing the ship to not so much ‘travel faster’ than light but to ‘change spaces’ more quickly than would normally be allowed. Physics seems to allow for ‘travel’ by manipulating the metric of space, the main goal in practice being to either reduce the amount of energy required or to harness the amount needed (which is a LOT). I used to believe that the only way to the stars was the long way, but a lot seems to have changed in the last 15 years or so.
This video is hard to understand but gives more useful information about alien civilization in a more sophisticated way than other videos do, and yet managed to maintain its chance to be understood by viewer at reasonable level. Thanks for great work!
These two videos delve into some fascinating concepts, but i gotta rewatch them a bunch of times to get them. A bit too fastpaced for my mind to wrap around them, but it's a nice challenge one hardly finds those days :) Keep it up ;)
So much better than videos that move at a snail’s pace, and with so much more information that you can always go back and watch again (and again ..and again, if necessary!)
Wow this is really well thought out considering how flawed the assumptions are. - All the math is assuming we are exactly average. Trying to make statistical predictions based on a single data point is fun but a waste of time. - This also assumes that grabby civilizations prevent new civilizations. The only way this would be true is if either they actively prevent new civilizations on all planets in their territory, or all lifeforms have the same "inhabitable" climate and are destructive of natural ecosystems. - There is also an assumption that we would be able to detect distant aliens. The only way we can currently detect anything outside our solar system is measuring light (or other photons) from Earth that happened to be emitted by distant objects (usually stars or former-stars). Why would we assume that aliens would block light from stars or emit enough light to be detected at a long distance? Are we assuming that the only way to expand a civilization is to build superstructures like Dyson Spheres? It's also possible that we already can detect aliens from Earth but we just don't know how. We're looking for very specific types of photons because the machines that detect them have to be specifically built to detect them, but aliens could be emitting a particle or wave that we just don't know about and don't have a machine designed to detect it. Basically my point is this is fun to theorize about, but it should be taken with a grain of salt since in the end it's just a fun way to waste brain power (much like writing RUclips comments)
1. Pretty sure later in the video they say that K is based off of assuming we could be statically anywhere on the graph, but anyway, why assume we aren't average? 2. It assumes grabby civilizations prevent other *grabby* civilizations, which they definitely would. If you're a powerful intergalactic empire you're not exactly going to let a new empire rise from inside you, you're (sadly) probably going to get rid of them while they're weak. (Or they'll join your empire) 3. Fair enough.
The crazy part about the grabby aliens - or any aliens for that matter - making changes to the parts of space that they colonise, is that it could have already happened up until a certain amount of light-years away & we still wouldn't know. Because light travels at the speed of, well, light 😅, the images we see through telescopes etc are all in the past. This means that we don't actually know what space looks like, beyond a certain point. It could be absolutely heaving with Dyson spheres, galactic megastructurs & intergalactic malls. We have no way of knowing, as we can't see it until the light reaches us. By the time we _do_ see all of this, it would have likely all died out a long, long time before.
Maybe could note once, that most people on the planet hate (human) history, because it so boringly past tense, out of date, unhip, so not with it, so behind the current times... if hundreds to thousands of years ago history is so worthless, what is millions to billions of years ago Astronomy and Cosmology?
There are eerie similarities to other natural processes to grabby aliens. The formation of ice crystals (you can't start the nucleus of a new crystal where there already is one) and the growth of bacterial colonies (you can't have a colony radiate out if there already is one that had radiated there). I'd like to take that as a sign of this model's credence, but I can do no more than take it.
Thank you so much. I've been stuck in my head trying to understand and explain the reason why well never meet aliens and I could never explain why. This is exactly what's in my head you're amazing and so much smarter than i could be. Hero. Thank you
I feel like this model lives on somewhat more shaky assumptions than portrayed: My biggest concern is that it assumes the only possible outcome for a civilization is either (1) to never expand outwards and remain on its home planet or (2) to take over the entire universe without limitation. My question is- why should it be that way? A defense for this is given in comparing these civilizations to the development of life on Earth - and sure, they are alien life that probably developed the same way, but assuming all life in the universe will behave this way, or even that 'primal' life will naturally overpower 'intelligent' life are quite lofty assumptions. I say this because the entire motive of 'grabby' life seems to be based in this evolutionary precedent. If this precedent doesn't exist, then what follows doesn't really seem logically sound. A counter-prediction isn't really necessary, but just for the sake of giving alternatives, here's some civilizations that would neither be grabby nor non-grabby: - What if a civilization decided that it would purposefully uphold the natural development of life, and refrain from interacting with that life until it becomes more advanced? - What if a civilization found no need for habitable planets, more practically constructing its own purpose-built artificial habitats? - What if a civilization did one of these previous things, but also repelled traditionally 'grabby' civilizations from colonizing the area anyway? If any of these alternatives - or any other - turn out to be true, the very premise of this theory becomes more and more far fetched, not to mention all of the predictions it makes.
Let me address your second counterexample first. Then, these habitats require energy. Furthermore, thermodynamics requires that a certain amount of their usable energy becomes unusable (ie entropy increases). In short, either their waste energy becomes a black hole, or is radiated away as black body radiation. Assuming that they cannot survive at stellar temperatures, which I believe is a fair assumption, they will therefore need to radiate heat away, and thus will have a visible signature on the universe: somewhere that has high amounts of low-frequency light output, but low amounts of high-frequency light output. But where would they get the energy in the first place? Probably from stars (either directly, by using the heat and light output by the star, or indirectly by siphoning off matter from the star to perform fusion or more exotic energy generation). So, they would probably either utilise stellar lifting (removing matter from their star) or construct a Dyson sphere or swarm. In either case, the low-frequency light output should be visible. Thus, your second counterexample does not address the assumptions or logic of the Grabby Aliens theory. Even if aliens built their own artificial habitats, they can still be grabby. Next, your first counterexample. Suppose that the aliens prevented information regarding them reaching humanity. That's a big task, by the way, as it requires that it mask all electromagnetic radiation that have or will reach humanity, but more importantly, they will need to send replacement information that obeys the laws of physics, excluding any possible observation that includes them. If we looked at their star, not only do they need to prevent us from seeing whatever infrared radiation is being given off as a necessary side-effect of energy use, but they'd also need to send an image of their own star, with the necessary spectral lines, and also include wobble of the star as planets orbit it, and include the periodic dimming as planets pass in front of it, etc. Not only would the inhabitants of that one star need to do this in all directions (since their emissions would only reach us in a very long time, they can't predict whether we exist on this star system or if any other star systems have life that could detect them), they'd also need to mask all emissions that would involve doing that. They'd need a higher energy-per-mass output than fusion (as they cannot be more massive than the star system they inhabit, otherwise gravity would detect them), they'd need to somehow prevent all of the waste energy from exiting (which probably would involve a black hole), and they'd need to force inhabitants of all other star systems from sending information to us, even accidentally. Considering that they might not be even able to communicate with the other civilisations before we spot them, this means that *all* civilisations must mutually decide to hide themselves as best as possible. Thus, your argument is, "in the case where all alien species mutually and successfully hide themselves from each other, and also there was never a slip from any civilisation that we can detect, the premise of the grabby aliens theory is false". And, while that argument is correct, I suspect that the probability of all alien species both deciding to hide and successfully doing so would be ridiculously low, so as to be ignorable in the context of this theory. For your third counterexample, either the non-grabby aliens colonising the volume utilise the energy in that volume, or they do not utilise the energy in that volume. If they did utilise the energy in that volume, they'd probably be visible, contradicting observations. Areas of the sky would have higher amounts of low-frequency light than physics would predict, and lower amounts of high-frequency light than physics would predict. So, we can presume that such non-grabby aliens would not utilise the energy in the colonised volume. However, since they must somehow prevent grabby civilisations from colonising the volume, they must be able to either prevent colonisation through diplomacy or through force. Since they aren't harvesting the energy of the colonised volume, but the grabby aliens are, the grabby aliens would have a much larger energy budget for the conflict: the non-grabby colonisers would have such a large energy disadvantage, it'd probably make halberdiers fighting an aircraft carrier ten miles offshore, with bombers dropping nuclear bombs, look like a fair fight. In short, they cannot prevent colonisation through force. Thus, they would need to prevent colonisation through diplomacy. However, since the grabby aliens have such a great advantage in energy, they'd probably decide to fight for the volume. They might not even consider it a conflict, since the defending aliens can't even hope to threaten the grabby aliens. It's like picking up a stack of 100 dollar bills off the top of an anthill: you might get a couple of bites, but it's worth it. So, the grabby aliens would probably just colonise the non-grabby aliens' volume as if they weren't there. Therefore, non-grabby aliens defending a volume from grabby aliens appears to be either impossible or contradict our observations.
Any civilization that doesn't become grabby just gets overwhelmed by a civilization that does become grabby. So even if there are a hundred non-grabby aliens, just one 'grabby' alien is needed to take over their galaxy. Because a non-grabby alien, by definition of it not expanding much, wouldn't be powerful enough to stop a grabby alien. Things naturally fall into line from there, literal natural selection for grabby aliens.
I think it is incredibly unlikely for any technologically advanced tool-using civilization to be anything but very similar in nature to humans, as I believe drives to cooperate, compete, improve and expand are all needed to get to the kind of technology that even allows exiting a planet's orbit. To address your other objections, I think it is very true that some "grabby" civilizations might avoid planets where life or intelligence exists, but a new planet developing life or intelligence by itself still means a grabby civilization didn't get to it first. Any "spared" planets/sectors/galaxies would just become smaller grabby civilizations or temporary holes in the civilization, depending. A more interesting point, imho, is the question of whether or not "system-jumping" and "galaxy-jumping" might be something that stops several grabbys for quite a while. I think a system-wide civ or a galaxy-wide civ sound like fairly reasonable suggestions as points at which some "pseudo-grabbys" might get stuck in-between being planet-bound and constantly expanding through the universe.
Given the scales of space and time that would be really stretching the definition of 'civilization' in terms of any form of cohesiveness as we know it. I also think that the kind of technology that would allow interstellar colonization would probably be compact and efficient enough not to be obvious. Still though, very good analysis that makes a lot of good predictions out of not a lot of information.
It doesn't need to be a cohesive 'civilization' as we think of them for the model to work. 'Civilization' can be a stand-in for 'a technological species'. Human beings are an expansionist species that spread itself across every continent over the course of a few tens of thousands of years without ever being a cohesive civilization. The expansion pattern was carried out without any grand design simply by small tribes individually deciding to move to regions adjacent to themselves, repeatedly, over the course of generations. I do think an interstellar civilization would be pretty obvious. That's been the experience of life and technology on this planet. Even photosynthetic bacteria completely and permanently changed the atmosphere of the Earth. The lights of our cities are visible from orbit at night, we've transformed vast swaths of the globe into farmland & pastureland, our general tendency is to transform natural resources into that which is useful to us unless it has strong aesthetic, religious or cultural value (nature preserves). Even as we get more resource efficient, we generally plow this efficiency into greater production & resource utilization rather than trying to minimize consumption. The fact we'll have more efficient solar panels in the future doesn't negate the expansionist drive to reproduce, build ever more space habitats and ultimately dismantle planets and asteroids to build a Dyson swarm.
@@AlexM-wq7in Yeah, though the divergence in biology, technology, politics and more would leave the constituent parts virtually alien to each other save for a past common point of origin. That does serve the purpose of the term in this instance, but it's loose on an astronomical scale. Also in terms of visibility of scale, I just don't know. Popular speculation about dyson swarms and other methods of expansion noticeable to our primitive methods and short search time rely on a lot of assumptions about what is possible and practical. Why build trillions of sollar panel stations with inefficient microwave transmitters when fusion power would probably come first? We just need more information to get any proper answers, that's why I love this study and support more science and exploration, they both make steps to solve that beyond unsubstantiable speculation.
@@spacecanuk8316 Yes, this is true, but also irrelevant for the purposes of explaining why we are early & don't see other civilizations. So long as they maintain the trait of being "grabby" they will prevent new civilizations from emerging in the star system they colonize (or more perniciously will wipe out existing pre-grabby civilizations in order to colonize new systems). The giveaway that there are no other advanced civilizations in our lightcone is the presence of a seemingly natural universe that doesn't look dramatically altered by intelligent agents. All the solar energy that isn't captured by solar cells is essentially wasted, just as every asteroid or planet that isn't mined and processed into useful items (e.g space habitats, computer AIs), is wasted (from the perspective of expansionist advanced civilizations). 99.8% of the mass-energy in the solar system is in the Sun. However future civilizations access such mass energy, they would not simply let it go unutilized by letting it remain in its natural form. If efficient fusion reactors were invented, the optimal growth strategy would simply be to dismantle the star for its hydrogen to feed such reactors (plus all the other heavy metals & volatiles you'd get). That pattern of expansion would be just as visible as a the creation of countless dyson swarms. I agree that visibility resulting from inefficient processes (e.g radiowave leakage) is unlikely for advanced civilizations. But it's hard to see how there wouldn't be visibility resulting from the sheer scale of power generation and resource utilization we would expect from expansionist civilizations.
If a civilization can be grabby with or without compact and efficient technology, then it's almost guaranteed that it would not be. You can see this as describing a hard step, which would increase the amount of time it would take a civilization to become grabby. A civilization that has a wider range of technology to choose from increases their probability of passing this hard step faster than a civilization which *must* be non-noticeable. Therefore the likelihood of a grabby civilization existing is tied to its noticeability, as non-noticeable grabby civilizations would become grabby later than noticeable grabby civilizations. We can even describe the amount of non-noticeable technologies compared to the whole category of technologies with a ratio that we can call *W,* where W = Non-noticeable Technology/All Technology. The higher W is, the sooner we must assume that non-noticeable civilizations can be grabby, and the lower our chance of being early. The lower W is, the later non-noticeable grabby civilizations can exist, and the higher our chance of being early. Therefore, seeing as we have not observed any aliens (grabby or not) and we are not special, it would be more likely that we are simply early and that grabby civilizations spread fast, because a non-noticeable civilization would likely have already prevented us from existing according to the ratio W. The higher W is, the less likely we are to be existing, and the more special we would be. Because of this, grabby aliens are much, much more likely to be noticeable than invisible.
It could be that there is a hard step before expansion that is so unlikely it’s nearly nonexistent, such as say a requirement for an extremely high degree of cooperation and tolerance.
That is a probability. Seeing aliens before we are capable of being interstellar would be incredibly horrible... it increases the chances of a "great filter" happening in the future. Let's cross our fingers.
@@absta1995 100%. Most of people in first world countries don't understand that the one who doesn't try to expand, conquer, or suppress others loses in an eternal race
This makes me happy, because I want at least some life to exist. In this model either we will exist or someone else, but someone will. It's motivating.
At that point is it really "us" tho. I mean how much do u have in common with the ancients let alone the cro magnons? Not much aside from the physical and even that there are vast differences. What do u think ull have in common with a "human" a million years from now let alone ten million years?
@@juanmccoy3066 It's very likely that more than a few of us will be able to answer that question directly, if it ever gets asked. As in, one of our might-as-well-be-alien descendants can just straight up converse some human that's been digitized or made immortal or cloned from a brain template with stored memories or whatever.
Awesome video, very thought provoking. A question just occurred to me... When we look at the stars, we are looking at the past. Light from a habitable planet could have taken millions of years to arrive. How can we say that we are EARLY if we are looking at old data. There could be many civilizations active right now, some that came earlier or at the same time as us, we just haven't had enough time to receive the evidence.
Exactly what I think. Maybe there is an advanced civilization 1miilion LY out, and who had begun industrialization at the same time time as us, and will this build megastructures at the same time as us. However, we wouldn't know, not without getting closer, which has to be done at FTL.
This was the perfect change in pace I paused my subnautica playthrough and my first watch of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure check this out and I was not disappointed.
Fantastic. Nice narration by R Miles! Just a suggestion: leave some more "white space" in the videos - sometimes this much information needs a little breather or signpost or "let's take a step back" in order to be digested fully. Lovely stuff, though - well done.
"grabby civilizations stop other civilizations from developing in their sphere of influence" Japan, just after making contact with America: Time to just copy their technology and conquer Asia, I guess
Or more like life in general. Once life gets going on a planet it will spread all over and any new life that spontaneously comes into being will be quickly consumed by the older life forms. I guess the same can be said about multicellular life too. If a single celled organism mutates into a multicellular organism now, it will have near impossible task of competing with the already existing multicellular organisms, after all they have over 500 million head start. But then again, i believe all civilizations will become "crabby civilizations" if they have the technology to do so.
I'm probably missing the point a bit, but isn't there a difference between a civilization being able to travel at a speed approaching the speed of light (using solar sails eg.), and that civilization actually expanding at that rate, creating visible changes along the way? I would think it takes a while to build those visible structures, collect resources and keep going. I do understand that if a civilization were to expand more slowly, it would become visible to other civilizations sooner, so that would speak for us being early, as it says, rather than others being fast, since logistically it's hard to imagine that a grabby civilization would actually expand at a rate of, let's say, 1/3 speed of light. I might have missed something, though.
Using the rates of how bacteria interact in limited resources might be interesting to guess at how populations may meet each other. Also fantastic work
but bacteria are way simpler than humans. looking at human empires, we can see that they don’t typically last too long. they only exist for about a century or 2 before rapidly deteriorating
@Valer Take that premise even further than that. That was the state of our planet until the dawn of our Industrial Revolution. Empires expanded to fill their local space until meeting with their competitive, competent neighbors. Expansion stalled out and then the empire collapsed after a few hundred years, tops. They then fell backwards logistically, culturally, and politically, and oftentimes technologically as well. But then one of our Iron Age Empires was lucky enough to have a continent where the opposition was an order of magnitude weaker than them, allowing them to grow to a technological era before stagnation set in. I'm betting that's going to be the status quo for the universe. Alien civilizations are permanently stuck at our version of the Iron Age because industrialization requires expansion, and there is no place to expand to on their planets anymore. They have to use up all of their surplus just to stay where they are, rather than using the surplus to build the foundations for more surplus -- a cycle that humanity was very, very lucky to break.
I think the biggest problem with aliens will be time perception, we have no way to know how fast they will think or react, maybe what we consider an hour, would drag for them like it’s weeks or vice versa, like the ents in lord of the rings takes them years to have a chat
I don't think that makes any sense. Faster species have an evolutionary advantage. A species that would take a week to respond to a predator would simply be eradicated. A competitor to homo sapies that would think twice as fast (but otherwise be identical) would out-think us, etc. Faster is better, so there is a constant push for speed, until you run up against obstacles in reality itself (it's simply not possible to run much faster than a cheetah), or various local optima. Not that speed is the ONLY thing that matter, but it matters.
Excellent animations and overall video! I rarely watch videos more than once but this one is so interesting I've watched twice and still want to watch it again. These videos directly answers the questions I was wondering ever since I saw videos on the great filter. I can't describe how satisfying it is to have someone lay out the answers to questions you have so thoroughly and entertaining...ly. It might have been helpful to convert "galaxies" (1 Mil. stars) to "milky ways" (100 Bil. stars) when it was mentioned as that is a more relatable number of stars. I found myself converting to milky ways while watching this video to get a better idea of when we'll run into another civilization. Also at time code 17:43 it looks like you're illustrating the milky way but you're talking about galaxies (1 Mil. stars). You provide the conversion rate and explain the difference well in the video which is good enough though so it's not really worth putting in note cards over top of the video with conversions. The pacing would be messed up a bit and I would hate for the beautiful animations to have distracting cards covering them. Maybe if you decide to make a summary video where you lay out the answers to the main questions people have you could use milky ways when discussing where we'll meet another grabby civ.
Even If it wasn't what makes u think ud be a part of it? Look at what Musk and Bezos are doing now. Ur not part of that. They will only get more and more effective and there's no reason to believe you or I would be part of their experiments and exploration. If u, a lowly peasant, were born a million years later do u really think it'd be any different? What's the chances of ur family line entering the classes of the elite? Ur destiny is locked to the land my friend. Embrace it.
I’m going to read the paper later and might answer this comment if I found an answer but I have an immediate question: The model deals a lot with timelines and the passage of time but from what I got from your video series it always treats this time strictly linear. Does it deal with for example star systems that might be spinning at higher/lower speeds around their galaxy and thus experiencing a significantly faster or slower passage of time. I imagine this would shake up the factors of these equations somewhat.
I can absolutely see Faster Than Light travel being possible in the future and even aliens currently possesing such tech. However, I find it very unlikely for a civilization to expand at even near light speed as expansion isn't just how fast you can travel, but how fast you can set up colonies. If we for example say that it takes 50 years from finding a planet to having a colony there able to sustain itself (which I would set as the minimum when talking about a civilisation having expanded) and we want the expansion rate to be half the speed of light as an average speed. That would mean that the newly built colony has to put out colonizing ships that travel at 26x the speed of light, with a travel time of approx a year to have reached the next planet 26LY away to continue the cycle (factoring in the 1 year travel time). Not only that but consider that we are moving in 3d space means that for every lightyear outwards from the centre there is way more space to colonize. I'd love to meet some ayyliens in my lifetime but I honestly don't think humanity will ever meet any other space fearing race
You made good point that no one(except me, of course) have considered. The answer is that speed is not linear(which should be accounted for in further models on this topic) -- as civilization advances(kinda exponentially, to be exact), its FTL capabilities get better and better and colonization ships can fly for longer periods of time. So as at first expansion rate is extremely slow, in 10 thousand years it can surpass the speed of light by great margin. And our planet has a tasty biosphere(no terraforming required!) that would justify a long flight for aliens(which would mean they would have arrived before humans came into existence) And yeah, my personal opinion is that our descendants may "resurrect" us, but we are not meeting conventional sentient aliens(conscious oceans or atmospheres are possible)
yeah, once a member of a species has become bionic, or fully robotic, has overcome aging and death, has reached a level of intellect where they can individually create advanced technologies, has the technological capabilities to heal or repair itself, has the technology to travel anywhere in space and time instantaneously, i imagine you wouldnt be part of a civilization anymore. You would just be this omnipotent entity that is just seeking to experience as much of the vast universe as possible.
This is both uplifting and disheartening in the sense that we are likely to find ourselves trekking across the stars but instead of Aliens and other Civilizations we are alone.
In the Foundation series, the Human Galactic Empire rises and falls before alien life is encountered, and then it goes unrecognized as a representative of a grabby Andromeda civilization. To be continued, except that Asimov departed this mortal coil.
Another thought provoking video, made much more palatable by the animation, and RM's narration. Thank you. Insofar as aliens, grabby or otherwise, are concerned is they may very well already be here. They may be intelligent enough to keep a low profile, and I am certain their perspective differs markedly than ours. For some ET, staying home, on their home world, is both fulfilling, and brings them joy and contentment. For other ET their concept of a host world may be similar to that of migratory fowl species, with the exception that once their outward star bound journey has begun the entirety of the galaxy is the destination. They may be well aware of their diminutive status in regards to both space and time, and may simply choose to make the most of things as they travel along, not wasting precious resources with imperial conquest. Think interstellar Bohemians and you get the picture. By the way, "they" are, most definitely already here. About that there can be no doubt. You will see one soon enough. (I have seen three, my first thirteen years ago when I was fifty years young.) Once you do you will know, for certain, that we are not alone, nor ever have been. Of course being curious by nature other questions concerning our place in the universe will likely arise. Good luck with that.
Aliens with a markedly content disposition to thier expansion are almost certainly destined for annihilation/and or absorption. The Species that don't move from their home world will ultimately become the playthings of those who do... The Grabby Civilizations.
Once I have worked with a similar model in a field of mass-crystallisation problems (there were also random seeds, growing in 3D medium, and a limiting factor of diffusion in some regimes), so I have a few practical remarks on this model you have shown. 1. Remember, that a set of three free parameters in a model is mathematically enough to draw any plot you want. Sure, an educated guess might provide some constrains, that will limit this shape-shifting ability of numbers, but generally, the sign of a good model would be the elimination of as much of free parameters, as possible. In this case - one of parameters is purely free, one is a rather weak guess, and one (speed) have a solid scientific limitations, though still may vary hugely. From this I expect this model to produce A LOT of different combinations of answers, sometimes inconsistent - depending on input. Averaging them before classifing into groups might be meaningless (in some cases), and has to be grounded with supplement theory - one originated out of this model, but from a different perspective (ideally - from an entirely different type of observations). 2. Some of plots about indirect predictions, like the volume at the moment of contact - is a very sensitive to input stuff. In real life the chaos of the opened system may cause fast divergence, so that sometimese you can jump 5 orders of magnitude by slightly adjusting the speed (I am talking in general, not about this exponential f). So every step away, every indirect result of a model deepens the possible discrepancy of an outcome. So if you trust speed_ratio/n plot by A, trust the next one by A/2 at least. this parts is aplicable only to open systems, where at least some chaotic behavior is likely to occure, you can trust by A and A in more classical cases of quasi-static world* 3. I'm curios about isotropic choice for the model of aliens spreading. Wouldn`t it affect the result much? I can imagine, aliens with several galaxy to pick from, will choose planets and regions of space that are more suitable for specifics of their species. Like - they can specifically look for a planet with a 1.1 g gravity, so they skip out Earth as not an interesting place, having multiple 1.1 planets in stock. So there must be an option, where grabbers are already in a yellow con, but our planet is not taken. Though, of course, this goes beyond the model described.
Interesting. I does appear to derive a little bit too much information from such a loose assortment of variables, even if the calculations (and hence conclusions) themselves, are technically valid.
If aliens are at the level where they cause noticeable changes to their environment on the cosmic scale, they are likely to take literally every planet because the vast majority of their population would be on constructed O’Neill cylinders or other ships that would form Dyson Swarms. As such, any matter would be considered valuable, especially around a star, so would be used.
The main threat to grabby aliens hypothesis I can think of, is an idea put by Matt from PBS spacetime, in that any civilization spanning a large space is impossible unless you allow for FTL communication. They couldn't maintain cohesion otherwise.
You don’t need FTL communication if your civilization is expanding at fraction of the speed of light. All colonies (at least the closest ones) will continue communicating with each other, but the speed of information transfer will be like speed of small Roman chariot, moving and spreading the news across the gigantic Roman empire. P.S. of course all empires die and fall apart, but if we talk about civilizations (and not about cosmic empires), then we should take into consideration that advanced and grabby civilizations (their cultures and technology) will continue developing, spreading and becoming the dominating part of other civilizations. The whole western civilization (and global as well) is mainly based on ancient Roman civilization, despite the death of empire itself.
@@dmytroivashchenko3047 definitely check out Matt's talk on it, without FTL the empire breaks cohesion at large scales, a message takes too long to get from one end to the other. An 'emperor' will be dead before he gets a reply to his first command.
@@McMurchie Civilizations do not need emperors to function. A military is not reliant on presidents to give every order, as each collective unit is recursively self-sufficient. Essentially, the argument that no such civilization could exist breaks down when you look at system theory. Asynchronous decentralized systems both exist and are used today in our own world.
@@fellowish fancy words for 'systems that don't change aren't impacted by distance' pretty much disproven by all human history. We always splinter, environments force it. A decentralised empire...isn't an empire, unless it communicates updates. Assuming zero change, is akin to saying humans are independent from their environment - they aren't.
@@McMurchie An _empire_ isn't a decentralized system, it is centralized. Do you understand what I was meaning? How a civilization functions is dependent on its environment. Distance is a topology a civilization interacts with. The solution to latency and asynchronicity is not by centralizing. Civilization is not dependent on centralization. The solution is decentralization of system structure. You can see splintering as an outcome of inherent latency and asynchronicity associated with distance. However, splintering is *uncontrolled* replication of structure. Controlling the self-replication of these systems is how decentralized structures develop, such as with blockchain technology, or federated server protocols. Why do you assume that civilization is dependent on centralization?
6:13 Love this quote! This is what I always tell people who think aliens have 'visted us' or are 'already here'. If they were here, we wouldn't be here. Meaning we can't see them because if we could we wouldn't be here, as the time we'd have to see them would be super tight before our system is occupied.
All good except for one thing. Remember the episode of ST Voyager where they find a planet where time moves faster? Yeaaahhh.. what are the chances that life exists in heavy gravitational states and with different chemical compositions? Add that to the equation. Otherwise very interesting concepts here! Also reminds me of a game where it turns out human civilization became space faring and were using a fuel called endurium (or something). Turns out the fuel they were using for light speed capability was another form of alien life that they were extinguishing unknowingly. I personally support the hardest step theory. Learning how to predict/dodge life extinction events 😉
18:32 Or I need to reject the idea that grabby aliens are a good explanation in the first place. We know from observation that in the first 11 billion years of the universe existing, zero obvious (i.e. far-visible) grabby aliens existed within an unimaginable number of star systems, which still holds true for insanely large numbers for the first 12, 13, and even 13.5 billion years. A lack of grabby aliens, or a slow emergence of them, explains this fact much better than the assumption that we are not early. This video has pretty much been one possible objection to the grabby aliens model being bent into one specific claim after another, lowering the Bayesian attractiveness of the model in each step. So while it is true that Human earliness appears to be less likely than Humans simply misestimating the habitability of planets or the longevity of the universe's habitability, so do grabby aliens. In either case, the fact that obvious grabby aliens do not exist across a gigantic amount of planets strongly favours the idea that something is wrong with your estimates over the proposal of grabby aliens.
If there are no grabby aliens there are only very pessimistic possible explanation for us being alone. 1) We are very likely to go extinct as everybody else before we become grabby. 2) We are all alone 3) We are "the very very special" 1) and 2) are covered in the video. To accept your point of view we have to make the assumption that "humans are very very special, and will become the first and only grabby civilization in our corner of the universe". The is also a very bold assumption to make.
@Artem Down Anything unlikely doesn't _need_ an explanation. It only _invites_ one. Whenever something unlikely is observed, the hypothesis that "it just randomly happened" is _always_ a competing hypothesis. Any other "explanation" needs to do better than that. Whether grabby aliens do better at explaining Human earliness depends not only on how likely our observations are _without_ grabby aliens (unlikely), but also on how likely they are _with_ grabby aliens (still unlikely). We divide the two, and since we are extremely uncertain about the number of future civilizations that might arise without grabby aliens, the result is inconclusive.
@@michaelrenper796 You're making the assumption that civilizations _want_ to become grabby. What if wanting to become grabby is only an evolutionary advantage in some environments in the universe, and leads to the downfall of some civilizations until a non-grabby mindset reigns superior and dominates any species advanced enough to be able to become grabby? Or what if what I said applies to a percentage of civilizations?
Thing is though, 96% of all galaxies in the observable universe lies beyond z = 1.64, which means we see 96% of the entire observable universe as it was when the universe was less than 4 billion years old, or 29% of its current age. We're estimating that the first planets habitable to life as we know it couldn't have come into existence earlier than 10 or 11 billion years ago, only 200 million to 1.2 billion years before the threshold. It gets even worse, if we give the planets 2 to 4 billion years to evolve a grabby civilization it means the first grabby aliens wouldn't have come into existence before the universe was half its current age. Our past light cone reaches this threshold at z = 0.79, which 99.25% of all the galaxies in the observable universe lies beyond at this point. Should we really conclude there's a "lack of grabby aliens" just because we're unable to find them in a volume occupying less than one percent of the observable universe, and in a timespan as short as only 7 billion years?
@@michaelrenper796 There is also the possibility of a combination of some Human earliness and some grabby civilization. Just quite reasonably not occupying the universe within the next 20 billion years, but rather setting out very late and slowly. A factor of 1000 in probability situations like this is not big, because we are extremely uncertain about how many planets would be habitable for how long at what chances, and how, what, and how many lifeforms would emerge on these planets over the history of the universe. Anything that seems "likely" by a factor of 1000 may very well be unlikely by a factor of 10^9 for a different reason.
4:50 in the morning- no sleep after work: What if we- humanity were a result of being part of one of these civilizations- meaning there are more like us like us, but we collapsed over time due to cataclysms- and all we're really waiting for are some species of aliens somewhat related to us to return and remind us who we are before some staying- and the rest moving on to continue "checking up" on others like us nearby- that we've yet not noticed or had contact with for a long time.
I think the problem with the equations is the speed of travel and the number of hard steps but I agree we are very very alone in this universe and probably will be forever. Hopefully we're able to leave a monument to our existence so that one day atleast we will have been recorded as having existed.
Should also be noted that civilizations theoretically can expand faster than light, and the speed of expansion is MOST likely non-linear. We will spend quite some time colonizing Milky Way, but Local Group and Virgo Supercluster will get colonized much faster. Also can expect a lot of automated ships being send to terraform planets preemptively before colonists arrive(at least before we turn into posthumans, if ever)
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Reaf my story. I have two i know of always in my room and i think they want fun or they will disrupt simple task for kicks. Like they are bored teens
Could you do a video taking into a count the fact that space expands faster than light, and so it is possible for FTL technology to exist? There are already models for FTL, maybe you could work with those to tell us how grabby aliens would expand then, or what would happen if different civilizations didn`t use FTL at All.
@@samueltrusik3251 i think its beyond light. I put it as they breath o2 and compatible with h20 but they are here with us just different frequency. Ive had some beyond pranks in my life growing up with dad on hollywood sets to mom in Air Force and one was having firect speakers as a kid wonder where what how so it freaked out 7 y.o. me than the waves started and random things happen. A lot. Look at my page on the blurry video. I have tons of them but rest have sounds of domestic violence(not gna post that) but look up Tesla whittier los Angeles electric dome. Another level since civid and my hz hits below 20 for hours. Yes its freaky
@@samueltrusik3251 The only way to expand faster than light is to hitch a ride on the expansion of space itself.
have you seen Anton Petrov videos about that the milky way exist on a borders to a vast emptiness
That animated model of grabby civilisations expanding looked exactly like every game of stellaris I've ever played, so this checks out.
I thought the same.
Beware the tall empires.
Literally though! Haha
I agree
@@maestreiluminati87 I like to build tall. Less territory to defend and its a lot harder to invade the few planets I have.
As a grabby alien myself, I'm glad you are helping raise awareness for the cause
I’m also a grabby alien!
@@labyrinthzone9397 light at the end of my tunnel
Bark bark bark ❤️💚💙
All dogs go to heaven, and I'm glad there are other dogs here.
I'm just learning to bark myself.
Stunning work! At this rate, you're destined to become a grabby youtuber 😏
only 1 in 5000 youtubers become grabby, however the current subscriber count of 32.7k indicates that the current chance is around 1 in 100. gl!
Lol 😂
Mine! Mine! Mine!
Lol
i'm grabbing this comment for myself and colonizing youtube
Imagine spanning thousands of solar systems in your home galaxy in which you thought you had alone and had always wished to find a neighbor, only to discover ancient ruins of that neighbor and learning that they calculated their chances of demise before they advanced to your current stage.
lmfao fr (for real)
@@omaki82036 the translation is killing me lol
That would make for a great short story
Halo lore?
@@dueinuremom5082 (laughing out loud)
If I ever hear about these theories again I’ll always imagine grabby aliens as coloured shibas. Great videos!
Colored alien Shibas
Earth Shibas are still the cutest
Grabbies come in all forms. Think “Crab People”.
I'd be totally ok with meeting aliens like these as a "first contact"
"less than half of a galaxy to a million galaxies" is an insane range, and throwing it around like it's no big deal feels surreal.
Perhaps not in scheme of things, and with other parameters controlling more and less stringently how large or small the others are. A larger range also gives more confidence that an actual point will lie within those boundaries making it oddly more accurate. In a way. More RELIABLE anyway.
@@michaelhoste_ You're exactly correct. This is how it needs to be.
Kind of like how we throw around measurements like light year or a billion light years 🙂
Yeah it puts whole new meaning to "Star Wars" in non movie sense... civ clashes would be incomprehensible
@@prolamer7 ww2 was already incomprehensible. 40,000,000 people died in a span of about 5 years, try comprehending how many bullets where fired, how many rooms where fought over, how many man hours where spend patrolling, advancing, nervously scouting the perimeter. the deeper you dig the more you realize that we have already reached a scale that is incomprehensible
Kurzgesagt meets Isaac Arthur... This is wild, I'm so glad to be here for this channels beginnings. Thanks for the hard work and for blowing my mind ❤️
This is what I thought as well! Glad to see this channel before it gets mega-big
Sold. And Subbed.
Isaac is more of science fiction. I see this as Kurzgesagt meets Cool Worlds!
@@sshkatula Well, if you see Isaac as hard Sci fi, we can get along :P
@@sshkatula That works too! But Isaac has a _ton_ of excellent material on Fermi Paradox / Dyson Dillemma.
Sometime in the near future, humanity receives messages from a nearby civilization. Peaceful communication is established, and against all odds it seems that both species are at comparable technological levels. "Weren't you scared to contact us?" say the aliens, "We could have been a grabby civilization." The human ambassador shakes his head and replies, "the odds of two grabby civilizations emerging in the same galaxy are incredibly low."
Then we bring them some grabbed freedom 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲
Then we gave them some native American treatment.
This made me laugh more than it should 😂
I hope for the sake of the rest of the hypothetical galactic community we never become grabby.
@@SaltyMaudbecome??
This approach to Fermi Paradox seems like a real breakthrough. It is somewhat related to "humans are firstborn" solution, but extended to the whole universe as opposed to single galaxy.
It seems more like the antithesis of the "firstborn" solution.
Though considering that an estimated 99.9 percent of all species that've ever existed have already vanished just on earth, there's no assurance that a similar percentage of all *_'intelligent'_* species in the galaxy might not suffer the same fate. Heck, even our own species can't get past petty Tribalism yet.
@@miniverse2002 Well, not really, since the firstborn hypothesis merely argues that humanity is first in this galaxy. It’s a pretty logical extension of its argument to assume that all observers are firstborn in their galaxy.
@@miniverse2002 How?
Can we consider it a breakthrough? Both theories are very anthropocentric. Even the hard steps...
Incredible work. Adorable animation, backed by legitimate research into fascinating subjects. You built a gingerbread house on a foundation of cold hard facts. Love it. Subbed.
grabby dog
Oh, hi cobblah!
I know what you did last night
aye oh
This channel is going to blow up, man.
It is, I remember there was about half the amount of subscribers a few days ago
Edit: the subscriber count has increased by 600 in the past 10 hours
MY MAIN GOAL IS TO BLOW UP 🦈
It's about time the algorithm favored content creators who put in effort versus garbage clickbait
let me know I know how to blow stuff up
Are we going to need the bomb disposal squad here?
First off, amazing videos! I love them! Secondly some food for thought:
I think the assumption that the growth is always positive has a massive impact on the results. While parts of this model seem viable, it doesn't seem to account for the "grabbyness of the species involved". Doing so should result in oscillations that shift expected values dramatically.
There are economic limits to expansion with any species and rapid expansion generally requires more resources than slow expansion. Rapid expansion of a "greedy" species would be followed by a rapid growth rate in population and infrastructure that depletes resources available in their expansion bubble. Depleting these resources renders an area of the universe un-usable and fuels a greater need to expand. Tracking this need to acquire new resources as the required expansion velocity needed to fuel expansion is exponential. It can surpass the speed of light, and become impossible. Thus, civilizations that are "too grabby" would not be able to achieve sustainable rapid expansion placing an upper limit on expansion below the speed of light. I think this might be called the "light trap" theory.
Civilizations could expand if they did not grow as quickly, but these would be less grabby by nature, and would imply less need/desire for rapid expansion. I think this is called the "(ecologically) green alien" theory.
The limit on speed, and the impact on available resources available at any time makes this process much more oscillatory than one of steady growth. Oscillation of occupied zones would make our chances of seeing a civilization smaller. Imagine if a cancerous cells could die on it's own. It is just as likely to exist, but less likely to be observed. Factoring in these economic constraints, make us less special, and aliens more likely to exist. It's the cake and eating it, too. :)
Assuming a self replicating Von Neuman probe could be built along with a ship with 100 tons of material, half of Mercury should be enough to colonize all of the visible universe. The theory is to send robots to do the colonizing, so we would not actually go to the other worlds, but new people would be grown on those worlds natively by the machines. Assuming planets are common, we will never run out of resources on any world, because even one planet contains millions of years of material, and we have at least 7 nice piles of material to harness, in our system alone.
Well, you sure are one of the clever ones; and with an informed and smart reply/comment like that, I think you're ready! Ready, that is, for:
the Lex Fridman podcast where he interviews Robin Hanson (the author of the paper this theory is based on and who was referenced throughout).
You're in for a treat! 😄
I actually saw that first and was like
😳 ...wait; WHAT?! 🤯
(then found these videos for a helpful breakdown!; )
@@sprinkle61 This also means that the inverse is true. It would take nearly the same amount of energy to break a planet apart like mercury as it would take to colonize the known universe. Not to say it can't happen, but all the the energy expended in all the nuclear tests we've ever done as a species has only ever released about an equivalent of 2.5 magnitude 9 Earthquakes. Keep in mind that a planet can withstand orders of magnitude more energy than that before being forced apart.
Taking apart half of Mercury seems simple because it's close, but we would likely expend more resources/energy taking it apart than we would get out of it. Sure there is a lot of "mass" energy to be had there, but most of that would be un-usable for fusion or fission, even in a universe where humanity had 100% efficient fusion and fission. The issue is that only certain elements have the potential to generate usable amounts of energy in the first place, and many elements are already stable, requiring more energy to be expended in fusion/fission than we can get out, even at 100% efficiency. This isn't an engineering problem, but a physical constraint.
Additionally by removing the mass from Mercury, we are changing the rotational energy in our own solar system. We can't just pick up a planet and move it without slowing down the suns' rotation, or expending a TON of energy speeding up another planet. Sure we might not care about this as Mercury is a tiny fraction of the total rotational energy of the solar system, but we do need to find the energy to move it in the first place. One rocket leaving Mercury's orbit isn't a big deal, but with enough to move the entire planet this energy loss becomes not insignificant. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about the obvious energy to get a rocket into space, but the additional energy to break the orbit as well.
The last statement about us "having 7 nice piles of material to harness in our system alone" is language reminiscent of language used in the industrial revolution that legitimized dumping crude oil into rivers, and pumping radioactive coal smoke-stacks into the atmosphere. I get that what you said was a hyperbole about the amount of mass we have in our solar-system, and not condoning the destruction of Earth, but it needs comment. While to us, as a planet bound species, having the entirety of the solar system to work with seems like a lot, it is still finite, and exponential population/resource growth is a tried and true principle. We once thought oil and water reserves would never run out, yet the later could be a very real reason to leave Earth in the first place. This use of resources first, and thought about sustainability isn't solved by introducing more resources: that just leads to more growth.
Another question that is asked is why should we move? Either we have run low on resources, and it is a move of desperation, or we see a massive financial incentive, or we are doing it for the sake of 'adventure'. The first reason is not indicative of good planning, or successful recolonization. I mean if we mess up badly enough to need that, we aren't going to work out anywhere else, or do a good job with the transition. The second reason requires two way communication and collection of resources, i.e. trade. In a capitalist society this would benefit from growth and fast growth. They wouldn't set up independent civilizations, but attempt large-scale colonialism, and would want exponential growth to increase the market. The last reason is beautiful, and human, and is the least likely. If it did happen, it wouldn't happen fast, and it couldn't be driven by short-sited colonization profits, and it would struggle with recruitment, resources to get started, etc, and would struggle each time it wanted to travel further. But that last one also has the most potential to spread the farthest.
@sprinkle61 I realize this runs the risk of 'internet tone' so just know, none of the above is a personal attack or anything :) I think it's fair to say we both love talking to friends and family about this stuff
I like this comment a lot, but am a bit confused by it. Is the core idea that excessively grabby aliens would not maximize for expansion?
Maybe introducing a new term would clarify things. I would assume "maximally grabby" = maximizing for expansion. It seems like your argument is that a more-grabby species would expand less. This is an oxymoron based on the definition I'm using.
If what you mean by "grabby" is "species that maximizes for population," I would argue that 100% population maxing would probably get you within in an order of magnitude of 100% expansion maxing (as in, if you 100% max for population, you probably expand to at least 10% of maximum potential).
I think this because a larger population would need more resources, and expansion would be a logical way to attain these resources. For example, a swarm of self replicating drones could be built to bring more and more resources from new areas of space to populated areas, or populating new areas would also by definition constitute expansion.
If you're arguing that 100% population max would result in less than 10% of max expansion, I would disagree that this is likely. If you're arguing it would result in 50% of max expansion, I find this a lot more plausible.
If by "grabby" you mean "competitive/wasteful", then I agree that a competitive/wasteful species would expend resources on internal power struggles rather than expansion, or destroy resources such that they cannot be used/reused on expansion respectively. I agree that these traits could plausibly result in expansion less than 10% of max. For example, an extreme nuclear war could result in far less than 10% of max expansion being achieved.
I also agree that a species that maximizes for something other than population or expansion might plausibly attain less than 10% of possible expansion. For example, a "quality over quantity" species might find that for whatever reason space expansion does not increase happiness as much as other competing methods. However, it seems very plausible that a "quality over quantity" species would in fact find expansion to be in alignment with quality of life maximization. For example, self replicating robots could be used to obtain greater and greater quantities of resources from new areas of space, and these resources could be used to improve quality of life. More resources has been very strongly associated with higher quality of life for human history so far, so it seems unlikely to change. Maybe new resources could be spent on researching human or animal psychology, creating new technologies that grant humans access to new, good experiences, prolong human life, and so on.
I guess my argument is that unless civilization on earth is destroyed by competition/wastefulness/asteroid/etc or its goals change in an unforeseeable and seemingly unlikely way, there will be probably be a good reason to achieve at least 10% of potential expansion.
I don't think you realize what it means to have resources in a post-scarcity, matrioskha brain-building civilization. Even if you take every planet in our solar system, (a lot of resources from our perspective) that is nothing compared to a single star at the center of it all. To have a thousand stars in your civilization? A million? Resources are not the issue.
So either we become intergalactic dominating spacefarers with little rivalry, or we encounter aliens soon and potentially meet our early end? I see this as an absolute win! Great video.
I think if an intergalactic alien civilization existed anywhere near close enough to us to contact us in the next 10,000 years - we'd have detected their presence by now.
Sadly it seems we are the first intelligent race in at least the Milky Way which is really disappointing. I'm sure we'd all love a "The Culture" like Utopian civilization to arrive in their giant ships and save us from ourselves but such a thing is like waiting for the Second Coming of Christ, there's no evidence for it whatsoever :-(
@@mikesully110 or lets do our best and become that super advanced aliens that saves others.
@@joimy95 Even better!
The “get rich or die trying” theorem
Personally adhere to the Frank Herbert idea;
We are the First. From our voyaging into the stars and adapting to many planets, we become the many aliens.
just seeing this in my recommended made my entire day. I've been waiting for this
I've spent 40 years as an R&D chemical engineer building mathematical models of systems, wherever doing so generates good to a consumer, and thereby income to me. As such, I've been trained by external reality to know certain principles which would never have been apparent without this abundance of reality checks. Foremost among them, is the observation that *most* *models* *can* *feel* *very* *convincing* *when* *listing* *their* *merits* , *yet* *in* *practice* *completely* *fail* *to* *predict* *nature* . This humbling experience reminds me to not fall in love with the logic on any one line of argumentation, and to bear in mind that models are only as good as their assumptions. In this case, the grabby aliens model assumes -- critically -- that the expansion of one species into proximal systems is inevitable. Now, while I cannot rule this assumption out, I think it is obviously a pretty bold assumption, ... i.e., a wild guess based more on what someone wants the universe to be, than based on any hard evidence or engineering assessment of the possibilities. And, as soon as you raise the barrier for outward expansion, this whole grabby aliens line of argument falls completely apart. It strikes me that a physicist, who builds at most a model or two in their career, and mostly only studies the proven models of others, might not have the same intuitive grasp on this weakness of the grabby aliens model. Any 40-year theoretical physicists here are welcome to debate me on that.
Your general suspicion of pure theory I think is correct. However, I don't think your specific critique of the grabby aliens model holds. One does not need to assume that any particular species will be grabby, only that some will. If any are, it will eat up everything in its sphere of the universe basically.
Also, looking at evolution on earth, it seems likely that any life form that survived for long periods of time on any planet would be selected for survival and reproduction. This behavior is, in essence, grabby.
Also the only advanced civilization we have evidence for, us, seems to be grabby. That should inform our prior about what the generic advanced civilization would be like. Small sample size obviously, but still it's the only evidence we have and it makes sense to use it.
I agree with you and I believe grabby aliens on the scale of millions of galaxies are impossible, let alone tens of billions
Does the grabby alien’s expansion model take into consideration the expansion of the universe and that eventually galaxies become so far apart they are unreachable via sublightspeed velocities? Does that even apply? Idk I’m ape. Great video though
The time frame for grabby aliens happening and what you describe are very far away from each other on the timeline.
Yes. But that’s really far away. It does take into account the expansion of the universe.
It seems to me that the model isn't worrying about expansion. They're just modeling the growth of grabby civilizations for a fixed volume over a given time. They could refine the model to include expansion of the universe, but it feels like the outcome would be roughly the same, no?
@@SamThird
I'm pretty sure that it does play a role on the level of galaxies. You can always spread through your galaxy really fast, but more and more galaxies become unreachable all the time. I would have to look up how quickly that happens, though.
Btw writing this comment I found out that the wikipedia page on intergalactic travel is really pitiful.
Yes, we explicitly take into account the expansion of the universe. Recall that in the simulation shown, the size of the ball is much smaller at the start than at the end.
These models assume there are only two options for the perveyance of life: grabby or non grabby which, for all we know, are human or at best earthly conceptions at our current understanding/limitations in lifes experience.
this didn't occur to when watching the first video, but this time around seeing the 3D sim of civilizations expanding in the sphere made me realize what you're suggesting. Maybe being grabby is not so good. Maybe it can actually lead to self-destruction of a civilization and takes others down with it. and maybe that's why we haven't met any grabby aliens yet.
@@surviveinc I think the idea is every civilization to exist would technically be grabby, and the ones that aren’t, simply never got to exist. if we assume, alien’s exist, we have to apply what we know about evolution.The traits learned from it, would most likely be replicated in every life form.
@@surviveinc being Grabby leads to you expanding, expansion leads to needing a way to communicate across LIGHT YEARS. Most likely the problem with becoming Grabby is you can splinter your civilization leading to self destruction through competition.
If Grabby aliens can still control a galaxy it'd require beating the hard step of communication across absurd distances.
@@logansmith2703 Keep in mind when they say "Human Civilization", they are just referring to humanity and our descendants as a whole.
Future Humanity's not going to have any type of unified political, cultural, or economic system. Each colonized star system would be largely independent anyway, only trading with its closest neighbors.
The Human race itself is probably going to quickly diverge into countless different species and sub species once we start expanding into space.
Either a civilization is grabby or it is not grabby. You have to pick one.
I generally don't follow "smaller" channels, but I look forward to seeing this grow! Subscribed!
Dude, that's where all the valuable content is. I've bee listening to unpopular audio books for months threw lockdown. have you ever seen the top content on an anonymouse browser window? It's horrifying!
Yeah it's rare for people to think about aliens correctly.
@@MrCmon113 absolutely correct! Although to be fair, most of us don't actually who we are going to meet out there, so any ideas are currently " technically valid" until that day comes when we are cable of interacting with said alien people.
Now you get to say you were an original subscriber to all the noobs
You're missing out. My favorite channels are pretty much all sub 100k. That's where the passion is before they find the click driving formula and it becomes for profit instead of a passion project
The level of logic and presentation in your videos is amazing.
Wishing you success from Saudi ❤
This feels like watching PBS SpaceTime but with less talking head (and less over my head lol) and more adorable. I love it.
It's less over your head because the idea comes from an economist, not a physicist. He's using probability, not quantum mechanics.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn
Physicists: rolling in their graves at the implication that quantum mechanics is not about probabilities
Wait, this is LESS over your head than space time?? I feel so much more lost on this... But probability makes my head hurt 😞
The production quality of your content is insanely high. The concepts you present are complex yet the explanation is so cleverly crafted, I watched the alien ones them multiple times and each times I gained a new level of understanding. Please, keep doing that.
I cannot stop watching this happy pupper
Been telling people for a while that advanced civilizations were one in thousands of galaxies rare, awesome to now have charts to elaborate further! Amazing work
...
You missed the point where it was a guessing estimate of the rate of growth of civilisations, not a literal fact based expansion
@@MrMan-np9jg I realize that there could be a thousand in our galaxy and we wouldn't see them easily. But it just doesn't make sense that primitive worlds would be ignored, a prime directive would be near impossible to enforce without filling our system with their military. As for why I take my hypothesis seriously, it's because everyone takes the idea that aliens avoid us like they're elves and we're orcs seriously, and I hate that
Robert Miles has a good voice for narration, no wonder the channel growth since sining him.
OK. I swear I never do this. It's kinda embarrassing but i can't help myself
Was he sined, or co-sined? sorry for the tangent
Robert Miles?
Same name as the musician and producer who wrote "Children", my first love in music when I was a child.
Unfortunately, he died in his 30s. Bloody cancer!!
Aka, Roberto Concina.
Seriously! As soon as he starts talking, I'm thinking I'm about to learn about AI safety!
It sounds exactly like him.
@@cartermclaughlin2908 I look Fourier to C where this is going.
Up and down, I predict.
@@willd4686 Not sure if I'm just misunderstanding your comment, but it sounds like you're not fully convinced that it actually *is* him. But I can assure you with 99.8% probability that it is indeed the case.
maybe my favorite takeaway from this video which isn't explicitly mentioned is that observing alien life that has not already figured out interstellar expansion strongly suggests it is either impossible or very, very hard to travel between star systems. very interesting theoretical work!
I think it is impossible but I can always be proven wrong.
I left watching a recent video of reallifelore to come and watch your video. I think small youtubers need to be supported over large channels.
I love everything about this channel. Just discovered it last night. The trippy concepts. The bizarre animation style. Thanks boys
One thought which occurs to me when considering the grabby alien model is that it seems extremely unlikely that a civilization would be able to maintain coherence and order when expanded over such vast cosmic scales. How might I coordinate and collaborate with my fellow citizens if I won't be alive by the time they have gotten my invitation? And how might I ensure that no competitor civilization is able to spring up in the far flung reaches of my empire? By the time I have been informed of their progress, they will have had time to significantly progress toward becoming a threat, and could even be well on their way to colonize further within the core of my territory.
It seems much more likely that grabby aliens would be interested in bringing objects closer to themselves, rather than going to those objects. This process has the further reinforcing effects of de facto denying materials and locations for unobserved non-grabby civilizations, slowing their progress and decreasing the likelihood of successful transition to grabbyness. Additionally, I would significantly reduce the resources required to coordinate within the territories I control, and the snowballing of my territory density would further accelerate my ability to "grab" resources. It seems to me that the incentives of cosmic security are highly aligned with being - not only grabby - but, also pully. I would imagine that a civilization intent on preserving itself would make a mad dash to the center of its galaxy and seek to gravitationally/magnetically manipulate the distribution of matter in the galaxy towards the greatest density possible.
@@corylong5808 I think that to not be a pully civilization, one would find themselves quickly outcompeted in any sort of conflict by a pully civilization which is able to coordinate production and action. An only grabby civilization would quickly find itself outcompeted in resource acquisition and utilization by a pully one. There is some consideration to be made that pure expansion would be a priority for a civilization, as this might maximize the amount of resources the civ is able to access by an increase in the radius of their sphere of influence, but the capacity to increase the radius of influence is strongly limited by the amount of resources contained already within their utilizable zone and the degree to which those resources are put to use in expansion by the implementation of increasing technological capacity and strategic communication. It seems certain to me that a civ which focuses on bringing the most systems possible under its control within the smallest zone possible would one-day outpace the expansion of a grabby civ that doesn't attempt to order the distribution of its holdings. The only challenge to this dynamic would be if the rate of expansion of a grabby civ is great enough to preempt the arrival of that tipping point in pully civ supremacy.
@@corylong5808 but if I can make it to the center of the galaxy, all I have to do is concentrate my waste into the central mass, increase the density of the galactic core, and mother nature takes care of the rest for me. No energy expended, besides the disposal of waste (which is a necessary cost no matter how I go about dispersing my civilization). I guess one does suffer from the power law which diminishes the efficacy of gravity over distance, as opposed to say magnetism. But I stand by the idea that a civilization which has expanded to some significant portion of a galaxy would have massive incentive to manipulate the distribution of the resources and systems within their control. As I am a very stupid being in comparison to these hypothetical beings, I can not imagine what that might look like, but I can imagine that the difficulties of ruling a civilization on the order of a galaxy would suffer from the same organizational challenges which have always plagued our terrestrial civilizations. Entropy is the enemy of all living things.
There is no "far flung reaches". The civilization expands through all of that space and when they built a dyson swarm around each and every star, they can also easily make sure that none of the planets brings forth a civilization independent from theirs.
Whether the descendants of such a vast civilization remain coherent is another question. This video seems to focus more about how many people get to experience being a new independent civilization.
The coherence of a civilization has no bearing on their grabbiness. evidence of a constantly civil-warring multi polity empire looks the same at the scales discussed in this video in regards to altering the universe as one that is not.
The entire earth has been 'grabbed' by humans and is irrevocably shaped by us. But we are by no means coherently governed or cooperative.
you dont need coherence to be a grabby alien, a couple of mormons may decide they want to colonize trappist system while a couple of martians decide they want to colonize kepler 186. Countries like America was colonized by a small amount of people and from there they expanded to become the America we know of today. Also it doesnt have to be a quick expansion you only colonize if you need to. I see space as an ecosystem with trillions or quadrillions of human descendants or artificial creations(drones, probes, A.I.)
This have me both hope and dread for humanity and our future. Good job!
Yeah I don't see interstellar speeds going much higher than 20-30%/c without established laser highway systems as detailed by Issac Arthur in his series on youtube.
Going much faster than that makes the interstellar medium much harder to manage.
But I'm no expert, so it's just my opinion on the matter.
To even expand at all, a civilisation would have to be highly advanced. But you would think that the earlier stages of expansion would be much slower.
@Sonic Hedgehog You might be right.
There are ways one CAN go faster on paper but it might not be practically possible.
Antimatter engines can get you to 70% of c, but how you'd get that much anti matter and how you would safely store it is a major problem with no known solution.
The laser highway system is the ONLY way you can do so that WOULD work for sure. It amounts to setting up a bunch of laser batteries on a path toward a star. You shoot them at your ships solar sail as it speeds by. These can get you up to 99% of c.
In theory you would use these lasers to clear out dust along the path, because hitting even a grain of dust would would cause the same damage to your ship as a 100 megaton nuke.
Also you need to have the system set up already, so you'd have to use nuclear fusion to get to the star first and set it all up along the way for future ships to use.
On the other hand, for colonisation over thousands or even millions of years - our galaxy is 100,000 ly across, so the absolute minimum lifetime of a galaxy-grabbing civilisation is 100,000 years - we can’t make assumptions based on current limits. If warp technology become practical anytime in the next 1000 - 10,000 years, we would still be on track to attain 50%-99% speeds in the relatively ‘early’ stages of growth.
@@michaelhoste_ Agreed. The possibility of new tech in the future can change everything.
I'd be frankly amazed if physics allows for ANY faster than light method of space travel, but I can't discount it as a possibility.
@@lastsilhouette85 Are you familiar with the Alcubierre (theoretical) warp drive and several other practical offshoots that require vast amounts of energy to create a bubble of compressed spacetime containing a ship - where space is compressed in front and restored behind - allowing the ship to not so much ‘travel faster’ than light but to ‘change spaces’ more quickly than would normally be allowed. Physics seems to allow for ‘travel’ by manipulating the metric of space, the main goal in practice being to either reduce the amount of energy required or to harness the amount needed (which is a LOT).
I used to believe that the only way to the stars was the long way, but a lot seems to have changed in the last 15 years or so.
This video is hard to understand but gives more useful information about alien civilization in a more sophisticated way than other videos do, and yet managed to maintain its chance to be understood by viewer at reasonable level. Thanks for great work!
These two videos delve into some fascinating concepts, but i gotta rewatch them a bunch of times to get them. A bit too fastpaced for my mind to wrap around them, but it's a nice challenge one hardly finds those days :) Keep it up ;)
So much better than videos that move at a snail’s pace, and with so much more information that you can always go back and watch again (and again ..and again, if necessary!)
LOL!
Wow this is really well thought out considering how flawed the assumptions are.
- All the math is assuming we are exactly average. Trying to make statistical predictions based on a single data point is fun but a waste of time.
- This also assumes that grabby civilizations prevent new civilizations. The only way this would be true is if either they actively prevent new civilizations on all planets in their territory, or all lifeforms have the same "inhabitable" climate and are destructive of natural ecosystems.
- There is also an assumption that we would be able to detect distant aliens. The only way we can currently detect anything outside our solar system is measuring light (or other photons) from Earth that happened to be emitted by distant objects (usually stars or former-stars). Why would we assume that aliens would block light from stars or emit enough light to be detected at a long distance? Are we assuming that the only way to expand a civilization is to build superstructures like Dyson Spheres? It's also possible that we already can detect aliens from Earth but we just don't know how. We're looking for very specific types of photons because the machines that detect them have to be specifically built to detect them, but aliens could be emitting a particle or wave that we just don't know about and don't have a machine designed to detect it.
Basically my point is this is fun to theorize about, but it should be taken with a grain of salt since in the end it's just a fun way to waste brain power (much like writing RUclips comments)
1. Pretty sure later in the video they say that K is based off of assuming we could be statically anywhere on the graph, but anyway, why assume we aren't average?
2. It assumes grabby civilizations prevent other *grabby* civilizations, which they definitely would. If you're a powerful intergalactic empire you're not exactly going to let a new empire rise from inside you, you're (sadly) probably going to get rid of them while they're weak. (Or they'll join your empire)
3. Fair enough.
just stopped listening to my favorite music to watch this. pog.
Really, pog?
@@justburb4811 Who’s pog?
@@LexusFox Pogo less one vowel?
The crazy part about the grabby aliens - or any aliens for that matter - making changes to the parts of space that they colonise, is that it could have already happened up until a certain amount of light-years away & we still wouldn't know.
Because light travels at the speed of, well, light 😅, the images we see through telescopes etc are all in the past.
This means that we don't actually know what space looks like, beyond a certain point. It could be absolutely heaving with Dyson spheres, galactic megastructurs & intergalactic malls. We have no way of knowing, as we can't see it until the light reaches us.
By the time we _do_ see all of this, it would have likely all died out a long, long time before.
Stars don't "look" pretty or sparkly or twinkly on the sky... "that was then"... that was the way they lookED long long ago
Maybe could note once, that most people on the planet hate (human) history, because it so boringly past tense, out of date, unhip, so not with it, so behind the current times... if hundreds to thousands of years ago history is so worthless, what is millions to billions of years ago Astronomy and Cosmology?
This is amazing, Great video, Great information, great animations! looking forward to watch your content blow up! :)
I must say these videos are the most field interaction I have ever field interaction in my field interation!
Very good work!
I'm inevitably reminded of the novel trilogy starting with "The Three Body Problem".
Wonderfully made & researched video!
Sophons are stupid and I hate them.
That's a classic right there. It's solution to the fermi paradox is one of my favorites as it's so obvious yet so enthralling
There are eerie similarities to other natural processes to grabby aliens. The formation of ice crystals (you can't start the nucleus of a new crystal where there already is one) and the growth of bacterial colonies (you can't have a colony radiate out if there already is one that had radiated there). I'd like to take that as a sign of this model's credence, but I can do no more than take it.
your videos are awesome and so underrated
there is a huuuuge problem with that grabby aliens simulation; they don't kill each other, subjugate and conquer.
YESSSSSSS
We've been waiting!!
Thank you so much. I've been stuck in my head trying to understand and explain the reason why well never meet aliens and I could never explain why. This is exactly what's in my head you're amazing and so much smarter than i could be. Hero. Thank you
Why does Robin Hanson seem like a pyschohistorian straight out of Isaac Asimovs "Foundation" series.
Peter Turchin is a psycohistorian IRL. I'm sure he can find a spot on his staff in Trantor for Hanson tho
Thanks RUclips recommendations for this gem channel. Amazing work.
I'm loving this. May the Algorithm be with you.
This channel helps me calmly speculate about the future curiously and go to sleep
I’d love to see a discussion of this topic with Isaac Arthur.
This!!!!
"Woahlds"
-I.A.
All love no hate for Isaac. It took me awhile to get past his speech impediment. It's also improved tenfold.
16:36 huge props for the paperclip planet reference. I wonder how many people got that
I feel like this model lives on somewhat more shaky assumptions than portrayed: My biggest concern is that it assumes the only possible outcome for a civilization is either (1) to never expand outwards and remain on its home planet or (2) to take over the entire universe without limitation. My question is- why should it be that way?
A defense for this is given in comparing these civilizations to the development of life on Earth - and sure, they are alien life that probably developed the same way, but assuming all life in the universe will behave this way, or even that 'primal' life will naturally overpower 'intelligent' life are quite lofty assumptions.
I say this because the entire motive of 'grabby' life seems to be based in this evolutionary precedent. If this precedent doesn't exist, then what follows doesn't really seem logically sound. A counter-prediction isn't really necessary, but just for the sake of giving alternatives, here's some civilizations that would neither be grabby nor non-grabby:
- What if a civilization decided that it would purposefully uphold the natural development of life, and refrain from interacting with that life until it becomes more advanced?
- What if a civilization found no need for habitable planets, more practically constructing its own purpose-built artificial habitats?
- What if a civilization did one of these previous things, but also repelled traditionally 'grabby' civilizations from colonizing the area anyway?
If any of these alternatives - or any other - turn out to be true, the very premise of this theory becomes more and more far fetched, not to mention all of the predictions it makes.
Let me address your second counterexample first. Then, these habitats require energy. Furthermore, thermodynamics requires that a certain amount of their usable energy becomes unusable (ie entropy increases). In short, either their waste energy becomes a black hole, or is radiated away as black body radiation. Assuming that they cannot survive at stellar temperatures, which I believe is a fair assumption, they will therefore need to radiate heat away, and thus will have a visible signature on the universe: somewhere that has high amounts of low-frequency light output, but low amounts of high-frequency light output. But where would they get the energy in the first place? Probably from stars (either directly, by using the heat and light output by the star, or indirectly by siphoning off matter from the star to perform fusion or more exotic energy generation). So, they would probably either utilise stellar lifting (removing matter from their star) or construct a Dyson sphere or swarm. In either case, the low-frequency light output should be visible. Thus, your second counterexample does not address the assumptions or logic of the Grabby Aliens theory. Even if aliens built their own artificial habitats, they can still be grabby.
Next, your first counterexample. Suppose that the aliens prevented information regarding them reaching humanity. That's a big task, by the way, as it requires that it mask all electromagnetic radiation that have or will reach humanity, but more importantly, they will need to send replacement information that obeys the laws of physics, excluding any possible observation that includes them. If we looked at their star, not only do they need to prevent us from seeing whatever infrared radiation is being given off as a necessary side-effect of energy use, but they'd also need to send an image of their own star, with the necessary spectral lines, and also include wobble of the star as planets orbit it, and include the periodic dimming as planets pass in front of it, etc. Not only would the inhabitants of that one star need to do this in all directions (since their emissions would only reach us in a very long time, they can't predict whether we exist on this star system or if any other star systems have life that could detect them), they'd also need to mask all emissions that would involve doing that. They'd need a higher energy-per-mass output than fusion (as they cannot be more massive than the star system they inhabit, otherwise gravity would detect them), they'd need to somehow prevent all of the waste energy from exiting (which probably would involve a black hole), and they'd need to force inhabitants of all other star systems from sending information to us, even accidentally. Considering that they might not be even able to communicate with the other civilisations before we spot them, this means that *all* civilisations must mutually decide to hide themselves as best as possible. Thus, your argument is, "in the case where all alien species mutually and successfully hide themselves from each other, and also there was never a slip from any civilisation that we can detect, the premise of the grabby aliens theory is false". And, while that argument is correct, I suspect that the probability of all alien species both deciding to hide and successfully doing so would be ridiculously low, so as to be ignorable in the context of this theory.
For your third counterexample, either the non-grabby aliens colonising the volume utilise the energy in that volume, or they do not utilise the energy in that volume. If they did utilise the energy in that volume, they'd probably be visible, contradicting observations. Areas of the sky would have higher amounts of low-frequency light than physics would predict, and lower amounts of high-frequency light than physics would predict. So, we can presume that such non-grabby aliens would not utilise the energy in the colonised volume. However, since they must somehow prevent grabby civilisations from colonising the volume, they must be able to either prevent colonisation through diplomacy or through force. Since they aren't harvesting the energy of the colonised volume, but the grabby aliens are, the grabby aliens would have a much larger energy budget for the conflict: the non-grabby colonisers would have such a large energy disadvantage, it'd probably make halberdiers fighting an aircraft carrier ten miles offshore, with bombers dropping nuclear bombs, look like a fair fight. In short, they cannot prevent colonisation through force. Thus, they would need to prevent colonisation through diplomacy. However, since the grabby aliens have such a great advantage in energy, they'd probably decide to fight for the volume. They might not even consider it a conflict, since the defending aliens can't even hope to threaten the grabby aliens. It's like picking up a stack of 100 dollar bills off the top of an anthill: you might get a couple of bites, but it's worth it. So, the grabby aliens would probably just colonise the non-grabby aliens' volume as if they weren't there. Therefore, non-grabby aliens defending a volume from grabby aliens appears to be either impossible or contradict our observations.
Any civilization that doesn't become grabby just gets overwhelmed by a civilization that does become grabby. So even if there are a hundred non-grabby aliens, just one 'grabby' alien is needed to take over their galaxy. Because a non-grabby alien, by definition of it not expanding much, wouldn't be powerful enough to stop a grabby alien. Things naturally fall into line from there, literal natural selection for grabby aliens.
I think it is incredibly unlikely for any technologically advanced tool-using civilization to be anything but very similar in nature to humans, as I believe drives to cooperate, compete, improve and expand are all needed to get to the kind of technology that even allows exiting a planet's orbit.
To address your other objections, I think it is very true that some "grabby" civilizations might avoid planets where life or intelligence exists, but a new planet developing life or intelligence by itself still means a grabby civilization didn't get to it first. Any "spared" planets/sectors/galaxies would just become smaller grabby civilizations or temporary holes in the civilization, depending.
A more interesting point, imho, is the question of whether or not "system-jumping" and "galaxy-jumping" might be something that stops several grabbys for quite a while. I think a system-wide civ or a galaxy-wide civ sound like fairly reasonable suggestions as points at which some "pseudo-grabbys" might get stuck in-between being planet-bound and constantly expanding through the universe.
These civilizations you describe would become space american natives and be genocided.
This channel is going to blow up, I guarantee it
Given the scales of space and time that would be really stretching the definition of 'civilization' in terms of any form of cohesiveness as we know it. I also think that the kind of technology that would allow interstellar colonization would probably be compact and efficient enough not to be obvious.
Still though, very good analysis that makes a lot of good predictions out of not a lot of information.
It doesn't need to be a cohesive 'civilization' as we think of them for the model to work. 'Civilization' can be a stand-in for 'a technological species'. Human beings are an expansionist species that spread itself across every continent over the course of a few tens of thousands of years without ever being a cohesive civilization. The expansion pattern was carried out without any grand design simply by small tribes individually deciding to move to regions adjacent to themselves, repeatedly, over the course of generations.
I do think an interstellar civilization would be pretty obvious. That's been the experience of life and technology on this planet. Even photosynthetic bacteria completely and permanently changed the atmosphere of the Earth. The lights of our cities are visible from orbit at night, we've transformed vast swaths of the globe into farmland & pastureland, our general tendency is to transform natural resources into that which is useful to us unless it has strong aesthetic, religious or cultural value (nature preserves). Even as we get more resource efficient, we generally plow this efficiency into greater production & resource utilization rather than trying to minimize consumption. The fact we'll have more efficient solar panels in the future doesn't negate the expansionist drive to reproduce, build ever more space habitats and ultimately dismantle planets and asteroids to build a Dyson swarm.
@@AlexM-wq7in Yeah, though the divergence in biology, technology, politics and more would leave the constituent parts virtually alien to each other save for a past common point of origin. That does serve the purpose of the term in this instance, but it's loose on an astronomical scale.
Also in terms of visibility of scale, I just don't know. Popular speculation about dyson swarms and other methods of expansion noticeable to our primitive methods and short search time rely on a lot of assumptions about what is possible and practical. Why build trillions of sollar panel stations with inefficient microwave transmitters when fusion power would probably come first?
We just need more information to get any proper answers, that's why I love this study and support more science and exploration, they both make steps to solve that beyond unsubstantiable speculation.
@@spacecanuk8316 Yes, this is true, but also irrelevant for the purposes of explaining why we are early & don't see other civilizations. So long as they maintain the trait of being "grabby" they will prevent new civilizations from emerging in the star system they colonize (or more perniciously will wipe out existing pre-grabby civilizations in order to colonize new systems).
The giveaway that there are no other advanced civilizations in our lightcone is the presence of a seemingly natural universe that doesn't look dramatically altered by intelligent agents. All the solar energy that isn't captured by solar cells is essentially wasted, just as every asteroid or planet that isn't mined and processed into useful items (e.g space habitats, computer AIs), is wasted (from the perspective of expansionist advanced civilizations).
99.8% of the mass-energy in the solar system is in the Sun. However future civilizations access such mass energy, they would not simply let it go unutilized by letting it remain in its natural form. If efficient fusion reactors were invented, the optimal growth strategy would simply be to dismantle the star for its hydrogen to feed such reactors (plus all the other heavy metals & volatiles you'd get). That pattern of expansion would be just as visible as a the creation of countless dyson swarms.
I agree that visibility resulting from inefficient processes (e.g radiowave leakage) is unlikely for advanced civilizations. But it's hard to see how there wouldn't be visibility resulting from the sheer scale of power generation and resource utilization we would expect from expansionist civilizations.
@@AlexM-wq7in Dismantling a star would increase its lifespan. Hmm, there are a lot of red dwarfs.
If a civilization can be grabby with or without compact and efficient technology, then it's almost guaranteed that it would not be.
You can see this as describing a hard step, which would increase the amount of time it would take a civilization to become grabby. A civilization that has a wider range of technology to choose from increases their probability of passing this hard step faster than a civilization which *must* be non-noticeable.
Therefore the likelihood of a grabby civilization existing is tied to its noticeability, as non-noticeable grabby civilizations would become grabby later than noticeable grabby civilizations. We can even describe the amount of non-noticeable technologies compared to the whole category of technologies with a ratio that we can call *W,* where W = Non-noticeable Technology/All Technology.
The higher W is, the sooner we must assume that non-noticeable civilizations can be grabby, and the lower our chance of being early. The lower W is, the later non-noticeable grabby civilizations can exist, and the higher our chance of being early. Therefore, seeing as we have not observed any aliens (grabby or not) and we are not special, it would be more likely that we are simply early and that grabby civilizations spread fast, because a non-noticeable civilization would likely have already prevented us from existing according to the ratio W. The higher W is, the less likely we are to be existing, and the more special we would be.
Because of this, grabby aliens are much, much more likely to be noticeable than invisible.
Warhammer 40k seems suddenly a lot less unlikely. Amazing video and amazing channel in general!
It could be that there is a hard step before expansion that is so unlikely it’s nearly nonexistent, such as say a requirement for an extremely high degree of cooperation and tolerance.
That is a probability. Seeing aliens before we are capable of being interstellar would be incredibly horrible... it increases the chances of a "great filter" happening in the future.
Let's cross our fingers.
On the contrary, you need mutual competition to expand. Not high degrees of cooperation. Look at the space race, for example.
@@absta1995 yeah I mean by the time you have colonized the belt it’s going to be very easy and very tempting to throw rocks
@@absta1995 100%. Most of people in first world countries don't understand that the one who doesn't try to expand, conquer, or suppress others loses in an eternal race
@Lalleland , I assume that for such civilizations, it would be easier to engineer themselves to live in other worlds than terraform
Great video! I'm excited to see how known hard points develop as we come to understand the Universe further.
Shatner: **sweats profusely** "What's this about grabby aliens?"
In the Season 2 episode "By Any Other Name", Kirk met Kelvans from the Andromeda Galaxy whose intent was to rule over the Milky Way.
I love your channel! Really great videos on this model
This makes me happy, because I want at least some life to exist. In this model either we will exist or someone else, but someone will. It's motivating.
At that point is it really "us" tho. I mean how much do u have in common with the ancients let alone the cro magnons? Not much aside from the physical and even that there are vast differences.
What do u think ull have in common with a "human" a million years from now let alone ten million years?
@@juanmccoy3066 Makes me wonder.
@@juanmccoy3066 Probably nothing, but at least we still exist, and thats enough for me
@@juanmccoy3066 It's very likely that more than a few of us will be able to answer that question directly, if it ever gets asked. As in, one of our might-as-well-be-alien descendants can just straight up converse some human that's been digitized or made immortal or cloned from a brain template with stored memories or whatever.
I loved your last video on this topic, I'm glad you made a part two!
Awesome video, very thought provoking. A question just occurred to me... When we look at the stars, we are looking at the past. Light from a habitable planet could have taken millions of years to arrive. How can we say that we are EARLY if we are looking at old data. There could be many civilizations active right now, some that came earlier or at the same time as us, we just haven't had enough time to receive the evidence.
Exactly what I think. Maybe there is an advanced civilization 1miilion LY out, and who had begun industrialization at the same time time as us, and will this build megastructures at the same time as us. However, we wouldn't know, not without getting closer, which has to be done at FTL.
That was the point about spreading speed. Grabby civilizations would likely arrive here shortly after they became visible.
This was the perfect change in pace I paused my subnautica playthrough and my first watch of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure check this out and I was not disappointed.
Fantastic. Nice narration by R Miles!
Just a suggestion: leave some more "white space" in the videos - sometimes this much information needs a little breather or signpost or "let's take a step back" in order to be digested fully.
Lovely stuff, though - well done.
This is really an amazing video. I'm already rewatching it for the third time.
"grabby civilizations stop other civilizations from developing in their sphere of influence"
Japan, just after making contact with America: Time to just copy their technology and conquer Asia, I guess
Hah. Cool observation
Or more like life in general. Once life gets going on a planet it will spread all over and any new life that spontaneously comes into being will be quickly consumed by the older life forms. I guess the same can be said about multicellular life too. If a single celled organism mutates into a multicellular organism now, it will have near impossible task of competing with the already existing multicellular organisms, after all they have over 500 million head start. But then again, i believe all civilizations will become "crabby civilizations" if they have the technology to do so.
@@puppeli How do viruses survive, then? You see, there is a strategy.
*Time to copy their entire civilization* you mean.
Reaffirming the original hypothesis.
Amazing concept. I can't believe its is never brought up by anyone discussing why we dont see type 3 civilizations and such.
What if you brought in the dark forest theory into this idea? That would be an interesting thought experiment.
This video is amazing and very informative. Also the dogs are adorable ❤
I'm probably missing the point a bit, but isn't there a difference between a civilization being able to travel at a speed approaching the speed of light (using solar sails eg.), and that civilization actually expanding at that rate, creating visible changes along the way? I would think it takes a while to build those visible structures, collect resources and keep going.
I do understand that if a civilization were to expand more slowly, it would become visible to other civilizations sooner, so that would speak for us being early, as it says, rather than others being fast, since logistically it's hard to imagine that a grabby civilization would actually expand at a rate of, let's say, 1/3 speed of light.
I might have missed something, though.
Yeah I was thinking the same
Its a problematic theory all around
This is the best video I’ve watched in a while
Using the rates of how bacteria interact in limited resources might be interesting to guess at how populations may meet each other. Also fantastic work
but bacteria are way simpler than humans. looking at human empires, we can see that they don’t typically last too long. they only exist for about a century or 2 before rapidly deteriorating
@@wren_. Good point
@Valer So you think the great filter is behind us, and that’s why we haven’t found any intelligent alien life yet?
@@tylermacdonald8924 alien city unlikely but they're live inside snail shell very longer
@Valer Take that premise even further than that. That was the state of our planet until the dawn of our Industrial Revolution. Empires expanded to fill their local space until meeting with their competitive, competent neighbors. Expansion stalled out and then the empire collapsed after a few hundred years, tops. They then fell backwards logistically, culturally, and politically, and oftentimes technologically as well. But then one of our Iron Age Empires was lucky enough to have a continent where the opposition was an order of magnitude weaker than them, allowing them to grow to a technological era before stagnation set in.
I'm betting that's going to be the status quo for the universe. Alien civilizations are permanently stuck at our version of the Iron Age because industrialization requires expansion, and there is no place to expand to on their planets anymore. They have to use up all of their surplus just to stay where they are, rather than using the surplus to build the foundations for more surplus -- a cycle that humanity was very, very lucky to break.
The quality of this production reminds me of when lemmino was a small channel of high quality. Good luck, and keep improving! The future is bright
I think the biggest problem with aliens will be time perception, we have no way to know how fast they will think or react, maybe what we consider an hour, would drag for them like it’s weeks or vice versa, like the ents in lord of the rings takes them years to have a chat
I don't think that makes any sense. Faster species have an evolutionary advantage. A species that would take a week to respond to a predator would simply be eradicated. A competitor to homo sapies that would think twice as fast (but otherwise be identical) would out-think us, etc. Faster is better, so there is a constant push for speed, until you run up against obstacles in reality itself (it's simply not possible to run much faster than a cheetah), or various local optima. Not that speed is the ONLY thing that matter, but it matters.
Excellent animations and overall video! I rarely watch videos more than once but this one is so interesting I've watched twice and still want to watch it again. These videos directly answers the questions I was wondering ever since I saw videos on the great filter. I can't describe how satisfying it is to have someone lay out the answers to questions you have so thoroughly and entertaining...ly.
It might have been helpful to convert "galaxies" (1 Mil. stars) to "milky ways" (100 Bil. stars) when it was mentioned as that is a more relatable number of stars. I found myself converting to milky ways while watching this video to get a better idea of when we'll run into another civilization. Also at time code 17:43 it looks like you're illustrating the milky way but you're talking about galaxies (1 Mil. stars). You provide the conversion rate and explain the difference well in the video which is good enough though so it's not really worth putting in note cards over top of the video with conversions. The pacing would be messed up a bit and I would hate for the beautiful animations to have distracting cards covering them. Maybe if you decide to make a summary video where you lay out the answers to the main questions people have you could use milky ways when discussing where we'll meet another grabby civ.
makes me sad that this is so far in the future.. would be awesome to explore the universe and see other alien civilisations and cultures
Im not so sure that you will be exploring those happily. You'll most likely be enslaved.
So make sure to live a LONG time.
@@insight_lolubad 😂😂😂
@@insight_lolubad …not if we kill them all.
Even If it wasn't what makes u think ud be a part of it?
Look at what Musk and Bezos are doing now. Ur not part of that. They will only get more and more effective and there's no reason to believe you or I would be part of their experiments and exploration.
If u, a lowly peasant, were born a million years later do u really think it'd be any different? What's the chances of ur family line entering the classes of the elite?
Ur destiny is locked to the land my friend. Embrace it.
How are you only at 39k??? Genuinely amazing work and deserves significantly more acknowledgement than it has 👏
I’m going to read the paper later and might answer this comment if I found an answer but I have an immediate question: The model deals a lot with timelines and the passage of time but from what I got from your video series it always treats this time strictly linear. Does it deal with for example star systems that might be spinning at higher/lower speeds around their galaxy and thus experiencing a significantly faster or slower passage of time. I imagine this would shake up the factors of these equations somewhat.
Fantastic video man! I won’t be surprised if you hit half 1 million within a year
I can absolutely see Faster Than Light travel being possible in the future and even aliens currently possesing such tech. However, I find it very unlikely for a civilization to expand at even near light speed as expansion isn't just how fast you can travel, but how fast you can set up colonies. If we for example say that it takes 50 years from finding a planet to having a colony there able to sustain itself (which I would set as the minimum when talking about a civilisation having expanded) and we want the expansion rate to be half the speed of light as an average speed. That would mean that the newly built colony has to put out colonizing ships that travel at 26x the speed of light, with a travel time of approx a year to have reached the next planet 26LY away to continue the cycle (factoring in the 1 year travel time). Not only that but consider that we are moving in 3d space means that for every lightyear outwards from the centre there is way more space to colonize. I'd love to meet some ayyliens in my lifetime but I honestly don't think humanity will ever meet any other space fearing race
Fear space. 😨
You made good point that no one(except me, of course) have considered. The answer is that speed is not linear(which should be accounted for in further models on this topic) -- as civilization advances(kinda exponentially, to be exact), its FTL capabilities get better and better and colonization ships can fly for longer periods of time. So as at first expansion rate is extremely slow, in 10 thousand years it can surpass the speed of light by great margin. And our planet has a tasty biosphere(no terraforming required!) that would justify a long flight for aliens(which would mean they would have arrived before humans came into existence)
And yeah, my personal opinion is that our descendants may "resurrect" us, but we are not meeting conventional sentient aliens(conscious oceans or atmospheres are possible)
yeah, once a member of a species has become bionic, or fully robotic, has overcome aging and death, has reached a level of intellect where they can individually create advanced technologies, has the technological capabilities to heal or repair itself, has the technology to travel anywhere in space and time instantaneously, i imagine you wouldnt be part of a civilization anymore. You would just be this omnipotent entity that is just seeking to experience as much of the vast universe as possible.
@@jdogsful
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@@jimmcneal5292 A civilization will never advance to the point of FTL travel as it is physically impossible. Causality itself forbids it.
Extremely enjoying the content on this channel!
In conclusion, to survive as a great civilization in the future, we must construct additional pylons.
This is both uplifting and disheartening in the sense that we are likely to find ourselves trekking across the stars but instead of Aliens and other Civilizations we are alone.
In the Foundation series, the Human Galactic Empire rises and falls before alien life is encountered, and then it goes unrecognized as a representative of a grabby Andromeda civilization. To be continued, except that Asimov departed this mortal coil.
i hope we are alone in our galaxy because I wanna be a grabby civilization. I want my grand children to build dyson spheres
The "we know we're early because we're here" prediction reminds of me "the missile knows where it is because it knows where it isn't"
Another thought provoking video, made much more palatable by the animation, and RM's narration. Thank you.
Insofar as aliens, grabby or otherwise, are concerned is they may very well already be here. They may be intelligent enough to keep a low profile, and I am certain their perspective differs markedly than ours. For some ET, staying home, on their home world, is both fulfilling, and brings them joy and contentment. For other ET their concept of a host world may be similar to that of migratory fowl species, with the exception that once their outward star bound journey has begun the entirety of the galaxy is the destination. They may be well aware of their diminutive status in regards to both space and time, and may simply choose to make the most of things as they travel along, not wasting precious resources with imperial conquest. Think interstellar Bohemians and you get the picture. By the way, "they" are, most definitely already here. About that there can be no doubt. You will see one soon enough. (I have seen three, my first thirteen years ago when I was fifty years young.) Once you do you will know, for certain, that we are not alone, nor ever have been. Of course being curious by nature other questions concerning our place in the universe will likely arise. Good luck with that.
Aliens with a markedly content disposition to thier expansion are almost certainly destined for annihilation/and or absorption. The Species that don't move from their home world will ultimately become the playthings of those who do... The Grabby Civilizations.
Once I have worked with a similar model in a field of mass-crystallisation problems (there were also random seeds, growing in 3D medium, and a limiting factor of diffusion in some regimes), so I have a few practical remarks on this model you have shown.
1. Remember, that a set of three free parameters in a model is mathematically enough to draw any plot you want. Sure, an educated guess might provide some constrains, that will limit this shape-shifting ability of numbers, but generally, the sign of a good model would be the elimination of as much of free parameters, as possible. In this case - one of parameters is purely free, one is a rather weak guess, and one (speed) have a solid scientific limitations, though still may vary hugely.
From this I expect this model to produce A LOT of different combinations of answers, sometimes inconsistent - depending on input. Averaging them before classifing into groups might be meaningless (in some cases), and has to be grounded with supplement theory - one originated out of this model, but from a different perspective (ideally - from an entirely different type of observations).
2. Some of plots about indirect predictions, like the volume at the moment of contact - is a very sensitive to input stuff. In real life the chaos of the opened system may cause fast divergence, so that sometimese you can jump 5 orders of magnitude by slightly adjusting the speed (I am talking in general, not about this exponential f). So every step away, every indirect result of a model deepens the possible discrepancy of an outcome. So if you trust speed_ratio/n plot by A, trust the next one by A/2 at least.
this parts is aplicable only to open systems, where at least some chaotic behavior is likely to occure, you can trust by A and A in more classical cases of quasi-static world*
3. I'm curios about isotropic choice for the model of aliens spreading. Wouldn`t it affect the result much? I can imagine, aliens with several galaxy to pick from, will choose planets and regions of space that are more suitable for specifics of their species. Like - they can specifically look for a planet with a 1.1 g gravity, so they skip out Earth as not an interesting place, having multiple 1.1 planets in stock. So there must be an option, where grabbers are already in a yellow con, but our planet is not taken. Though, of course, this goes beyond the model described.
Interesting. I does appear to derive a little bit too much information from such a loose assortment of variables, even if the calculations (and hence conclusions) themselves, are technically valid.
If aliens are at the level where they cause noticeable changes to their environment on the cosmic scale, they are likely to take literally every planet because the vast majority of their population would be on constructed O’Neill cylinders or other ships that would form Dyson Swarms. As such, any matter would be considered valuable, especially around a star, so would be used.
Pelas deusas e deuses, por que você ainda não tem um milhão ou mais de inscritos com um conteúdo tão divertido? Amei conhecer esse canal.
This upside down logic to make predictions is fascinating!
The main threat to grabby aliens hypothesis I can think of, is an idea put by Matt from PBS spacetime, in that any civilization spanning a large space is impossible unless you allow for FTL communication. They couldn't maintain cohesion otherwise.
You don’t need FTL communication if your civilization is expanding at fraction of the speed of light. All colonies (at least the closest ones) will continue communicating with each other, but the speed of information transfer will be like speed of small Roman chariot, moving and spreading the news across the gigantic Roman empire.
P.S. of course all empires die and fall apart, but if we talk about civilizations (and not about cosmic empires), then we should take into consideration that advanced and grabby civilizations (their cultures and technology) will continue developing, spreading and becoming the dominating part of other civilizations. The whole western civilization (and global as well) is mainly based on ancient Roman civilization, despite the death of empire itself.
@@dmytroivashchenko3047 definitely check out Matt's talk on it, without FTL the empire breaks cohesion at large scales, a message takes too long to get from one end to the other. An 'emperor' will be dead before he gets a reply to his first command.
@@McMurchie Civilizations do not need emperors to function. A military is not reliant on presidents to give every order, as each collective unit is recursively self-sufficient.
Essentially, the argument that no such civilization could exist breaks down when you look at system theory. Asynchronous decentralized systems both exist and are used today in our own world.
@@fellowish fancy words for 'systems that don't change aren't impacted by distance' pretty much disproven by all human history. We always splinter, environments force it. A decentralised empire...isn't an empire, unless it communicates updates. Assuming zero change, is akin to saying humans are independent from their environment - they aren't.
@@McMurchie An _empire_ isn't a decentralized system, it is centralized. Do you understand what I was meaning?
How a civilization functions is dependent on its environment. Distance is a topology a civilization interacts with.
The solution to latency and asynchronicity is not by centralizing. Civilization is not dependent on centralization. The solution is decentralization of system structure.
You can see splintering as an outcome of inherent latency and asynchronicity associated with distance. However, splintering is *uncontrolled* replication of structure.
Controlling the self-replication of these systems is how decentralized structures develop, such as with blockchain technology, or federated server protocols.
Why do you assume that civilization is dependent on centralization?
Wow! Great video. Love the animation and the fantastic topic.
6:13
Love this quote! This is what I always tell people who think aliens have 'visted us' or are 'already here'. If they were here, we wouldn't be here. Meaning we can't see them because if we could we wouldn't be here, as the time we'd have to see them would be super tight before our system is occupied.
have you ever heard of free will and it's power on a spiritual-pansympantic level?
@@fotiostrigonidis1698 Gesundheit.
Not necessarily. We might be in an alien Natural Reserve. Just like humans allow other species to live in untouched spaces for ethics sake.
@@WillMauer Doubtful. How would a peaceful alien species that makes 'nature reserves' develop when anything that expands would just out compete them?
found your channel today and binged watched all videos.
I need more!!!!!
All good except for one thing. Remember the episode of ST Voyager where they find a planet where time moves faster? Yeaaahhh.. what are the chances that life exists in heavy gravitational states and with different chemical compositions? Add that to the equation. Otherwise very interesting concepts here!
Also reminds me of a game where it turns out human civilization became space faring and were using a fuel called endurium (or something). Turns out the fuel they were using for light speed capability was another form of alien life that they were extinguishing unknowingly. I personally support the hardest step theory. Learning how to predict/dodge life extinction events 😉
I think I’m early to this channel. Soon it will be on the top of RUclips.
I need Kurzgesagt to put this into a form my brain can fully grasp XD because right now, i simply cannot.
I love this video so much it’s both incredibly adorable and very interesting
18:32 Or I need to reject the idea that grabby aliens are a good explanation in the first place.
We know from observation that in the first 11 billion years of the universe existing, zero obvious (i.e. far-visible) grabby aliens existed within an unimaginable number of star systems, which still holds true for insanely large numbers for the first 12, 13, and even 13.5 billion years.
A lack of grabby aliens, or a slow emergence of them, explains this fact much better than the assumption that we are not early.
This video has pretty much been one possible objection to the grabby aliens model being bent into one specific claim after another, lowering the Bayesian attractiveness of the model in each step.
So while it is true that Human earliness appears to be less likely than Humans simply misestimating the habitability of planets or the longevity of the universe's habitability, so do grabby aliens. In either case, the fact that obvious grabby aliens do not exist across a gigantic amount of planets strongly favours the idea that something is wrong with your estimates over the proposal of grabby aliens.
If there are no grabby aliens there are only very pessimistic possible explanation for us being alone.
1) We are very likely to go extinct as everybody else before we become grabby.
2) We are all alone
3) We are "the very very special"
1) and 2) are covered in the video. To accept your point of view we have to make the assumption that "humans are very very special, and will become the first and only grabby civilization in our corner of the universe". The is also a very bold assumption to make.
@Artem Down Anything unlikely doesn't _need_ an explanation. It only _invites_ one.
Whenever something unlikely is observed, the hypothesis that "it just randomly happened" is _always_ a competing hypothesis. Any other "explanation" needs to do better than that.
Whether grabby aliens do better at explaining Human earliness depends not only on how likely our observations are _without_ grabby aliens (unlikely), but also on how likely they are _with_ grabby aliens (still unlikely). We divide the two, and since we are extremely uncertain about the number of future civilizations that might arise without grabby aliens, the result is inconclusive.
@@michaelrenper796 You're making the assumption that civilizations _want_ to become grabby. What if wanting to become grabby is only an evolutionary advantage in some environments in the universe, and leads to the downfall of some civilizations until a non-grabby mindset reigns superior and dominates any species advanced enough to be able to become grabby? Or what if what I said applies to a percentage of civilizations?
Thing is though, 96% of all galaxies in the observable universe lies beyond z = 1.64, which means we see 96% of the entire observable universe as it was when the universe was less than 4 billion years old, or 29% of its current age. We're estimating that the first planets habitable to life as we know it couldn't have come into existence earlier than 10 or 11 billion years ago, only 200 million to 1.2 billion years before the threshold.
It gets even worse, if we give the planets 2 to 4 billion years to evolve a grabby civilization it means the first grabby aliens wouldn't have come into existence before the universe was half its current age. Our past light cone reaches this threshold at z = 0.79, which 99.25% of all the galaxies in the observable universe lies beyond at this point. Should we really conclude there's a "lack of grabby aliens" just because we're unable to find them in a volume occupying less than one percent of the observable universe, and in a timespan as short as only 7 billion years?
@@michaelrenper796 There is also the possibility of a combination of some Human earliness and some grabby civilization. Just quite reasonably not occupying the universe within the next 20 billion years, but rather setting out very late and slowly. A factor of 1000 in probability situations like this is not big, because we are extremely uncertain about how many planets would be habitable for how long at what chances, and how, what, and how many lifeforms would emerge on these planets over the history of the universe. Anything that seems "likely" by a factor of 1000 may very well be unlikely by a factor of 10^9 for a different reason.
4:50 in the morning- no sleep after work: What if we- humanity were a result of being part of one of these civilizations- meaning there are more like us like us, but we collapsed over time due to cataclysms- and all we're really waiting for are some species of aliens somewhat related to us to return and remind us who we are before some staying- and the rest moving on to continue "checking up" on others like us nearby- that we've yet not noticed or had contact with for a long time.
I think the problem with the equations is the speed of travel and the number of hard steps but I agree we are very very alone in this universe and probably will be forever. Hopefully we're able to leave a monument to our existence so that one day atleast we will have been recorded as having existed.
Should also be noted that civilizations theoretically can expand faster than light, and the speed of expansion is MOST likely non-linear. We will spend quite some time colonizing Milky Way, but Local Group and Virgo Supercluster will get colonized much faster. Also can expect a lot of automated ships being send to terraform planets preemptively before colonists arrive(at least before we turn into posthumans, if ever)