We can assume that an advanced civilization would be smart enough to hide their signatures to avoid space spammers asking about their ship's extended warranties.
This is something I've always struggled to reconcile with the Fermi paradox. If signals from Earth would be difficult to pick up even from within our own stellar neighborhood, then how can we expect to detect signals from any alien civilizations which might be further away? Even if we can conclusively say there's nothing within, say, 5,000 lightyears from us, that's only a tiny portion of the Milky Way, to say nothing about other galaxies.
The argument that is most commonly made against this is that aliens are highly advanc ed and thus be easily detectable. For example; a part of a Dyson sphere(or other megastructures) could be easily detected. There are a lot of other techno/bio signatures that could be detected but aren't so that is "weird". There are a lot of good video's made about this by "john micheal godier" (on youtube) i really recoomend watching if you are interested in this topic.
I think it’s that we should be seeing advanced civilisations, which would be detectable from hundreds of thousands of light years away as they would already be at least a type 2 civilisation and would be visibly dimming their star or a large neighbourhood of stars. We haven’t seen any of that yet so we have to assume that all species anywhere in our galaxy at least are ‘quiet’ like us right now.
@@akina3742What a fantastic metaphor. I believe this is exactly the answer. Except, maybe the other way around considering the increase in tech from texts and letters.
The paradox is based on the idea all civilisation eventualy use most of his star energy only emiting heat without the light. But dyson sphere are impossible and dyson swarm will lead to an stellar scale kesler syndrome long before harnessing more than 10% of the star energy. So, yeah we won't see any alien with current tech until they are in our backyard.
If one can imagine other scientifically accepted certainties like humans evolving from single celled organisms or the mountains growing from tectonic plate collision over millions of years, there is nothing outlandish about signals or material travel across astronomic distances. The light reaching your eyes from the stars already traveled that distance, it would be trivial for a sufficiently advanced civ to send an intelligible signal of identical intensity and speed across those same distances.
@@hairyott3rr The problem with that, is it takes thousands of years for even light to travel a small distance in space. We would have to learn to both transmit messages and travel, many many times faster than the speed of light, to accomplish anything within a single human life. Our current understanding of physics, says that's impossible.
The Three Body Problem trilogy was all about the importance of humans not being spotted by other civilizations. It's also one of the very best works of science fiction written in recent times, but not on too many people's radar because it was originally written in Chinese - the English translation of the trilogy is well worth the read.
It started so slow I put it down and never picked it back up. Hours in and I was still listening to maddening stuff about the Cultural Revolution. It may be great but it sure as hell dot get to the point with any hurry.
@@scottnolan2833 It's definitely a slow burner initially, but it's well worth staying with it. If you haven't got the the countdown showing up in one character's photographs you've missed the point where it turns from storytelling to great science fiction. They also dabble in 4 dimensional space and even with the slow start, the trilogy carries on right to the heat death of universe. I found it less tedious than Bored Of The Rings and the payoff as the initially inexplicable elements of the story get explained is what good science fiction is all about.
@@LeathalI I enjoyed watching Reservoir Dogs a lot more than Citizen Kane too, as I suspect did many other people, but I wouldn't consider either of them particularly good movies, and Citizen Kane was more tedious. Citizen Kane has been copied, refined and improved upon so much since it was made that it has nothing interesting to offer at this point regardless of how impressive it was relative to what was made in the 1940s. I'm not young and am still probably 50 years too young to appreciate it. It's not unlike saying the Model T is still the best car ever made because at one time it was revolutionary. Lord of the Rings is in a pretty similar situation where more engaging storytellers have used a lot of the same sort of lore to make objectively far better books, certainly if readability and ability to keep the reader engaged are part of the rating system. The hard science fiction genre is not well represented even within SF in general, making the Three Body Problem both more rare and more satisfying than the Lord of the Rings' swords and sorcery story, even if it defined its genre.
Dark Forest Theory - you don't know if the other creatures are friendly so you avoid them in case they are prone to attack any species not like them or other species have something the predator species desires
And if you had the capability to do so you would probably keep a covert eye on any emerging technological species' offensive capabilities. Whilst going to great lengths to do so without revealing yourself to said emerging technological species. Yet we've seen no evidence whatsoever of advanced unknown aircraft with superior performance characteristics operating in the vicinity of our military assets. Oh wait... 😂
The whistle blower David Grusch with approval from Pentagon admitted aliens have arrived. The US Congress just came out. Biden will openly announce by the end of this year. Wake up
Not sure how the Grabby Aliens Hypothesis assumes "universal alien behavior". It posits that Grabby civilizations make up a small percentage of the total number of civilizations, but all it takes is a few expansionistic civilizations to make the idea workable. There could be a variety of alien behaviors, but the aliens we would encounter almost by definition be the expansionistic ones rather than the peaceful home-world-bound alien space monks.
Yeah, I didn't understand why they thought that was a counter point either. With enough aliens it's only rational to assume that some of them would eventually turn out to be grabby and then things will start continuing as the simulation says. Their speculation on communication invalidating wanting to colonize other continents isn't really valid either I think. Humans have colonized non-communicating areas before and started diverging due to it.Even if most aliens don't want to, you only need a few who don't care about that and just want to colonize areas even if they can never go home ever again. The non-sentient replicator idea really isn't needed.
What bothers me about the argumentative notions of "assuming universal alien behavior" is when so many use it to decide that whatever alien behavior is, it WON'T be anything like humans would act... With no evidence either way, why even make such an argument??? We (humans) bitch and whine endlessly about using evidence based science and logic to reach our conclusions... SO let's look back to what science we DO actually have. Our species came about on this planet through cataclysms and COMPETITION. It's been a primary driver for all supposedly advanced species since life began, and we still see it everywhere. Our own species developed intelligence at least in part DUE to that competition. Instead of growing enormous like dinosaurs or the mega-fauna since, we developed an intellectual value, and used that intellect to expand around the world, alter the environment to suit us, and even manipulate the remaining animals and plants in our wake to the same. Based on that history, as completely as we can understand it, then it would stand to reason that about any other alien life would also face its own competition by nature of its own planet. Whether more cataclysms or fewer, and regardless of their scale, they would have to be negotiated as well at some level. There must be a value to turning to intellect in order to solve problems, amass armies (whether or not entirely military in nature) and use teamwork to accomplish grander goals on larger scales than we could ever possibly do as individuals... AND since we've colonized without concern for matters of contacting "home" (and we have), then there's no reason any aliens wouldn't have done the same... In point of fact, back a few years ago, when Musk was first rumbling about sending a colony to Mars on a schedule, there were several places that put out "recruitment" messages. Some were more serious than others. Some were social experiments, and some were entirely joking... or trolling Musk... whatever... BUT there was a fairly huge push from people who flat out did NOT care diddly if they ever even had a chance to get back to Earth. They wanted to go... AND I'd posit that somewhere in the basic nature of humans, we just have a primal "wanderlust". There's an instinctive idealism that there's greener pastures and better places to be than wherever we find ourselves "just now". That's probably the whole reason we've spread such that we cover the entire planet now... and it's why we long for a chance to launch big rocket ships and go off colonizing throughout the Solar System and eventually the Milky Way. SO now... I'm going to ask again... WHERE does it make any damn sense to start making assumptions that aliens wouldn't be JUST AS MOTIVATED as we seem to be, "downright hellbent" to get the hell off their rocks and start gallivanting about the universe as far as they can possibly spread? Sure, it seems "dubiously anthropomorphic" of me to say, but I see nothing in the way Nature has worked for the last several billion years on OUR rock to suggest there's anything else to expect of them... Maybe as they expand, likely searching for resources (and we can't just yet make assumptions about what exactly constitutes "valuable resources" to them) they'll also have the intelligence to avoid risking a tangle with a nuclear armed force... BUT I'd also suggest that rather than they possess some dubious "humanity" in their attitudes for loving peace, they intellectually tackled the "problem" with humanity on this particular chunk of rock, and reason that the LOSSES simply aren't worth bothering for the struggle. Unless we're, personally THE commodity in value or vogue... Then there's nothing here that can't be found on a lifeless rock somewhere just floating about and waiting to be exploited for such things... from gold and iron through the entire periodic chart... It all came from stars or nova explosions, so it's scattered all over... I doubt very much that there's some singularly unique bit of material that HAS to come from earth for any reason, unless you just NEED (somehow) Earthling humanoids or some such... ;o)
It still is pretty anthropomorphic to reason out that any advanced civilization would need to expand at all or would do it in such a way to have no regard for the beings they are invading. Perhaps a better way of saying it is that it's very Earth-bound. We don't know what higher intelligence really looks like and so we project based on the models we have at hand. Here on Earth, I'd say that most people would like to avert nuclear war and prevent further colonization at the present moment. Most people abhor, for instance, Putin's campaign in Ukraine as it seems strange in the modern world to annex established nation states. That kind of behavior was seen as pretty natural for millennia before it. So you could say we are already changing in our attitudes, if not in our actions always. If you're really advanced, that probably means you know how to harness large amounts of energy as well as produce tech that would be infinitely sustainable. Why make the effort to go expand yourself? Pride? Ego? Just to replicate like an unthinking microorganism? Seems pretty lame and expensive for something that advanced imo. Additionally, we can't also think that just because an advanced race isn't "grabby" or expansion-interested that would be defenseless against attacks. In fact, perhaps that would be quite helpful or even necessary in resolving and mitigating races and civilizations that get out of hand. But now I'm just talking about Mass Effect lmao. Who the fuck knows I suppose.
im just gonna leave this here, in my opinion its highly unlikely that we're gonna meet aliens since if you think about it, for the longest time in earths history it has just been a battle for survival of the strongest species which has been rather brutal and has forced rather brutish survival strategies. humans are very exceptional, and the fact that we can't even travel to the mars yet, and taking into account that we've only really been technologically advanced for like 200 years now, despite virtually perfect conditions and the first cell forming 4 billion years ago, its rather unlikely
@@Aryzo well, you’re discounting lost technologies and your “perfect conditions” statement is confusing… that’s verifiably incorrect…. How you could even say that is baffling. Also, how do you know people haven’t seen aliens or evidence of them? Could be covered up and you’d never even know. Your whole comment reads as a short sighted person trying to sound smart.
@@Aryzo well, you’re discounting lost technologies and your “perfect conditions” statement is confusing… that’s verifiably incorrect…. How you could even say that is baffling. Also, how do you know people haven’t seen aliens or evidence of them? Could be covered up and you’d never even know.
10:19 a big big thing about that: That applies to expansion *in opposition* to other nations / civilizations. When there is little to no resistance to expansion, it happens naturally whenever the pros of establishing in a new environment (resource abundance, easy(er) opportunities) outweighs the cons (loss of living standard until properly established, more instability)
A few years of "observation", compared to the gigantic timeframes we're dealing with, makes me think we don't have enough empiric data to decide anything. For now, using logic with what we have so far and improving observation would be a nice step.
The gigantic time-frames are part of the problem, though. There has already been so much time that MILLIONS of advanced, galaxy-colonizing civilizations should have already arisen, given liberal assumptions about life and habitability. We should be seeing evidence of alien megastructures in every corner of the galaxy, but we don't. Either something prevents them from advancing, or life is crazy-rare.
@@WaxPaper Probably both. The "great filter" is almost a certainty, and add to that the fact that the makeup of oursolarsystem seem to be quite rare. There probably aren't more than a handful of systems in the galaxy that can house planets, and advanced life, like ours.
@@WaxPapereven if they were already there, we still wouldn't be able to detect them or know what we're looking at, and that's assuming they were there the millions if not billions of years ago that would be required for us to even attempt looking at them.
Original Post sounds correct. We're dealing with speculation, much like thinking about exo-planets before we found any. Who knew that there would be super-Jupiters orbiting their stars in a few days? (Mercury's orbit is 88 days.) Of course, finding those planets first was due to the methods used which selected for them. Our technology isn't quite up to the task of finding Earth-sized planets and examining their atmospheres for life-signatures or techno-signatures. What we need to know is how many stars in how large a volume of space from our sun have been checked for radio signals, then how many for laser signals? We can also use our knowledge of evolution to remove the stars younger than 2 billion years from consideration, and maybe red dwarfs which usually have strong solar flares, likely to destroy life on an Earth-like planet in its habitable zone. Surely there's a magic number or distance that would say a negative result of our search is now worrying?
Grabby aliens. Basically, for anyone who's ever played a 4X strategy game, this is the "playing wide" strategy. Grab as much territory as you can as quickly as you can in order to capture the most resources possible and deny your enemies those same resources.
thank you for this and i hope you’re doing well. gonna try to start saying thank you on all your videos. you take the time to make these and i really appreciate your work!
Carl Sagan's book and movie 'Contact' are worth reading/watching for an interesting perspective on the motivations of the alien ET for contacting us. The movie significantly tweaked Sagan's original idea in interesting ways. 'We dont know why. It was like that when we found it. That's the way its been done for millions of years.'
I think we need to stop applying our own duality to other life forms. we are missing so many pieces of the puzzle.. just because we are stood on the beach of our island and when we look out to the ocean we see no other islands, does not mean there are none.. our island is tucked away in a very remote place in the galaxy and we are not ready to interact with other beings for at the moment we cannot even stand each other...
Agree with this 100%. All too often, people fall into the trap of thinking that potential alien life and the technology they use will be recognisable to humans.
I don't see how you could avoid duality. Aliens no matter how they look like, how they think, feel or what their notion of morality is, can either decide to stay "quiet" and not expand or decide to expand. Some of the choices are universal and quite binary.
We don't do that. But the thing is that the universe is so big and old that everything aliens can do they will do and did already. At least some of them. And every lifeform on earth tries to survive and multiply so some advanced aliens will also do that. And those grabby aliens who survive and expand even though maybe rare are enough to create the Fermi Paradox.
Fun fact. Fermi came up with the Fermi paradox in the early 50s at Los Alamos labs as a reaction to all the rumors of UFO sightings around the lab. It shows his frustration at people leaping to aliens.
How many times must the obvious be explained? There is no Fermi paradox, Abiogenesis is a hundred times over debunked theory due to numerous extensive limiting factors. The Universe can sustain life but natural processes do not contain the necessary information and mechanisms to self generate protein structures and viable Amino Acid chains. We don't see any life out there because there isn't any life out there.
Joe in the Carolina's also Beyond Belief channel posted the actual Freedom of information act lectures at Los Alamos. His channel has been defunct for a while now. I'd like to see those lectures again, know any links??
Cool so it's not aliens but some government that already has mastered anti-gravity to go from sea level to space in a matter of seconds? Please do explain the main UAP sighting that was recorded on Pentagon confirmed footage and witnessed by several U.S. Navy pilots and tracked by an entire ship.😊
70 years and a ton of information later, I would no longer call it a jump. As much as people, who have generally not spent any significant amount of time looking into the subject, like to say/think otherwise, it's safe to say that some percentage of UFOs are controlled by non-human intelligences.
Just heard it also! That was so simple and yet so true. Space is vast and our time here is probably very limited, no wonder we never coincide with each other. Thank you!
Thank you for pointing out the human-centric part of all of this. Our species' sameness makes it so difficult to even imagine intelligence in other animals let alone something outside our tiny sphere of influence. I remember how mindblowing it was learning that whales sing to each other across hundreds of miles. Resources are certainly an idea for dispersion but I often think about divisions that could force species to move beyond their genesis -- blue star bellie sneeches versus red, capitalist versus socialist, even species that diverged for various reasons including intentional genetic manipulation. The forces do not have to be violence or some form of slash-and-burn economics as is so popular in our current dark visions of the future.
It really doesn't take a lot of human assuming to deduce that most aliens will be imperialist and grabby. Anything that has a goal will always achieve that goal better by preserving itself and acquiring more resources. So really, all it takes for a species/animal to be expansionist is that it has a goal. Doesn't matter what that goal is, that's all you need to prove that expansionism will always be the optimal choice.
We have very limited means to try and find lifeforms with very limited tools while making very bizarre presumptions (like aliens using radio for instance, when we've only been doing that for a century or so)
@@UFOs_Over_EuropeThere are several frequencies that have much more of a punch wavelength wise, it's just more energy intensive therfore not viable for us
I agree, our top minds are ignorant to believe there isn’t anything out there in a universe so large we can’t wrap our heads around it, but instead humans make a number up and die by it. The universe is far older than 13 billion years old. So when they see something that they cannot Explain, they fall back on making assumptions and calling it as a fact.
Here’s the analogy: If the universe was Earth’s oceans, we’ve looked at a 12 ounce glass of seawater. If there were no fish in that 12 ounce glass, would you conclude that there are no fishes in the oceans?
Nope. We would keep studying that sample of water to the whole spectrum to see if there's any indicator of life, so we would find that there's fishes out there in the ocean.
What are the odds that you will find no life, no viruses, no bacteria. Zero. That's because life spreads out. Bacterias everywhere in that cup. And if advanced alien was life was common. Alien life would be everywhere, every solar system every planet in our galaxy. just like bacteria is everywhere in that cup. Just one alien civilization a million years ahead of us would be everywhere in this galaxy. And a million years is a very short time considering how old our galaxy is.
"The dark forest hypothesis" was not mentioned in the video. An idea from the trilogy of books "Remembrance of Earth's Past" by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. A very interesting solution to the Fermi paradox.
He was saying that most species would likely remain quiet, which is pretty much the conclusion of the dark forest hypothesis. I feel like mentioning it directly wouldn't really have added much to the video aside from the need to explain what it
some combination of the factors: -the rarity of planets that could support even extremophile cellular life -the rarity of spontaneously forming (or importing) cellular life on those planets -the rarity of planets that are hospitable enough for life to evolve further into more complicated animals -the rarity of life to evolve with a similar or greater intelligence to us (which appears to be our one species out of every single other one to exist in earth's history), not to mention communication and cooperation and all those other traits that make us even more special. -the rarity of said planet to have the material makeup and temperatures/atmosphere/etc for technology similar to how it operates here to make sense on that world (possible lack of rare metals, no abundance of resources to lead said species to think about building a radio, maybe it storms 20x as harshly and everything they build crumbles much faster.) -the rarity of a species this intelligent being capable, and willing to spend such enormous amounts of effort on simply colonizing other nearby planets (which are probably inhospitable anyways) -the PRACTICALITY of being able to colonize other planets, even if the entire species was on board with the idea -The vast distances combined with laws of physics. -all these rarities combined means that even if they passed it all, the nearest planet that would be able to hear transmissions is too far away, or the limits of where they can travel would be their moons or possibly solar system not to mention that the things we think aliens should be doing are almost exclusively based on what we see in movies or sci fi. the short-sighted idea that all life exists just to eventually evolve to colonize other places, like star wars or GalCiv (or in our war-centered psychology). or the far fetched idea that they would upload their consciousness to a computer like the matrix. Or the idea that other life is deliberately hiding because of some even worse entity, like out of lovecraft. it all reeks of humans not thinking outside the scope of their experience. life is certainly out there. the universe is basically infinite after all. we've observed so many planets, that I have to believe we've unknowingly already seen one with at least cellular life. But I have to assume that most life is simple due to all the harshness of reality.
It seems obvious to me the reason we are not being visited is that faster than light travel is impossible, but we forget as every SF story assumes it can be done or there would be no story
Check out the SF stories by Ursula Leguin. She has written some amazing novels and novellas whose drama and crises center around the 'time-lag problem'. So the issue of time and distance can actually be a great catalyst for dramatic tension and tragic scenarios..
Fun fact, if an identical civilization to 21st century humans existed around the closest neighboring solar system, we would not be able to detect any radio signals from them even with our best equipment. Radio signals become indistinguishable from background static quite quickly.
And it's very possible, without intentional efforts to be spotted, an even much more highly advanced civilization would not become more detectable. If you model our signal as a bunch of dipoles, the more signals, or dipoles you add the faster the signal actually falls off at range. You would have to design a constructively interfering system to get a signal that goes farther, and for what? Why do you want to be seen? The other possible ways to be detected... stellar expansion may be farther off technologically than we like to think, and megastructures, I'm gonna be honest I think they are total fiction. I don't see any reason to make those, as cool a concept as they are for scifi
It's likely we have already encountered several species. We for sure have encountered something in the tic tac incident, either during that incident or years ago that provided private miltary-industrial complex the anti gravity technology to go from sea level to space in seconds. The US Pentagon has confirmed this footage but it's blocked in several countries so you'll have to search on youtube for a mirror upload. It was also witnessed by several US Navy pilots, one of which testifed under oath to US Congress. These are not crack heads, these are government workers and whistleblowers working with congress to push for transparency and finding out what the hell is going on.
why would it be scary? whether such predatory entities exist or not, it wouldn't really change our current mortal situation, we are all just waiting for our death since our proto-human ancestors gained sentience and awareness of their sad and tragic predicament.
THANK YOU for finally mentioning the 'androcentric' thoughts on the Fermi Paradox that just ignores this. We can't even communicate with other species on a level field in our own planet, so I'm not sure that we could do so(assuming there is no 'shadow government alien conspiracy' already) with a non-terrestrial intelligence.
I think the biggest problem or mistake here is: How can we talk about a civilization that conquers a galaxy or lots of galaxies because the distance between its territories would be so huge that it is impossible for it to exist and act as a specific civilization with nearly similar biological, cultural, political or technological characteristics? During the millions of years of such supposed expansion the species would inevitably develop into more new species with many different forms and different coals. Anton understood this, or at least part of this, very well in this video. 👍
We do not know enough to make any real determination on whether life exists elsewhere, if the speed of light isn't the max speed of the universe all that we know becomes irrelevant.
The assumption that aliens would have the same issues as we do is flawed in many ways. "What if" their minute is our hour which would lead to a life span is far greater than ours. Our dreaming minds are relegated to controlled explosions for movement through space or being disassembled then assembled elsewhere
Okay, I flat out died laughing about the Loud Aliens rocking out. Maybe that's one of the Great Filters, and now I won't become an advanced civilization
A very complex and convoluted hypothesis. I would go with the simplest one, aliens are extremely rare and the chance of any one civilisation like ours being within contactable distance of another is very small. So most civilisations are effectively alone and will never see the neighbours. The fact that we've been trying to create life from non-living matter for nearly 70 years since Stanley Miller's famous experiment and still haven't got close suggests such an event maybe very rare in nature.
If our nearest neighbors are just beyond 100 light years they might not know about us, because first radio signals emitted by Earth are: A. Very weak. B. Reached them just couple of years ago and might have not been noticed. And even if they noticed us and decided to send a signal back, we will receive it a hundred years from now.
Nah The Black Forest is referred to as a theory of the reason alien civilizations don't reach out or announce their existence is because there are far more dangerous things out there so they remain silent so they aren't discovered. Three Body Problem series actually does a really good job explaining the whole thing.@@patriciofernandez6500
If you haven’t read “The Three Body Problem” (trilogy) go get it! It deals with these questions in mind-blowing fashion, proposing the “Dark Forrest” theory for why civilizations should best be quiet, for as long as possible.
An advanced civilization, including us, would realize the futility of finding other civilizations due to the vast, insurmountable distance between stars.
This sure puts the book "Old Man's War" into a different perspective. Maybe the Consu were the actual loud aliens, and they were cultivating the younger species within their area to be more battle ready, so they could help with the REAL war.
physics as currently understood by humanity and utilized in practice? Or physics as a concept that we acknowledge we know only a small fraction of? There is no saying in what can be unlocked by a civilization that possesses even just a slightly higher exponential evolutionary curve than humanity. For what could take us millions to discover, could only be a few centuries away from another civilization even if we currently are at the same starting point. Our understanding of physics at a macro scale is absurdly limited. So in regards to your wonder, my question would rather be how likely it is for a civilization in general to develop a desire to expand in the universe in the first place. Humans are driven by ego and desire (especially desire for knowledge). But that is also at the same time what is holding us back, because ego and desire cripples efficiency and cooperative effort.
@@Real_MisterSir Wow that was a brain dead analysis. Go read some books about evolution and answer your own question... Holy crap your whole post is full of hippy dippy nonsense. Do you also believe that the american indians were like a disney cartoon and not like every other civilization, fighting, killing and expanding?
How many times must the obvious be explained? There is no Fermi paradox, Abiogenesis is a hundred times over debunked theory due to numerous extensive limiting factors. The Universe can sustain life but natural processes do not contain the necessary information and mechanisms to self generate protein structures and viable Amino Acid chains. We don't see any life out there because there isn't any life out there.
@@Real_MisterSir without FTL or at least relativistic speeds space colonization gets really bad and it is unknown yet whether these can be achieved practically and it should be quite dangerous. Another question for me would be amounts of resources/energy spent to travel to even closest system and whether it is reasonable at all. And even after nuclear war earth would be better place to live than most planets.
Everything we call physics is based on observations. We don't know what the physics would be like passing through a wormhole. I think the hope is that eventually our understanding of physics will advance enough to allow us to overcome the limitations presented by physics.
Thank you Anton for your great content!!! I wonder if there's a hypothesis out there that would solve the fermi-paradoxon as follows: when species come to a certain age they may have looked around the galaxy from their home-world for long enough to realize, that the few other aliens are as far away, that it would be pointless to even trying to reach out for them, therefor they decided to 'stay home' and become ever smaller (through selection or conditioning) so that their home-world becomes relativly bigger for them - i'd call it 'shrinking aliens'. Not the most uplifting idea, but maybe an explanation...
A great theoretical concept that has been proposed, is dubbed "the Dark Forest" phenomenon, where the basis of communication filter (due to distance and time) basically means you have no idea of assessing what any discovered civilization would do or be capable of, so the only course of action is for one to take preemptive measures and try to eradicate the other as soon as they're discovered. It's like imagining two nations with nuclear weapons - the one who strikes first ensures they get to live. They could both get to live if neither fires at all, but you have no way of telling if the other nation thinks the same way you do, because objectively to them there is no downside to firing first (other than moral implications, which we only really understand from a human perspective to begin with). They could just as well view us as weed, or a virus, and simply treat us in a similar manner with no moral implication at all. So the only sound thing to do to ensure one's own survival, is to be the one who fires first. Due to this, it is speculated that every civilization that evolves beyond a certain point, reaches a state of self silence to avoid the risk of broadcasting signals to someone else of potentially superior advancement, and since the barrier of information exists, you can never determine who is more advanced than the other, so the only option is to be the one who shoots first and then hope for the best - thus the "Dark Forest". Nobody dares to speak up, because everyone knows that those who speak up, will be taken immediate action against by one observing civilization or another. I made a really poor example of the theory to be honest, but the channel 'Quinn's Ideas' goes over it in great detail, and with a knack for storytelling too. It's a great watch, and makes a really good case of why it would be in every civilization's best interest to not broadcast any signals and instead go into hiding as a default state of existence.
Yeah I think it's a pretty daft idea, to be honest; far, far too anchored in a rather primitive and logically flawed mentality. For one thing, it proposes a galaxy in which the fundamental evolutionary drive that brought a species to space-fairing levels of technology... just switched off once it got that far; that this crippling fear of being attacked by someone who has better technology (and thus, would already know you exist) suddenly conquers the fundamental desire to travel, to meet others, to trade, and to learn. Essentially, it would mean that life itself has a fundamental flaw that would absolutely destroy it on the grand scale by halting its otherwise unceasing progress - everyone restraining their otherwise irrepressible urge to spread, to grow, to become more complex, to assimilate more information and adapt to more varied circumstances, so that the galaxy becomes a weirdly crowded but isolated place, despite the fact that literally everyone's star is mortal, and every race in existence would NEED to relocate eventually. A far more reasonable explanation for the "silence" is merely the progression of technology. Broadcast communications are hugely inefficient and primitive, prone to degradation, interference, interception. Radio in particular is now... really very old and primitive, even by our standards. Even a benign race would want to keep its basic communications relatively private - just like the private citizens of any given nation. Doesn't mean those private citizens are all carefully peering out of their windows, shotgun in hand; just means... they wish to communicate on their terms. So what if the next step in communications technology was based on quantum entanglement, for example? There'd be nothing to intercept, nothing to see, nothing to hear. Not because they were striving for secrecy, but simply because... it's a better way to communicate.
@@NicholasBrakespear It would be more plausible from a speculative point of view, to think that some civilizations did indeed reach space faring technological advance - and since they did not try to hide, they got punished for it and that's why we do not see any evidence of them. So either civilizations reach a hard break and decide it's best to stay in hiding, or they press forward and get punished by whatever is the most advanced civilization out there to pick up their signals first - either to eradicate them, or to prevent their signals to reveal nearby locations to an even greater threat out there.
I’m glad Anton mentioned resources as motivation to expand. It brings to an opinion of mine. That any civilization must manage its resources. No exception. Some may go further than others. Leading to greater collapse until they learn to manage resources. Societal growth simply cannot out pace its production.
It wouldn't have to be common, just have to have happened long enough ago along with the advancement of tech and the desire to expand. Which could simply come from the desire to survive which is inherent to life in general as that is the sole purpose of evolution, to increase survival. Avoidance of mass extinction events outside of their control. Edit: I just mean given enough time they could be everywhere, but likely we won't see any for millions or billions of years unless we are later to the game than currently estimated. Or just lucky/unlucky to not be nearby another.
I think life is very common out in the galaxy and universe but intelligent life very uncommon. When looking at our own solar system compared to the other ones we've seen, ours is unique and rare. Then you look at the process of life on earth and how long it took to get complex life and the extinction events that have happened over that time the likelihood of intelligent life is not very high
I would agree that you will probably not live long enough to meet aliens in person. But that doesn't mean our descendants might not meet them in the far future. It's far more likely that we will receive radio or laser messages from one or more civilizations.
The largest empires in Earth history had end-to-end communication times of several months to a year. I can't imagine an empire being able to expand to anywhere near a galactic level without infighting, due to an inability to effectively communicate if nothing else. This is assuming FTL communication remains impossible.
One thing that shows that humanity has a lot to learn is the Fermi Paradox. Theories all assume that all the advanced aliens or AI aliens would think like us. Anton did talk about this in the video. I think advanced civs would have less need to conquer. We only have to worry about less advanced, more local aliens.
Do the equations include the need for multiple star cycles for metals? Our system has been thru 4 stars, creating more complex elements (metals) with each. Perhaps hi-tech needs a full range or metals, hence 3 or 4 thru-star cycles are necessary? This would stop (potentially) complex civilizations for the 1st 8..12 billion years.
Look how far we've come in 500 years. We took our sweet time to make use of heavy elements at our disposal. An alien civilization in the Milky Way that reached our current level even a million years ago could have populated the galaxy by now.
I don't think that it is unusual that it is quiet, mainly due to the distances we are talking about. Our radio waves have only covered a fraction of the distance of the milky way for example, we do not have any kind of communication that could travel to another galaxy without taking millions of years.
Well, Im not a uap fanatic, but with some of the storys i also wouldnt say i can be certain they are not already here. the US government literally confirmed there are uaps that exceed known human capabilitys by a lot. In this case i would think they just observe and study us and take samples once in a while, like in a zoo. also while the grabby alien theory seems to make sense, i would also think there might be a point where there are enough advanced civilizations trying to expand, to either have wars or establish rules in the universe to prevent conflict. also if there would be some technology to instantly wipe out planetary systems or galaxies for example, it could also be a cold war situation, similar to the atomic bomb on earth. I think all of this wouldnt be too unlikely, because all species on this planet have one thing in common, to survive and to multiply. this seems to be the very essence of life, from the smallest to the biggest life forms. so i dont see why it would be different for other life in the universe.
Yep...only places within about 60 to 120 lightyears would be able to see *our* signals as of yet...and thatl's like a pinpoint, much less a pinhead, on cosmic scales.
@@IkarusTelevision You don't even need to develop the weapons capable, rouge black holes, gamma ray burst, solar collapse/expansion, asteroids or even rouge planetary bodies that have been slingshot out. The Universe already has plenty of things any sufficiently advanced species with natural survival instinct, that caused them to evolve intelligence in the first place, would discover about and want to avoid.
Some thoughts: 1) You could in theory colonize the galaxy using "sub-light" interstellar travel, but you wouldn't be able to build an interstellar "empire" this way or even only to hold your star-spanning civilization together. If some of your colonies would not die out due to too less support from the home world, they would develop into their own cultures and civilizations (and perhaps lose some technologies especially regarding star-faring in the process, because settlers on a new world don't have time for such fancies). The most calculations do not take those slowing-down factors into account. If you would invent a faster-than-light method of travel however you could start to do some systematic colonization and expansion, but the probability you could manage and maintain any kind of united civilization on such a scale is not very high, to say the least. Most 'loud' civilizations would therefore probably soon split up in different competing "tribes", and maybe even stop to expand in favor of concentrating on those "inner" conflicts. 2) You can't conclude from one data point on the time a technological civilizations needs to evolve in average. The four billion years of Earth include multiple major and minor extinction events and also many chance events. There is no clear stepladder from simple life to complex life to intelligent lifeforms to technical civilizations. The first of those steps took about a billion years on Earth, but we can't say much about the other steps - only that it took only about 66 million years from the last major extinction event to our technical civilization, and that our species evolved during an ice age, which about 34 million years before with alternating glaciation periods and interglacials, and especially during the Pleistocene epoch of the last 2.5 million years. 3) If human history can provide any clue to how interstellar civilizations evolve, then it would be: empires grow and then crumble, civilizations expand and then fall apart. Fast growing empires die often also fast, slower growing empires can live for longer, but there will come a time when they encounter some challenges (sometimes including other empires, but not always) they are not able to master - due to the working of their internal structures, due to creeping corruption or due to other reasons. Even "in modern times" that happens still all the time. Non-imperialistic federations or similar structures may have a longer shelf life, but again - too little data points. There is simply not enough time in the lifetime of any civilization (even of very long-lived individuals) to pocket a larger chunk of the universe or even of a single galaxy (except maybe with faster-than-light travel and and the will of leaving gaps e.g. by jumping whole star systems).
It seemed like the model presented left-out the expansion of the universe. I think it may be impossible to ever travel between galaxies that are rushing away from one another at sufficient speed.
Maybe they've already been here, saw nothing of interest, and scraped away the Boring Billion years ... If the speed of light is a hard limit, we're unlikely to see or hear anyone, even if the universe was loaded with aliens.
This. People always like to ignore the speed of light limit when discussing the Fermi paradox, which in my opinion makes for a very awkward communication dilemma for any species trying to expand beyond their own solar system. I feel like a any spacefaring civilization would have to eventually come to an agreement with their own kind that once they leave their original star system, they’re pretty much on their own, realistically, ain’t nobody gonna be sending delayed messages back and forth with several years worth of lag to another civilization in a different star system which you won’t even know if they received your message.
@@Miguel.L It's not just the lag either. Maybe someone can calculate the energy needed for a signal from Earth to reach Proxima Centauri, at a "mere" 4,25 LY . We can only communicate with Voyager 1 because we know where it is and what it sends out (we receive < 1 attowatt after 46 years) - but Voyager would need another 1600 years to reach PC if it was headed that way. 1600 years ago, the Western Roman Empire was in its last days ...
Let's better assume that we are alone and try to survive the next generation to pass the great filter. We are doing weird things now that might let us go extinct or at least destroy or havily demage our civilisation. Thanks to Anton for the interesting thoughts.
I don’t think we are alone but I do think the way our species lives makes us undesirable. I think we claim things based on ‘intelligent life’ but I don’t think humans really meet that. We have millions that die of lack of basic food, hygiene, medical care, wars, poor education etc. We ruin our environment and are generally pretty barbaric to many humans. We are more like locusts in many respects. We also still have many millions that believe in religion l. We just aren’t worth interacting with, why ever would another species want to?
@@lijohnyoutube101 100% agree why would any advanced civilizations try to contact us whilst we are still in this crazy evolutionary stage ? Dude we nooked 2 fucking cities i can not imagine what we would do if we had some insane advanced tech from other civilizations. It is very much possible to me that no one wants to actually contact us atm.
I think that humans claiming they are "advanced" is more or less all you need to hear. Someone needs to be handed the mirror and dragged out of their hole in the ground.
Another assumption here is that the technology of interstellar space travel is actually going to be achieved by any species. Maybe the limitations of physics and the matter we have to work with is going to make interstellar space travel far more difficult and risky than we'd love to imagine.
In addition to literally EVERYTHING ELSE IMAGINABLE, there is yet another insurmountable barrier to alien life ( let alone intelligent life) that asks the question "Got phosphorus?"
Using the Drake equation Brian Cox figures that the number of planets that reach a level of technology where they could communicate with other planets in the galaxy in less than one per galaxy.
N=1, a thought that most aren't willing to even entertain. Or even less... Imagin so far, life has only arisen a few times throughout the entire universe. Or maybe we're the first. I think about that sometimes, because let's face it, humanity probably won't survive for a million years. We may not survive another thousand. What if life never develops anywhere in the universe again? It would just be this small blip of time that the universe was "aware of itself," to quote Sagan or someone else I heard that from. One tiny moment when sentience existed, and that's it...
The solution is way simpler than that. We suck at detecting things. Most of the search was on the hydrogen band and we avoid the more logical bands which is what we use for communication. Then there was a paper that said a non directional signal can't be detected compared to noise to past a certain lightyear range.
@@panzrok8701 That makes zero sense. The paradox is about not being able to detect life in a vast universe. What you're saying is like saying pre-colonial europeans have a fermi paradox because they exist and can't see anything across the ocean when all they had to do was cross the ocean to find there were other life and civilizations. We're at the stage where we are looking across a vast ocean and can see there are islands out there but can't tell if there life in them.
@@soulwynd If you really want to use this analogy: In this case the europeans could have concluded that they are the first and most advanced civilisation to colonize other continents in the world because if not they would be already colonized themself by other more advanced powers. They could have concluded that even though they didn't know about all the other civilizations in the world. It's unlikely that there are two independent civilizations near each other that expand at the same time and detect each other because the expansion happens really fast. In case of european colonization of the world it happened in around 200 years of the 200 000 years of human history. For our galaxy it would take only millions of years. And because we are also still uncolonized and are on the brink to colonize ourselves means that other civilizations that expand are really rare and far away or it's impossible for some reason.
@@panzrok8701 Or the ocean is too vast to traverse easily and the scales are way off for this analogy. Even if we're also not the first, we always look into the past. Let's say, if a civilization became space borne 50000 years ago, if it is on the other side of the milky way, we wouldn't see it. If we are to assume other civilizations in our own galaxy would take about the same time we did to get to this point , we wouldn't see them. And even if they are ancient and detectable, the bands we scan for radio signals usually stay under 2ghz with only a few projects scanning above that, such as the late arrecibo observatory that went up to 10ghz. Meanwhile most microwave communication we use are in frequencies way higher than that. And even then, if it is not directional, there is only a certain range over signal power we can detect it. We can't detect even if they're there because we suck at it or it is impossible to given a certain civilization at a certain distance over a certain time period. As for why we haven't been colonized, the universe is huge and even assuming FTL capabilities like in star trek, the galaxy would take thousands of years to traverse. And then for them to land here, they have to roll the dice between other 80ish billion G type stars. Not to mention civilizations might not become spaceborn and be content where they are. Even then the paradox is mainly about detection and we will still take many many years before we are up to the task.
It's less about detecting and more about why OUR system isn't covered in artifical structures or that all our asteroids and other materials, like Mercury, seem intact. Even if aliens existed within the last few million years that's enough time to colonize the galaxy. Or at least send probes everywhere. The fact nothing has arrived means either the only aliens that exist are around our tech level, or lower, or they don't exist.
The other, more likely, possibility is that interstellar travel is simply too difficult to ever achieve. Unless FTL can be reached, travel between even close-by stars becomes totally impractical except for one-way trips to colonize a fortunately close-by planetary system. Another possibility is that radio waves are replaced with FTL communications, and the aliens who achieve that tech (along with FTL travel) avoid contact with 'lesser' species who might blow everybody up by crashing FTL ships into various planets while screaming about how bad "The Flash" was or something. ;D
Until now, I never considered the fact that maybe aliens really need better amplifiers for their electric guitars. Seriously, I mean no harm. I thank you for your consistent contribution to science.
I like that the "fermi paradox" is a paradox just for our ego. We are looking up for a brief flash, with relatively primitive tools and without even trying to think about how completely alien race would communicate, assuming they are just like us. In other words Fermi Paradox is just a skill issue.
lol well put, exactly my thoughts. Like, we're still using radio. But why would anyone who could travel the stars use the technological equivalent of rolling down the window and shouting real loud?
That seems unfair. Some pretty big brains have considered all that and put a lot of work thinking alternatives. No serious scientist will ever say "we've searched enough" at this point. We are trying our best and continue the search. To me that's all that matters. We haven't given up yet.
Humanity being perhaps the first technological intelligence, or at least a very early example within the nearby galactic group seems to be the most likely explanation for why we haven't yet encountered recognizable signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. We may be "the old ones".
Probably not. We are at the outskirts of the milky way and the entire milky way is not particularly older... So it's more likely there are older species out there... That or we are a colony of one
Being older doesn’t mean smarter, and smarter doesn’t mean more advanced tech either. A peaceful smart species wouldn’t advance war tech like humans have, would not have the same reasons to develop flight let alone space travel. Could potentially be peaceful blue native Americans out of a James Cameron movie.
@@woof3065 when we discover any kind of life beyond our planet I’ll consider those odds. As it stands now, we are alone without proof to the contrary, patiently waiting.
I've been thinking something along a very similar line of the point I think part of this paper is making. It's very possible the signals and light from other civilizations simply hasn't had the time to reach us yet here on Earth. When we're looking at galaxies or even across the Milky Way, we're looking at objects as they appeared a very long time ago. Some of those photons have been traveling long enough for their origins to have developed a loud alien culture and we'd have no idea. We'd still be looking at a totally natural region of space.
I believe where the math falls apart is by failing to account for the scope of the universe. There are likely far more unknown galaxies than there are stars in our known universe. If you calculate from the standpoint of galaxies and not stars, then the chance we will ever know about or encounter another lifeform is far less likely by orders of magnitude.
This does make me want to play Stellaris now... I think if there isn't currently a grabby alien civilization in our galaxy yet, we will definitely be one once we reach that state. Assuming of course we don't wipe ourselves out first...
Unfortunately human leaders and politicians from all the most advanced governments are filled with liars, cheaters, thieves and warmongers. Humanity is too busy trying to conquer or steal a mountain while missing the bigger picture of the galaxy and universe. The equivalent of five bears fighting over one fish as dozens of cows, sheep, deer and elk walk past them on the other side of the river.
Since you live under a rock or news is blocked in your country, the U.S. Pentagon has confirmed U.S. Navy recordings of a UAP going from sea level to space. It was recorded by warships and witnessed by several U.S. Navy pilots. Commonly known as the tic tac incident.😊
Grabby aliens seem more like an infestation or form of Galactic cancer than a civilization. I imagine it depends on the definition of "civilization". I don't consider ants or bee's to have civilizations just because they work cooperatively to form a colony. Thanks for the video!
Any life that gets smart is going to realize how incredibly dangerous it is to be loud. You want to learn to be completely silent leaving no trace as fast as possible. None of them know what else could be out there.
The Dark Forest hypothesis is a very pessimistic take on things. IMHO it's more likely species would be careful not to overreact to each other lest the other one is pretty widely spread. Attacking the source of the most noise might be the same as attacking a honeypot trap, making a thousand other less noisy, and less fake, ones attack you. There is a correlate of that among tribal societies here on Earth, in actual dark forests. If you want to be seen as potentially friendly and not attacked by them, you move around VERY LOUDLY, making sure you leave vestiges and not try to conceal them. If you're making yourself perceived, the spies around you understand you aren't stealthily trying to invade and kill them, and after a few days of observing you, hidden without you not noticing them, send an envoy to meet you and establish formal contact. Conversely, if you move making as little noise as possible, they assume you're very likely an enemy and will attack you first and ask questions later. And yes, they assume your loud group also may have hidden people not making themselves known to their hidden ones. Hence approaching with care tends to be the default strategy.
@@AlexanderGieg I've been reading about this topic for many years and this is a new detail I hadn't thought of. Very plausible. So I guess, in our case, the Vulcans are waiting and watching what we do next very keenly.
I didn’t really hear much of what you told - I was just too much distracted by the hilarious scenes you showed in the background. 😂 So I listened again from the beginning without watching. It was worth it. I kinda like the grabby theory.
First of all we need to put more effort trying to discover if there are life signs nearby like Mars Europa and Venus. If so I believe then it’s definitely sure life is everywhere in the universe in different stages of evolution.
That would be a bit of a crazy assumption as well though. If there is life elsewhere in our solar system, it doesn't imply it is common elsewhere. We know conditions in our system are quite rare, but it could also simply mean that life on this planet was seeded by some event that affected other planets, or that life was able to spread locally by some mechanism and the ancestry is the same. We wouldn't know whether this means it exists elsewhere or not.
Sakis79, Agreed, we should invest more in exploring our little corner of space! I hope to see the discovery of extraterrestrial life (no matter how basic) in our Solar System in my lifetime. 🤞🏼
Or it could be that, given the physics of this universe, no matter how advanced you are you cannot traverse the immense distances and contact other people. So we might infinitely advance, but be forever bound to our local place here, where we are the only ones.
In the past I jokingly suggested that some or all of the gamma ray bursts we detect aren't actually natural events, instead they're advanced civilisations destroying themselves after making some extremely advanced discovery they could not control. Which sounds kinda depressing, but not if you assume it's only a small percentage of all the civilisations out there.
I can’t imagine we are the only humans/advanced species in the universe. I really think it just comes down to how massive the universe is. Even just the size of our own galaxy, it is so big we will probably only explore 1% In many generations.
Quantum communication could travel galaxies while being secure, Quantum Computing can help advance Fusion which leaves little atmospheric chemical signatures, etc... We are only just now understanding the possibilities. While we are seeing the past of those stars & galaxies. Not the current condition of those objects.
what if there’s a race of aliens who perceived our noise as colors instead? So we are just sending them a beautiful light show and maybe driving them nuts because they can’t sleep.
Given all of the intelligent life forms on earth that we still can’t communicate with, why do we think we could actually even recognize communication from intelligent life that probably formed in an entirely different manner than the oxygen breathing carbon life that is most prevalent on our own planet?
The amount of anthro-centric suppositions involved in this makes it meaningless. i agree with some of your responses to this. The main thing I see is that there is no reason for them to share any of our motivations. So, modeling behaviors is entirely pointless.
I think we can make a few assumptions, if we're looking specifically for technological civilizations. Any species that creates a planet-spanning civilization is bound to be expansionistic (at least some of the time), which suggests militarism once civilization develops. They have to be competitive, else they'd get out-competed and never develop to a planetary scale. They have to be able to communicate (at least sometimes) - or they won't be able to build large-ish projects (like homes or machines). The exact reason they'd do this is irrelevant, but if they manage to grow to a planetary scale we can make a few reasonable assumptions about them.
@@wojtek4p4 I think if they can get here from any star not Sol, they can destroy a planet. So, no matter what we think of motivations, they have already developed conflict resolution. Otherwise they wouldn't exist. As far as hive intelligences, if you can get here, you don't need to. Meaning If you can travel between stars you can turn one material into another. You aren't coming for resources. As my cousin at NASA says, it is more likely that anything we encounter will be beyond us in a way that we are beyond mollusks. Most importantly, everyone looks at our future progression like 'where will we be in 50,000 years?' In all likelihood, 2000 years of development from here would put us on a level that we would consider Deific now. In the end, who knows, distance might be king. You might just be relegated to STL travel.
My hypothesis for a solution to the Parmi Paradox is that intelligent species at some point in time become virtual, they are able to transfer their consciousness to a Universal System where all intelligent species can meet and communicate freely, without the burden of space travel. They use this V-Universe yo interact with each other and share culture and knowledge. We're not there yet.
the Fermi paradox theory I like the most is the one where we are in a vast "collection" of some alien super race. They came to our planet in the past, froze everyone and uploaded all of our minds into a matrix. They then disposed of our bodies and then systematically erased every trace of our presence on the real Earth. They have done this to millions of other races, and display their collection in a sort of grand gallery on their mothership. Kind of like how entomologists have large insect collections. They then re-deposit a neolithic race on the rewilded planet and then move on to their next acquisition. This would explain why there seems to be no trace of any intelligent life in the universe. The answer is that we are trapped in their bug collection, and the pocket universe (matrix) we are trapped in is empty, except for us. Sort of like Dark City meets the Matrix trilogy...
I have this theory that consciousness (as a thing that exists) is like a wave that travel through scale when matter gets more complex.. in that model, at some point unicellular life was somewhat conscious and then organized into multicellular organism so consciousness changed scale (which is basically when the things are free to organize and have to choose themself what to do).. Here "consciousness" is defined as a singularity in causality, a point of chaos where the least action principle lead to chaotic solutions.. in the least action principle : we have choices to make, between almost equal solutions in term of least action.. (the ball in the air follow a continuous trajectory, but our brain allow us to use the stored energy in our body to throw the ball in any direction : the causality follow a route splitting into multiple unpredictable results : it's chaos). And so, this type of robotic ant-like aliens would be the next step in evolution, when the important choices of action doesn't occur at the scale of individuals, but at the scale of colonies (planets etc).. when the choice would not be at the scale of individual but at the scale of the code that drive the society.. We already see that when we as countries compete with different political systems and values.. that would be the same thing except individual would be much more disciplined (every day to day action would be optimized and solved according to a global strategy) and so wouldn't need the ability to think about anything in their day to day life..
I doesn't but only if you accept that we will all die out because of some filter in the future or we are so so rare that there isnt a single alien intelligent being out there for hundreds of galaxies around us.
@@panzrok8701 no. It would if we knew some law of nature stating that the universe must be full of life.. we think we do, but we don't. A paradox is a contradiction between two theory or models that seems correct otherwise. When the observations contradict the model, the model is simply incorrect. The model stating "the universe should be full of life" is simply refuted by observations. It's a model only motivated by our own experience of what life is. According to observations life isn't easy or probable (at least in our corner of the universe), that's not a theory, that's a measurable fact.
If we have no evidence of their existence, they are as good as not existing for now. We cannot say they do not exist, but we can say there is no evidence that they do.
@@joeprimal2044 There's a lot of "evidence" and a lot of it is stubbornly held rather than looked at rationally. Humans do that with a lot of things tbh. One example is a video of an aircraft moving at impossible acceleration. This was vehemently defended by a military pilot who "is highly trained and knows what he saw." NASA, and others debunked it because it was most likely a duck based on the information provided. The pilot was fooled. There is no evidence yet. It is fun to imagine and think about, but as far as the public knows, we got nothin. Not to mention that aliens being so advanced tend to crash a lot. Kinda odd.
The model described in this report overlooks one important point which would explain why we don’t see any grabby alien civilizations in the universe: to reach that level an alien civilization must reach an extremely aggressive and united level. Nobody reaches that level because of self destruction. Think of us with nuclear weapons times a million… and with countless dictators fighting each other for dominance… Self destruction is almost guaranteed. In a way, quiet and stealth alien civilizations are evolutionarily advantageous.
I was thinking the same thing; it actually dovetails nicely with the "grabby aliens" theory because if there are grabby aliens in your vicinity, the last thing you want to do is make yourself visible. The grabby aliens might have absolutely no interest in your planet as a source of natural resources, but the minute you start making noise, you label yourself as a potential competitor and thereby sign your civilization's death warrant. This was actually a concern with the Voyager 1 & 2 probes; we gave our potential enemies nudes, a mix tape, and a map to our front door. Perhaps not our best decision making.
Are there any techno signatures at a galactic scale we can search for? E.g., are there any techno signatures we might expect to see from a galaxy colonised by 'grabby' aliens?
I wonder what will happen to all those science people when they realise that Alien life is already among us, they always have been. It sounds absolutely crazy, but this could be true.
We assume human behavior, but we also assume they’ve discovered the same tools and technologies, but why? Surely there are classes of matter, dimensions of physics, scientific principles, etc, that we know nothing about and would never think of
Our method of distant communication is not necessarily the best or the one used by alien civilizations, we could easily be looking at the wrong spectrum all together. Maybe they are using a very private ultra fast method like quantum entanglement(something we are beginning to explore), doubtful you could listen in on that though.
I'll say it again: entanglement _can't transmit information_. I don't know why this particular idea persists, but it is _quite_ wrong. It's barely even a real thing to begin with, a hard-to-detect correlation across an ensemble of measurements. Single measurements are useless at detecting it, and the measurement destroys it, so... it's just not a thing that can happen.
@@jameshart2622I take it your one of those that thinks we have discovered all the properties of everything and there is nothing left that is beyond what we know now. Even a lot of the laws of physics we have built a lot around are turning out to not be a simple as once believed, quantum tunneling is used in electronics but isn't fully understood as to why it works only that it does and quantum entanglement is even less understood right now, give it a couple hundred years and things now will look like the 1800s look to us now.
@@stevej7139 I don't know everything, but I do know what entanglement actually is. The fact that it can't transmit information isn't some kind of weird limitation that popped up at the last second. What's odd is that it can happen _at all_ in a relativistic universe, which all available evidence says is the one we live in. It's literally the strongest non-signaling quantum relationship that is logically possible (given relativity and quantum mechanics writ large), but it _is_ non-signaling to it's very core. There are theorems about that fact. Of course, theorems are only as good as their postulates, so loopholes are possible. Loopholes are always possible, up to and including the "Last Thursday" hypothesis. But...in reality, cracks in that assertion require reworking special and general relativity and/or quantum mechanics in a way compatible with what we already know, which is difficult. I suspect that if we do find such loopholes, and faster-than-light communication is possible through them, I doubt it will piggy-back on entanglement. As for the progress argument: logical fallacy. We don't know that progress can or will continue at the rate it has for the past couple of centuries, or that we will progress beyond our current best theories. Certainly we've done it before, so not impossible, but not certain either. Particle physics has definitely run into a serious wall, which is why I avoided the field getting my graduate degree.
another explanation to the fermi paradox may be the following: we haven't reached the point yet when we find out that it makes more sense to become a interdimensional species rather then interstellar
If a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri (4.25 light-years away) has an advanced civilization, imagine trying to communicate. You send something like an email and wait longer than 8 years to get a reply. Then you reply to the reply and another 8+ years passes. It's hard to get to know anyone under such constraints. Imagine sending a note to a pen pal in France and having to wait 8+ years for a reply. Species who experience time differently than we do could perhaps make something of that time lag. A very long-lived, patient species could perhaps communicate with a similar counterpart. (Think of the aliens in the movie Arrival.) But for humans, the temporal barrier is too great.
To give another perspective. Let's shrink our galaxy and just our galaxy to the same amount of water we have here on earth. Lakes, rivers, oceans etc all combined into one blob. As u know there will be plenty of fish there in that blob. And the amount we have explored in our galaxy is roughly 1 cup of water. It's quite hard to notice those fishes if u just have scooped up 1 cup
Putting out some serious John Michael Godier vibes in this video!! This topic is one he often discusses. In fact he's done this very Fermi paradox "solution." I'm loving the fact that he's done a few videos with Dr Avi Loeb. I can't wait for the data to come from the IM1 meteorite he managed to locate on the ocean floor off of Papua New Guinea. Preliminary results are intriguing to say the least!!! Id loke if you did a video on that topic. I'm sure if you managed to het ahold of Avi he'd be willing to answer your questions. Especially when he takes a look at the excellent work you already do in the realm of space sciences.
Unless one of these posited grabby civilizations develops faster-than-light communication, it's hard to see how it could be considered one civilization across even one galaxy, let alone multiples. It would be more like umpty jillion independent civilizations, each within its tiny sphere of acceptably quick communication. American Indian culture may have originated from Asian people crossing an arctic land bridge, but they were not sending telegrams between North America and China.
It is not about a singular civilization. It is about the binary choice of "life or no life" on a planet and the spread of life throughout the universe.
@@dominikvonlavante6113 The problem I see is that they could eventually rival each other and destroy each other. Or at least, with increasing number of civilizations, slow down their growth. Maybe it's the last great filter. Colonize the stars before you develope faste-than-lightspeed communication and travel and you will annihilate each other. If something like that is even possible.
We can assume that an advanced civilization would be smart enough to hide their signatures to avoid space spammers asking about their ship's extended warranties.
To be a Civilzation you need to be civil or civilized we are savages not even worth being bothered with.
@@TooMuchDramaInTheMilkyWayThe Galactic Empires will be troubled by this news
yes spammig with malware and any message with a hello with alienes might jus be spammy malware
And avoid debt collectors too!
😂❤
This is something I've always struggled to reconcile with the Fermi paradox. If signals from Earth would be difficult to pick up even from within our own stellar neighborhood, then how can we expect to detect signals from any alien civilizations which might be further away? Even if we can conclusively say there's nothing within, say, 5,000 lightyears from us, that's only a tiny portion of the Milky Way, to say nothing about other galaxies.
The argument that is most commonly made against this is that aliens are highly advanc ed and thus be easily detectable. For example; a part of a Dyson sphere(or other megastructures) could be easily detected.
There are a lot of other techno/bio signatures that could be detected but aren't so that is "weird". There are a lot of good video's made about this by "john micheal godier" (on youtube) i really recoomend watching if you are interested in this topic.
I think it’s that we should be seeing advanced civilisations, which would be detectable from hundreds of thousands of light years away as they would already be at least a type 2 civilisation and would be visibly dimming their star or a large neighbourhood of stars. We haven’t seen any of that yet so we have to assume that all species anywhere in our galaxy at least are ‘quiet’ like us right now.
it is like waiting for a letter when everyone is sending text messages
@@akina3742What a fantastic metaphor. I believe this is exactly the answer. Except, maybe the other way around considering the increase in tech from texts and letters.
The paradox is based on the idea all civilisation eventualy use most of his star energy only emiting heat without the light. But dyson sphere are impossible and dyson swarm will lead to an stellar scale kesler syndrome long before harnessing more than 10% of the star energy.
So, yeah we won't see any alien with current tech until they are in our backyard.
Distances are unimaginable. If we scale Milky Way to a continental USA, the speed of light is comparable to the speed of the growing grass.
Nah, they are out there. They are just avoiding us. I would too.
They are imaginable. Traveling them with current physics is not.
If one can imagine other scientifically accepted certainties like humans evolving from single celled organisms or the mountains growing from tectonic plate collision over millions of years, there is nothing outlandish about signals or material travel across astronomic distances. The light reaching your eyes from the stars already traveled that distance, it would be trivial for a sufficiently advanced civ to send an intelligible signal of identical intensity and speed across those same distances.
@@hairyott3rr The problem with that, is it takes thousands of years for even light to travel a small distance in space. We would have to learn to both transmit messages and travel, many many times faster than the speed of light, to accomplish anything within a single human life. Our current understanding of physics, says that's impossible.
@@hairyott3rr”identical speed and intensity” you just forget light shift’s frequency through space no matter what?
The Three Body Problem trilogy was all about the importance of humans not being spotted by other civilizations. It's also one of the very best works of science fiction written in recent times, but not on too many people's radar because it was originally written in Chinese - the English translation of the trilogy is well worth the read.
It started so slow I put it down and never picked it back up. Hours in and I was still listening to maddening stuff about the Cultural Revolution. It may be great but it sure as hell dot get to the point with any hurry.
@@scottnolan2833 It's definitely a slow burner initially, but it's well worth staying with it. If you haven't got the the countdown showing up in one character's photographs you've missed the point where it turns from storytelling to great science fiction.
They also dabble in 4 dimensional space and even with the slow start, the trilogy carries on right to the heat death of universe.
I found it less tedious than Bored Of The Rings and the payoff as the initially inexplicable elements of the story get explained is what good science fiction is all about.
Three Body Problem is good stuff (possibly great stuff in original language) but comparing it to LotR is like comparing Reservoir Dogs to Citizen Kane
@@LeathalI I enjoyed watching Reservoir Dogs a lot more than Citizen Kane too, as I suspect did many other people, but I wouldn't consider either of them particularly good movies, and Citizen Kane was more tedious.
Citizen Kane has been copied, refined and improved upon so much since it was made that it has nothing interesting to offer at this point regardless of how impressive it was relative to what was made in the 1940s. I'm not young and am still probably 50 years too young to appreciate it. It's not unlike saying the Model T is still the best car ever made because at one time it was revolutionary.
Lord of the Rings is in a pretty similar situation where more engaging storytellers have used a lot of the same sort of lore to make objectively far better books, certainly if readability and ability to keep the reader engaged are part of the rating system.
The hard science fiction genre is not well represented even within SF in general, making the Three Body Problem both more rare and more satisfying than the Lord of the Rings' swords and sorcery story, even if it defined its genre.
@@peglor 100% agree with your review on CK. It's bizarre hearing people still call it the best. It maybe WAS the best but not anymore imo
Dark Forest Theory - you don't know if the other creatures are friendly so you avoid them in case they are prone to attack any species not like them or other species have something the predator species desires
And if you had the capability to do so you would probably keep a covert eye on any emerging technological species' offensive capabilities. Whilst going to great lengths to do so without revealing yourself to said emerging technological species. Yet we've seen no evidence whatsoever of advanced unknown aircraft with superior performance characteristics operating in the vicinity of our military assets. Oh wait... 😂
Earth has nothing that isn't already abundant in the galaxy.
@@salvatronprime9882 It has us!
@@salvatronprime9882It has Trees!!
@@realsatoshihashimotowe don’t KNOW any of it all all. Do you know what our aircrafts are capable of? You know what they let you know
Can't even imagine how much fun Anton had going trough a ton of stock footage about the aliens 👀
Came down here to say this after seeing the 7,000-foot-tall rock star aliens jamming out.
I was waiting for him to turn around and seize the controls of that spaceship.
The one with the electric guitars blew my socks off
The whistle blower David Grusch with approval from Pentagon admitted aliens have arrived. The US Congress just came out. Biden will openly announce by the end of this year. Wake up
The aliens playing metal was fun!
Not sure how the Grabby Aliens Hypothesis assumes "universal alien behavior". It posits that Grabby civilizations make up a small percentage of the total number of civilizations, but all it takes is a few expansionistic civilizations to make the idea workable. There could be a variety of alien behaviors, but the aliens we would encounter almost by definition be the expansionistic ones rather than the peaceful home-world-bound alien space monks.
More likely to be Grabby than Gabby.
Yeah, I didn't understand why they thought that was a counter point either. With enough aliens it's only rational to assume that some of them would eventually turn out to be grabby and then things will start continuing as the simulation says.
Their speculation on communication invalidating wanting to colonize other continents isn't really valid either I think. Humans have colonized non-communicating areas before and started diverging due to it.Even if most aliens don't want to, you only need a few who don't care about that and just want to colonize areas even if they can never go home ever again. The non-sentient replicator idea really isn't needed.
What bothers me about the argumentative notions of "assuming universal alien behavior" is when so many use it to decide that whatever alien behavior is, it WON'T be anything like humans would act... With no evidence either way, why even make such an argument???
We (humans) bitch and whine endlessly about using evidence based science and logic to reach our conclusions... SO let's look back to what science we DO actually have. Our species came about on this planet through cataclysms and COMPETITION. It's been a primary driver for all supposedly advanced species since life began, and we still see it everywhere. Our own species developed intelligence at least in part DUE to that competition. Instead of growing enormous like dinosaurs or the mega-fauna since, we developed an intellectual value, and used that intellect to expand around the world, alter the environment to suit us, and even manipulate the remaining animals and plants in our wake to the same.
Based on that history, as completely as we can understand it, then it would stand to reason that about any other alien life would also face its own competition by nature of its own planet. Whether more cataclysms or fewer, and regardless of their scale, they would have to be negotiated as well at some level. There must be a value to turning to intellect in order to solve problems, amass armies (whether or not entirely military in nature) and use teamwork to accomplish grander goals on larger scales than we could ever possibly do as individuals... AND since we've colonized without concern for matters of contacting "home" (and we have), then there's no reason any aliens wouldn't have done the same...
In point of fact, back a few years ago, when Musk was first rumbling about sending a colony to Mars on a schedule, there were several places that put out "recruitment" messages. Some were more serious than others. Some were social experiments, and some were entirely joking... or trolling Musk... whatever... BUT there was a fairly huge push from people who flat out did NOT care diddly if they ever even had a chance to get back to Earth. They wanted to go... AND I'd posit that somewhere in the basic nature of humans, we just have a primal "wanderlust". There's an instinctive idealism that there's greener pastures and better places to be than wherever we find ourselves "just now". That's probably the whole reason we've spread such that we cover the entire planet now... and it's why we long for a chance to launch big rocket ships and go off colonizing throughout the Solar System and eventually the Milky Way.
SO now... I'm going to ask again... WHERE does it make any damn sense to start making assumptions that aliens wouldn't be JUST AS MOTIVATED as we seem to be, "downright hellbent" to get the hell off their rocks and start gallivanting about the universe as far as they can possibly spread? Sure, it seems "dubiously anthropomorphic" of me to say, but I see nothing in the way Nature has worked for the last several billion years on OUR rock to suggest there's anything else to expect of them... Maybe as they expand, likely searching for resources (and we can't just yet make assumptions about what exactly constitutes "valuable resources" to them) they'll also have the intelligence to avoid risking a tangle with a nuclear armed force... BUT I'd also suggest that rather than they possess some dubious "humanity" in their attitudes for loving peace, they intellectually tackled the "problem" with humanity on this particular chunk of rock, and reason that the LOSSES simply aren't worth bothering for the struggle. Unless we're, personally THE commodity in value or vogue... Then there's nothing here that can't be found on a lifeless rock somewhere just floating about and waiting to be exploited for such things... from gold and iron through the entire periodic chart... It all came from stars or nova explosions, so it's scattered all over... I doubt very much that there's some singularly unique bit of material that HAS to come from earth for any reason, unless you just NEED (somehow) Earthling humanoids or some such... ;o)
It still is pretty anthropomorphic to reason out that any advanced civilization would need to expand at all or would do it in such a way to have no regard for the beings they are invading.
Perhaps a better way of saying it is that it's very Earth-bound. We don't know what higher intelligence really looks like and so we project based on the models we have at hand.
Here on Earth, I'd say that most people would like to avert nuclear war and prevent further colonization at the present moment. Most people abhor, for instance, Putin's campaign in Ukraine as it seems strange in the modern world to annex established nation states.
That kind of behavior was seen as pretty natural for millennia before it. So you could say we are already changing in our attitudes, if not in our actions always.
If you're really advanced, that probably means you know how to harness large amounts of energy as well as produce tech that would be infinitely sustainable. Why make the effort to go expand yourself? Pride? Ego? Just to replicate like an unthinking microorganism?
Seems pretty lame and expensive for something that advanced imo.
Additionally, we can't also think that just because an advanced race isn't "grabby" or expansion-interested that would be defenseless against attacks.
In fact, perhaps that would be quite helpful or even necessary in resolving and mitigating races and civilizations that get out of hand.
But now I'm just talking about Mass Effect lmao. Who the fuck knows I suppose.
@@Quickshot0 Yeah, an infinite expanse with infinite possibilities but aliens have to either be grabby or not... 🤔
Please keep it up.I hope you and your family are well. Your friend from Seattle
Both Three Body Problem (aliens hiding) and Blindsight (non-sentient aliens) are great books/series that touch on a lot of these ideas. Great video!
im just gonna leave this here, in my opinion its highly unlikely that we're gonna meet aliens since if you think about it, for the longest time in earths history it has just been a battle for survival of the strongest species which has been rather brutal and has forced rather brutish survival strategies. humans are very exceptional, and the fact that we can't even travel to the mars yet, and taking into account that we've only really been technologically advanced for like 200 years now, despite virtually perfect conditions and the first cell forming 4 billion years ago, its rather unlikely
@@Aryzo well, you’re discounting lost technologies and your “perfect conditions” statement is confusing… that’s verifiably incorrect…. How you could even say that is baffling. Also, how do you know people haven’t seen aliens or evidence of them? Could be covered up and you’d never even know. Your whole comment reads as a short sighted person trying to sound smart.
@@Aryzo well, you’re discounting lost technologies and your “perfect conditions” statement is confusing… that’s verifiably incorrect…. How you could even say that is baffling. Also, how do you know people haven’t seen aliens or evidence of them? Could be covered up and you’d never even know.
10:19 a big big thing about that: That applies to expansion *in opposition* to other nations / civilizations. When there is little to no resistance to expansion, it happens naturally whenever the pros of establishing in a new environment (resource abundance, easy(er) opportunities) outweighs the cons (loss of living standard until properly established, more instability)
Yes! The expansion spoken of in the model is closer to the spread of humans out of Africa, a gradual diffusion into unoccupied areas.
A few years of "observation", compared to the gigantic timeframes we're dealing with, makes me think we don't have enough empiric data to decide anything. For now, using logic with what we have so far and improving observation would be a nice step.
The gigantic time-frames are part of the problem, though. There has already been so much time that MILLIONS of advanced, galaxy-colonizing civilizations should have already arisen, given liberal assumptions about life and habitability. We should be seeing evidence of alien megastructures in every corner of the galaxy, but we don't. Either something prevents them from advancing, or life is crazy-rare.
@@WaxPaper Probably both.
The "great filter" is almost a certainty, and add to that the fact that the makeup of oursolarsystem seem to be quite rare.
There probably aren't more than a handful of systems in the galaxy that can house planets, and advanced life, like ours.
@@WaxPapereven if they were already there, we still wouldn't be able to detect them or know what we're looking at, and that's assuming they were there the millions if not billions of years ago that would be required for us to even attempt looking at them.
A civilization that will exist in a million years isn't relevant.
Original Post sounds correct. We're dealing with speculation, much like thinking about exo-planets before we found any. Who knew that there would be super-Jupiters orbiting their stars in a few days? (Mercury's orbit is 88 days.) Of course, finding those planets first was due to the methods used which selected for them. Our technology isn't quite up to the task of finding Earth-sized planets and examining their atmospheres for life-signatures or techno-signatures.
What we need to know is how many stars in how large a volume of space from our sun have been checked for radio signals, then how many for laser signals? We can also use our knowledge of evolution to remove the stars younger than 2 billion years from consideration, and maybe red dwarfs which usually have strong solar flares, likely to destroy life on an Earth-like planet in its habitable zone. Surely there's a magic number or distance that would say a negative result of our search is now worrying?
Grabby aliens. Basically, for anyone who's ever played a 4X strategy game, this is the "playing wide" strategy. Grab as much territory as you can as quickly as you can in order to capture the most resources possible and deny your enemies those same resources.
The same Physics applies to ALL life in this universe. Do you know how difficult interstellar travel is? Nevermind intergalactic.
thank you for this and i hope you’re doing well. gonna try to start saying thank you on all your videos. you take the time to make these and i really appreciate your work!
Carl Sagan's book and movie 'Contact' are worth reading/watching for an interesting perspective on the motivations of the alien ET for contacting us. The movie significantly tweaked Sagan's original idea in interesting ways. 'We dont know why. It was like that when we found it. That's the way its been done for millions of years.'
I think we need to stop applying our own duality to other life forms. we are missing so many pieces of the puzzle.. just because we are stood on the beach of our island and when we look out to the ocean we see no other islands, does not mean there are none.. our island is tucked away in a very remote place in the galaxy and we are not ready to interact with other beings for at the moment we cannot even stand each other...
We aren't even interested in getting along with the intelligent species we share our planet with.
Agree with this 100%. All too often, people fall into the trap of thinking that potential alien life and the technology they use will be recognisable to humans.
I don't see how you could avoid duality. Aliens no matter how they look like, how they think, feel or what their notion of morality is, can either decide to stay "quiet" and not expand or decide to expand. Some of the choices are universal and quite binary.
We don't even understand our oceans...idk why modern humanity is still looking at the sky we got enough problems here
We don't do that. But the thing is that the universe is so big and old that everything aliens can do they will do and did already. At least some of them. And every lifeform on earth tries to survive and multiply so some advanced aliens will also do that. And those grabby aliens who survive and expand even though maybe rare are enough to create the Fermi Paradox.
Fun fact. Fermi came up with the Fermi paradox in the early 50s at Los Alamos labs as a reaction to all the rumors of UFO sightings around the lab. It shows his frustration at people leaping to aliens.
How many times must the obvious be explained?
There is no Fermi paradox, Abiogenesis is a hundred times over debunked theory due to numerous extensive limiting factors.
The Universe can sustain life but natural processes do not contain the necessary information and mechanisms to self generate protein structures and viable Amino Acid chains.
We don't see any life out there because there isn't any life out there.
Joe in the Carolina's also Beyond Belief channel posted the actual Freedom of information act lectures at Los Alamos. His channel has been defunct for a while now. I'd like to see those lectures again, know any links??
It is also a great reminder that people knew about pollution and our ability for destruction in the 50s...
Cool so it's not aliens but some government that already has mastered anti-gravity to go from sea level to space in a matter of seconds? Please do explain the main UAP sighting that was recorded on Pentagon confirmed footage and witnessed by several U.S. Navy pilots and tracked by an entire ship.😊
70 years and a ton of information later, I would no longer call it a jump. As much as people, who have generally not spent any significant amount of time looking into the subject, like to say/think otherwise, it's safe to say that some percentage of UFOs are controlled by non-human intelligences.
Peter Mulvey's song Vlad The Astrophysicist is my absolute favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox. Goosebumps every time!
I just heard it, thanks! Thats a good answer!
Just heard it also! That was so simple and yet so true. Space is vast and our time here is probably very limited, no wonder we never coincide with each other. Thank you!
Just dug it up and listened to it..I know the theory but how wonderful was it to hear ot explained like that..Thanks for the heads up.I loved it.
A beautiful and inspiring song I'd never have heard of if not for your comment, thank you so much! ✨
@@Ann-snowshoeingonEnceladus You're very welcome 🙂
Thankyou! I really enjoy the way you present incredibly complex topics in an approachable way & your love for the subjects is infectious!
Thank you for pointing out the human-centric part of all of this. Our species' sameness makes it so difficult to even imagine intelligence in other animals let alone something outside our tiny sphere of influence. I remember how mindblowing it was learning that whales sing to each other across hundreds of miles. Resources are certainly an idea for dispersion but I often think about divisions that could force species to move beyond their genesis -- blue star bellie sneeches versus red, capitalist versus socialist, even species that diverged for various reasons including intentional genetic manipulation. The forces do not have to be violence or some form of slash-and-burn economics as is so popular in our current dark visions of the future.
It really doesn't take a lot of human assuming to deduce that most aliens will be imperialist and grabby. Anything that has a goal will always achieve that goal better by preserving itself and acquiring more resources. So really, all it takes for a species/animal to be expansionist is that it has a goal. Doesn't matter what that goal is, that's all you need to prove that expansionism will always be the optimal choice.
Would have to be true for ALL civs for all time or else the few loud ones will quickly become gabby.
We have very limited means to try and find lifeforms with very limited tools while making very bizarre presumptions (like aliens using radio for instance, when we've only been doing that for a century or so)
u R wrong... I assure U
@@UFOs_Over_Europewrong about what? And how can you assure anything?
@@UFOs_Over_EuropeThere are several frequencies that have much more of a punch wavelength wise, it's just more energy intensive therfore not viable for us
@@antoniop5739 Well, I have some videos showing some Alien presence, actually a lot of them , have a look
I agree, our top minds are ignorant to believe there isn’t anything out there in a universe so large we can’t wrap our heads around it, but instead humans make a number up and die by it. The universe is far older than 13 billion years old. So when they see something that they cannot
Explain, they fall back on making assumptions and calling it as a fact.
Here’s the analogy: If the universe was Earth’s oceans, we’ve looked at a 12 ounce glass of seawater. If there were no fish in that 12 ounce glass, would you conclude that there are no fishes in the oceans?
Good anolagy....but that glass would be teeming with life. Just not as advanced as a fish.
I might add that there are ways to make a more informed search for life, especially life like ours
Nope. We would keep studying that sample of water to the whole spectrum to see if there's any indicator of life, so we would find that there's fishes out there in the ocean.
What are the odds that you will find no life, no viruses, no bacteria. Zero. That's because life spreads out. Bacterias everywhere in that cup. And if advanced alien was life was common. Alien life would be everywhere, every solar system every planet in our galaxy. just like bacteria is everywhere in that cup. Just one alien civilization a million years ahead of us would be everywhere in this galaxy. And a million years is a very short time considering how old our galaxy is.
@@sebastiangruszczynski1610 That's the whole problem though; we assume advanced alien civilizations will be like us.
Where the hell did you get all the b-roll? 😂
This was so well put together.
Loved the alien band rocking out🤘😂
"The dark forest hypothesis" was not mentioned in the video. An idea from the trilogy of books "Remembrance of Earth's Past" by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. A very interesting solution to the Fermi paradox.
He was saying that most species would likely remain quiet, which is pretty much the conclusion of the dark forest hypothesis.
I feel like mentioning it directly wouldn't really have added much to the video aside from the need to explain what it
some combination of the factors:
-the rarity of planets that could support even extremophile cellular life
-the rarity of spontaneously forming (or importing) cellular life on those planets
-the rarity of planets that are hospitable enough for life to evolve further into more complicated animals
-the rarity of life to evolve with a similar or greater intelligence to us (which appears to be our one species out of every single other one to exist in earth's history), not to mention communication and cooperation and all those other traits that make us even more special.
-the rarity of said planet to have the material makeup and temperatures/atmosphere/etc for technology similar to how it operates here to make sense on that world (possible lack of rare metals, no abundance of resources to lead said species to think about building a radio, maybe it storms 20x as harshly and everything they build crumbles much faster.)
-the rarity of a species this intelligent being capable, and willing to spend such enormous amounts of effort on simply colonizing other nearby planets (which are probably inhospitable anyways)
-the PRACTICALITY of being able to colonize other planets, even if the entire species was on board with the idea
-The vast distances combined with laws of physics.
-all these rarities combined means that even if they passed it all, the nearest planet that would be able to hear transmissions is too far away, or the limits of where they can travel would be their moons or possibly solar system
not to mention that the things we think aliens should be doing are almost exclusively based on what we see in movies or sci fi. the short-sighted idea that all life exists just to eventually evolve to colonize other places, like star wars or GalCiv (or in our war-centered psychology). or the far fetched idea that they would upload their consciousness to a computer like the matrix. Or the idea that other life is deliberately hiding because of some even worse entity, like out of lovecraft. it all reeks of humans not thinking outside the scope of their experience.
life is certainly out there. the universe is basically infinite after all. we've observed so many planets, that I have to believe we've unknowingly already seen one with at least cellular life. But I have to assume that most life is simple due to all the harshness of reality.
It seems obvious to me the reason we are not being visited is that faster than light travel is impossible, but we forget as every SF story assumes it can be done or there would be no story
Check out the SF stories by Ursula Leguin. She has written some amazing novels and novellas whose drama and crises center around the 'time-lag problem'. So the issue of time and distance can actually be a great catalyst for dramatic tension and tragic scenarios..
Fun fact, if an identical civilization to 21st century humans existed around the closest neighboring solar system, we would not be able to detect any radio signals from them even with our best equipment. Radio signals become indistinguishable from background static quite quickly.
How about detonating nukes? Heard something that it would "disturb" something at quantum level, maybe wild disturbances on entangled particles?
Wrong. They would be very bright in radio frequencies and many other wavelengths. We would have found them decades ago.
And it's very possible, without intentional efforts to be spotted, an even much more highly advanced civilization would not become more detectable. If you model our signal as a bunch of dipoles, the more signals, or dipoles you add the faster the signal actually falls off at range. You would have to design a constructively interfering system to get a signal that goes farther, and for what? Why do you want to be seen?
The other possible ways to be detected... stellar expansion may be farther off technologically than we like to think, and megastructures, I'm gonna be honest I think they are total fiction. I don't see any reason to make those, as cool a concept as they are for scifi
I am sure there is other intelligent life out there just the distance between us is just too immense
Nuclear explosions happen so quickly that it would be improbable to be seen before it was over. (Assuming that there is someone watching).
The dark forest hypothesis is what scares me the most. Everyone is being silent because there are predators.
There are no dark forests. Only forests.
@@carlwide6594 it's just the name that was given to the hypothesis, also you base your assumption of the peacefulness of all aliens on...?
It's likely we have already encountered several species. We for sure have encountered something in the tic tac incident, either during that incident or years ago that provided private miltary-industrial complex the anti gravity technology to go from sea level to space in seconds. The US Pentagon has confirmed this footage but it's blocked in several countries so you'll have to search on youtube for a mirror upload. It was also witnessed by several US Navy pilots, one of which testifed under oath to US Congress. These are not crack heads, these are government workers and whistleblowers working with congress to push for transparency and finding out what the hell is going on.
why would it be scary?
whether such predatory entities exist or not,
it wouldn't really change our current mortal situation,
we are all just waiting for our death since our proto-human ancestors gained sentience and awareness of their sad and tragic predicament.
@@gelmir7322 aren't you concerned about the total genocide or enslavement of humanity?
THANK YOU for finally mentioning the 'androcentric' thoughts on the Fermi Paradox that just ignores this. We can't even communicate with other species on a level field in our own planet, so I'm not sure that we could do so(assuming there is no 'shadow government alien conspiracy' already) with a non-terrestrial intelligence.
I think the biggest problem or mistake here is:
How can we talk about a civilization that conquers a galaxy or lots of galaxies because the distance between its territories would be so huge that it is impossible for it to exist and act as a specific civilization with nearly similar biological, cultural, political or technological characteristics? During the millions of years of such supposed expansion the species would inevitably develop into more new species with many different forms and different coals.
Anton understood this, or at least part of this, very well in this video. 👍
We do not know enough to make any real determination on whether life exists elsewhere, if the speed of light isn't the max speed of the universe all that we know becomes irrelevant.
The assumption that aliens would have the same issues as we do is flawed in many ways. "What if" their minute is our hour which would lead to a life span is far greater than ours. Our dreaming minds are relegated to controlled explosions for movement through space or being disassembled then assembled elsewhere
Okay, I flat out died laughing about the Loud Aliens rocking out. Maybe that's one of the Great Filters, and now I won't become an advanced civilization
🔥🎸🤘👽🤘🎸🔥
"You Earthlings have some good riffs, but your lyrics-game is weak. Back to monkeys you go..."
(zåp!)
you young kids music suck.. i mean sucks.. Alien music rocks
A very complex and convoluted hypothesis. I would go with the simplest one, aliens are extremely rare and the chance of any one civilisation like ours being within contactable distance of another is very small. So most civilisations are effectively alone and will never see the neighbours. The fact that we've been trying to create life from non-living matter for nearly 70 years since Stanley Miller's famous experiment and still haven't got close suggests such an event maybe very rare in nature.
If our nearest neighbors are just beyond 100 light years they might not know about us, because first radio signals emitted by Earth are:
A. Very weak.
B. Reached them just couple of years ago and might have not been noticed.
And even if they noticed us and decided to send a signal back, we will receive it a hundred years from now.
Great Filter and The Black Forest are two interesting theories.
The Black Forest is not a theory.
The Age of Empires II map?
Nah The Black Forest is referred to as a theory of the reason alien civilizations don't reach out or announce their existence is because there are far more dangerous things out there so they remain silent so they aren't discovered. Three Body Problem series actually does a really good job explaining the whole thing.@@patriciofernandez6500
If you haven’t read “The Three Body Problem” (trilogy) go get it! It deals with these questions in mind-blowing fashion, proposing the “Dark Forrest” theory for why civilizations should best be quiet, for as long as possible.
there's a RUclips channel called Quinn's Ideas where he discusses this a lot
@@Meilk27that channel is great!
An advanced civilization, including us, would realize the futility of finding other civilizations due to the vast, insurmountable distance between stars.
This sure puts the book "Old Man's War" into a different perspective. Maybe the Consu were the actual loud aliens, and they were cultivating the younger species within their area to be more battle ready, so they could help with the REAL war.
Anton in “pointless to resist” tshirt with alien rock band behind his back was really something
I wonder how far a civilization can even progress given by physics. This doesn’t seem to be considered…
physics as currently understood by humanity and utilized in practice? Or physics as a concept that we acknowledge we know only a small fraction of?
There is no saying in what can be unlocked by a civilization that possesses even just a slightly higher exponential evolutionary curve than humanity. For what could take us millions to discover, could only be a few centuries away from another civilization even if we currently are at the same starting point. Our understanding of physics at a macro scale is absurdly limited.
So in regards to your wonder, my question would rather be how likely it is for a civilization in general to develop a desire to expand in the universe in the first place. Humans are driven by ego and desire (especially desire for knowledge). But that is also at the same time what is holding us back, because ego and desire cripples efficiency and cooperative effort.
@@Real_MisterSir Wow that was a brain dead analysis. Go read some books about evolution and answer your own question...
Holy crap your whole post is full of hippy dippy nonsense. Do you also believe that the american indians were like a disney cartoon and not like every other civilization, fighting, killing and expanding?
How many times must the obvious be explained?
There is no Fermi paradox, Abiogenesis is a hundred times over debunked theory due to numerous extensive limiting factors.
The Universe can sustain life but natural processes do not contain the necessary information and mechanisms to self generate protein structures and viable Amino Acid chains.
We don't see any life out there because there isn't any life out there.
@@Real_MisterSir without FTL or at least relativistic speeds space colonization gets really bad and it is unknown yet whether these can be achieved practically and it should be quite dangerous. Another question for me would be amounts of resources/energy spent to travel to even closest system and whether it is reasonable at all. And even after nuclear war earth would be better place to live than most planets.
Everything we call physics is based on observations. We don't know what the physics would be like passing through a wormhole. I think the hope is that eventually our understanding of physics will advance enough to allow us to overcome the limitations presented by physics.
Thank you Anton for your great content!!! I wonder if there's a hypothesis out there that would solve the fermi-paradoxon as follows: when species come to a certain age they may have looked around the galaxy from their home-world for long enough to realize, that the few other aliens are as far away, that it would be pointless to even trying to reach out for them, therefor they decided to 'stay home' and become ever smaller (through selection or conditioning) so that their home-world becomes relativly bigger for them - i'd call it 'shrinking aliens'. Not the most uplifting idea, but maybe an explanation...
A great theoretical concept that has been proposed, is dubbed "the Dark Forest" phenomenon, where the basis of communication filter (due to distance and time) basically means you have no idea of assessing what any discovered civilization would do or be capable of, so the only course of action is for one to take preemptive measures and try to eradicate the other as soon as they're discovered. It's like imagining two nations with nuclear weapons - the one who strikes first ensures they get to live. They could both get to live if neither fires at all, but you have no way of telling if the other nation thinks the same way you do, because objectively to them there is no downside to firing first (other than moral implications, which we only really understand from a human perspective to begin with). They could just as well view us as weed, or a virus, and simply treat us in a similar manner with no moral implication at all. So the only sound thing to do to ensure one's own survival, is to be the one who fires first.
Due to this, it is speculated that every civilization that evolves beyond a certain point, reaches a state of self silence to avoid the risk of broadcasting signals to someone else of potentially superior advancement, and since the barrier of information exists, you can never determine who is more advanced than the other, so the only option is to be the one who shoots first and then hope for the best - thus the "Dark Forest". Nobody dares to speak up, because everyone knows that those who speak up, will be taken immediate action against by one observing civilization or another.
I made a really poor example of the theory to be honest, but the channel 'Quinn's Ideas' goes over it in great detail, and with a knack for storytelling too. It's a great watch, and makes a really good case of why it would be in every civilization's best interest to not broadcast any signals and instead go into hiding as a default state of existence.
Yeah I think it's a pretty daft idea, to be honest; far, far too anchored in a rather primitive and logically flawed mentality. For one thing, it proposes a galaxy in which the fundamental evolutionary drive that brought a species to space-fairing levels of technology... just switched off once it got that far; that this crippling fear of being attacked by someone who has better technology (and thus, would already know you exist) suddenly conquers the fundamental desire to travel, to meet others, to trade, and to learn.
Essentially, it would mean that life itself has a fundamental flaw that would absolutely destroy it on the grand scale by halting its otherwise unceasing progress - everyone restraining their otherwise irrepressible urge to spread, to grow, to become more complex, to assimilate more information and adapt to more varied circumstances, so that the galaxy becomes a weirdly crowded but isolated place, despite the fact that literally everyone's star is mortal, and every race in existence would NEED to relocate eventually.
A far more reasonable explanation for the "silence" is merely the progression of technology. Broadcast communications are hugely inefficient and primitive, prone to degradation, interference, interception. Radio in particular is now... really very old and primitive, even by our standards. Even a benign race would want to keep its basic communications relatively private - just like the private citizens of any given nation. Doesn't mean those private citizens are all carefully peering out of their windows, shotgun in hand; just means... they wish to communicate on their terms.
So what if the next step in communications technology was based on quantum entanglement, for example? There'd be nothing to intercept, nothing to see, nothing to hear. Not because they were striving for secrecy, but simply because... it's a better way to communicate.
@@NicholasBrakespear It would be more plausible from a speculative point of view, to think that some civilizations did indeed reach space faring technological advance - and since they did not try to hide, they got punished for it and that's why we do not see any evidence of them. So either civilizations reach a hard break and decide it's best to stay in hiding, or they press forward and get punished by whatever is the most advanced civilization out there to pick up their signals first - either to eradicate them, or to prevent their signals to reveal nearby locations to an even greater threat out there.
Bush camp is safest.
They called me a 'Grabby Alien' back in college haha
I’m glad Anton mentioned resources as motivation to expand. It brings to an opinion of mine. That any civilization must manage its resources. No exception. Some may go further than others. Leading to greater collapse until they learn to manage resources. Societal growth simply cannot out pace its production.
I think life is a lot less common than people want to believe. If there is other intelligent life out there it is so far away we will never meet them.
It wouldn't have to be common, just have to have happened long enough ago along with the advancement of tech and the desire to expand. Which could simply come from the desire to survive which is inherent to life in general as that is the sole purpose of evolution, to increase survival. Avoidance of mass extinction events outside of their control.
Edit: I just mean given enough time they could be everywhere, but likely we won't see any for millions or billions of years unless we are later to the game than currently estimated. Or just lucky/unlucky to not be nearby another.
That's probably what the native Americans thought before some ships appeared on the horizon.
I think life is very common out in the galaxy and universe but intelligent life very uncommon. When looking at our own solar system compared to the other ones we've seen, ours is unique and rare. Then you look at the process of life on earth and how long it took to get complex life and the extinction events that have happened over that time the likelihood of intelligent life is not very high
You might be right. The rare earth hypothesis could lead to a handful of life bareing planets few galaxy.
I would agree that you will probably not live long enough to meet aliens in person. But that doesn't mean our descendants might not meet them in the far future. It's far more likely that we will receive radio or laser messages from one or more civilizations.
The largest empires in Earth history had end-to-end communication times of several months to a year. I can't imagine an empire being able to expand to anywhere near a galactic level without infighting, due to an inability to effectively communicate if nothing else. This is assuming FTL communication remains impossible.
One thing that shows that humanity has a lot to learn is the Fermi Paradox. Theories all assume that all the advanced aliens or AI aliens would think like us. Anton did talk about this in the video. I think advanced civs would have less need to conquer. We only have to worry about less advanced, more local aliens.
Do the equations include the need for multiple star cycles for metals? Our system has been thru 4 stars, creating more complex elements (metals) with each. Perhaps hi-tech needs a full range or metals, hence 3 or 4 thru-star cycles are necessary? This would stop (potentially) complex civilizations for the 1st 8..12 billion years.
Look how far we've come in 500 years. We took our sweet time to make use of heavy elements at our disposal. An alien civilization in the Milky Way that reached our current level even a million years ago could have populated the galaxy by now.
I don't think that it is unusual that it is quiet, mainly due to the distances we are talking about. Our radio waves have only covered a fraction of the distance of the milky way for example, we do not have any kind of communication that could travel to another galaxy without taking millions of years.
Well, Im not a uap fanatic, but with some of the storys i also wouldnt say i can be certain they are not already here. the US government literally confirmed there are uaps that exceed known human capabilitys by a lot. In this case i would think they just observe and study us and take samples once in a while, like in a zoo. also while the grabby alien theory seems to make sense, i would also think there might be a point where there are enough advanced civilizations trying to expand, to either have wars or establish rules in the universe to prevent conflict. also if there would be some technology to instantly wipe out planetary systems or galaxies for example, it could also be a cold war situation, similar to the atomic bomb on earth.
I think all of this wouldnt be too unlikely, because all species on this planet have one thing in common, to survive and to multiply. this seems to be the very essence of life, from the smallest to the biggest life forms. so i dont see why it would be different for other life in the universe.
Yep...only places within about 60 to 120 lightyears would be able to see *our* signals as of yet...and thatl's like a pinpoint, much less a pinhead, on cosmic scales.
@@IkarusTelevision You don't even need to develop the weapons capable, rouge black holes, gamma ray burst, solar collapse/expansion, asteroids or even rouge planetary bodies that have been slingshot out. The Universe already has plenty of things any sufficiently advanced species with natural survival instinct, that caused them to evolve intelligence in the first place, would discover about and want to avoid.
Let's table life in other galaxies, considering they are so far away, compared to our 80,000 x 1,000 light-year Milky Way galaxy.
@@sandal_thong8631Our signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light, so you would still be talking about 1000 years to cover the milky way.
If it's civilization could reach the distant other galaxies I don't think they would have a need to conquer anything
Some thoughts:
1) You could in theory colonize the galaxy using "sub-light" interstellar travel, but you wouldn't be able to build an interstellar "empire" this way or even only to hold your star-spanning civilization together. If some of your colonies would not die out due to too less support from the home world, they would develop into their own cultures and civilizations (and perhaps lose some technologies especially regarding star-faring in the process, because settlers on a new world don't have time for such fancies). The most calculations do not take those slowing-down factors into account.
If you would invent a faster-than-light method of travel however you could start to do some systematic colonization and expansion, but the probability you could manage and maintain any kind of united civilization on such a scale is not very high, to say the least. Most 'loud' civilizations would therefore probably soon split up in different competing "tribes", and maybe even stop to expand in favor of concentrating on those "inner" conflicts.
2) You can't conclude from one data point on the time a technological civilizations needs to evolve in average. The four billion years of Earth include multiple major and minor extinction events and also many chance events. There is no clear stepladder from simple life to complex life to intelligent lifeforms to technical civilizations. The first of those steps took about a billion years on Earth, but we can't say much about the other steps - only that it took only about 66 million years from the last major extinction event to our technical civilization, and that our species evolved during an ice age, which about 34 million years before with alternating glaciation periods and interglacials, and especially during the Pleistocene epoch of the last 2.5 million years.
3) If human history can provide any clue to how interstellar civilizations evolve, then it would be: empires grow and then crumble, civilizations expand and then fall apart. Fast growing empires die often also fast, slower growing empires can live for longer, but there will come a time when they encounter some challenges (sometimes including other empires, but not always) they are not able to master - due to the working of their internal structures, due to creeping corruption or due to other reasons. Even "in modern times" that happens still all the time. Non-imperialistic federations or similar structures may have a longer shelf life, but again - too little data points. There is simply not enough time in the lifetime of any civilization (even of very long-lived individuals) to pocket a larger chunk of the universe or even of a single galaxy (except maybe with faster-than-light travel and and the will of leaving gaps e.g. by jumping whole star systems).
It seemed like the model presented left-out the expansion of the universe. I think it may be impossible to ever travel between galaxies that are rushing away from one another at sufficient speed.
Maybe they've already been here, saw nothing of interest, and scraped away the Boring Billion years ...
If the speed of light is a hard limit, we're unlikely to see or hear anyone, even if the universe was loaded with aliens.
This. People always like to ignore the speed of light limit when discussing the Fermi paradox, which in my opinion makes for a very awkward communication dilemma for any species trying to expand beyond their own solar system. I feel like a any spacefaring civilization would have to eventually come to an agreement with their own kind that once they leave their original star system, they’re pretty much on their own, realistically, ain’t nobody gonna be sending delayed messages back and forth with several years worth of lag to another civilization in a different star system which you won’t even know if they received your message.
@@Miguel.L It's not just the lag either.
Maybe someone can calculate the energy needed for a signal from Earth to reach Proxima Centauri, at a "mere" 4,25 LY .
We can only communicate with Voyager 1 because we know where it is and what it sends out (we receive < 1 attowatt after 46 years) - but Voyager would need another 1600 years to reach PC if it was headed that way.
1600 years ago, the Western Roman Empire was in its last days ...
Let's better assume that we are alone and try to survive the next generation to pass the great filter. We are doing weird things now that might let us go extinct or at least destroy or havily demage our civilisation.
Thanks to Anton for the interesting thoughts.
I don’t think we are alone but I do think the way our species lives makes us undesirable. I think we claim things based on ‘intelligent life’ but I don’t think humans really meet that.
We have millions that die of lack of basic food, hygiene, medical care, wars, poor education etc. We ruin our environment and are generally pretty barbaric to many humans.
We are more like locusts in many respects. We also still have many millions that believe in religion l.
We just aren’t worth interacting with, why ever would another species want to?
@@lijohnyoutube101 100% agree why would any advanced civilizations try to contact us whilst we are still in this crazy evolutionary stage ? Dude we nooked 2 fucking cities i can not imagine what we would do if we had some insane advanced tech from other civilizations. It is very much possible to me that no one wants to actually contact us atm.
It's time to admit it Anton. It definitely is aliens
What is?
It.
It's time for Anton to admit Dark Matter isn't there.
MOND is the yellow brick rd.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Until we see them, they're just a quantum fuzz of possibilities. So are we to them
I think that humans claiming they are "advanced" is more or less all you need to hear.
Someone needs to be handed the mirror and dragged out of their hole in the ground.
Another assumption here is that the technology of interstellar space travel is actually going to be achieved by any species. Maybe the limitations of physics and the matter we have to work with is going to make interstellar space travel far more difficult and risky than we'd love to imagine.
In addition to literally EVERYTHING ELSE IMAGINABLE, there is yet another insurmountable barrier to alien life ( let alone intelligent life) that asks the question "Got phosphorus?"
Using the Drake equation Brian Cox figures that the number of planets that reach a level of technology where they could communicate with other planets in the galaxy in less than one per galaxy.
N=1, a thought that most aren't willing to even entertain. Or even less... Imagin so far, life has only arisen a few times throughout the entire universe. Or maybe we're the first. I think about that sometimes, because let's face it, humanity probably won't survive for a million years. We may not survive another thousand. What if life never develops anywhere in the universe again? It would just be this small blip of time that the universe was "aware of itself," to quote Sagan or someone else I heard that from. One tiny moment when sentience existed, and that's it...
You can get any result from the Drake Equation you want, so it is effectively useless.
The solution is way simpler than that. We suck at detecting things. Most of the search was on the hydrogen band and we avoid the more logical bands which is what we use for communication. Then there was a paper that said a non directional signal can't be detected compared to noise to past a certain lightyear range.
No it's not because it isnt about us not detecting something. That would be really unlikely. The fact that we exist is enough to create the paradox.
@@panzrok8701 That makes zero sense. The paradox is about not being able to detect life in a vast universe. What you're saying is like saying pre-colonial europeans have a fermi paradox because they exist and can't see anything across the ocean when all they had to do was cross the ocean to find there were other life and civilizations.
We're at the stage where we are looking across a vast ocean and can see there are islands out there but can't tell if there life in them.
@@soulwynd If you really want to use this analogy: In this case the europeans could have concluded that they are the first and most advanced civilisation to colonize other continents in the world because if not they would be already colonized themself by other more advanced powers. They could have concluded that even though they didn't know about all the other civilizations in the world. It's unlikely that there are two independent civilizations near each other that expand at the same time and detect each other because the expansion happens really fast. In case of european colonization of the world it happened in around 200 years of the 200 000 years of human history. For our galaxy it would take only millions of years. And because we are also still uncolonized and are on the brink to colonize ourselves means that other civilizations that expand are really rare and far away or it's impossible for some reason.
@@panzrok8701 Or the ocean is too vast to traverse easily and the scales are way off for this analogy. Even if we're also not the first, we always look into the past. Let's say, if a civilization became space borne 50000 years ago, if it is on the other side of the milky way, we wouldn't see it. If we are to assume other civilizations in our own galaxy would take about the same time we did to get to this point , we wouldn't see them. And even if they are ancient and detectable, the bands we scan for radio signals usually stay under 2ghz with only a few projects scanning above that, such as the late arrecibo observatory that went up to 10ghz. Meanwhile most microwave communication we use are in frequencies way higher than that. And even then, if it is not directional, there is only a certain range over signal power we can detect it. We can't detect even if they're there because we suck at it or it is impossible to given a certain civilization at a certain distance over a certain time period.
As for why we haven't been colonized, the universe is huge and even assuming FTL capabilities like in star trek, the galaxy would take thousands of years to traverse. And then for them to land here, they have to roll the dice between other 80ish billion G type stars. Not to mention civilizations might not become spaceborn and be content where they are. Even then the paradox is mainly about detection and we will still take many many years before we are up to the task.
It's less about detecting and more about why OUR system isn't covered in artifical structures or that all our asteroids and other materials, like Mercury, seem intact. Even if aliens existed within the last few million years that's enough time to colonize the galaxy. Or at least send probes everywhere. The fact nothing has arrived means either the only aliens that exist are around our tech level, or lower, or they don't exist.
Imagine the irony if the aliens were called the Fermi.
😂😂😂
Stargate was a documentary
...and spoke English with an American accent
The other, more likely, possibility is that interstellar travel is simply too difficult to ever achieve. Unless FTL can be reached, travel between even close-by stars becomes totally impractical except for one-way trips to colonize a fortunately close-by planetary system.
Another possibility is that radio waves are replaced with FTL communications, and the aliens who achieve that tech (along with FTL travel) avoid contact with 'lesser' species who might blow everybody up by crashing FTL ships into various planets while screaming about how bad "The Flash" was or something. ;D
Until now, I never considered the fact that maybe aliens really need better amplifiers for their electric guitars.
Seriously, I mean no harm. I thank you for your consistent contribution to science.
Aliens prefer acoustic, actually
I like that the "fermi paradox" is a paradox just for our ego.
We are looking up for a brief flash, with relatively primitive tools and without even trying to think about how completely alien race would communicate, assuming they are just like us.
In other words Fermi Paradox is just a skill issue.
lol well put, exactly my thoughts. Like, we're still using radio. But why would anyone who could travel the stars use the technological equivalent of rolling down the window and shouting real loud?
That seems unfair. Some pretty big brains have considered all that and put a lot of work thinking alternatives. No serious scientist will ever say "we've searched enough" at this point. We are trying our best and continue the search. To me that's all that matters. We haven't given up yet.
Humanity being perhaps the first technological intelligence, or at least a very early example within the nearby galactic group seems to be the most likely explanation for why we haven't yet encountered recognizable signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. We may be "the old ones".
Probably not. We are at the outskirts of the milky way and the entire milky way is not particularly older... So it's more likely there are older species out there... That or we are a colony of one
Being older doesn’t mean smarter, and smarter doesn’t mean more advanced tech either. A peaceful smart species wouldn’t advance war tech like humans have, would not have the same reasons to develop flight let alone space travel. Could potentially be peaceful blue native Americans out of a James Cameron movie.
A simulation of the old ones*
@@Ivan.A.Churlyuski true but it still put's the odds against us humans being the first technological intelligence.
@@woof3065 when we discover any kind of life beyond our planet I’ll consider those odds. As it stands now, we are alone without proof to the contrary, patiently waiting.
Thanks Anton! I love the Fermi Paradox videos!
I've been thinking something along a very similar line of the point I think part of this paper is making. It's very possible the signals and light from other civilizations simply hasn't had the time to reach us yet here on Earth. When we're looking at galaxies or even across the Milky Way, we're looking at objects as they appeared a very long time ago. Some of those photons have been traveling long enough for their origins to have developed a loud alien culture and we'd have no idea. We'd still be looking at a totally natural region of space.
I believe where the math falls apart is by failing to account for the scope of the universe. There are likely far more unknown galaxies than there are stars in our known universe. If you calculate from the standpoint of galaxies and not stars, then the chance we will ever know about or encounter another lifeform is far less likely by orders of magnitude.
This does make me want to play Stellaris now...
I think if there isn't currently a grabby alien civilization in our galaxy yet, we will definitely be one once we reach that state. Assuming of course we don't wipe ourselves out first...
Unfortunately human leaders and politicians from all the most advanced governments are filled with liars, cheaters, thieves and warmongers. Humanity is too busy trying to conquer or steal a mountain while missing the bigger picture of the galaxy and universe. The equivalent of five bears fighting over one fish as dozens of cows, sheep, deer and elk walk past them on the other side of the river.
Since you live under a rock or news is blocked in your country, the U.S. Pentagon has confirmed U.S. Navy recordings of a UAP going from sea level to space. It was recorded by warships and witnessed by several U.S. Navy pilots. Commonly known as the tic tac incident.😊
Grabby aliens seem more like an infestation or form of Galactic cancer than a civilization. I imagine it depends on the definition of "civilization". I don't consider ants or bee's to have civilizations just because they work cooperatively to form a colony. Thanks for the video!
And that is exactly why mr.Anton cautious us not to think in anthropocentric terms
Any life that gets smart is going to realize how incredibly dangerous it is to be loud. You want to learn to be completely silent leaving no trace as fast as possible. None of them know what else could be out there.
It's only dangerous to be loud if there's someone out there bigger than you. The biggest predator has no need for stealth, yet we don't see it.
The Dark Forest hypothesis is a very pessimistic take on things. IMHO it's more likely species would be careful not to overreact to each other lest the other one is pretty widely spread. Attacking the source of the most noise might be the same as attacking a honeypot trap, making a thousand other less noisy, and less fake, ones attack you.
There is a correlate of that among tribal societies here on Earth, in actual dark forests. If you want to be seen as potentially friendly and not attacked by them, you move around VERY LOUDLY, making sure you leave vestiges and not try to conceal them. If you're making yourself perceived, the spies around you understand you aren't stealthily trying to invade and kill them, and after a few days of observing you, hidden without you not noticing them, send an envoy to meet you and establish formal contact. Conversely, if you move making as little noise as possible, they assume you're very likely an enemy and will attack you first and ask questions later. And yes, they assume your loud group also may have hidden people not making themselves known to their hidden ones. Hence approaching with care tends to be the default strategy.
@@AlexanderGieg I've been reading about this topic for many years and this is a new detail I hadn't thought of. Very plausible. So I guess, in our case, the Vulcans are waiting and watching what we do next very keenly.
@@filonin2 The universe is too large for any race to assume they're the biggest predator.
I didn’t really hear much of what you told - I was just too much distracted by the hilarious scenes you showed in the background. 😂
So I listened again from the beginning without watching. It was worth it. I kinda like the grabby theory.
Stellaris getting a name drop!!! Love the uploads. Thank you!
First of all we need to put more effort trying to discover if there are life signs nearby like Mars Europa and Venus. If so I believe then it’s definitely sure life is everywhere in the universe in different stages of evolution.
That would be a bit of a crazy assumption as well though. If there is life elsewhere in our solar system, it doesn't imply it is common elsewhere. We know conditions in our system are quite rare, but it could also simply mean that life on this planet was seeded by some event that affected other planets, or that life was able to spread locally by some mechanism and the ancestry is the same. We wouldn't know whether this means it exists elsewhere or not.
Sakis79, Agreed, we should invest more in exploring our little corner of space!
I hope to see the discovery of extraterrestrial life (no matter how basic) in our Solar System in my lifetime. 🤞🏼
Or it could be that, given the physics of this universe, no matter how advanced you are you cannot traverse the immense distances and contact other people. So we might infinitely advance, but be forever bound to our local place here, where we are the only ones.
Yes. That's what I'm thinking as well. The universe is not limitless and that's what we know for sure.
I think we might be taking cosmic events as natural when we don't really know
I think we go with the simplest explanation. Someone suggested pulsars might be engineered as navigational aids, but sheesh, that's far out.
In the past I jokingly suggested that some or all of the gamma ray bursts we detect aren't actually natural events, instead they're advanced civilisations destroying themselves after making some extremely advanced discovery they could not control. Which sounds kinda depressing, but not if you assume it's only a small percentage of all the civilisations out there.
I can’t imagine we are the only humans/advanced species in the universe. I really think it just comes down to how massive the universe is. Even just the size of our own galaxy, it is so big we will probably only explore 1% In many generations.
Quantum communication could travel galaxies while being secure, Quantum Computing can help advance Fusion which leaves little atmospheric chemical signatures, etc... We are only just now understanding the possibilities. While we are seeing the past of those stars & galaxies. Not the current condition of those objects.
what if there’s a race of aliens who perceived our noise as colors instead? So we are just sending them a beautiful light show and maybe driving them nuts because they can’t sleep.
omg stop bro 🤣
This would make a good sitcom.
ha that awesome
Aahhhhhh (in my best glow stick voice)
then our sun and all stars would be blasting all colors all the time
Given all of the intelligent life forms on earth that we still can’t communicate with, why do we think we could actually even recognize communication from intelligent life that probably formed in an entirely different manner than the oxygen breathing carbon life that is most prevalent on our own planet?
Exactly!
Best comment here iv seen so far.
The amount of anthro-centric suppositions involved in this makes it meaningless. i agree with some of your responses to this. The main thing I see is that there is no reason for them to share any of our motivations. So, modeling behaviors is entirely pointless.
Agree 💯!
I think we can make a few assumptions, if we're looking specifically for technological civilizations.
Any species that creates a planet-spanning civilization is bound to be expansionistic (at least some of the time), which suggests militarism once civilization develops. They have to be competitive, else they'd get out-competed and never develop to a planetary scale. They have to be able to communicate (at least sometimes) - or they won't be able to build large-ish projects (like homes or machines).
The exact reason they'd do this is irrelevant, but if they manage to grow to a planetary scale we can make a few reasonable assumptions about them.
@@wojtek4p4 I think if they can get here from any star not Sol, they can destroy a planet. So, no matter what we think of motivations, they have already developed conflict resolution. Otherwise they wouldn't exist. As far as hive intelligences, if you can get here, you don't need to. Meaning If you can travel between stars you can turn one material into another. You aren't coming for resources. As my cousin at NASA says, it is more likely that anything we encounter will be beyond us in a way that we are beyond mollusks. Most importantly, everyone looks at our future progression like 'where will we be in 50,000 years?' In all likelihood, 2000 years of development from here would put us on a level that we would consider Deific now. In the end, who knows, distance might be king. You might just be relegated to STL travel.
My hypothesis for a solution to the Parmi Paradox is that intelligent species at some point in time become virtual, they are able to transfer their consciousness to a Universal System where all intelligent species can meet and communicate freely, without the burden of space travel. They use this V-Universe yo interact with each other and share culture and knowledge. We're not there yet.
Interesting but still a small problem of getting the signals so far across the universe
👍👍🚀🚀The Fermi Paradox. Endlessly fascinating topic. Thanks. Great video with a new perspective. I can read & watch videos on this subject all day.
the Fermi paradox theory I like the most is the one where we are in a vast "collection" of some alien super race. They came to our planet in the past, froze everyone and uploaded all of our minds into a matrix. They then disposed of our bodies and then systematically erased every trace of our presence on the real Earth. They have done this to millions of other races, and display their collection in a sort of grand gallery on their mothership. Kind of like how entomologists have large insect collections. They then re-deposit a neolithic race on the rewilded planet and then move on to their next acquisition. This would explain why there seems to be no trace of any intelligent life in the universe. The answer is that we are trapped in their bug collection, and the pocket universe (matrix) we are trapped in is empty, except for us. Sort of like Dark City meets the Matrix trilogy...
@@JBS2018furthermore, i am wondering what type of movie you have in mind..purely sci fi or some sort of comedy?
the fermi paradox isn't a paradox, it's a mystery.. the fact that we exists doesn't really conflict with the absence of others alien.
I have this theory that consciousness (as a thing that exists) is like a wave that travel through scale when matter gets more complex.. in that model, at some point unicellular life was somewhat conscious and then organized into multicellular organism so consciousness changed scale (which is basically when the things are free to organize and have to choose themself what to do).. Here "consciousness" is defined as a singularity in causality, a point of chaos where the least action principle lead to chaotic solutions.. in the least action principle : we have choices to make, between almost equal solutions in term of least action.. (the ball in the air follow a continuous trajectory, but our brain allow us to use the stored energy in our body to throw the ball in any direction : the causality follow a route splitting into multiple unpredictable results : it's chaos).
And so, this type of robotic ant-like aliens would be the next step in evolution, when the important choices of action doesn't occur at the scale of individuals, but at the scale of colonies (planets etc).. when the choice would not be at the scale of individual but at the scale of the code that drive the society..
We already see that when we as countries compete with different political systems and values.. that would be the same thing except individual would be much more disciplined (every day to day action would be optimized and solved according to a global strategy) and so wouldn't need the ability to think about anything in their day to day life..
I doesn't but only if you accept that we will all die out because of some filter in the future or we are so so rare that there isnt a single alien intelligent being out there for hundreds of galaxies around us.
@@panzrok8701 no. It would if we knew some law of nature stating that the universe must be full of life.. we think we do, but we don't.
A paradox is a contradiction between two theory or models that seems correct otherwise. When the observations contradict the model, the model is simply incorrect. The model stating "the universe should be full of life" is simply refuted by observations. It's a model only motivated by our own experience of what life is. According to observations life isn't easy or probable (at least in our corner of the universe), that's not a theory, that's a measurable fact.
Why do we need to see them for them to exist? They can't see us and we exist.
If we have no evidence of their existence, they are as good as not existing for now. We cannot say they do not exist, but we can say there is no evidence that they do.
i've seen them already
Excellent point. But IMHO they’re all over the place but too many people just refuse to see.
@@joeprimal2044 There's a lot of "evidence" and a lot of it is stubbornly held rather than looked at rationally. Humans do that with a lot of things tbh. One example is a video of an aircraft moving at impossible acceleration. This was vehemently defended by a military pilot who "is highly trained and knows what he saw." NASA, and others debunked it because it was most likely a duck based on the information provided. The pilot was fooled.
There is no evidence yet. It is fun to imagine and think about, but as far as the public knows, we got nothin. Not to mention that aliens being so advanced tend to crash a lot. Kinda odd.
The fact that Earth hosts life has been obvious for millions of years. Our 20% oxygen atmosphere is one obvious sign of life. There are several more.
The model described in this report overlooks one important point which would explain why we don’t see any grabby alien civilizations in the universe: to reach that level an alien civilization must reach an extremely aggressive and united level. Nobody reaches that level because of self destruction. Think of us with nuclear weapons times a million… and with countless dictators fighting each other for dominance… Self destruction is almost guaranteed.
In a way, quiet and stealth alien civilizations are evolutionarily advantageous.
Aliens are so advanced that they probably just make their own bubble universe and then proceed to leave.
Could you please make a video on the Dark Forest solution to Fermi Paradox? It's my favorite and I think it makes a lot of sense!
I was thinking the same thing; it actually dovetails nicely with the "grabby aliens" theory because if there are grabby aliens in your vicinity, the last thing you want to do is make yourself visible. The grabby aliens might have absolutely no interest in your planet as a source of natural resources, but the minute you start making noise, you label yourself as a potential competitor and thereby sign your civilization's death warrant. This was actually a concern with the Voyager 1 & 2 probes; we gave our potential enemies nudes, a mix tape, and a map to our front door. Perhaps not our best decision making.
Are there any techno signatures at a galactic scale we can search for? E.g., are there any techno signatures we might expect to see from a galaxy colonised by 'grabby' aliens?
Any time someone mentions the Fermi paradox online, a puppy is thrown into a volcano. Be careful with feeding the daydreamers
So many Star Trek episodes rolling through my head now.
I wonder what will happen to all those science people when they realise that Alien life is already among us, they always have been. It sounds absolutely crazy, but this could be true.
If you consider deep sea creatures as aliens, sure,
We assume human behavior, but we also assume they’ve discovered the same tools and technologies, but why? Surely there are classes of matter, dimensions of physics, scientific principles, etc, that we know nothing about and would never think of
Our method of distant communication is not necessarily the best or the one used by alien civilizations, we could easily be looking at the wrong spectrum all together. Maybe they are using a very private ultra fast method like quantum entanglement(something we are beginning to explore), doubtful you could listen in on that though.
It doesnt matter what spectrum we are looking at. Optimal communications would use optimal data compression, which looks just like noise.
I'll say it again: entanglement _can't transmit information_. I don't know why this particular idea persists, but it is _quite_ wrong. It's barely even a real thing to begin with, a hard-to-detect correlation across an ensemble of measurements. Single measurements are useless at detecting it, and the measurement destroys it, so... it's just not a thing that can happen.
@@jameshart2622I take it your one of those that thinks we have discovered all the properties of everything and there is nothing left that is beyond what we know now. Even a lot of the laws of physics we have built a lot around are turning out to not be a simple as once believed, quantum tunneling is used in electronics but isn't fully understood as to why it works only that it does and quantum entanglement is even less understood right now, give it a couple hundred years and things now will look like the 1800s look to us now.
@@stevej7139 I don't know everything, but I do know what entanglement actually is.
The fact that it can't transmit information isn't some kind of weird limitation that popped up at the last second. What's odd is that it can happen _at all_ in a relativistic universe, which all available evidence says is the one we live in. It's literally the strongest non-signaling quantum relationship that is logically possible (given relativity and quantum mechanics writ large), but it _is_ non-signaling to it's very core. There are theorems about that fact.
Of course, theorems are only as good as their postulates, so loopholes are possible. Loopholes are always possible, up to and including the "Last Thursday" hypothesis. But...in reality, cracks in that assertion require reworking special and general relativity and/or quantum mechanics in a way compatible with what we already know, which is difficult. I suspect that if we do find such loopholes, and faster-than-light communication is possible through them, I doubt it will piggy-back on entanglement.
As for the progress argument: logical fallacy. We don't know that progress can or will continue at the rate it has for the past couple of centuries, or that we will progress beyond our current best theories. Certainly we've done it before, so not impossible, but not certain either. Particle physics has definitely run into a serious wall, which is why I avoided the field getting my graduate degree.
If the galactic internet uses neutrinos we can barely even detect them, much less see patterns of data.
Literally looking for a needle in a 90 billion lightyear (or whatever) wide universe
Planets are a lot bigger than needles
@@c_n_bthe universe is a lot bigger than a haystack
@@c_n_bcompared to the universe, planets are a lot smaller than needles
another explanation to the fermi paradox may be the following: we haven't reached the point yet when we find out that it makes more sense to become a interdimensional species rather then interstellar
If a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri (4.25 light-years away) has an advanced civilization, imagine trying to communicate. You send something like an email and wait longer than 8 years to get a reply. Then you reply to the reply and another 8+ years passes. It's hard to get to know anyone under such constraints. Imagine sending a note to a pen pal in France and having to wait 8+ years for a reply. Species who experience time differently than we do could perhaps make something of that time lag. A very long-lived, patient species could perhaps communicate with a similar counterpart. (Think of the aliens in the movie Arrival.) But for humans, the temporal barrier is too great.
To give another perspective. Let's shrink our galaxy and just our galaxy to the same amount of water we have here on earth. Lakes, rivers, oceans etc all combined into one blob. As u know there will be plenty of fish there in that blob. And the amount we have explored in our galaxy is roughly 1 cup of water. It's quite hard to notice those fishes if u just have scooped up 1 cup
Putting out some serious John Michael Godier vibes in this video!! This topic is one he often discusses.
In fact he's done this very Fermi paradox "solution."
I'm loving the fact that he's done a few videos with Dr Avi Loeb. I can't wait for the data to come from the IM1 meteorite he managed to locate on the ocean floor off of Papua New Guinea. Preliminary results are intriguing to say the least!!!
Id loke if you did a video on that topic. I'm sure if you managed to het ahold of Avi he'd be willing to answer your questions. Especially when he takes a look at the excellent work you already do in the realm of space sciences.
Unless one of these posited grabby civilizations develops faster-than-light communication, it's hard to see how it could be considered one civilization across even one galaxy, let alone multiples. It would be more like umpty jillion independent civilizations, each within its tiny sphere of acceptably quick communication. American Indian culture may have originated from Asian people crossing an arctic land bridge, but they were not sending telegrams between North America and China.
Actually, the Native Americans most likely originated from ancient human populations in Central Asia not East Asia, but yes, that makes ense
It is not about a singular civilization. It is about the binary choice of "life or no life" on a planet and the spread of life throughout the universe.
@@dominikvonlavante6113 The problem I see is that they could eventually rival each other and destroy each other. Or at least, with increasing number of civilizations, slow down their growth. Maybe it's the last great filter. Colonize the stars before you develope faste-than-lightspeed communication and travel and you will annihilate each other. If something like that is even possible.
Always a pleasure to get this nuggets of knowledge, keep up the great work! More research and less personal bias and we will get through the stars.
Great video thanks for sharing Anton