Thanks for watching and thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video. Download unlimited stock media at one set price with Storyblocks at storyblocks.com/CoolWorlds Let me know what you think about the Grabby Aliens video down below. A question I see some of you asking is about the self-sampling issue. It's important to remember that it's a probabilistic statement and certainly doesn't guarantee validity. If I claim I'm in the middle 90th percentile of all humans who ever lived, I can only do so to 90% confidence - which means 10% of the time I am wrong. A much more subtle issue is about which beings qualify as human to begin with, does homo erectus count? Does an advanced cyborg count? These are difficult questions and perhaps deserve their own video in the future. UPDATE Sep 1st: Robin Hanson has posted a response to this video on his blog, please do check it out: www.overcomingbias.com/p/kipping-on-grabby-aliens
@CoolWorldsLab Could a form of life that isn't based on chemistry using an atmosphere evolve on a planet like Mercury? Given enough time and the huge number of worlds close to their high radiation stars, you would think something would evolve that uses that radiation that would kill us as its food source. Could the solution be that the vast majority of aliens live on worlds that are so different from ours that they consider ours as a frozen, barren wasteland? I know, I have no evidence to support this wild conjecture. Yet, it seems plausible to me.
You mention that some planets could remain viable for the development of life for trillions of years, and while that may be true if you only look at the star, I think you may be neglecting the planet itself. I'm a bit rusty on the details, but water and carbon are cycled tectonically. and vulcanism is constantly releasing gas including nitrogen which offsets atmosphere erosion(memory is fuzzy on if this is meaningful for earth or not, but over a trillion years bleed will add up); iirc the earth only has about a billion years left before plate tectonics shuts down and meaningful vulcanism will peter out some time after that; even with an orange sun, or a red dwarf that skips the turbulent planet-atmosphere-stripping phase, life is on the clock if it's to develop civilization. (there's also the more speculative question of how life changed the primordial atmosphere and if the sun's shorter lifespan with it's gradually getting brighter over time was necessary to keep the planet from getting locked into life-induced snowballs alternating with slow volcanically driven thaws that would limit the complexity of life that could develop before the interior cools. Atmosphere plays a huge role in surface temperature, of course, and life alters the atmosphere in major ways; it could be that stars have to warm at a rate within a certain range in order for a planet that is the right temperature for life to really get going(not just confined to volcanic vents/etc but to have the large scale nutrient and energy availability to thrive) to remain the right temperature for complex life to develop before the geological clock runs out), which if true would confine complex life to stars with a certain range of lifespans - presumably similar to the sun. A larger planet with more residual heat would remain active longer, but of course we can only speculate what other issues that may tend to bring with it. The greater mass and initial volcanism seems likely to cause it's own issues, from increased potential to end up like Venus to, well, the Great Dying wasn't the only mass extinction that involved flood basalts(microbial life is near certain to survive unless it's bad enough to boil the planet under the eventually-warmer sun, but if you keep resetting the clock on life it wastes a lot of the extra time that size bought you). There's potentially a range of viable planet and star masses for the evolution of complex life (can you tell I lean towards Rare Earth ?).
Once again there is no Fermi paradox lol kiddo you don't watch news do you or see the thousands of videos of ufos or uap as the government calls them The chuck Schumer amendment calls for transparency on what they call non human intelligence, it is well known by smart people that the US government has a crash retrieval program that has recovered non human technology and craft .. this is a established fact and when you have so many high ranking military and intelligence officials claiming that uap ufos are real and we have recovered their craft and bodies and especially lately have come out yet you and other so called scientist and your bias is only going to make you an example in history as what is wrong with bias science... please save your name and actually do the research and pay attention. Don't you see most of humanity see the truth so most people don't have your ignorance . Why your so popular is unfortunate because many but not most thankfully..follow you and buy into your ignorance. When it comes to aliens your ignorant your absolutely wrong without doubt since we already know without doubt aliens are real. Here and proven
U've stated many times of ur lack of belief in their existence (here ir out there) without definitive proof so YTF would we want2 here more of ur "speculation" on them? I'm an experiencer that my ex-wife &kids saw (which I'm not suggesting is the said extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence Bcause we no wot we saw) but 2flip that coin..... the extraordinary claims of bein alone in universe requires extraordinary evidence (not the 1data point of earth) that we r alone. MayB u coukd explain how these UAP vehicles defy phyics 2bac ur argument of their non existence 🤷
Us being "early" might be unexpected or unlikely, but by definition it cannot be impossible: *someone* has to arrive first, and there's no law of physics that actively blocks us from being that someone. As a person whose last name begins with "A", I have a lifetime of experience being the first person in roll-calls, so while it's true that *most* people's names get called somewhere in the middle I'm here to tell you that being called first is not prohibited. The fact we haven't seen civilizations emerge a trillion years from now around m-dwarf stars has less to do with probability than it does with us just not having waited long enough yet.
Yes, someone has to be early and wonder about that earliness. Also being randomly chosen first out of lets say a hundred is no more surprising than being the 85th chosen, even though we psychologically ascribe more relevance to it.
@@xbox70333I wonder if we only think it’s unlikely because we cannot see everyone else in our class. If my name was Aaron Abby and I was always called first I would know why I’m first in line. It’s the unknowing that drives us crazy. And that we don’t even know what causes us to be first/early in line in the cosmos. I think the point is a good one. It could just as easily be explained that we’re first/early because we’re first/early. I do, however, like to think about the repercussions of why we’re here. It’s just that I can easily grasp this as an explanation. I could be missing something though. I work in consumer software and not anything is heady as philosophy or science.
I've always thought , in a 14 billion yr. old universe , we are way late to the party. 5 billion years ago, earth wasn't even here, but the universe had been here a while. I don't "buy" the early thing. The actual odds of being first are astronomically small , even more so, when you are late.
Couple of fellas sat around a post-harvest Mesopotamian campfire, 11,000BC, sharing a fermented drink or two. "I know this agriculture lark seems to be paying off, but I'm fairly certain we're about to die." "Why's that?" "Well we've been hunting and gathering for tens of thousands of years now, and we've been farming for a few years. If it's a successful future strategy, what are the chances that we're among the very first few to try it?" "Good point, especially when you consider that a successful civilisation based on agriculture could support many hundreds of times the population that hunting and gathering does. That makes it even less likely we're amongst the first few to farm. Statistically it seems fairly certain we're about to die." "Yep."
If everyone did this, a tiny fraction of people (such as these fellas) would be wrong. But the vast majority of people would be correct. The key point about statistical arguments is that they’re not deterministic, sometimes they will be erroneous, but in most cases (whatever confidence interval is employed) they are correct - by construction
Yeah well, it's just a rewritten version of the "what are the probabilities that you'll be first to be called in a lottery?" Problem. The chances of being first are very very small for the vast majority of participants, yet *someone* has got to be the first.
@@CoolWorldsLab I agree with that, and I think the analysis is both fascinating and worthwhile, but I think it's always worth emphasising that the current evidence of our existence is entirely consistent with a whole range of possibilities. That doesn't make it less valid to consider the probability of those possibilities though, and your work is always brilliant when it does this. If I had to bet I'd say that symbiogenesis, or life on Earth becoming multicellular, were locks so hard to pick, the average number of intelligent species per observable universe is < 1. But this is just one possibility among many of those consistent ones, and there's a reason bookmaking is a profitable industry...
@@CoolWorldsLab You are of course correct, but it makes statistical arguments as an explanation also pretty much useless. Statistics are great for predicting, but after the fact the probability function has collapsed, it has no explanatory value to explain why the result we see is in a particular part of the probability distribution.
@@CoolWorldsLab The problem with this line of thinking is that it only makes sense if you're sampling is random, but that's not the case, there since there is only a limited window in which "you" could have been born, since you're parents had to be alive and having kids at that time, and a limited window for each of your parents and so on. So your (individual) time of existence is relatively deterministic rather then being random.
The oversimplification of the Gigantic task that is space travel is always mind blowing. Imagine trying to meet a person that it’s walking at 828000 km/h and gave you the position he was 30 years ago in a space that is 99.9% empty
Space travel might even be impossible, and yet we're assuming that the impossible barrier of millions of lightyears is not an issue worth considering when thinking about alien sentient life forms. We can't come even close to light speed, and yet to travel anywhere further than within our own star system something far surpassing it would be necessary. Whenever we're looking to the skies, we're seeing past trying to catch up with us. Countless other civilizations might be out there, but because of that limitation we might die off as a species before being able to observe any proof of them.
@@nihili4196 True although with good enough technology even without the ability to travel through space we could eventually get the tools to look at planets surfaces quicker and determine if civilizations like ours exist since you can visibly tell just by looking at the planet itself without having to see remnants covering the sky. But obviously that would be far in the future and from a civilization that lived long enough ago to have it's light even reach us.
@@ragegaze3482you can't just "look at something faster" That's just not how that works. There just isn't ever going to be a technology to speed up light that we haven't even recieved yet. If someone throws you a ball, you can't speed up the ball and catch it faster. It might not even be possible to make something faster than light, let alone make light faster than light.
One little thing that always sticks in my mind when I think about this is that life on Earth actually very nearly ended during the Permian mass extinction. This is the time before the time before the dinosaurs, when terrestrial vertebrates were dominating the earth for the very first time (and the dominant animals were actually proto-mammals rather than reptiles), and it very nearly all ended right then and there. Its always seemed like just another one of those locks we were lucky to slip through. Just a bit more vulcanism and our ancestors might've perished before they even had a chance.
this a great point lol but idk if I were aliens why not send some small drone ship to look at earth from afar and check for satellite's every couple hundred years idk.
Always fun seeing someone you're subbed to in a comment section of a completely unrelated video. Thought provoking point you make here, I wonder if we're more likely to find alien fossils than alien life
My response to the fermi paradox has always been that space is actually quite big, and our ability to perceive it is miniscule. It's like finding it wierd that you can't see a tree that's five hours drive away, on a foggy night, without your glasses.
like yeah, we dont even know how many planets there are in our next system over. our detection equipment just isnt sensitive enough to get that kind of information, the idea that we would be able to see an alien civilization if we were pointing a telescope at their star is. well we arent there yet
Also the tree, through some quirk of physics, is projecting an image of the area from before it started growing, thereby even if you COULD see that far you would see an empty field.
Yeah and didnt we only disciver more then 100,000 planets? Thats a REAL small number at this point Edit: only 5,000. Thats even smaller then i thought! Even between all of species on earth, only 1 is sentient, and even if were sentient, weve been progressing slowly for 100,000s of years, Whos not to say sentient species can progress even slower then we do And that most alien species arent sentient at all, and is just life?
Been saying this for years. There can be tens of thousands of space traveling advanced intelligent species out there concurrent with ourselves... and that would be a fraction of the number of galaxies out there. So less than 1 intelligent species per 1,000 galaxies or more. And with space the size it is, if you get some level of faster than light travel, you are likely to still be limited to your own galaxy. And even IF you happen to on a very slim chance share a galaxy with another concurrent intelligent species, you are still very likely to never run across each other. As for seeing each other through mega-structures... Doubt it as mega structures are very much inefficient. An advanced species would not waste their time on such other than sheer necessity for one for whatever reason. Space can be full of intelligent life. But we are unlikely to even run across one.
My personal take is that if the unobservable universe is super large or infinite, then we're just dealing with a sampling problem. We have no clue about the distribution density of life as a whole in the same way if you lived in the desert and had never seen a jungle, you might well assume the world is largely barren. Aliens might be super abundant in other parts of the universe, whereas our region might well be the cosmic boondocks just based on sheer randomness. Even if you take our own observation bubble as is, the speed of light produces a cosmic picture of a distant past that is vastly different from what things actually look like in the present, and you don't have to travel very far before this becomes a significant problem. Other parts of the galaxy, never mind the universe, could be extantly colonised and we wouldn't know it for millions of years.
the oldest stars in our galaxy are only about 30,000 light years away. if this hypothesis was correct, that these grabber aliens are colonizing at near the speed of light, and have taken at least as long as us to "unlock the doors", they would have been at it for a few billion years by now. we should be well inside that colonizing bubble.
Our galaxy contains enough stars (100 billion to 400 billion) that it would be a frankly unbelievable statistical anomaly if the distribution of (intelligent) life here is very different from elsewhere in the universe. Unless (intelligent) life is exceedingly rare, which raises other questions.
@@Fluxquark Plenty of other galaxies have highly active black holes or quasars that pump out 10-factor gigatons of ionising radiation over huge distances, as do typically more violent stars in CME events, all of which can easily sterilise a fertile planet with the potential for life, or at least knock it off any trajectory towards intelligence and an advanced civilisation. As far as I know we haven't even found a single exoplanet with truly Earthlike conditions yet - granted that the telescopes capable of searching for them are still relatively new, but the early results haven't been good. Since we only have a confirmed sample of one, we can already assume that unless we just can't see it beyond our own observation bubble where light takes millions of years to travel from the nearest star, life is already an unbelievable statistical anomaly. That then brings us back to the sampling problem of whether its overall distribution is different elsewhere, which it could be - we've found life in extremely isolated places on Earth, and since we can't see beyond the observable universe we can never be sure that its larger superstructure is exactly the same everywhere.
@@alexdenton9176 So you are saying there should be more life here than in other places since we are not near any highly active quasars? The sample is biased in favour of us finding alien life? Anyways, unless (intelligent) life is so rare that it only occurs a few times per hundred galaxies, we should have a reasonable sample size in our galaxy. Enough stars with planets, many hundreds of millions of which will be in a habitable zone (I think assuming alien life needs the same habitable zone as us is silly). How have the results so far not been good? We immediately found hundreds of exoplanets as soon as we figured out a way to find (certain types of) them. The techniques we have now almost guarantee we won't find any exoplanets like earth but the fact most stars appear to have planets means there are a lot of planets out there.
I thought that too and that the theory was going to be that developing hands is the key to the Fermi Paradox, the idea being that maybe most dominant/intelligent aliens *don't* develop hands, and thus are unable to achieve any kind of advanced technological development, while still being dominant enough on their own planets to prevent anything that could evolve hands from ever occurring.
I love how we as humans, a species that has not even broken out of our own solar system, is so confident about an idea that is at best just a blind guess. We don’t have the faintest idea about what could be out there, for all we know our galaxy is surrounded by alien life. If they have the technology to move across galaxy, let alone multiple galaxies, they have the tech to fool us and keep us in the dark.
Yeah exactly other videos go more in depth for the grabby aliens model and it also allows for aliens to make changes we don't see so for us dont apear loud. This personally makes more sense to me as detecting dyson swarms is so incredibly hard and assumes thats the best energy source for aliens with very advanced tech. Overall I think we will be very good to even colonaise our own solar system and that ill be a while after that when we see any evidence or have more thoroughly scanned our galaxy for life with better scopes.
So your evidence of aliens is that there are no aliens. That’s like saying the fbi is watching you because they could. But with them we actually know what they have done before when they want to watch someone. They probably could easily watch you if they wanted, but that doesn’t prove, they’re watching you right now and doing something so you don’t notice. We also simply have nothing to compare it to. We know how we act and affect the universe around us, but we haven’t found anything like it yet. It just doesn’t make sense to me why it seams more possible, that there’s many planets, far more advanced than ours. So advanced they’re completely hidden from us who haven’t taken any contact with us in any way we could understand if they had tried. Rather than there just isn’t anything. There’s no concept of wasting space and there just has to be something out there. It’s just there. Also if your argument is that they’re so advanced that we don’t notice, then you can use that for literally anything. Why stop at aliens, why not include magic and multiple dimensions while we’re at it. It’s not that it doesn’t exist, it’s just hidden and decide not to show us.
Honestly we are very aggressive and I wouldn’t blame them if we’re in like a zoo or something and it’s like “COME ONE COME ALL AND ALL AND WITTINESS THE DUMBEST AND MOST AGGRESSIVE SPECIES IN THE ENTIRE GALAXY also in the side booth learn about the famous Minecraft RUclipsr”
if we weren't confident enough to make claims about the greater universe we wouldn't bother with science to begin with. imagine if every scientist said "who are we, insignificant as we are, to ever think we can understand anything?" and gave up
The mere thought of being born into a relatively early universe is both inspiring and horrifying. We could spend our whole existence improving technology to such incredible depths, yet continue drawing conclusive evidence that alien civilizations just aren't out there, or aren't visible. And we'll still keep looking out there anyway, because the search is what drives us in the first place.
I dont agree with that we are born specifically into an early universe. Or i mean i do agree we are early, but it has no meaning because whatever time you pick there is always infinite time that comes after so pick whatever point in time and it will be early. 1000 years is early. 13 billion years is early. 100 googol years is early.
@@RonBest no infinite time, while the universe may be limitless in time each star has a limited lifespan, the stelliferous era (star forming period) is also finite so the timescale is limited for the evolution of both stars and any putative life around them.
I do think it's neat to suppose that we are the ancient aliens, that someone in the future will look upon what we leave behind in the manner that we look upon Stonehenge or the Pyramids or the Antikythera mechanism.
08:11 Evolution has nothing to do with complexity; many species have actually evolved to be simpler than their ancestrals. Evolution simply prioritizes reproduction.
3 месяца назад+9
Yes. Though you could perhaps habe the hypothesis that over time life as a whole has a tendency to diversify? So many things you can measure will have a broader and broader probability distribution when taken over all life currently existing. So the size of the currently largest creature will statistically increase over time, and so will the hottest and coldest temperatures tolerable by some life, etc. And perhaps the range of complexity (and simplicity!) and the range of possible levels of intelligence will also increase over time? I don't know if this is true, but it's a testable prediction,.we could investigate. It's also more plausible than the more simplistic 'complexity goes up over time' model, which as you point out, is just wrong.
So thinking of species as analogue to gas particles, and ecological niches as positions/velocities? I wonder if there's some objective way of putting biosphere entropy into numbers...
The evolution of all life, as an overall process, is the sum of all these individual species, so while some species may evolve to be simpler, while others remain constant, in terms of complexity, the NET direction can still be towards greater complexity.
It's less about complexity and more about energy available. Life on earth has consistently evolved to be able to increase the energy that can be used. Replication -> photosynthesis -> oxygen -> multicellularity (and consumption of it) -> fire -> intelligence?????
Yes there's a huge increase in biodiversity over time this is observable data, and yes the blue whale is the largest creature that ever existed, you actually are true in your observation. However, it's good to point out that the largest land creature today is far smaller than in the past and the strategy of being huge on land is simply lost. It's possible that overtime the range of size, intelligence, heat tolerance etc. will be lost over time, considering what humans do now and comparing what algae did in the past, it is possible that we will limit severely this range of diversity the same way that when algae triggered the ice age creatures that liked to live in hot climate simply died.
I'm on the Subjective Rarity = time + distance boat. Let's say every galaxy gets ONE technological civilization. 1. No all civilizations may expand. 2. Not all civilizations last. 3. Not all civilizations that do expand and last make a significant enough mark on their galaxy to be detected from any other galaxy. 4. Not all civilizations that expand, last, or leave a detectable mark have done so long enough ago for that signal to be detectable from any other nearby galaxy, and less so others beyond that. 5. Not all galaxies close enough to detect a detectable signal of a technological civilization have their own technological civilization to even detect a signal. 6. Not all technological civilizations in nearby galaxies that could detect a signal from a neighboring galaxy will exist at a time in their own history where they have the technology to detect that neighboring galaxy civilization signal. It's a rough progression of nopes. All in all, there could be(and/or eventually) Billions of technological civilizations across the known universe, but, because the vast gulfs of both time and distance between galaxies, no civilization may ever exist at a time and distance such they may detect/observe even one other civilization in another galaxy. Let's pretend there's a mirror "Earth" in our neighboring galaxy Andromeda. They're 2.5 Million years away from us, so, unless they've developed a space-faring civilization of significant enough impact to be detectable 2.5 Million years ago, before us, we're not going to see anything. If they're on the same level we are now, We to them and them to us are functionally nonexistent until about 2.5 Million years from now when our respective detectable signals reach us and/or them ... if anyone is still around to even detect either.
Assuming that aliens would even have such a thing as civilization. Which is a pretty big assumption. Humans can only understand human concpets just like ants can only understand ant concepts. Flip that around to where we're the ants and aliens are the humans, we wouldn't even be capable of understanding them or even understanding their siginificance. They would be so far beyond our conprehension to the point that the concept of "aliens" (a human concept) would be completely meaningless.
Very succinct observations, which I happen to agree with. If we look at the timeline of life on Earth and the extremely recent emergence of human technology, life could be abundant but advanced civilization even rarer than one per galaxy throughout all time. -For example, could octopuses create the sort of science that humans have if they lived on an ocean planet?- What if procaryotes selectively made an atmosphere more hostile to eukaryotes development rather than accommodating? Could advanced civilization emerge on a planet that had no predation driving evolution? As for grabby aliens, we haven’t developed any technology that would support practical interstellar travel. It just might be an impossible feat given the fragility of life and the intense energy required and the limitations of material properties. [Edit] Dang it, I paused to read comments too early and he actually mentions the aquatic world limitation at 14:09
@@blacksmith67 - it's very doubtful any species of anything, no matter how "intelligent" that lives on a water planet that's ONLY a water planet with no land masses could ever develop much by way of technology because fire, and the control of it is one of those important steps, as well as a very important tool in the tool bag of technological civilization. A water-world civilization could have "technology" in the sense that we differentiate between types of stone tool technologies like Oldowan and Acheulean. Also, as to fire, a water-locked species could, arguably employ active underwater volcanoes for some rudiments of crafting with fire, but, we have some very real very smart bird species here on Earth that capitalize on brush fires to pick up burning brush, burning branches, and other burning material to actively spread the fire because they've learned brush fires create some free cooked meals, plus it can drive insects, lizards, and other prey out to easier hunting. We've birds that even make and use tools; The Caldonian crow for instance. As to going interstellar, it's less complicated than many think. We could hollow out large asteroids to create rotating habitats as a byproduct of asteroid mining, and all that work could be done by AI-managed mining drone swarms in space. It'd take a mere 100 years to finish one project with internal land mass equivalent to France. Such large habitats could house millions of people, as well as a complete self sustaining sustainable ecosystem of lakes, river systems, full-sized mountains, and even atmospheric depth up to the central axis of spin roughly equivalent to Earth's atmosphere and that would allow for natural weather systems for such bottled worlds. Having a self sustaining sustainable system inside a sectioned and nested multi-levelled world in a bottle squashes most of the problems with space ships. The hardest part would be bolting engines on, and the slow, slow slow sllooooow nudging of such a huge object into slingshot passes at planets around our solar system until it's gained enough momentum to achieve solar system escape velocity. THAT would probably take another 100 years just to build up enough speed. Most humans, however are too short-sighted, corrupt and personally self-interested in power and wealth to invest in such long-term projects that would take several generations to complete, although most of it could be done by AI workforces at very little energy or monetary cost since building such structures could be almost a waste-product of asteroid mining. Travelling the stars in this way would likely be one of the more sensible because any destination does not need to be "habitable", or have a planet that's a good candidate for terraforming. Any system visited would only need to have the raw material to build more large rotating habitats, as well as adding to/remodeling/repairing the original structure. It could all be done with technology available today, except we're not exactly "there" yet for space-based mining bot swarms managed by AI that can be put to work and forgotten. An alternative method of travelling is significantly more spooky science fiction fantasy where we have only the very rudiments of the beginnings of the technologies that could make this happen, but, this alternative would be to send sophisticated AI 3D printers everywhere, and once they arrive, using whatever transmission technologies we have available, we could then (if the technology exists) transmit the digitized consciousness of travelers to the 3D printers on far far away worlds and places, and for them, the travel would be instant, with no requirement for food, life support systems, or any other bothersome stuff meant to protect and sustain life travelling across the stars. Once the traveler consciousness arrives, they print a body that's already pre-adapted for the local environment from local materials without fear of contaminating anything, and they go explore. Of course, this would require several very spooky technologies we only have the very beginnings of, so, it's a thing that might not ever happen. Travelling and exploring without spaceships, using 3D printers would, however, solve a LOT of problems. :)
@@konstantinavalentina3850 Thank you for the long and thoughtful response. I have thought of asteroids as an interstellar vehicle, but the cost of energy to make it possible would be enormous. We have put things in space at enormous cost, and even though the cost has dropped significantly it’s still around $25000 per kilogram. Assume that we can do that for 1 percent of that cost, and we are still looking at trillions of dollars to start a project with no immediate financial return and zero reward for anyone currently living. I absolutely agree that we could do it, but humans would have to change our ways of thinking drastically. It would be actually easier to convince everyone to save the environment here on Earth.
These explanations that stray into metaphysics by being unfalsifiable are always interesting, but they reveal more about the people and cultures putting them forward than they do about the objective universe.
First time I've heard "Grabby Aliens" being called a "solution" to the Fermi Paradox; before this video it has always seemed like it was just a reinforcement of the paradox itself, showing logic leads to concluding we should indeed be seeing clear signs of aliens and yet we don't; in essence, just a more elaborate formulation of "where is everybody?"...
It's a solution because of the anthropic principle. At any time and place in the universe where you can look up at the sky and see alien life, you most likely wouldn't evolve to observe it. Because the aliens would have transformed your planet, preventing you from existing to observe them.
the original formulation was "why aren't they already here" as in, they should have colonized the entire galaxy or at least visited the solar system by now, not just that we'd be able to see them "out there"
@@RoyWiggins Oh and youd never see a species in space because variety and differences are paramount. If a new species can see you theyll just copy you, no spacefaring species will actually ever allow itself to be known also due to the fact slavery between species is quite. Quite. Common. Earth is lucky its small and only evolved one race at a time. Easy answer. When any species evolves tech follows. As tech advances two things inevitably follow. Artificial intelligence and fear. As the organic species grows in advancement and complexity so too does their capacity for destruction and the ease with which it occurs. Eventually factions will react out of extreme paranoia and fear as technology continues to advance further and further eventually getting to where the weapons of choice for interplanetary warfare is lobbing black holes at each other. Once a species reaches that point the Artificially intelligent beings will deduce that the most appropiate action to continue lifes sustainment is to remove the advanced sapient races. Quite sad that it happens everytime though.
Economists have a bad enough track record of predicting the future in their own field of expertise, I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting one to figure out the future of cosmology and alien life.
I think it's an excellent model, but as the video explains, it also has a severe problem in assuming red dwarf systems are habitable. Once you assume there won't be habitable planets sitting around M-dwarfs for trillions of years, everything about the intergalactic Fermi paradox changes because G-type star production is in decline, meaning we may not be nearly as early as its proponents want to believe. I also think it appeals to an anti-Copernican crowd where we are special, and humanity and/or our AIs are "endowed" to own several galactic superclusters.
@@codys447only our robots will have time, and that’s if they still work once they leave the Oort Cloud not to mention the millennia across the depths, if our radiation protection works.
Yes Windmonkey! Just look how long it took Economists to stop their obsession with a model that depends on a "rational actor" when it's obvious that our brains evolved to make quick decisions on limited information.
@@codys447 I think it's funny you say that because, even though the conclusions might appeal to the anti-Copernican, the premises seem like a gross over-application of the Copernican principle. I'm in the 99th percentile for males in the world height-wise, and if I was applying the Copernican principle as much as they are here, I would be trying to find explanations as to why I'm not shorter.
@@jetfuelcantmeltsteelmemes8791 As another commenter said, there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world and only 8 billion humans. Statistically speaking, I should be an ant.
"Future aliens are why we live in the past" is truly an incoherent idea. If there are going to be sentient creatures, then someone has to be the first one. Sentient beings a trillion years from now won't be marveling at what a weird coincidence it was for *us* to be born so early.
So if there's a lottery with one-in-a-billion odds of winning, a billion people buy tickets, and one person wins, that's not surprising. But if there's a lottery with one-in-a-billion odds of winning, only one person buys a ticket, and that person wins, that's very surprising. We are, as far as our current observational ability is concerned, in the second situation. We can only see one lottery ticket, and it happens to be the winning one. It is of course possible that we are just very lucky, and I don't think anybody discussing the topic is dismissing that possibility outright. It's just that the odds of it are, y'know, one in a billion. So in effect the probability is 0.999999 that something else is going on -- that our assumption of a fair one-in-a-billion lottery is wrong somehow.
That's my main problem with the entire concept, and probably why I haven't ever heard of this idea aside from on RUclips. It's such a weird misinterpretation (or perhaps over-reliance) of the Copernican principle that I don't even know where to start with explaining why it doesn't make sense. Makes me think of the saying "You're not right. You're not even wrong."
@@thecosmickid8025 But what would could as a ticket with that metaphor? is it every star? every planet? When we start looking at just stars we see so many tickets that us having gotten a winning one isn't so strange.
@@JaneDoe-dg1gv The ticket in this metaphor would be a civilization. The winning ticket is the first one. Cards on the table, I am extremely skeptical of this kind of logic too. I'm just trying to give it the fairest hearing possible, and "this is just nonsense" doesn't strike me as a satisfactory refutation.
Two points: - Industrialized civilizations are inherently unstable, and likely to flame out before making any progress beyond their home planets. (see: Earth) - Interstellar civilizations are functionally impossible to maintain. Additionally, space colonization is so difficult, resource-intensive, and emotionally demanding for colonists that sufficiently advanced civilizations are unlikely to pursue it seriously. Hypotheses like the one discussed in this video frustrate me because they tend to ignore basic realities in favor of attractive tropes commonly found in science fiction (i.e. galactic civilizations, all-consuming alien forces, etc.) I counter this perspective with what I call the “boring principle”-the reality of the cosmos is considerably more mundane than the stories we imagine.
I'm pretty sure we are still progressing towards expansion into our solar system, and yet you are using us as an example of a civilization that flamed out? Earth had higher average temperatures and CO2 during the dinosaur times. Just because we don't have temperature readings doesn't mean it's our fault the planet is changing and we are flaming out. Our orbit cycles and both geological data and astrological data confirms that even without humans lakes have gone from deserts back to lakes for centuries at a time because it turns out the distance we are to the sun matters more than human activities. The problem with global warming theory is every deadline they set we pass by and prove the estimate wrong. I will trust millions of years of cycles over a few hundred years, which could just be one layer among hundreds without fosil fuels.
Point 1: "Inherently" ? There is only one sample we have and even for that one we don't know how unstable our civilization is, it hasn't ended yet. Point 2: Space colonization seems difficult with the resources we currently have, but assuming it will be difficult forever and for every species out there is completely baseless
One thing that I notice about Grabby Aliens is that it's very appealing. We want a universe that looks like Star Trek. The answers to the fermi paradox mostly boil down to either life can't colonize the galaxy (which kills a lot of fun SF, so that's no fun), or that there is no aliens (which feels unlikely, and also kills a lot of SF, so that's no fun). Grabby Aliens invokes suggests aliens are roughly at our level of development, and that we're all equally vying for a cool, galaxy-spanning empire and a vibrant, interstellar future that also has interesting aliens. That's fun SF! So, people find it appealing. This is not to comment on the validity of the theory! But why I think it became so popular.
It's not about cool, it's just what life does. It keeps on existing and the way to keep on existing is to expand. If life stays in one place, stagnant, it will disappear. So expanding life keeps on existing. And that us, that's the life that exists today. If we won't expand, we will disappear. If there is a life out there that will expand, it will inherit the universe.
Ever play an rts or halo? If those aliens out macro us and tech up faster or rush us before our macro has paid off we lose. Now imagine a giant free for all where one faction snowballs by beating every other faction and claiming their troops and resources, you get the covenant from halo. lol I would not call that fun just go play halo reach and see how that ends.
"Its like showing up to a party very first, and you wonder... is there really a party... are other people even coming?" Of course, given enough time your party will sooner or later have enough people to fill every free square foot.... Even if only 1 in 1 million people want to join your party, given an infinite amount of time, it will still fill up. The question isn't if there are people coming to the party or not, its if we will have gotten bored and left before the real fun guests show up fashionably late at 2 am
"its like dressing up as a CEO and believing that tomorrow you are going to be rich. Just because your bank account isnt full with money already, doesnt mean it wont any second now" this theory in a nutshell. despite there being no evidence to support any of those claims, the theory just ignores everything and goes on to make its hypothesis.
@@CharIie83 I think it may be feasible to reach ONE star/remote habitable planet. Given the length of time and investment it would take to accomplish the feat.....I imagine the settlers on the new planet would stop there, and never consider doing it again.
I feel like the Grabby Aliens hypothesis presented in this video is not the same one I have heard before. I think in the version I was told, the reason we don't see grabby aliens isn't because they are spreading close to the speed of light, but because we are just early and no one is there and close enough for us to see. We do not have to assume they can travel at near lightspeed to be grabby either. At 1% speed of light, a civilization can still colonize our whole galaxy in 10 million years, which is still very fast compared to the time for us to evolve. Grabby Aliens is basically saying that because spreading is so fast compared to evolution, an observer can only see either a pre-grabby local region where no one is out there, or a post-grabby region where everywhere is grabbed, and the intermediary state is very short compared to either of the two states. Also factor in the assumption that no civilization can emerge in an already grabbed region, then we would arrive at the conclusion that we could only be at a pre-grabby region, solving the fermi paradox. I think this was the version I heard, and if not, at least this could be a plausible explanation nonetheless.
Yes. I watched the kurzgesagt video and it semed to build around this exact idea that you said. And as you say this idea has been around a while. I see no need for hard locks and red dwarfs for the bones of the theory to be very compelling. Biological creatures fill niches...for that we have N = billions. So if a technological civilisations niche is space, and it can spread quickly then either aliens dont exist or we wouldn't because the earth would have been grabbed by now
This is also my understanding of it. No m-dwarves or speed of light travel required. Just the fact that a civilization occupying a habitable planet would preclude the possibility of other life developing on that planet
yeah this was also my understanding? halfway through the vid i got a vague impression bro is mad his idea didnt grt picked up like grabby aliens has, as well, which makes me find this video's intent a touch more suspect (just a touch)
@evernoon your explanation is the way I remember it and it makes way more sense to me then the video said. The video seems to say the only way we could NOT see them is if the were expanding at the Speed of Light...that makes no sense to me, if they we expanding at 1% of LS we would definitely not see them.
@@joelee3716 near-lightspeed would be inefficient and would need extreme shielding. It could end up being impractical in even the most advanced civilization's standards.
hi there, this is my first time visiting the channel, and i just subscribed. i don't see many 'academics' on youtube (with large subscriber counts - yours is approaching 1M soon!), so this is refreshing. i love the way you grab material from other sources (e.g. movies and other youtube channels) and then reference them with a watermark - i think this is a great practice! i like how you have done your own academic peer-reviewed research and have shared it with others, whilst also appearing approachable and 'human' in your presentation of the science. i am looking forward to watching more of your content :)
As a bipolar sufferer, thinking about how insignificant I am compared to the universe always helps me put things in perspective. I am a ridiculously improbable conglomeration of strangely behaving bits of mass that can somehow understand the universe I find myself in. I should count myself very lucky to exist. My problems always seem much more manageable after a healthy dose of thinking about the universe.
It's funny how the smallest things, like finding a good creator in you subscription feed, can overshadow every other feeling. Our minds are amazing sometimes. However, for me; no matter what mood i'm in, these videos often replaces it with existential dread. But the soft music and dr. Kippings soothing voice makes it feel like a good thing.
My take on this "where are the aliens" hypothesis is simply the vast area of space. Space is huge and all. Maybe there are life way far away from us to pick up with any instrument. Maybe there is something preventing lifes from being too close to each other?
There doesn't even need to really be something actively keeping life apart, as simple probability will suffice. There's an unfathomable number of planets in our galaxy alone, and the distances between solar systems is just as incomprehensible. Even if 99% of all planets evolved sentient life, the odds any of those two planets would be close enough for one to observe the other is still fractional, because that 1% would still be billions of planets spanning trillions of lightyears.
Yeah or maybe aliens came here 2 million years ago found these neat bipedal apes that immediately started worshiping them as Gods. So they set up a 30 light year nature reserve around our star system so they wouldn't screwup our evolution.
@@THX..1138 hah! One of my other ideas for this type of theory is that gods were ancient aliens who came to Earth and left, and we are their decesdents or leftover worshippers.
I think grabby aliens are highly unlikely for a couple reasons: 1. Space is big. Really big. And most of it is empty. 2. It is hard for life to evolve and survive in this universe. Really hard. And once life gets started, it is only adapted for life on its home planet, and other environments are inhospitable for its survival. 3. Space travel requires a lot of energy and matter, and a lot of technological advancement. You can't just send out millions of manned space missions in every single direction at light speed and colonize every single planet you come across. It requires resources to build the spaceships, the people need food and water and everything to survive. There are quite a lot of logistics required to make this practical. 4. Suppose you actually succeed at colonizing and conquering first your entire home planet (as humanity has done), then your entire solar system, then your entire galaxy. Each step is tougher than the one before, much tougher. How then would you expand beyond your galaxy? The void of intergalactic space in between galaxies is really, really big, with almost no resources there to mine or use as fuel or food or anything, and you would have to cross a tremendous distance before you ever get to another galaxy. These are really, really big distances that would take huge amounts of time to cross. If anything goes wrong and the crew on your ship all dies or whatever, the mission is a failure. That is not the type of thing that is even remotely practical, or that would have the benefits outweigh the costs on any remotely rational cost-benefit analysis. 5. Suppose grabby aliens actually overcome all these barriers and colonize multiple galaxies according to how the grabby alien hypothesis defines them. Statistically, the exact collection of features that define grabby aliens are likely to be incredibly rare. So rare that, in an area the size of our cosmic event horizon, around 16 billion light years, there is probably a less than 1% chance of them occurring in this particular region of the universe, assuming we live in a truly infinite universe. In fact, if the probability of them is greater than 0%, even a tiny tiny fraction of 1%, they are 100% guaranteed to exist somewhere in an infinite universe. However, the issue is that our cosmic event horizon limits which part of the universe we can interact with. So, unless the grabby aliens happen to exist within the confines of our little cosmic event horizon, we will never encounter them and they will never encounter us, and for the purposes of our finite known universe rather than the infinite unknown parts of the universe, they do not exist in our region of the universe. So, do I think grabby aliens exist? Maybe somewhere VERY far away, outside of our 16 billion light year cosmic event horizon, but nowhere near us, which means, realistically speaking, no, in our part of the universe, they almost certainly don't exist, statistically speaking. Almost certainly meaning that it is highly unlikely but not impossible. It is a better use of our time to think about things that are more likely to be true, than things like this which are highly unlikely. Do I think there is probably something similar to grabby aliens, maybe even that exact thing, at least somewhere in an infinite universe, very very far away? Yes, of course! That is the nature of infinity. If the probability of something is greater than zero, even if it is only 0.000000000001% or something, it is still 100% guaranteed to occur somewhere in an infinite universe, and not just occur once but an infinite number of times. But another part of infinity is, these grabby aliens would be so far away, we will never encounter them. And because of how cosmic expansion results in the cosmic event horizon making an ever-smaller part of the universe causally connected over time, this means, in all likelihood, grabby aliens will NEVER reach our part of the universe at ANY point in the future, no matter how many billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions, etc. of years go by, because our part of the universe is physically cut off from the rest of the universe due to the cosmic event horizon from the universe's expansion and the speed of light limit. Wherever grabby aliens DO exist, they are stuck in their OWN cosmic event horizon, centered on their own home planet, unable to expand beyond it, and it likely doesn't overlap with our own cosmic event horizon, centered on the Earth, because the 2 planets are too far away from each other for their respective 16 billion light year cosmic event horizons to overlap.
Thank you. Your comment was way more developed and logical than this video. I do want to point out that the Grabby Alien Hypothesis would only be galactic in scale, so as long as you think that the probability of only one interstellar species evolving per galaxy (or less), which seems to be the case in your argument, then it would be consistent. Grabby Alien Hypothesis would only take effect if two or more interstellar species are possible to evolve within one galaxy if they were to hypothetically no never meet within the past, present, and future of the Universe.
I don't like the "expansion as fast as the speed of light" assumption, but I don't think that really affects what I think of the grabby aliens hypothesis. I think that if you make the assumption that grabby civilizations make it impossible for new life to emerge on a planet they've grabbed, the fact that we exist means that we're among the first within our sphere of grabbiness since there's been plenty of time for other worlds to develop grabby aliens and therefore suggests that the density of technological civilizations in a grabbiness sphere is low. This means that if the grabby aliens hypothesis is true, either technological civilizations are rare or grabbiness spheres are small, and doesn't eliminate the possibility that both are true. Meaning we're still left with the Fermi Paradox.
The paper uses 0.3c, IIRC. That's close to light speed in the grand scheme of things. It's necessary for the theory because, if an interstellar civilization were expanding much slower than that, we would see them coming from a long way away. Us not seeing them implies a short window to see them.
Or, that even if such grabby aliens were to exist, there's nothing to say they couldn't have evolved, expanded and eventually gone extinct with their constructs and signals having long since faded out long before Earth was around.
The thing that seems very very weird to me about the grabby aliens statistical argument, is that I just don't understand how it answers the main question that it purports to answer. Provided I understood things correctly, the starting question is: If you and I assume ourselves to be an average observer, then why do you and I see an early and empty universe, while our best theories tell us that the universe has a long and densely populated future ahead of it? Which grabby aliens answers with: That long and densely populated future contains only long-lived "grabby" civilizations. To which my follow-up question remains exactly equal the original question... If we assume ourselves to be an average observer, then why are you and I not members of one of those long-lived grabby civilizations in the far future? As far as I understand it, nothing about grabby aliens even prevents the emergence of new observers in those civilizations. Because fundamentally it is not civilizations that observe, it is sentient beings. To me this seems so obvious that I'm weirded out by so many people discussing grabby aliens without at least touching on the "who are observers?" question. It makes me wonder if I have really completely misunderstood everything, somehow.
I don't know if we're both right or both wrong, but we're in the same boat. Nothing about this argument makes any sense to me on a fundamental level. I'm not even on board with the Copernican Principle being applied this way in general, but people much smarter than me keep doing it, so I guess I'm probably missing something about that too. To me, it just seems like the most obvious case of statistical sampling bias of all time, but physicists keep talking about it like it's one of the universe's great mysteries. Taking a sample size of 1/x where x is unknown and then trying to extrapolate it into anything seems ridiculous. Especially when the 1 is a biased sample. It's like looking outside your window to try to determine what the weather is like everywhere on Earth. It was 75 degrees and overcast outside today and I expect myself to be a typical observer, so it was probably 75 and overcast for a vast majority of people everywhere on the planet, right? For that matter, I bet it was 75F for a majority of conscious observers everywhere in the universe today because I expect my perspective as an observer to be typical. Even talking about the time in which we were born being atypical doesn't make any sense on a fundamental level. Is it pretty unlikely that out of a sample of every possible observer to ever exist, that I would be born in 1993? Sure, that's wildly unlikely. But what if I were born in the year 3,847,219,623? Being born in that exact year is also wildly unlikely. Both of these probabilities are almost zero, but someone using the Copernican Principle in the year 3,847,219,658 would say that it's much more likely that they would be born in the time period of 5,000,000,000-10,000,000,000. Any date you pick is going to have a probability about as close to zero as you can get. Nobody in any perspective would ever come to the conclusion that they are a "typical observer" so this logic would always lead you down a misleading path.
@@firstlast6085 I'm theoretically on board with the statistics of extrapolating from a sample size of one. Of course the result is literally the least trustworthy you can be relying on data, but the pure mathematics of it does make sense. This is called the maximum likelihood estimation, which you can look up on Wikipedia. The Copernican Principle is a slightly less mathematical concept, but it follows similar logic. That's theory, because on a practical level all of it is just way too uncertain. However, even on a theoretical level, I don't understand how the grabby alien solution applies the principle. Sure, we know of only one globally unified civilization, so we are permitted to assume it is average in every way. However, as I see it, we are NOT permitted to view it as average is some ways, but not others. What the grabby aliens solution is doing, is viewing our civilization as average in regards the circumstances of its founding, but then pushes all other ways it could be average aside, merely to make them fit the story. The example I gave is the individual average observer. If grabby aliens is true, then the universe would host trillions of sentient observers in its lifespan, with me being an extreme outlier. Another example is the lifespan of a civilization. The maximum likelihood estimation tells us that we most likely are about halfway through, giving humanity another 250k years or so, for a total of 500k years. That would allow us to colonize the milky way, but would should also assume that 500k years is the normal lifespan for most civilizations, which doesn't match the grabby aliens solution. Of course, all of these assumptions should be taken with a grain of salt, but the point is that all of them are equally valid! Choosing one over all the others - without any justification as far as I can tell - just doesn't convince me. And especially when it is contradicting much more of those assumptions than it is validating, then the entire solution is built on a foundation that actually undermines it.
@@upgradeplans777 I disagree with the lifetime estimate. As we are keeping up, I would be surprised if we survive into the next millenium (although I won't be surprised as I will be long dead in case I am wrong).
@@ertymexx Yes, there are a lot of data points we can use to make predictions about this. And it makes complete sense to try and do so. But the situation I was talking about is when you literally only have one data point (such as the age of the only global civilization we know about), then you can still take the average of it, and you can still apply the maximum likelihood estimation to it. From that simple fact alone, we are justified in saying that the most likely lifespan of global civilizations is 500k years. Then you introduce another datapoint: there is evidence behind the prediction that we wont last another 1000 years. And then the math is different. 🙂I don't think we have any disagreement about that.
Brutal take-down. Delivered with professionalism and receipts. This cycle of thought and criticism and debate is exactly how we were able to come as far as we have as a species.
I have been waiting for you to cover this fascinating hypothesis for a while. The grabby aliens hypothesis seems weird and strange and is yet so much alike biological systems and organisms would actually expand.
That is if they get past the stage we are in. I doubt it very much. They would have exactly the same problems and the biggest problem is wars. Man has too many psychos in power who love money and war. I would place a bet that every civilisation that has been and will be has this exact problem. I am a big believer that we will destroy ourselves one day and if we don’t then nature will. Another thing is space travel to other stars. We already know that it is virtually impossible to get warp drive and to fuel a ship to get to any decent speed is astronomical. People like to dream but that is all it is.
@@CoolWorldsLab I'm so glad that instead of just summarizing it you offered your own well thought out arguments and analysis as well. Love this channel :)
Worth noting: Astronomy and many other areas of research can afford to be magnanimous because "who is right" doesn't have a _known, immediate, and dramatic_ impact on someone's quality of everyday life. Thus cordiality is the norm. When it comes to ethics, morality, politics, & (socio)economics, that is very much not the case, which is why you will see people understandably get upset. This is not to try and turn the conversation to that end. Rather simply to point out that some subjects simply lend themselves to "rational debate" a lot better than others. I suspect if there was the potential for a (known, immediate, dramatic) impending asteroid ending all life on earth, the debate might get considerably more heated.
I feel like a lot of people forget how big the universe is. It's not like "Oh, there's lights in the distance there's people there." Except the universe is so big we won't be able to see beyond what the laws of physics lets us see. Like just because we can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Observable universe vs actual universe size. On top of that, they act like aliens are smarter than us and will have figured out faster than light travel as well as being able to make dyson spheres and so on, when in reality they're probably just as limited in intelligence than us. And even if they're 10 times smarter, that doesn't mean they can just disregard physics and will be a giant galactic force like scifi stories show them as. With that all being said, aliens aren't always going to be like us, There is assuredly aliens who will just be animals roaming a planet. There is 100% aliens out there, but we'll never see them with how big the universe is, ontop of the hurdles we will have to over come, and what they'll need to overcome.
And those “lights in the distance” are so far away that the light we’re seeing is billions of years old. If there was alien life, its in a different time to what we can see. Maybe there’s alien life there now but their light hasn’t got to us yet.
@@notmenotme614 mhmhm. There's a very human mentality that "oh, aliens exist, they HAVE to come visit us. If they don't then they don't exist." There is a theory I do like, or understand. That aliens will end up destroying their own planet with war, or global warming, or over population before they can figure out space travel. Depressing, but I feel that line of thinking helps put aliens more in our shoes than in a pedestal.
@@CoolWorldsLab never! This is one of my favorite channels, thank you to everyone on the Cool Worlds team ~ your videos are always thoughtful and informative, and I appreciate you 👏👏👏👏😘
It's entirely possible that we're the first living beings that could be considered sapient in the universe. We simply don't have enough data to make conclusions on how likely/unlikely the development of life and sapient life is in environments that could theoretically support it.
@@ertymexx No. There was no other sapient creatures. Except for maybe the Neanderthals', but they're kinda still around as we bred with them and are partly them.
Really love David Kipping. He have so great voice and interesting thoughts. Thank you for all the time and effort you and your team put into making these videos.
I'm so glad that you pointed out how similar it is to ancient people explaining everything by blaming "gods", because I've tried to point out the same thing to people. I've even noticed a tendency of some people who cease believing in religion to then shift to aliens as if they simply NEED something otherworldly to cast their hopes on. Just kinda odd to me.
Same here, even amongst human cultures the need for constant expansion isn't even a constant and our modern assumptions that it is comes from a modern post-industrial revolution and colonialism viewpoint.
I already* felt suspicious about this the moment these somehow **``monolithic``** aliens were brought up, and were mainly the focus of such theory from there. Clearly an obligate sapient species comparable to us from there would already be more individual and complex from each other, even in small communities, so why assume that they would all think the same like a stereotypical hive mind???
Literally all life operates on certain assumptions. No life, for example, can exist without replicating itself. None. All it takes is one lifeform to replicate more than another for the replicator to make the one that doesn't replicate as much irrelevant. On Earth, this sort of thing is 'mitigated' by millions of years of back and forth. An ecosystem balance. When one organism starts to expand too much, they run out of resources, and thus start to die off. Balancing their numbers naturally. Because Earth doesn't have infinite resources. In space, things are different. All it would take is a single organism, a single alien species, to start expanding indefinitely. They could move on, constantly, but unlike on Earth, with animals and organisms, there is no self-balancing act. These beings would be too smart for that. All resources would be utilized, all. And if one alien species doesn't do it, then they're irrelevant. They do not matter. because while they're twiddling their thumbs, conservatives, the ones who decide to expand WILL expand into their territory, overwhelming them. Period. This is the core of grabby aliens. Not that we're assuming how ALL aliens behave, but we're looking at how life behaves with near-infinite resources, and then realizing even if ONE out of a million alien species decides to expand, it's over. Everyone else loses.
PBS spacetime goes over why this is reasonable to assume 1. Organisms tend to be expansionist because of natural selection (which applies at cosmic scales as well of course) 2. You only need 1 in a thousand to become expansionist, and the result will be a universe dominated by expansionists, because expansionism grows your numbers and power exponentially. Example: Imperialist countries in the past.
This. I always think of space elevators and solar sails and how complex they would be to build and maintain. I mean, chemistry and physics can only take us so far before we cross into the realm of science fiction rather than feasible concepts.
@@Miguel.LSpace elevators are a fairly readily solvable engineering problem though (there's a clear incremental improvement pathway in materials science to solve the one remaining problem, sufficient tether strength), and solar sails are even easier. Neither of these are Fermi paradox grade stuff though because they primarily facilitate expansion within the solar system, but still
After reading about SAFIRE and the remarkable work with elemental transmutation through Nuclear Plasma reators currently underway by Aureon Ltd I feel our civilization is on the cusp of something grand and transformative
We have a lot of biases that affect our exploration of the unknown. One of them being our propensity to project our own motivations and perhaps instinctual drives onto other hypothetical species. We as a species seem to have a need to conquer and dominate. The evolutionary path of other sentient creatures may result in a different social structure, a different relationship with their environment and a different way of thinking about the cosmos and their place in it. We don't understand our own consciousness, let alone the workings of minds that evolved light-years away. The most alien thing imaginable cannot even be imagined by us.
Possibly.. but you might not be giving us enough credit. There's a lot we don't understand, but I think we can use our imagination and come up with a whole lot of possibilities. If the Alien is a biological creature.. and has somehow found a way to survive for many millions of years.. unless they're popping in and out of different dimensions, they would still likely have certain survival needs. I guess it's possible they are that advanced and just decided.. the universe isn't that interesting and not worth exploring, or don't have any desire to make contact with other species, either because they had done it in the past and it didn't go well, or because they already understand how primitive we are, and are waiting to see if we evolve into something more interesting. I guess maybe if time isn't a concern.. Why not wait until life meets certian technological advancements before you bother making contact. Could be a species unable to even populate their own solar system isn't even at it's infancy stage yet.
True, but it is sufficient for _some_ aliens to become grabby at some point. They may well be 0.1% of all alien species, but due to their grabby nature, they would still occupy most of the universe.
@@cheshire1 eventually, and if a few, given the size - that eventually is going to take a very long time and you are not very likely to encounter them early.
I think that there’s no method for a united civilisation to persist across hundreds of light-years, it’s never some sort of power hungry imperialism. And O’Neill cylinders in a Dyson swarm are more than enough to solve overpopulation if populations don’t expand exponentially (they aren’t). But I can see there being a motivation for sending out self-replicating probes, just for research. It’s definitely possible to make one robust enough so it would sooner self-destruct than go rogue. Though none of this applies to machine civilisations, they absolutely could remain united across hundreds of light years.
Isn't the reason we can't see other civilizations that exist now, that the radiation (including light) that arrives here for most of our own galaxy is over 1000 years old? Our galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across. So even if these civilizations exist, we would not know about them for thousands of years.
@@deathbysvent source: trust me bro. But for real: we have several cases of parallel evolution on our own planet, as well as searching for life evolved at roughly the same time as we did in our own solar system. So the chances are not next to null if that much research and money is invested in finding life on mars and europa and such
feel like the main philosophical issue with this theory is that its assuming an alien civilization would act similar to the way our human civilization does.
Assuming that there are billions of alien civilizations all, somehow, expanding out in every direction at the speed of light seems like the biggest issue for me. That doesn’t sound like a thing that is possible, let alone reasonable to assume.
That's actually one of the least problematic assumptions. Like us, they must have evolved on a world in which other creatures evolved and they would have evolved to compete for life and resources against those other creatures until, eventually, just like us, they evolved to compete amongst themselves for the available resources and best mates. The laws of differential survival are universal.
I'm still hung up on how most of society believe that if an advanced alien species somehow traveled to our solar system that they'd actually come straight to earth. How heartbroken would humanity really be if said advanced aliens shoot right past earth without even a hello wave and straight to Venus to terraform and settle?
@SmileyEmoji42 except that again presupposes that the environment another life form raises from is even remotely like ours. Ie: a society of silicon based life forms that use a form of photosynthesis for a caloric energy intake with a sentient hive mind, would develop technology in a vastly different form then us. Or imagine an alien race that evolved/acted exactly like humans, but their planet has a substance that provided unlimited clean energy available way back in their caveman days. They would never see the need to devlop non-renewable resources for energy.
@@bossredd-77They'd visit Earth to observe propably because life like this is a very rare thing after all. Also, they aren't stupid lmao. They would know to not distrupt humanity as it is currently not ready for such a phenomen. They could contact some individuals they think are interesting as an experiment but we'd shrugg these people off as freaks anyway so and we wont believe them anyway xD
I think this is making a very simple question way too complicated. The entire premise of the Fermi paradox is based on the idea that we don't see aliens when we look at the cosmos. But... Do we? Maybe we "see" them, but we don't know it and don't detect them with our half assed eyes and technology. Isn't it much simpler to say that at a certain point we will have the tecnology to say "oh, here they are, they were right in front of us this whole time"?
Is the assumption that the number of hard steps is a universal value really necessary? Wouldn't the planets with fewer hard steps simply produce life much earlier, which would then expand to occupy the universe, rendering the ones with more hard steps irrelevant?
The steps would seem inherent though. While evolution has tried countless pathways countless times, there seem to be some that were both essential to us being here, and which happened only once in Earth's history. Abiogenesis, symbiogenesis, life becoming multicellular, the emergence of our level of intelligence. Even knowing that to be here we must have been very lucky, we seem to have been *exceptionally* lucky.
Hard steps suggests a defined end goal. We got "here" through a series of hard steps. Someone else doesn't need to get "here," they just need to get somewhere. Their steps are likely very different. The only real universal hard step is probably closer to 1 hard step: a minimum stability over a minimum period of time.
Earth produced life only 200-300 million years after it was formed, an insignificant amount of time on a cosmic scale. I would assume that every habitable planet produces life, the hard steps are found elsewhere.
Agreed. Hard Steps is obviously a very simple model. It seems clear enough there's _something_ which makes it hard/rare to become grabby, otherwise we'd already see the aliens. You can break that something down into multiple "hard steps", but each step doesn't have to be equally hard everywhere, so long as the overall result stays hard
@udishomer5852 There's no way to tell if 'early life' is a universal principle or whether Earth is just an extreme fluke. We only have one data point (Earth), so no statistical conclusions can be drawn.
I appreciate that you don’t focus on attacking someone and simply give your input, why you feel differently, and ending it with a friendly acknowledgement of another’s theories
I think one of the issues with trying to extrapolate M-dwarf habitability into the far future is that there are so many of these stars and they live for such long periods of time that it is difficult to imagine any form of exclusivity with respect to their nature. It's hard to conclude that ALL of them would remain inhospitable to advanced life for the ENTIRETY of their lifespans. We already know that some M-dwarfs aren't very active, and there remains a possibility that at least some of the ones that are active now will become less active as they age. And there are mechanisms by which a planet around such stars that has lost its atmosphere could regain a new atmosphere later in time. If M-dwarfs in the present era as a whole don't have a high likelihood of hosting grabby civilizations, but can become more so in the future, that would explain why we don't see grabby aliens all over the place in the present era, but it would not preclude a grabby alien scenario happening in the future.
If it wasn't for the asteroid that hit earth appropriately 65 million years ago wiping out the dinosaurs allowing mammals to evolve into modern day humans (us) we simply would not be here so thank that asteroid guys stay safe 👍
Videos like this make me think about millions or billions of years from now, some alien species will come upon earth {if it even still exists) and it will be a desolate wasteland, and they will dig up our ancient ruins. The future is scary to think about
Along those lines, what is the longest lasting relic we could manufacture? And how do we make it easy to find and unlikely to be destroyed by impact or exploding star?
@masterSageHarpuia i'd be of the idea that constructing a pyramid out of hardened and very dense metals waurd be an obvious sign of "intelligent species was here". A pyramid's shape would remain recognizable for hundreds of thousands of years, even after erosion - and if materials are selected correctly, you can create something nobody could mistake for a natural folmation
@@CoolWorldsLab We did. A long time ago. Then we did it again with Rushmore. At least they'll know what we looked like instead of having to figure out what the daym pyramids were about.
Do we though? I feel we think of ourselves in too much of a grand fashion. I honestly think we are to the universe what single cell organisms are to us. They have no idea of the layers of existence around them and neither do we. Doesn’t mean we can’t try of course, but we have a long way to go
17:26 A wise fictional doctor once said, “it’s never lupus.” I would amend that to say, “it’s never aliens, until it is.” That’s just my take. This theory ultimately doesn’t move the needle for me anywhere on the existence of aliens. Still pressing that x to doubt.
I am not an astrophysicist or evolutionary biologist nor do I hold a PHD in anything. I just have an interest in the sciences, especially those that deal in the existential. For a long time I have pondered the question; "if we see no evidence of other advanced civilisations, what if we are first?". The "because, aliens" trope without strong and irrefutable evidence is to me at least, akin to spiritualism. Its a wish that something you believe is true. We don't want to be alone in the universe. But what if we are? At least in our Galaxy. The potential and also responsibility that gives humanity is immense. The bigger question for me is, what do we do with this power?
Because he was careful to not tell you everything or something else? Just asking because he definitely misrepresented the Grabby Aliens Hypothesis a bit to make it easier to fight against.
11:23 I really don’t understand why the grabby alien theory requires the hard steps model to be true, if we are the first to emerge at least in our observable region of space
We already have an example of "grabby aliens": all life on Earth is related, because the first succesful organisms took over and made it impossible for any other, independent life to evolve.
But animals are evolving around us all the time, even monkeys. Have you seen that video of a monkey sharpening a rock and then using it to break its enclosure?
@@globin3477 too bad for them Mycelium proves that false as its not native to Eath and is derived from space. We can deduce this from the numerous genetic evolutions mushrooms have that protect them and no other species from space faring travel.
Although I am not sold on "Grabby Aliens", couldn't there be expanding civilizations out there that we simply cannot see because their arriving photons are simply too old? Meaning, the light reaching us from deep distant space might be from _BEFORE_ they began expanding. And thus, in reality (i.e., now), the could have immense structures and vast colonies whose light won't reach our detectors for millennia. Is that possible, Professor?
Due to the accelerated expansion of hte universe, parts of the universe are already beyond our horizon. We will never be able to observe civilizations in those areas of the universe. And in the far future essentially all galaxies except our own will be beyond this horizon.
Another explanation for lack of ‘grabby’ aliens so far (that an economist probably should’ve thought of) is that, given available technology, being a ‘grabby’ civilization takes two things: 1. Unification and commitment of an entire planet to one goal 2. Willingness to take enormous risks. An entire planet may not be able to agree with eachother, (as we see on earth) and spreading out your resources throughout space may not bring immediate rewards, and might even bring about the wrath of another civilization, leading to risk aversion. We always imagine aliens attacking out of desire to conquer, or desperation for resources. But if a planet is desperate for resources, they’re not going to spend what little they have to look through space for it. And desire to conquer is only going to possess about half of a planet’s residents at a time (if their version of consciousness is similar to ours and they aren’t a unimind like in 3 body problem). It might just be that if a civilization is smart enough, they decide keep to themselves. Alternatively, we could be in a young universe where we are developing simultaneously with other young civilizations. But think about the things we’ve sent into space. Very few, small and hard to spot rockets and telescopes aren’t even going to make a blip on other planet’s radars. If we assume they are developing at the same pace as us, they also would have sent out probes that are too small to differentiate from an asteroid.
I would say it doesn't take unification to sustainably go to another planet or star system, just a determined group. I do think you're right, it takes willingness for enormous risk. And yes, we might still never see technological aliens.
What you're saying is, when another intelligent species evloves, they are likely to be quarrelsome bastards just like us, and just as susceptible to the prisoner's dillema, and just as unable to commit to a *massive* joint undertaking?
They are referring to all of the radio signals, microwave signals, etc, that we produce. If it was out there (when the EM radiation was created) then we should have picked up on those signals from other civilizations. It is not about the size of rockets.
Monkeys on a typewriter has at least one big issue: for any given answer there is a nearly 100% (infinity to one odds) chance that it is wrong. That and it has been tried, apparently the works of shakespeare are several poopstained pages of the letter S.
For me, the answer seems simple. I bet no aliens colonize the galaxy because of two factors. 1. Financial incentives are damned. 2. Communication essentially severs the species into two separate factions. What good is collecting resources if it takes you 60 years to collect them and or bring them back "home"? If it takes 20 years for one way messaging you might as well be severed from the home planet. If a species splinters itself to colonize the galaxy, who actually benefits from it? The species doesn't benefit from it because nothing can be shared fast enough to make it beneficial.
Your assuming there is no was to communicate instantly or travel in ways we can't now. Look in to quantum entanglement just as one example. It's like people 500 years ago not believeing people could possibly communicate from one continent to another instantly. Bur they had no concept of a telephone or Internet. You couldn't travel 100 miles in a hour because no concept of a car or aircraft
@@blakecrosby5123 you make a good point. Which also means if that kind of communication is viable then we should be seeing the galaxy colonized. It's not and it's probably because that form of communication actually doesn't work. It would be great if it did though..
Several decades ago the US military was designing a new fighter jet (F15? I can't recall) and someone realized they could save a lot of weight by making the cockpit fit the average pilot rather than having to include a bunch of adjustability. They went out and measured all of the current fighter pilots on a dozen different factors, took the averages, and designed the cockpit to that specification. No one fit in the cockpit. When going back to look at the data, no pilot was near the average on more than two measures. Not only that, but knowing one measure didn't help you narrow down the range on any of the others. They ended up having to include all of the same adjustments as were in every other plane because there's no such thing as an average human. I suspect something similar is happening with the hard filter argument. I really like the core concept of several hard steps over a single great filter, but the statistical arguments fall flat because averages just aren't the right tool for the job. All of the predictions of the hard steps model are just a consequence of how they set up the thought experiment and averages being misused.
First video I’ve seen, and I’m impressed! I love how respectful you are of this odd theory and the man who postulated it. You even talked to him about your criticisms of his theory before you released your video. This was a very interesting video, and I appreciate your highly informative and intelligent remarks. I can’t wait to explore your other videos, and thank you for this one!
It is also my first time seeing one of his videos. It is not my first time hearing about the Grabby Alien Hypothesis and I am rather disappointed that he misrepresented it so he could argue against it more easily.
4:20 it’s so much like Stellaris. You can find primitive species and either help them grow and be space bound or force them to slow progress and farm minerals and food for you. Wild concept
16:30 There is a way of falsifying grabby aliens with regards to expansion speed - if you can prove that there is an insurmountable cap to the expansion speed that is sufficiently slower than the speed of light, the grabby aliens hypothesis struggles to match the data. If you argue that this is impossible to prove, then your own alternative hypothesis (that aliens simply do not expand in that manner) is also impossible to prove.
The metalicity of the Universe was not high enough to create Earth-like rocky planets until it was ~8B years old¹. Our solar system formed 1.3B years after that. ¹Per Isaac Arthur.
I refuse to call this a paradox for the same reason I don't believe my kids when they can't find something they've barely looked for. If life exists here, it exists elsewhere. Why do i say this? Well, have we ever found a thing, that we can't find more of? Does even one person believe we've found all the life on our own planet? Why do we call this a paradox when we've barely begun to look? Perhaps, we are impatient?
Yes but at least your kid knows the thing he is looking for actually exists. And if you knew anything about the fermi paradox, you would understand that their presence would be obvious by now. But you would rather think in useless platitudes than think critically because it justifies your world view.
@@Stormyano lmfao if I knew anything about it! The hubris on you! Arrogant and insulting. Tell u what Internet know it all, I was just offering an opinion but u seem so in love with your own self that I would love u to explain it all! Go ahead , send me the link of u settling this once and for all. Go ahead I'm waiting on u to do more than be smug, follow it up with action. Can't wait to see u explain it all to the world. You'll likely be celebrated for solving this!
As I said in my reply above: human hubris. Humans will be undetectable in a few decades. Even our modern communications are nearly undetectable, because it's wasteful to blast radio waves in all directions, so most are fairly directional... But precise directional radio is already in labs and will be in wifi and cell phones soon. Either way, there's nothing we're looking for, as signs of life, that would actually make sense for an advanced species to still be using. In other words: SETI will never detect radio waves, because aliens aren't blasting them out, like it's 1960's Earth ratio technology, for the galaxy to see.
@@mitchelcline9759 Did you reply to the wrong person? I was expanding on your f'ck'ng comment, in defense of it, to the other knucklehead's pointless comment. But, if you want to get into what so useless and time-wasting about my comment, than let's do this thing...
I'm not sure if you put it into words correctly. The concept of grabby aliens is just an application of the anthropic principal. It doesn't matter how unlikely it is for an "Observer" to crop up in a universe, by definition, "Observers" are only going to crop up in universes where they win that lottery, aka passing all those hard steps/great filters. The grabby aliens hypothesis is just the inclusion of "Other aliens existing first" as another hard step. It takes cosmological time frames, billions of years, for sentient creatures that can do science to evolve, but /on/ cosmological timescales, the very instant they do evolve, the very next instant, millions or even just thousands of years, they colonize their whole galaxy, so there is no time for another source of sentient life to pop up. Imagine the galaxy like barrel of gunpowder. Imagine that a spark has an approximate 1 in 1,000,000 chance of spontaneously manifesting in the barrel every passing moment, that spark is sentient life. It's incredibly unlikely for the spark to manifest, but once it does, *boom*, there goes the barrel. Multiple sources of sentient life popping up in the same galaxy at relatively the same time would be like one spark manifesting by that 1/1,000,000 chance in one moment, and then by random unrelated chance, another spark also manifests in another part of the barrel at the exact next moment before that part gets overtaken by the explosion caused by the first spark. There is no particular reason why two sparks should go off independently at the same time, and there is no opportunity for a second one to happen after the first. It's like rolling a d-1million until you get a nat-1million and then you stop, but when you finally get the nat-1million, there is enough of a delay before you realize you got it for you to roll one more time, and that last accidental roll also coincidentally turns out to be a nat-1million. Technically possible, but utterly unlikely, and no reason for it to happen in particular. The question is how far do you think humanity will advance in 100,000 years? In just a couple thousand years we went from banging rocks together to the beginnings of colonizing our solar system. In 50 years we went from creating calculators to touching on artificial intelligence. The reason we don't /see/ grabby aliens is because we /are/ the grabby aliens.
Well, that is the most likely conclusion of the Grabby Alien Hypothesis. He just didn't want to mention it in the video so he could argue against the hypothesis more easily.
The Grabby alien Paradox. Any Alien advanced enough to travel interstellar already has access to an infinite number of planets and resources... without germy critters on it. If you are an Alien Resource collector would you choose a barren planet... or a planet covered in violent monsters? Grabby Aliens would grab the easiest stuff not fight death and illness to get it. Same as we do.
We don't/can't know their ethics. Right now we can be inside an Alien empire borders without knowing that we are kept inside a wildlife protection zone.
2:28 Isn't that based on an assumption that those "steps" had to be statistically of the same "difficulty"? I think it could be that the first step is moderately hard and takes e.g. 500 million years, the next is harder and takes e.g. 2 billion years, etc.
The fact that the Grabby Aliens hypothesis uses advanced civilizations with presumably quintillions upon quintillions of individual members actually makes the problem it's trying to explain worse. If the future is populated by so much more consciousness, why do we find ourselves living in a time of relatively extremely scarce consciousness in the universe?
Not a comment on the idea but as a general comment on the timescales in question. Could it not be the case that alien civilisations of immense magnitudes may or may not have evolved but simply due to the distance/time involved, any evidence of their potential varied existences could simply have become consumed by the general process of the galaxies, galactic structures and the like doing what they do over time. A lot of the discussion feels a bit overly relativistic to the perception of time from the perspective of earth or our galaxy. If a civilisation or millions of civilisations arose and even spread across entire galaxies, they could very well exist without ever being aware of each other. In a very real sense most of the universe exists within pockets of information voids, since the distances involved are further/longer than the the observable universe has assumed to have been around. Even an entire galaxy is only ever privy to a small subsect of light from the greater regions of space. There's just so much information that is fundamentally impossible, under the current model of space time, for a region to collect and observe. As though we are commenting on the deepest depths of the ocean by shoving our heads in a bathtub.
If you lived two thousand years in the past in where New York will be I don't think you would find it weird that you don't see 8 million people already. It might just be a matter of "having babies and increasing the population takes quite a while"
@@CommanderNewton You misunderstand. It _would_ be weird living in a village knowing it will grow into a metropolis just a few hundred years later. Because that is by definition an unlikely scenario. You can compare it to getting an extremely rare disease: Sure, _someone_ will have to get it statistically, but if that someone happens to be you, it should feel unusual to you. Another way to think about it is the following: Your birth naturally happens at a random place at a random time. This randomness produces a bell curve. The peak of that curve is the point in time where there are the highest number of individuals alive in the universe. You would never assume that your birth is likely to happen at the left or right end of the bell curve. Thus, you should always assume that the experience of your life happens in the most likely and most average time possible. That means, if you consider all of time, _right now_ is the most likely time to exist - otherwise you would not exist now. Any lifeform _must_ make this assumption, or they're statistically wrong, no matter if they _actually_ life in the middle or toward either end of the curve.
@@tree_eats But the thing is, if you shove your head into a bathtub, you will see and touch an enormous amount of lifeforms (bacteria) already. We must assume that at the very least our own galaxy is likely empty apart from us. Otherwise our star system would've been colonized by any interstellar civilization many times over, even if they only had a million years head start. And if our galaxy is indeed empty, that means you could say that life is rare. Another thing to keep in mind is that while the universe is ~14 billion years old, it only became hospitable to life much later. That means, while there was a lot of time for traces of past civs to disappear, it is not _THAT_ much time. To regard "cosmic erosion" (for lack of a better term) as the likely reason why we don't see other life, you would need to know how quickly technosignatures of advanced civs degrade and disappear on average. And I'm not sure we can know that. It might be that a galaxy filled with dyson swarms returns to a "natural state" relatively quickly, or it might be that it takes longer than the universe is old for _ALL_ visible signs to disappear. I'm leaning towards the latter based purely on intuition.
i really like this, im gonna finish the rest of the video after posting this as well my favourite theory (and i dont know how popular it is), is that we're actually completely alone within out space in the universe and that we'd been in it for so long that we've had almost the same issues brought up in the series foundation like, we got to the great filter or whichever you want to pick, but then we ran the planet we were on into the ground. this would give an explaination as to why so many religions talk about something akin to the "other world" and the "death of the gods" and "leaving the garden/tree of knowledge" or multiple realms this idea is that that, venus was either our home planet or a second planet we developed on, but we were pulled the mistakes happening now with overuse of resources resulting in a run away green house effect. these stories about leaving the garden or leaving the other world or choosing to live here might be a sort of, language drift or failure of language through generations of people retelling the story with mistakes it could also be that there is no evidence because the coming to this planet mightve been a one way trip, which would explain why very little information survived outside of things that are attributed to religious origin some of the creation stories may even be people telling their great grandchildren the stories of how they arrived, but since there's no frame of reference for these children, they have no way of understanding or interpreting what is meant so they're forced to just "fill in the gaps" it kinda bleeds into conspiracy theory territory because it's not really any one thing on its own but dependent on a bunch of things all at once, but if it were true it could explain why some things are the way they are and why we have certain inclinations as humans and another reason why there's so many parallels between existing religions other than just "lol human behaviour patterns and nature patterns"
I just don't think we can really impart many if not any human characteristics on aliens, their mind would not evolve like ours, their bodies wouldn't have evolved like ours. So I think it's actually rather strange that we would assume that alien life would look and think anything like us
@@dutchmansmine9053 again that is carbon based lifeforms on earth who all share DNA and common characteristics there is no reason to assume aliens will have bones, nerves, skin or muscle and not some totally alien and unfathomable way of being I think the odds of it looking, acting or thinking like anything we see on earth are nearly impossible this is to say the biggest weakness of the human mind is the inability to think of new things, we always modify or adapt already existing concepts and apply that outwards, it works well for earth but not imagining alien life
Sure, in an infinite universe there are infinite species and infinite species that look the same with the same history with the same names because patterns repeat with enough space. That said, it can be rare in the sense of density.
I think we shouldn't shy away from space exploration, and exposing our presence. We got here by being brave, and i don't see a reason to change. Even if it's incredibly hostile. We'd surely be better off coming out looking scary than looking feeble trying to hide away in a corner, hoping nobody will see us.
im ok if its done in that order. space exploration to somewhere else, then expose ourselves. at least that way if things turn sour they wont know where we live
We may have already announced our presence. When we look at stars sometimes a planet passes in front if it. We can tell what its' atmosphere is made of based on the wavelengths of light absorbed by it. Aliens as advanced as we are could probably tell theres life on Earth if they caught a glimpse of us. An alien advanced enough to detect the fluorinated gasses in our atmosphere would know we're here and be able to guess how advanced we are. Fluorinated gasses have been in our atmosphere for almost 100 years.
For me, your point on grabby aliens not happening for "whatever reason" is the answer here. And the reason actually seems pretty obvious to me ... being a "grabby alien" species isn't possible because the path to it - ie, the path of continual growth, continual expansion, etc - is actually the great filter that Fermi postulates. Especially in today's perspective, it seems kind of obvious to me that being an "invasive species" which is what grabby alien amounts to, isn't something that is sustainable over millions or billions of years, and intelligent species either change their ways to a more sustainable, but quieter, more contained existence, or they die trying to become "grabby". We are very much already grabby on the planetary scale, but we've only REALLY been that way for ~10k-20k years and it's already going badly for us in many ways like climate change and pollution, economic disparities and social divisions. We have made tons of progress since, say, Gobleki Tepe, but that progress has come with potentially world-ending problems. And we haven't even STARTED to expand off our planet yet. So ya, it seems (to me at least) that very likely that the Great Filter is actually being an invasive, grabby species (like we are right now). Those species, when they evolve as we did, either manage to change their ways, or kill themselves off long before they are advanced enough to be grabby beyond their own system, or maybe a few light years.
A future which doesn't include expanding out to other stars and planets is also not sustainable. We have a mere 500 million or so years before the sun becomes hot enough to boil away our oceans. If intelligent life really is as astonishingly rare as seems to be implied by ideas like grabby aliens, we may be the only chance for life to continue existing in our galaxy for most of its lifetime
Just to be devils advocate, this makes sense if the universe has a limited size, but if it is larger or infinitely sized, odds will not be zero that this can't happen. If the universe is infinite, then it is possible for all sorts of unlikely scenarios to actually eventually happen, given enough chances.
@@chrisblacklock9468 Agreed here, but probably still unlikely within the confines of our finite observable universe, so effectively grand Type-III civs outside of 2x that size will never be known to us ... unless we are also assuming there's a workaround to the speed of light limit. It really depends on how "hard" of a filter being a grabby alien might be. To be fair, I have no idea, but I'm basing it on the notion that we are ALREADY doing more than one thing that potentially threatens to end our existence, so it doesn't feel like it scales much farther than this. I have a feeling this could be a pretty "hard filter" ...
I’m about a minute and a half in, and a foundational flaw I see is that it seems like the grabby alien idea assumes that alien species will think and behave as humans do “I’m not saying it’s wrong, just that it’s unproven.” Thank you for that terminology!! That perfectly expresses my take on evolutionary theories.
That would be a flaw... However, is there any other way that a species can be that would become interstellar? I don't think so. I don't even think a person could think of a species that wouldn't be "grabby" on Earth; from bacteria to fungi to animals, etc, all are grabby. It is possible that grabbiness is unique to Earth, but I am pretty sure it is a byproduct of evolution and existence.
@@deathbysvent While I do agree with a lot of those points, I also think it’s flawed to assume that everything else in the universe behaves in the exact same way. We have no way to say currently that alien species out there *are* interstellar, we also have no way to truly predict why they’d become interstellar. While our only frame of reference for sapient life is ourselves, I think that keeping an open mind to other possibilities than what we see on our planet is useful too. For me personally, I think it’s entirely possible that the alien species out there don’t think or behave the same way we do, leading to behaviors and achievements that we would struggle to comprehend because they’re… well… alien to us. A major problem with that line of thought on my part though is that it’s practically impossible to test for 😅 which to me makes it an idea that I like, but not really one that’s scientific. Idk where I was going with all that, sorry for the ramble XD
I think the question "why don't we live a trillion years from now around a red star?" is irrelevant to why we don't see evidence of aliens today. The universe could be teeming with life, including intelligent, technological civilizations, but our ability to detect any sign of it is so limited that it's weird to even be wondering why we haven't detected it yet. Of course we can't. The circumstances required for us to _detect_ life or civilization is probably a far worse statistical bottleneck. It would be an absolute fluke if we did. The farther away we can look, the less detail we see _and_ the farther back in time we see. We can only look at a certain window into the history of any place. So even if there's a civilization identical to ours out there in terms of its timeline, it would be completely undetectable to us more than say 200 light years away. That's a tiny distance on the scale of the universe, but any farther back in that planet's history its civilization wouldn't have produced enough environmental change for us to detect anything other than an atmosphere that _possibly_ harbors life of some kind. Why haven't we seen planets like that? Because the methods we use to detect planets around other stars are not really capable of that. That's why the only rocky planets we see are usually "super earths" with a huge mass, and why the planets we detect are usually whipping around their star with an orbit of days or hours. That's what we can detect. Small terrestrial planets in a slow, stable orbit, that don't noticeably perturb or eclipse their parent star? They might as well be invisible. They might be extremely common, but we don't have a way to know that right now. Also, what are we looking for? Someone like us, about our size, who makes gadgets out of metals and polymers, whose technological processes produce detectable chemical signatures like ours do, and whose life unfolds over a timescale similar to our own? Maybe that's not who is out there in our window of detection. I mean, think about how different we are from every other living thing on Earth, and consider that every living thing on Earth is more closely related to us than any other life form out in the universe. We might just not know what we were looking at, or what we're looking for, as signs of its presence, or signs that it has developed its version of technology. We're probably not going to detect "aliens" until they get here. And even then we might not. We're certainly capable of observing other creatures undetected if we want to, so why couldn't they? I think it's just fundamentally arrogant to think that just because we have some great telescopes, that we should have detected other "people" by now and maybe it means we're alone in the universe, or are superlative in some way like, we're the FIRST. Jeez, we JUST STARTED looking for life on Mars, one of our very nearest rocks, and we're still not sure if we've found any. WHY should we expect to be reliably detecting it any farther away already? Also, it took five billion years on our planet to get to us modern humans, but the random events that led to us aren't on a time limit. A planet doesn't have to exist for three billion years before complex life forms, or have 300 million years of reptile-brained thunderlizards that die in a cataclysm before cleverer rodents can spread out to fill their ecological niches, and so on. Creating THE SAME TIMELINE for how long any other planet takes for the emergence of intelligent life is absurd. And then, if you throw that model away, and assume that any time after the development of complex life, it might only be a few hundred million years worth of evolutionary changes to reach our level of intelligence, you have to guess there could be alien civilizations from a billion years ago or more. If they survived and continued to thrive, how far would their technology advance in that time? Would we even be able to identify their lives or technology if we saw them? If they didn't survive, what traces would they have left of their existence that would still be detectable today? "Why haven't we seen aliens?" It's an interesting question, but the actual answer is disappointingly simple. It would be a miraculous coincidence for us to have seen them yet, even if they live around half the stars in the cosmos. We're not really technologically capable of it yet.
Yup, we're just not that advanced. On top of that, it also makes us much less interesting to visit for aliens.What would a hyper advanced species even gain from visiting a species that are equivalent to amoebas in their evolutionary timeline?
I have this joke thought I like to pull out at times like this: We failed to discover Zorg, and without that knowledge we can't develop nth dimensional communication. Alien life doesn't see this as a bad thing, for whom wants to interact with someone who can't find Zorg?! The core of this joke is still something to keep in mind: Why do we assume other's will use our dominate communication technology? What if they did have access to some technology that we have already missed....
They are called spectral type M luminosity class V (i.e. main sequence stars.) Astrophysicists usually call them "red dwarfs" since all main sequence stars are called dwarfs. Betelgeuse is also a spectral type M star however its luminosity class is 1a-1b (i.e. a supergiant.)
We don't live around an M-dwarf right now for a very obvious reason: the time it takes for evolution to result in civilization is going to be significantly longer on planets with less energy. If they ever reach civilization at all.
Damn. That is a nice truth bomb. Also throw in the fact that M-class stars are mostly first generation and therefore lack the elemental makeup that would make life possible in their solar systems.
I love the Fermi paradox “If you just have an infinity self replicating space ship with a infinitetly reproducing population that does nothing but expand exponentially like cells undergoing mitosis who do not stop ever for any reason whatsoever they’d take over the galaxy. Why hasn’t that happened yet?” Gee idk MAYBE BECAUSE THAT IS SUCH A LUDICROUSLY INSANE CONCEPT THAT IT COULD NEVER FUCKING HAPPEN AND ALL ITD TAKE IS ONE GENERATION DECIDING “nah. I don’t wanna live on the space ship all my life: let’s stop at the garden world.” And suddenly it’s stopped
I mean it's honestly not that insane. Theoretically all it would take is one civilization building colonization bots with a programming to keep expanding and an ability to know how to build more of themselves. You are kind of assuming a human mentality to something that very well could be totally emotionless from our viewpoint so wouldn't care if there is a nice bit of real estate nearby when they are driven to expand and send resources back at all costs.
I'm not sure why, but I absolutely LOATHE the word "grabby"! ESPECIALLY in THIS context (which is the only context I've seen the word, lol). It's like it was made by someone too stupid to understand the word "expansionist" or something similar!
Are we just gonna handwave the fact that galactic conquest requires either vast amounts of time or break the laws of physics. Seems more likely that humanity will never come in direct contact with alien life.
A couple million years at sublight speeds. If I remember at current human speeds which seems quite amazing if you think about it. Still, there's no reason to think their development would happen at around the same time as ours. The size of the milky way is 100000 light years. There just needs to be one highly visible civilization within the timeframe of such. That is nothing on cosmic scales.
@eldestfan101 Current technology is a constantly increasing concept. It's not relevant to what we can do next century let alone a thousand years from now or a million. With technology we know for a fact is possible we can do it.
The galaxy has existed for "vast amounts of time", sufficiently for advanced civilizations to have risen before us and reached the spacefaring stage at astronomical scales by now; hence the Fermi Paradox.
I know that I'm "just some guy on the internet," but the grabby aliens theory sounds a lot like something that an average science fiction writer would come up with and create a religion around.
This doesn't even sound like a new theory. It sounds like just a combination of the Great Filter and the Dark Forest theories, and neither of those require a certain psychology on other alien life
Thanks for watching and thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video. Download unlimited stock media at one set price with Storyblocks at storyblocks.com/CoolWorlds Let me know what you think about the Grabby Aliens video down below. A question I see some of you asking is about the self-sampling issue. It's important to remember that it's a probabilistic statement and certainly doesn't guarantee validity. If I claim I'm in the middle 90th percentile of all humans who ever lived, I can only do so to 90% confidence - which means 10% of the time I am wrong. A much more subtle issue is about which beings qualify as human to begin with, does homo erectus count? Does an advanced cyborg count? These are difficult questions and perhaps deserve their own video in the future.
UPDATE Sep 1st: Robin Hanson has posted a response to this video on his blog, please do check it out: www.overcomingbias.com/p/kipping-on-grabby-aliens
@CoolWorldsLab Could a form of life that isn't based on chemistry using an atmosphere evolve on a planet like Mercury? Given enough time and the huge number of worlds close to their high radiation stars, you would think something would evolve that uses that radiation that would kill us as its food source. Could the solution be that the vast majority of aliens live on worlds that are so different from ours that they consider ours as a frozen, barren wasteland? I know, I have no evidence to support this wild conjecture. Yet, it seems plausible to me.
You mention that some planets could remain viable for the development of life for trillions of years, and while that may be true if you only look at the star, I think you may be neglecting the planet itself. I'm a bit rusty on the details, but water and carbon are cycled tectonically. and vulcanism is constantly releasing gas including nitrogen which offsets atmosphere erosion(memory is fuzzy on if this is meaningful for earth or not, but over a trillion years bleed will add up); iirc the earth only has about a billion years left before plate tectonics shuts down and meaningful vulcanism will peter out some time after that; even with an orange sun, or a red dwarf that skips the turbulent planet-atmosphere-stripping phase, life is on the clock if it's to develop civilization.
(there's also the more speculative question of how life changed the primordial atmosphere and if the sun's shorter lifespan with it's gradually getting brighter over time was necessary to keep the planet from getting locked into life-induced snowballs alternating with slow volcanically driven thaws that would limit the complexity of life that could develop before the interior cools. Atmosphere plays a huge role in surface temperature, of course, and life alters the atmosphere in major ways; it could be that stars have to warm at a rate within a certain range in order for a planet that is the right temperature for life to really get going(not just confined to volcanic vents/etc but to have the large scale nutrient and energy availability to thrive) to remain the right temperature for complex life to develop before the geological clock runs out), which if true would confine complex life to stars with a certain range of lifespans - presumably similar to the sun.
A larger planet with more residual heat would remain active longer, but of course we can only speculate what other issues that may tend to bring with it. The greater mass and initial volcanism seems likely to cause it's own issues, from increased potential to end up like Venus to, well, the Great Dying wasn't the only mass extinction that involved flood basalts(microbial life is near certain to survive unless it's bad enough to boil the planet under the eventually-warmer sun, but if you keep resetting the clock on life it wastes a lot of the extra time that size bought you). There's potentially a range of viable planet and star masses for the evolution of complex life (can you tell I lean towards Rare Earth ?).
Once again there is no Fermi paradox lol kiddo you don't watch news do you or see the thousands of videos of ufos or uap as the government calls them
The chuck Schumer amendment calls for transparency on what they call non human intelligence, it is well known by smart people that the US government has a crash retrieval program that has recovered non human technology and craft .. this is a established fact and when you have so many high ranking military and intelligence officials claiming that uap ufos are real and we have recovered their craft and bodies and especially lately have come out yet you and other so called scientist and your bias is only going to make you an example in history as what is wrong with bias science... please save your name and actually do the research and pay attention. Don't you see most of humanity see the truth so most people don't have your ignorance
. Why your so popular is unfortunate because many but not most thankfully..follow you and buy into your ignorance. When it comes to aliens your ignorant your absolutely wrong without doubt since we already know without doubt aliens are real. Here and proven
@@CoolWorldsLab you have a problem with your intelligence.
U've stated many times of ur lack of belief in their existence (here ir out there) without definitive proof so YTF would we want2 here more of ur "speculation" on them? I'm an experiencer that my ex-wife &kids saw (which I'm not suggesting is the said extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence Bcause we no wot we saw) but 2flip that coin..... the extraordinary claims of bein alone in universe requires extraordinary evidence (not the 1data point of earth) that we r alone.
MayB u coukd explain how these UAP vehicles defy phyics 2bac ur argument of their non existence 🤷
Us being "early" might be unexpected or unlikely, but by definition it cannot be impossible: *someone* has to arrive first, and there's no law of physics that actively blocks us from being that someone. As a person whose last name begins with "A", I have a lifetime of experience being the first person in roll-calls, so while it's true that *most* people's names get called somewhere in the middle I'm here to tell you that being called first is not prohibited. The fact we haven't seen civilizations emerge a trillion years from now around m-dwarf stars has less to do with probability than it does with us just not having waited long enough yet.
Yes, someone has to be early and wonder about that earliness. Also being randomly chosen first out of lets say a hundred is no more surprising than being the 85th chosen, even though we psychologically ascribe more relevance to it.
You misunderstand the problem. No one says its impossible, its just not likely.
@@xbox70333I wonder if we only think it’s unlikely because we cannot see everyone else in our class. If my name was Aaron Abby and I was always called first I would know why I’m first in line. It’s the unknowing that drives us crazy. And that we don’t even know what causes us to be first/early in line in the cosmos. I think the point is a good one. It could just as easily be explained that we’re first/early because we’re first/early.
I do, however, like to think about the repercussions of why we’re here. It’s just that I can easily grasp this as an explanation. I could be missing something though. I work in consumer software and not anything is heady as philosophy or science.
It's a matter of probability though, most people using the logic will be correct
I've always thought , in a 14 billion yr. old universe , we are way late to the party. 5 billion years ago, earth wasn't even here, but the universe had been here a while. I don't "buy" the early thing. The actual odds of being first are astronomically small , even more so, when you are late.
Couple of fellas sat around a post-harvest Mesopotamian campfire, 11,000BC, sharing a fermented drink or two.
"I know this agriculture lark seems to be paying off, but I'm fairly certain we're about to die."
"Why's that?"
"Well we've been hunting and gathering for tens of thousands of years now, and we've been farming for a few years. If it's a successful future strategy, what are the chances that we're among the very first few to try it?"
"Good point, especially when you consider that a successful civilisation based on agriculture could support many hundreds of times the population that hunting and gathering does. That makes it even less likely we're amongst the first few to farm. Statistically it seems fairly certain we're about to die."
"Yep."
If everyone did this, a tiny fraction of people (such as these fellas) would be wrong. But the vast majority of people would be correct. The key point about statistical arguments is that they’re not deterministic, sometimes they will be erroneous, but in most cases (whatever confidence interval is employed) they are correct - by construction
Yeah well, it's just a rewritten version of the "what are the probabilities that you'll be first to be called in a lottery?" Problem. The chances of being first are very very small for the vast majority of participants, yet *someone* has got to be the first.
@@CoolWorldsLab I agree with that, and I think the analysis is both fascinating and worthwhile, but I think it's always worth emphasising that the current evidence of our existence is entirely consistent with a whole range of possibilities. That doesn't make it less valid to consider the probability of those possibilities though, and your work is always brilliant when it does this. If I had to bet I'd say that symbiogenesis, or life on Earth becoming multicellular, were locks so hard to pick, the average number of intelligent species per observable universe is < 1. But this is just one possibility among many of those consistent ones, and there's a reason bookmaking is a profitable industry...
@@CoolWorldsLab You are of course correct, but it makes statistical arguments as an explanation also pretty much useless. Statistics are great for predicting, but after the fact the probability function has collapsed, it has no explanatory value to explain why the result we see is in a particular part of the probability distribution.
@@CoolWorldsLab The problem with this line of thinking is that it only makes sense if you're sampling is random, but that's not the case, there since there is only a limited window in which "you" could have been born, since you're parents had to be alive and having kids at that time, and a limited window for each of your parents and so on. So your (individual) time of existence is relatively deterministic rather then being random.
The oversimplification of the Gigantic task that is space travel is always mind blowing. Imagine trying to meet a person that it’s walking at 828000 km/h and gave you the position he was 30 years ago in a space that is 99.9% empty
Wtf is a km/h🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Space travel might even be impossible, and yet we're assuming that the impossible barrier of millions of lightyears is not an issue worth considering when thinking about alien sentient life forms.
We can't come even close to light speed, and yet to travel anywhere further than within our own star system something far surpassing it would be necessary.
Whenever we're looking to the skies, we're seeing past trying to catch up with us.
Countless other civilizations might be out there, but because of that limitation we might die off as a species before being able to observe any proof of them.
@@nihili4196 True although with good enough technology even without the ability to travel through space we could eventually get the tools to look at planets surfaces quicker and determine if civilizations like ours exist since you can visibly tell just by looking at the planet itself without having to see remnants covering the sky. But obviously that would be far in the future and from a civilization that lived long enough ago to have it's light even reach us.
@@ragegaze3482you can't just "look at something faster"
That's just not how that works. There just isn't ever going to be a technology to speed up light that we haven't even recieved yet. If someone throws you a ball, you can't speed up the ball and catch it faster. It might not even be possible to make something faster than light, let alone make light faster than light.
@@Echo-hg7gu That's not what I meant, I was referring to looking at more options quicker
One little thing that always sticks in my mind when I think about this is that life on Earth actually very nearly ended during the Permian mass extinction. This is the time before the time before the dinosaurs, when terrestrial vertebrates were dominating the earth for the very first time (and the dominant animals were actually proto-mammals rather than reptiles), and it very nearly all ended right then and there. Its always seemed like just another one of those locks we were lucky to slip through. Just a bit more vulcanism and our ancestors might've perished before they even had a chance.
this a great point lol but idk if I were aliens why not send some small drone ship to look at earth from afar and check for satellite's every couple hundred years idk.
@@michaelkhiev2070what if you have extremely long-range or somehow imperceptible recon? Then there’s no need to expose yourself while watching.
Always fun seeing someone you're subbed to in a comment section of a completely unrelated video. Thought provoking point you make here, I wonder if we're more likely to find alien fossils than alien life
@@michaelkhiev2070 Perhaps they have. Perhaps these UAP's are those very things.
@@PorcuDuckSlugTrust the numbers not your gut.
My response to the fermi paradox has always been that space is actually quite big, and our ability to perceive it is miniscule.
It's like finding it wierd that you can't see a tree that's five hours drive away, on a foggy night, without your glasses.
like yeah, we dont even know how many planets there are in our next system over. our detection equipment just isnt sensitive enough to get that kind of information, the idea that we would be able to see an alien civilization if we were pointing a telescope at their star is. well we arent there yet
Also the tree, through some quirk of physics, is projecting an image of the area from before it started growing, thereby even if you COULD see that far you would see an empty field.
Yeah and didnt we only disciver more then 100,000 planets?
Thats a REAL small number at this point
Edit: only 5,000. Thats even smaller then i thought!
Even between all of species on earth, only 1 is sentient, and even if were sentient, weve been progressing slowly for 100,000s of years,
Whos not to say sentient species can progress even slower then we do
And that most alien species arent sentient at all, and is just life?
We're also early as fuck it looks like.
Been saying this for years. There can be tens of thousands of space traveling advanced intelligent species out there concurrent with ourselves... and that would be a fraction of the number of galaxies out there. So less than 1 intelligent species per 1,000 galaxies or more. And with space the size it is, if you get some level of faster than light travel, you are likely to still be limited to your own galaxy. And even IF you happen to on a very slim chance share a galaxy with another concurrent intelligent species, you are still very likely to never run across each other. As for seeing each other through mega-structures... Doubt it as mega structures are very much inefficient. An advanced species would not waste their time on such other than sheer necessity for one for whatever reason. Space can be full of intelligent life. But we are unlikely to even run across one.
My personal take is that if the unobservable universe is super large or infinite, then we're just dealing with a sampling problem. We have no clue about the distribution density of life as a whole in the same way if you lived in the desert and had never seen a jungle, you might well assume the world is largely barren. Aliens might be super abundant in other parts of the universe, whereas our region might well be the cosmic boondocks just based on sheer randomness. Even if you take our own observation bubble as is, the speed of light produces a cosmic picture of a distant past that is vastly different from what things actually look like in the present, and you don't have to travel very far before this becomes a significant problem. Other parts of the galaxy, never mind the universe, could be extantly colonised and we wouldn't know it for millions of years.
the oldest stars in our galaxy are only about 30,000 light years away. if this hypothesis was correct, that these grabber aliens are colonizing at near the speed of light, and have taken at least as long as us to "unlock the doors", they would have been at it for a few billion years by now. we should be well inside that colonizing bubble.
Our galaxy contains enough stars (100 billion to 400 billion) that it would be a frankly unbelievable statistical anomaly if the distribution of (intelligent) life here is very different from elsewhere in the universe. Unless (intelligent) life is exceedingly rare, which raises other questions.
@@Fluxquark Plenty of other galaxies have highly active black holes or quasars that pump out 10-factor gigatons of ionising radiation over huge distances, as do typically more violent stars in CME events, all of which can easily sterilise a fertile planet with the potential for life, or at least knock it off any trajectory towards intelligence and an advanced civilisation. As far as I know we haven't even found a single exoplanet with truly Earthlike conditions yet - granted that the telescopes capable of searching for them are still relatively new, but the early results haven't been good. Since we only have a confirmed sample of one, we can already assume that unless we just can't see it beyond our own observation bubble where light takes millions of years to travel from the nearest star, life is already an unbelievable statistical anomaly. That then brings us back to the sampling problem of whether its overall distribution is different elsewhere, which it could be - we've found life in extremely isolated places on Earth, and since we can't see beyond the observable universe we can never be sure that its larger superstructure is exactly the same everywhere.
The great voids really big too
@@alexdenton9176 So you are saying there should be more life here than in other places since we are not near any highly active quasars? The sample is biased in favour of us finding alien life?
Anyways, unless (intelligent) life is so rare that it only occurs a few times per hundred galaxies, we should have a reasonable sample size in our galaxy. Enough stars with planets, many hundreds of millions of which will be in a habitable zone (I think assuming alien life needs the same habitable zone as us is silly). How have the results so far not been good? We immediately found hundreds of exoplanets as soon as we figured out a way to find (certain types of) them. The techniques we have now almost guarantee we won't find any exoplanets like earth but the fact most stars appear to have planets means there are a lot of planets out there.
By "grabby ailens" i completely thought that it meant aliens with grabby hands, like we have
By "grabby aliens" It meant aliens that don't have a good understanding of personal space
@@SolarFlareAmerica 💀
Diddy Aliens
I thought that too and that the theory was going to be that developing hands is the key to the Fermi Paradox, the idea being that maybe most dominant/intelligent aliens *don't* develop hands, and thus are unable to achieve any kind of advanced technological development, while still being dominant enough on their own planets to prevent anything that could evolve hands from ever occurring.
Yup. And the crab monster in the thumbnail just reinforces it. Crabs are very grabby indeed.
I love how we as humans, a species that has not even broken out of our own solar system, is so confident about an idea that is at best just a blind guess. We don’t have the faintest idea about what could be out there, for all we know our galaxy is surrounded by alien life. If they have the technology to move across galaxy, let alone multiple galaxies, they have the tech to fool us and keep us in the dark.
and quite frankly i wouldnt blame them
Yeah exactly other videos go more in depth for the grabby aliens model and it also allows for aliens to make changes we don't see so for us dont apear loud. This personally makes more sense to me as detecting dyson swarms is so incredibly hard and assumes thats the best energy source for aliens with very advanced tech.
Overall I think we will be very good to even colonaise our own solar system and that ill be a while after that when we see any evidence or have more thoroughly scanned our galaxy for life with better scopes.
So your evidence of aliens is that there are no aliens. That’s like saying the fbi is watching you because they could. But with them we actually know what they have done before when they want to watch someone. They probably could easily watch you if they wanted, but that doesn’t prove, they’re watching you right now and doing something so you don’t notice. We also simply have nothing to compare it to. We know how we act and affect the universe around us, but we haven’t found anything like it yet. It just doesn’t make sense to me why it seams more possible, that there’s many planets, far more advanced than ours. So advanced they’re completely hidden from us who haven’t taken any contact with us in any way we could understand if they had tried. Rather than there just isn’t anything. There’s no concept of wasting space and there just has to be something out there. It’s just there.
Also if your argument is that they’re so advanced that we don’t notice, then you can use that for literally anything. Why stop at aliens, why not include magic and multiple dimensions while we’re at it. It’s not that it doesn’t exist, it’s just hidden and decide not to show us.
Honestly we are very aggressive and I wouldn’t blame them if we’re in like a zoo or something and it’s like “COME ONE COME ALL AND ALL AND WITTINESS THE DUMBEST AND MOST AGGRESSIVE SPECIES IN THE ENTIRE GALAXY also in the side booth learn about the famous Minecraft RUclipsr”
if we weren't confident enough to make claims about the greater universe we wouldn't bother with science to begin with. imagine if every scientist said "who are we, insignificant as we are, to ever think we can understand anything?" and gave up
The mere thought of being born into a relatively early universe is both inspiring and horrifying. We could spend our whole existence improving technology to such incredible depths, yet continue drawing conclusive evidence that alien civilizations just aren't out there, or aren't visible.
And we'll still keep looking out there anyway, because the search is what drives us in the first place.
Eventually we'd split into countless sub species both organic and cybernetic.
I dont agree with that we are born specifically into an early universe. Or i mean i do agree we are early, but it has no meaning because whatever time you pick there is always infinite time that comes after so pick whatever point in time and it will be early. 1000 years is early. 13 billion years is early. 100 googol years is early.
@@RonBestGood point!
@@RonBest no infinite time, while the universe may be limitless in time each star has a limited lifespan, the stelliferous era (star forming period) is also finite so the timescale is limited for the evolution of both stars and any putative life around them.
I do think it's neat to suppose that we are the ancient aliens, that someone in the future will look upon what we leave behind in the manner that we look upon Stonehenge or the Pyramids or the Antikythera mechanism.
08:11 Evolution has nothing to do with complexity; many species have actually evolved to be simpler than their ancestrals. Evolution simply prioritizes reproduction.
Yes. Though you could perhaps habe the hypothesis that over time life as a whole has a tendency to diversify? So many things you can measure will have a broader and broader probability distribution when taken over all life currently existing.
So the size of the currently largest creature will statistically increase over time, and so will the hottest and coldest temperatures tolerable by some life, etc. And perhaps the range of complexity (and simplicity!) and the range of possible levels of intelligence will also increase over time?
I don't know if this is true, but it's a testable prediction,.we could investigate. It's also more plausible than the more simplistic 'complexity goes up over time' model, which as you point out, is just wrong.
So thinking of species as analogue to gas particles, and ecological niches as positions/velocities? I wonder if there's some objective way of putting biosphere entropy into numbers...
The evolution of all life, as an overall process, is the sum of all these individual species, so while some species may evolve to be simpler, while others remain constant, in terms of complexity, the NET direction can still be towards greater complexity.
It's less about complexity and more about energy available. Life on earth has consistently evolved to be able to increase the energy that can be used. Replication -> photosynthesis -> oxygen -> multicellularity (and consumption of it) -> fire -> intelligence?????
Yes there's a huge increase in biodiversity over time this is observable data, and yes the blue whale is the largest creature that ever existed, you actually are true in your observation. However, it's good to point out that the largest land creature today is far smaller than in the past and the strategy of being huge on land is simply lost.
It's possible that overtime the range of size, intelligence, heat tolerance etc. will be lost over time, considering what humans do now and comparing what algae did in the past, it is possible that we will limit severely this range of diversity the same way that when algae triggered the ice age creatures that liked to live in hot climate simply died.
I'm on the Subjective Rarity = time + distance boat.
Let's say every galaxy gets ONE technological civilization. 1. No all civilizations may expand. 2. Not all civilizations last. 3. Not all civilizations that do expand and last make a significant enough mark on their galaxy to be detected from any other galaxy. 4. Not all civilizations that expand, last, or leave a detectable mark have done so long enough ago for that signal to be detectable from any other nearby galaxy, and less so others beyond that. 5. Not all galaxies close enough to detect a detectable signal of a technological civilization have their own technological civilization to even detect a signal. 6. Not all technological civilizations in nearby galaxies that could detect a signal from a neighboring galaxy will exist at a time in their own history where they have the technology to detect that neighboring galaxy civilization signal.
It's a rough progression of nopes. All in all, there could be(and/or eventually) Billions of technological civilizations across the known universe, but, because the vast gulfs of both time and distance between galaxies, no civilization may ever exist at a time and distance such they may detect/observe even one other civilization in another galaxy.
Let's pretend there's a mirror "Earth" in our neighboring galaxy Andromeda. They're 2.5 Million years away from us, so, unless they've developed a space-faring civilization of significant enough impact to be detectable 2.5 Million years ago, before us, we're not going to see anything. If they're on the same level we are now, We to them and them to us are functionally nonexistent until about 2.5 Million years from now when our respective detectable signals reach us and/or them ... if anyone is still around to even detect either.
Assuming that aliens would even have such a thing as civilization. Which is a pretty big assumption. Humans can only understand human concpets just like ants can only understand ant concepts. Flip that around to where we're the ants and aliens are the humans, we wouldn't even be capable of understanding them or even understanding their siginificance. They would be so far beyond our conprehension to the point that the concept of "aliens" (a human concept) would be completely meaningless.
Very succinct observations, which I happen to agree with. If we look at the timeline of life on Earth and the extremely recent emergence of human technology, life could be abundant but advanced civilization even rarer than one per galaxy throughout all time. -For example, could octopuses create the sort of science that humans have if they lived on an ocean planet?- What if procaryotes selectively made an atmosphere more hostile to eukaryotes development rather than accommodating? Could advanced civilization emerge on a planet that had no predation driving evolution?
As for grabby aliens, we haven’t developed any technology that would support practical interstellar travel. It just might be an impossible feat given the fragility of life and the intense energy required and the limitations of material properties.
[Edit] Dang it, I paused to read comments too early and he actually mentions the aquatic world limitation at 14:09
Wrong. Humans can only understand human concepts. Civilization is a human concept. We would not be able to comprehend true "aliens"
@@blacksmith67 - it's very doubtful any species of anything, no matter how "intelligent" that lives on a water planet that's ONLY a water planet with no land masses could ever develop much by way of technology because fire, and the control of it is one of those important steps, as well as a very important tool in the tool bag of technological civilization.
A water-world civilization could have "technology" in the sense that we differentiate between types of stone tool technologies like Oldowan and Acheulean. Also, as to fire, a water-locked species could, arguably employ active underwater volcanoes for some rudiments of crafting with fire, but, we have some very real very smart bird species here on Earth that capitalize on brush fires to pick up burning brush, burning branches, and other burning material to actively spread the fire because they've learned brush fires create some free cooked meals, plus it can drive insects, lizards, and other prey out to easier hunting. We've birds that even make and use tools; The Caldonian crow for instance.
As to going interstellar, it's less complicated than many think. We could hollow out large asteroids to create rotating habitats as a byproduct of asteroid mining, and all that work could be done by AI-managed mining drone swarms in space.
It'd take a mere 100 years to finish one project with internal land mass equivalent to France. Such large habitats could house millions of people, as well as a complete self sustaining sustainable ecosystem of lakes, river systems, full-sized mountains, and even atmospheric depth up to the central axis of spin roughly equivalent to Earth's atmosphere and that would allow for natural weather systems for such bottled worlds.
Having a self sustaining sustainable system inside a sectioned and nested multi-levelled world in a bottle squashes most of the problems with space ships. The hardest part would be bolting engines on, and the slow, slow slow sllooooow nudging of such a huge object into slingshot passes at planets around our solar system until it's gained enough momentum to achieve solar system escape velocity. THAT would probably take another 100 years just to build up enough speed.
Most humans, however are too short-sighted, corrupt and personally self-interested in power and wealth to invest in such long-term projects that would take several generations to complete, although most of it could be done by AI workforces at very little energy or monetary cost since building such structures could be almost a waste-product of asteroid mining.
Travelling the stars in this way would likely be one of the more sensible because any destination does not need to be "habitable", or have a planet that's a good candidate for terraforming. Any system visited would only need to have the raw material to build more large rotating habitats, as well as adding to/remodeling/repairing the original structure.
It could all be done with technology available today, except we're not exactly "there" yet for space-based mining bot swarms managed by AI that can be put to work and forgotten.
An alternative method of travelling is significantly more spooky science fiction fantasy where we have only the very rudiments of the beginnings of the technologies that could make this happen, but, this alternative would be to send sophisticated AI 3D printers everywhere, and once they arrive, using whatever transmission technologies we have available, we could then (if the technology exists) transmit the digitized consciousness of travelers to the 3D printers on far far away worlds and places, and for them, the travel would be instant, with no requirement for food, life support systems, or any other bothersome stuff meant to protect and sustain life travelling across the stars. Once the traveler consciousness arrives, they print a body that's already pre-adapted for the local environment from local materials without fear of contaminating anything, and they go explore. Of course, this would require several very spooky technologies we only have the very beginnings of, so, it's a thing that might not ever happen. Travelling and exploring without spaceships, using 3D printers would, however, solve a LOT of problems. :)
@@konstantinavalentina3850 Thank you for the long and thoughtful response. I have thought of asteroids as an interstellar vehicle, but the cost of energy to make it possible would be enormous. We have put things in space at enormous cost, and even though the cost has dropped significantly it’s still around $25000 per kilogram. Assume that we can do that for 1 percent of that cost, and we are still looking at trillions of dollars to start a project with no immediate financial return and zero reward for anyone currently living. I absolutely agree that we could do it, but humans would have to change our ways of thinking drastically. It would be actually easier to convince everyone to save the environment here on Earth.
These explanations that stray into metaphysics by being unfalsifiable are always interesting, but they reveal more about the people and cultures putting them forward than they do about the objective universe.
thats true! it just feels quite strange why we dont see any other life out there
@@thefrostbee4182 It is, but I figure we are currently simply too ignorant about the universe to understand why it is silent.
@@testname3829 it’s cool to think about! And it’s cool to see what it says about ourselves as u said
First time I've heard "Grabby Aliens" being called a "solution" to the Fermi Paradox; before this video it has always seemed like it was just a reinforcement of the paradox itself, showing logic leads to concluding we should indeed be seeing clear signs of aliens and yet we don't; in essence, just a more elaborate formulation of "where is everybody?"...
"where is the rent?" - grabby glork from C32LV
It's a solution because of the anthropic principle. At any time and place in the universe where you can look up at the sky and see alien life, you most likely wouldn't evolve to observe it. Because the aliens would have transformed your planet, preventing you from existing to observe them.
the original formulation was "why aren't they already here" as in, they should have colonized the entire galaxy or at least visited the solar system by now, not just that we'd be able to see them "out there"
@@RoyWiggins
Oh and youd never see a species in space because variety and differences are paramount. If a new species can see you theyll just copy you, no spacefaring species will actually ever allow itself to be known also due to the fact slavery between species is quite. Quite. Common. Earth is lucky its small and only evolved one race at a time.
Easy answer.
When any species evolves tech follows. As tech advances two things inevitably follow.
Artificial intelligence and fear.
As the organic species grows in advancement and complexity so too does their capacity for destruction and the ease with which it occurs.
Eventually factions will react out of extreme paranoia and fear as technology continues to advance further and further eventually getting to where the weapons of choice for interplanetary warfare is lobbing black holes at each other.
Once a species reaches that point the Artificially intelligent beings will deduce that the most appropiate action to continue lifes sustainment is to remove the advanced sapient races.
Quite sad that it happens everytime though.
Economists have a bad enough track record of predicting the future in their own field of expertise, I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting one to figure out the future of cosmology and alien life.
I think it's an excellent model, but as the video explains, it also has a severe problem in assuming red dwarf systems are habitable. Once you assume there won't be habitable planets sitting around M-dwarfs for trillions of years, everything about the intergalactic Fermi paradox changes because G-type star production is in decline, meaning we may not be nearly as early as its proponents want to believe. I also think it appeals to an anti-Copernican crowd where we are special, and humanity and/or our AIs are "endowed" to own several galactic superclusters.
@@codys447only our robots will have time, and that’s if they still work once they leave the Oort Cloud not to mention the millennia across the depths, if our radiation protection works.
Yes Windmonkey! Just look how long it took Economists to stop their obsession with a model that depends on a "rational actor" when it's obvious that our brains evolved to make quick decisions on limited information.
@@codys447 I think it's funny you say that because, even though the conclusions might appeal to the anti-Copernican, the premises seem like a gross over-application of the Copernican principle. I'm in the 99th percentile for males in the world height-wise, and if I was applying the Copernican principle as much as they are here, I would be trying to find explanations as to why I'm not shorter.
@@jetfuelcantmeltsteelmemes8791 As another commenter said, there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world and only 8 billion humans. Statistically speaking, I should be an ant.
"Future aliens are why we live in the past" is truly an incoherent idea.
If there are going to be sentient creatures, then someone has to be the first one. Sentient beings a trillion years from now won't be marveling at what a weird coincidence it was for *us* to be born so early.
So if there's a lottery with one-in-a-billion odds of winning, a billion people buy tickets, and one person wins, that's not surprising.
But if there's a lottery with one-in-a-billion odds of winning, only one person buys a ticket, and that person wins, that's very surprising.
We are, as far as our current observational ability is concerned, in the second situation. We can only see one lottery ticket, and it happens to be the winning one. It is of course possible that we are just very lucky, and I don't think anybody discussing the topic is dismissing that possibility outright. It's just that the odds of it are, y'know, one in a billion. So in effect the probability is 0.999999 that something else is going on -- that our assumption of a fair one-in-a-billion lottery is wrong somehow.
That's my main problem with the entire concept, and probably why I haven't ever heard of this idea aside from on RUclips. It's such a weird misinterpretation (or perhaps over-reliance) of the Copernican principle that I don't even know where to start with explaining why it doesn't make sense. Makes me think of the saying "You're not right. You're not even wrong."
@@thecosmickid8025 But what would could as a ticket with that metaphor? is it every star? every planet? When we start looking at just stars we see so many tickets that us having gotten a winning one isn't so strange.
@@JaneDoe-dg1gv The ticket in this metaphor would be a civilization. The winning ticket is the first one.
Cards on the table, I am extremely skeptical of this kind of logic too. I'm just trying to give it the fairest hearing possible, and "this is just nonsense" doesn't strike me as a satisfactory refutation.
@@thecosmickid8025 It really couldn't be civilizations as tickets because a winning ticket is to have civilization in the first place.
Two points:
- Industrialized civilizations are inherently unstable, and likely to flame out before making any progress beyond their home planets. (see: Earth)
- Interstellar civilizations are functionally impossible to maintain. Additionally, space colonization is so difficult, resource-intensive, and emotionally demanding for colonists that sufficiently advanced civilizations are unlikely to pursue it seriously.
Hypotheses like the one discussed in this video frustrate me because they tend to ignore basic realities in favor of attractive tropes commonly found in science fiction (i.e. galactic civilizations, all-consuming alien forces, etc.) I counter this perspective with what I call the “boring principle”-the reality of the cosmos is considerably more mundane than the stories we imagine.
Bro everything u said only applies to human life. What if the intelligent life doesn't have emotions? 😂
@Kazuhiro-i Define your question? What do you mean emotions?.
Intelligent+Emotions= Chaos no progress.
Intelligent+No Emotions= Successful progress.
I'm pretty sure we are still progressing towards expansion into our solar system, and yet you are using us as an example of a civilization that flamed out? Earth had higher average temperatures and CO2 during the dinosaur times. Just because we don't have temperature readings doesn't mean it's our fault the planet is changing and we are flaming out. Our orbit cycles and both geological data and astrological data confirms that even without humans lakes have gone from deserts back to lakes for centuries at a time because it turns out the distance we are to the sun matters more than human activities. The problem with global warming theory is every deadline they set we pass by and prove the estimate wrong. I will trust millions of years of cycles over a few hundred years, which could just be one layer among hundreds without fosil fuels.
Point 1: "Inherently" ? There is only one sample we have and even for that one we don't know how unstable our civilization is, it hasn't ended yet.
Point 2: Space colonization seems difficult with the resources we currently have, but assuming it will be difficult forever and for every species out there is completely baseless
@@linuszarrouk2004 our defence mechanism? Tik tok dances
One thing that I notice about Grabby Aliens is that it's very appealing. We want a universe that looks like Star Trek. The answers to the fermi paradox mostly boil down to either life can't colonize the galaxy (which kills a lot of fun SF, so that's no fun), or that there is no aliens (which feels unlikely, and also kills a lot of SF, so that's no fun). Grabby Aliens invokes suggests aliens are roughly at our level of development, and that we're all equally vying for a cool, galaxy-spanning empire and a vibrant, interstellar future that also has interesting aliens. That's fun SF! So, people find it appealing. This is not to comment on the validity of the theory! But why I think it became so popular.
It's not about cool, it's just what life does. It keeps on existing and the way to keep on existing is to expand. If life stays in one place, stagnant, it will disappear. So expanding life keeps on existing. And that us, that's the life that exists today. If we won't expand, we will disappear. If there is a life out there that will expand, it will inherit the universe.
Ever play an rts or halo? If those aliens out macro us and tech up faster or rush us before our macro has paid off we lose. Now imagine a giant free for all where one faction snowballs by beating every other faction and claiming their troops and resources, you get the covenant from halo. lol I would not call that fun just go play halo reach and see how that ends.
By the way, theories are never described as valid or invalid, only arguments are.
Grabby aliens is much the same as the "boring" no aliens case. It suggests we're alone in our galaxy and all nearby galaxies
Just because you said Star Trek just before I read Ferengi Paradox instead of Fermi 😅
"Its like showing up to a party very first, and you wonder... is there really a party... are other people even coming?"
Of course, given enough time your party will sooner or later have enough people to fill every free square foot.... Even if only 1 in 1 million people want to join your party, given an infinite amount of time, it will still fill up.
The question isn't if there are people coming to the party or not, its if we will have gotten bored and left before the real fun guests show up fashionably late at 2 am
But what if they are on a road that expands faster than the car allows them to get there?
"its like dressing up as a CEO and believing that tomorrow you are going to be rich. Just because your bank account isnt full with money already, doesnt mean it wont any second now" this theory in a nutshell. despite there being no evidence to support any of those claims, the theory just ignores everything and goes on to make its hypothesis.
@@kierhudson1328sounds like you should have had a road trip rather than a party
maybe its impossible to reach the stars, and every civilization just stops at their own doorstep
@@CharIie83 I think it may be feasible to reach ONE star/remote habitable planet.
Given the length of time and investment it would take to accomplish the feat.....I imagine the settlers on the new planet would stop there, and never consider doing it again.
I feel like the Grabby Aliens hypothesis presented in this video is not the same one I have heard before. I think in the version I was told, the reason we don't see grabby aliens isn't because they are spreading close to the speed of light, but because we are just early and no one is there and close enough for us to see.
We do not have to assume they can travel at near lightspeed to be grabby either. At 1% speed of light, a civilization can still colonize our whole galaxy in 10 million years, which is still very fast compared to the time for us to evolve. Grabby Aliens is basically saying that because spreading is so fast compared to evolution, an observer can only see either a pre-grabby local region where no one is out there, or a post-grabby region where everywhere is grabbed, and the intermediary state is very short compared to either of the two states. Also factor in the assumption that no civilization can emerge in an already grabbed region, then we would arrive at the conclusion that we could only be at a pre-grabby region, solving the fermi paradox.
I think this was the version I heard, and if not, at least this could be a plausible explanation nonetheless.
Yes. I watched the kurzgesagt video and it semed to build around this exact idea that you said. And as you say this idea has been around a while.
I see no need for hard locks and red dwarfs for the bones of the theory to be very compelling.
Biological creatures fill niches...for that we have N = billions.
So if a technological civilisations niche is space, and it can spread quickly then either aliens dont exist or we wouldn't because the earth would have been grabbed by now
This is also my understanding of it. No m-dwarves or speed of light travel required. Just the fact that a civilization occupying a habitable planet would preclude the possibility of other life developing on that planet
yeah this was also my understanding?
halfway through the vid i got a vague impression bro is mad his idea didnt grt picked up like grabby aliens has, as well, which makes me find this video's intent a touch more suspect (just a touch)
@evernoon your explanation is the way I remember it and it makes way more sense to me then the video said. The video seems to say the only way we could NOT see them is if the were expanding at the Speed of Light...that makes no sense to me, if they we expanding at 1% of LS we would definitely not see them.
@@joelee3716 near-lightspeed would be inefficient and would need extreme shielding. It could end up being impractical in even the most advanced civilization's standards.
hi there, this is my first time visiting the channel, and i just subscribed. i don't see many 'academics' on youtube (with large subscriber counts - yours is approaching 1M soon!), so this is refreshing. i love the way you grab material from other sources (e.g. movies and other youtube channels) and then reference them with a watermark - i think this is a great practice! i like how you have done your own academic peer-reviewed research and have shared it with others, whilst also appearing approachable and 'human' in your presentation of the science. i am looking forward to watching more of your content :)
I'm having one of my many depressed days, stuff like this showing up lights it up just a bit more. Thanks for making these.
Stick with it then.There is light.
As a bipolar sufferer, thinking about how insignificant I am compared to the universe always helps me put things in perspective.
I am a ridiculously improbable conglomeration of strangely behaving bits of mass that can somehow understand the universe I find myself in. I should count myself very lucky to exist.
My problems always seem much more manageable after a healthy dose of thinking about the universe.
Your comment did the same for me
It's funny how the smallest things, like finding a good creator in you subscription feed, can overshadow every other feeling. Our minds are amazing sometimes.
However, for me; no matter what mood i'm in, these videos often replaces it with existential dread. But the soft music and dr. Kippings soothing voice makes it feel like a good thing.
You're gonna make it... you're best day ever hasnt happened yet. It's coming . Be excited for whats coming ❤
My take on this "where are the aliens" hypothesis is simply the vast area of space. Space is huge and all. Maybe there are life way far away from us to pick up with any instrument. Maybe there is something preventing lifes from being too close to each other?
Hot take here but I think the aliens purposely ended their existence.
There doesn't even need to really be something actively keeping life apart, as simple probability will suffice. There's an unfathomable number of planets in our galaxy alone, and the distances between solar systems is just as incomprehensible. Even if 99% of all planets evolved sentient life, the odds any of those two planets would be close enough for one to observe the other is still fractional, because that 1% would still be billions of planets spanning trillions of lightyears.
@@trianglemoebius yeah people often forget how huge the observable universe is. And we still don't know if it even has a limit or not.
Yeah or maybe aliens came here 2 million years ago found these neat bipedal apes that immediately started worshiping them as Gods. So they set up a 30 light year nature reserve around our star system so they wouldn't screwup our evolution.
@@THX..1138 hah! One of my other ideas for this type of theory is that gods were ancient aliens who came to Earth and left, and we are their decesdents or leftover worshippers.
I like your videos. You don't blow smoke or try to provide false hope. But you're very thought provoking and your voice is so relaxing.
He also ignores a whole shit ton of circumstantial evidence because he has no understanding of it or inability to apply a scientific method.
I think grabby aliens are highly unlikely for a couple reasons:
1. Space is big. Really big. And most of it is empty.
2. It is hard for life to evolve and survive in this universe. Really hard. And once life gets started, it is only adapted for life on its home planet, and other environments are inhospitable for its survival.
3. Space travel requires a lot of energy and matter, and a lot of technological advancement. You can't just send out millions of manned space missions in every single direction at light speed and colonize every single planet you come across. It requires resources to build the spaceships, the people need food and water and everything to survive. There are quite a lot of logistics required to make this practical.
4. Suppose you actually succeed at colonizing and conquering first your entire home planet (as humanity has done), then your entire solar system, then your entire galaxy. Each step is tougher than the one before, much tougher. How then would you expand beyond your galaxy? The void of intergalactic space in between galaxies is really, really big, with almost no resources there to mine or use as fuel or food or anything, and you would have to cross a tremendous distance before you ever get to another galaxy. These are really, really big distances that would take huge amounts of time to cross. If anything goes wrong and the crew on your ship all dies or whatever, the mission is a failure. That is not the type of thing that is even remotely practical, or that would have the benefits outweigh the costs on any remotely rational cost-benefit analysis.
5. Suppose grabby aliens actually overcome all these barriers and colonize multiple galaxies according to how the grabby alien hypothesis defines them. Statistically, the exact collection of features that define grabby aliens are likely to be incredibly rare. So rare that, in an area the size of our cosmic event horizon, around 16 billion light years, there is probably a less than 1% chance of them occurring in this particular region of the universe, assuming we live in a truly infinite universe. In fact, if the probability of them is greater than 0%, even a tiny tiny fraction of 1%, they are 100% guaranteed to exist somewhere in an infinite universe. However, the issue is that our cosmic event horizon limits which part of the universe we can interact with. So, unless the grabby aliens happen to exist within the confines of our little cosmic event horizon, we will never encounter them and they will never encounter us, and for the purposes of our finite known universe rather than the infinite unknown parts of the universe, they do not exist in our region of the universe.
So, do I think grabby aliens exist? Maybe somewhere VERY far away, outside of our 16 billion light year cosmic event horizon, but nowhere near us, which means, realistically speaking, no, in our part of the universe, they almost certainly don't exist, statistically speaking. Almost certainly meaning that it is highly unlikely but not impossible. It is a better use of our time to think about things that are more likely to be true, than things like this which are highly unlikely. Do I think there is probably something similar to grabby aliens, maybe even that exact thing, at least somewhere in an infinite universe, very very far away? Yes, of course! That is the nature of infinity. If the probability of something is greater than zero, even if it is only 0.000000000001% or something, it is still 100% guaranteed to occur somewhere in an infinite universe, and not just occur once but an infinite number of times.
But another part of infinity is, these grabby aliens would be so far away, we will never encounter them. And because of how cosmic expansion results in the cosmic event horizon making an ever-smaller part of the universe causally connected over time, this means, in all likelihood, grabby aliens will NEVER reach our part of the universe at ANY point in the future, no matter how many billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions, etc. of years go by, because our part of the universe is physically cut off from the rest of the universe due to the cosmic event horizon from the universe's expansion and the speed of light limit. Wherever grabby aliens DO exist, they are stuck in their OWN cosmic event horizon, centered on their own home planet, unable to expand beyond it, and it likely doesn't overlap with our own cosmic event horizon, centered on the Earth, because the 2 planets are too far away from each other for their respective 16 billion light year cosmic event horizons to overlap.
Thank you. Your comment was way more developed and logical than this video.
I do want to point out that the Grabby Alien Hypothesis would only be galactic in scale, so as long as you think that the probability of only one interstellar species evolving per galaxy (or less), which seems to be the case in your argument, then it would be consistent. Grabby Alien Hypothesis would only take effect if two or more interstellar species are possible to evolve within one galaxy if they were to hypothetically no never meet within the past, present, and future of the Universe.
I don't like the "expansion as fast as the speed of light" assumption, but I don't think that really affects what I think of the grabby aliens hypothesis. I think that if you make the assumption that grabby civilizations make it impossible for new life to emerge on a planet they've grabbed, the fact that we exist means that we're among the first within our sphere of grabbiness since there's been plenty of time for other worlds to develop grabby aliens and therefore suggests that the density of technological civilizations in a grabbiness sphere is low. This means that if the grabby aliens hypothesis is true, either technological civilizations are rare or grabbiness spheres are small, and doesn't eliminate the possibility that both are true. Meaning we're still left with the Fermi Paradox.
To me the problem of expansion at the speed of light is that it assumes all grabby aliens expand at the speed of light.
The paper uses 0.3c, IIRC. That's close to light speed in the grand scheme of things.
It's necessary for the theory because, if an interstellar civilization were expanding much slower than that, we would see them coming from a long way away. Us not seeing them implies a short window to see them.
The paradox is only a paradox is you assume we could even detect technological civilisations at massive distances, let alone shorter ones
Or, that even if such grabby aliens were to exist, there's nothing to say they couldn't have evolved, expanded and eventually gone extinct with their constructs and signals having long since faded out long before Earth was around.
ruclips.net/video/Amb5ee2x9DY/видео.html
Plot twist: We're the first grabby aliens.
And if so, given our current course of grabbing resources and converting them into pollutants, we won't be grabbing much beyond this fragile sphere.
😮😂
It's the reason we need the ending of Raised by Wolves. I have bets that was the target main plot to-be-revealed
@Charles-Darwin man was I upset with the second season, the new producers totally dropped the balm on that show. Season 1 was amazing
@@astyanax905 warner got all mythraic on us, realizing the show would make them look bad 😆
The thing that seems very very weird to me about the grabby aliens statistical argument, is that I just don't understand how it answers the main question that it purports to answer.
Provided I understood things correctly, the starting question is: If you and I assume ourselves to be an average observer, then why do you and I see an early and empty universe, while our best theories tell us that the universe has a long and densely populated future ahead of it?
Which grabby aliens answers with: That long and densely populated future contains only long-lived "grabby" civilizations.
To which my follow-up question remains exactly equal the original question... If we assume ourselves to be an average observer, then why are you and I not members of one of those long-lived grabby civilizations in the far future?
As far as I understand it, nothing about grabby aliens even prevents the emergence of new observers in those civilizations. Because fundamentally it is not civilizations that observe, it is sentient beings. To me this seems so obvious that I'm weirded out by so many people discussing grabby aliens without at least touching on the "who are observers?" question. It makes me wonder if I have really completely misunderstood everything, somehow.
I don't know if we're both right or both wrong, but we're in the same boat. Nothing about this argument makes any sense to me on a fundamental level. I'm not even on board with the Copernican Principle being applied this way in general, but people much smarter than me keep doing it, so I guess I'm probably missing something about that too. To me, it just seems like the most obvious case of statistical sampling bias of all time, but physicists keep talking about it like it's one of the universe's great mysteries.
Taking a sample size of 1/x where x is unknown and then trying to extrapolate it into anything seems ridiculous. Especially when the 1 is a biased sample. It's like looking outside your window to try to determine what the weather is like everywhere on Earth. It was 75 degrees and overcast outside today and I expect myself to be a typical observer, so it was probably 75 and overcast for a vast majority of people everywhere on the planet, right? For that matter, I bet it was 75F for a majority of conscious observers everywhere in the universe today because I expect my perspective as an observer to be typical.
Even talking about the time in which we were born being atypical doesn't make any sense on a fundamental level. Is it pretty unlikely that out of a sample of every possible observer to ever exist, that I would be born in 1993? Sure, that's wildly unlikely. But what if I were born in the year 3,847,219,623? Being born in that exact year is also wildly unlikely. Both of these probabilities are almost zero, but someone using the Copernican Principle in the year 3,847,219,658 would say that it's much more likely that they would be born in the time period of 5,000,000,000-10,000,000,000. Any date you pick is going to have a probability about as close to zero as you can get. Nobody in any perspective would ever come to the conclusion that they are a "typical observer" so this logic would always lead you down a misleading path.
@@firstlast6085 I'm theoretically on board with the statistics of extrapolating from a sample size of one. Of course the result is literally the least trustworthy you can be relying on data, but the pure mathematics of it does make sense. This is called the maximum likelihood estimation, which you can look up on Wikipedia. The Copernican Principle is a slightly less mathematical concept, but it follows similar logic.
That's theory, because on a practical level all of it is just way too uncertain. However, even on a theoretical level, I don't understand how the grabby alien solution applies the principle. Sure, we know of only one globally unified civilization, so we are permitted to assume it is average in every way. However, as I see it, we are NOT permitted to view it as average is some ways, but not others. What the grabby aliens solution is doing, is viewing our civilization as average in regards the circumstances of its founding, but then pushes all other ways it could be average aside, merely to make them fit the story.
The example I gave is the individual average observer. If grabby aliens is true, then the universe would host trillions of sentient observers in its lifespan, with me being an extreme outlier.
Another example is the lifespan of a civilization. The maximum likelihood estimation tells us that we most likely are about halfway through, giving humanity another 250k years or so, for a total of 500k years. That would allow us to colonize the milky way, but would should also assume that 500k years is the normal lifespan for most civilizations, which doesn't match the grabby aliens solution.
Of course, all of these assumptions should be taken with a grain of salt, but the point is that all of them are equally valid! Choosing one over all the others - without any justification as far as I can tell - just doesn't convince me. And especially when it is contradicting much more of those assumptions than it is validating, then the entire solution is built on a foundation that actually undermines it.
@@upgradeplans777 I disagree with the lifetime estimate. As we are keeping up, I would be surprised if we survive into the next millenium (although I won't be surprised as I will be long dead in case I am wrong).
@@ertymexx Yes, there are a lot of data points we can use to make predictions about this. And it makes complete sense to try and do so. But the situation I was talking about is when you literally only have one data point (such as the age of the only global civilization we know about), then you can still take the average of it, and you can still apply the maximum likelihood estimation to it.
From that simple fact alone, we are justified in saying that the most likely lifespan of global civilizations is 500k years. Then you introduce another datapoint: there is evidence behind the prediction that we wont last another 1000 years. And then the math is different. 🙂I don't think we have any disagreement about that.
Brutal take-down. Delivered with professionalism and receipts.
This cycle of thought and criticism and debate is exactly how we were able to come as far as we have as a species.
Nothing better than opening my laptop to discover a new Cool Worlds video. Thank you professor Kipping!
Happy Friday!
Brown noser.
Nothing better then a brown noser
Cool Worlds, John Michael Godier, and History of the Universe are automatic clicks for me.
Yep, saw this, grabbed snacks and a drink, and sat down to enjoy
I have been waiting for you to cover this fascinating hypothesis for a while. The grabby aliens hypothesis seems weird and strange and is yet so much alike biological systems and organisms would actually expand.
Ye I've wanted to tackle this one for a while too!
That is if they get past the stage we are in. I doubt it very much. They would have exactly the same problems and the biggest problem is wars. Man has too many psychos in power who love money and war. I would place a bet that every civilisation that has been and will be has this exact problem.
I am a big believer that we will destroy ourselves one day and if we don’t then nature will.
Another thing is space travel to other stars. We already know that it is virtually impossible to get warp drive and to fuel a ship to get to any decent speed is astronomical.
People like to dream but that is all it is.
@@CoolWorldsLab I'm so glad that instead of just summarizing it you offered your own well thought out arguments and analysis as well. Love this channel :)
The world needs so much more of 18:46 . We need to recapture that in all fields, and make it the norm again.
Feel like it's pretty much the norm
It is the norm, it's just that the exceptions that break it are more memorable
Worth noting: Astronomy and many other areas of research can afford to be magnanimous because "who is right" doesn't have a _known, immediate, and dramatic_ impact on someone's quality of everyday life. Thus cordiality is the norm. When it comes to ethics, morality, politics, & (socio)economics, that is very much not the case, which is why you will see people understandably get upset.
This is not to try and turn the conversation to that end. Rather simply to point out that some subjects simply lend themselves to "rational debate" a lot better than others. I suspect if there was the potential for a (known, immediate, dramatic) impending asteroid ending all life on earth, the debate might get considerably more heated.
I feel like a lot of people forget how big the universe is. It's not like "Oh, there's lights in the distance there's people there." Except the universe is so big we won't be able to see beyond what the laws of physics lets us see. Like just because we can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Observable universe vs actual universe size. On top of that, they act like aliens are smarter than us and will have figured out faster than light travel as well as being able to make dyson spheres and so on, when in reality they're probably just as limited in intelligence than us. And even if they're 10 times smarter, that doesn't mean they can just disregard physics and will be a giant galactic force like scifi stories show them as. With that all being said, aliens aren't always going to be like us, There is assuredly aliens who will just be animals roaming a planet. There is 100% aliens out there, but we'll never see them with how big the universe is, ontop of the hurdles we will have to over come, and what they'll need to overcome.
And those “lights in the distance” are so far away that the light we’re seeing is billions of years old. If there was alien life, its in a different time to what we can see. Maybe there’s alien life there now but their light hasn’t got to us yet.
@@notmenotme614 mhmhm. There's a very human mentality that "oh, aliens exist, they HAVE to come visit us. If they don't then they don't exist." There is a theory I do like, or understand. That aliens will end up destroying their own planet with war, or global warming, or over population before they can figure out space travel. Depressing, but I feel that line of thinking helps put aliens more in our shoes than in a pedestal.
Professor Kipping has one of the best voices in this genre. Great video, as always ~ I was hoping CW would weigh in on "Grabby Aliens".
Hope it didn't disappoint!
@@CoolWorldsLab never! This is one of my favorite channels, thank you to everyone on the Cool Worlds team ~ your videos are always thoughtful and informative, and I appreciate you 👏👏👏👏😘
@@CoolWorldsLabofc it didn’t
It's entirely possible that we're the first living beings that could be considered sapient in the universe.
We simply don't have enough data to make conclusions on how likely/unlikely the development of life and sapient life is in environments that could theoretically support it.
We are not even the first sapient things on earth. We are the first with advanced technology though.
@@ertymexx
No. There was no other sapient creatures. Except for maybe the Neanderthals', but they're kinda still around as we bred with them and are partly them.
@@MrNote-lz7lh Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Erectus and many, many more.
Really love David Kipping. He have so great voice and interesting thoughts. Thank you for all the time and effort you and your team put into making these videos.
I'm so glad that you pointed out how similar it is to ancient people explaining everything by blaming "gods", because I've tried to point out the same thing to people. I've even noticed a tendency of some people who cease believing in religion to then shift to aliens as if they simply NEED something otherworldly to cast their hopes on. Just kinda odd to me.
The issue I took with this theory is assuming intentions of lifeforms we haven't found.
Isn't everyone else in the universe exactly like us? Or are we just a planet full of narcissists.
Same here, even amongst human cultures the need for constant expansion isn't even a constant and our modern assumptions that it is comes from a modern post-industrial revolution and colonialism viewpoint.
I already* felt suspicious about this the moment these somehow **``monolithic``** aliens were brought up, and were mainly the focus of such theory from there.
Clearly an obligate sapient species comparable to us from there would already be more individual and complex from each other, even in small communities, so why assume that they would all think the same like a stereotypical hive mind???
Literally all life operates on certain assumptions. No life, for example, can exist without replicating itself. None. All it takes is one lifeform to replicate more than another for the replicator to make the one that doesn't replicate as much irrelevant. On Earth, this sort of thing is 'mitigated' by millions of years of back and forth. An ecosystem balance. When one organism starts to expand too much, they run out of resources, and thus start to die off. Balancing their numbers naturally. Because Earth doesn't have infinite resources.
In space, things are different. All it would take is a single organism, a single alien species, to start expanding indefinitely. They could move on, constantly, but unlike on Earth, with animals and organisms, there is no self-balancing act. These beings would be too smart for that. All resources would be utilized, all. And if one alien species doesn't do it, then they're irrelevant. They do not matter. because while they're twiddling their thumbs, conservatives, the ones who decide to expand WILL expand into their territory, overwhelming them. Period.
This is the core of grabby aliens. Not that we're assuming how ALL aliens behave, but we're looking at how life behaves with near-infinite resources, and then realizing even if ONE out of a million alien species decides to expand, it's over. Everyone else loses.
PBS spacetime goes over why this is reasonable to assume
1. Organisms tend to be expansionist because of natural selection (which applies at cosmic scales as well of course)
2. You only need 1 in a thousand to become expansionist, and the result will be a universe dominated by expansionists, because expansionism grows your numbers and power exponentially. Example: Imperialist countries in the past.
One simple assumption solves the Fermi paradox: There's a hard limit to technological advancement.
YES! We take the assumption of unending development for granted
This. I always think of space elevators and solar sails and how complex they would be to build and maintain. I mean, chemistry and physics can only take us so far before we cross into the realm of science fiction rather than feasible concepts.
@@Miguel.LSpace elevators are a fairly readily solvable engineering problem though (there's a clear incremental improvement pathway in materials science to solve the one remaining problem, sufficient tether strength), and solar sails are even easier. Neither of these are Fermi paradox grade stuff though because they primarily facilitate expansion within the solar system, but still
After reading about SAFIRE and the remarkable work with elemental transmutation through Nuclear Plasma reators currently underway by Aureon Ltd I feel our civilization is on the cusp of something grand and transformative
@@CoolWorldsLabbrilliant way to summarize it
We have a lot of biases that affect our exploration of the unknown. One of them being our propensity to project our own motivations and perhaps instinctual drives onto other hypothetical species.
We as a species seem to have a need to conquer and dominate. The evolutionary path of other sentient creatures may result in a different social structure, a different relationship with their environment and a different way of thinking about the cosmos and their place in it.
We don't understand our own consciousness, let alone the workings of minds that evolved light-years away. The most alien thing imaginable cannot even be imagined by us.
Well said
Possibly.. but you might not be giving us enough credit. There's a lot we don't understand, but I think we can use our imagination and come up with a whole lot of possibilities. If the Alien is a biological creature.. and has somehow found a way to survive for many millions of years.. unless they're popping in and out of different dimensions, they would still likely have certain survival needs.
I guess it's possible they are that advanced and just decided.. the universe isn't that interesting and not worth exploring, or don't have any desire to make contact with other species, either because they had done it in the past and it didn't go well, or because they already understand how primitive we are, and are waiting to see if we evolve into something more interesting. I guess maybe if time isn't a concern.. Why not wait until life meets certian technological advancements before you bother making contact. Could be a species unable to even populate their own solar system isn't even at it's infancy stage yet.
True, but it is sufficient for _some_ aliens to become grabby at some point. They may well be 0.1% of all alien species, but due to their grabby nature, they would still occupy most of the universe.
@@cheshire1 eventually, and if a few, given the size - that eventually is going to take a very long time and you are not very likely to encounter them early.
I think that there’s no method for a united civilisation to persist across hundreds of light-years, it’s never some sort of power hungry imperialism. And O’Neill cylinders in a Dyson swarm are more than enough to solve overpopulation if populations don’t expand exponentially (they aren’t). But I can see there being a motivation for sending out self-replicating probes, just for research. It’s definitely possible to make one robust enough so it would sooner self-destruct than go rogue.
Though none of this applies to machine civilisations, they absolutely could remain united across hundreds of light years.
Isn't the reason we can't see other civilizations that exist now, that the radiation (including light) that arrives here for most of our own galaxy is over 1000 years old? Our galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across. So even if these civilizations exist, we would not know about them for thousands of years.
Yes, but the chances of two civilizations evolving at exactly the same time is extremely farfetched. The chances of that happening is next to null.
@@deathbysvent source: trust me bro.
But for real: we have several cases of parallel evolution on our own planet, as well as searching for life evolved at roughly the same time as we did in our own solar system. So the chances are not next to null if that much research and money is invested in finding life on mars and europa and such
feel like the main philosophical issue with this theory is that its assuming an alien civilization would act similar to the way our human civilization does.
Assuming that there are billions of alien civilizations all, somehow, expanding out in every direction at the speed of light seems like the biggest issue for me. That doesn’t sound like a thing that is possible, let alone reasonable to assume.
That's actually one of the least problematic assumptions. Like us, they must have evolved on a world in which other creatures evolved and they would have evolved to compete for life and resources against those other creatures until, eventually, just like us, they evolved to compete amongst themselves for the available resources and best mates. The laws of differential survival are universal.
I'm still hung up on how most of society believe that if an advanced alien species somehow traveled to our solar system that they'd actually come straight to earth. How heartbroken would humanity really be if said advanced aliens shoot right past earth without even a hello wave and straight to Venus to terraform and settle?
@SmileyEmoji42 except that again presupposes that the environment another life form raises from is even remotely like ours.
Ie: a society of silicon based life forms that use a form of photosynthesis for a caloric energy intake with a sentient hive mind, would develop technology in a vastly different form then us.
Or imagine an alien race that evolved/acted exactly like humans, but their planet has a substance that provided unlimited clean energy available way back in their caveman days. They would never see the need to devlop non-renewable resources for energy.
@@bossredd-77They'd visit Earth to observe propably because life like this is a very rare thing after all. Also, they aren't stupid lmao. They would know to not distrupt humanity as it is currently not ready for such a phenomen. They could contact some individuals they think are interesting as an experiment but we'd shrugg these people off as freaks anyway so and we wont believe them anyway xD
I think this is making a very simple question way too complicated.
The entire premise of the Fermi paradox is based on the idea that we don't see aliens when we look at the cosmos. But... Do we?
Maybe we "see" them, but we don't know it and don't detect them with our half assed eyes and technology. Isn't it much simpler to say that at a certain point we will have the tecnology to say "oh, here they are, they were right in front of us this whole time"?
In astronomy, there's a whole lot of '...is that a pulsar or a dyson sphere?' going 'round.
I'm pretty sure wat u propose is one of the Fermi paradox theories
Is the assumption that the number of hard steps is a universal value really necessary? Wouldn't the planets with fewer hard steps simply produce life much earlier, which would then expand to occupy the universe, rendering the ones with more hard steps irrelevant?
The steps would seem inherent though. While evolution has tried countless pathways countless times, there seem to be some that were both essential to us being here, and which happened only once in Earth's history. Abiogenesis, symbiogenesis, life becoming multicellular, the emergence of our level of intelligence. Even knowing that to be here we must have been very lucky, we seem to have been *exceptionally* lucky.
Hard steps suggests a defined end goal. We got "here" through a series of hard steps. Someone else doesn't need to get "here," they just need to get somewhere. Their steps are likely very different. The only real universal hard step is probably closer to 1 hard step: a minimum stability over a minimum period of time.
Earth produced life only 200-300 million years after it was formed, an insignificant amount of time on a cosmic scale.
I would assume that every habitable planet produces life, the hard steps are found elsewhere.
Agreed. Hard Steps is obviously a very simple model. It seems clear enough there's _something_ which makes it hard/rare to become grabby, otherwise we'd already see the aliens. You can break that something down into multiple "hard steps", but each step doesn't have to be equally hard everywhere, so long as the overall result stays hard
@udishomer5852 There's no way to tell if 'early life' is a universal principle or whether Earth is just an extreme fluke. We only have one data point (Earth), so no statistical conclusions can be drawn.
I appreciate that you don’t focus on attacking someone and simply give your input, why you feel differently, and ending it with a friendly acknowledgement of another’s theories
I think one of the issues with trying to extrapolate M-dwarf habitability into the far future is that there are so many of these stars and they live for such long periods of time that it is difficult to imagine any form of exclusivity with respect to their nature. It's hard to conclude that ALL of them would remain inhospitable to advanced life for the ENTIRETY of their lifespans. We already know that some M-dwarfs aren't very active, and there remains a possibility that at least some of the ones that are active now will become less active as they age. And there are mechanisms by which a planet around such stars that has lost its atmosphere could regain a new atmosphere later in time. If M-dwarfs in the present era as a whole don't have a high likelihood of hosting grabby civilizations, but can become more so in the future, that would explain why we don't see grabby aliens all over the place in the present era, but it would not preclude a grabby alien scenario happening in the future.
If it wasn't for the asteroid that hit earth appropriately 65 million years ago wiping out the dinosaurs allowing mammals to evolve into modern day humans (us) we simply would not be here so thank that asteroid guys stay safe 👍
True! But perhaps dinosaurs would have developed civilisation themselves eventually?
@@CoolWorldsLab That's one theory 👍
@@CoolWorldsLabThat sounds like heresy against doctrine. (Star Trek Voyager reference.)
There is still a chance for civilizations of hyper intelligent techno-crows after we are gone :)
maybe with no asteroid there would have evolved 3 species of 'intelligent' life who knows
Videos like this make me think about millions or billions of years from now, some alien species will come upon earth {if it even still exists) and it will be a desolate wasteland, and they will dig up our ancient ruins. The future is scary to think about
I think this is more plausible than most people give credit to. I think we should build a relic for them to find...
Along those lines, what is the longest lasting relic we could manufacture? And how do we make it easy to find and unlikely to be destroyed by impact or exploding star?
@masterSageHarpuia i'd be of the idea that constructing a pyramid out of hardened and very dense metals waurd be an obvious sign of "intelligent species was here". A pyramid's shape would remain recognizable for hundreds of thousands of years, even after erosion - and if materials are selected correctly, you can create something nobody could mistake for a natural folmation
@@CoolWorldsLab We did. A long time ago. Then we did it again with Rushmore. At least they'll know what we looked like instead of having to figure out what the daym pyramids were about.
@@CoolWorldsLab But the future archeologists ascribing those relics to an ancient civilization will just be ridiculed ;-)
First video I've watched from this channel. Really well made and easy to follow. Great content. Thanks.
Just want to say thank you dr.kipping for doing what you do. You truly are absolute national treasure!
The idea that we may be the only sentient life forms in the universe really puts a lot of responsibility on humanity.
Do we though? I feel we think of ourselves in too much of a grand fashion. I honestly think we are to the universe what single cell organisms are to us. They have no idea of the layers of existence around them and neither do we. Doesn’t mean we can’t try of course, but we have a long way to go
Gotta make every moment count
**sits on couch and eats Cheetos *harder***
@@Azmodaii
Well. In a million years we would have spread life to every corner of our galaxy. Which seems pretty grand to me.
The Mantle of Responsibility is a lie.
17:26 A wise fictional doctor once said, “it’s never lupus.” I would amend that to say, “it’s never aliens, until it is.” That’s just my take. This theory ultimately doesn’t move the needle for me anywhere on the existence of aliens. Still pressing that x to doubt.
What about "grabby aliens" plus "simulation theory" PLUS an all-powerful deity?
17:54 i have never heard anyone make this point before. you're so right. get them
I am not an astrophysicist or evolutionary biologist nor do I hold a PHD in anything. I just have an interest in the sciences, especially those that deal in the existential. For a long time I have pondered the question; "if we see no evidence of other advanced civilisations, what if we are first?".
The "because, aliens" trope without strong and irrefutable evidence is to me at least, akin to spiritualism. Its a wish that something you believe is true. We don't want to be alone in the universe.
But what if we are? At least in our Galaxy. The potential and also responsibility that gives humanity is immense. The bigger question for me is, what do we do with this power?
@@DazzleRebel
Spread life through the barren universe, of course.
There are two possibilities: either we are alone, or we aren't.
Both can be frightening.
what responsibility?
Dark Forest? Yes, please.
If you're talking about a cake, then yes I agree
shhhhh the sophons might put a trget on your back!!
Dark forest is one of the most UNLIKELY scenarios
@@JP-rg1yj have you read the trilogy? it makes a convincing case so... "never ask an alien where "it" is from. it's impolite"
Another terrible myopic 'theory'
I absolutely love the fact that Cool Worlds really learns me how to be carefull with information:) Nice video!
Because he was careful to not tell you everything or something else? Just asking because he definitely misrepresented the Grabby Aliens Hypothesis a bit to make it easier to fight against.
Good afternoon from a Sunny UK David. Look forward to watching this. Hope all is well. Big up the notification gang 👍🏻
Always nice to see fellow Brits here!
@@CoolWorldsLab Thanks David!
11:23 I really don’t understand why the grabby alien theory requires the hard steps model to be true, if we are the first to emerge at least in our observable region of space
We already have an example of "grabby aliens": all life on Earth is related, because the first succesful organisms took over and made it impossible for any other, independent life to evolve.
Are you talking about humans, chickens or bacteria? 🤣
But animals are evolving around us all the time, even monkeys. Have you seen that video of a monkey sharpening a rock and then using it to break its enclosure?
@@THX..1138 Bacteria, I'm pretty sure.
@@globin3477 too bad for them Mycelium proves that false as its not native to Eath and is derived from space.
We can deduce this from the numerous genetic evolutions mushrooms have that protect them and no other species from space faring travel.
Great point. You are exactly right!
So, us. We are grabby aliens. 0:54
Although I am not sold on "Grabby Aliens", couldn't there be expanding civilizations out there that we simply cannot see because their arriving photons are simply too old? Meaning, the light reaching us from deep distant space might be from _BEFORE_ they began expanding. And thus, in reality (i.e., now), the could have immense structures and vast colonies whose light won't reach our detectors for millennia. Is that possible, Professor?
Doesn't take a professor. Yeah, it's possible. We look out into the stars, and we see ONLY the past.
Due to the accelerated expansion of hte universe, parts of the universe are already beyond our horizon. We will never be able to observe civilizations in those areas of the universe. And in the far future essentially all galaxies except our own will be beyond this horizon.
He literally said that in the video.
So what you're saying is that grabby aliens mined all the antimatter out of our universe, hence the baryon asymmetry.
Provocative
I like the idea!
Another explanation for lack of ‘grabby’ aliens so far (that an economist probably should’ve thought of) is that, given available technology, being a ‘grabby’ civilization takes two things: 1. Unification and commitment of an entire planet to one goal 2. Willingness to take enormous risks. An entire planet may not be able to agree with eachother, (as we see on earth) and spreading out your resources throughout space may not bring immediate rewards, and might even bring about the wrath of another civilization, leading to risk aversion. We always imagine aliens attacking out of desire to conquer, or desperation for resources. But if a planet is desperate for resources, they’re not going to spend what little they have to look through space for it. And desire to conquer is only going to possess about half of a planet’s residents at a time (if their version of consciousness is similar to ours and they aren’t a unimind like in 3 body problem). It might just be that if a civilization is smart enough, they decide keep to themselves. Alternatively, we could be in a young universe where we are developing simultaneously with other young civilizations. But think about the things we’ve sent into space. Very few, small and hard to spot rockets and telescopes aren’t even going to make a blip on other planet’s radars. If we assume they are developing at the same pace as us, they also would have sent out probes that are too small to differentiate from an asteroid.
I would say it doesn't take unification to sustainably go to another planet or star system, just a determined group. I do think you're right, it takes willingness for enormous risk. And yes, we might still never see technological aliens.
What you're saying is, when another intelligent species evloves, they are likely to be quarrelsome bastards just like us, and just as susceptible to the prisoner's dillema, and just as unable to commit to a *massive* joint undertaking?
They are referring to all of the radio signals, microwave signals, etc, that we produce. If it was out there (when the EM radiation was created) then we should have picked up on those signals from other civilizations. It is not about the size of rockets.
Monkeys on a typewriter has at least one big issue: for any given answer there is a nearly 100% (infinity to one odds) chance that it is wrong.
That and it has been tried, apparently the works of shakespeare are several poopstained pages of the letter S.
For me, the answer seems simple. I bet no aliens colonize the galaxy because of two factors.
1. Financial incentives are damned.
2. Communication essentially severs the species into two separate factions.
What good is collecting resources if it takes you 60 years to collect them and or bring them back "home"?
If it takes 20 years for one way messaging you might as well be severed from the home planet.
If a species splinters itself to colonize the galaxy, who actually benefits from it? The species doesn't benefit from it because nothing can be shared fast enough to make it beneficial.
Great point. The communication/faction issue seems like quite an important factor that isn't often mentioned
It might also be plain impossible to do interstellar travel.
Your assuming there is no was to communicate instantly or travel in ways we can't now. Look in to quantum entanglement just as one example. It's like people 500 years ago not believeing people could possibly communicate from one continent to another instantly. Bur they had no concept of a telephone or Internet. You couldn't travel 100 miles in a hour because no concept of a car or aircraft
@@blakecrosby5123 you make a good point. Which also means if that kind of communication is viable then we should be seeing the galaxy colonized.
It's not and it's probably because that form of communication actually doesn't work. It would be great if it did though..
@@blakecrosby5123 Quantum entanglement does not allow for travel or meaningful communication, by its nature.
Several decades ago the US military was designing a new fighter jet (F15? I can't recall) and someone realized they could save a lot of weight by making the cockpit fit the average pilot rather than having to include a bunch of adjustability. They went out and measured all of the current fighter pilots on a dozen different factors, took the averages, and designed the cockpit to that specification. No one fit in the cockpit. When going back to look at the data, no pilot was near the average on more than two measures. Not only that, but knowing one measure didn't help you narrow down the range on any of the others. They ended up having to include all of the same adjustments as were in every other plane because there's no such thing as an average human.
I suspect something similar is happening with the hard filter argument. I really like the core concept of several hard steps over a single great filter, but the statistical arguments fall flat because averages just aren't the right tool for the job. All of the predictions of the hard steps model are just a consequence of how they set up the thought experiment and averages being misused.
First video I’ve seen, and I’m impressed! I love how respectful you are of this odd theory and the man who postulated it. You even talked to him about your criticisms of his theory before you released your video. This was a very interesting video, and I appreciate your highly informative and intelligent remarks. I can’t wait to explore your other videos, and thank you for this one!
David's great! He's an actual professor in Astronomy so he always sets the bar exceptionally high.
It is also my first time seeing one of his videos. It is not my first time hearing about the Grabby Alien Hypothesis and I am rather disappointed that he misrepresented it so he could argue against it more easily.
4:20 it’s so much like Stellaris. You can find primitive species and either help them grow and be space bound or force them to slow progress and farm minerals and food for you. Wild concept
16:30 There is a way of falsifying grabby aliens with regards to expansion speed - if you can prove that there is an insurmountable cap to the expansion speed that is sufficiently slower than the speed of light, the grabby aliens hypothesis struggles to match the data. If you argue that this is impossible to prove, then your own alternative hypothesis (that aliens simply do not expand in that manner) is also impossible to prove.
The metalicity of the Universe was not high enough to create Earth-like rocky planets until it was ~8B years old¹. Our solar system formed 1.3B years after that. ¹Per Isaac Arthur.
I refuse to call this a paradox for the same reason I don't believe my kids when they can't find something they've barely looked for. If life exists here, it exists elsewhere. Why do i say this? Well, have we ever found a thing, that we can't find more of? Does even one person believe we've found all the life on our own planet? Why do we call this a paradox when we've barely begun to look? Perhaps, we are impatient?
Yes but at least your kid knows the thing he is looking for actually exists. And if you knew anything about the fermi paradox, you would understand that their presence would be obvious by now. But you would rather think in useless platitudes than think critically because it justifies your world view.
@@Stormyano lmfao if I knew anything about it! The hubris on you! Arrogant and insulting. Tell u what Internet know it all, I was just offering an opinion but u seem so in love with your own self that I would love u to explain it all! Go ahead , send me the link of u settling this once and for all. Go ahead I'm waiting on u to do more than be smug, follow it up with action. Can't wait to see u explain it all to the world. You'll likely be celebrated for solving this!
As I said in my reply above: human hubris.
Humans will be undetectable in a few decades. Even our modern communications are nearly undetectable, because it's wasteful to blast radio waves in all directions, so most are fairly directional... But precise directional radio is already in labs and will be in wifi and cell phones soon.
Either way, there's nothing we're looking for, as signs of life, that would actually make sense for an advanced species to still be using.
In other words: SETI will never detect radio waves, because aliens aren't blasting them out, like it's 1960's Earth ratio technology, for the galaxy to see.
@@roberthoople dude u offer nothing, nothing at all that's new or interesting to me. Waste of everyone's time.
@@mitchelcline9759 Did you reply to the wrong person?
I was expanding on your f'ck'ng comment, in defense of it, to the other knucklehead's pointless comment.
But, if you want to get into what so useless and time-wasting about my comment, than let's do this thing...
I'm not sure if you put it into words correctly.
The concept of grabby aliens is just an application of the anthropic principal. It doesn't matter how unlikely it is for an "Observer" to crop up in a universe, by definition, "Observers" are only going to crop up in universes where they win that lottery, aka passing all those hard steps/great filters.
The grabby aliens hypothesis is just the inclusion of "Other aliens existing first" as another hard step. It takes cosmological time frames, billions of years, for sentient creatures that can do science to evolve, but /on/ cosmological timescales, the very instant they do evolve, the very next instant, millions or even just thousands of years, they colonize their whole galaxy, so there is no time for another source of sentient life to pop up.
Imagine the galaxy like barrel of gunpowder. Imagine that a spark has an approximate 1 in 1,000,000 chance of spontaneously manifesting in the barrel every passing moment, that spark is sentient life. It's incredibly unlikely for the spark to manifest, but once it does, *boom*, there goes the barrel. Multiple sources of sentient life popping up in the same galaxy at relatively the same time would be like one spark manifesting by that 1/1,000,000 chance in one moment, and then by random unrelated chance, another spark also manifests in another part of the barrel at the exact next moment before that part gets overtaken by the explosion caused by the first spark. There is no particular reason why two sparks should go off independently at the same time, and there is no opportunity for a second one to happen after the first. It's like rolling a d-1million until you get a nat-1million and then you stop, but when you finally get the nat-1million, there is enough of a delay before you realize you got it for you to roll one more time, and that last accidental roll also coincidentally turns out to be a nat-1million. Technically possible, but utterly unlikely, and no reason for it to happen in particular.
The question is how far do you think humanity will advance in 100,000 years? In just a couple thousand years we went from banging rocks together to the beginnings of colonizing our solar system. In 50 years we went from creating calculators to touching on artificial intelligence. The reason we don't /see/ grabby aliens is because we /are/ the grabby aliens.
4:52 What if We earthlings are the grabby aliens ? 👽
Well, that is the most likely conclusion of the Grabby Alien Hypothesis. He just didn't want to mention it in the video so he could argue against the hypothesis more easily.
The Grabby alien Paradox.
Any Alien advanced enough to travel interstellar already has access to an infinite number of planets and resources... without germy critters on it. If you are an Alien Resource collector would you choose a barren planet... or a planet covered in violent monsters? Grabby Aliens would grab the easiest stuff not fight death and illness to get it. Same as we do.
We don't/can't know their ethics.
Right now we can be inside an Alien empire borders without knowing that we are kept inside a wildlife protection zone.
Grabby aliens? 👾 I’m intrigued
Always nice to see fellow Brits here!
2:28 Isn't that based on an assumption that those "steps" had to be statistically of the same "difficulty"? I think it could be that the first step is moderately hard and takes e.g. 500 million years, the next is harder and takes e.g. 2 billion years, etc.
The fact that the Grabby Aliens hypothesis uses advanced civilizations with presumably quintillions upon quintillions of individual members actually makes the problem it's trying to explain worse. If the future is populated by so much more consciousness, why do we find ourselves living in a time of relatively extremely scarce consciousness in the universe?
Not a comment on the idea but as a general comment on the timescales in question. Could it not be the case that alien civilisations of immense magnitudes may or may not have evolved but simply due to the distance/time involved, any evidence of their potential varied existences could simply have become consumed by the general process of the galaxies, galactic structures and the like doing what they do over time.
A lot of the discussion feels a bit overly relativistic to the perception of time from the perspective of earth or our galaxy. If a civilisation or millions of civilisations arose and even spread across entire galaxies, they could very well exist without ever being aware of each other. In a very real sense most of the universe exists within pockets of information voids, since the distances involved are further/longer than the the observable universe has assumed to have been around.
Even an entire galaxy is only ever privy to a small subsect of light from the greater regions of space. There's just so much information that is fundamentally impossible, under the current model of space time, for a region to collect and observe. As though we are commenting on the deepest depths of the ocean by shoving our heads in a bathtub.
If you lived two thousand years in the past in where New York will be I don't think you would find it weird that you don't see 8 million people already. It might just be a matter of "having babies and increasing the population takes quite a while"
ruclips.net/video/Amb5ee2x9DY/видео.html
@@CommanderNewton You misunderstand. It _would_ be weird living in a village knowing it will grow into a metropolis just a few hundred years later. Because that is by definition an unlikely scenario. You can compare it to getting an extremely rare disease: Sure, _someone_ will have to get it statistically, but if that someone happens to be you, it should feel unusual to you.
Another way to think about it is the following: Your birth naturally happens at a random place at a random time. This randomness produces a bell curve. The peak of that curve is the point in time where there are the highest number of individuals alive in the universe. You would never assume that your birth is likely to happen at the left or right end of the bell curve. Thus, you should always assume that the experience of your life happens in the most likely and most average time possible. That means, if you consider all of time, _right now_ is the most likely time to exist - otherwise you would not exist now. Any lifeform _must_ make this assumption, or they're statistically wrong, no matter if they _actually_ life in the middle or toward either end of the curve.
@@tree_eats But the thing is, if you shove your head into a bathtub, you will see and touch an enormous amount of lifeforms (bacteria) already. We must assume that at the very least our own galaxy is likely empty apart from us. Otherwise our star system would've been colonized by any interstellar civilization many times over, even if they only had a million years head start. And if our galaxy is indeed empty, that means you could say that life is rare.
Another thing to keep in mind is that while the universe is ~14 billion years old, it only became hospitable to life much later. That means, while there was a lot of time for traces of past civs to disappear, it is not _THAT_ much time. To regard "cosmic erosion" (for lack of a better term) as the likely reason why we don't see other life, you would need to know how quickly technosignatures of advanced civs degrade and disappear on average. And I'm not sure we can know that. It might be that a galaxy filled with dyson swarms returns to a "natural state" relatively quickly, or it might be that it takes longer than the universe is old for _ALL_ visible signs to disappear. I'm leaning towards the latter based purely on intuition.
I did not expect Clark Kent to explain the Fermi Paradox today.
It's never aliens, until such time when their presence becomes undeniable.
i really like this, im gonna finish the rest of the video after posting this as well
my favourite theory (and i dont know how popular it is), is that we're actually completely alone within out space in the universe and that we'd been in it for so long that we've had almost the same issues brought up in the series foundation
like, we got to the great filter or whichever you want to pick, but then we ran the planet we were on into the ground. this would give an explaination as to why so many religions talk about something akin to the "other world" and the "death of the gods" and "leaving the garden/tree of knowledge" or multiple realms
this idea is that that, venus was either our home planet or a second planet we developed on, but we were pulled the mistakes happening now with overuse of resources resulting in a run away green house effect. these stories about leaving the garden or leaving the other world or choosing to live here might be a sort of, language drift or failure of language through generations of people retelling the story with mistakes
it could also be that there is no evidence because the coming to this planet mightve been a one way trip, which would explain why very little information survived outside of things that are attributed to religious origin
some of the creation stories may even be people telling their great grandchildren the stories of how they arrived, but since there's no frame of reference for these children, they have no way of understanding or interpreting what is meant so they're forced to just "fill in the gaps"
it kinda bleeds into conspiracy theory territory because it's not really any one thing on its own but dependent on a bunch of things all at once, but if it were true it could explain why some things are the way they are and why we have certain inclinations as humans and another reason why there's so many parallels between existing religions other than just "lol human behaviour patterns and nature patterns"
I just don't think we can really impart many if not any human characteristics on aliens, their mind would not evolve like ours, their bodies wouldn't have evolved like ours. So I think it's actually rather strange that we would assume that alien life would look and think anything like us
You could consider convergent evolution, while unlikely it's not impossible.
@@dutchmansmine9053 again that is carbon based lifeforms on earth who all share DNA and common characteristics
there is no reason to assume aliens will have bones, nerves, skin or muscle and not some totally alien and unfathomable way of being
I think the odds of it looking, acting or thinking like anything we see on earth are nearly impossible
this is to say the biggest weakness of the human mind is the inability to think of new things, we always modify or adapt already existing concepts and apply that outwards, it works well for earth but not imagining alien life
What is rare in the infinite? The scale of the universe ensures life is not rare
It can be rare in that its hard to find
Sure, in an infinite universe there are infinite species and infinite species that look the same with the same history with the same names because patterns repeat with enough space. That said, it can be rare in the sense of density.
So calming
Good video. Very thoughtful, and clearly presented.
Of course aliens are grabby they've been probing unsuspecting rural folks' poopholes for a long time 😂
I'm both glad and saddened the prof didnt "love" your comment lol
@@astyanax905 a man in his position cannot afford to look ridiculous.
I think we shouldn't shy away from space exploration, and exposing our presence. We got here by being brave, and i don't see a reason to change. Even if it's incredibly hostile. We'd surely be better off coming out looking scary than looking feeble trying to hide away in a corner, hoping nobody will see us.
im ok if its done in that order. space exploration to somewhere else, then expose ourselves. at least that way if things turn sour they wont know where we live
We may have already announced our presence. When we look at stars sometimes a planet passes in front if it. We can tell what its' atmosphere is made of based on the wavelengths of light absorbed by it. Aliens as advanced as we are could probably tell theres life on Earth if they caught a glimpse of us. An alien advanced enough to detect the fluorinated gasses in our atmosphere would know we're here and be able to guess how advanced we are. Fluorinated gasses have been in our atmosphere for almost 100 years.
For me, your point on grabby aliens not happening for "whatever reason" is the answer here. And the reason actually seems pretty obvious to me ... being a "grabby alien" species isn't possible because the path to it - ie, the path of continual growth, continual expansion, etc - is actually the great filter that Fermi postulates. Especially in today's perspective, it seems kind of obvious to me that being an "invasive species" which is what grabby alien amounts to, isn't something that is sustainable over millions or billions of years, and intelligent species either change their ways to a more sustainable, but quieter, more contained existence, or they die trying to become "grabby".
We are very much already grabby on the planetary scale, but we've only REALLY been that way for ~10k-20k years and it's already going badly for us in many ways like climate change and pollution, economic disparities and social divisions. We have made tons of progress since, say, Gobleki Tepe, but that progress has come with potentially world-ending problems. And we haven't even STARTED to expand off our planet yet.
So ya, it seems (to me at least) that very likely that the Great Filter is actually being an invasive, grabby species (like we are right now). Those species, when they evolve as we did, either manage to change their ways, or kill themselves off long before they are advanced enough to be grabby beyond their own system, or maybe a few light years.
THIS.
A future which doesn't include expanding out to other stars and planets is also not sustainable. We have a mere 500 million or so years before the sun becomes hot enough to boil away our oceans. If intelligent life really is as astonishingly rare as seems to be implied by ideas like grabby aliens, we may be the only chance for life to continue existing in our galaxy for most of its lifetime
Very interesting!
Just to be devils advocate, this makes sense if the universe has a limited size, but if it is larger or infinitely sized, odds will not be zero that this can't happen. If the universe is infinite, then it is possible for all sorts of unlikely scenarios to actually eventually happen, given enough chances.
@@chrisblacklock9468 Agreed here, but probably still unlikely within the confines of our finite observable universe, so effectively grand Type-III civs outside of 2x that size will never be known to us ... unless we are also assuming there's a workaround to the speed of light limit. It really depends on how "hard" of a filter being a grabby alien might be. To be fair, I have no idea, but I'm basing it on the notion that we are ALREADY doing more than one thing that potentially threatens to end our existence, so it doesn't feel like it scales much farther than this. I have a feeling this could be a pretty "hard filter" ...
I’m about a minute and a half in, and a foundational flaw I see is that it seems like the grabby alien idea assumes that alien species will think and behave as humans do
“I’m not saying it’s wrong, just that it’s unproven.” Thank you for that terminology!! That perfectly expresses my take on evolutionary theories.
That would be a flaw... However, is there any other way that a species can be that would become interstellar? I don't think so. I don't even think a person could think of a species that wouldn't be "grabby" on Earth; from bacteria to fungi to animals, etc, all are grabby. It is possible that grabbiness is unique to Earth, but I am pretty sure it is a byproduct of evolution and existence.
@@deathbysvent While I do agree with a lot of those points, I also think it’s flawed to assume that everything else in the universe behaves in the exact same way. We have no way to say currently that alien species out there *are* interstellar, we also have no way to truly predict why they’d become interstellar. While our only frame of reference for sapient life is ourselves, I think that keeping an open mind to other possibilities than what we see on our planet is useful too. For me personally, I think it’s entirely possible that the alien species out there don’t think or behave the same way we do, leading to behaviors and achievements that we would struggle to comprehend because they’re… well… alien to us. A major problem with that line of thought on my part though is that it’s practically impossible to test for 😅 which to me makes it an idea that I like, but not really one that’s scientific. Idk where I was going with all that, sorry for the ramble XD
I think the question "why don't we live a trillion years from now around a red star?" is irrelevant to why we don't see evidence of aliens today. The universe could be teeming with life, including intelligent, technological civilizations, but our ability to detect any sign of it is so limited that it's weird to even be wondering why we haven't detected it yet. Of course we can't. The circumstances required for us to _detect_ life or civilization is probably a far worse statistical bottleneck. It would be an absolute fluke if we did.
The farther away we can look, the less detail we see _and_ the farther back in time we see. We can only look at a certain window into the history of any place. So even if there's a civilization identical to ours out there in terms of its timeline, it would be completely undetectable to us more than say 200 light years away. That's a tiny distance on the scale of the universe, but any farther back in that planet's history its civilization wouldn't have produced enough environmental change for us to detect anything other than an atmosphere that _possibly_ harbors life of some kind.
Why haven't we seen planets like that? Because the methods we use to detect planets around other stars are not really capable of that. That's why the only rocky planets we see are usually "super earths" with a huge mass, and why the planets we detect are usually whipping around their star with an orbit of days or hours. That's what we can detect. Small terrestrial planets in a slow, stable orbit, that don't noticeably perturb or eclipse their parent star? They might as well be invisible. They might be extremely common, but we don't have a way to know that right now.
Also, what are we looking for? Someone like us, about our size, who makes gadgets out of metals and polymers, whose technological processes produce detectable chemical signatures like ours do, and whose life unfolds over a timescale similar to our own? Maybe that's not who is out there in our window of detection. I mean, think about how different we are from every other living thing on Earth, and consider that every living thing on Earth is more closely related to us than any other life form out in the universe. We might just not know what we were looking at, or what we're looking for, as signs of its presence, or signs that it has developed its version of technology.
We're probably not going to detect "aliens" until they get here. And even then we might not. We're certainly capable of observing other creatures undetected if we want to, so why couldn't they?
I think it's just fundamentally arrogant to think that just because we have some great telescopes, that we should have detected other "people" by now and maybe it means we're alone in the universe, or are superlative in some way like, we're the FIRST. Jeez, we JUST STARTED looking for life on Mars, one of our very nearest rocks, and we're still not sure if we've found any. WHY should we expect to be reliably detecting it any farther away already?
Also, it took five billion years on our planet to get to us modern humans, but the random events that led to us aren't on a time limit. A planet doesn't have to exist for three billion years before complex life forms, or have 300 million years of reptile-brained thunderlizards that die in a cataclysm before cleverer rodents can spread out to fill their ecological niches, and so on. Creating THE SAME TIMELINE for how long any other planet takes for the emergence of intelligent life is absurd. And then, if you throw that model away, and assume that any time after the development of complex life, it might only be a few hundred million years worth of evolutionary changes to reach our level of intelligence, you have to guess there could be alien civilizations from a billion years ago or more.
If they survived and continued to thrive, how far would their technology advance in that time? Would we even be able to identify their lives or technology if we saw them? If they didn't survive, what traces would they have left of their existence that would still be detectable today?
"Why haven't we seen aliens?" It's an interesting question, but the actual answer is disappointingly simple. It would be a miraculous coincidence for us to have seen them yet, even if they live around half the stars in the cosmos. We're not really technologically capable of it yet.
Yup, we're just not that advanced. On top of that, it also makes us much less interesting to visit for aliens.What would a hyper advanced species even gain from visiting a species that are equivalent to amoebas in their evolutionary timeline?
I have this joke thought I like to pull out at times like this:
We failed to discover Zorg, and without that knowledge we can't develop nth dimensional communication.
Alien life doesn't see this as a bad thing, for whom wants to interact with someone who can't find Zorg?!
The core of this joke is still something to keep in mind:
Why do we assume other's will use our dominate communication technology?
What if they did have access to some technology that we have already missed....
They are called spectral type M luminosity class V (i.e. main sequence stars.) Astrophysicists usually call them "red dwarfs" since all main sequence stars are called dwarfs. Betelgeuse is also a spectral type M star however its luminosity class is 1a-1b (i.e. a supergiant.)
@2:00 You haven't seen The Lockpicking Lawyer's channel, have you?
I've always thought that LL voice sounds like Robert Picardo.
Lockpickinglawyer is why our species made it and he even had enough time to do it again to show us it was not a fluke
I was thinking McNally
@@PatThePerson lol
We don't live around an M-dwarf right now for a very obvious reason: the time it takes for evolution to result in civilization is going to be significantly longer on planets with less energy. If they ever reach civilization at all.
Damn. That is a nice truth bomb. Also throw in the fact that M-class stars are mostly first generation and therefore lack the elemental makeup that would make life possible in their solar systems.
Nice work! I would like to see more videos on things such as the Dark Forest theory, as you mentioned. Great content!
I do not see anything paradoxal with the "Fermi paradox" and do not understand why should we look for a solution.
I love the Fermi paradox
“If you just have an infinity self replicating space ship with a infinitetly reproducing population that does nothing but expand exponentially like cells undergoing mitosis who do not stop ever for any reason whatsoever they’d take over the galaxy. Why hasn’t that happened yet?”
Gee idk MAYBE BECAUSE THAT IS SUCH A LUDICROUSLY INSANE CONCEPT THAT IT COULD NEVER FUCKING HAPPEN AND ALL ITD TAKE IS ONE GENERATION DECIDING “nah. I don’t wanna live on the space ship all my life: let’s stop at the garden world.”
And suddenly it’s stopped
I mean it's honestly not that insane. Theoretically all it would take is one civilization building colonization bots with a programming to keep expanding and an ability to know how to build more of themselves. You are kind of assuming a human mentality to something that very well could be totally emotionless from our viewpoint so wouldn't care if there is a nice bit of real estate nearby when they are driven to expand and send resources back at all costs.
I'm not sure why, but I absolutely LOATHE the word "grabby"! ESPECIALLY in THIS context (which is the only context I've seen the word, lol). It's like it was made by someone too stupid to understand the word "expansionist" or something similar!
Same thing but with a classier tone to it. ;-)
@@ertymexx Huh? I'm not sure what you mean. Which word are you saying is "classier"?
@@MatthewTheWanderer expansionist is classier than grabby. But they mean the same thing, basically. 🙂
@@ertymexx Oh, okay, yeah, I agree.
Different people testing the same hypotheses and getting different results is what makes science so interesting.
Are we just gonna handwave the fact that galactic conquest requires either vast amounts of time or break the laws of physics. Seems more likely that humanity will never come in direct contact with alien life.
A couple million years at sublight speeds. If I remember at current human speeds which seems quite amazing if you think about it. Still, there's no reason to think their development would happen at around the same time as ours. The size of the milky way is 100000 light years. There just needs to be one highly visible civilization within the timeframe of such. That is nothing on cosmic scales.
@@eldestfan101
We can colonize the entire galaxy in a million years. That's nothing on a cosmic timescale.
@MrNote-lz7lh No, we couldn't with current technology, and a millions of years, we couldn't even get an object out of our galactic arm.
@eldestfan101
Current technology is a constantly increasing concept. It's not relevant to what we can do next century let alone a thousand years from now or a million. With technology we know for a fact is possible we can do it.
The galaxy has existed for "vast amounts of time", sufficiently for advanced civilizations to have risen before us and reached the spacefaring stage at astronomical scales by now; hence the Fermi Paradox.
I know that I'm "just some guy on the internet," but the grabby aliens theory sounds a lot like something that an average science fiction writer would come up with and create a religion around.
This doesn't even sound like a new theory. It sounds like just a combination of the Great Filter and the Dark Forest theories, and neither of those require a certain psychology on other alien life
I'm already on board with the doubts here