This is really helpful to sci fi writers. I remember a book Roger Zelazney wrote that had humans spreading all over the galaxy. After a long time they were searching for our original planet hidden in ancient mythology. Our protagonist suspected it was on this old planet called dirt.
Reminds me of the Voth in the episode of Voyager "Distant Origin" where this one scientist suspects that they came from this blue ball earth but they've been away for so long and the knowledge has been lost so they consider him a heretic.
That theme was touched on by Asimov in one of his novellas. There were two competing theories: that humanity originates in a single cradle world or it developed on multiple locations and mixed later. The novella played out in an ancient world that went almost completely radioactive to the point of being practically inhospitable (Earth, not due to war but for other spoilery reasons). A time traveller was asked by a local scientist whether he knows if this is the cradle of humanity, but the question is an oxymoron, since in order to be able to map the galaxy for the absence of other humans you first need to get to become a galactic civilisation, and by that time if you lost the location of the cradle world, you'll never know if it even existed. The scientist was a proponent of the single cradle world theory and came to the now inhospitable Earth to check whether the high amounts of radioactivity could be a trigger to slingshot rapid evolution, which they haven't found anywhere else in the galaxy.
Zelazny did not write that. In “Lord Of Light”, the starship “Star Of India” lost track of Earth’s location by the time that the gods (actually the crew and their children) defeated local intelligent races, many of which had abandoned physical forms. What you write about sounds like something written by an SF author of the Campbell era.
Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat stories several times mentioned the "rumored home of Mankind" called (by some) Dirt, or Earth. Never saw anything like that written by Zelazny, though.
@@okankyoto Don't worry, just a statue of a throbbing penis with RGB lights could serve that purpose. A lot of things that seem normal to us could be weird and mysterious to aliens.
People seem to be generally obsessed with the idea that we are some “infantile” civilization with primitive abilities. I think we are at least decently advanced as far as civilizations go. Keep in mind it’s entirely possible that there are thousands of civilizations if not more that haven’t even explored their entire planet, and only live on a few continents. (Oceans of course are another matter).
Ocean-dwelling civilizations have a hard step that we can gloss over: underwater metallurgy. Given enough time, I think a social/smart species could overcome this, but it would take significantly longer than a land-dwelling species, since they'd be relying on naturally occurring heat sources (they can't exactly start a fire for a forge).
most would more like have no need for technology, they've evolved to their planet to survive, we're very unique in the fact we evolved to survive any environment and control our environment to survive
But we're WIP anyway! 250 years ago humans were restricted to existence on the ground with no prospect of flight. That's just a blink in humankind's history - let alone earth's history, let alone the universe's past, let alone the trillions of years to come - so, give us another 500-1000 years (still only a blink) and what we'll have achieved by then is pretty unimaginable to us now....
I think this is a case where it's helpful to apply Occam's Razor. Sure, there might be a bunch of grabby aliens rushing to colonize the rest of the universe, but that involves a lot more assumptions than "we're early". The same logic we use to assume we're fairly typical in the cosmos could just as easily be used by the very first civilization to appear, and they'd have no way of knowing how wrong they are.
I think the principal that we should land in the middle in time of all intelligent civilisations is poorly motivated. It's a misapplication of frequentist probability.
It's all down to the way you approach the idea of being the first intelligent lifeform. Logically, someone has to be first, so it must be possible Mathematically, if life is common, then the odds of being the first intelligent life is beyond 1 in a googleplex. That's infinitesimally small. It's like dropping a grain of sand on a beach and trying to pick up the same single grain of sand again - that's how unlikely it is.
See, but that's the thing. You're putting a whole lot of weight on that "if". We have a grand total of one planet that we can say for sure has life on it. To say that life is common is a pretty big assumption to begin with. The further assumptions needed to reach "grabby aliens" means that Occam's razor leans towards "we're early".
I think it's more interesting that even when we become the "grabby alien" and are an early civilization, it's still inevitable that we will run into another grabby alien, another space empire. What will happen then? Can we peacefully coexist and learn off each other, or will there be a galaxy spanning war?
@@Gwyrddu grow up man-child. There won't be ever anyone reaching us. It's not realistic. It's not fathomable. You just cannot arrive here until you'll become bunch of corpses on that damn spaceship. Even so, you would at least come with a enormous fleet of spaceships in which it carries fuel and whatnot to sustain such a distance. Even a large amount of energy if you use that fasterthanlight concept. Stars amount of energy in fact. So yeah. This topic is total unnecessary bullshit. It's as nonsensical as Dyson spheres. I seen people commenting about it being the "future" but all those tailless monkeys don't seem to account for the amount of materials needed which isn't even enough if you use the entire entire itself. Like gosh this is such a childishly naive topic to begin with
@@VinnyUnion All you are pointing out are a bunch of engineering challenges. Lifespan (which can vary depending on the alien) versus travel distance isn't that important when you can build generation ships, maybe even hollowing out a small asteroid as your base. And that's assuming that our first contact will be the alien itself instead of one of their unmanned probes are a cheap and easy to send out everywhere as a precursor to space colonization. Faster than light would be nice but is unnecessary (as if your hostility) when you can just take everything you need with you, and in context of millions of years it's probably inevitable that we will solve all these problems if not sooner.
Being early is definitely preferable to the alternative. Since we have no way of knowing how aggressive other intelligent species may be, being early gives us time to gain a technological advantage to allow us to defend ourselves if need-be.
Well, given the nature of life, saying we would have ample time to have an advantage to defend ourselves would be quite optimistic. And naive. If we aren't going to encounter extraterrestrial aggressors, we are gonna be the aggressors.
@@buragi5441 Makes sense. Any race aggressive enough to go out and explore would likely be colonizers like us. Just because of being competitive enough to expand
Being early isn't necessarily an advantage. Take a look at the map of the world and see where the oldest cultures are. Seems like it's good to be middle of the pack time-wise. Not so early as to be decrepit when challenges come; not so late as to be completely determined by what came before (with a few exceptions).
I always wondered about two factors that rarely get mentioned - our freakishly large moon and how it was formed (giving us a significantly larger than normal iron core, possibly spinning faster than normal, to give us a stronger magnetic field, plus the freakishly larger moon acting as both a gyroscope to reduce wobble, create large waves and act as an asteroid shield/deflector) and the possibility of intelligent life evolving too quickly and not have fossil fuels available to power industrialization, and thus limit their technological progress.
The industrial revolution was well under way before we discovered the true utility of fossil fuels. If they had never existed, things would have progressed more slowly, but still in the same direction.
I saw a video that summed up in ’no dry land=no fire=no metal=no electricity=no space’. I believe that life can appear in a large variety of places and do its best, but maybe one in a million planet gas the conditions to raise a space civilization.
People seem to always leave out the pretty obvious issue that there are so many potential hazards for a planet that while life supporting planets may be very common, going 5 billion consecutive years being habitable enough not to reset everything may be very rare and make Earth quite special (lucky).
When you look at the evolution of humans, the circumstances of our evolution all seem very, well, circumstantial. There is nothing in the fossil record to suggest anything on par with our intelligence has ever existed before, or will again. It's not like the convergent evolution of Sharks, Ichthyosaurs and Dolphins all having similar body plans. Our sentience seems to be random and wholly unique evolutionary pressures. Assuming that life has appeared on other worlds. It then evolving a species intelligent enough to achieve space travel seems like a whole other leap. The fact that the human species, as intelligent as it is existing at all seems an astronomical stroke of luck. A miracle frankly.
You only have to think about how many billions of species lived and died on earth for humans to be the only ones to achieved what we have, to put in perspective how rare we are
I'll point out that life on earth has been almost completely wiped out around 5 times. On the one hand, disasters are common on planetary time scales, on the other hand life is very resilient. Every time life got almost wiped out it came back stronger and better adapted
There is also the factor that a civilizations can't progress without the help of cheap energy. It is near impossible for a civilization to go from the medieval to the nuclear age without the help of coal and crude oil. Just think about how much our world relies on fossil fuels today.
If humanity would actually be the first intelligent civilization in our galaxy or even the universe, we would be studied if they found out in the future - which is also pretty cool.
I love imagining scenarios where we’re that “wise” ancient race that everyone looks at as basically gods, like the Asgard from Stargate or the Vorlons from Babylon 5 or something. It’s much more fun to think about than seeing ourselves as the emerging “protagonist” race that has no clue what anything is in the universe.
I've thought this for a long time, and I LOVE to use this analogy, What if we are "The Ancients"(Stargate)? What if it is us that will be leaving clues behind for descendants to find in 5 million years? It's amazing to think about what Our "Galactic Place/Purpose" might turn out to truly be.
I don't think that's gonna happen mostly because when humanity becomes a true interstellar civilization, the chances of humanity going extinct would dwindle to zero. At best, humanity might forget that we were the first but at the end of the day we would still be around.
I can't wait to leave all sorts of esoteric artifacts and cryptic, unintuitive puzzles for our temporal successors. That'll teach 'em not to be late to the party.
@@aaroncabatingan5238 while I agree that a spacefaring humanity will most likely not be able to fully go extinct, it's certainly possible that the future humanity will be so varied in cultures, languages and knowledge, that after a couple millions of years and billions of lighyears of distance to the pioneers that they have little to no understanding of the artifacts left by their forefathers. Imagine coming across the remains of a, for lack of better terms, fully alien civilization, with no way to translate their writings and understand the meanings behind their monuments. We already have these issues with cultures barely thousands of years removed from us, so imagine how hard it would be for humans from different galaxies to understand eachother.
what makes you think ours is the civilization that is forerunner likely we blow ourselves up, THERE IS NO WAY we are going to survive adolescent man...not a chance. We will be as forgotten as neanderthals
I'd MUCH rather us being early to a party than late. Us finding early civilizations elsewhere is much more comforting thought than advanced aliens finding us. One gives us control, the other leaves us helpless. If we are the "young brothers", we might get a boost for our development but a much more likely scenario would be indifference or outright predatory behavior towards us. Maybe our fate is to simply become eaten by some other intelligent life and be a tiny asterisk in history of intelligent life - just food for others.
@@nomorebeans800 why? We generally think fondly and identify proudly with civilizations before us even if they weren't nice and cuddly like the Aztecs or the Romans.
@@mrvk39 but we dont to civilisations that exist today..... if we as a species are willing to hate and discriminate and even kill other members of our species for slight and meaningless diferences....then what will happen when we encounter a completly foreign civilisation from our own. If we end up being technologicaly superior then i see a repeat of what happened to the native american people from european invaders but on a planetary scale.
@@nomorebeans800 We generally do mean things by either mistake with good intentions or when we feel insecure (competitive issues or maybe lack of some resource or perceived lack of something). And I think this will guide our interactions with alien civilizations too. We will simply project our evolutionary-driven responses to each other to alien civilizations. And our evolutionary responses are desire to cooperate and trade (ideas, resources, etc) and our competitive fears/insecurities (securing resources, having places to expand). So, if they are far less advanced and we don't feel we are on a brink of extinction with resources plentiful and other planets to colonize, we should be benevolent or at the very least non-interfering. If we are close technologically, our fears might override our desire to cooperate but even that isn't set in stone and will depend on what are evolutionary drives of alien civilizations or at least, our interpretation of it (for we might never quite understand what really motivates alien intelligence). I don't think we will act like we did in Africa/New World because space seems vast and empty of colonizing species - there are a lot of resources out there and a lot of planets without a likely very, very rare event of having intelligent life there.
@@mrvk39 i think you misunderstand humanitys potentential for evil....what well meaning motive or isecurity drives racism and prejedice. When we encounter a group with something we want, we invade and take from them and their is no form of insecurity or well meaning motive behind it. Just look at the conflicts in afganhistan and syria or the isreal palestine conflict. These are situations where one group of humans crushes another for resources and land and that has happened throughout all of history. If we encounter another sentient species...i hope their world is uninhabitable for humans with a lack of any precious materials for their sakes because humanitys trackrecord for those kinds of situations is not very good towords even itself let alone other species. Why do you think so many of our animals our reaching extinction....
Pseudoscience very shortly. We no nothing about other Civilizations (although arguably the only thing we know that we aren't visited yet) The rest of that paper is purest pseudoscience.
@@ExternusArmy Dark Energy and MAtter is just a placeholder for unknown things tho, the ehter was an idea of something more specific with a certain purpose etc. Dark Energy and Dark Matter are things we can not fully explain or detect, but hypothesize something or another must be there in order to explain what we know. Yet remain unknown.
I think technologically advanced life like us will be super rare if not a complete fluke of nature, but normal carbon based life will be just fairly rare - mostly depdant on the type of star of a solar system. This would be the best kind of situation if we eventually can master space travel as that would mean there are habitable worlds waiting for us
I agree with this, evolution doesn't favor technology or consciousness. Most life will probably be animalistic in some way and human-like technology will be extremely rare. 500 Million years away to meet them sounds reasonable.
@@LANeverSleeps “evolution doesn’t favor technology or consciousness” this statement is unverifiable because as a scientific community we haven’t yet defined what “consciousness” actually is.
@Joseph Williams He didn't claim it to be a scientific statement just an observation anyone can make: intelligent life only appeared around a hundred thousand years ago, but that's only tiny fraction of the time complex life have existed on the planet, having plenty of opportunities to evolve. But it didn't, despite life already existing. The overwhelming majority of lifeforms that we know of only follow the natural life cycle: born, grow, reproduce and die. They spent literal billions of years doing just that. Taking that into account, the statement "evolution doesn't favor technology or consciousness" sounds quite possible. All indications point towards life being common, but intelligence being rare.
It’s probably better if it has no life and we terraform the planet. Unfortunately a planet which already supports and has simple life is filled with all kinds of microscopic death that we are immune to none of and wouldn’t be for possibly many generations.
My best guess is that humans won't ever escape the solar system. The beings that will escape our solar system into interstellar space will be so specialized that it won't be recognizable as human anymore.
The sheer amount of interesting hypotheses regarding aliens, the extensive models, the variability of assumptions and how some assumptions cancel each other out make me think of a scenario in the future on a distant planet: Explorer 1: "Oh wow look! There's something like insects on this planet, that resembles an anthill!" Explorer 2: *Grabs huge binder of hypotheses, furiously turning pages* "Right. The existence of space-ants means that the Carter-Schmidt hypothesis is almost certainly correct. There should be around 5 other civilizations in a 100 lightyear radius, 2 of them spacefaring, 1 of them with a unified government. They reproduce asexually, are highly religious, and pronounce it Warseester Shiree Sauce... well that's just wrong."
Imagine we are just part of some space nature preserve, the aliens just looking at our landfills and being like "Isn't nature beautiful". After all to a sufficiently advanced civilization we are just some reasonably smart animals.
@@Exquailibur that's almost as ridiculous of an assumption to make. "Reasonably smart animals" yeah even disregarding our very non-animal technology, we do not have the same relationship to aliens that animals have to us. Not at all. Not even analogous.
@@joshyoung1440 Bro we are animals by definition so our technology isn't non-animal. We also dont know what our relationship to aliens will be, and it would depend on the aliens. How aliens view us will be alien, Even things as simple as whether they see us as worth preserving will vary based on culture and biology. But the main thing is that I was making an amusing joke so whining at me is kind of in poor taste.
I always thought that knowing that the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and knowing that it took humanity nearly 4.5 billion years to evolve on earth. It made perfect sense that we may be among the first intellignet species in the universe, i mean if you think about it, it took nearly a third of the age of the present universe for us to evolve. So given the sheer length of time and the extemely rare and specific conditions required for intelligent life to evolve on this planet. It would be logical to conclude that the emergence of Intelligent life is a rare and time consuming thing to occur, meaning that given the age of the universe already elapsed and how much longer the universe has yet to live, we are among the very first intelligent civilizations to evolve from the primordial soup if you will of the early universe.
And it only took us less than 500 years if you count Galileo as the beginning of modern science to reach the moon... imagine next 500 years if we managed not to kill ourselves
@@Krypt0n1an1I think people usually like to imagine tech advancement as an exponential thing. Personally I subscribe more to the idea that it’s periodically logarithmic, as in it’ll flatten out for some time. One example is if we assume that interstellar expansion is a requirement for a civilization, there’s really no way for us to do that in a timely manner since that’ll require some way of reducing the travel time (aside from colony ships). And with current applicable principles of physics, FTL just isn’t possible. We’d need to discover something new.
Hey Space Timers! A bit of safety news. We've recently spotted quite a few different impersonator accounts that respond to episode comments, pretending to be us. We're currently working with RUclips to remove them, but please don't fall for any of their fake requests. Official Space Time requests will only ever be made in the video and/or the description box. We'll NEVER ask for your information from the comments!
Almost every channel seems to be experiencing this. Very weird that RUclips can't seem to stop it, considering the text of them is always identical, saying you've won a prize or something.
RUclips has made it abundantly clear they don't care about scammers profiting off their users. This is a problem that was solved years ago elsewhere (including in other Google products). RUclips does not even do the absolute minimum to put a stop to this.
Some person came in as @OfficialPBSSpaceTime and tried to get a screenshot of the reply they made to my comment. I was excited for a good 10 min before I saw this comment. Thanks guys **UPDATE** So they would ask you to take a screenshot of the reply they made on you comment. Then they will ask you to chose a box on telegram. I didn't go past that cause I don't want to compromise myself any more but stay vigilant kids. Ask a lot of questions. Make sure they are physics based but with typos and can't be guessed or researched easily. The guy got confused and pushed hard to have me follow his instructions. Clearly a faker
Yes, I've noticed this on a few RUclips accounts that I comment on - a bot pretending to be the content creator claims I have won a prize or special advice or some such and to contact them via a certain way.
Unless US Government send private companies, like Space X who is in it for profit, doing the exploration, I would guess we would try to stay hidden while observing and learning. What do you think?
Do you go to the zoo and say "hey, look at those intelligent life"? The difference in intelligence between a space-veering species and us is could be the same as the difference between us and a termite.
@@abnorman541 I think you meant spacefaring. I know videos may make it seem like we are stationary, but I assure you, we are traveling through space. A very poor analogy, though. I applaud the imagination and your reflection. Rest assured we are very important. Each one of us a reflection of reality. Bravo!
@@puppykibble Yeah, it was a typo, my mind and my fingers don't agree sometimes lol. I'm not saying we're not important, I just think it's more than a tad mora than optimistic that aliens capable of interstellar would view us as intelligent. I'm sure aliens would have a interest in us but they'd never see us a equals.
I think my one criticism with the Copernican principal being used in this issue is the "lottery" paradox. Essentially, the idea is that even though there's a very low chance of getting the ticket--or being one of the first civilizations in this case--someone is still going to get it. If we take a step back and assume other space civilizations think of their birth rank in the same way as us, then there's always going to be one 'confused' about why it's so early. Also consider the fact that despite the thousands of years that humans have existed, we're still in the first few decades of having a way to instantly connect to anyone else in the world. There isn't really a way to assume this is an average point in that regard.
My main criticism about most of this stuff is that it's not scientific. The principles are taken outside context and then still assumed to be functional, and more than that, it's used to build secondary speculation.
@@vulcwen Most models like this are woven from abstract assumptions. There is no need for anything to exist according to our intuition, so we make assumptions to essentially narrow the scope of potential results (and to make the math easier). The issue with this hypothesis is that we really can't get any results for millions of years. It still uses scientific principles of logic and reason, but it lacks a means of punctual confirmation to make it worthwhile.
Yeah, this model really assumes earth *must* be temporally typical, and so any scenario in which it is possible for it not to be has to be contrived to make it so. Why isn't it enough to say "either we're early or we're normal"? What's so special about being typical that everything has to be contrived to make humanity in particular ununique?
I like to think that probably we´re one of the first civilizations to be formed in the universe and that the best objective possible for our race, our legacy, is to spread the seeds of life across the universe so that one day, it´ll be full of life...
If you consider, "how many times did life start on Earth," there was a relatively short window for it to happen more than once before the existing successful life absorbed all available space. It makes it seem plausible that we must be in that early phase for the universe. Great video. Glad someone ran the math on this. Makes the Fermi paradox start to make sense.
It's reasonable to think that existing life might have "absorbed space" or outcompeted any newer life that may have later emerged, but it's also plausible that an inhabited planet covered with all sorts of simple and complex organic reactions is more adept at producing new life than any sterile environment. If that's the case, then the fact that all life on earth came from a common ancestor and therefore only arose once, even though it may have been easier for life to arise afterward, lends support to the "life is absurdly rare" suggestion of the rare earth hypothesis.
@@alecbader7433 It is possible that life has emerged billions of times on Earth in the last four billions of years, and was snuffed out each time by existing life. What reason do we have to not think this happens?
@@TristanCleveland Well, a lack of any chemical or fossil evidence, as well as no observations of it currently unfolding. But you're right that it's possible.
Once self replicating molecules that can be air or water born form, there is no longer any realistic chance for that same process to start again independently somewhere else in the same environment. The same is true for even more successful forms of self replicating structures, all the way until what we would call life. Within the confines of a planet, it is practically impossible for life to form more than once, because the first one to form prevents it. If that's true more largely, then it means we are the first within the feasibly reachable domain of this galaxy/cluster/universe.
One thing I have only heard a couple of times is whether any advanced spacefaring civilization would end up being a machine civilization - as in no or few organic beings and most of it or all of it comprised of machines. The argument goes something like this: If you want to go spacefaring you need computers and detailed observations, so computers are a minimum and artificial intelligence a likely outcome of computers. (This makes the assumption biological computers - wet brains - will not be sufficiently fast to support celestial navigation in a realistic timeframe.) Then there are two problems with sending meat (us) into interstellar space - hard radiation and time. Unless there is some organic life form that has no issue with getting its organic molecules beat to a pulp, hard radiation is a potential hard stop to organic space exploration. Machines can be hardened to radiation with designed-in redundancy and the capability to be repaired. Then there is time - even at 0.10 times the speed of light, intergalactic distances mean thousands of years would be required to travel between the stars. This would be no problem for machine intelligence - at worst it has to be shut down for long durations. Maybe some incredibly advanced organic intelligence will figure out workarounds for these problems, but at present finding solutions seems way easier for machines than for biological organisms. My own theory is that if we are to spread humanity across the stars it will be only after we have used robots to pave the way - so the likelihood of encountering a robot civilization seems way higher than an organic one - even if it is only the scouts for an organic civilization. I apologize for rattling on...
One of my own personal theories about (worthwhile) aliens is that they're almost exactly like us in many aspects. Think about how many solutions there are to every problem that involves becoming spacefaring; many species would have to have characteristics like intelligence, social behavior, biological abilities to overcome abstract issues, and the ability to communicate complex thoughts. While they may differ in other ways, if they are to become a spacefaring species they must first be able to advance far enough to even consider that option. Then there's also the other thing. whatever species passes these requirements must also pass a final set; do they live in the right place? A species that develops on a planet with a massive gravitational pull could simply prevent space travel from even being a possibility in the first place, and too low of a gravity and they most likely won't be able to venture onto most other planets. Then there's the resource issue. There are some resources that must be present for space exploration to even start, including rare elements like gold, platinum, and many others which don't appear very regularly in some planets, meaning that many species, if they did exist, wouldn't even have the materials to get to space. Meaning if we do encounter a species in space, more likely than not, they will almost certainly share huge similarities with us.
But wouldn’t alien that evolve differently have a different view on how to space travel maybe even different material can be found in other part of the universe
@@indogen2198 while yes, they may have different ways of thinking and views, they would most likely still think in a few of the ways we do because certain things only have one answer. There's no situation where 2+2 is equal to anything other than 4, and the same goes for a lot of things, so most likely they would have to think in similar ways to us simply because neither of us have any other way to think. Of course, they may have differing views elsewhere, but they would still have a similar way of thinking.
@@oatmealman1586 interesting let’s hope your theory is right because if it’s not then we would have no way of understanding each other if something as important as math or physics is understood differently, also we must not forget that we human might still not have discovered everything in filed such as physic which might put other species in a big advantage
@@oatmealman1586 you can only assume that the methods of space travel available to current human knowledge is the only method. A more advanced civilization may have discovered methods not even thought of on earth. We cant have so much hubris to think humans have mastered the mysteries of the universe.
@@spenser6353 but you also need to put into account the fact that our method to go to space is the best method in respect of many metric of obstacles, limitations, and constraints for example: "why don't we use a more advanced form of non rocket space launch as opposed of using our rocket-based conventional method?" the answer would be: "because in respect of obstacles, limitations, and constraints in the form of economic, physical, political, technological, sociological complications, things like such are just not feasible enough" the same can be said to these so called aliens with 'more advanced space launch technology' for something that humanity can achieve by using a tech that works by burning things through chemical combustion (rocket essentially is just that) in which in itself is something that derived from one of humanity's earlier invention (we invented fire from chemical combustion since prehistoric times), probably going to be able to be achieved in a far more easier manner compared to whatever more advanced technology the aliens needs to be able to escape their planet's atmosphere chances are, your more advanced civilization going to achieve better non space-related tech, since our technological progress going to diverge with them in respect to the civilizations respective environment
Really interesting! I doubt we can take it too seriously as being predictive but it shows there are many possible ways that the Fermi Paradox may not be a paradox at all. It's easy to forget that the Copernican Principle is not a law at all and that it could be wrong or not complete. Extraordinarily rare things must occur if they're possible, and we could potentially lie anywhere on a distribution curve if it's truly random.
Like the "Boltzmann brain" thought experiment. Anything could pop into existence, assuming certain quantum physics theories are correct. But the odds are so small, it could take trillions of years to happen and only happen in one place in the entire universe.
A paradox is not an impossibility, it's just a problem that hasn't been solved yet. If we survive long enough as a species, our decedents may yet find the correct answer to the Fermi paradox. We just don't have access to enough hard data, to do that now.
Knowing the age of the universe, it seems more likely there are older, much older races out there. The real issue is how vast the universe is, a race in another galaxy will most likely never get here, there are just too many other destinations to consider. In our galaxy, we still must conquer vast distances to visit another race, and just like us that takes time, effort and resources. Are we worth the trouble for a more advanced civilization to bother? Of all places in the solar system we might find life, just small simple life, it’s probably under the ice on Europa, but we haven’t busted our hump to get there and find it, too expensive, too much trouble to get there and look. When and if we do, finding simple life on Europa will have a very small payoff. Some great knowledge, but no real cash return on our investment. Galactic aliens face similar problems coming to see us. It may be just not worth the effort?
I am still wondering why most of the videos of this type, which contemplate development of life on not Earth planets, generally fail to comment on one of the MOST FUNDAMENTAL reasons that there is and can be life on Earth: Our planet has a magnetic field, produced by the spinning Iron core. I find it quite improbable that, regardless of Star type, any planet can sustain Life without this one thing.
The grabby theory is similar to the dark forest theory. I wonder if the correct theory might be a combination of the two. That we are somewhat early... but also that most emerging civilizations get silenced by the closest grabby. Also Grabby civs may well figure out the dark forest is true and do their level best to stay quite even as they expand, to reduce issues with other grabby civs. It may also be true that the idea of the ladder, and hard steps can keep some civs (like perhaps ourselves) both safe and in the dark. Its possible earlier then us civs may have evolved on planets with fewer steps... and they may view our planet as just not worthy of colonization. I mean if we discover life somewhere like Titan or the clouds of a gas giant... it will be interesting but not exactly a new home for humanity, so the life there could still continue its long slow climb. (grabby civs in our neck of the woods... may see a 5 billion life span planet as not worth the effort to colonize)
Or perhaps there are many hospitable planets, but just not a lot of intelligent life, therefore grabby aliens choose to colonize non-intelligent life planets instead, thus intelligent life like us never "meet" other alien species until we're space-faring themselves and other aliens consider us ready. Can you guys imagine the religions of the world, the panic, when alien starships decloak above in Earth's atmosphere?
@@BD-np6bv That is the point made in the hard step paper. That such aliens with a prime directive would actually still stifle intelligent life when talking cosmic scales. As they would take over on planets that could have spawned intelligent life given another 100-500k years. They argue that life would arise on a bell curve and the odd planet in the universe with fewer hard steps to intelligence would on a cosmic scale spread so fast they would stifle life across their chunk of the universe. Its an interesting thought and dilemma imagine humans in 10,000 years looking at a planet that could barely support life we may say we can colonize here we aren't displacing anyone... but who are we to say that in another billion years life wouldn't make the steps required there. Early species (and we may be early) would probably not even consider that life could gain intelligence in what they would see as hard environments.
You guys seem to forget something: The further away we look, the more into the past, we also look. Imagine we identified a planet in the habitable zone some 500 million light years away... In those 500 million years light takes to travel to us, some civilization might have already risen and fallen (hey there, warmongers in east and west!) and we would not know of any of that. So even if there were "grabby civilizations", they would have the same problem. Detection and travel time being so long, that they could as well travel to some random planets in the habitable zone, not caring what state it is currently in.
@@ruffianeo3418 Lots of good sci fi there. Which show was it. Defiance I think it was... where that was basically the premise. That a Alien civ whos planet was dying decided earth was habitable but devoid of intelligent life. So they set all their ark ships to earth. Got here and discovered us... wars and colonization ensue.
I believe that it's also important to remember that the hard steps have to happen in sequence, and along that journey there are many points at which the lifeform could be set back to square one. That may make it increasingly likely that we're early to the game, or maybe just that it's just so incomprehensibly unlikely and rare that we're essentially, if not literally, alone.
@Alexander Diogenes, why would the process of life forming being difficult make us more likely to be early? The assumption in this paper is the Copernican principle: that regardless of the process that creates civilizations like ours, we are uniformly distributes among those civilizations. The reason this paper concludes we are likely not alone is because that conclusion would not explain our earliness, but the Grabby Aliens hypothesis would.
Even if only one civilization in a galaxy became advanced enough to travel between the stars, there would still be a huge number of such civilizations. And it's possible that for every advanced civilization that is capable of traveling between the stars, there are still many others that either stay within their solar system due to the vast distances between the stars, or that for whatever reason never venture into space, but still have an advanced civilization on their own world. We're still technologically young, and have been searching for other civilizations in the galaxy for a short time. We're really just beginning to get instruments powerful enough to begin taking a closer look at worlds we've only just discovered in the last 30 years. And with the huge distances involved between the stars, any civilizations that may have developed within the last 100,000 years, their signatures and signals may still be enroute. Even a civilization a few hundred light years from Earth would not have received any signals from Earth. We still have a long way to go before we really know if there are others out there.
I like the idea that the fact we only find bare empty uninhabitle exoplanets in our local area indicates that we are in a very remote backwater of the cosmos that no one has bothered to investigate yet, or even reached.
I can see three probabilities if humans are the first space faring species. 1: we become conquerors who conquer nearby systems. 2: we become teachers who teach the species we find intergalactically 3: we become sort of myths and ghosts watching other species and learning about them but not interacting with them
I think we are the first, and I believe we must strive to become the alpha and omega, we may be able to avoid the universe having to blip out of existence if we make enough progress.
I look at the world of today and believe we are firmly in option one. Think avatar but with real militarized industrial complexes to back up our expansions
I'd love the idea that the Bootes Void is actually a normally populated area, but each star is covered by the alien equivalent of solar cells to grab all the energy possible to transmit in it's given solar system. Its only a void to us because the shades are drawn.
@@kryptiqk2141 They wouldn't all do that, you can't expect entities of that of that number to act monolithically like that, at the very least some would like to live around stars for the heck of it, and there's no reason to not live around stars
@@kryptiqk2141 That's unlikely, as stars are both the most easily available energy sources and even if you have methods of energy generation that don't rely on stars, you'll still be relying on mass... which is again found mostly in stars.
Yes! Going along: Yup, mmhhmm, okay, BULLSHIT METER PEGGED!!!! The speed of light is horrifyingly slow, so expanding at the speed of light isn't going to get you anywhere very quickly.
On the other hand, the reification of mathematical models could see the replacement of science with scientism. Mathematical models are simply mechanical devices that produce "results" depending on the assumptions, inputs, and rules applied. Or, in technical (😉) terms: GIGO. You cannot draw statistical inferences from a sample of one. You can, however, draw up a model of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin given certain assumptions about the nature of angels and the size and shape of pinheads. Modern science began with ridiculing this approach, and yet here we are replicating it in a more sophisticated fashion. The so-called "appearance rate" is the equivalent of speculating on the properties of angels. There is a lot of this about, leading some to speculate that we are entering, or even have entered, a new dark age. Mathematical models are heuristic devices that merely allow you to backward check whether your assumptions and interpretations fit the available evidence. They do not describe external reality, and it is a category error to think that they do or to use them as if they do. However, it was an interesting video, as entertainment, and the paper described also sound interesting, _as entertainment_ .
What makes this debate interesting is the idea that there are other civilizations that have become space-faring at this EXACT point in time, but because of time relativity we would not know for a LOOOONG time
Based on our current technology, I don't think humans will be grabby that encompasses an entire galaxy or even multiple galaxies because of VR technology. Once we know how to replicate / transfer our counsciousness into virtual worlds, colonizing an entire galaxy seems futile. Inside a vietual world, you can do anything, be a god or create your own worlds and stories + immortality. I think gaming in the far future would be something like that, where AI can crafts us worlds and even stimulate reincarnation every playthrough meaning you won't get bored even if you have immortality.
@@神林しマイケル Interesting, but I guess one of the points of being the grabby aliens first is to not be destroyed by the grabby aliens that may arise. Even with virtual reality, brain simulation etc you should still need some sort of physical form handling it. You just transposed the problem with the device handling it as the body of the human race and the simulation its brain but then we can consider this a life form that is vulnerable to grabby aliens. Saying this I'm thinking of something funny, we could then become the grabby alien with the simulation as a hive mind controlling robotic bodies
This was an amazing thought provoking episode. I personally feel a bit of existential terror at the thought that half the universe could already be colonized, and we simply do not see any evidence of aliens because they are moving so fast that they day we can see them (their light reaches us) is also the day that they arrive.
That’s going on the List of Things to Tell H.P. Lovecraft if we get time travel. Along with: Africans are the only pure blooded humans, the entire AI thing, quantum mechanics, & space
@@jocylinfrancis930 The out of africa model is disputed at best and would not be an argument for race mixing which he was against. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15878780/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23124308/ Also "Africans are the only pure blooded humans" is an incredibly racist statement.
I mean, that is what will happen. Same with that they will show up VERY quickly after we break the "light barrier" in any way shape or form. Well maybe not going through a natural worm hole if they exist and we can indeed get through them. But, it really stands to reason that any civilization with FTL (and other higher tech) will be peaceful. They all would have planet busting tech and well; that makes war a bit insane. --But, humanity still goes to war so, IDK.
I love how our current models for the universe have to plug in so many mathematical formulas until it's completely accurate, of course there must be things that we're missing in the standard model but it's as correct as it can be until we find out about something more to our universe. It's like doing a math problem no one has the answer to, just roughly what it looks like and if you plug in the wrong equation or number you won't know until you get there.
"there must be things that we're missing in the standard model but it's as correct as it can be until we find out about something more to our universe." we already know that both our best theories for understanding the universe - the Standard cosmological model and the Standard model of particle physics are both incomplete and inaccurate in some very important aspects and we do not know yet how to combine them together into one single theory.
You didn't watch the video did you? What Arthur says was based on Copernicus's Assumption (explained in the video) that we mustn't think ourselves/universe as special or the center of universe, if our civilization can exists then there should be others, hence what Arthur's Quote if we didn't find anyone its either this universe is empty or they already being destroyed so long ago (which are terrifying). Meanwhile the assumption used in the video, the reason we cannot find anyone else was because we looked too early, which means there are still chances (we are not at the stage where Arthur's assumption comes to reality yet)
@@coasttoaster7675 tf? I watched the video. I am merely quoting. And yes I dd watch and know about all the statistics, but you forget basic math. There are ONLY 2 options. We are alone, or we are not. This is talking about right now. Not thinking about the future or the past. In the future, obvously alien species will exist and probably already have. I am not posting humanity up on some celestial pedestal that we are so special and must be the only ones that will ever exist. I am saying, and the quote is too, that RIGHT NOW, at this very moment, there are only TWO options. We are CURRENTLY the only civilization in the universe, or we are not. You can't deny that, it is mathematical fact, It's 50/50. Yes or no. You can't say "we are not at the stage where Arthur's assumption comes to reality yet." ?????? How can we not be at a stage where a 50/50 chance is not reality? You are denying the probability of a coin flip. I did watch the video, you just don't understand the quote.
@@sudmuck it's defiantly depressing, but I guess the only good thing that would come from that outcome is we wouldn't have to worry about being wiped out by aliens. We could basically do whatever we want. But again it'd be so lonely :(
that wouldnt be as exciting as encountering a more advanced civilization. Humans have not been good at meeting new less advanced societies. It usually leads to extermination or slavery
This channel, and channels like it, have slowly become my happy place...I am not a highly educated individual, but there's something about casual learning that calms the most chaotic parts of my mind. Thankyou
This is a magnificent achievement in this single episode Matt and all your associates!! You have clearly summarized key aspects of deeply attracting, motivating, inspiring question of Cosmic origins and Life Origins in 20 brief, easily educational and enlightening minutes. Thank you very much. A wonderful example of coherent model of process that assembles and shows relationships with prior scientific discoveries across fields of science, math, engineering, biophysics and more. I believe I like your work here!
I appreciate PBS Spacetime including all possibilities, especially one where a potentially advanced species can travel faster than light. Yes, the pessimistic predictions (ex. We’re all alone or vulnerable to a super predator) can be possible as well, but it’s nice to hear that humanity may yet stand a chance at survival for the long term.
My own pet theory is that we'll much sooner see ourselves spread life elsewhere, intentionally or not, than meeting any life that evolved independently of us.
@@SineEyed The chance that we accidentally fail to clean equipment, or one day decide to just choose to do sth for an experiment or whatever, is knowable and infinitely greater. In fact, we've already spottet accidental bacterial contamination on the hull of the ISS for example. We have life on earth, so the only requirement for spreading it is merely for that to happen - there's a lot more factors going into life independently forming elsewhere.
It depends on how we spread. Slower then light? Yah, we have a lot of room to spread by building space stations and trying to terraform planets or moons. Maybe even make it to a planet that humans can live on at slower then light if we figure out colony ships in the form of generation or cryogenic. If we discover some way to do FTL? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a Star Trek moment and aliens show up within hours or days of us "breaking the light barrier" the first time. Also, we humans tend to be so humanoid centric. There very well could be intelligent life out there that is nothing like us.
I'm a pessimist so I think we will either: 1. Obliterate ourselves with nukes and biological weapons before we learn lightspeed travel. 2. Or drain our planet of water and crops and die of starvation.
I'd rather see a subspecies of humans branching off, featuring rather short height and a love for beers, then starting a mining company, exploiting alien planet teeming with bugs... FOR KARL
@Cosmic Soup The much sadder and more probable idea is that space travel will never be possible outside extreme local space like our solar system and this is the same all over the universe meaning that no matter how many civilizations rise none will ever meet or know of the existence of others.
I love it that now finally, my favourite channels are beginning to discuss the idea of grabby aliens. For me, it's one of the most fascinating proposals I have heard in years. Thank you. ❤️
Even if we're not THE first space faring race the idea of us being one of the first explains a lot. Maybe there are even 2 or so that know each other and have noticed us but are watching us as we're only like the 3rd. There would definitely be some ethical concerns with first contact.
From our perspective it seems hard.. But we also haven't evolved to thrive in those conditions. I just don't think we have any right to say that an ice covered ocean with volcanic activity beneath is hard for life, and that will probably become more clear once we start exploring some of these moons.
@@stormevans6897 You’re right that we’ll see (hopefully), but from a biochemistry perspective, volcanic activity provides many, many orders of magnitude less energy input than solar radiation, which means much less chemistry going on as a whole. So it’s not life-extinguishing, but it’d be a far greater challenge for evolution to progress past single-celled.
@@fluorotoluene It amazes me how often people just blithely propose alternate biospheres or even anatomical chemistries with a 'we don't know, could be the case' as an all-purpose excuse for lazy speculating. Life requires energy. If your proposal of other forms of life doesn't explain HOW the biosphere is getting energy, it's worthless. If your proposal for energy is 50% that of Earth -- or the not even 1% of volcanic activity -- then you need to adjust your evolutionary timelines.
@@maltheopia: You appear to be responding to someone else. I was commenting solely on Earth - with a dim view towards the prospects for ice-shell life - and then responding to someone who obliquely referenced Europa/Enceladus/etc.
The two saddest scenarios would be for us to be the first or the last interstellar civilization. It's either empty and lonely, or abandoned and lonely.
If you're first, it's not lonely, you just get a massive advantage. An early civilization would be impossibly powerful for any newer civilizations to usurp.
it seems our understanding of the age of the Universe is actually quite wrong and this is still the very early stage(of what might be a cycle) and thus we are still billions and trillions and quadrillions and quintillions of years ahead of future civilizations
@@mjflit I guess, if your goal is exploitation and not exploration. If there's nobody to meet, no community to join, no civilizations or cultures to connect with, it's just infinite rocks and balls of frozen gas.
I always thought as inhabiters of a third generation star we were late to the party but now I see we're close to the beginning, fascinating! Thanks for the video
Yeah. We're only about 2 or 3 million years into the time frame where we could develop. To be earlier would basically require our ancestors to magically learn about fire and cooking, and be pro-settling down... which is anti-human nature in a right as we were getting to becoming modern humans... Beyond that... there is F stars which make up 3% of all stars and should develop faster than us which means that if they hit upon every lucky event we did, they'd develop before us, but by how much i don't know. You'd have to ask someone who understands how the mutation rate of an organism is affected by sustained increased radiation. I'd saying "up to 500m years" ahead of us, but I'd guess much lower... My guess with F stars is that they can support advanced life, but are unlikely to develop Intelligent life or they are cutting it very close to the cut off point to the point where a intelligent species would have just enough time to realize how boned they are.
1st generation stars couldn't have life around them anyway, few to no heavy elements. Second generation stars might have had too little for high life probability. Sure it wouldn't take too many millions of years after the first stars to start getting heavy elements, but it can take quite a while to accumulate appreciable amounts, especially enough to facilitate complex life on the long term. It makes sense to me that we may well be early.
@@keyboardt8276 Actually there is a factor for judging intelligence. Intelligence costs energy, a lot of it. It is like a computer running pac man vs one running Microsoft flight simulator. The second needs far more processing, and that can't be as energy cheap as pac man. The battery dies far sooner. This is one reason intelligence is considered possibly rare. Intelligence for the sake of it is a fuel gobbler that threatened survival. Intelligence has to enhance survival aspects. That's why I also expect it to follow the predator line. Eating grass doesn't require much smarts. But since the brain is a computer, we can predict the energy requirements of smarter brains. So unless their world is made of super food, there will be limits.
Agreed, the claim in the video that we don’t see any aliens or alien activity when we look at space completely ignores the fact that we would be misinterpreting what we see. Stupid example but consider some advanced even-earlier-than-humans civilization that for whatever reason needs a ton of readily available, concentrated carbon. So they seed/spin up a solar system and loop back once we’ve saturated the surface of the planet through climate change and eliminated ourselves. From the perspective of the aliens, zipping around at near-light speed or some other means entirely, very little time has passed. Rinse, repeat with other seeded solar systems as needed.
One thing I think is certain is that we are not alone, purely based on the fact that the universe, aside from beginning, does not just do something once. Whether we are early or late, given the size of the universe, if life can emerge here on earth at what we consider to be an intelligent level, then it is reasonable to assume that it has happened, is happening, or will happen millions or billions of times elsewhere. Making contact is just an issue of the scale of space and time.
@@erbenton07 It's not Darwin's evolution. It's a flourishing field built by thousands of serious scientists over more than a hundred years, always pushing the envelope, using (and developing) state-of-the-art technology in order to advance the knowledge of mankind.
Also about red dwarves, many models don't take into account habitable moons, when actually living near a giant around a red dwarf could be very stable, provide volcanic activity to the moon and protect it from solar flares as well as creating a day and night cycle
Indeed, a satellite being tidally locked to a gas giant would mean that it's not tidally locked to the sun and would get variable sunlight on the entire planet most likely, just like a regular planet that rotates and orbits a sun.
This idea reminds me of Frank Herbert's 'Dune' where humans are literally alone in the universe and have to make up for the aliens by themselves. LOL Great book BTW, you should all read it.
@@djdoc06 but given long time spans in the books. They are kinda like another species by the time they return. I watched few summaries on youtube though, bit it is on my list for reading.
It's all a matter of: - being able to mine asteroids and other celestial bodies for raw materials (since we don't have enough on Earth and we also don't want to destroy Earth) - use said materials for manufacturing satellites in space (Moon base, Mars, or even at the place of mining, using AI controlled robots) in order to save on transporation/take off energy requirements, etc - deploy manufactured satellites around the Sun (Dyson Swarm) to collect energy similar to solar panels and beam it back to Earth and other stations on Moon or wherever we need energy in the solar system - develop technologies to store the beamed energy (which will be orders of magnitude above anything we've ever seen until now, think of gathering energy from a continuous nuclear explosion each fraction of a second) - once we have this framework of owning a solar system, send probes (or even start earlier, in parallel) to Proxima Centauri and other nearby stars that we know they host Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, to determine the parameters of the planets and requirements to terraform them - repeat the process around stars in vicinity, terraform planets in the habitable zone using energy gathered from local star and resources from the solar system (we can even alter asteroid/comets' paths to crash them into planets if they lack water or anything else) - have an entity like an ASI managing all those nodes, build it like a blockchain, and allow it to have some governance about energy usage on each node, other policies, to ensure fairness for all nodes involved and avoid conflict - expand on a hop-to-hop basis, enjoy the exponential expansion - develop ways to communicate with eventual alien civilizations we encounter across the Universe and develop some kind of galactic Forum As you see all the steps from the above are not so SF at the moment...some of them are in progress, others we know are achievable - for example beaming energy into space can be handled by using lasers to keep the photons parallel basically and not lose energy, we know that even laser is not perfect and the photons can diverge, thus you might need satelites orbiting at different point in space to act as repeaters to re-focus the beams...Also, due to the fact that space is...well..empty, there will be no atenuation and most of the atenuation would ironically be in our Earth's atmosphere and even that we can go around...are there technological challenges to that? yes...but are they impossible or SF? no way...we already have ideas how to do that Once you can own the energy of the local star, the system becomes your playground, you have enough to even deploy energy-inefficient technologies and not care, and develop more efficient ways while already being on your way to colonize, if a solar sail only uses 1% of the beamed energy to move, you'd still not care, if the remaining 99% doesn't melt you ofc, but you get the idea. If there's no Great Filter ahead, no AI wiping us, we are destined to colonize the Universe in what it will look like an explosion, literally. We'll have AI robots terraforming planets using their own star's energy before we even land there.
The fact that we evolved to our current levels within this tiny window of time is already a profound against-the-odds miracle, I see no reason to believe another species not only was able to evolve in the same amount of time as we, but has surpassed us to interstellar travel.
why do you see no reason? there may be older civilizations in the universe than mankind. Thats hubris to believe that humans are the center of the universe and there can be no civilization more advanced. theres really know way of knowing that. We must always be open minded to possibilities
@@spenser6353 We are technically the center of our universe. There's a perfectly spherical area we can observe and we are in the center of that sphere. There's no proof anything beyond that exists.
I'm sure a lot of people would have been happy to see how the amount of hard steps influence the mathematical model. Surely it neatly ties in and the relationship between itself and the amount of time is very intuitive to understand. Generally more maths would be great to see.
The reason they don't give a hard number is because if you look at the evolutionary record and human development timeline... evolution of intelligence is pretty much a guaranteed thing... however human level intelligence and civilization is essentially throwing some dice and happening to happening to get super charged from the results of going into controversial territories. There is just a lot of stupid luck that resulted in modern humans that are more or less happen stance within a niche situation. For example, we need to be able to work with tools which requires us to stand upright which we only do because we evolved in a environment that became deforested and tall grass took over which had to have a climatic reason for changing, but it had to change from a pretty dense forested area to forest and savanah area... and we have to develop from creatures that need to find advantage from grasping things at least part of the time and on and on... Then you realize that's all before you account for fire usage and cooking which we can see there is a long separation between the two... and thats before you get into how long it took for humans to become settlement dwellers... And then once that happens you then have to account for Rome and several other empires coming about that turned away from developing further and becoming anti-new technologies... and then once you get past all that you still have to account for all the chances off destroying ourselves or preventing ourselves from leaving our planet which we haven't gotten through all of yet and teetering very close to the edge of them... When I was figuring this all out long ago for this stuff, anything I could think of that would stunt a creature/civilization from advancing to the stars the stars i gave 50/50 shot to even though they are probably much lower chances. I came to the answer that there should be a space faring civilization for every 500 light years of space. And that number is not accounting for time disparity between when a civilization could arise to fill that space... but if I were to give it a mathematic answer... Gstars are 25% of all stars and we developed around 2 million years ago and if you just use all the time for 500 million years even though I'm sure there's less time than that for complex organism to exist you'd come to answer something like there is 500 million years, for at least 25% of the possibility, for a space fairing civilization to arise in a 500 light year bubble. Even if you don't consider FTL or near Light velocity a thing or even 50% light velocity... we're talking a 1 in 500 million probability that the first space fairing civilization will be the only space fairing civilization in their region space that they can get to, especially for a species like us who have stupidly jumped the IQ curve by quite a lot. That is not to say we won't find other intelligent life out there if we get out there, but they will not be space fairing. They will be at various points throughout our history up to and including those points that could befall us, like running out of resources to rebuild their civ after some massive break down. They could be millions of years technologically superior to us, yet unable to reach space... and that's only accounting for G class stars... The class of stars on either side of us have shorter/longer spans than us and should equally advance at faster/slower paces so those are interesting to consider too, but they should skew too much for them to be as readily predictable as what would stunt them from becoming space fairing or enhance them. All I know is, based on what I see and how stupidly unlikely it is for us to have certain events happen to us, as pointed out before, we're super early in history and the reason we won't see many other space fairing civs is because they exist either in the future or very far away... unless we hit another improbability of them being right next door... in which case that starts to, if it hasn't already, what they heck is happening to make us get this improbably "lucky".
@@Durakken i dont think they'd at any point during human history, they'd be before or after it. It took us 2mil from hunter gatherers to now, while it took 500mil years from the emergence of "intelligent" predators to now. If we assume their evolutionary path isnt totally different, intelligence will need a long time to evolve.
If we are among the first to travel in space, we need to expand rules and regulations on how to act and how to make First Contact. Maybe some kind of Prime Directives.
The Fermi Paradox's assumption of unlimited expansion is unjustified and even unlikely in my view. Yes, life tends to expand as far as it can, but intelligent life is not a fungus. There are a number of reasons to suspect that most civilizations would reach a point of stagnation in its colonized volume. 1) After expanding to the limits of their planet, a species will need to learn how to create social systems based on balance and equilibrium rather than expansion, if it is to survive long enough to make it into interstellar exploration. Having developed such ways of existing, unlimited expansion will no longer be driven by an unending need for more and more consumption. Technology would even allow for highly reliable means of population control. 2) Every time we see prosperous cultures on earth, we also see a decrease in the birth rate. This is because offspring are an economic liability in post-industrial societies. 3) This leaves only two remaining impetus for going out into the stars: the collection of scientific knowledge, and the romantic notion of exploration. These two incentives to expand would be sustainable for a time. Each new star system full of planets would provide a wealth of planetary science and even biological discovery. Space will also be new to us as it is now, and we will have a zest for seeing what's out there. 4) But after exploring and settling 10 star systems (25-100 planets?) we would begin to lose that zest. The variance of discovery would begin to average out and by the time we explored our 100th system, we would be seeing a whole lot of the kind of thing we've already seen. More importantly, the scientific benefits would reach a point of diminishing returns. How many gas giants would we need to study before we pretty much 'get it'. 5) At perhaps 100 star systems colonized, what will be the incentive for exploring the 101st system, much less colonizing it? By this time, we will have perfected societal knowledge and social systems such that we are living in a virtual paradise with automated systems handling the heavy lifting for us. Who would want to leave that, for no needed economic gain, to brave a harsh environment, only to be forgotten as one of countless other colonists who collected no significant scientific discoveries? Instead, it is more likely most species simply go into a sustainable mode with several dozen systems colonized, having greatly reduced the chances of their extinction by settling into other worlds. The name of the game then would be perfection, not expansion. In fact, expansion beyond that point would only increase the danger of the ONE thing that could threaten such a multi-system species - attack by another. If this is so, then there could be many ancient bubbles of colonized spaces all over our galaxy, which would still leave the vast majority of the galaxy between uncolonized.
To play devil's advocate, I'll make an attempt to refute: 1) You could argue the greatest motivating factor for interstellar expansion is due to expanding beyond our means and requiring additional resources - something already commonly displayed by life on earth, and certainly by humans throughout our evolution. I think it's unlikely finding equilibrium on one's host planet is requisite for developing interstellar travel. We're almost there (a few hundred years at most) and have no such equilibrium. Also expansion will certainly in some cases be driven by the need to evacuate one's local system due to impending, unavoidable doom (star/planet instability for example). 2) It is just as likely to imply as technology progresses, the economic liability of children, and life in general, will decrease. 3) Certainly this motivation alone would likely not sustain; on that I wouldn't argue.
@@sidpomy Thanks for the response :) 1) "You could argue the greatest motivating factor... additional resources". I thought I had mentioned that with population control and a well orchestrated system, recycling is perfectly possible indefinitely (as long as the colonized stars are burning at least), with no need of any further resources. "I think it's unlikely finding equilibrium on one's host planet is requisite for developing interstellar travel. We're almost there (a few hundred years at most) and have no such equilibrium". I mean it is a requisite in the sense that we are reaching the limits of what our planet can sustain - we don't have a few hundred years unless we learn how to stop with unbridled expansion and consumption. Both in terms of climate and resources, the effects of our exponentially growing population is already an issue. "Also expansion will certainly in some cases be driven by the need to evacuate one's local system due to impending, unavoidable doom (star/planet instability for example)." True, but that was a hundred star systems ago from the civilization I'm describing. The precariousness of only occupying one star system are important to address, and we will have long since done so. 2) "It is just as likely to imply as technology progresses, the economic liability of children, and life in general, will decrease." I'm sure it will, but even so - the liability could be zero and still, prosperous people who have access to education and perfect birth control methods will tend toward a birth rate that is less than 2.0 (replacement rate for a couple). While we will have the ability to control our population, in such a prosperous society it may very well be the case that our problem is the very opposite: making sure we are making enough babies just to remain at the same population.
There are really standard objections to all this. To me it sounds like you're saying: After we've occupied 100 islands, we couldn't possibly ever want to move to the 101st! Well ok, maybe you and your buddies don't want it, but somebody eventually will. Maybe you like your neighbors, but they don't like theirs. Or maybe a non-biological AI will do most of the expanding, because from its perspective every extra bit of computation is a positive thing. To think that self-reproducing populations stop expanding before their niche is filled is contrary to everything we observe.
I would also like to add... 6) We already have a perfect real-world example of how expansion stops without incentive - our current age. Just after we went to the moon, we had the technology needed to continue expansion. Everyone projected a robust future of expansion into the solar system - and they were wrong. That is because the cost/benefit ratio of expanding into the solar system did not justify or incentivize it. But over time, the cost side of that ratio is coming down, as we learn to mass produce space tech, and learn cheaper ways of building it. Also over time, the benefit side of that ratio is going up, as resources here become more rare. The cost benefit ratio is still negative, but we are getting closer to the 1/1 mark. When it passes that threshhold you are going to see a very rapid expansion into the solar system because it will be profitable. Looking back on the period between the moon landing and that moment, we will see it was not technology holding us back, so much as simple lack of incentive. When you project into the future, there is simply no reason to suspect some eternally present source of incentive to continue. Our second age of equilibrium with then come again.
@@Daniel-Strain Plausible certainly, although I would say it's not presumptuous to foresee a civilization that achieves interstellar travel faster than us yet still doesn't achieve equilibrium, or a civilization with higher birth rates and a stronger biological drive to reproduce despite their advanced society. I would actually say one scenario I find intriguing to quell colonization is a society falling into a rapturous virtual reality and seeing no desire or even curiosity to expand or explore "mundane" reality further. But this likely wouldn't happen 100% of the time, which is kind of required if civilizations are common - otherwise the outliers few may they be do expand and colonize everything.
that wouldnt be as cool as encountering a more advanced civilization. Humans have not been good at meeting new less advanced societies. It usually leads to extermination or slavery
Interesting. I have thought about that a lot when discussing the fermi paradox. An optimistic and somewhat surprising solution to the fermi paradox could be that near FTL travel has to be possible because any civilization that can travel at such velocitites would inevitably disappear from our radar due to time dilation. The fermi paradox only becomes a problem when we assume low velocities (that are still fast enough for generations ships) or any near FTL travel that bypasses the effects of time dilation (like infamous warp drive). Any other method of travel should be able to solve the Fermi paradox without requiring u to be really alone in the universe, or in other words: The Fermi paradox only tells us that we don't live in a Star Trek universe.
I'm always rather skeptical of astrophysical claims that rest heavily on the Copernican Principle. There's a weak statement of "we shouldn't assume our place and time is special" and a strong statement of "we should assume our place isn't special". The weak statement I'm fine with - the strong statement seems extremely suspicious - the kind of assumption you make because it lets you put numbers on things, not because you have any reason to think it's true. It feels a lot like it actually does rely on us being in a very specific and special place and time, namely the mean. The temporal Copernican Principle seems particularly specious because we assume we're a middle civilization because our point in time can't be special, but we also assume that there's special a time before which no civilizations can occur and a special time after which no civilizations can occur and that we just happen to be in the middle. We choose that time (for some reason) specifically to make sure we're in the middle and use it to draw conclusions about the rate that hypothetical galactic empires must be spreading given no information about the capacity and practicality of long-distance space travel. Apparently we can make conclusions about the state of the universe right now based on something that hypothetically happens in the future? If anything, that feels like the kind of thought experiment that demonstrates that it's generally a bad assumption, not unlike how schrodinger's cat was devised as a criticism of the copenhagen interpretation.
My (almost wholly uninformed) opinion is that our position in time _is_ special, in that we are in the very early stages of the stelliferous era. Somebody has to be first, and the universe is young enough that it's not completely unreasonable to believe it's us.
@Spencer Thomas, I think the reason the Copernican Principle seems spurious to you is that you are imagining a day-to-day human use of the word "middle" instead of the astrophysical one that is being used. Presuming that your data point is in the middle 99.99% of data points is not specious reasoning. And of course we can draw conclusions about the state of the universe right now based on hypothetical ways the universe would have looked in the future. If I'm playing Texas Holdem and I know my opponent bets 100% of rivers where he has top pair or better, then once he checks, I can conclude his hand is weak based on what I know he would have done in hypothetical scenarios.
The Copernican Principle is not a claim, is just an hypotheses that our planet and the Solar System is not in a privileged place of the universe, this is because history has taught us that everytime time we thought that we were in the special place of the universe, we were wrong. So from an statistical point of view, it makes more sense to follow the Copernical Principle.
If we were 10% later in evolution, or had one additional extinction event while mammals were getting it on, our planet wouldn't have had a civilization. Our existence kind of defies the Copernican Principal already in that we barely made it in the door on this planet, and could easily not have. Also there are multiple planets that likely had or certainly did have liquid water in our sun's habitable zone just in this solar system. Seemingly only 1 produced a civilization, barely - more likely only one produced life at all. We are special to some degree even within our own solar system.
@@mallninja9805 i agree, until life is found anywhere else it seems plausible that we could indeed be first, at least of a lifeform that has already left its home planet. Even the thought of having plenty of hydrocarbons after millions of years of evolution to enable a lifeform the ability to have energy capable to expand enough to be able to do this needs a few extinction episodes to go through, then again maybe the dinosaurs if they had more time could have evolved enough to get to the moon.
I saw this episode of Star Trek: TNG. They chased genetic "clues" all over the galaxy to find a species that evolved, explored but no one was there so they dumped their genes into every primordial soup they found and left "instructions" on how to find them and all the races' common ancestors. The alien hologram was played by the same actor who ended up playing the Female Changeling in DS9. Yeah, the Klingons and Romulans weren't too happy to learn they were cousins...lol
We've had five mass extinction events on Earth that we know of. Five times that the planet hit the reset button, causing millions of years of catastrophic evolutionary delays. In that sense, I've always thought humanity might be a little late to the party. It's reasonable to expect other life-sustaining planets in the universe to experience similar extinction events, but it's also reasonable that some of those planets might have had fewer extinction events than Earth, giving life a longer time frame to evolve intelligence space-faring civilizations.
Also consider that humanity very likely wouldn't have evolved at all without those extinction events. If you think about how evolution works, selective pressures push species towards solutions for problems. Humanity has evolved to a point that we could likely prevent extinction events altogether with our technology (though we can certainly cause them as well... whoops) Would a paradise world with no major threats to life even necessitate consciousness?
Sometimes I wonder.. most areas where progress is made rapidly are in areas with little regulation, where many people qualified as well as not are able to simply do stuff and see what works. More brains, more failure, more success. Space has been a frontier where the government has been involved since day 1 and heavily regulated. So if we are actually gonna get somewhere maybe we need to change that.
If there was a large moon (like ours) around an exoplanet around a red dwarf star, would a tidal lock to the star still be more likely than a tidal lock to the moon?
Such a thing wouldn't be stable. If the moon was experiencing that much gravity from the star, it would be ripped away from the planet in ~1000s of years. Could such a thing temporarily exist? Possibly?
My main issue with this type of speculation is we have no idea how likely it is for life to spontaneously form even if conditions are perfect. For all we know the nearest life in the universe could be far beyond the limit of the observable universe, and this wouldn't make us as humans in any way special since in an infinite universe any event with a non-zero probability regardless how small is guaranteed to happen somewhere.
Well, the "observable" universe when it comes to the chances of seeing signs of other life are much smaller then the observable universe. The vast majority of signs of life just get lost in the background noise and light of the universe very quickly. Heck, there could be civilizations out there blowing up stars and we just think they are going nova. For all we really know, ALL stars that go nova are other civilizations. Same with black holes etc etc etc etc. Super advanced space ship 40 miles long FTL's to the edge of a solar system, launches some kind of device / weapon at a sun and FTL's away.. and we'd just see the sun go nova 500+ years after it's happened.
1:21 We are not in fact on a typical planet. Earth, as planets go is actually very peculiar from what we are currently able to learn about other planets.
My answer has been "why do we think they are leaking radio waves?" Because radiowaves have only existed on earth for less than 100 years and we are already figuring out quantum mechanics. Who is to say in 100 years we don't invent radioless communication. What if radio is only a stepping stone and by searching for radio we are only looking for aliens within 100 years of our own level of technology. Seriously.
My answer has always been that we're long in contact with aliens and some people in power who "know what's best" for -themselves- the world are making sure to keep it a secret.
That basically implies the theory that the great filter is behind us. That there is some difficult or improbable step in our development that other systems didn't experience.
One of the model results, that the successfully “grabby” share of civilisations is around one in a thousand is effectively a statement of the Great Filter hypothesis you’ve discussed previously. It’s a reminder of the rarity and importance of us getting on with it or we’re dead (in half a billion years 😂).
I mean, is it really bad if your civilization doesn't reach the stars? It doesn't have to mean that we're dead. It would be a gross simplification to assume that those grabby civilizations are necessarily completely hostile. There's already a lot of assumptions to get there. In fact, this model shows that the "'great filter hypothesis" is an antiquated way to work compared to the models we make today. Afawk, civilizations could be potentially eternal, or at least very, very long lived without having to leave their home system. We know very little.
@@Ezullof we do in fact have to get off planet. The sun will consume the earth eventually and we need to be able to move before that happens, that or move the earth itself.
That is if humanity is still thriving or even exists in 500,000,000 years. The typical dominant species, on our planet anyhow, averages 1,000,000 years before extinction. We are around 200,000 years old. A mere adolescent of dominant species. If we can't mature a bit and quit all the self-destructive behavior, we aren't likely to even reach that average, especially not 500 times that average.
The RUclips channel Rational Animations has a great series of videos narrated by Robert Miles that cover the Grabby Aliens model. I highly recommend them!
@@harpfully It's honestly not close at all. RA's video was about the practical process by which a civilization could spread across the universe. This video was about the implications that has on our observations and place in history.
I have seriously started to think Copernicus just didn't have a firm grasp on the law of averages. Fun fact: it's actually very special to be exactly average in every manner. It's more appropriate to say we are average in any given manner, likely near average in most manners, and special in some manner. It's also unreasonable to assume we, along with everyone else is average, as uniformity across everything, everywhere is an absurdity. Taking it seriously though, if we are average, then it's average to not reach the stars, the Fermi Paradox assumes we are late to the party, which is not average.
He didn't say we're exactly average in every manner though. He said our location is not special. That's one manner in which we should have a lot of company, i.e. our world is not significantly different from plenty of other worlds. But i assume this notion was mostly aimed at religion and geocentrism. Traditions that _demanded_ humanity be special, even though there was no real reason to believe so. Maybe it will turn out that life is really rare, and that earth therefore is special in some ways, but i don't think that's what Copernicus was arguing against.
I was convinced this is likely the case awhile ago. Isaac Arthur has some great videos about these topics, and yeah, being local firstborn is very likely, we have a ton of advantages in our favour for rapid evolution to intelligence, coupled with an early formation of our solar system which has all the required elements from past supernovae. Massive tides from the moon being very close to earth just after the collision that gave us our marge iron core; creating a very fast evolutionary playing field. The stoned ape theory probably has some truth to it as well, the size of our heads compared to the birth canal further supports how fast we evolved large brains. The lack of alien evidence would be more compelling of an argument toward some kind of a zoo if the universe were older, but the universe is relatively young, earth has had wildly good luck at creating the conditions for intelligent life quikly. Also, the likelyhood that these same factors exist all around our 'stellar neighbourhood' are high. If looking for alien life we're more likely to find it close-by, surrounding similar stars, than far away in the even earlier universe. Again, local firstborn does not mean we're some kind of forerunner, there are almost definitely other races out there, but they are probably just as confused as us about the lack of other life. This becomes easier to parse when understanding that we're looking back in time when we look to the stars. Aliens in the Andromeda Galaxy are looking back 2.5 million years when looking in the direction of earth. Sure they would see evidence of oxygen in our atmosphere that could compel them to look further, but 'intelligent' life hasn't arisen yet on earth when they look here, and thats the closest large galaxy to the milky way. Anyways, that's a compelling reason to explore space aggressively, because we don't want to be on wooden canoes when the tall mast ships arrive. They are likely coming, just over the horizon still.
How are they looking back in time at us if Andromeda and the milky way are on a collision course with one another? Does time move in different directions and it matches up at the collision? Wouldn't whether we are looking back in time in reference to the stars depend on which direction you are looking?
@@270eman Light doesn't travel instantly, it has a finite speed. The andromeda galaxy is so far away it takes light 2.5 million years to reach it at that speed, which means an observer from andromeda will see light that left earth 2.5 million years ago and only just finally reached andromeda. As a result they are looking back in time when they observe the earth/milky way
awesome video -- I love how they were able to take some assumptions and come up with a specific sort of answer. Sadly another possibility is that it's impossible to be a grabby alien for some reason and we are all contained to our local solar systems. Of course if the authors assumptions are correct then we need to start working on our 0.3c spacecraft!
Mr. J.M. , Some of the authors assumptions are NOT correct ; particularly in regards to planetary evolution . Firstly ; terrestrial planets do not stay geologically active, and thus ecologically viable, in perpetuity . The mechanisms which generate internal heat weaken and die out over time , eventually sterilizing the ecologies and rendering the planets barren . Secondly , the host stars' rotations slow drastically over time , this engendering tidal-forces which lower the planets' orbits until they eventually reach their Roche Limits , disintegrating and being consumed by their stars . *.Planets unfortunately, have seriously limited lifespans . They definitely do not live forever .
JM, the paper does take into account this possibility. But this possibility would not explain why our civilization is so early in the universe which is what this paper attempts to explain. I would consider it to be very unlikely that there is some invisible barrier around all solar systems. In an earlier episode, Matt explains how with current technology, we could send small spacecraft out of the solar system to take pictures using our Sun to refract light. In millions of years, technology may be so unimaginably more advanced that colonizing another star may involve sensing a seed-sized nanobot to procreate there.
@@gavrielcohen5095 Mr. Cohen , In a million years mankind will either have evolved into a much more human form , or incinerated itself w/technology such as what you referenced .
@@gavrielcohen5095 The invisible barrier around us is space. Once you start measuring distances in light years, the concept of constructing 'societies' across such distances becomes impossible. No colony would be a member of it's home world's sphere of influence, even for a little while. They'd just be wholly independent worlds from the day they were colonized, with no material trade, and only very difficult and slow communications. Societal drift would have kicked in long before the colony was even founded, due to the wildly different mode of living on a colony ship for decades, so the colony would never have any basis for relation with its home world, again from day one. Needless to say, this very much eliminates most of the potential incentives for the powers-that-be on a given world to pour the vast resources into a colonization effort that would be required. They have literally zero chance of any return on investment, ever. This would be as true for any alien species as it is for us. The only thing you'd be able to get from your colonies would be data (very slowly), and if relations sour, possibly an RKKV.
I have started to wonder if part of the reason we haven't seen aliens yet is that most civilizations move so quickly (at a galactic time scale) after achieving space flight that by the time you see evidence of them in their home system they're already on your front porch. i.e. the day we notice them both at a distance and up close will necessarily be closer together the further away they start. More distance just gives them more time to develop faster methods to get here. Depending on how good we get at scanning the skies the order in which we locate them and their home system could give us an idea of the speed at which they can travel. If they show up on our front porch before signals of their home system can reach us they've clearly achieved FTL travel. If they arrive after then it's less likely. The fact that the former case could account for why we've seen nothing yet though is kinda eerie.
Unless we have something very, very wrong about physics, FTL isn't possible. It basically implies backwards time travel by its very existence - should it be possible. I think the fastest a civilization would expand is probably around 10-20% speed of light. Beyond that requires enormous energy and has weird relativistic effects.
@@bozo5632 If they aren't traveling faster than the speed of light, we certainly would see them before they got here, if only because ships traveling at relativistic speeds (which, if they got here, they would most likely be traveling at) give off distinctly large amounts of light, which would be traveling faster than the actual ship and thus get to Earth before them.
I think it might just be really hard for any organism to survive cut off from its planet . You have to bring your whole ecosystem with you or else it's like you are a cut off arm. We are a part of this planet we grow out of it. And we have to kind of planet/cell duplicate before we can get any good distance
I've actually made an ecosystem in a jar that's completely sealed off and separate from the outside world. It has thrived for over 4 years already and it'll continue to thrive for the rest of my life as long as it receives a sustainable amount of energy. I believe making a smaller version of our ecosystem in colonies on other planets or spaceships that can sustain itself indefinitely is very possible if not the only way we get to colonize the stars.
That's just incorrect. We don't need our whole ecosystem at all. In fact I bet not a single human in history have ever relied on all of the earth ecosystem.
I never thought this principle was really applicable in this way. We are indeed on a typical planet orbiting a typical star. But that's in the sense that we live on a rocky planet around a common type of star. And it stops there. No unique material, no unique fate. But we can still have a rare position in the galaxy, in chronology, or even be a rare outcome of a series of events. We don't even know if out steps are the only possible ones - or even the most common ones. Just think about this: if you apply this principle to yourself, then it means that you're living at the time in the history of manking when humans are the most numerous. Before us were fewer humans, but also after us. But we know it's unlikely. Let's keep in mind that there are a lot of strong bias in astrobiology, and the first one is that they, by default, seek for Earth-like life. Because otherwise, they'd have nothing to work with.
It seems to make the same mistake as the doomsday argument of taking the Copernican Principle and using it to assert that you're somehow a randomly-selected person. You're not randomly-selected; you are precisely the being that was born at your time+place of birth. The odds of someone born in 1990 C.E. being born in 1990 C.E. are 100%. Us being "early" doesn't need an explanation; *someone* has to be first.
@@sidpomy it depends on your definition of "common". Not nearly as common as red dwarfs, yes, but also yellow dwarfs like Sol aren't exactly rare. It could be that life develops on both and we're just one of the few on this type of world. It is statistically bound to happen because... it did, and that's all we'd need for statistical possibility.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I feel like no one is talking about this. Everyone is enamored with the the fermi paradox, but there is not paradox. Stars today are only 3rd or 4th generation. Meaning, heavy elements are relatively new and life is just now becoming possible. 13 billion years is a very long time, but on the cosmic scale, it’s nothing. It stands to reason we could be one of the first forms of intelligent life to explore space. We could be setting the stage for all life to follow!
"If these authors are right - and that's a big big if - then it may be that our empty sky is one piece of evidence for a universe filled with aliens rushing in to grab this rare remaining patch of empty space time." One must be incredible smart to come to the conclusion that "us not being able to detect any evidence of alien life may prove that the universe is (half) full of alien life". Right up there with "if we go at night, we can land on the sun".
Our industrialization supports that hypothesis. Billions of years for evolution Millions to master fire hundreds of thousands to master civilization thousands for significant technological progress hundreds of industrialization. If the trend continues, one can see how million year old light reaching our galaxy is absolutely insufficient and dangerously misleading to show us what is "really" out there right now in this minute.
@@flyingchimp5012 Lack of evidence of existence doesn't prove non-existence. I agree. But the video says that lack of evidence of existence may be evidence of existence, so I repeat (using different words): one must be very smart to say something that stupid with a straight face.
Either aliens are incapable of reaching us, or they are capable and find it insignificant. That's logically valid, if you consider non-existence a form of incapability. If they are incapable, then we may detect them one day. If they find us insignificant, then something must explain why we don't detect them.
Their are some misunderstanding on how difficult it is to do it. For any species to exist beyond existence.They will first have to learn how to stabilize the entire fabric of space in which they inhabit. Until you're able to control that, the great filter will delete everything.
I’m so glad you did an episode on this. I had watched the grabby aliens video about a year ago and I’m glad it’s getting more traction on the work that was done
actually our situation is very atypical. our solar system is very odd. we have one star with a bunch of planets, and the earth just so happens to have the necessary resources for life and is in the stars habitable zone
What if even for far more advanced civilizations it still takes a LOT of time/effort to travel to/near us. Simply because the universe is so vast. Even if they can reach the speed of light, we're still far from around the corner for them. They might have been here already but it's not like they will hang around or re-visit within the next 1000 years.
Considering the known size and age of the visible universe and the age of our planet and the life on it i guess it may as well be a possibility that we may be the first or amongst the first intelligent forms of life in the universe, one has to factor in the time it may take for life to evolve to this stage, which is actually quite unlikely as something is bound to happen and disturb it which prohibits life from getting to the advanced stage, i think humans are actually truly unique in the context of the universe, i believe we are special in this regard, advanced life isn't common.
I don't think that makes any sense. There are literally trillions of planets, at the very least there has to be more than one species that managed to reach intelligence advanced life. Humans aren't unique in my opinion.
We only have a sample size of one so you can’t say that there’s at least one other advanced species exists when the chance of them appearing may be infinitesimally close to zero
@@olivercharles2930 i feel pretty confident in saying that we are most likely the only truly inteligent species in existance. While there are an almost uncountable amount of planets how many of those meet the believed criteria for life? An incredibly small amount, of the tiny amount of planets that exist in the goldilocks zone how many have liquid h2o or oxygen rich atmospheres.....even less. When we start talking about JUST the planets that could hold life we are looking at a nigh zero chance and then you have to through the formation of cells, plant life, other complex life and the eventual beginning stages of sentience.....yeah no we are most likely the only intelligent species in the universe. Think about how many others creatures existed on our planet before us and now think about how many of them achieved any form of true intelligence...just us humans and our deceased genetic cousins from billions of years of life....just us
@@olivercharles2930 Trillions of planets but what if each hard step is like one in trillion-trillion? And if there's like 20 hard steps. The closest other technological civ can easily be not just far outside our galaxy but far beyond the cosmological horizon..
We actually don't know the age or size of the universe, even the visible one. Our CLOSEST guess has a margin of error plus or minus 59 million years. 59 million years ago, the planet was still recovering after the asteroid extinction event, and in 59 million years from now, we may as well have traveled to every star in our entire galaxy. Remember, the diameter of our galaxy is only 100,000 light years across, and CURRENT technology has been able to push an unmanned probe fast enough to cross our entire galaxy in less than 170 million years. 170 million sounds like a lot until you realize you can send 2, one in each direction, and suddenly it's only 85 million years... using 2018 technology. Its still a lot closer to the 59 million margin of error. Point is, 59 million years is a MASSIVE margin for error when in the perspective of a species that would be unrecognized in that time frame.
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This is really helpful to sci fi writers. I remember a book Roger Zelazney wrote that had humans spreading all over the galaxy. After a long time they were searching for our original planet hidden in ancient mythology. Our protagonist suspected it was on this old planet called dirt.
It that stupid planet that always causes trouble in the database since it doesn't has a number associated with it, only a number of names.
Reminds me of the Voth in the episode of Voyager "Distant Origin" where this one scientist suspects that they came from this blue ball earth but they've been away for so long and the knowledge has been lost so they consider him a heretic.
That theme was touched on by Asimov in one of his novellas. There were two competing theories: that humanity originates in a single cradle world or it developed on multiple locations and mixed later. The novella played out in an ancient world that went almost completely radioactive to the point of being practically inhospitable (Earth, not due to war but for other spoilery reasons). A time traveller was asked by a local scientist whether he knows if this is the cradle of humanity, but the question is an oxymoron, since in order to be able to map the galaxy for the absence of other humans you first need to get to become a galactic civilisation, and by that time if you lost the location of the cradle world, you'll never know if it even existed. The scientist was a proponent of the single cradle world theory and came to the now inhospitable Earth to check whether the high amounts of radioactivity could be a trigger to slingshot rapid evolution, which they haven't found anywhere else in the galaxy.
Zelazny did not write that. In “Lord Of Light”, the starship “Star Of India” lost track of Earth’s location by the time that the gods (actually the crew and their children) defeated local intelligent races, many of which had abandoned physical forms.
What you write about sounds like something written by an SF author of the Campbell era.
Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat stories several times mentioned the "rumored home of Mankind" called (by some) Dirt, or Earth. Never saw anything like that written by Zelazny, though.
It would be both very cool and very daunting if it turned out that we were the forerunner race in the galaxy/universe
We would have a duty to leave lots of mysterious cryptic artifacts for future civilizations to discover.
@@okankyoto Don't worry, just a statue of a throbbing penis with RGB lights could serve that purpose. A lot of things that seem normal to us could be weird and mysterious to aliens.
No pressure
@@DinosaurEmperor84 man this is a great comment.
On our current track, we'd be the first loser too. We'll be lucky to have heavy industry in two centuries, let alone be in space.
People seem to be generally obsessed with the idea that we are some “infantile” civilization with primitive abilities. I think we are at least decently advanced as far as civilizations go. Keep in mind it’s entirely possible that there are thousands of civilizations if not more that haven’t even explored their entire planet, and only live on a few continents. (Oceans of course are another matter).
I like this take
Ocean-dwelling civilizations have a hard step that we can gloss over: underwater metallurgy. Given enough time, I think a social/smart species could overcome this, but it would take significantly longer than a land-dwelling species, since they'd be relying on naturally occurring heat sources (they can't exactly start a fire for a forge).
most would more like have no need for technology, they've evolved to their planet to survive, we're very unique in the fact we evolved to survive any environment and control our environment to survive
@@jasonbreathkiller3660 A definite possibility- but one that makes it more difficult to detect civilizations
But we're WIP anyway! 250 years ago humans were restricted to existence on the ground with no prospect of flight. That's just a blink in humankind's history - let alone earth's history, let alone the universe's past, let alone the trillions of years to come - so, give us another 500-1000 years (still only a blink) and what we'll have achieved by then is pretty unimaginable to us now....
I think this is a case where it's helpful to apply Occam's Razor. Sure, there might be a bunch of grabby aliens rushing to colonize the rest of the universe, but that involves a lot more assumptions than "we're early". The same logic we use to assume we're fairly typical in the cosmos could just as easily be used by the very first civilization to appear, and they'd have no way of knowing how wrong they are.
I think the principal that we should land in the middle in time of all intelligent civilisations is poorly motivated. It's a misapplication of frequentist probability.
Yes someone who actually understands Occam’s Razor is about Assumptions not Simplicity. It annoys me far more that it should when people get it wrong.
It's all down to the way you approach the idea of being the first intelligent lifeform.
Logically, someone has to be first, so it must be possible
Mathematically, if life is common, then the odds of being the first intelligent life is beyond 1 in a googleplex. That's infinitesimally small. It's like dropping a grain of sand on a beach and trying to pick up the same single grain of sand again - that's how unlikely it is.
See, but that's the thing. You're putting a whole lot of weight on that "if". We have a grand total of one planet that we can say for sure has life on it. To say that life is common is a pretty big assumption to begin with. The further assumptions needed to reach "grabby aliens" means that Occam's razor leans towards "we're early".
He already talked about the CHANCE of those being grabby aliens.
You bake that chance into your assumption how high that chance is.
Its crazy to think that at some distant point in the future humans could be an elder race in the galaxy
I think it's more interesting that even when we become the "grabby alien" and are an early civilization, it's still inevitable that we will run into another grabby alien, another space empire. What will happen then? Can we peacefully coexist and learn off each other, or will there be a galaxy spanning war?
@@Gwyrddu grow up man-child. There won't be ever anyone reaching us. It's not realistic. It's not fathomable. You just cannot arrive here until you'll become bunch of corpses on that damn spaceship. Even so, you would at least come with a enormous fleet of spaceships in which it carries fuel and whatnot to sustain such a distance. Even a large amount of energy if you use that fasterthanlight concept. Stars amount of energy in fact. So yeah. This topic is total unnecessary bullshit. It's as nonsensical as Dyson spheres. I seen people commenting about it being the "future" but all those tailless monkeys don't seem to account for the amount of materials needed which isn't even enough if you use the entire entire itself. Like gosh this is such a childishly naive topic to begin with
@@VinnyUnion All you are pointing out are a bunch of engineering challenges. Lifespan (which can vary depending on the alien) versus travel distance isn't that important when you can build generation ships, maybe even hollowing out a small asteroid as your base. And that's assuming that our first contact will be the alien itself instead of one of their unmanned probes are a cheap and easy to send out everywhere as a precursor to space colonization. Faster than light would be nice but is unnecessary (as if your hostility) when you can just take everything you need with you, and in context of millions of years it's probably inevitable that we will solve all these problems if not sooner.
that is if we can survive that long.
We wont, we'll be extinct.
Being early is definitely preferable to the alternative. Since we have no way of knowing how aggressive other intelligent species may be, being early gives us time to gain a technological advantage to allow us to defend ourselves if need-be.
You mean to go and wipe out the rest. Humans prefer the offensive.
"Defend"
Well, given the nature of life, saying we would have ample time to have an advantage to defend ourselves would be quite optimistic. And naive. If we aren't going to encounter extraterrestrial aggressors, we are gonna be the aggressors.
@@buragi5441 Makes sense. Any race aggressive enough to go out and explore would likely be colonizers like us. Just because of being competitive enough to expand
Being early isn't necessarily an advantage. Take a look at the map of the world and see where the oldest cultures are. Seems like it's good to be middle of the pack time-wise. Not so early as to be decrepit when challenges come; not so late as to be completely determined by what came before (with a few exceptions).
I always wondered about two factors that rarely get mentioned - our freakishly large moon and how it was formed (giving us a significantly larger than normal iron core, possibly spinning faster than normal, to give us a stronger magnetic field, plus the freakishly larger moon acting as both a gyroscope to reduce wobble, create large waves and act as an asteroid shield/deflector) and the possibility of intelligent life evolving too quickly and not have fossil fuels available to power industrialization, and thus limit their technological progress.
Solar
The industrial revolution was well under way before we discovered the true utility of fossil fuels. If they had never existed, things would have progressed more slowly, but still in the same direction.
I saw a video that summed up in ’no dry land=no fire=no metal=no electricity=no space’. I believe that life can appear in a large variety of places and do its best, but maybe one in a million planet gas the conditions to raise a space civilization.
@@franck3279 They could probably melt metal in hot enough sea vents or do stuff above the water's surface if they could stand it.
@@nilo70 You cannot get to solar until you have fossil fuels and the society that fossil fuels can support.
People seem to always leave out the pretty obvious issue that there are so many potential hazards for a planet that while life supporting planets may be very common, going 5 billion consecutive years being habitable enough not to reset everything may be very rare and make Earth quite special (lucky).
When you look at the evolution of humans, the circumstances of our evolution all seem very, well, circumstantial. There is nothing in the fossil record to suggest anything on par with our intelligence has ever existed before, or will again. It's not like the convergent evolution of Sharks, Ichthyosaurs and Dolphins all having similar body plans. Our sentience seems to be random and wholly unique evolutionary pressures. Assuming that life has appeared on other worlds. It then evolving a species intelligent enough to achieve space travel seems like a whole other leap. The fact that the human species, as intelligent as it is existing at all seems an astronomical stroke of luck. A miracle frankly.
You only have to think about how many billions of species lived and died on earth for humans to be the only ones to achieved what we have, to put in perspective how rare we are
But the evidence by Navy pilots shows that non-human intelligence already exists on Earth, do we've already have been grabbed.
I'll point out that life on earth has been almost completely wiped out around 5 times. On the one hand, disasters are common on planetary time scales, on the other hand life is very resilient. Every time life got almost wiped out it came back stronger and better adapted
There is also the factor that a civilizations can't progress without the help of cheap energy. It is near impossible for a civilization to go from the medieval to the nuclear age without the help of coal and crude oil. Just think about how much our world relies on fossil fuels today.
If humanity would actually be the first intelligent civilization in our galaxy or even the universe, we would be studied if they found out in the future - which is also pretty cool.
We would be studied anyway if found out, just like you study the 10.000th coup in ancient rome if you take that field of study
Intelligent. Have you seen how political zealots behave? It does not look intelligent to me. Math is racist. remember?
Can't wait for them to find out about furries
everyone, before you die DELETE YOUR BROWSER HISTORY, the child races cannot know what we were into.
Not a chance.
I love imagining scenarios where we’re that “wise” ancient race that everyone looks at as basically gods, like the Asgard from Stargate or the Vorlons from Babylon 5 or something. It’s much more fun to think about than seeing ourselves as the emerging “protagonist” race that has no clue what anything is in the universe.
That's fantasy, not 'sci-fi'. Personally I have zero time for fantasy novels dressed up as 'sci-fi'... looking at you Star Wars, etc.
@@sunnyjim1355 well aren't you special
I certainly don’t contribute to humanity’s greatness. If only I could stop reading RUclips comments.
What a sunny person
@@sunnyjim1355 is that your way of saying that you are a better person than OP?
I've thought this for a long time, and I LOVE to use this analogy, What if we are "The Ancients"(Stargate)? What if it is us that will be leaving clues behind for descendants to find in 5 million years? It's amazing to think about what Our "Galactic Place/Purpose" might turn out to truly be.
I don't think that's gonna happen mostly because when humanity becomes a true interstellar civilization, the chances of humanity going extinct would dwindle to zero.
At best, humanity might forget that we were the first but at the end of the day we would still be around.
I can't wait to leave all sorts of esoteric artifacts and cryptic, unintuitive puzzles for our temporal successors. That'll teach 'em not to be late to the party.
@@aaroncabatingan5238 how would we forget just RUclips it
@@aaroncabatingan5238 while I agree that a spacefaring humanity will most likely not be able to fully go extinct, it's certainly possible that the future humanity will be so varied in cultures, languages and knowledge, that after a couple millions of years and billions of lighyears of distance to the pioneers that they have little to no understanding of the artifacts left by their forefathers.
Imagine coming across the remains of a, for lack of better terms, fully alien civilization, with no way to translate their writings and understand the meanings behind their monuments.
We already have these issues with cultures barely thousands of years removed from us, so imagine how hard it would be for humans from different galaxies to understand eachother.
what makes you think ours is the civilization that is forerunner likely we blow ourselves up, THERE IS NO WAY we are going to survive adolescent man...not a chance. We will be as forgotten as neanderthals
I'd MUCH rather us being early to a party than late. Us finding early civilizations elsewhere is much more comforting thought than advanced aliens finding us. One gives us control, the other leaves us helpless. If we are the "young brothers", we might get a boost for our development but a much more likely scenario would be indifference or outright predatory behavior towards us. Maybe our fate is to simply become eaten by some other intelligent life and be a tiny asterisk in history of intelligent life - just food for others.
But if we are the precursors..... i get the feeling that were gonna end up being the villains
@@nomorebeans800 why? We generally think fondly and identify proudly with civilizations before us even if they weren't nice and cuddly like the Aztecs or the Romans.
@@mrvk39 but we dont to civilisations that exist today..... if we as a species are willing to hate and discriminate and even kill other members of our species for slight and meaningless diferences....then what will happen when we encounter a completly foreign civilisation from our own. If we end up being technologicaly superior then i see a repeat of what happened to the native american people from european invaders but on a planetary scale.
@@nomorebeans800 We generally do mean things by either mistake with good intentions or when we feel insecure (competitive issues or maybe lack of some resource or perceived lack of something). And I think this will guide our interactions with alien civilizations too. We will simply project our evolutionary-driven responses to each other to alien civilizations. And our evolutionary responses are desire to cooperate and trade (ideas, resources, etc) and our competitive fears/insecurities (securing resources, having places to expand). So, if they are far less advanced and we don't feel we are on a brink of extinction with resources plentiful and other planets to colonize, we should be benevolent or at the very least non-interfering. If we are close technologically, our fears might override our desire to cooperate but even that isn't set in stone and will depend on what are evolutionary drives of alien civilizations or at least, our interpretation of it (for we might never quite understand what really motivates alien intelligence). I don't think we will act like we did in Africa/New World because space seems vast and empty of colonizing species - there are a lot of resources out there and a lot of planets without a likely very, very rare event of having intelligent life there.
@@mrvk39 i think you misunderstand humanitys potentential for evil....what well meaning motive or isecurity drives racism and prejedice. When we encounter a group with something we want, we invade and take from them and their is no form of insecurity or well meaning motive behind it. Just look at the conflicts in afganhistan and syria or the isreal palestine conflict. These are situations where one group of humans crushes another for resources and land and that has happened throughout all of history. If we encounter another sentient species...i hope their world is uninhabitable for humans with a lack of any precious materials for their sakes because humanitys trackrecord for those kinds of situations is not very good towords even itself let alone other species. Why do you think so many of our animals our reaching extinction....
You should do a historical spin off series of past discoveries, what they got wrong, what they discovered and how it is used today.
Like this opportunity society spin off?
Pseudoscience very shortly. We no nothing about other Civilizations (although arguably the only thing we know that we aren't visited yet)
The rest of that paper is purest pseudoscience.
I have a feeling in however many years, dark energy and dark matter will be on that list like the ether is now.
@@ExternusArmy Dark Energy and MAtter is just a placeholder for unknown things tho, the ehter was an idea of something more specific with a certain purpose etc.
Dark Energy and Dark Matter are things we can not fully explain or detect, but hypothesize something or another must be there in order to explain what we know.
Yet remain unknown.
@@iron_side5674 Haha, no, it has become way more than that.
I think technologically advanced life like us will be super rare if not a complete fluke of nature, but normal carbon based life will be just fairly rare - mostly depdant on the type of star of a solar system. This would be the best kind of situation if we eventually can master space travel as that would mean there are habitable worlds waiting for us
I agree with this, evolution doesn't favor technology or consciousness. Most life will probably be animalistic in some way and human-like technology will be extremely rare. 500 Million years away to meet them sounds reasonable.
@@LANeverSleeps “evolution doesn’t favor technology or consciousness” this statement is unverifiable because as a scientific community we haven’t yet defined what “consciousness” actually is.
@Joseph Williams He didn't claim it to be a scientific statement just an observation anyone can make: intelligent life only appeared around a hundred thousand years ago, but that's only tiny fraction of the time complex life have existed on the planet, having plenty of opportunities to evolve. But it didn't, despite life already existing.
The overwhelming majority of lifeforms that we know of only follow the natural life cycle: born, grow, reproduce and die. They spent literal billions of years doing just that.
Taking that into account, the statement "evolution doesn't favor technology or consciousness" sounds quite possible. All indications point towards life being common, but intelligence being rare.
It’s probably better if it has no life and we terraform the planet. Unfortunately a planet which already supports and has simple life is filled with all kinds of microscopic death that we are immune to none of and wouldn’t be for possibly many generations.
My best guess is that humans won't ever escape the solar system. The beings that will escape our solar system into interstellar space will be so specialized that it won't be recognizable as human anymore.
The sheer amount of interesting hypotheses regarding aliens, the extensive models, the variability of assumptions and how some assumptions cancel each other out make me think of a scenario in the future on a distant planet:
Explorer 1: "Oh wow look! There's something like insects on this planet, that resembles an anthill!"
Explorer 2: *Grabs huge binder of hypotheses, furiously turning pages* "Right. The existence of space-ants means that the Carter-Schmidt hypothesis is almost certainly correct. There should be around 5 other civilizations in a 100 lightyear radius, 2 of them spacefaring, 1 of them with a unified government. They reproduce asexually, are highly religious, and pronounce it Warseester Shiree Sauce... well that's just wrong."
LMAO
Imagine we are just part of some space nature preserve, the aliens just looking at our landfills and being like "Isn't nature beautiful". After all to a sufficiently advanced civilization we are just some reasonably smart animals.
Just because you don't understand or agree with science doesn't mean it comes up with ridiculous bullshit like whatever you're sarcastically proposing
@@Exquailibur that's almost as ridiculous of an assumption to make. "Reasonably smart animals" yeah even disregarding our very non-animal technology, we do not have the same relationship to aliens that animals have to us. Not at all. Not even analogous.
@@joshyoung1440 Bro we are animals by definition so our technology isn't non-animal. We also dont know what our relationship to aliens will be, and it would depend on the aliens. How aliens view us will be alien, Even things as simple as whether they see us as worth preserving will vary based on culture and biology.
But the main thing is that I was making an amusing joke so whining at me is kind of in poor taste.
I always thought that knowing that the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and knowing that it took humanity nearly 4.5 billion years to evolve on earth.
It made perfect sense that we may be among the first intellignet species in the universe, i mean if you think about it, it took nearly a third of the age of the present universe for us to evolve. So given the sheer length of time and the extemely rare and specific conditions required for intelligent life to evolve on this planet. It would be logical to conclude that the emergence of Intelligent life is a rare and time consuming thing to occur, meaning that given the age of the universe already elapsed and how much longer the universe has yet to live, we are among the very first intelligent civilizations to evolve from the primordial soup if you will of the early universe.
irk
I've tried to explain thise to the "aliens are visiting us" family members.
And it only took us less than 500 years if you count Galileo as the beginning of modern science to reach the moon... imagine next 500 years if we managed not to kill ourselves
@@Krypt0n1an1I think people usually like to imagine tech advancement as an exponential thing. Personally I subscribe more to the idea that it’s periodically logarithmic, as in it’ll flatten out for some time. One example is if we assume that interstellar expansion is a requirement for a civilization, there’s really no way for us to do that in a timely manner since that’ll require some way of reducing the travel time (aside from colony ships). And with current applicable principles of physics, FTL just isn’t possible. We’d need to discover something new.
It's also possible that we aren't the first intelligent species to emerge... The silurian hypothesis
Hey Space Timers! A bit of safety news. We've recently spotted quite a few different impersonator accounts that respond to episode comments, pretending to be us. We're currently working with RUclips to remove them, but please don't fall for any of their fake requests. Official Space Time requests will only ever be made in the video and/or the description box. We'll NEVER ask for your information from the comments!
You should pin this.
Almost every channel seems to be experiencing this.
Very weird that RUclips can't seem to stop it, considering the text of them is always identical, saying you've won a prize or something.
RUclips has made it abundantly clear they don't care about scammers profiting off their users. This is a problem that was solved years ago elsewhere (including in other Google products). RUclips does not even do the absolute minimum to put a stop to this.
Some person came in as @OfficialPBSSpaceTime and tried to get a screenshot of the reply they made to my comment.
I was excited for a good 10 min before I saw this comment. Thanks guys
**UPDATE**
So they would ask you to take a screenshot of the reply they made on you comment.
Then they will ask you to chose a box on telegram. I didn't go past that cause I don't want to compromise myself any more but stay vigilant kids.
Ask a lot of questions. Make sure they are physics based but with typos and can't be guessed or researched easily. The guy got confused and pushed hard to have me follow his instructions. Clearly a faker
Yes, I've noticed this on a few RUclips accounts that I comment on - a bot pretending to be the content creator claims I have won a prize or special advice or some such and to contact them via a certain way.
We often think about aliens landing on Earth.
Imagine being an alien and exploring a planet with intelligent life.
Sounds like you just did.
Unless US Government send private companies, like Space X who is in it for profit, doing the exploration, I would guess we would try to stay hidden while observing and learning. What do you think?
Do you go to the zoo and say "hey, look at those intelligent life"? The difference in intelligence between a space-veering species and us is could be the same as the difference between us and a termite.
@@abnorman541 I think you meant spacefaring. I know videos may make it seem like we are stationary, but I assure you, we are traveling through space. A very poor analogy, though. I applaud the imagination and your reflection. Rest assured we are very important. Each one of us a reflection of reality. Bravo!
@@puppykibble Yeah, it was a typo, my mind and my fingers don't agree sometimes lol. I'm not saying we're not important, I just think it's more than a tad mora than optimistic that aliens capable of interstellar would view us as intelligent. I'm sure aliens would have a interest in us but they'd never see us a equals.
I think my one criticism with the Copernican principal being used in this issue is the "lottery" paradox. Essentially, the idea is that even though there's a very low chance of getting the ticket--or being one of the first civilizations in this case--someone is still going to get it. If we take a step back and assume other space civilizations think of their birth rank in the same way as us, then there's always going to be one 'confused' about why it's so early.
Also consider the fact that despite the thousands of years that humans have existed, we're still in the first few decades of having a way to instantly connect to anyone else in the world. There isn't really a way to assume this is an average point in that regard.
My main criticism about most of this stuff is that it's not scientific. The principles are taken outside context and then still assumed to be functional, and more than that, it's used to build secondary speculation.
@@vulcwen I'm really not sure what you mean by scientific. In what context is the Copernican principle functional and scientific to you?
@@vulcwen Perhaps not experimentally so, but it is a strong thought experiment. Haven't seen such thought architecture before
@@vulcwen Most models like this are woven from abstract assumptions. There is no need for anything to exist according to our intuition, so we make assumptions to essentially narrow the scope of potential results (and to make the math easier). The issue with this hypothesis is that we really can't get any results for millions of years. It still uses scientific principles of logic and reason, but it lacks a means of punctual confirmation to make it worthwhile.
Yeah, this model really assumes earth *must* be temporally typical, and so any scenario in which it is possible for it not to be has to be contrived to make it so. Why isn't it enough to say "either we're early or we're normal"? What's so special about being typical that everything has to be contrived to make humanity in particular ununique?
I like to think that probably we´re one of the first civilizations to be formed in the universe and that the best objective possible for our race, our legacy, is to spread the seeds of life across the universe so that one day, it´ll be full of life...
If you consider, "how many times did life start on Earth," there was a relatively short window for it to happen more than once before the existing successful life absorbed all available space. It makes it seem plausible that we must be in that early phase for the universe.
Great video. Glad someone ran the math on this. Makes the Fermi paradox start to make sense.
It's reasonable to think that existing life might have "absorbed space" or outcompeted any newer life that may have later emerged, but it's also plausible that an inhabited planet covered with all sorts of simple and complex organic reactions is more adept at producing new life than any sterile environment. If that's the case, then the fact that all life on earth came from a common ancestor and therefore only arose once, even though it may have been easier for life to arise afterward, lends support to the "life is absurdly rare" suggestion of the rare earth hypothesis.
@@alecbader7433 It is possible that life has emerged billions of times on Earth in the last four billions of years, and was snuffed out each time by existing life. What reason do we have to not think this happens?
@@TristanCleveland Well, a lack of any chemical or fossil evidence, as well as no observations of it currently unfolding. But you're right that it's possible.
Once self replicating molecules that can be air or water born form, there is no longer any realistic chance for that same process to start again independently somewhere else in the same environment. The same is true for even more successful forms of self replicating structures, all the way until what we would call life. Within the confines of a planet, it is practically impossible for life to form more than once, because the first one to form prevents it. If that's true more largely, then it means we are the first within the feasibly reachable domain of this galaxy/cluster/universe.
@@eventhisidistaken Why would that be the case? Life must have arose from more than a single kind of molecule in any given environment anyway, right?
One thing I have only heard a couple of times is whether any advanced spacefaring civilization would end up being a machine civilization - as in no or few organic beings and most of it or all of it comprised of machines. The argument goes something like this: If you want to go spacefaring you need computers and detailed observations, so computers are a minimum and artificial intelligence a likely outcome of computers. (This makes the assumption biological computers - wet brains - will not be sufficiently fast to support celestial navigation in a realistic timeframe.) Then there are two problems with sending meat (us) into interstellar space - hard radiation and time. Unless there is some organic life form that has no issue with getting its organic molecules beat to a pulp, hard radiation is a potential hard stop to organic space exploration. Machines can be hardened to radiation with designed-in redundancy and the capability to be repaired. Then there is time - even at 0.10 times the speed of light, intergalactic distances mean thousands of years would be required to travel between the stars. This would be no problem for machine intelligence - at worst it has to be shut down for long durations. Maybe some incredibly advanced organic intelligence will figure out workarounds for these problems, but at present finding solutions seems way easier for machines than for biological organisms. My own theory is that if we are to spread humanity across the stars it will be only after we have used robots to pave the way - so the likelihood of encountering a robot civilization seems way higher than an organic one - even if it is only the scouts for an organic civilization.
I apologize for rattling on...
One of my own personal theories about (worthwhile) aliens is that they're almost exactly like us in many aspects. Think about how many solutions there are to every problem that involves becoming spacefaring; many species would have to have characteristics like intelligence, social behavior, biological abilities to overcome abstract issues, and the ability to communicate complex thoughts. While they may differ in other ways, if they are to become a spacefaring species they must first be able to advance far enough to even consider that option. Then there's also the other thing. whatever species passes these requirements must also pass a final set; do they live in the right place? A species that develops on a planet with a massive gravitational pull could simply prevent space travel from even being a possibility in the first place, and too low of a gravity and they most likely won't be able to venture onto most other planets. Then there's the resource issue. There are some resources that must be present for space exploration to even start, including rare elements like gold, platinum, and many others which don't appear very regularly in some planets, meaning that many species, if they did exist, wouldn't even have the materials to get to space. Meaning if we do encounter a species in space, more likely than not, they will almost certainly share huge similarities with us.
But wouldn’t alien that evolve differently have a different view on how to space travel maybe even different material can be found in other part of the universe
@@indogen2198 while yes, they may have different ways of thinking and views, they would most likely still think in a few of the ways we do because certain things only have one answer. There's no situation where 2+2 is equal to anything other than 4, and the same goes for a lot of things, so most likely they would have to think in similar ways to us simply because neither of us have any other way to think. Of course, they may have differing views elsewhere, but they would still have a similar way of thinking.
@@oatmealman1586 interesting let’s hope your theory is right because if it’s not then we would have no way of understanding each other if something as important as math or physics is understood differently, also we must not forget that we human might still not have discovered everything in filed such as physic which might put other species in a big advantage
@@oatmealman1586 you can only assume that the methods of space travel available to current human knowledge is the only method. A more advanced civilization may have discovered methods not even thought of on earth. We cant have so much hubris to think humans have mastered the mysteries of the universe.
@@spenser6353 but you also need to put into account the fact that our method to go to space is the best method in respect of many metric of obstacles, limitations, and constraints
for example:
"why don't we use a more advanced form of non rocket space launch as opposed of using our rocket-based conventional method?"
the answer would be:
"because in respect of obstacles, limitations, and constraints in the form of economic, physical, political, technological, sociological complications, things like such are just not feasible enough"
the same can be said to these so called aliens with 'more advanced space launch technology'
for something that humanity can achieve by using a tech that works by burning things through chemical combustion (rocket essentially is just that) in which in itself is something that derived from one of humanity's earlier invention (we invented fire from chemical combustion since prehistoric times), probably going to be able to be achieved in a far more easier manner compared to whatever more advanced technology the aliens needs to be able to escape their planet's atmosphere
chances are, your more advanced civilization going to achieve better non space-related tech, since our technological progress going to diverge with them in respect to the civilizations respective environment
"we can't see ANY aliens"
"they must be coming for us, just REALLY fast"
Really interesting! I doubt we can take it too seriously as being predictive but it shows there are many possible ways that the Fermi Paradox may not be a paradox at all. It's easy to forget that the Copernican Principle is not a law at all and that it could be wrong or not complete. Extraordinarily rare things must occur if they're possible, and we could potentially lie anywhere on a distribution curve if it's truly random.
Like the "Boltzmann brain" thought experiment. Anything could pop into existence, assuming certain quantum physics theories are correct. But the odds are so small, it could take trillions of years to happen and only happen in one place in the entire universe.
One of the simulation (reality is a simulation) Hypotheses suggests we might be just a thought or a dream of a Boltzmann brain. 😂
A paradox is not an impossibility, it's just a problem that hasn't been solved yet. If we survive long enough as a species, our decedents may yet find the correct answer to the Fermi paradox. We just don't have access to enough hard data, to do that now.
Knowing the age of the universe, it seems more likely there are older, much older races out there. The real issue is how vast the universe is, a race in another galaxy will most likely never get here, there are just too many other destinations to consider. In our galaxy, we still must conquer vast distances to visit another race, and just like us that takes time, effort and resources. Are we worth the trouble for a more advanced civilization to bother? Of all places in the solar system we might find life, just small simple life, it’s probably under the ice on Europa, but we haven’t busted our hump to get there and find it, too expensive, too much trouble to get there and look. When and if we do, finding simple life on Europa will have a very small payoff. Some great knowledge, but no real cash return on our investment. Galactic aliens face similar problems coming to see us. It may be just not worth the effort?
I am still wondering why most of the videos of this type, which contemplate development of life on not Earth planets, generally fail to comment on one of the MOST FUNDAMENTAL reasons that there is and can be life on Earth:
Our planet has a magnetic field, produced by the spinning Iron core.
I find it quite improbable that, regardless of Star type, any planet can sustain Life without this one thing.
The grabby theory is similar to the dark forest theory. I wonder if the correct theory might be a combination of the two. That we are somewhat early... but also that most emerging civilizations get silenced by the closest grabby. Also Grabby civs may well figure out the dark forest is true and do their level best to stay quite even as they expand, to reduce issues with other grabby civs.
It may also be true that the idea of the ladder, and hard steps can keep some civs (like perhaps ourselves) both safe and in the dark. Its possible earlier then us civs may have evolved on planets with fewer steps... and they may view our planet as just not worthy of colonization. I mean if we discover life somewhere like Titan or the clouds of a gas giant... it will be interesting but not exactly a new home for humanity, so the life there could still continue its long slow climb. (grabby civs in our neck of the woods... may see a 5 billion life span planet as not worth the effort to colonize)
Or perhaps there are many hospitable planets, but just not a lot of intelligent life, therefore grabby aliens choose to colonize non-intelligent life planets instead, thus intelligent life like us never "meet" other alien species until we're space-faring themselves and other aliens consider us ready. Can you guys imagine the religions of the world, the panic, when alien starships decloak above in Earth's atmosphere?
@@BD-np6bv That is the point made in the hard step paper. That such aliens with a prime directive would actually still stifle intelligent life when talking cosmic scales. As they would take over on planets that could have spawned intelligent life given another 100-500k years. They argue that life would arise on a bell curve and the odd planet in the universe with fewer hard steps to intelligence would on a cosmic scale spread so fast they would stifle life across their chunk of the universe.
Its an interesting thought and dilemma imagine humans in 10,000 years looking at a planet that could barely support life we may say we can colonize here we aren't displacing anyone... but who are we to say that in another billion years life wouldn't make the steps required there. Early species (and we may be early) would probably not even consider that life could gain intelligence in what they would see as hard environments.
You guys seem to forget something: The further away we look, the more into the past, we also look.
Imagine we identified a planet in the habitable zone some 500 million light years away... In those 500 million years light takes to travel to us, some civilization might have already risen and fallen (hey there, warmongers in east and west!) and we would not know of any of that.
So even if there were "grabby civilizations", they would have the same problem. Detection and travel time being so long, that they could as well travel to some random planets in the habitable zone, not caring what state it is currently in.
@@ruffianeo3418 Lots of good sci fi there. Which show was it. Defiance I think it was... where that was basically the premise. That a Alien civ whos planet was dying decided earth was habitable but devoid of intelligent life. So they set all their ark ships to earth. Got here and discovered us... wars and colonization ensue.
dark forest theory is flawed at the very core, that is, agressive super-hi-tech civilization simply can't exist.
I believe that it's also important to remember that the hard steps have to happen in sequence, and along that journey there are many points at which the lifeform could be set back to square one. That may make it increasingly likely that we're early to the game, or maybe just that it's just so incomprehensibly unlikely and rare that we're essentially, if not literally, alone.
Yep . . . and as his t-shirt clearly illustrates, it's never aliens . . . and it never will be.
Yes, they may have religious zealots who keep burning libraries and setting them back to the Stone Age 🙄
@Alexander Diogenes, why would the process of life forming being difficult make us more likely to be early? The assumption in this paper is the Copernican principle: that regardless of the process that creates civilizations like ours, we are uniformly distributes among those civilizations. The reason this paper concludes we are likely not alone is because that conclusion would not explain our earliness, but the Grabby Aliens hypothesis would.
Even if only one civilization in a galaxy became advanced enough to travel between the stars, there would still be a huge number of such civilizations. And it's possible that for every advanced civilization that is capable of traveling between the stars, there are still many others that either stay within their solar system due to the vast distances between the stars, or that for whatever reason never venture into space, but still have an advanced civilization on their own world. We're still technologically young, and have been searching for other civilizations in the galaxy for a short time. We're really just beginning to get instruments powerful enough to begin taking a closer look at worlds we've only just discovered in the last 30 years. And with the huge distances involved between the stars, any civilizations that may have developed within the last 100,000 years, their signatures and signals may still be enroute. Even a civilization a few hundred light years from Earth would not have received any signals from Earth. We still have a long way to go before we really know if there are others out there.
That's called "The Great Filter," the idea that most races and civilizations die out or destroy themselves before they become spacefaring empires.
I like the idea that the fact we only find bare empty uninhabitle exoplanets in our local area indicates that we are in a very remote backwater of the cosmos that no one has bothered to investigate yet, or even reached.
Or that the entire universe is like that and we're just an abnormality.
run if you hear the galactic banjos
I can see three probabilities if humans are the first space faring species.
1: we become conquerors who conquer nearby systems.
2: we become teachers who teach the species we find intergalactically
3: we become sort of myths and ghosts watching other species and learning about them but not interacting with them
I think we are the first, and I believe we must strive to become the alpha and omega, we may be able to avoid the universe having to blip out of existence if we make enough progress.
I look at the world of today and believe we are firmly in option one. Think avatar but with real militarized industrial complexes to back up our expansions
If there are no ancient aliens then we will be the aliens. Get it.
I really like 1
Lets be xenophobic
We can be all 3, just at different time periods.
I'd love the idea that the Bootes Void is actually a normally populated area, but each star is covered by the alien equivalent of solar cells to grab all the energy possible to transmit in it's given solar system. Its only a void to us because the shades are drawn.
I have the idea that aliens decide not to live around stars. They collect energy and move into the intergalactic void.
@@kryptiqk2141 They wouldn't all do that, you can't expect entities of that of that number to act monolithically like that, at the very least some would like to live around stars for the heck of it, and there's no reason to not live around stars
Nice thought but don't discount the possibility that [for now] we are completely alone.
The issue here is that it's highly unlikely such a civilization wouldn't still emit infrared light in amounts we could detect.
@@kryptiqk2141 That's unlikely, as stars are both the most easily available energy sources and even if you have methods of energy generation that don't rely on stars, you'll still be relying on mass... which is again found mostly in stars.
I love how scientists go so deep into their theories that at some point they jump the gun and we're just like "wait what?"
Based solely on guesses and made up and untestable information.
Doesn't sound like science to me.
Yes! Going along: Yup, mmhhmm, okay, BULLSHIT METER PEGGED!!!! The speed of light is horrifyingly slow, so expanding at the speed of light isn't going to get you anywhere very quickly.
lol
Science has been like this for the past 100 years or so.
On the other hand, the reification of mathematical models could see the replacement of science with scientism. Mathematical models are simply mechanical devices that produce "results" depending on the assumptions, inputs, and rules applied. Or, in technical (😉) terms: GIGO.
You cannot draw statistical inferences from a sample of one.
You can, however, draw up a model of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin given certain assumptions about the nature of angels and the size and shape of pinheads.
Modern science began with ridiculing this approach, and yet here we are replicating it in a more sophisticated fashion. The so-called "appearance rate" is the equivalent of speculating on the properties of angels.
There is a lot of this about, leading some to speculate that we are entering, or even have entered, a new dark age.
Mathematical models are heuristic devices that merely allow you to backward check whether your assumptions and interpretations fit the available evidence. They do not describe external reality, and it is a category error to think that they do or to use them as if they do.
However, it was an interesting video, as entertainment, and the paper described also sound interesting, _as entertainment_ .
What makes this debate interesting is the idea that there are other civilizations that have become space-faring at this EXACT point in time, but because of time relativity we would not know for a LOOOONG time
That doesn't really apply in galaxy
We may never know due to the expansion of the universe
I always say about life elsewhere is not "If" but "when".
i thought the same. What if most life in the universe forms right now at the same time? we wouldnt know because they are just too far away.
Am I the only one who really want us to be grabby aliens ?
We all naturally want to be the best, everyone will end up with some definition of that.
Let’s grab this bag baby
Of course the Alien Schoolgirl wants us to be the grabby alien. 🧐
Based on our current technology, I don't think humans will be grabby that encompasses an entire galaxy or even multiple galaxies because of VR technology.
Once we know how to replicate / transfer our counsciousness into virtual worlds, colonizing an entire galaxy seems futile. Inside a vietual world, you can do anything, be a god or create your own worlds and stories + immortality.
I think gaming in the far future would be something like that, where AI can crafts us worlds and even stimulate reincarnation every playthrough meaning you won't get bored even if you have immortality.
@@神林しマイケル Interesting, but I guess one of the points of being the grabby aliens first is to not be destroyed by the grabby aliens that may arise. Even with virtual reality, brain simulation etc you should still need some sort of physical form handling it. You just transposed the problem with the device handling it as the body of the human race and the simulation its brain but then we can consider this a life form that is vulnerable to grabby aliens. Saying this I'm thinking of something funny, we could then become the grabby alien with the simulation as a hive mind controlling robotic bodies
This was an amazing thought provoking episode. I personally feel a bit of existential terror at the thought that half the universe could already be colonized, and we simply do not see any evidence of aliens because they are moving so fast that they day we can see them (their light reaches us) is also the day that they arrive.
That’s going on the List of Things to Tell H.P. Lovecraft if we get time travel.
Along with:
Africans are the only pure blooded humans, the entire AI thing, quantum mechanics, & space
@@jocylinfrancis930 lol that and show him some rick and morty. honestly that show does existential terror like none other.
@@jocylinfrancis930 The out of africa model is disputed at best and would not be an argument for race mixing which he was against.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15878780/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23124308/
Also "Africans are the only pure blooded humans" is an incredibly racist statement.
Come on why are you still so racially childish. So go f-- your sister.
I mean, that is what will happen. Same with that they will show up VERY quickly after we break the "light barrier" in any way shape or form. Well maybe not going through a natural worm hole if they exist and we can indeed get through them.
But, it really stands to reason that any civilization with FTL (and other higher tech) will be peaceful. They all would have planet busting tech and well; that makes war a bit insane.
--But, humanity still goes to war so, IDK.
I love how our current models for the universe have to plug in so many mathematical formulas until it's completely accurate, of course there must be things that we're missing in the standard model but it's as correct as it can be until we find out about something more to our universe.
It's like doing a math problem no one has the answer to, just roughly what it looks like and if you plug in the wrong equation or number you won't know until you get there.
"there must be things that we're missing in the standard model but it's as correct as it can be until we find out about something more to our universe."
we already know that both our best theories for understanding the universe - the Standard cosmological model and the Standard model of particle physics are both incomplete and inaccurate in some very important aspects and we do not know yet how to combine them together into one single theory.
Hey, did you reply to the “you’re a winner“ message on telegram? I’ve been approached like that before and it was a scam. Thanks
This is one of my favorite videos on this channel. The simple model to simulate alien expansion is so interesting.
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
You didn't watch the video did you? What Arthur says was based on Copernicus's Assumption (explained in the video) that we mustn't think ourselves/universe as special or the center of universe, if our civilization can exists then there should be others, hence what Arthur's Quote if we didn't find anyone its either this universe is empty or they already being destroyed so long ago (which are terrifying).
Meanwhile the assumption used in the video, the reason we cannot find anyone else was because we looked too early, which means there are still chances (we are not at the stage where Arthur's assumption comes to reality yet)
@@coasttoaster7675 tf? I watched the video. I am merely quoting. And yes I dd watch and know about all the statistics, but you forget basic math.
There are ONLY 2 options. We are alone, or we are not. This is talking about right now. Not thinking about the future or the past. In the future, obvously alien species will exist and probably already have. I am not posting humanity up on some celestial pedestal that we are so special and must be the only ones that will ever exist.
I am saying, and the quote is too, that RIGHT NOW, at this very moment, there are only TWO options. We are CURRENTLY the only civilization in the universe, or we are not.
You can't deny that, it is mathematical fact, It's 50/50. Yes or no. You can't say "we are not at the stage where Arthur's assumption comes to reality yet." ?????? How can we not be at a stage where a 50/50 chance is not reality? You are denying the probability of a coin flip.
I did watch the video, you just don't understand the quote.
I find the idea that we are alone is far more depressing than the other idea.
@@sudmuck it's defiantly depressing, but I guess the only good thing that would come from that outcome is we wouldn't have to worry about being wiped out by aliens. We could basically do whatever we want.
But again it'd be so lonely :(
@@sudmuck Humanity isn't alone. Most of us have pets.
Dominant species extinction played a role in those "hard steps" and it happened multiple times on our planet.
It would be super exciting. Imagine being the gods that lift alien race to civilization and teach them the middle finger mean good luck.
that wouldnt be as exciting as encountering a more advanced civilization. Humans have not been good at meeting new less advanced societies. It usually leads to extermination or slavery
This channel, and channels like it, have slowly become my happy place...I am not a highly educated individual, but there's something about casual learning that calms the most chaotic parts of my mind.
Thankyou
Watch enough casually, over many years, and you may end up more educated than some with degrees
Broad knowledge, rather than specialized
6:33
I love this episode because the script needs Matt to say "habitable" multiple times ❤
thats great little buddy
Habitbl
@@tuneboyz5634 why are you condescending xd
habibi. LOL ur profiel avatar
@@lucar.5045 "Habitbl" sounds like the name of some ancient Aztec god of suitable living conditions.
This is a magnificent achievement in this single episode Matt and all your associates!! You have clearly summarized key aspects of deeply attracting, motivating, inspiring question of Cosmic origins and Life Origins in 20 brief, easily educational and enlightening minutes. Thank you very much. A wonderful example of coherent model of process that assembles and shows relationships with prior scientific discoveries across fields of science, math, engineering, biophysics and more. I believe I like your work here!
I appreciate PBS Spacetime including all possibilities, especially one where a potentially advanced species can travel faster than light. Yes, the pessimistic predictions (ex. We’re all alone or vulnerable to a super predator) can be possible as well, but it’s nice to hear that humanity may yet stand a chance at survival for the long term.
Define long term ?
@@Eris123451 Undefined. It could be thousands to trillions or years.
Well, if we kill everything humanity cant die from a alien
We shall conquer the universe in the name of the emperor
My own pet theory is that we'll much sooner see ourselves spread life elsewhere, intentionally or not, than meeting any life that evolved independently of us.
Why do you feel that one is more probable than the other?..
@@SineEyed The chance that we accidentally fail to clean equipment, or one day decide to just choose to do sth for an experiment or whatever, is knowable and infinitely greater. In fact, we've already spottet accidental bacterial contamination on the hull of the ISS for example. We have life on earth, so the only requirement for spreading it is merely for that to happen - there's a lot more factors going into life independently forming elsewhere.
It depends on how we spread. Slower then light? Yah, we have a lot of room to spread by building space stations and trying to terraform planets or moons. Maybe even make it to a planet that humans can live on at slower then light if we figure out colony ships in the form of generation or cryogenic.
If we discover some way to do FTL? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a Star Trek moment and aliens show up within hours or days of us "breaking the light barrier" the first time.
Also, we humans tend to be so humanoid centric. There very well could be intelligent life out there that is nothing like us.
I'm a pessimist so I think we will either:
1. Obliterate ourselves with nukes and biological weapons before we learn lightspeed travel.
2. Or drain our planet of water and crops and die of starvation.
@@One.Zero.One101 why is this even a reply to me writing "we might not clean a rover enough eventually"
I love you guys. I grew up watching PBS in the early 2000's and seeing that you guys are still putting out absolutely spectacular content is awesome.
Dude I know this is good content even now as an adult
I think this was one of the best Space Time episodes. Very interesting and expertly explained.
then we would become helldivers
There is nithing to fight except yourswlf
I'd rather see a subspecies of humans branching off, featuring rather short height and a love for beers, then starting a mining company, exploiting alien planet teeming with bugs... FOR KARL
I love democracy.
I think knowing the Universe is young, and we are the first space faring civilization is exciting, that this is truly the First Time.
Lolz.
But we arent...
Universe be like "Be gentle, it's my first time"
@@nokta7373 ayo what? 🤨📸
@Cosmic Soup The much sadder and more probable idea is that space travel will never be possible outside extreme local space like our solar system and this is the same all over the universe meaning that no matter how many civilizations rise none will ever meet or know of the existence of others.
@@deadwingdomain And you know this how?
I love this show. It always makes me think and wonder in amazement at how special the cosmos and our tiny patch in it are.
I love it that now finally, my favourite channels are beginning to discuss the idea of grabby aliens. For me, it's one of the most fascinating proposals I have heard in years. Thank you. ❤️
Aye. SFIA has a nice few expansions on the idea.
@@bobdrooples second this
Rational Animations did a great episode on grabby aliens a few months back
@@Phriedah yes that was my introduction. The recent one 'tutorial to take over the universe' was epic too. ❤️
Have you seen Isaac Arthur's video on it? ruclips.net/video/llS4thbZkd0/видео.html
Even if we're not THE first space faring race the idea of us being one of the first explains a lot.
Maybe there are even 2 or so that know each other and have noticed us but are watching us as we're only like the 3rd.
There would definitely be some ethical concerns with first contact.
Getting through the iceball/ice-shell planet phases of life seems like it should be classed as a *very* hard step
Of course all the steps are hard. Evolution wants better. Or the sun's radiative changes want better.
From our perspective it seems hard.. But we also haven't evolved to thrive in those conditions. I just don't think we have any right to say that an ice covered ocean with volcanic activity beneath is hard for life, and that will probably become more clear once we start exploring some of these moons.
@@stormevans6897 You’re right that we’ll see (hopefully), but from a biochemistry perspective, volcanic activity provides many, many orders of magnitude less energy input than solar radiation, which means much less chemistry going on as a whole. So it’s not life-extinguishing, but it’d be a far greater challenge for evolution to progress past single-celled.
@@fluorotoluene It amazes me how often people just blithely propose alternate biospheres or even anatomical chemistries with a 'we don't know, could be the case' as an all-purpose excuse for lazy speculating.
Life requires energy. If your proposal of other forms of life doesn't explain HOW the biosphere is getting energy, it's worthless. If your proposal for energy is 50% that of Earth -- or the not even 1% of volcanic activity -- then you need to adjust your evolutionary timelines.
@@maltheopia: You appear to be responding to someone else. I was commenting solely on Earth - with a dim view towards the prospects for ice-shell life - and then responding to someone who obliquely referenced Europa/Enceladus/etc.
The two saddest scenarios would be for us to be the first or the last interstellar civilization. It's either empty and lonely, or abandoned and lonely.
First maybe but definitely not going to be the last.
If you're first, it's not lonely, you just get a massive advantage. An early civilization would be impossibly powerful for any newer civilizations to usurp.
it seems our understanding of the age of the Universe is actually quite wrong and this is still the very early stage(of what might be a cycle) and thus we are still billions and trillions and quadrillions and quintillions of years ahead of future civilizations
@@mjflit I guess, if your goal is exploitation and not exploration. If there's nobody to meet, no community to join, no civilizations or cultures to connect with, it's just infinite rocks and balls of frozen gas.
@Buzás András I like that.
I always thought as inhabiters of a third generation star we were late to the party but now I see we're close to the beginning, fascinating! Thanks for the video
Yeah. We're only about 2 or 3 million years into the time frame where we could develop. To be earlier would basically require our ancestors to magically learn about fire and cooking, and be pro-settling down... which is anti-human nature in a right as we were getting to becoming modern humans...
Beyond that... there is F stars which make up 3% of all stars and should develop faster than us which means that if they hit upon every lucky event we did, they'd develop before us, but by how much i don't know. You'd have to ask someone who understands how the mutation rate of an organism is affected by sustained increased radiation. I'd saying "up to 500m years" ahead of us, but I'd guess much lower... My guess with F stars is that they can support advanced life, but are unlikely to develop Intelligent life or they are cutting it very close to the cut off point to the point where a intelligent species would have just enough time to realize how boned they are.
1st generation stars couldn't have life around them anyway, few to no heavy elements. Second generation stars might have had too little for high life probability.
Sure it wouldn't take too many millions of years after the first stars to start getting heavy elements, but it can take quite a while to accumulate appreciable amounts, especially enough to facilitate complex life on the long term.
It makes sense to me that we may well be early.
@@NATIK001 Problem 1 how does life emerge. Problem 2 what's the chance of hyper intelligent life like us to emerge. I would say both are close to 0
@@chozer1 you're making the assumption that we're "hyper intelligent"
@@keyboardt8276
Actually there is a factor for judging intelligence. Intelligence costs energy, a lot of it. It is like a computer running pac man vs one running Microsoft flight simulator. The second needs far more processing, and that can't be as energy cheap as pac man. The battery dies far sooner.
This is one reason intelligence is considered possibly rare. Intelligence for the sake of it is a fuel gobbler that threatened survival. Intelligence has to enhance survival aspects. That's why I also expect it to follow the predator line. Eating grass doesn't require much smarts.
But since the brain is a computer, we can predict the energy requirements of smarter brains. So unless their world is made of super food, there will be limits.
What if we do see evidence, and we just aren't interpreting it correctly? Quasars for example.
Agreed, the claim in the video that we don’t see any aliens or alien activity when we look at space completely ignores the fact that we would be misinterpreting what we see.
Stupid example but consider some advanced even-earlier-than-humans civilization that for whatever reason needs a ton of readily available, concentrated carbon. So they seed/spin up a solar system and loop back once we’ve saturated the surface of the planet through climate change and eliminated ourselves. From the perspective of the aliens, zipping around at near-light speed or some other means entirely, very little time has passed. Rinse, repeat with other seeded solar systems as needed.
One thing I think is certain is that we are not alone, purely based on the fact that the universe, aside from beginning, does not just do something once. Whether we are early or late, given the size of the universe, if life can emerge here on earth at what we consider to be an intelligent level, then it is reasonable to assume that it has happened, is happening, or will happen millions or billions of times elsewhere. Making contact is just an issue of the scale of space and time.
But if we can never meet them, we are effectively alone.
Of course that requires you to believe in Darwin's evolution.
I do not.
Check out why: The Holy Bible, 1st chapter
@@erbenton07 no
@@erbenton07 There are 1000 options to evolution, if you're willing to go down the religion/mythology road.
@@erbenton07 It's not Darwin's evolution. It's a flourishing field built by thousands of serious scientists over more than a hundred years, always pushing the envelope, using (and developing) state-of-the-art technology in order to advance the knowledge of mankind.
Also about red dwarves, many models don't take into account habitable moons, when actually living near a giant around a red dwarf could be very stable, provide volcanic activity to the moon and protect it from solar flares as well as creating a day and night cycle
Indeed, a satellite being tidally locked to a gas giant would mean that it's not tidally locked to the sun and would get variable sunlight on the entire planet most likely, just like a regular planet that rotates and orbits a sun.
@@wesdoobner7521 Isn’t that precisely how our moon works? I never really considered it that way.
@@gavinm2183 yes, the mood is tidally locked to the earth, that's why it has a dark side from our perspective.
This idea reminds me of Frank Herbert's 'Dune' where humans are literally alone in the universe and have to make up for the aliens by themselves. LOL
Great book BTW, you should all read it.
Personally, whenever theoretical models such as these are cooked up, it brings psychohistory to mind.
I mean they aren't really alone, there were many animals
But doesn't an alien race appear in later books?
@@djdoc06 but given long time spans in the books. They are kinda like another species by the time they return. I watched few summaries on youtube though, bit it is on my list for reading.
What if we're the result of colonization, from a forerunner civilization
It's all a matter of:
- being able to mine asteroids and other celestial bodies for raw materials (since we don't have enough on Earth and we also don't want to destroy Earth)
- use said materials for manufacturing satellites in space (Moon base, Mars, or even at the place of mining, using AI controlled robots) in order to save on transporation/take off energy requirements, etc
- deploy manufactured satellites around the Sun (Dyson Swarm) to collect energy similar to solar panels and beam it back to Earth and other stations on Moon or wherever we need energy in the solar system
- develop technologies to store the beamed energy (which will be orders of magnitude above anything we've ever seen until now, think of gathering energy from a continuous nuclear explosion each fraction of a second)
- once we have this framework of owning a solar system, send probes (or even start earlier, in parallel) to Proxima Centauri and other nearby stars that we know they host Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, to determine the parameters of the planets and requirements to terraform them
- repeat the process around stars in vicinity, terraform planets in the habitable zone using energy gathered from local star and resources from the solar system (we can even alter asteroid/comets' paths to crash them into planets if they lack water or anything else)
- have an entity like an ASI managing all those nodes, build it like a blockchain, and allow it to have some governance about energy usage on each node, other policies, to ensure fairness for all nodes involved and avoid conflict
- expand on a hop-to-hop basis, enjoy the exponential expansion
- develop ways to communicate with eventual alien civilizations we encounter across the Universe and develop some kind of galactic Forum
As you see all the steps from the above are not so SF at the moment...some of them are in progress, others we know are achievable - for example beaming energy into space can be handled by using lasers to keep the photons parallel basically and not lose energy, we know that even laser is not perfect and the photons can diverge, thus you might need satelites orbiting at different point in space to act as repeaters to re-focus the beams...Also, due to the fact that space is...well..empty, there will be no atenuation and most of the atenuation would ironically be in our Earth's atmosphere and even that we can go around...are there technological challenges to that? yes...but are they impossible or SF? no way...we already have ideas how to do that
Once you can own the energy of the local star, the system becomes your playground, you have enough to even deploy energy-inefficient technologies and not care, and develop more efficient ways while already being on your way to colonize, if a solar sail only uses 1% of the beamed energy to move, you'd still not care, if the remaining 99% doesn't melt you ofc, but you get the idea.
If there's no Great Filter ahead, no AI wiping us, we are destined to colonize the Universe in what it will look like an explosion, literally. We'll have AI robots terraforming planets using their own star's energy before we even land there.
We should be more careful about Terraforming planets, we could find rare materials that the Terraforming process could negate.
The fact that we evolved to our current levels within this tiny window of time is already a profound against-the-odds miracle, I see no reason to believe another species not only was able to evolve in the same amount of time as we, but has surpassed us to interstellar travel.
why do you see no reason? there may be older civilizations in the universe than mankind. Thats hubris to believe that humans are the center of the universe and there can be no civilization more advanced. theres really know way of knowing that. We must always be open minded to possibilities
@@spenser6353 We are technically the center of our universe. There's a perfectly spherical area we can observe and we are in the center of that sphere. There's no proof anything beyond that exists.
@@volos_olympus absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
If their planet has mars gravity and thus they can access space easier?
I'm sure a lot of people would have been happy to see how the amount of hard steps influence the mathematical model. Surely it neatly ties in and the relationship between itself and the amount of time is very intuitive to understand. Generally more maths would be great to see.
If you search "Grabby aliens" on RUclips and watch the video from Rational Animations, he goes into greater depth with the calculations.
The reason they don't give a hard number is because if you look at the evolutionary record and human development timeline... evolution of intelligence is pretty much a guaranteed thing... however human level intelligence and civilization is essentially throwing some dice and happening to happening to get super charged from the results of going into controversial territories.
There is just a lot of stupid luck that resulted in modern humans that are more or less happen stance within a niche situation. For example, we need to be able to work with tools which requires us to stand upright which we only do because we evolved in a environment that became deforested and tall grass took over which had to have a climatic reason for changing, but it had to change from a pretty dense forested area to forest and savanah area... and we have to develop from creatures that need to find advantage from grasping things at least part of the time and on and on...
Then you realize that's all before you account for fire usage and cooking which we can see there is a long separation between the two... and thats before you get into how long it took for humans to become settlement dwellers... And then once that happens you then have to account for Rome and several other empires coming about that turned away from developing further and becoming anti-new technologies... and then once you get past all that you still have to account for all the chances off destroying ourselves or preventing ourselves from leaving our planet which we haven't gotten through all of yet and teetering very close to the edge of them...
When I was figuring this all out long ago for this stuff, anything I could think of that would stunt a creature/civilization from advancing to the stars the stars i gave 50/50 shot to even though they are probably much lower chances. I came to the answer that there should be a space faring civilization for every 500 light years of space.
And that number is not accounting for time disparity between when a civilization could arise to fill that space... but if I were to give it a mathematic answer... Gstars are 25% of all stars and we developed around 2 million years ago and if you just use all the time for 500 million years even though I'm sure there's less time than that for complex organism to exist you'd come to answer something like there is 500 million years, for at least 25% of the possibility, for a space fairing civilization to arise in a 500 light year bubble. Even if you don't consider FTL or near Light velocity a thing or even 50% light velocity... we're talking a 1 in 500 million probability that the first space fairing civilization will be the only space fairing civilization in their region space that they can get to, especially for a species like us who have stupidly jumped the IQ curve by quite a lot.
That is not to say we won't find other intelligent life out there if we get out there, but they will not be space fairing. They will be at various points throughout our history up to and including those points that could befall us, like running out of resources to rebuild their civ after some massive break down. They could be millions of years technologically superior to us, yet unable to reach space... and that's only accounting for G class stars... The class of stars on either side of us have shorter/longer spans than us and should equally advance at faster/slower paces so those are interesting to consider too, but they should skew too much for them to be as readily predictable as what would stunt them from becoming space fairing or enhance them.
All I know is, based on what I see and how stupidly unlikely it is for us to have certain events happen to us, as pointed out before, we're super early in history and the reason we won't see many other space fairing civs is because they exist either in the future or very far away... unless we hit another improbability of them being right next door... in which case that starts to, if it hasn't already, what they heck is happening to make us get this improbably "lucky".
@@Durakken i dont think they'd at any point during human history, they'd be before or after it. It took us 2mil from hunter gatherers to now, while it took 500mil years from the emergence of "intelligent" predators to now. If we assume their evolutionary path isnt totally different, intelligence will need a long time to evolve.
This is by far the coolest video I've seen on here in a while. Thank you. And thanks to the people that were involved with this paper.
If we are among the first to travel in space, we need to expand rules and regulations on how to act and how to make First Contact. Maybe some kind of Prime Directives.
The Fermi Paradox's assumption of unlimited expansion is unjustified and even unlikely in my view. Yes, life tends to expand as far as it can, but intelligent life is not a fungus. There are a number of reasons to suspect that most civilizations would reach a point of stagnation in its colonized volume.
1) After expanding to the limits of their planet, a species will need to learn how to create social systems based on balance and equilibrium rather than expansion, if it is to survive long enough to make it into interstellar exploration. Having developed such ways of existing, unlimited expansion will no longer be driven by an unending need for more and more consumption. Technology would even allow for highly reliable means of population control.
2) Every time we see prosperous cultures on earth, we also see a decrease in the birth rate. This is because offspring are an economic liability in post-industrial societies.
3) This leaves only two remaining impetus for going out into the stars: the collection of scientific knowledge, and the romantic notion of exploration. These two incentives to expand would be sustainable for a time. Each new star system full of planets would provide a wealth of planetary science and even biological discovery. Space will also be new to us as it is now, and we will have a zest for seeing what's out there.
4) But after exploring and settling 10 star systems (25-100 planets?) we would begin to lose that zest. The variance of discovery would begin to average out and by the time we explored our 100th system, we would be seeing a whole lot of the kind of thing we've already seen. More importantly, the scientific benefits would reach a point of diminishing returns. How many gas giants would we need to study before we pretty much 'get it'.
5) At perhaps 100 star systems colonized, what will be the incentive for exploring the 101st system, much less colonizing it? By this time, we will have perfected societal knowledge and social systems such that we are living in a virtual paradise with automated systems handling the heavy lifting for us. Who would want to leave that, for no needed economic gain, to brave a harsh environment, only to be forgotten as one of countless other colonists who collected no significant scientific discoveries?
Instead, it is more likely most species simply go into a sustainable mode with several dozen systems colonized, having greatly reduced the chances of their extinction by settling into other worlds. The name of the game then would be perfection, not expansion. In fact, expansion beyond that point would only increase the danger of the ONE thing that could threaten such a multi-system species - attack by another. If this is so, then there could be many ancient bubbles of colonized spaces all over our galaxy, which would still leave the vast majority of the galaxy between uncolonized.
To play devil's advocate, I'll make an attempt to refute:
1) You could argue the greatest motivating factor for interstellar expansion is due to expanding beyond our means and requiring additional resources - something already commonly displayed by life on earth, and certainly by humans throughout our evolution. I think it's unlikely finding equilibrium on one's host planet is requisite for developing interstellar travel. We're almost there (a few hundred years at most) and have no such equilibrium. Also expansion will certainly in some cases be driven by the need to evacuate one's local system due to impending, unavoidable doom (star/planet instability for example).
2) It is just as likely to imply as technology progresses, the economic liability of children, and life in general, will decrease.
3) Certainly this motivation alone would likely not sustain; on that I wouldn't argue.
@@sidpomy Thanks for the response :)
1) "You could argue the greatest motivating factor... additional resources". I thought I had mentioned that with population control and a well orchestrated system, recycling is perfectly possible indefinitely (as long as the colonized stars are burning at least), with no need of any further resources.
"I think it's unlikely finding equilibrium on one's host planet is requisite for developing interstellar travel. We're almost there (a few hundred years at most) and have no such equilibrium". I mean it is a requisite in the sense that we are reaching the limits of what our planet can sustain - we don't have a few hundred years unless we learn how to stop with unbridled expansion and consumption. Both in terms of climate and resources, the effects of our exponentially growing population is already an issue.
"Also expansion will certainly in some cases be driven by the need to evacuate one's local system due to impending, unavoidable doom (star/planet instability for example)." True, but that was a hundred star systems ago from the civilization I'm describing. The precariousness of only occupying one star system are important to address, and we will have long since done so.
2) "It is just as likely to imply as technology progresses, the economic liability of children, and life in general, will decrease." I'm sure it will, but even so - the liability could be zero and still, prosperous people who have access to education and perfect birth control methods will tend toward a birth rate that is less than 2.0 (replacement rate for a couple). While we will have the ability to control our population, in such a prosperous society it may very well be the case that our problem is the very opposite: making sure we are making enough babies just to remain at the same population.
There are really standard objections to all this. To me it sounds like you're saying: After we've occupied 100 islands, we couldn't possibly ever want to move to the 101st! Well ok, maybe you and your buddies don't want it, but somebody eventually will. Maybe you like your neighbors, but they don't like theirs. Or maybe a non-biological AI will do most of the expanding, because from its perspective every extra bit of computation is a positive thing. To think that self-reproducing populations stop expanding before their niche is filled is contrary to everything we observe.
I would also like to add...
6) We already have a perfect real-world example of how expansion stops without incentive - our current age. Just after we went to the moon, we had the technology needed to continue expansion. Everyone projected a robust future of expansion into the solar system - and they were wrong. That is because the cost/benefit ratio of expanding into the solar system did not justify or incentivize it. But over time, the cost side of that ratio is coming down, as we learn to mass produce space tech, and learn cheaper ways of building it. Also over time, the benefit side of that ratio is going up, as resources here become more rare. The cost benefit ratio is still negative, but we are getting closer to the 1/1 mark. When it passes that threshhold you are going to see a very rapid expansion into the solar system because it will be profitable. Looking back on the period between the moon landing and that moment, we will see it was not technology holding us back, so much as simple lack of incentive. When you project into the future, there is simply no reason to suspect some eternally present source of incentive to continue. Our second age of equilibrium with then come again.
@@Daniel-Strain Plausible certainly, although I would say it's not presumptuous to foresee a civilization that achieves interstellar travel faster than us yet still doesn't achieve equilibrium, or a civilization with higher birth rates and a stronger biological drive to reproduce despite their advanced society.
I would actually say one scenario I find intriguing to quell colonization is a society falling into a rapturous virtual reality and seeing no desire or even curiosity to expand or explore "mundane" reality further. But this likely wouldn't happen 100% of the time, which is kind of required if civilizations are common - otherwise the outliers few may they be do expand and colonize everything.
It was fun to see your take on this. Rational Animations has done a great job covering this in depth, so it’s fun to see an echo here
It would be fantastic.
The universe would be our sandbox to play with.
Until the Tyranids gets to us
Free real estate for everyone
@@majorhumbert676 well ... then we fight .. FOR THE EMPEROR!!!
@@Chestyfriend Grab the Conestoga starships, SOONERS! 😂
that wouldnt be as cool as encountering a more advanced civilization. Humans have not been good at meeting new less advanced societies. It usually leads to extermination or slavery
Interesting. I have thought about that a lot when discussing the fermi paradox. An optimistic and somewhat surprising solution to the fermi paradox could be that near FTL travel has to be possible because any civilization that can travel at such velocitites would inevitably disappear from our radar due to time dilation. The fermi paradox only becomes a problem when we assume low velocities (that are still fast enough for generations ships) or any near FTL travel that bypasses the effects of time dilation (like infamous warp drive). Any other method of travel should be able to solve the Fermi paradox without requiring u to be really alone in the universe, or in other words: The Fermi paradox only tells us that we don't live in a Star Trek universe.
I'm always rather skeptical of astrophysical claims that rest heavily on the Copernican Principle. There's a weak statement of "we shouldn't assume our place and time is special" and a strong statement of "we should assume our place isn't special". The weak statement I'm fine with - the strong statement seems extremely suspicious - the kind of assumption you make because it lets you put numbers on things, not because you have any reason to think it's true.
It feels a lot like it actually does rely on us being in a very specific and special place and time, namely the mean. The temporal Copernican Principle seems particularly specious because we assume we're a middle civilization because our point in time can't be special, but we also assume that there's special a time before which no civilizations can occur and a special time after which no civilizations can occur and that we just happen to be in the middle. We choose that time (for some reason) specifically to make sure we're in the middle and use it to draw conclusions about the rate that hypothetical galactic empires must be spreading given no information about the capacity and practicality of long-distance space travel.
Apparently we can make conclusions about the state of the universe right now based on something that hypothetically happens in the future? If anything, that feels like the kind of thought experiment that demonstrates that it's generally a bad assumption, not unlike how schrodinger's cat was devised as a criticism of the copenhagen interpretation.
My (almost wholly uninformed) opinion is that our position in time _is_ special, in that we are in the very early stages of the stelliferous era. Somebody has to be first, and the universe is young enough that it's not completely unreasonable to believe it's us.
@Spencer Thomas, I think the reason the Copernican Principle seems spurious to you is that you are imagining a day-to-day human use of the word "middle" instead of the astrophysical one that is being used. Presuming that your data point is in the middle 99.99% of data points is not specious reasoning.
And of course we can draw conclusions about the state of the universe right now based on hypothetical ways the universe would have looked in the future. If I'm playing Texas Holdem and I know my opponent bets 100% of rivers where he has top pair or better, then once he checks, I can conclude his hand is weak based on what I know he would have done in hypothetical scenarios.
The Copernican Principle is not a claim, is just an hypotheses that our planet and the Solar System is not in a privileged place of the universe, this is because history has taught us that everytime time we thought that we were in the special place of the universe, we were wrong. So from an statistical point of view, it makes more sense to follow the Copernical Principle.
If we were 10% later in evolution, or had one additional extinction event while mammals were getting it on, our planet wouldn't have had a civilization. Our existence kind of defies the Copernican Principal already in that we barely made it in the door on this planet, and could easily not have. Also there are multiple planets that likely had or certainly did have liquid water in our sun's habitable zone just in this solar system. Seemingly only 1 produced a civilization, barely - more likely only one produced life at all. We are special to some degree even within our own solar system.
@@mallninja9805 i agree, until life is found anywhere else it seems plausible that we could indeed be first, at least of a lifeform that has already left its home planet. Even the thought of having plenty of hydrocarbons after millions of years of evolution to enable a lifeform the ability to have energy capable to expand enough to be able to do this needs a few extinction episodes to go through, then again maybe the dinosaurs if they had more time could have evolved enough to get to the moon.
I saw this episode of Star Trek: TNG. They chased genetic "clues" all over the galaxy to find a species that evolved, explored but no one was there so they dumped their genes into every primordial soup they found and left "instructions" on how to find them and all the races' common ancestors.
The alien hologram was played by the same actor who ended up playing the Female Changeling in DS9.
Yeah, the Klingons and Romulans weren't too happy to learn they were cousins...lol
We've had five mass extinction events on Earth that we know of. Five times that the planet hit the reset button, causing millions of years of catastrophic evolutionary delays. In that sense, I've always thought humanity might be a little late to the party. It's reasonable to expect other life-sustaining planets in the universe to experience similar extinction events, but it's also reasonable that some of those planets might have had fewer extinction events than Earth, giving life a longer time frame to evolve intelligence space-faring civilizations.
Also consider that humanity very likely wouldn't have evolved at all without those extinction events. If you think about how evolution works, selective pressures push species towards solutions for problems. Humanity has evolved to a point that we could likely prevent extinction events altogether with our technology (though we can certainly cause them as well... whoops)
Would a paradise world with no major threats to life even necessitate consciousness?
Sometimes I wonder.. most areas where progress is made rapidly are in areas with little regulation, where many people qualified as well as not are able to simply do stuff and see what works. More brains, more failure, more success.
Space has been a frontier where the government has been involved since day 1 and heavily regulated.
So if we are actually gonna get somewhere maybe we need to change that.
If there was a large moon (like ours) around an exoplanet around a red dwarf star, would a tidal lock to the star still be more likely than a tidal lock to the moon?
Too many variables for an accurate answer. Mass and distance of celestial bodies vary greatly.
Such a thing wouldn't be stable. If the moon was experiencing that much gravity from the star, it would be ripped away from the planet in ~1000s of years. Could such a thing temporarily exist? Possibly?
could a moon form close enough in these circumstances?
This is why Mercury and Venus don't have moons.
@Cancer McAids This makes me miss my home world; love having a gas giant fill the sky.
My main issue with this type of speculation is we have no idea how likely it is for life to spontaneously form even if conditions are perfect.
For all we know the nearest life in the universe could be far beyond the limit of the observable universe, and this wouldn't make us as humans in any way special since in an infinite universe any event with a non-zero probability regardless how small is guaranteed to happen somewhere.
Also, we're only talking about the life as we know it and the conditions for the life as we know it.
Yes, I also had this idea pure speculation except planet formation speed.
@@barbthegreat586 We have no evidence that other ways of life aren't possible
Well, the "observable" universe when it comes to the chances of seeing signs of other life are much smaller then the observable universe. The vast majority of signs of life just get lost in the background noise and light of the universe very quickly.
Heck, there could be civilizations out there blowing up stars and we just think they are going nova. For all we really know, ALL stars that go nova are other civilizations. Same with black holes etc etc etc etc.
Super advanced space ship 40 miles long FTL's to the edge of a solar system, launches some kind of device / weapon at a sun and FTL's away.. and we'd just see the sun go nova 500+ years after it's happened.
Our planet size and physical form helps us a lot with becoming spacefaring. Everything lining up correctly is very rare.
And that is the beauty of chance and evolution. It all falls so neatly together all by the luck of the mutation of maybe a single gen in a single cell
1:21 We are not in fact on a typical planet. Earth, as planets go is actually very peculiar from what we are currently able to learn about other planets.
This is such a fantastic idea. Thanks for all of the great videos.
My answer to the Fermi's Paradox has always been the question "What if we are the firsts in the observable universe?".
My answer is humans are so stupid/silly/arrogant that aliens are just avoiding us to not deal with our BS.
My answer has been "why do we think they are leaking radio waves?" Because radiowaves have only existed on earth for less than 100 years and we are already figuring out quantum mechanics. Who is to say in 100 years we don't invent radioless communication. What if radio is only a stepping stone and by searching for radio we are only looking for aliens within 100 years of our own level of technology. Seriously.
@@ub3rfr3nzy94 good point they could be using communication tech that our species and tech is to primative detect or understand.
My answer has always been that we're long in contact with aliens and some people in power who "know what's best" for -themselves- the world are making sure to keep it a secret.
That basically implies the theory that the great filter is behind us. That there is some difficult or improbable step in our development that other systems didn't experience.
One of the model results, that the successfully “grabby” share of civilisations is around one in a thousand is effectively a statement of the Great Filter hypothesis you’ve discussed previously. It’s a reminder of the rarity and importance of us getting on with it or we’re dead (in half a billion years 😂).
I mean, is it really bad if your civilization doesn't reach the stars? It doesn't have to mean that we're dead. It would be a gross simplification to assume that those grabby civilizations are necessarily completely hostile. There's already a lot of assumptions to get there. In fact, this model shows that the "'great filter hypothesis" is an antiquated way to work compared to the models we make today.
Afawk, civilizations could be potentially eternal, or at least very, very long lived without having to leave their home system. We know very little.
@@Ezullof we do in fact have to get off planet. The sun will consume the earth eventually and we need to be able to move before that happens, that or move the earth itself.
@@Ezullof yeah, it's pretty bad. Those grabby aliens probably aren't going to stroll by our planet and leave it alone
That is if humanity is still thriving or even exists in 500,000,000 years. The typical dominant species, on our planet anyhow, averages 1,000,000 years before extinction. We are around 200,000 years old. A mere adolescent of dominant species. If we can't mature a bit and quit all the self-destructive behavior, we aren't likely to even reach that average, especially not 500 times that average.
Well, the idea of the Great Filter originates from Robin Hanson, the same primary author of this Grabby Aliens research!
david grusch and lue elezondo and the US congress would disagree.
The RUclips channel Rational Animations has a great series of videos narrated by Robert Miles that cover the Grabby Aliens model. I highly recommend them!
Yeah, and this video is a bit too close to Rational Animations''. And Isaac Arthur did one last month too.
@@harpfully It's honestly not close at all. RA's video was about the practical process by which a civilization could spread across the universe. This video was about the implications that has on our observations and place in history.
@@harpfully I mean come on you can't expect them not to talk about this
I have seriously started to think Copernicus just didn't have a firm grasp on the law of averages. Fun fact: it's actually very special to be exactly average in every manner.
It's more appropriate to say we are average in any given manner, likely near average in most manners, and special in some manner.
It's also unreasonable to assume we, along with everyone else is average, as uniformity across everything, everywhere is an absurdity.
Taking it seriously though, if we are average, then it's average to not reach the stars, the Fermi Paradox assumes we are late to the party, which is not average.
He didn't say we're exactly average in every manner though. He said our location is not special. That's one manner in which we should have a lot of company, i.e. our world is not significantly different from plenty of other worlds.
But i assume this notion was mostly aimed at religion and geocentrism. Traditions that _demanded_ humanity be special, even though there was no real reason to believe so. Maybe it will turn out that life is really rare, and that earth therefore is special in some ways, but i don't think that's what Copernicus was arguing against.
Copernicus didn't actually state the Copernican Principle. It's just named after him.
I was convinced this is likely the case awhile ago. Isaac Arthur has some great videos about these topics, and yeah, being local firstborn is very likely, we have a ton of advantages in our favour for rapid evolution to intelligence, coupled with an early formation of our solar system which has all the required elements from past supernovae. Massive tides from the moon being very close to earth just after the collision that gave us our marge iron core; creating a very fast evolutionary playing field. The stoned ape theory probably has some truth to it as well, the size of our heads compared to the birth canal further supports how fast we evolved large brains.
The lack of alien evidence would be more compelling of an argument toward some kind of a zoo if the universe were older, but the universe is relatively young, earth has had wildly good luck at creating the conditions for intelligent life quikly.
Also, the likelyhood that these same factors exist all around our 'stellar neighbourhood' are high. If looking for alien life we're more likely to find it close-by, surrounding similar stars, than far away in the even earlier universe.
Again, local firstborn does not mean we're some kind of forerunner, there are almost definitely other races out there, but they are probably just as confused as us about the lack of other life.
This becomes easier to parse when understanding that we're looking back in time when we look to the stars. Aliens in the Andromeda Galaxy are looking back 2.5 million years when looking in the direction of earth. Sure they would see evidence of oxygen in our atmosphere that could compel them to look further, but 'intelligent' life hasn't arisen yet on earth when they look here, and thats the closest large galaxy to the milky way.
Anyways, that's a compelling reason to explore space aggressively, because we don't want to be on wooden canoes when the tall mast ships arrive. They are likely coming, just over the horizon still.
How are they looking back in time at us if Andromeda and the milky way are on a collision course with one another? Does time move in different directions and it matches up at the collision? Wouldn't whether we are looking back in time in reference to the stars depend on which direction you are looking?
@@270eman Light doesn't travel instantly, it has a finite speed. The andromeda galaxy is so far away it takes light 2.5 million years to reach it at that speed, which means an observer from andromeda will see light that left earth 2.5 million years ago and only just finally reached andromeda. As a result they are looking back in time when they observe the earth/milky way
Aliens aren't interested in the Milky Way--they prefer Snickers.
awesome video -- I love how they were able to take some assumptions and come up with a specific sort of answer. Sadly another possibility is that it's impossible to be a grabby alien for some reason and we are all contained to our local solar systems. Of course if the authors assumptions are correct then we need to start working on our 0.3c spacecraft!
Mr. J.M. ,
Some of the authors assumptions are NOT correct ; particularly in regards to planetary evolution .
Firstly ; terrestrial planets do not stay geologically active, and thus ecologically viable, in perpetuity . The mechanisms which generate internal heat weaken and die out over time , eventually sterilizing the ecologies and rendering the planets barren .
Secondly , the host stars' rotations slow drastically over time , this engendering tidal-forces which lower the planets' orbits until they eventually reach their Roche Limits , disintegrating and being consumed by their stars .
*.Planets unfortunately, have seriously limited lifespans . They definitely do not live forever .
JM, the paper does take into account this possibility. But this possibility would not explain why our civilization is so early in the universe which is what this paper attempts to explain.
I would consider it to be very unlikely that there is some invisible barrier around all solar systems. In an earlier episode, Matt explains how with current technology, we could send small spacecraft out of the solar system to take pictures using our Sun to refract light. In millions of years, technology may be so unimaginably more advanced that colonizing another star may involve sensing a seed-sized nanobot to procreate there.
@@gavrielcohen5095
Mr. Cohen ,
In a million years mankind will either have evolved into a much more human form , or incinerated itself w/technology such as what you referenced .
Vaguely interesting, but so many assumptions it's pretty much worthless.
@@gavrielcohen5095 The invisible barrier around us is space. Once you start measuring distances in light years, the concept of constructing 'societies' across such distances becomes impossible. No colony would be a member of it's home world's sphere of influence, even for a little while. They'd just be wholly independent worlds from the day they were colonized, with no material trade, and only very difficult and slow communications. Societal drift would have kicked in long before the colony was even founded, due to the wildly different mode of living on a colony ship for decades, so the colony would never have any basis for relation with its home world, again from day one.
Needless to say, this very much eliminates most of the potential incentives for the powers-that-be on a given world to pour the vast resources into a colonization effort that would be required. They have literally zero chance of any return on investment, ever. This would be as true for any alien species as it is for us. The only thing you'd be able to get from your colonies would be data (very slowly), and if relations sour, possibly an RKKV.
I have started to wonder if part of the reason we haven't seen aliens yet is that most civilizations move so quickly (at a galactic time scale) after achieving space flight that by the time you see evidence of them in their home system they're already on your front porch. i.e. the day we notice them both at a distance and up close will necessarily be closer together the further away they start.
More distance just gives them more time to develop faster methods to get here. Depending on how good we get at scanning the skies the order in which we locate them and their home system could give us an idea of the speed at which they can travel. If they show up on our front porch before signals of their home system can reach us they've clearly achieved FTL travel. If they arrive after then it's less likely. The fact that the former case could account for why we've seen nothing yet though is kinda eerie.
Unless we have something very, very wrong about physics, FTL isn't possible. It basically implies backwards time travel by its very existence - should it be possible. I think the fastest a civilization would expand is probably around 10-20% speed of light. Beyond that requires enormous energy and has weird relativistic effects.
How would we see them before they arrived on the front porch?
But we see them everyday as UFO.
@@bozo5632 If they aren't traveling faster than the speed of light, we certainly would see them before they got here, if only because ships traveling at relativistic speeds (which, if they got here, they would most likely be traveling at) give off distinctly large amounts of light, which would be traveling faster than the actual ship and thus get to Earth before them.
The problem with that theory is they're not on our front porch.
I think it might just be really hard for any organism to survive cut off from its planet . You have to bring your whole ecosystem with you or else it's like you are a cut off arm. We are a part of this planet we grow out of it. And we have to kind of planet/cell duplicate before we can get any good distance
I've actually made an ecosystem in a jar that's completely sealed off and separate from the outside world. It has thrived for over 4 years already and it'll continue to thrive for the rest of my life as long as it receives a sustainable amount of energy. I believe making a smaller version of our ecosystem in colonies on other planets or spaceships that can sustain itself indefinitely is very possible if not the only way we get to colonize the stars.
@@legendarypussydestroyer6943
With a username like that I have questions about your ecosystem such as; shape, size and smell. 🤔
😂
That's just incorrect. We don't need our whole ecosystem at all. In fact I bet not a single human in history have ever relied on all of the earth ecosystem.
We’re not spacefaring yet and it remains to be seen if we’ll hold it together that long.
We technically are tho, yet very limited and primitive.
I never thought this principle was really applicable in this way. We are indeed on a typical planet orbiting a typical star. But that's in the sense that we live on a rocky planet around a common type of star. And it stops there. No unique material, no unique fate. But we can still have a rare position in the galaxy, in chronology, or even be a rare outcome of a series of events. We don't even know if out steps are the only possible ones - or even the most common ones.
Just think about this: if you apply this principle to yourself, then it means that you're living at the time in the history of manking when humans are the most numerous. Before us were fewer humans, but also after us. But we know it's unlikely.
Let's keep in mind that there are a lot of strong bias in astrobiology, and the first one is that they, by default, seek for Earth-like life. Because otherwise, they'd have nothing to work with.
It seems to make the same mistake as the doomsday argument of taking the Copernican Principle and using it to assert that you're somehow a randomly-selected person. You're not randomly-selected; you are precisely the being that was born at your time+place of birth. The odds of someone born in 1990 C.E. being born in 1990 C.E. are 100%. Us being "early" doesn't need an explanation; *someone* has to be first.
Our star is actually by definition not common for life if red dwarfs have habitable zones.
@@sidpomy or star might still be common for life during this time period. Though in another few billion years not so much anymore.
@@Sanquinity It is possible, yes. Much is unknown.
@@sidpomy it depends on your definition of "common". Not nearly as common as red dwarfs, yes, but also yellow dwarfs like Sol aren't exactly rare. It could be that life develops on both and we're just one of the few on this type of world. It is statistically bound to happen because... it did, and that's all we'd need for statistical possibility.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I feel like no one is talking about this. Everyone is enamored with the the fermi paradox, but there is not paradox.
Stars today are only 3rd or 4th generation. Meaning, heavy elements are relatively new and life is just now becoming possible.
13 billion years is a very long time, but on the cosmic scale, it’s nothing. It stands to reason we could be one of the first forms of intelligent life to explore space.
We could be setting the stage for all life to follow!
"If these authors are right - and that's a big big if - then it may be that our empty sky is one piece of evidence for a universe filled with aliens rushing in to grab this rare remaining patch of empty space time."
One must be incredible smart to come to the conclusion that "us not being able to detect any evidence of alien life may prove that the universe is (half) full of alien life". Right up there with "if we go at night, we can land on the sun".
Our industrialization supports that hypothesis.
Billions of years for evolution
Millions to master fire
hundreds of thousands to master civilization
thousands for significant technological progress
hundreds of industrialization.
If the trend continues, one can see how million year old light reaching our galaxy is absolutely insufficient and dangerously misleading to show us what is "really" out there right now in this minute.
@@flyingchimp5012
Lack of evidence of existence doesn't prove non-existence. I agree.
But the video says that lack of evidence of existence may be evidence of existence, so I repeat (using different words): one must be very smart to say something that stupid with a straight face.
Either aliens are incapable of reaching us, or they are capable and find it insignificant. That's logically valid, if you consider non-existence a form of incapability. If they are incapable, then we may detect them one day. If they find us insignificant, then something must explain why we don't detect them.
Their are some misunderstanding on how difficult it is to do it. For any species to exist beyond existence.They will first have to learn how to stabilize the entire fabric of space in which they inhabit. Until you're able to control that, the great filter will delete everything.
The content on this channel is just incredible, and Fermi Paradox solutions are one of my favourite topics. Greetings from Argentina!
I'm so impressed by how much some people manage to deduce from so little information.
it isn't "deduction", but speculation (and a lot of BS).
I’m so glad you did an episode on this. I had watched the grabby aliens video about a year ago and I’m glad it’s getting more traction on the work that was done
your a complete fool
actually our situation is very atypical. our solar system is very odd. we have one star with a bunch of planets, and the earth just so happens to have the necessary resources for life and is in the stars habitable zone
What if even for far more advanced civilizations it still takes a LOT of time/effort to travel to/near us. Simply because the universe is so vast. Even if they can reach the speed of light, we're still far from around the corner for them. They might have been here already but it's not like they will hang around or re-visit within the next 1000 years.
Especially if the inhabitants of the plane chop each other to pieces.
Is proof that faster than light travel is impossible.
Considering the known size and age of the visible universe and the age of our planet and the life on it i guess it may as well be a possibility that we may be the first or amongst the first intelligent forms of life in the universe, one has to factor in the time it may take for life to evolve to this stage, which is actually quite unlikely as something is bound to happen and disturb it which prohibits life from getting to the advanced stage, i think humans are actually truly unique in the context of the universe, i believe we are special in this regard, advanced life isn't common.
I don't think that makes any sense. There are literally trillions of planets, at the very least there has to be more than one species that managed to reach intelligence advanced life.
Humans aren't unique in my opinion.
We only have a sample size of one so you can’t say that there’s at least one other advanced species exists when the chance of them appearing may be infinitesimally close to zero
@@olivercharles2930 i feel pretty confident in saying that we are most likely the only truly inteligent species in existance. While there are an almost uncountable amount of planets how many of those meet the believed criteria for life? An incredibly small amount, of the tiny amount of planets that exist in the goldilocks zone how many have liquid h2o or oxygen rich atmospheres.....even less. When we start talking about JUST the planets that could hold life we are looking at a nigh zero chance and then you have to through the formation of cells, plant life, other complex life and the eventual beginning stages of sentience.....yeah no we are most likely the only intelligent species in the universe. Think about how many others creatures existed on our planet before us and now think about how many of them achieved any form of true intelligence...just us humans and our deceased genetic cousins from billions of years of life....just us
@@olivercharles2930 Trillions of planets but what if each hard step is like one in trillion-trillion? And if there's like 20 hard steps. The closest other technological civ can easily be not just far outside our galaxy but far beyond the cosmological horizon..
We actually don't know the age or size of the universe, even the visible one. Our CLOSEST guess has a margin of error plus or minus 59 million years. 59 million years ago, the planet was still recovering after the asteroid extinction event, and in 59 million years from now, we may as well have traveled to every star in our entire galaxy. Remember, the diameter of our galaxy is only 100,000 light years across, and CURRENT technology has been able to push an unmanned probe fast enough to cross our entire galaxy in less than 170 million years. 170 million sounds like a lot until you realize you can send 2, one in each direction, and suddenly it's only 85 million years... using 2018 technology. Its still a lot closer to the 59 million margin of error. Point is, 59 million years is a MASSIVE margin for error when in the perspective of a species that would be unrecognized in that time frame.
Now imagine the aliens faces in a future, discovering a rest of the "primordial humanity civilization". It would be fascinating
Because of our moon we also could figure physics out a lot faster. Plus we strick it lucky with the materials we have in our astroids.