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Very nice video, but could you please turn down the BGM a little bit, it makes it hard for me to understand the words without concentrating very much on it.
I mean, looking mildly early is ok. It's when we look so early that someone is gonna accuse us of manipulating our pearl and blaze rod drop rates that this is concerning.
It's so interesting that, in spite of all the media involving humans discovering ancient civilizations that knew great secrets about the universe, it's likely that *we* are that ancient civilization that some civilization will stumble across. We might be the ones that arrive and give others our secrets, because we're the only ones here as of now.
@@the13inquisitor59 But if you think about it any "ancient species" would be the same way. Any ancient species had to have died out or moved on at some point, and surely any intelligent species that isn't self-destructive would be able to figure out a way around their problems.
We always think about 'what if we found life on another planet?' But I just had the thought of what if we find a mining probe working on a different planet. That would be even crazier. Not only did we discover other life, but they're more advanced than us.
It is overwhelmingly likely that if we happen to discover an alien race they will be much more advanced than us. It's nearly impossible to detect a more primitive species and it would be fairly easy to detect a super advanced one.
Well i would say if we're talking about any kind of reasonable timeframe where we can even imagine how humanity will be like, then meeting another species would either be really primitive or waaay ahead of us since they'd have to be the ones to find us.
i like the concept that we used to be very advanced but then we fell off and the solar system society was lost to time but humanity is still out there in the universe
Me to! I am creating my own universe for a scifi comic and humans are simply the 5. First smart species in universe, and the 3 of the previous ones dissapeared long times ago! Humanity never see any other species instead of them not because they are hiding or not real but because humans are the very first members of something big!
@@alejotassile6441 not really, if anything the Qu are the precursors (or the dudes who put the dinosaur on the other planet, although that may have been the Qu I'm not sure if the author clarified that part)
I disagree, Stellaris represents a universe where this hypothesis is false. According to this hypothesis you are either grabby and entering into a mostly empty universe or you never exist because all the planets are already taken. In Stellaris your empires appear as newly evolved in the middle of the timelime (Precursors and Fallen empires before you, and Primitives after you). This suggests that all empires in Stellaris (past and future) are non-grabby. They do not pass Rule 1 and Rule 3 "Expanding outwards constantly for a long time, cosmologically" and it seems there is something which stops empires from expanding forever... but lets stay spoiler free shall we.
@@benbuckton5114 an interesting point, and a good one; indeed the grabby aliens hypothesis, at least in this video's interpretation, neglects the decline of grabby civilizations. In stellaris, the precursor aliens either go extinct, or become non-grabby (fallen empires). It also features an unrealistic world where you spawn in a relatively short timeframe of your conquering the universe (100-300 years ish), and implies a short decline (centuries at most). You can actually see grabby survivor bias in stellaris: if the fallen empires never became docile, they could easily dominate the galaxy . However, since they wait, the new aliens have ample opportunity to overcome and destroy them through grabby behavior or other stellaris cheese. Also, stellaris raises the question of bureaucracy; can all aliens expand infinitely, or is there a point at which they overextend and disintegrate due to their massive sprawl?
@@Pyrohawk I'm of the opinion that colonies of formerly grabby aliens would be isolated from each other by lightyears of space, and over the millions of years apart evolve to become very distinct alien species from one another.
We do often overlook the fact that we haven’t always been alone. We used to share the Earth with other intelligent hominids, but they were all killed or, in the case of the Neanderthals, integrated and absorbed into our own species over time.
We simply out-competed our four friends in a sense, but well said. We didn't even have to directly murder them like how some species now seem to be incompatible with how we do things and move stuff around usually ones who are too niche. We are quite the wave makers.
When your channel blows up and starts making merchandise I want all the grabby alien plushies. Which should be in a week or so. Really enjoying your work. Keep being awesome.
The biggest problem I have with the "grabby aliens" hypothesis is that it assumes interstellar civilizations would have resource desires and needs that directly conflict with our own. However this could be a flawed assumption for a number of reasons: If it's possible for a species to travel light years away in some fashion, then given how empty space is, it's unlikely that they're explicitly dependent on planets for resources. Planets are infrequent, have high gravity and other hazards that mean they take HUGE amounts of conventional energy and effort to deal with. Let's take water for example, which is the most essential substance for life we know of. Despite the fact that Earth has literal oceans of the stuff, for a space faring civilization it'd be far more efficient to mine planets and asteroids, or even simply harvest hydrogen and oxygen from nebulae etc., then to land on a planet massive enough to hold water and grab it from there. Even if we assume ultra advanced future tech makes it *easier* to harvest water from an earth-like planet then it is today...why wouldn't it be even easier and more efficient to still get water from those other sources? Additionally, it's plausible that microbiological life on any alien planets are a potential *extreme* hazard to any species that evolved on a different planet; because their mere metabolism might produce compounds that are highly-toxic to alien life from other planets. If there's not a credible, ultra-scientifically advanced way around this...then one would expect aliens to *actively avoid* at least any physical contact with other life-bearing worlds.
That's a decent thesis you have there. I'd really only have one note to offer: According to biologists, there is absolutely no reason we should assume a risk regarding alien pathogens because of how pathogens have to evolve, often in very inefficient and counterintuitive ways to infect their prey. Just looking at how complicated it is for a virus to be able to infect a particular cell, from a particular host, one can see how unlikely it is for a virus, that has never seen a species, to be ready and armed for infection. These complications even make disease less likely when it comes to more complicated infectious agents, like nematodes and parasitic worms that often require multiple host species to complete a life cycle.
@@donttouchmycoffee The point is not pathogens, but chemicals. Uric acid is harmless to life on earth and occurs very commonly as a byproduct of biological activity, but might be highly poisonous to life forms which have a completely different metabolism.
The point of "being early" is that the aliens arriving on a potentially habitable planet arrive most likely even before life evolves there. Then they change that planet in some form. And yes, there is a question whether or not they would need to mine or extract resources from that planet if there are asteroids and other planets around. But for one thing, they'd be going at the expansion full-tilt so they would use exponentially replicating machines, and consume all the resources in a solar system. For another, they might construct a dyson sphere or something similar, stopping any life from evolving also.
@@Hannah-cb7wr This is somewhat plausible, but a lot less so than sci-fi authors would like it to be. If we assume CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen) life, as we have on Earth, then the basic chemistry is all the same. You can imagine the biochemistry developing differently, but it still has to deal with the same chemical building blocks as we do, so convergent evolution is likely to make many chemicals have similar effects in practice (CHON aliens will not melt when you dump water on them, for example). More complex stuff, like DNA, is going to be entirely different of course, but it's not as if we're going to try and breed organisms from different biospheres with each other. If we suppose the aliens are not CHON, then you run into two basic problems: * Your chemistry has to be elaborate enough to support complex biochemical pathways, and perform at least most of the basic functions that we see in CHON organic chemistry. * Your chemistry has to involve elements that are relatively abundant in the local environment, which is probably at least _somewhat_ similar to abundance in the universe as a whole. CHON satisfies both of these requirements. Most proposed alternative biochemistries run afoul of one or both requirements. Ammonia-based and methane-based are somewhat plausible, but both of those are hypothesized to function at temperatures and/or pressures vastly different to those of Earth, so they're not going to land on Earth for the same reason that we're not going to land on Venus (yes, the sulfuric acid is a problem, but the temperature is a much more immediate problem).
I'm often confused by why people think we should be communicating with aliens by now. Our earliest transmissions, if they've managed to maintain coherency at all, are only about 80 light years away. We've been discovering hidden tribes on Earth up to the past decade, so who's to say we just haven't been passed over?
Exactly. Shit man, we've only JUST had our first actual up-close pictures of the planets in our own solar system, yet we're somehow going to have communicated with species developing in the next galaxy over? All we know are theories built from scraps of information. For all we know there's life on the other side of the Milky Way, but they're just as blind and dumb as we are so neither has spotted the other. And yeah, telescopes let us look at distant planets (in very low detail...) but most of our "knowledge" comes from math and cross-referencing what we think should exist because it exists a certain way in our own situation, all the telescopes really let us do is calculate the size (still math...) as well as guess at atmospheric compositions.
@@MrDifsh We're still making advancements in our telescope technology and being able to see the silhouette of a planet or theorize the composition of its atmosphere is not the same thing as being able to see a civilization.
@@MrDifsh But the light we see through telescopes are still millions of years old. What if they’re all right there waving at us, but the ping is just really high
The idea that we humans are amongst the few primordial species to arise in the universe is not frequently considered, though interesting Of those whom believe we are not alone, it's far in a way common to depict our own race as the slowpokes of the stars. I believe the idea that we could be in first place with all our flaws is a scary one to some. More comfort in being able to look up at a race more competent than ourselves, whether that be to our betterment or detriment. Us holding the reigns? Like an unsupervised child swimming in the deep end of a pool.
when i was a kid i almost drowned cuz i went on the deep side of the pool and out of panic i learned how to swim upwards, soo maybe that can happend to humanity aswell 🤔
Not all people who believe we are not alone assume the aliens are more advanced than us. I personally do not believe we are alone, but believe that the vast majority of extraterrestrial life is single celled or “animals” of limited intelligence or physical capacity to construct things. That is after all what we find on our own planet. I won’t deny the possibility of more advanced civilisations or that we are the most advanced, as all the calculations used to do so are so speculative as civilisation and the emergence of consciousness is difficult to quantify. However I do believe that to just assume we are likely the most advanced species in the universe is just as hubris as to believe the universe was created for us. It is possible, but to actually believe it takes an unjustifiable leap of faith.
i kinda feels its a biproduct of how people view the species as a whole and how religion has played a role on humans plus a self calculation of the universes age and the relative time humans have been around seeing how actually understanding those large numbers is rather difficult
Fascinating stuff! I rarely find such a gem through UA-cam recommendations. You did an incredible job explaining the model in a way your more casual space and science geek can understand.
Imagine how much more stuff could possibly exist that we might not be able to wrap our heads around... it'd be like an ant trying to comprehend a computer
I always found it interesting how we can’t understand our brain, and there would be no way we COULD because we would have to be dumber to have a simpler brain, thus not understanding THAT brain. Intelligence is wacky.
@@Clarkamadorian its not that the brain is fundamentally impossible to understand we just dont have the tools and knowledge to. we most likely will at some point. a computer can "imagine" a computer after all
I've come to suspect that being "grabby" in and of itself is one of the great filters. We don't see expansionist alien civs because that tendency tends to result in their own collapse before they ever escape their own gravity well in any sort of significant way. If you can last long enough to become space faring, you almost by default have learned to live within your own means.
@@hungrycrab3297 and the crazy thing is, a solar system could have hundreds of thousands of O'Neill Cylinders (or maybe even the larger Mckendree Cylinders) housing trillions of people, and they STILL would not have altered the appearance of their star enough to be detectable from even a light year away, let alone dozens or thousands of light years away.
That outlook assumes many things about he human consumption and multiplication. During the time of greatest plenty (right now) the human population is on decline, kept out of free fall only by life extending medicine. People can only consume so much in a lifetime and with basic recycling the inner solar system has enough to support trillions of people. Humanity can't consume enough to strain the solar system for billions of years.
@@zackwalker6775 "only consume so much" you write. How about durable goods? Yachts, planes? What if everybody want own spaceship like now want a car? Own space station as a house? To be independent somehow. What might keep up in Solar I think is short lifespan. How many work toward something that will bring any result in only 1000 years? I bet close to zero.
You see this a lot in 4x games like Civilization. If you start expanding too late all of the good spots will be taken so at best you'll have a disjointed empire with a few ok resources.
I kind of agree, it happens in Stellaris. But Stellaris has charitably 600 solar systems per galaxy, maybe 400 if the player wants late game to work well. The Milky Way has perhaps 100,000,000,000 solar systems. That makes it more like No Man’s Sky with near infinite empty space. It’s feasible to assume spacefaring interstellar civilizations learn to use birth control and don’t ha the urge to mine every resource, burn every hydrocarbon and pave every grassland. Those with that instinct climate change their home planet into unlivability and don’t reach the next solar system.
@@Shane2020xxx It's just an assumption with zero proof though, and assumption people make too often, people think all the time the aliens might better morality-wise than us but people never think: what if they are worse? We never know, maybe we are doing great right now.
I think we have to contemplate the hypothesis that intelligent life at the human level is extremely rare.Suffice it to note that intelligent life like us has not appeared on Earth in billions of years.And even then, it was just a species that emerged and that almost went extinct.
What's your evidence that humans almost became extinct? Even the largest disasters in history (bubonic plague, etc) never threatened total human eradication
That's one of those things I point to for evidence of a higher being. The odds of us existing are astronomical even in conservative estimates. It's not a definitive bit of proof, but I find it more believable that we're a product of intelligent design than mere happenstance
@@pryordevine3855 Nah, that hypothesis would be more probable if humans appeared from nothing, but we didn’t, we have a clear evolutive connection with the other hominids, who also have a clear evolutive connection with ancient apes (modern apes are an entirely separate group from hominids), who also have a clear evolutive connection to mammals, and so on and so on. Not only that but also intelligence isn’t exclusive to the Homo Sapiens, the Homo habilis could already use rock tools, the homo erectus could use fire and Neanderthals could pretty much do anything that we could too. From a genetic viewpoint I find humans being altered and/or created by aliens highly unlikely.
@@ilosada2933 all I'm pointing to is the improbability of this planet being habitable, plus us evolving from what we did to what we are. a crap ton of things have to go right for us to get where we are now. Many more things have to go right than go wrong. I'm not arguing that we were placed here, I'm more arguing from a narrative/writing perspective that there's a (rough) plan and in order to get to the end point, all that other stuff had to happen to act as setup for the payoff.
I'm curious as to how much of the "early" factor may actually just be a component of distance. As the further away you look into universe the earlier you are also observing.
@@ME-ru4hv He is talking about how when we see something 1 lightyear away it takes the light 1 lightyear to reach us. So when we see something 1 lightyear away we see it as it was 1 lightyear ago.
But a billion ly is quite far? The distance within the galaxy is not significant. A million yrs not that significant and could cover the local group IF we really mean the unlikely event of galactic civilisation. But one thing is obvious: we really just haven't looked at that much and have only a single perspective, effectively a point, to do it from. Call back when SETI covers a significant percentage of possible locations 😆
Right! All these stars millions of light-years away and we've been into space for under 100 years. If all life on planets started around the same time we wouldn't even expect to hear their signals for another million years
A better way to put it: you come to a party and without looking to see who is there, you find that the snack table looks completely untouched. Therefore, you must conclude that either you are early or no one decided to come.
Was about to comment this, though I wasn’t sure if it was actually a reference or just coincidentally similar. BUT since your comment got a heart, I guess it really was a reference. Love it!
My favorite part about this whole thing is the question of, “why are we so early?” Like it’s a question you can find a hard answer to. It’s RNG. That’s like asking, “why wasn’t I born 100 years from now?” Well, the answer is easy. Just because. You were born the day you were born for the same reason your parents happened to cross eyes for the first time, and the same reason the raindrop hit your right cheek and not your left one. It happened because the specific events that allowed it to happen were present. Then the dice were rolled, and you won. Saying we are early is assuming that there is some deadline we totally missed. I also think it’s flawed to think that being early is some kind of special status that is weird to have when it really isn’t. If 100 people were placed in separate rooms with a button placed in front of them and told, “you may press this button whenever you like,” and given the freedom to do so at the exact same time, inevitably, one of those hundred will be the first person to press the button. Sure, you can try to come up with reasons as to why they were first, but they were just as likely to be last as they wer to be first. Their status as “first person to press the button” does not make them special for doing so. They just happened to be the first one by chance. We could very well be of the first 1% of all advanced civilizations that will ever be born in the known universe, but I don’t see what the problem is with that because being in the last 50% instead still implies that there was a first 1%, so if it isn’t us, it’s going to be someone else. Swapping our place with another advanced civilization wouldn’t make us normal. It’d just make us later by relation alone. I think the best way to look at it is to see that there is a high chance we may be of the very first, but know that we could always be wrong.
blah blah blah!!!! hey carlos? 1-you are aware the universe is billions of years old right? 2-so other lifeforms had a quantum leap jump start ahead of us. 3-issac asimov said it best "any suff. advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic" 4-mike shermer of skeptic mag said "any suff. advanced alien life, is indistinguishable from god" 5-so a god or gods in relation to us is VERY HIGH PROB!!! 6-if there is a multiverse/other dimensions...then abilities like foreknowledge/time travel/gods/aliens/etc is all VERY PROB!!!!
You're right but i think your perspective is a bit off. There must ofcourse be someone who is the first, or early. But the probability that, if you take a random civilization, that that is the early one is still very low. If you take a random person out of the room then the possibility that they were the first to press the button is only 1%. The same goes for us. The probability that we are early is very small if there are going to be a lot of civilizations, its not impossible, just very unlikely. Thats why this theory is interesting because it makes it more probable.
The theory doesn't make it any more probable that it happened, it only offers a different calculation of how probable it is. Nothing about reality has changed no matter what theory you believe to be true. That's what I think Carlos was getting at. To use the button pushing example; imagine each contestant is locked in their respective room, and the only way they can leave the room is by pushing the button to unlock the door. Humanity is like a person that pushes the button and walks out the door, and then sees nobody. If all the information we have is that there are 100 people locked in their rooms with the button that unlocks the door and can press it at any time, there's a 1/100 chance that we were the first person to walk out of the room. That theory explains why we don't see any other people, but it's still only a 1/100 chance it happened under that theory. However, the "grabbiness" theory would be akin to a theory that once the first person presses their button, all the other buttons in the vicinity are disabled. This theory also explains why we don't see any other people, but given the theory it'd be near a 1/1 chance it happened. The video was explaining the grabbiness theory, and how under that theory it's much more likely that we wouldn't see any other civilizations. Just like the theory of the first button press disabling all other nearby buttons. I think what the video missed is how this fits within a framework of Bayesian thinking: the idea of taking the given evidence and weighting the probabilities of theories based on that evidence. Humanity pressed the button and walked out to see nobody; that much doesn't change. But given that as your evidence, what then do you decide to be a more likely theory? Put simply, the grabbiness theory doesn't make it more likely that we're early. Rather, our apparent earliness makes it more likely the grabbiness theory is correct.
@@yamiyugi2894 "a scientific proof" Science doesn't "prove" like math does. The only realm science can operate within is "very probably" type spaces. That's the whole point of sigma-surity and repeatable experiments.
It would be very interesting to see younger alien species evolve and grow, going through the same or similar struggles as we did and are currently. Maybe poking them on occasion for a bit of fun and to see their reactions. Making sure their nukes won’t work if the worst happens and someone gets a bit too trigger happy when looking at each other. Then, eventually, welcoming them to the stage and introducing them to the universe and it’s wonders. I hope we have someone like that, looking out for us.
@@APufferfish Despite what people think, i don't believe current humanity would straight up enslave they, politicians of today would see no value on doing that and ruining their reputation. However, that is, unless the aliens are actually alien, like, despite being sentient their culture is so strange that it is incomprehensible to us, in that case, conflict would be inevitable.
There's an assumption that advanced aliens, when they move out into the universe, will only inhabit planets. They could also live inside hollowed out asteroids. Lots more space for population growth that way.
Or build their own micro-planets. Or maybe there are extremely heat resistant aliens who live in the atmosphere of stars. Or extremely large aliens who live in the vacuum of space and drift around collecting hydrogen, and they have a natural fusion reactor powering them and creating new elements to grow and reproduce. Or even macro scale organisms that are composed of trillions and trillions of galaxies that think about stars like we do atoms (this one is probably impossible because of hubble expansion but it is fun to think about).
I really like this kind of storytelling. You parsed an academic paper and presented in a way that makes it incredibly accessible and super cool to watch. sub++
I wished you had mentioned the unimaginable size of the universe. There may very well be endless Grabby aliens already having formed intergalactic empires, but if the universe is infinite, what are the chances that they are going to be within any visible range for us to detect?
The universe isn't infinite, though. If it is infinite in any dimension, then by definition, it contains infinite energy. That's a lot of energy to pull out of your cosmic ass
I find it weird that he didn't mention how grabby aliens could intentionally raise other civilizations/species. Not to mention the definition of life. Can life only exist in the same form of us or could there be something intelligent that has a vastly different make up composition than us. In that situation you have to account for planets that would normally be considered "barren" for us but be especially welcoming for a different life form.
When I learned about the mechanics of cancer I always thought the statistics seemed similar to the Fermi paradox stuff... It's cool to see someone did proper research on it
Extremely interesting. I can't wait for humanity take up all the good planets in the galaxy and prevent different forms of sapient life from naturally evolving.
Potentially. Grabby Aliens certainly looks like a modified version of the Super Predator "Dark Forest" solution to the paradox. It remains to be seen how tolerant a future humanity would be to alien lifeforms.
The thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is that earth hasn't always been suitable for complex life - first, it needs to suit simple life, and change in certain ways that allow the life to grow. It's almost like life has to adapt to survive within a moving "window" of suitability.
What if alien civilizations were beginning to colonize galaxies hundreds of thousands of light years away within the last couple thousands of years, and the light from that time hasn’t reached us yet.
@@dipanjanghosal1662 Like watching a video in slow motion. Imagine how a time lapse of the universe would look, like from a photo taken now of the night sky to one taken 1000 or 10,000 years from now.
The hardest hypothesis to believe in is the existence of such "grabby aliens" themselves. It is hard to believe that species would remain "constant/uniform" across distances as large as in the model. I find it much more likely that solar systems would be colonized one at a time. Now as for self-replicating robots, that's a whole other story.
If any portion is grabby then it will seem like the whole species is grabby. If one portion decides to stop expanding, then the other portions will still take over and expand into where that first portion would have expanded into.
@@SeraphimFelis are we sure about that? If someone gets too grabby and everyone else stops them, why do we assume that everyone will be as grabby as the first guy?
@@elizabethjones9581 Did anyone stop us? Everyone doesn't need to be grabby, only one civilization needs to be grabby for it to out grow everyone else. Then if some parts of that civilization decide not to be grabby anymore. the grabby parts will outgrow those too.
@@SeraphimFelis what if the grabby parts overconsume and starve? That's what happens to cancer, and it's happening to us, the grabby society this idea is based off of
I agree with the first part: that we in fact may just be early. I've thought about this before. But the issue I have with Grabby Aliens is that it necessitates the need for Grabby Aliens blazing through the Cosmos at breakneck speeds to colonize in order to explain why the window for life is narrow enough to make us look "normal". It seems to be obsessed with averaging our situation as humans. It creates a "future" event to retroactively explain our arrival in the cosmos. It's like they are looking at multiple Universes and explaining why this one has only early life. But there are no other Universes to look at. There is no other "Older Histories" to look at. All we know is that compared to the potential age of the universe (assuming we are correct about red dwarves and the stellar age of the Universe) we are early. That's all we know.
Huh, just saw the video on reddit and I got very surprised when I heard Robert Miles narrating it. Really high quality stuff, and I loved the animations. I'll be looking at the other videos on the channel!
The reverse-time-flow reasoning process here is weird: "the future will have grabby aliens. which explains why we are stuck here in the past"? If the anthropic principle allows the future to force our consciousnesses to live in the past, I will eat my hat. Now, I don't own a hat, but if my hat were conscious, it would (by the anthropic principle) live in a universe where I do own it, and that's where I would eat it.
No it just means that we aren't special, non-grabby aliens like us can only exist in the early stages of the universe. Given that, it is not actually that unlikely that we, a non-grabby alien at the moment, exist early, because that is the only time we could exist. We aren't in the "past", these are just predictions of what will happen in the future. We are in the now. Being able to predict future events is pretty much orthogonal to the other things discussed.
You are correct. The notion of reasoning that we must be early because the future is much longer than the past is a tautology. We exist in the first 0.01% of the life of the universe, therefore we are early. It is both true and meaningless. That said, I am very much a proponent of "we are early" because, IMO, there has not been that much time for "advanced" civilizations to evolve. The gas cloud that became the earth and sun formed approximately 1/2 the age of the universe ago. Gas clouds that possessed enough complex elements to form life on a rocky planet had to form from a combination of fairly common nova and supernova events AND much less common hypernova events. The latter, in addition to being very rare, also require much longer, not because of the lifespans of the original stars, but because they had to be far enough apart that the second star was not destroyed by the first one going supernova, but not so far apart that they would not have collided by 7bn years ago. It takes a very long time for two bodies to bleed off enough momentum via gravitational waves to collide. In other words, the clock did not start for the development of "advanced" civilizations until some amount of time passed between the big bang and about 6-7bn years ago when our home dust cloud formed. We took about 6-7bn years from when that formed, and it is unlikely that anyone got more than a couple bn years head start on us. Further, if they did, they may have been working from a less enriched cloud, so may be developing more slowly.
@@andrewandersson it doesn't mean we aren't special, it is a hypothesis which only creates the existence of grabby aliens with math specifically designed to incentive early civilizations in order to claim grabby aliens are real. It has the attractive point of grabby aliens mean we're not special so that they can bully you into thinking it's legitimate. Cus clearly, if you don't agree with this hypothesis you must believe humans are special and magical, so you're basically a geocentrist. It can't be legitimate as the reasoning is circular and retroactive. Circular because it makes claims which are unsubstantiated that all support each other, "the universe is young thus we seem early" as well as "grabby aliens exist" which are followed by a retroactive effect of the fact that "it would make sense that we are early because the grabby aliens exist and would have all the planets in the future, so we wouldn't have been able to make our own civilization in the future." Not to mention literally just random math which isn't actually based on anything derivable 🙃 Do advanced alien civilizations exist? Almost certainly. Is this a good argument in favor of that? Absolutely not.
The way I see it, it's not that we're early, it's that we're right on time. A few million years later and we may not have developed before some other advanced civilization claimed our planet, stunting our growth. Perhaps causing us to become beasts of burden or livestock of a sort. It's not that the universe is anthropic, but that we literally could not develop outside of this narrow period of time. Consider the other species of hominids and how they were -slaughtered- outcompeted by homo sapiens. Should homo sapiens have finished a hard step a few thousand years later we may have been beaten out by another species of hominid.
Why are we early? ... _someone,_ who _just happens to be early_ is going to find themselves wondering why they're so early, assume they're not early because of how improbable that is, or assume they're something fishy going on, some problem to solve -- and then try to infer a bunch of stuff from their apparent earliness. It's entirely possible we're early because we happen to be early. The universe looks exactly as you would expect it to look to a civilization that was very improbably early.
I think it’s important to remember that this is more of a thought experiment than a substantive theory. Much like Roko’s Basilisk it makes numerous large and often illogical assumptions in order to operate.
Agreed. Like Drake's equation, it's mostly assumptions with a glaringly obvious flaw. If we are early, wouldn't the grabby aliens be even earlier, necessitating even earlier aliens to account for them, and so on? As a Christian, I know what accounts for our existence, but even if I were not, it's obvious that some species had to be first. Why do we assume that it isn't us?
@@hungrycrab3297 it's not about being "wise"; conquering the galaxy is a preference. If you have an open ended goal to do as much ${x} as possible not conquering the galaxy becomes a huge waste.
I could recognize Robert Miles' voice instantly! Say what you want but the guy has such a calm tone and perfectly moderate pace, he makes every video he narrates super easy to follow (can't wait for his next AI videos too). Together with the unique and high quality animation, this video is a masterpiece. I am disappointed I only now came across this channel, subscribed!
The grabby alien hypothesis isn't one I had heard of before but it sure builds a strong case for us being among the first intelligent beings out there. Great, great video! You've got a new subsciber
That’s compelling enough. It is optimistic to view ourselves as arriving early, as if we could act as a model for later civilizations. It’s always constructive to assume a leadership role. The scale of thinking is so huge and it’s hard to know exactly what impact we could have on that future, if any.
I'm struggling with the observation/conclusion that we appear "early".. it seems to rest on other assumptions, like that life and advanced civilization would arise often enough that advanced civilizations could expect to actually see each other... I don't think that's a safe assumption..
@@adfaklsdjf It’s indeed not an safe assumption because that’s not the point, the true safe assumption is that every advanced civilization would be “grabby” and have intentions to expand, therefore eventually meeting other advanced civilizations, in this case, life being common or not doesn’t matter at all.
"We developed very early in the galactic timescale, and this is very unlikely. The most likely explanation is that an advanced species influenced our development." But, doesn't that make them even more early, and therefore, even more unlikely? I think it's more likely that we are a weird statistical anomaly, spawned purely of the law of large numbers, rather than the likely result of an even more unlikely civilisation.
@@MsNikeNike What I'm saying is if you watched the video then it would make sense that alien influence would become very very quickly obvious due to how rapidly they spread. This would probably mean that they'd have either colonized most surrounding systems with obvious waste heat signatures and other things or have colonized our own solar system. Why would aliens colonize the galaxy and just happen to skip out on our bubble? If there are grabby aliens they would've colonized our entire galaxy including the moon. I could, although, see earth being left as a nature preserve just due to the sheer quantity of planets. I also don't see any reason they'd hide themselves from us (which would be very hard because of waste heat.) Anyways point I was trying to make was there is no sign of alien influence in our neighborhood, I gave a bit of an extreme (or perhaps not so much depending on alien behaviors) example of alien megacities on the moon.
This has always been my hypothesis to the Fermi Paradox. We have to be alone in the universe because viewable aliens around us would prevent our existence.
@@cortster12 it's pathetically wishful thinking to believe we are the only or the very first. At one point the best minds argued just as logically that the Earth was the center of the universe, but we're not even in the center of the milky way or our own solar system. Humanity has always had a problem with accepting humility but the overwhelming evidence thus far is we are truly and utterly insignificant.
@kimpeater1 Wishful? It's logical. It doesn't make sense to me we could exist in a spot another advanced alien race could occupy at once. So either they exist, but aren't here (possible), or they would exist in the future, but won't because WE (or our robots) will occupy where they would have evolved. Which is what would have happened to us if they existed where we are.
@@cortster12 illogical. If doesn't make sense to you because of ignorance. You simply don't know what you don't know. The OBSERVABLE universe is all you have to make any "logical" inference. However, the actual universe is arguably infinite. Humanity simply hasn't been around long enough, nor observed the night sky well enough to make any conclusion about anything regarding the cosmos. So your "logic" is still only conjecture and wishful thinking. At the very least we should fully explore the milky way before making any generalizations. Humanity hasn't even fully explored their own insignificant solar system.
i'm 15 and hope to be an astrobiologist someday! this is an awesome, well thought through theory that has some serious merit and implications. i hope humanity lives long enough to grab some of the stars out there- maybe i'll even be around to see it. thank you robin hanson for being your genius self and massive props to the rational animations team for this awesome, high quality video! also hi robert miles oh and the song in the background is 'dreams become real' by kevin mcleod. great music :)
Isaac Arthur has a whole channel where he discusses the Fermi Paradox at great length. There are an uncountable number of planets that preexisted Earth where life had an opportunity to evolve. If it was going to happen it would have happened billions of years ago, and be visible as an entire altered galaxy of Dyson spheres.
This strains my credibility. We have just barely observed other planets. And we can really only call a few Earth-like based on a tiny amount of data on their star, orbit, and apparent mass. Our theories certainly suggest that planets that could support evolution are many, but I think we are a very long way from observing them yet.
I had completely missed Hanson et al. paper, this was such a nice surprise. In my experience, YT channels such as yours become better and better with time. I can't wait to see where this channel will go. It has the potential to rival legends like CGP Grey, Exurb1a, and 3blue1brown.
A superior theory to me to the clumsy Dyson Sphere idea is the idea that more advanced civilisations will tend to minimize their form factor. Being smaller seems an obvious way to be more energy efficient. Needless to say civilisations that go in this direction would potentially be quite hard to spot. And/or maybe they just go virtual and outgrow the need to physically explore the universe.
Other things to consider are the great filters you mentioned before. Humanity being as "grabby" as it is might (and already kinda is) result in a backfire where we start depleting resources and expanding way faster than our host planet can handle, eventually leading to a war on resources which escalates into a nuclear apocalypse, another possibility is a carington-like event happening every few often that pretty much presses a reset button on a civilization's technology, theres also how hard interstellar travel is, the creation of a superweapon or technology that leads to the total destruction of a species, so on. Maybe actual advanced grabby civilizations that succeed are extremely rare, so rare that the nearest one is multiple galaxies away. As for solar sails while they are useful they kinda require either a massive laser or being extremely close to a star for propulsion, they could maybe be used partially but I feel that fusion/antimatter technology will also be a big thing when it comes interstellar travel.
I m kinda sceptical about laser-biased accelerarion cause we don't have material able to sustain such stream of energy in a limited timeframe. Everything will vaporize
Why not to accelerate a probe with mass driver? We can build say 1 GW solar power plant on orbit, plug in magnet accelerator and shoot probes in all directions. They will then open solar sails and use distant star light to decelerate and park in a foreign system
@@nickolayyegorov4755 A mass driver sounds fun I guess, though for interstellar travel you would need a mass driver so big that it might as well be easier to make a generation ship. You need to accelerate to at least something like 1%C, you are probably better off with a few fusion or antimatter torchships or hell even a u235 nswr. Solar sails sound interesting for decelerating tho. (also recoil lol, if you accelerate stuff in orbit so insanely fast you are gonna have to move that thing so it doesnt deorbit itself over time, not to mention the ammount of solar power you need is also insane. Let's wait till fusion or really advanced fission drives come along and then we can start going interstellar shall we?)
I mean, any speculation about future technology runs into a serious roadblock, or set of roadblocks: That we can't predict the next Revolutionary Innovation. To a scientist prior to Agriculture the idea of a tribe of tens of thousands of people settling down in one area and not immediately starving to death would have required a land of incredibly implausible fertility. To a scientist prior to Industrialization the idea of one brand of clothing being so uniformly, cheaply, and easily replicated and shipped worldwide as to be worn by commoners in Europe and Indonesia and America alike would've required a literal deity of sewing and the intervention of several deities of the sea, just to produce and ship. To a scientist prior to Flight the idea of humans flying seemed totally unreachable, a pipedream for the philosophers with more optimism than practicality. It makes it very difficult to predict future technology, because a lot of the time these Revolutions aren't born of the typical plodding forward that fills out behind them and is propagated by everyone with a doctorate - they're crazy, unpredictable leaps forward by total madmen who happen to reach for the stars and snag one. We can't entirely depend on interstellar travel being impractical. For all we know, the next revolution is mathematical, and the redefinition of space-time under this new mathematical paradigm allows us to use exceptionally low amounts of energy to warp space-time directly and permanently. Suddenly we can brute-force an event horizon, generate artificial gravity, and use alcubierre drives to zip from system to system in half a minute. I think this is the real killer for the Great Filter hypothesis. I'm sure some species do indeed off themselves early on - but by the same token, many won't. And with the unpredictability of innovation, I don't think it's smart to discount anything for being "inefficient". It's probably not even smart to discount the impossible, but that at least is more forgiving. The inefficient regularly becomes the efficient, historically, and I expect to see that trend continue into the future.
We already have the tech to reach 10% the speed of light we just have treaties to not use it or develop it. Project orion. Just drop a nuke every so often behind a shield and ride the wave. Shielding on the forward side against impacts is what becomes difficult then. Large amounts of ice would likely be the cheapest and easiest to use. I still have faith we will crack the alcubiere warp drive and none of those things will matter.
I'm blown away by the quality of the writing and the animation. It's hard to sounds sincere within UA-cam comments, but I'm very thankful for your work and have no doubt you'll continue to grow. I hope the channel, and humanity as whole continues to be grabby!
A Dyson sphere sounds like the worst possible situation in a universe full of other civilizations. Like a big neon sign for all to see letting them know just how dangerous you are and just how little you care that everyone knows it.
Only if others exist. They can't exist if you began first and spread to every possible place they could have. Any alien expanding without contest would come to this conclusion.
When discussing Fermi's Paradox and its related ideas, no one ever seems to consider the possibility that significant and visible changes are not possible. Indeed, the very existence of the Fermi Paradox seems to be extremely strong evidence that things like Dyson spheres are actually impossible. This idea about the likelihood of developing advanced civilization so early is interesting, but it can really be simplified: Given the current apparent age of the universe, 13.8 billion years, why does it appear that the universe will continue to exist for so much longer than its current age. We don't need hard steps or planet lifetimes, just the observation of the age of the universe compared to our models for how long stars and planets last (many times the current age of the universe). Grabby Aliens seem like a terrible solution. My view is that most habitable planets are inhabited, and that a significant number have civilizations on them, just not much more advanced than our own, because interstellar travel is harder than people think, and because visible changes to solar systems are completely technologically impossible for everyone everywhere.
The entire idea that a civilization could reach the heights necessary to attempt interstellar colonization and still be driven by any traits derived from their evolution strikes me as wildly unlikely. Also, they always take the paradox as a given. It isn't. We are practically blind in terms of our ability to observe another intelligent species. If FTL travel is impossible, and we believe more and more every day that it is, then the odds are overwhelmingly high that we just haven't been observing long enough or wide enough.
@@tobyvision Yeah, exactly that last part. The "paradox" is just very strong evidence that FTL travel as well as phenomena that's easy to observe from lightyears away like Dyson Spheres, are actually not just impractical, but actually impossible, in the latter case given real limitations like the age and matter density of the universe.
@@WylliamJudd for all we know, a Dyson construct might be possible, but completely unnecessary for a species capable of building one. Humanity is just about to the point of being able to adapt ourselves to our environment instead of the other way around, but we are certainly millennia away from being able to build anything on that scale.
@@tobyvision we seem to have evidence that it is not possible, or at least close enough to impossible to not be surprising that it never happened given the age of the universe. As long as we're talking about a Dyson construct that should be easily detectible from Earth given our technology and how long we've been looking. Behavioral arguments are hard to swallow, since in the vastness of space and time, it seems unlikely that no civilization would *ever* do a certain thing. It makes much more sense to me to conclude that certain feats are actually physically out of reach even if the most advanced possible civilization put all of their efforts into some random endeavor.
This is a really cool video, you are very good at explaining things and the animations are great also. Looking at interesting papers and doing explanations on them would be a good model for future videos too if you’re looking for ideas. Keep up the good work!
Just here to say that your videos hit the sweet-spot for me right inbetween entertainingly-simplistic such as Kurzgesagt and plainly-informative such as PBS Space Time. I'm gonna subscribe to you after only watching this one video (which usually doesn't happen for me).
The way the argument is explained mistakes probability with causation. That grabby aliens displace non-grabby species makes our early existence probable, but does not explain why we are early. We could be in region next to a grabby neighbor that they hadn’t yet explored due to limited interstellar travel speeds. They could invade us in, say, 100 years. And we would still be early today.
This is about geological timelines, millions of years. The fact that our planet was not colonized long before humanity even emerged as a species, makes the existence of expansionist neighbors really improbable. The earth is what, 4 and a half billion years old? And for most of that time, it did not have a technological civilization, so one emerging just at the time for them to reach us in the next 100 years would be about as plausible as one person winning the lottery every day of their life.
@@_Muzolf I agree up to a point. For your argument to be true we would need to know for certain that life does not need 4 billion years to evolve a sentient species. We are not sure if we could physically have evolved earlier than we did. But yes, you have a point there for sure
@@germanpenn Oh nonono, there is a misunderstanding here. I am not going with the assumption that it does necessarily needs 4 billion years. I am certain it could emerge earlier or later depending on the circumstances of a planet, but the point is that these things work on geological timelines. 100 years is nothing compared to the age of the planet and even the age of life here. So i would assert that it is really unlikely that two technological civilization would emerge close to eachother at the same time. Since we are not seeing dyson swarms all over the nearby stars, i would assume that either we are early in our neigborhood, or that if someone is around, they are much older then us, and for some reason were not interested in expanding around here.
First off, amazing video and writing. I also love the animations. Secondly, this actually plays into a solution of yhe Fermi paradox called "The Firstborn"
This is a way better idea than the Fermi Paradox since it actually makes sense. It's a really cool hypothesis and it makes a lot of sense. Whether or not it's true, it's a lot more plausible than the "whelp, I looked outside and saw nothing but sun and blue skies for 30 seconds, looks like rain doesn't exist at all" logic of Fermi.
Awesome video, very thought provoking. A question just occurred to me... When we look at the stars, we are looking at the past. Light from a habitable planet could have taken millions of years to arrive. How can we say that we are EARLY if we are looking at old data. There could be many civilizations active right now, some that came earlier or at the same time as us, we just haven't had enough time to receive the evidence.
Because of how information travels, it's not old data. It's current to our time frame. If FTL travel is impossible, then there's no way for that data to be 'old,' because there's no possible way for anything from that planet to reach us until the number of years it takes for information to travel passes. Basically, it's not old data because information has a travel speed; the information you observe right now *is* current. It takes time to travel somewhere and affect it (light traveling a distance is considered affecting things, gravity waves are the same, etc), therefore what we observe *is* current.
@@Mage_Chartreux I'm going to call bs on this here. If we see a star blowing up, it has been done with that for a huge amount of time. Light takes time to travel and thus we see what was there, not what is.
Lmao, everything is old data. You always perceive things late, because that's how information works. Unless you mess with quantum mechanics that is. Information from a star 100m years ago reaches your eyes today, is that new information or is that old information which took 100m years to reach your eyes. If you were able to teleport to the star you'd see it would be different from the star you saw earlier, because 100m have passed. In that sense it's possible to have many advanced alien civilizations, the newest information just hasn't reached us yet.
@@christianstamm94 it's not bs. Effects of that supernova will not be felt faster than light. If the sun were to disappear right now, we would not realize it for 8 minutes. Only then gravity of the sun would stop affecting us, and the light would cease to illuminate the earth. For all intents and purposes, the speed of information is the speed of events happening
Harrd step are a equivalent to filters in Fermy, the main difference it's that Fermy propose that some of these filters/hards step can destroy all progress in a massive extinsion and became the end of the civilization while Grabby afirm this barrier it's eventually overcomed. Both theories seek answer the same question "why we don't findalien life sing,already?" but reach a completely different outcome based in a small difference of perspective in their basics.
I love finding out about new theory then hopping around trying to find various explanations so I can "get it" and fit it into my worldview as an option. Well you didn't make me hop around; you just explained it concisely here and now. ON TO THE NEXT VIDEO!
cosmic conditions can lower the number of hard steps locally, so that we may be early overall, but very much on schedule considering our specific conditions.
Science that can’t be proven is my favorite kind. When we have no data for a huge topic like this we start coming up with the craziest but detailed explanations. Too bad I won’t be around when this goes from theory to fact.
By 2050 it will be common knowledge we are not alone. Science that can’t be proven is not science. The _whole_ point of Science is _repeatability_ to _verify_ assumptions.
no, you misunderstood the argument. it's not "grabby aliens on the future affect us" but it's "if grabby aliens would exist, they don't exist yet because we're yet not colonized, so we must be early."
People won't believe in aliens until an alien comes to earth and knocks on every single door of every single home on earth and says, "hey, look at me I'm an alien from outer space." And even then there will be a committee of scientists formed to debunk the alien knocking on every door on earth myth.
Completely lost me with the Grabbly Alien Hypo when the assumption was made that highly advanced spacefairing civilizations would be even interested in planets as a place to "live"
@@SeraphimFelis Not strictly true. There are many other explanations to the Fermi paradox. The ultimate resource problem for an advanced species would not be space, materials, or energy, but time. The heat death of the universe puts a hard limit on time for biology. A sufficiently advanced race might "move inward" to a simulated reality that can be progressively operated at faster and faster speed, giving them much greater time, and perhaps time enough to transcend the heat death limit. Another explanation is that expansion is not actually cost effective. We know that there is more mineral resources in our own asteroid belt than humanity could use at its most wasteful for millenia. And we only get more efficient in material use. It is entirely possible that trying to send any small number of ourselves to another planet would be a tiny drop in the bucket of resource gain compared to maximizing our use or own solar system. And in the millennia following, we might advance our science so far that moving to another planet would be a needless concept.
I love how we humans can impose our own model of how we think life evolves (something we barely understand) onto the rest of the universe, life can evolve from and to so many variations we simply cannot comprehend, at times, it’s okay to admit we simply do not know how the universe works.
It is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist. It’s like saying “wait, how could I possibly have been the one to win the lottery? That’s a 1 in a million chance. There must be something deeper at play here” without realising that the chance of *somebody* winning the lottery was always 1 in 1.
I also have a feeling that this whole thing might be a bit too inaccurate, the concept of planet lifetime on that graph kinda confuses me, even on video he stated that shorter lived planets make us more rare and early, while the graph shows the reverse stating that life on those longer lived planets is more early, probably to understand this I would need to read that paper, unless someone can explain to me that in short also 10% still seems like a lot unless I don't get the scale, maybe instead of lifetime of a planet, it would be better to use age of universe + number of planets/stars that exist in certain category or something like that on 3d graph... the more I think of this the more I feel motivated to read this whole paper unless it will be too long and too big brain for me
@@sirramic202 If sapient life is possible, which we know that it is, then it had to happen *somewhere* first. So yes, someone had to "win" in this analogy.
My basic gripe with all ideas like this is the belief that a species could achieve interstellar colonization while retaining the competitive traits acquired through evolution. We already know that strong genetic engineering is required for any long range space travel, and absolutely essential for colonization of another planet. We are on the cusp of our genetic age already, long before serious space travel. If we ever do send ourselves to another planet, believe that they will not really be modern day "us." This would likely hold true for any space fairing race.
I mean, this whole theory depends on the assumptions that A) All habitable planets will inevitably be colonized and B) a civilization can't rise from a planet that's already inhabited Does the paper have an explanation for these?
I’ve wondered how fucked certain life would be to get off it’s rock. Imagine a fish species under a layer of ice. How much more do they have to advance then us just to get to space. They need tons of water in a shuttle and to break a ice layer.
It's simple long tail. The vast majority of rational species may not be grabby, or may never develop science and technology to ever have a chance of becoming grabby. But if there's a small chance for one of them to become grabby, then a big enough number of them almost guarantees one of them _will_ become grabby as the probability of that happening grows assimptotically toward 1. And that one, whenever and wherever it arises, will then capture everything in their future light cone.
Guessing that If a specie is capable of reaching an alien world in order to take its resources and colonize it, it can probably sterilize it in preparation of Terraforming. Making the previous life forms go extinct and in the end it's as if they were never there.
@@tech-heck3155 A ocean based lifeform would be fucked in many ways, just by virtue of the fact that a fluid medium reacts dramatically and combines with way more then a gas medium making their scientific development way harder by several magnitudes. A ice ceiling would barely qualify as a hurdle next to all the other problems.
This was facinating. It is interesting to think that we are just so early that there aren’t any other civs out there, or if there are then they are at similar levels of development (so similarly early).
I don't understand what the evidence is that life/civilization would be common enough that they could reasonably expect to see each other at all ever. We don't have to be alone in the universe or early for advanced civilizations to never see each other, and our existence isn't evidence that life is common. That life arose so early in our planet's geology suggests that it will arise readily on a suitable planet, but we don't have any sense of how common suitable planets are except that they don't appear common. Every other world in our solar system looks highly unsuitable, and we can produce a lengthy list of attributes about our world that make it especially suitable.
I think what this theory doesn't take into account is the power of evolution, it assumes grabby aliens will remain the same over time. For example, as a species becomes grabby and expands outwards into the universe they would, over time, evolve to different conditions and become less and less like their grabby ancestors. After billions of years, the grabby aliens in different parts of the universe would be almost unrecognizable from each other. The logical conclusion to this is that at some point in the far future all habitable planets are occupied by different grabby alien species some that look similar and some that are vastly different (but all arose from a single origin). This kind of mirrors how all life on earth began with one single self replicating entity that evolved to all the biodiversity we see today. Every living thing on earth is related but we are now all vastly different organisms.... and that's only after ~0.5 billion years.... could you imagine 1000 billion and a whole universe to grow into? It doesn't really matter if humans are early or not, if we expand to the universe our descendants will be so different from us they may as well be completely unrelated at that point.
I have done no science, me not smart but... What if there was a science or math that shows that we are the drones, but really sub-optimal, 1st generation, really flawed primitive drones.
I’d love to see a sci-fi story about how humans were the very first intelligent species and that’s because they were born way before their time and they had no competition, and lo and behold about 10 billion years after humans went extinct there was an explosion in intelligent civilizations. That would be cool
I'd write a sci-fi comedy story about humans being the precursors whose evolution has diverge down 50 different branches and each species represents where self-directed and/or natural evolution could lead us if given the chance. The crux of the story is that humanity has reached godlike power as a type 3 to 4 civilisation but is bored because they are still alone amongst the stars and have no one to show off to. The reason for this is because no species is smart enough to reach interstellar levels of technology and are stuck at the type 0.3-0.6 civilisation level, so humanity decides to cheat by creating beacons that broadcasts packs of information containing type 1 civilisation levels of interstellar technology throughout the universe along with FTL and then go into hiding or hermitage for lols so they can watch to see what they do. Hundreds of species finally enter space and find a galaxy spanning empire that is nothing but a ghost town of empty worlds belonging to these precursors with tech too advanced for them to understand or replicate. The comedy comes from the aliens wondering what happened to these precursors, figuring out our technology, and the reactions, ideas and beliefs towards humanity branch species and the other aliens that form. Every now and then humanity teases the aliens by hinting at their presence then goes back into hiding to watch the show.
That kind of mirrors our genetic ancestors, Homo Erectus. They were around for over 500k years, colonized the Old World and then went extinct when having to compete with Homo Sapiens, once we finally bred our way our of Africa.
@@masc6287 Reminds me of those ufo religion people who have a whole pantheon of different alien races and believe they influenced our development a la _2001: A Space Odyssey_ or the Watchers/Grigori from the Second Book of Enoch.
I remain unconvinced on proposition that grabbiness is an evolved inherent behaviour species will maintain. The idea of continued civilisation expansion relies on the idea that the species itself will continue to expand and thereby consume more resources. However, at our current level of technology every developed nation is seeing a drop off in birth rates and in turn a need for immigration to prevent the stagnation of their growth. A space faring species would naturally have technology which vastly outstrips our own so if this trend holds true such a species would run out of people. We can speculate on ai becoming grabby for us but that becomes a solution looking for a problem. AI can find planets and make them habitable but there aren't any people to immigrate, it can build dyson swarms around foreign suns but what would they power, it can mine distant asteroids but there's more than enough minerals in the solar system to see all our needs met for millions of years. Artificial birthing and cloning technologies could bypass the need for natural human reproduction and those people could settle new worlds but what would these new worlds offer the old which couldn't be supplied locally? How would the people travel from one world to the next to justify those planets being terraformed in the first place, machines can survive on solar sail ships but people are a different issue. That's without considering the economic and political risks of setting up foreign groups of humanity who are just as likely to declare independence and become Earth's competitors. The other elephant in the room is advancements in virtual technology, if worlds better than our own can be simulated than no matter how grabby our species is, our greed will be concentrated on the artificial universe while the rest of the universe continues to believe they are just too early to meet us.
You got it. Ideas like this video always revolve around the idea that the brain we have is the one we will always have. I find this extremely unlikely. Genetic engineering will be a prerequisite for interstellar colonization. There are probably billions of solutions to species survival more elegant and easier than trying to find and inhabit other planets. The only plausible "grabby" situation I can think of is an AI that has as it's only goal to increase it's own intelligence. As far as we know, this would require ever increasing amounts of physical matter and energy to use as substrate. It would presumably also get geometrically smarter and therefore better at expanding itself. But even in this scenario, I have to imagine that at some point it would transcend needing the physical universe to continue growing and no longer bother to expand in our universe.
I think this is the first decent argument I've seen against this theory. Although there is also the idea of, "Because we can," so even if your argument is true, I think the possibility of universal expansion is still there.
This is nuts, did not expect to wake up today and find that someone might have solved the damn fermi paradox--or that the answer would be so seemingly obvious
Well yeah, I've played Stellaris. Also, if we're on that topic, it's possible that many Grabby Alien civilizations have actually existed but have all collapsed or become non-grabby after a while. This would mean they've stopped changing the universe, and we'll only notice them once we make actual contact with them.
I'd guess becoming non-grabby is a possibility - much the same way in human civilizations, when we're just getting going and still striving/struggling, we have a lot of children, and expand our population. The more advanced a civ gets, the fewer children it has, even to the point of a birth rate that isn't population-sustaining anymore. Could happen on a larger galactic scale, too.
What's crazy is that we are probably that weird impossibly advanced alien that can only exist in some super sci-fi habitation suit that other civilizations look up to and aspire to be at some point in the future. We just have to pass the hard step of not blowing ourselves up first.
So one of the bigger problems with this argument is the assumption that alien modifications to their environments would be noticeable by us. This is necessarily not true. Whatever way an alien modified universe looks, we would always be able to invent an alternative 'natural' i.e. non-alien explanation for our observations. That's the nature of astronomy and science in general: make observations then invent and fit models of natural processes to those observations. In astronomy in particular the information in our observations is quite sparse and there is a great deal of room for modelling. The wrong but 'natural' explanation will always be chosen by us until something happens to convince us that an alien explanation is not unthinkable (and has more explanatory power). As a consequence we could be quite happily be living in a galaxy that is already largely 'grabbed' and be blissfully unaware of it.
The bit about grabby aliens taking up all the habitable planets reminded me of how in Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, the titular galactic civilization The Culture lives almost entirely on artificially created habitats. It's not outright forbidden from living on planets, but it's seen as very gauche. I think the idea is that they want to leave planets undisturbed so as not to prevent a native species from developing some day.
The Earth is only habitable by the standards that we experience. By that standard, the Earth is only barely habitable and for us, the Universe isn't habitable at all. But then why does life, in any form, even exist to begin with? What is the mechanism by which we even ask that question?
This video has been the hardest to make so far, but my hope is that we'll be able to maintain this kind of quality and slowly improve further.
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Very nice video, but could you please turn down the BGM a little bit, it makes it hard for me to understand the words without concentrating very much on it.
Your effort paid off because this got into my recommended. Get ready to blow up
Wait a sec. Are you the safety in AI guy?
good news i found your channel through top recommendations ^-^ your getting recommended to people that's a hard step for ya
How do you mean a billion years before earth is inhabitable?
It will just be a few hundred years at most.
Cause: "humanity"
I mean, looking mildly early is ok. It's when we look so early that someone is gonna accuse us of manipulating our pearl and blaze rod drop rates that this is concerning.
underrated comment
the MMO conundrum ?
Oh, THAT video about probability!
It’s not inconceivable that we really just are very early.
manipulating the spawn rate of civilisations and citing "Java is weird" to cover your tracks
It's so interesting that, in spite of all the media involving humans discovering ancient civilizations that knew great secrets about the universe, it's likely that *we* are that ancient civilization that some civilization will stumble across. We might be the ones that arrive and give others our secrets, because we're the only ones here as of now.
that is a responsibility we're definitely not ready to occupy
@@matheussanthiago9685 Yeah, as a species, we're still self-destructive toddlers. Selish teenagers at best.
@@the13inquisitor59 so I guess we’d set an example of what *not* to be for future species
@@elokin300 Right now? Yeah, pretty much.
@@the13inquisitor59 But if you think about it any "ancient species" would be the same way. Any ancient species had to have died out or moved on at some point, and surely any intelligent species that isn't self-destructive would be able to figure out a way around their problems.
We always think about 'what if we found life on another planet?'
But I just had the thought of what if we find a mining probe working on a different planet. That would be even crazier. Not only did we discover other life, but they're more advanced than us.
It is overwhelmingly likely that if we happen to discover an alien race they will be much more advanced than us. It's nearly impossible to detect a more primitive species and it would be fairly easy to detect a super advanced one.
Well i would say if we're talking about any kind of reasonable timeframe where we can even imagine how humanity will be like, then meeting another species would either be really primitive or waaay ahead of us since they'd have to be the ones to find us.
Imo we’d blow it up
I’d say in that case, we’re fucked. Also, more technologically advance civilization would sooner discover us then vise versa
i like the concept that we used to be very advanced but then we fell off and the solar system society was lost to time but humanity is still out there in the universe
I have oft been a fan of the concept of "Humans are the ancient precursors."
Interstellar?
Me to! I am creating my own universe for a scifi comic and humans are simply the 5. First smart species in universe, and the 3 of the previous ones dissapeared long times ago! Humanity never see any other species instead of them not because they are hiding or not real but because humans are the very first members of something big!
You dont need to populate unreachable parts of a simulation, waste of computing power
All tomorrows is a good example!
@@alejotassile6441 not really, if anything the Qu are the precursors (or the dudes who put the dinosaur on the other planet, although that may have been the Qu I'm not sure if the author clarified that part)
If you want to see the grabby aliens hypothesis in action, play stellaris
My psionic isolationist xenophobic irenic bureaucracy totally obsessed with inward perfection and technological supremacy would beg to differ.
Maybe Spore too? This hypothesis gave me major EXPLORE AND CONQUER THE UNIVERSE AFTER SPENDING ONLY HOURS AS A UNICELULAR ORGANISM
I disagree, Stellaris represents a universe where this hypothesis is false. According to this hypothesis you are either grabby and entering into a mostly empty universe or you never exist because all the planets are already taken. In Stellaris your empires appear as newly evolved in the middle of the timelime (Precursors and Fallen empires before you, and Primitives after you). This suggests that all empires in Stellaris (past and future) are non-grabby. They do not pass Rule 1 and Rule 3 "Expanding outwards constantly for a long time, cosmologically" and it seems there is something which stops empires from expanding forever... but lets stay spoiler free shall we.
@@benbuckton5114 an interesting point, and a good one; indeed the grabby aliens hypothesis, at least in this video's interpretation, neglects the decline of grabby civilizations. In stellaris, the precursor aliens either go extinct, or become non-grabby (fallen empires).
It also features an unrealistic world where you spawn in a relatively short timeframe of your conquering the universe (100-300 years ish), and implies a short decline (centuries at most).
You can actually see grabby survivor bias in stellaris: if the fallen empires never became docile, they could easily dominate the galaxy . However, since they wait, the new aliens have ample opportunity to overcome and destroy them through grabby behavior or other stellaris cheese.
Also, stellaris raises the question of bureaucracy; can all aliens expand infinitely, or is there a point at which they overextend and disintegrate due to their massive sprawl?
@@Pyrohawk I'm of the opinion that colonies of formerly grabby aliens would be isolated from each other by lightyears of space, and over the millions of years apart evolve to become very distinct alien species from one another.
We do often overlook the fact that we haven’t always been alone. We used to share the Earth with other intelligent hominids, but they were all killed or, in the case of the Neanderthals, integrated and absorbed into our own species over time.
We simply out-competed our four friends in a sense, but well said. We didn't even have to directly murder them like how some species now seem to be incompatible with how we do things and move stuff around usually ones who are too niche. We are quite the wave makers.
But we still had a common origin... That's the big difference
@@konsta245 not if you believe in panspermia
@@robertperschau5910 panspermia just explains abiogenesis; it'd still be a common origin, just that origin being from another planet or system
We also overlook the fact that other species are equal in intelligence, the only difference is that some creatures have different priorities.
Drake: "There must be aliens somewhere!"
Fermi: "So, where are they?"
Hanson: "We are the aliens."
Plank: "Of matter, neither we, nor aliens actually exist, but are merely waves of quantum potential."
@@aardque very nice
You just sprout after flood you are new flood dna
Are we the baddies?
Drake the type of lightskin to hypothesize about alien lifeforms
When your channel blows up and starts making merchandise I want all the grabby alien plushies. Which should be in a week or so. Really enjoying your work. Keep being awesome.
I already considered making some...how funny
Yes please!
send the link please =)
The biggest problem I have with the "grabby aliens" hypothesis is that it assumes interstellar civilizations would have resource desires and needs that directly conflict with our own. However this could be a flawed assumption for a number of reasons:
If it's possible for a species to travel light years away in some fashion, then given how empty space is, it's unlikely that they're explicitly dependent on planets for resources. Planets are infrequent, have high gravity and other hazards that mean they take HUGE amounts of conventional energy and effort to deal with.
Let's take water for example, which is the most essential substance for life we know of. Despite the fact that Earth has literal oceans of the stuff, for a space faring civilization it'd be far more efficient to mine planets and asteroids, or even simply harvest hydrogen and oxygen from nebulae etc., then to land on a planet massive enough to hold water and grab it from there.
Even if we assume ultra advanced future tech makes it *easier* to harvest water from an earth-like planet then it is today...why wouldn't it be even easier and more efficient to still get water from those other sources?
Additionally, it's plausible that microbiological life on any alien planets are a potential *extreme* hazard to any species that evolved on a different planet; because their mere metabolism might produce compounds that are highly-toxic to alien life from other planets. If there's not a credible, ultra-scientifically advanced way around this...then one would expect aliens to *actively avoid* at least any physical contact with other life-bearing worlds.
Yeah but we need to send a message to the aliens so they know that water belongs to us.
That's a decent thesis you have there.
I'd really only have one note to offer:
According to biologists, there is absolutely no reason we should assume a risk regarding alien pathogens because of how pathogens have to evolve, often in very inefficient and counterintuitive ways to infect their prey.
Just looking at how complicated it is for a virus to be able to infect a particular cell, from a particular host, one can see how unlikely it is for a virus, that has never seen a species, to be ready and armed for infection.
These complications even make disease less likely when it comes to more complicated infectious agents, like nematodes and parasitic worms that often require multiple host species to complete a life cycle.
@@donttouchmycoffee The point is not pathogens, but chemicals. Uric acid is harmless to life on earth and occurs very commonly as a byproduct of biological activity, but might be highly poisonous to life forms which have a completely different metabolism.
The point of "being early" is that the aliens arriving on a potentially habitable planet arrive most likely even before life evolves there. Then they change that planet in some form. And yes, there is a question whether or not they would need to mine or extract resources from that planet if there are asteroids and other planets around. But for one thing, they'd be going at the expansion full-tilt so they would use exponentially replicating machines, and consume all the resources in a solar system. For another, they might construct a dyson sphere or something similar, stopping any life from evolving also.
@@Hannah-cb7wr This is somewhat plausible, but a lot less so than sci-fi authors would like it to be. If we assume CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen) life, as we have on Earth, then the basic chemistry is all the same. You can imagine the biochemistry developing differently, but it still has to deal with the same chemical building blocks as we do, so convergent evolution is likely to make many chemicals have similar effects in practice (CHON aliens will not melt when you dump water on them, for example). More complex stuff, like DNA, is going to be entirely different of course, but it's not as if we're going to try and breed organisms from different biospheres with each other.
If we suppose the aliens are not CHON, then you run into two basic problems:
* Your chemistry has to be elaborate enough to support complex biochemical pathways, and perform at least most of the basic functions that we see in CHON organic chemistry.
* Your chemistry has to involve elements that are relatively abundant in the local environment, which is probably at least _somewhat_ similar to abundance in the universe as a whole.
CHON satisfies both of these requirements. Most proposed alternative biochemistries run afoul of one or both requirements. Ammonia-based and methane-based are somewhat plausible, but both of those are hypothesized to function at temperatures and/or pressures vastly different to those of Earth, so they're not going to land on Earth for the same reason that we're not going to land on Venus (yes, the sulfuric acid is a problem, but the temperature is a much more immediate problem).
I'm often confused by why people think we should be communicating with aliens by now. Our earliest transmissions, if they've managed to maintain coherency at all, are only about 80 light years away. We've been discovering hidden tribes on Earth up to the past decade, so who's to say we just haven't been passed over?
Exactly.
Shit man, we've only JUST had our first actual up-close pictures of the planets in our own solar system, yet we're somehow going to have communicated with species developing in the next galaxy over?
All we know are theories built from scraps of information. For all we know there's life on the other side of the Milky Way, but they're just as blind and dumb as we are so neither has spotted the other.
And yeah, telescopes let us look at distant planets (in very low detail...) but most of our "knowledge" comes from math and cross-referencing what we think should exist because it exists a certain way in our own situation, all the telescopes really let us do is calculate the size (still math...) as well as guess at atmospheric compositions.
1. Why has no one stumbled on us yet?
2. We have telescopes that can see much farther than 80 lightyears and we haven't found any evidence of life.
@@MrDifsh We're still making advancements in our telescope technology and being able to see the silhouette of a planet or theorize the composition of its atmosphere is not the same thing as being able to see a civilization.
@@MrDifsh But the light we see through telescopes are still millions of years old. What if they’re all right there waving at us, but the ping is just really high
90% of ocean is unexplored, new civilizations are more likely underwater than in outer space.
This channel is going to grow like crazy. Love the content!
Very cute axolotl. Subscribed.
@@RationalAnimations 32.2K subscribers now, but it might get as big as Isaac Arthur in a few short years.
Lies
@@RationalAnimations are you an old woman. Or a pre man?
The voice is just throwing me a curve ball
@@alexmcphee6789 what voice
The idea that we humans are amongst the few primordial species to arise in the universe is not frequently considered, though interesting
Of those whom believe we are not alone, it's far in a way common to depict our own race as the slowpokes of the stars. I believe the idea that we could be in first place with all our flaws is a scary one to some. More comfort in being able to look up at a race more competent than ourselves, whether that be to our betterment or detriment. Us holding the reigns? Like an unsupervised child swimming in the deep end of a pool.
when i was a kid i almost drowned cuz i went on the deep side of the pool and out of panic i learned how to swim upwards, soo maybe that can happend to humanity aswell 🤔
@@Nell_Hell same
Not all people who believe we are not alone assume the aliens are more advanced than us. I personally do not believe we are alone, but believe that the vast majority of extraterrestrial life is single celled or “animals” of limited intelligence or physical capacity to construct things. That is after all what we find on our own planet.
I won’t deny the possibility of more advanced civilisations or that we are the most advanced, as all the calculations used to do so are so speculative as civilisation and the emergence of consciousness is difficult to quantify. However I do believe that to just assume we are likely the most advanced species in the universe is just as hubris as to believe the universe was created for us. It is possible, but to actually believe it takes an unjustifiable leap of faith.
@@Nell_Hell you're overestimating humans by a big margin. Most humans are stupid
i kinda feels its a biproduct of how people view the species as a whole and how religion has played a role on humans plus a self calculation of the universes age and the relative time humans have been around seeing how actually understanding those large numbers is rather difficult
Fascinating stuff! I rarely find such a gem through UA-cam recommendations. You did an incredible job explaining the model in a way your more casual space and science geek can understand.
Yo, Neatling!
Same!
just the fact that a lifeform[us] can even fathom these concepts and quantify them is remarkable in and of itself
Imagine how much more stuff could possibly exist that we might not be able to wrap our heads around... it'd be like an ant trying to comprehend a computer
I always found it interesting how we can’t understand our brain, and there would be no way we COULD because we would have to be dumber to have a simpler brain, thus not understanding THAT brain. Intelligence is wacky.
Only because you are a fathoming quantifying being
@@Clarkamadorian its not that the brain is fundamentally impossible to understand we just dont have the tools and knowledge to. we most likely will at some point.
a computer can "imagine" a computer after all
@@shoeofobama6091 oh yeah that makes sense
I've come to suspect that being "grabby" in and of itself is one of the great filters. We don't see expansionist alien civs because that tendency tends to result in their own collapse before they ever escape their own gravity well in any sort of significant way. If you can last long enough to become space faring, you almost by default have learned to live within your own means.
@@hungrycrab3297 and the crazy thing is, a solar system could have hundreds of thousands of O'Neill Cylinders (or maybe even the larger Mckendree Cylinders) housing trillions of people, and they STILL would not have altered the appearance of their star enough to be detectable from even a light year away, let alone dozens or thousands of light years away.
Yup, I would liken our expansion to the spread of bacteria in a petri dish, rapidly expanding...until they all die off.
That outlook assumes many things about he human consumption and multiplication. During the time of greatest plenty (right now) the human population is on decline, kept out of free fall only by life extending medicine. People can only consume so much in a lifetime and with basic recycling the inner solar system has enough to support trillions of people. Humanity can't consume enough to strain the solar system for billions of years.
@@zackwalker6775 this population collapse is due to a small fraction of humans being extremely greedy.
@@zackwalker6775 "only consume so much" you write. How about durable goods? Yachts, planes? What if everybody want own spaceship like now want a car? Own space station as a house? To be independent somehow.
What might keep up in Solar I think is short lifespan. How many work toward something that will bring any result in only 1000 years? I bet close to zero.
You see this a lot in 4x games like Civilization. If you start expanding too late all of the good spots will be taken so at best you'll have a disjointed empire with a few ok resources.
I kind of agree, it happens in Stellaris. But Stellaris has charitably 600 solar systems per galaxy, maybe 400 if the player wants late game to work well. The Milky Way has perhaps 100,000,000,000 solar systems. That makes it more like No Man’s Sky with near infinite empty space.
It’s feasible to assume spacefaring interstellar civilizations learn to use birth control and don’t ha the urge to mine every resource, burn every hydrocarbon and pave every grassland. Those with that instinct climate change their home planet into unlivability and don’t reach the next solar system.
German Empire be like
@@Shane2020xxx
It's just an assumption with zero proof though, and assumption people make too often, people think all the time the aliens might better morality-wise than us but people never think: what if they are worse?
We never know, maybe we are doing great right now.
I love Robs voice. It’s so calming for someone who I know mostly for talking about dangerous ai risk and easy to hype predictions of the future.
I think we have to contemplate the hypothesis that intelligent life at the human level is extremely rare.Suffice it to note that intelligent life like us has not appeared on Earth in billions of years.And even then, it was just a species that emerged and that almost went extinct.
What's your evidence that humans almost became extinct? Even the largest disasters in history (bubonic plague, etc) never threatened total human eradication
That's one of those 'hard steps' that the video is talking about.
That's one of those things I point to for evidence of a higher being. The odds of us existing are astronomical even in conservative estimates. It's not a definitive bit of proof, but I find it more believable that we're a product of intelligent design than mere happenstance
@@pryordevine3855 Nah, that hypothesis would be more probable if humans appeared from nothing, but we didn’t, we have a clear evolutive connection with the other hominids, who also have a clear evolutive connection with ancient apes (modern apes are an entirely separate group from hominids), who also have a clear evolutive connection to mammals, and so on and so on.
Not only that but also intelligence isn’t exclusive to the Homo Sapiens, the Homo habilis could already use rock tools, the homo erectus could use fire and Neanderthals could pretty much do anything that we could too.
From a genetic viewpoint I find humans being altered and/or created by aliens highly unlikely.
@@ilosada2933 all I'm pointing to is the improbability of this planet being habitable, plus us evolving from what we did to what we are. a crap ton of things have to go right for us to get where we are now. Many more things have to go right than go wrong. I'm not arguing that we were placed here, I'm more arguing from a narrative/writing perspective that there's a (rough) plan and in order to get to the end point, all that other stuff had to happen to act as setup for the payoff.
So, we're in the empire creation phase of the universal 4x game.
Neat!
Though, once again the discussion relies somewhat on selective imagination.
It's the selective imagination of only ever assuming we're in a 4x game
@@z-beeblebrox Ah yes eXpand eXplore and eXterminate all Xenomorphs
@@magithegreat zeth
Which one of you a-holes checked off pre-warp, Hardcore, PVP, and 'None of My Starting Pops Get Along' mode?
Explain
I'm curious as to how much of the "early" factor may actually just be a component of distance. As the further away you look into universe the earlier you are also observing.
@@ME-ru4hv He is talking about how when we see something 1 lightyear away it takes the light 1 lightyear to reach us. So when we see something 1 lightyear away we see it as it was 1 lightyear ago.
@@ME-ru4hv Based on what?
@@billybigmeat *takes 1 year to reach us
But a billion ly is quite far? The distance within the galaxy is not significant. A million yrs not that significant and could cover the local group IF we really mean the unlikely event of galactic civilisation.
But one thing is obvious: we really just haven't looked at that much and have only a single perspective, effectively a point, to do it from. Call back when SETI covers a significant percentage of possible locations 😆
Right! All these stars millions of light-years away and we've been into space for under 100 years. If all life on planets started around the same time we wouldn't even expect to hear their signals for another million years
A better way to put it: you come to a party and without looking to see who is there, you find that the snack table looks completely untouched. Therefore, you must conclude that either you are early or no one decided to come.
I'm going to use this analogy when explaining this topic to people!
Love the reference to Lahabrea (9:21) and, by extension, the Ascians from FFXIV’s Zodiark dimension who were, in effect, grabby aliens.
Was about to comment this, though I wasn’t sure if it was actually a reference or just coincidentally similar. BUT since your comment got a heart, I guess it really was a reference. Love it!
Such devastation was their intention.
LAHABREA, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?
Lol I was like is that an ascian?! I had to scroll through comments to make sure I wasn't seeing things!
@@slawdawg7148 A month later and here I am doing the same. Shoutout to all WoL out there!
My favorite part about this whole thing is the question of, “why are we so early?” Like it’s a question you can find a hard answer to. It’s RNG. That’s like asking, “why wasn’t I born 100 years from now?” Well, the answer is easy. Just because. You were born the day you were born for the same reason your parents happened to cross eyes for the first time, and the same reason the raindrop hit your right cheek and not your left one. It happened because the specific events that allowed it to happen were present. Then the dice were rolled, and you won. Saying we are early is assuming that there is some deadline we totally missed. I also think it’s flawed to think that being early is some kind of special status that is weird to have when it really isn’t. If 100 people were placed in separate rooms with a button placed in front of them and told, “you may press this button whenever you like,” and given the freedom to do so at the exact same time, inevitably, one of those hundred will be the first person to press the button. Sure, you can try to come up with reasons as to why they were first, but they were just as likely to be last as they wer to be first. Their status as “first person to press the button” does not make them special for doing so. They just happened to be the first one by chance. We could very well be of the first 1% of all advanced civilizations that will ever be born in the known universe, but I don’t see what the problem is with that because being in the last 50% instead still implies that there was a first 1%, so if it isn’t us, it’s going to be someone else. Swapping our place with another advanced civilization wouldn’t make us normal. It’d just make us later by relation alone. I think the best way to look at it is to see that there is a high chance we may be of the very first, but know that we could always be wrong.
blah blah blah!!!!
hey carlos?
1-you are aware the universe is billions of years old right?
2-so other lifeforms had a quantum leap jump start ahead of us.
3-issac asimov said it best "any suff. advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic"
4-mike shermer of skeptic mag said "any suff. advanced alien life, is indistinguishable from god"
5-so a god or gods in relation to us is VERY HIGH PROB!!!
6-if there is a multiverse/other dimensions...then abilities like foreknowledge/time travel/gods/aliens/etc
is all VERY PROB!!!!
You're right but i think your perspective is a bit off. There must ofcourse be someone who is the first, or early. But the probability that, if you take a random civilization, that that is the early one is still very low. If you take a random person out of the room then the possibility that they were the first to press the button is only 1%. The same goes for us. The probability that we are early is very small if there are going to be a lot of civilizations, its not impossible, just very unlikely. Thats why this theory is interesting because it makes it more probable.
The theory doesn't make it any more probable that it happened, it only offers a different calculation of how probable it is. Nothing about reality has changed no matter what theory you believe to be true. That's what I think Carlos was getting at.
To use the button pushing example; imagine each contestant is locked in their respective room, and the only way they can leave the room is by pushing the button to unlock the door.
Humanity is like a person that pushes the button and walks out the door, and then sees nobody.
If all the information we have is that there are 100 people locked in their rooms with the button that unlocks the door and can press it at any time, there's a 1/100 chance that we were the first person to walk out of the room. That theory explains why we don't see any other people, but it's still only a 1/100 chance it happened under that theory.
However, the "grabbiness" theory would be akin to a theory that once the first person presses their button, all the other buttons in the vicinity are disabled. This theory also explains why we don't see any other people, but given the theory it'd be near a 1/1 chance it happened.
The video was explaining the grabbiness theory, and how under that theory it's much more likely that we wouldn't see any other civilizations. Just like the theory of the first button press disabling all other nearby buttons.
I think what the video missed is how this fits within a framework of Bayesian thinking: the idea of taking the given evidence and weighting the probabilities of theories based on that evidence. Humanity pressed the button and walked out to see nobody; that much doesn't change. But given that as your evidence, what then do you decide to be a more likely theory?
Put simply, the grabbiness theory doesn't make it more likely that we're early. Rather, our apparent earliness makes it more likely the grabbiness theory is correct.
@@markclark8917 1.That was Arthur C clark not issac Asimov who said advanced tech is magic.
2. VERI PROB is not a scientific proof
@@yamiyugi2894 "a scientific proof"
Science doesn't "prove" like math does. The only realm science can operate within is "very probably" type spaces. That's the whole point of sigma-surity and repeatable experiments.
It would be very interesting to see younger alien species evolve and grow, going through the same or similar struggles as we did and are currently. Maybe poking them on occasion for a bit of fun and to see their reactions. Making sure their nukes won’t work if the worst happens and someone gets a bit too trigger happy when looking at each other. Then, eventually, welcoming them to the stage and introducing them to the universe and it’s wonders.
I hope we have someone like that, looking out for us.
If we don't, then maybe our species can be the one looking out for them?
i mean there’s been plenty of reports of unidentified aerial phenomena and happenstances around nuclear power sites so you never know
i feel like if we did discover early intelligent life on another planet some asshole in power would do something to interfere significantly
@@APufferfish
Despite what people think, i don't believe current humanity would straight up enslave they, politicians of today would see no value on doing that and ruining their reputation.
However, that is, unless the aliens are actually alien, like, despite being sentient their culture is so strange that it is incomprehensible to us, in that case, conflict would be inevitable.
@@aldiascholarofthefirstsin1051 be 👏the👏change👏you👏want👏to👏see
Great video as always! Great voice-over by our favorite AI safety advocate, great animations, and great script!
There's an assumption that advanced aliens, when they move out into the universe, will only inhabit planets. They could also live inside hollowed out asteroids. Lots more space for population growth that way.
Or build their own micro-planets. Or maybe there are extremely heat resistant aliens who live in the atmosphere of stars. Or extremely large aliens who live in the vacuum of space and drift around collecting hydrogen, and they have a natural fusion reactor powering them and creating new elements to grow and reproduce. Or even macro scale organisms that are composed of trillions and trillions of galaxies that think about stars like we do atoms (this one is probably impossible because of hubble expansion but it is fun to think about).
I really like this kind of storytelling. You parsed an academic paper and presented in a way that makes it incredibly accessible and super cool to watch. sub++
I wished you had mentioned the unimaginable size of the universe.
There may very well be endless Grabby aliens already having formed intergalactic empires, but if the universe is infinite, what are the chances that they are going to be within any visible range for us to detect?
@graydon woods to hang out with some alien bros and play alien video games or get married to an alien gf
@@hahaureadmyname Indeed, that’s what all of this is about
The universe isn't infinite, though. If it is infinite in any dimension, then by definition, it contains infinite energy. That's a lot of energy to pull out of your cosmic ass
I find it weird that he didn't mention how grabby aliens could intentionally raise other civilizations/species. Not to mention the definition of life. Can life only exist in the same form of us or could there be something intelligent that has a vastly different make up composition than us. In that situation you have to account for planets that would normally be considered "barren" for us but be especially welcoming for a different life form.
The observable universe isn’t infinite
ROB MILES IS THAT YOU???
IT'S HIM BUT HE'S NOT ME. WE'RE SEPARATE. ONE DAY WE'LL BE ONE.
@@RationalAnimations This is a really good channel, friend. Keep going you're gonna see it grow
@@acapellascience Thanks ,_,
Shucks I felt special for recognizing the voice until I scrolled down here. Well either way I'm glad to hear 'em.
@@RationalAnimations first time watcher. Very impressive. Hope to see more. I'll probably binge watch the channel on my ride to work.
When I learned about the mechanics of cancer I always thought the statistics seemed similar to the Fermi paradox stuff... It's cool to see someone did proper research on it
I never knew that I needed furry cosmology but I’m glad I found it
Now u ruined ir for me.
It's just a cute dog right? 😔
@@ոakedsquirtle cute dog character = furry lol
Hell, even Squirtle is by-definition a furry
@@iSchmidty13 my friend: I hate furries so goddamn much! I'd never associate myself with furries.
That same friend: Animal Crossing is a great game.
@@Gloomdrake camel by camel
@@Gloomdrake yall acting like furry community isn’t a bunch of weirdos and pedophiles and beastiality freaks
Extremely interesting. I can't wait for humanity take up all the good planets in the galaxy and prevent different forms of sapient life from naturally evolving.
We gonna do some nuclear drive bys on them aliens
There’s a billion dead rocks out there waiting for us to turn them into gardens.
Potentially. Grabby Aliens certainly looks like a modified version of the Super Predator "Dark Forest" solution to the paradox. It remains to be seen how tolerant a future humanity would be to alien lifeforms.
I think we will be extinct before getting to do any of that
Naw I'm sure we will just genocide them like in getter robo. Humans will be humans
The thing I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is that earth hasn't always been suitable for complex life - first, it needs to suit simple life, and change in certain ways that allow the life to grow. It's almost like life has to adapt to survive within a moving "window" of suitability.
What if alien civilizations were beginning to colonize galaxies hundreds of thousands of light years away within the last couple thousands of years, and the light from that time hasn’t reached us yet.
I often think about this
@@dipanjanghosal1662 Like watching a video in slow motion. Imagine how a time lapse of the universe would look, like from a photo taken now of the night sky to one taken 1000 or 10,000 years from now.
The hardest hypothesis to believe in is the existence of such "grabby aliens" themselves. It is hard to believe that species would remain "constant/uniform" across distances as large as in the model. I find it much more likely that solar systems would be colonized one at a time.
Now as for self-replicating robots, that's a whole other story.
If any portion is grabby then it will seem like the whole species is grabby. If one portion decides to stop expanding, then the other portions will still take over and expand into where that first portion would have expanded into.
@@SeraphimFelis are we sure about that? If someone gets too grabby and everyone else stops them, why do we assume that everyone will be as grabby as the first guy?
@@elizabethjones9581 Did anyone stop us? Everyone doesn't need to be grabby, only one civilization needs to be grabby for it to out grow everyone else. Then if some parts of that civilization decide not to be grabby anymore. the grabby parts will outgrow those too.
@@SeraphimFelis what if the grabby parts overconsume and starve? That's what happens to cancer, and it's happening to us, the grabby society this idea is based off of
@@elizabethjones9581 then it'll just be forced to never stop being grabby.
I agree with the first part: that we in fact may just be early. I've thought about this before. But the issue I have with Grabby Aliens is that it necessitates the need for Grabby Aliens blazing through the Cosmos at breakneck speeds to colonize in order to explain why the window for life is narrow enough to make us look "normal". It seems to be obsessed with averaging our situation as humans. It creates a "future" event to retroactively explain our arrival in the cosmos. It's like they are looking at multiple Universes and explaining why this one has only early life. But there are no other Universes to look at. There is no other "Older Histories" to look at. All we know is that compared to the potential age of the universe (assuming we are correct about red dwarves and the stellar age of the Universe) we are early. That's all we know.
Huh, just saw the video on reddit and I got very surprised when I heard Robert Miles narrating it. Really high quality stuff, and I loved the animations. I'll be looking at the other videos on the channel!
The reverse-time-flow reasoning process here is weird: "the future will have grabby aliens. which explains why we are stuck here in the past"? If the anthropic principle allows the future to force our consciousnesses to live in the past, I will eat my hat. Now, I don't own a hat, but if my hat were conscious, it would (by the anthropic principle) live in a universe where I do own it, and that's where I would eat it.
No it just means that we aren't special, non-grabby aliens like us can only exist in the early stages of the universe. Given that, it is not actually that unlikely that we, a non-grabby alien at the moment, exist early, because that is the only time we could exist. We aren't in the "past", these are just predictions of what will happen in the future. We are in the now. Being able to predict future events is pretty much orthogonal to the other things discussed.
You are correct. The notion of reasoning that we must be early because the future is much longer than the past is a tautology. We exist in the first 0.01% of the life of the universe, therefore we are early. It is both true and meaningless.
That said, I am very much a proponent of "we are early" because, IMO, there has not been that much time for "advanced" civilizations to evolve. The gas cloud that became the earth and sun formed approximately 1/2 the age of the universe ago. Gas clouds that possessed enough complex elements to form life on a rocky planet had to form from a combination of fairly common nova and supernova events AND much less common hypernova events. The latter, in addition to being very rare, also require much longer, not because of the lifespans of the original stars, but because they had to be far enough apart that the second star was not destroyed by the first one going supernova, but not so far apart that they would not have collided by 7bn years ago. It takes a very long time for two bodies to bleed off enough momentum via gravitational waves to collide.
In other words, the clock did not start for the development of "advanced" civilizations until some amount of time passed between the big bang and about 6-7bn years ago when our home dust cloud formed. We took about 6-7bn years from when that formed, and it is unlikely that anyone got more than a couple bn years head start on us. Further, if they did, they may have been working from a less enriched cloud, so may be developing more slowly.
@@andrewandersson it doesn't mean we aren't special, it is a hypothesis which only creates the existence of grabby aliens with math specifically designed to incentive early civilizations in order to claim grabby aliens are real. It has the attractive point of grabby aliens mean we're not special so that they can bully you into thinking it's legitimate. Cus clearly, if you don't agree with this hypothesis you must believe humans are special and magical, so you're basically a geocentrist.
It can't be legitimate as the reasoning is circular and retroactive. Circular because it makes claims which are unsubstantiated that all support each other, "the universe is young thus we seem early" as well as "grabby aliens exist" which are followed by a retroactive effect of the fact that "it would make sense that we are early because the grabby aliens exist and would have all the planets in the future, so we wouldn't have been able to make our own civilization in the future." Not to mention literally just random math which isn't actually based on anything derivable 🙃
Do advanced alien civilizations exist? Almost certainly. Is this a good argument in favor of that? Absolutely not.
Wow, way to misconstrue and misrepresent the information in the video.
The way I see it, it's not that we're early, it's that we're right on time. A few million years later and we may not have developed before some other advanced civilization claimed our planet, stunting our growth. Perhaps causing us to become beasts of burden or livestock of a sort.
It's not that the universe is anthropic, but that we literally could not develop outside of this narrow period of time. Consider the other species of hominids and how they were -slaughtered- outcompeted by homo sapiens. Should homo sapiens have finished a hard step a few thousand years later we may have been beaten out by another species of hominid.
Why are we early? ... _someone,_ who _just happens to be early_ is going to find themselves wondering why they're so early, assume they're not early because of how improbable that is, or assume they're something fishy going on, some problem to solve -- and then try to infer a bunch of stuff from their apparent earliness.
It's entirely possible we're early because we happen to be early. The universe looks exactly as you would expect it to look to a civilization that was very improbably early.
I think it’s important to remember that this is more of a thought experiment than a substantive theory. Much like Roko’s Basilisk it makes numerous large and often illogical assumptions in order to operate.
Kinda annoying to say that and not say what you in particular think is the large and illogical assumption
Agreed. Like Drake's equation, it's mostly assumptions with a glaringly obvious flaw. If we are early, wouldn't the grabby aliens be even earlier, necessitating even earlier aliens to account for them, and so on?
As a Christian, I know what accounts for our existence, but even if I were not, it's obvious that some species had to be first. Why do we assume that it isn't us?
@@drakkonis1 We could be the first, but that's a lonely thought.
@@hungrycrab3297 it's not about being "wise"; conquering the galaxy is a preference. If you have an open ended goal to do as much ${x} as possible not conquering the galaxy becomes a huge waste.
!!
I could recognize Robert Miles' voice instantly! Say what you want but the guy has such a calm tone and perfectly moderate pace, he makes every video he narrates super easy to follow (can't wait for his next AI videos too). Together with the unique and high quality animation, this video is a masterpiece.
I am disappointed I only now came across this channel, subscribed!
The grabby alien hypothesis isn't one I had heard of before but it sure builds a strong case for us being among the first intelligent beings out there. Great, great video! You've got a new subsciber
That’s compelling enough. It is optimistic to view ourselves as arriving early, as if we could act as a model for later civilizations. It’s always constructive to assume a leadership role. The scale of thinking is so huge and it’s hard to know exactly what impact we could have on that future, if any.
I'm struggling with the observation/conclusion that we appear "early".. it seems to rest on other assumptions, like that life and advanced civilization would arise often enough that advanced civilizations could expect to actually see each other... I don't think that's a safe assumption..
@@adfaklsdjf It’s indeed not an safe assumption because that’s not the point, the true safe assumption is that every advanced civilization would be “grabby” and have intentions to expand, therefore eventually meeting other advanced civilizations, in this case, life being common or not doesn’t matter at all.
"We developed very early in the galactic timescale, and this is very unlikely. The most likely explanation is that an advanced species influenced our development." But, doesn't that make them even more early, and therefore, even more unlikely? I think it's more likely that we are a weird statistical anomaly, spawned purely of the law of large numbers, rather than the likely result of an even more unlikely civilisation.
Considering we have no way of knowing how accurate this model is, we cannot say either one is more likely
The argument doesn't imply aliens influenced our development.
@@Youngnrrwhtjwtjetk We have a fairly good way of knowing because we can look outside and see there are no alien megacities on the moon
Nothing in this video implies an advanced species influenced our development, where did you get that from?
@@MsNikeNike What I'm saying is if you watched the video then it would make sense that alien influence would become very very quickly obvious due to how rapidly they spread. This would probably mean that they'd have either colonized most surrounding systems with obvious waste heat signatures and other things or have colonized our own solar system. Why would aliens colonize the galaxy and just happen to skip out on our bubble? If there are grabby aliens they would've colonized our entire galaxy including the moon. I could, although, see earth being left as a nature preserve just due to the sheer quantity of planets. I also don't see any reason they'd hide themselves from us (which would be very hard because of waste heat.) Anyways point I was trying to make was there is no sign of alien influence in our neighborhood, I gave a bit of an extreme (or perhaps not so much depending on alien behaviors) example of alien megacities on the moon.
This has always been my hypothesis to the Fermi Paradox.
We have to be alone in the universe because viewable aliens around us would prevent our existence.
Maybe we just haven't caught their attention ... yet...
@@kimpeater1
You didn't watch the video if you think that counters the point.
@@cortster12 it's pathetically wishful thinking to believe we are the only or the very first. At one point the best minds argued just as logically that the Earth was the center of the universe, but we're not even in the center of the milky way or our own solar system. Humanity has always had a problem with accepting humility but the overwhelming evidence thus far is we are truly and utterly insignificant.
@kimpeater1
Wishful? It's logical. It doesn't make sense to me we could exist in a spot another advanced alien race could occupy at once. So either they exist, but aren't here (possible), or they would exist in the future, but won't because WE (or our robots) will occupy where they would have evolved. Which is what would have happened to us if they existed where we are.
@@cortster12 illogical. If doesn't make sense to you because of ignorance. You simply don't know what you don't know. The OBSERVABLE universe is all you have to make any "logical" inference. However, the actual universe is arguably infinite. Humanity simply hasn't been around long enough, nor observed the night sky well enough to make any conclusion about anything regarding the cosmos. So your "logic" is still only conjecture and wishful thinking. At the very least we should fully explore the milky way before making any generalizations. Humanity hasn't even fully explored their own insignificant solar system.
Honestly i've never done patreon for any content creators but you guys definitely deserve it.
i'm 15 and hope to be an astrobiologist someday! this is an awesome, well thought through theory that has some serious merit and implications. i hope humanity lives long enough to grab some of the stars out there- maybe i'll even be around to see it. thank you robin hanson for being your genius self and massive props to the rational animations team for this awesome, high quality video! also hi robert miles
oh and the song in the background is 'dreams become real' by kevin mcleod. great music :)
Isaac Arthur has a whole channel where he discusses the Fermi Paradox at great length. There are an uncountable number of planets that preexisted Earth where life had an opportunity to evolve. If it was going to happen it would have happened billions of years ago, and be visible as an entire altered galaxy of Dyson spheres.
This strains my credibility. We have just barely observed other planets. And we can really only call a few Earth-like based on a tiny amount of data on their star, orbit, and apparent mass. Our theories certainly suggest that planets that could support evolution are many, but I think we are a very long way from observing them yet.
I agree 100%. If intelligent life was even SOMEWHAT common (1 in every 100 million planets), we would have noticed by now
The early universe might have been pretty uninhabitable due to much more frequent supernova and generally being more dynamic
Assuming that all life everywhere in the universe develops in exactly the same pattern as on Earth.
Suprising to see such high quality content from a channel with less than 10k subs, keep up the good work!
I really appreciated the Ascian illustration you put in there.
I had completely missed Hanson et al. paper, this was such a nice surprise.
In my experience, YT channels such as yours become better and better with time. I can't wait to see where this channel will go. It has the potential to rival legends like CGP Grey, Exurb1a, and 3blue1brown.
"Just grant us one miracle and we can explain everything else."
A superior theory to me to the clumsy Dyson Sphere idea is the idea that more advanced civilisations will tend to minimize their form factor. Being smaller seems an obvious way to be more energy efficient. Needless to say civilisations that go in this direction would potentially be quite hard to spot.
And/or maybe they just go virtual and outgrow the need to physically explore the universe.
We are just some dudes car battery lol
Maybe this is just the virtual experience
Other things to consider are the great filters you mentioned before. Humanity being as "grabby" as it is might (and already kinda is) result in a backfire where we start depleting resources and expanding way faster than our host planet can handle, eventually leading to a war on resources which escalates into a nuclear apocalypse, another possibility is a carington-like event happening every few often that pretty much presses a reset button on a civilization's technology, theres also how hard interstellar travel is, the creation of a superweapon or technology that leads to the total destruction of a species, so on. Maybe actual advanced grabby civilizations that succeed are extremely rare, so rare that the nearest one is multiple galaxies away.
As for solar sails while they are useful they kinda require either a massive laser or being extremely close to a star for propulsion, they could maybe be used partially but I feel that fusion/antimatter technology will also be a big thing when it comes interstellar travel.
I m kinda sceptical about laser-biased accelerarion cause we don't have material able to sustain such stream of energy in a limited timeframe. Everything will vaporize
Why not to accelerate a probe with mass driver? We can build say 1 GW solar power plant on orbit, plug in magnet accelerator and shoot probes in all directions. They will then open solar sails and use distant star light to decelerate and park in a foreign system
@@nickolayyegorov4755 A mass driver sounds fun I guess, though for interstellar travel you would need a mass driver so big that it might as well be easier to make a generation ship. You need to accelerate to at least something like 1%C, you are probably better off with a few fusion or antimatter torchships or hell even a u235 nswr. Solar sails sound interesting for decelerating tho.
(also recoil lol, if you accelerate stuff in orbit so insanely fast you are gonna have to move that thing so it doesnt deorbit itself over time, not to mention the ammount of solar power you need is also insane. Let's wait till fusion or really advanced fission drives come along and then we can start going interstellar shall we?)
I mean, any speculation about future technology runs into a serious roadblock, or set of roadblocks: That we can't predict the next Revolutionary Innovation.
To a scientist prior to Agriculture the idea of a tribe of tens of thousands of people settling down in one area and not immediately starving to death would have required a land of incredibly implausible fertility.
To a scientist prior to Industrialization the idea of one brand of clothing being so uniformly, cheaply, and easily replicated and shipped worldwide as to be worn by commoners in Europe and Indonesia and America alike would've required a literal deity of sewing and the intervention of several deities of the sea, just to produce and ship.
To a scientist prior to Flight the idea of humans flying seemed totally unreachable, a pipedream for the philosophers with more optimism than practicality.
It makes it very difficult to predict future technology, because a lot of the time these Revolutions aren't born of the typical plodding forward that fills out behind them and is propagated by everyone with a doctorate - they're crazy, unpredictable leaps forward by total madmen who happen to reach for the stars and snag one.
We can't entirely depend on interstellar travel being impractical. For all we know, the next revolution is mathematical, and the redefinition of space-time under this new mathematical paradigm allows us to use exceptionally low amounts of energy to warp space-time directly and permanently. Suddenly we can brute-force an event horizon, generate artificial gravity, and use alcubierre drives to zip from system to system in half a minute.
I think this is the real killer for the Great Filter hypothesis. I'm sure some species do indeed off themselves early on - but by the same token, many won't. And with the unpredictability of innovation, I don't think it's smart to discount anything for being "inefficient". It's probably not even smart to discount the impossible, but that at least is more forgiving. The inefficient regularly becomes the efficient, historically, and I expect to see that trend continue into the future.
We already have the tech to reach 10% the speed of light we just have treaties to not use it or develop it. Project orion. Just drop a nuke every so often behind a shield and ride the wave.
Shielding on the forward side against impacts is what becomes difficult then. Large amounts of ice would likely be the cheapest and easiest to use.
I still have faith we will crack the alcubiere warp drive and none of those things will matter.
I'm blown away by the quality of the writing and the animation. It's hard to sounds sincere within UA-cam comments, but I'm very thankful for your work and have no doubt you'll continue to grow. I hope the channel, and humanity as whole continues to be grabby!
A Dyson sphere sounds like the worst possible situation in a universe full of other civilizations. Like a big neon sign for all to see letting them know just how dangerous you are and just how little you care that everyone knows it.
Or its the sign of a very old and very large threat because even that Dyson sphere is old old.
Nah man we using that sun energy to help others frfr 😇😇😇
We will be roleplaying as jesus for y'all as long as you don't have a sphere of your own.
Paints a target on your back as well.
Only if others exist. They can't exist if you began first and spread to every possible place they could have. Any alien expanding without contest would come to this conclusion.
Yeah but you have a Dyson sphere, no one can mess with you anyway
When discussing Fermi's Paradox and its related ideas, no one ever seems to consider the possibility that significant and visible changes are not possible. Indeed, the very existence of the Fermi Paradox seems to be extremely strong evidence that things like Dyson spheres are actually impossible.
This idea about the likelihood of developing advanced civilization so early is interesting, but it can really be simplified: Given the current apparent age of the universe, 13.8 billion years, why does it appear that the universe will continue to exist for so much longer than its current age. We don't need hard steps or planet lifetimes, just the observation of the age of the universe compared to our models for how long stars and planets last (many times the current age of the universe).
Grabby Aliens seem like a terrible solution. My view is that most habitable planets are inhabited, and that a significant number have civilizations on them, just not much more advanced than our own, because interstellar travel is harder than people think, and because visible changes to solar systems are completely technologically impossible for everyone everywhere.
The entire idea that a civilization could reach the heights necessary to attempt interstellar colonization and still be driven by any traits derived from their evolution strikes me as wildly unlikely. Also, they always take the paradox as a given. It isn't. We are practically blind in terms of our ability to observe another intelligent species. If FTL travel is impossible, and we believe more and more every day that it is, then the odds are overwhelmingly high that we just haven't been observing long enough or wide enough.
@@tobyvision Yeah, exactly that last part. The "paradox" is just very strong evidence that FTL travel as well as phenomena that's easy to observe from lightyears away like Dyson Spheres, are actually not just impractical, but actually impossible, in the latter case given real limitations like the age and matter density of the universe.
@@WylliamJudd for all we know, a Dyson construct might be possible, but completely unnecessary for a species capable of building one. Humanity is just about to the point of being able to adapt ourselves to our environment instead of the other way around, but we are certainly millennia away from being able to build anything on that scale.
@@tobyvision we seem to have evidence that it is not possible, or at least close enough to impossible to not be surprising that it never happened given the age of the universe. As long as we're talking about a Dyson construct that should be easily detectible from Earth given our technology and how long we've been looking.
Behavioral arguments are hard to swallow, since in the vastness of space and time, it seems unlikely that no civilization would *ever* do a certain thing. It makes much more sense to me to conclude that certain feats are actually physically out of reach even if the most advanced possible civilization put all of their efforts into some random endeavor.
@@WylliamJudd I think you are right. In either your case or mine, both of which could apply, there is no reason to believe the paradox even holds.
This is a really cool video, you are very good at explaining things and the animations are great also. Looking at interesting papers and doing explanations on them would be a good model for future videos too if you’re looking for ideas. Keep up the good work!
Yo, you sound just like the dude on computerphile who talks about stop buttons on AI. Main reason I'm subbing for now.
Just here to say that your videos hit the sweet-spot for me right inbetween entertainingly-simplistic such as Kurzgesagt and plainly-informative such as PBS Space Time.
I'm gonna subscribe to you after only watching this one video (which usually doesn't happen for me).
The way the argument is explained mistakes probability with causation. That grabby aliens displace non-grabby species makes our early existence probable, but does not explain why we are early. We could be in region next to a grabby neighbor that they hadn’t yet explored due to limited interstellar travel speeds. They could invade us in, say, 100 years. And we would still be early today.
Why should there be an explanation for the causation?
This is about geological timelines, millions of years. The fact that our planet was not colonized long before humanity even emerged as a species, makes the existence of expansionist neighbors really improbable. The earth is what, 4 and a half billion years old? And for most of that time, it did not have a technological civilization, so one emerging just at the time for them to reach us in the next 100 years would be about as plausible as one person winning the lottery every day of their life.
@@driveasandwich6734 because the title of the video is: "the reason is grabby aliens"
@@_Muzolf I agree up to a point. For your argument to be true we would need to know for certain that life does not need 4 billion years to evolve a sentient species. We are not sure if we could physically have evolved earlier than we did. But yes, you have a point there for sure
@@germanpenn Oh nonono, there is a misunderstanding here. I am not going with the assumption that it does necessarily needs 4 billion years. I am certain it could emerge earlier or later depending on the circumstances of a planet, but the point is that these things work on geological timelines. 100 years is nothing compared to the age of the planet and even the age of life here. So i would assert that it is really unlikely that two technological civilization would emerge close to eachother at the same time. Since we are not seeing dyson swarms all over the nearby stars, i would assume that either we are early in our neigborhood, or that if someone is around, they are much older then us, and for some reason were not interested in expanding around here.
criminally underrated channel
subscribed!!
cute doggo! much rational!
First off, amazing video and writing. I also love the animations.
Secondly, this actually plays into a solution of yhe Fermi paradox called "The Firstborn"
This is a way better idea than the Fermi Paradox since it actually makes sense. It's a really cool hypothesis and it makes a lot of sense. Whether or not it's true, it's a lot more plausible than the "whelp, I looked outside and saw nothing but sun and blue skies for 30 seconds, looks like rain doesn't exist at all" logic of Fermi.
The Fermi paradox: How did he teach dogs to hold a mug like him?
Awesome video, very thought provoking. A question just occurred to me... When we look at the stars, we are looking at the past. Light from a habitable planet could have taken millions of years to arrive. How can we say that we are EARLY if we are looking at old data. There could be many civilizations active right now, some that came earlier or at the same time as us, we just haven't had enough time to receive the evidence.
Because of how information travels, it's not old data. It's current to our time frame. If FTL travel is impossible, then there's no way for that data to be 'old,' because there's no possible way for anything from that planet to reach us until the number of years it takes for information to travel passes.
Basically, it's not old data because information has a travel speed; the information you observe right now *is* current. It takes time to travel somewhere and affect it (light traveling a distance is considered affecting things, gravity waves are the same, etc), therefore what we observe *is* current.
@@Mage_Chartreux I'm going to call bs on this here. If we see a star blowing up, it has been done with that for a huge amount of time. Light takes time to travel and thus we see what was there, not what is.
Lmao, everything is old data. You always perceive things late, because that's how information works. Unless you mess with quantum mechanics that is.
Information from a star 100m years ago reaches your eyes today, is that new information or is that old information which took 100m years to reach your eyes. If you were able to teleport to the star you'd see it would be different from the star you saw earlier, because 100m have passed.
In that sense it's possible to have many advanced alien civilizations, the newest information just hasn't reached us yet.
@@christianstamm94 it's not bs. Effects of that supernova will not be felt faster than light. If the sun were to disappear right now, we would not realize it for 8 minutes. Only then gravity of the sun would stop affecting us, and the light would cease to illuminate the earth. For all intents and purposes, the speed of information is the speed of events happening
First reply
Harrd step are a equivalent to filters in Fermy, the main difference it's that Fermy propose that some of these filters/hards step can destroy all progress in a massive extinsion and became the end of the civilization while Grabby afirm this barrier it's eventually overcomed.
Both theories seek answer the same question "why we don't findalien life sing,already?" but reach a completely different outcome based in a small difference of perspective in their basics.
I love finding out about new theory then hopping around trying to find various explanations so I can "get it" and fit it into my worldview as an option.
Well you didn't make me hop around; you just explained it concisely here and now.
ON TO THE NEXT VIDEO!
Humanity
cosmic conditions can lower the number of hard steps locally, so that we may be early overall, but very much on schedule considering our specific conditions.
But why does us being early need a special explanation? It might just be dumb luck.
I mean, given how humans act, I'm not surprised we're basically saying "First!" on a galactic level
Science that can’t be proven is my favorite kind. When we have no data for a huge topic like this we start coming up with the craziest but detailed explanations. Too bad I won’t be around when this goes from theory to fact.
By 2050 it will be common knowledge we are not alone.
Science that can’t be proven is not science. The _whole_ point of Science is _repeatability_ to _verify_ assumptions.
Great video, thanks for bringing this paper to my attention. Gonna go patron.
Id love if you had a discord to talk about these topics.
We're definitely going to create a Discord server soon enough
Here it is, in case you didn't already know: discord.gg/5Y3Dwz89yH
It's really weird that only if the future affects the past, does the theory about grabby aliens really mean anything.
no, you misunderstood the argument.
it's not "grabby aliens on the future affect us" but it's "if grabby aliens would exist, they don't exist yet because we're yet not colonized, so we must be early."
People won't believe in aliens until an alien comes to earth and knocks on every single door of every single home on earth and says, "hey, look at me I'm an alien from outer space." And even then there will be a committee of scientists formed to debunk the alien knocking on every door on earth myth.
Completely lost me with the Grabbly Alien Hypo when the assumption was made that highly advanced spacefairing civilizations would be even interested in planets as a place to "live"
It isn't that grabby aliens would live on planets, it is that they would use and change planets, among all the other available resources.
Mining the planet still works
Either way, you still need space and resources. The only way to get that is expansion.
@@SeraphimFelis Not strictly true. There are many other explanations to the Fermi paradox. The ultimate resource problem for an advanced species would not be space, materials, or energy, but time. The heat death of the universe puts a hard limit on time for biology. A sufficiently advanced race might "move inward" to a simulated reality that can be progressively operated at faster and faster speed, giving them much greater time, and perhaps time enough to transcend the heat death limit.
Another explanation is that expansion is not actually cost effective. We know that there is more mineral resources in our own asteroid belt than humanity could use at its most wasteful for millenia. And we only get more efficient in material use. It is entirely possible that trying to send any small number of ourselves to another planet would be a tiny drop in the bucket of resource gain compared to maximizing our use or own solar system. And in the millennia following, we might advance our science so far that moving to another planet would be a needless concept.
@@SeraphimFelis wrong assumption on many levels. Also wrong to assume and anthropomorphize human replicative strategy to alien psychology lol
I love how we humans can impose our own model of how we think life evolves (something we barely understand) onto the rest of the universe, life can evolve from and to so many variations we simply cannot comprehend, at times, it’s okay to admit we simply do not know how the universe works.
Extremely good presentation. Very much enjoyed it.
Feels a little like an early, more benevolent representation of the dark forest...
There seems to be something wrong with the logic of this argument to me
It is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist. It’s like saying “wait, how could I possibly have been the one to win the lottery? That’s a 1 in a million chance. There must be something deeper at play here” without realising that the chance of *somebody* winning the lottery was always 1 in 1.
I also have a feeling that this whole thing might be a bit too inaccurate, the concept of planet lifetime on that graph kinda confuses me, even on video he stated that shorter lived planets make us more rare and early, while the graph shows the reverse stating that life on those longer lived planets is more early, probably to understand this I would need to read that paper, unless someone can explain to me that in short
also 10% still seems like a lot unless I don't get the scale, maybe instead of lifetime of a planet, it would be better to use age of universe + number of planets/stars that exist in certain category or something like that on 3d graph... the more I think of this the more I feel motivated to read this whole paper unless it will be too long and too big brain for me
@@Vo_Siri except there's no reason to assume someone had to "win".
@@sirramic202 If sapient life is possible, which we know that it is, then it had to happen *somewhere* first. So yes, someone had to "win" in this analogy.
My basic gripe with all ideas like this is the belief that a species could achieve interstellar colonization while retaining the competitive traits acquired through evolution. We already know that strong genetic engineering is required for any long range space travel, and absolutely essential for colonization of another planet. We are on the cusp of our genetic age already, long before serious space travel. If we ever do send ourselves to another planet, believe that they will not really be modern day "us." This would likely hold true for any space fairing race.
I mean, this whole theory depends on the assumptions that A) All habitable planets will inevitably be colonized and B) a civilization can't rise from a planet that's already inhabited
Does the paper have an explanation for these?
earth itself having different "advanced" civilizations kinda already disproves it
I’ve wondered how fucked certain life would be to get off it’s rock. Imagine a fish species under a layer of ice.
How much more do they have to advance then us just to get to space. They need tons of water in a shuttle and to break a ice layer.
It's simple long tail. The vast majority of rational species may not be grabby, or may never develop science and technology to ever have a chance of becoming grabby. But if there's a small chance for one of them to become grabby, then a big enough number of them almost guarantees one of them _will_ become grabby as the probability of that happening grows assimptotically toward 1. And that one, whenever and wherever it arises, will then capture everything in their future light cone.
Guessing that If a specie is capable of reaching an alien world in order to take its resources and colonize it,
it can probably sterilize it in preparation of Terraforming. Making the previous life forms go extinct and in the end it's as if they were never there.
@@tech-heck3155 A ocean based lifeform would be fucked in many ways, just by virtue of the fact that a fluid medium reacts dramatically and combines with way more then a gas medium making their scientific development way harder by several magnitudes. A ice ceiling would barely qualify as a hurdle next to all the other problems.
just got a subsriber! great video and animations, i love all the different iterations of the dog!!!
Such an incredible channel. I feel like I’m getting in on the ground floor before you gain millions of subscribers!
“Shut up Fermi, you’re a nerd.”
-Me, also a nerd.
This was facinating. It is interesting to think that we are just so early that there aren’t any other civs out there, or if there are then they are at similar levels of development (so similarly early).
I don't understand what the evidence is that life/civilization would be common enough that they could reasonably expect to see each other at all ever. We don't have to be alone in the universe or early for advanced civilizations to never see each other, and our existence isn't evidence that life is common. That life arose so early in our planet's geology suggests that it will arise readily on a suitable planet, but we don't have any sense of how common suitable planets are except that they don't appear common. Every other world in our solar system looks highly unsuitable, and we can produce a lengthy list of attributes about our world that make it especially suitable.
God damn. Found the channel through Rob's (Hanson) tweet and it's narrated by Rob Miles? I have never clicked subscribe faster.
I think what this theory doesn't take into account is the power of evolution, it assumes grabby aliens will remain the same over time. For example, as a species becomes grabby and expands outwards into the universe they would, over time, evolve to different conditions and become less and less like their grabby ancestors. After billions of years, the grabby aliens in different parts of the universe would be almost unrecognizable from each other. The logical conclusion to this is that at some point in the far future all habitable planets are occupied by different grabby alien species some that look similar and some that are vastly different (but all arose from a single origin). This kind of mirrors how all life on earth began with one single self replicating entity that evolved to all the biodiversity we see today. Every living thing on earth is related but we are now all vastly different organisms.... and that's only after ~0.5 billion years.... could you imagine 1000 billion and a whole universe to grow into? It doesn't really matter if humans are early or not, if we expand to the universe our descendants will be so different from us they may as well be completely unrelated at that point.
There's a book that has Grabby aliens -The Qu, all tommorows by C. M. Kosemen. Great video!
I like the idea that humans are the ancient precursors, since there always has to be a first
Or you know we could be the drones🤣
I have done no science, me not smart but...
What if there was a science or math that shows that we are the drones, but really sub-optimal, 1st generation, really flawed primitive drones.
Are the steps assumed to be fixed probabilities? I guess I'm not sure how more/less hard steps changes our likelihood of space faring life timelines
Finally someone wrote an article about a concept I've been telling people for like 6 years or something.
I’d love to see a sci-fi story about how humans were the very first intelligent species and that’s because they were born way before their time and they had no competition, and lo and behold about 10 billion years after humans went extinct there was an explosion in intelligent civilizations. That would be cool
I'd write a sci-fi comedy story about humans being the precursors whose evolution has diverge down 50 different branches and each species represents where self-directed and/or natural evolution could lead us if given the chance. The crux of the story is that humanity has reached godlike power as a type 3 to 4 civilisation but is bored because they are still alone amongst the stars and have no one to show off to.
The reason for this is because no species is smart enough to reach interstellar levels of technology and are stuck at the type 0.3-0.6 civilisation level, so humanity decides to cheat by creating beacons that broadcasts packs of information containing type 1 civilisation levels of interstellar technology throughout the universe along with FTL and then go into hiding or hermitage for lols so they can watch to see what they do.
Hundreds of species finally enter space and find a galaxy spanning empire that is nothing but a ghost town of empty worlds belonging to these precursors with tech too advanced for them to understand or replicate. The comedy comes from the aliens wondering what happened to these precursors, figuring out our technology, and the reactions, ideas and beliefs towards humanity branch species and the other aliens that form. Every now and then humanity teases the aliens by hinting at their presence then goes back into hiding to watch the show.
@@masc6287 holy shit get this man a Netflix show
That kind of mirrors our genetic ancestors, Homo Erectus. They were around for over 500k years, colonized the Old World and then went extinct when having to compete with Homo Sapiens, once we finally bred our way our of Africa.
@@masc6287 Reminds me of those ufo religion people who have a whole pantheon of different alien races and believe they influenced our development a la _2001: A Space Odyssey_ or the Watchers/Grigori from the Second Book of Enoch.
I remain unconvinced on proposition that grabbiness is an evolved inherent behaviour species will maintain.
The idea of continued civilisation expansion relies on the idea that the species itself will continue to expand and thereby consume more resources. However, at our current level of technology every developed nation is seeing a drop off in birth rates and in turn a need for immigration to prevent the stagnation of their growth. A space faring species would naturally have technology which vastly outstrips our own so if this trend holds true such a species would run out of people. We can speculate on ai becoming grabby for us but that becomes a solution looking for a problem. AI can find planets and make them habitable but there aren't any people to immigrate, it can build dyson swarms around foreign suns but what would they power, it can mine distant asteroids but there's more than enough minerals in the solar system to see all our needs met for millions of years.
Artificial birthing and cloning technologies could bypass the need for natural human reproduction and those people could settle new worlds but what would these new worlds offer the old which couldn't be supplied locally? How would the people travel from one world to the next to justify those planets being terraformed in the first place, machines can survive on solar sail ships but people are a different issue. That's without considering the economic and political risks of setting up foreign groups of humanity who are just as likely to declare independence and become Earth's competitors.
The other elephant in the room is advancements in virtual technology, if worlds better than our own can be simulated than no matter how grabby our species is, our greed will be concentrated on the artificial universe while the rest of the universe continues to believe they are just too early to meet us.
You got it. Ideas like this video always revolve around the idea that the brain we have is the one we will always have. I find this extremely unlikely. Genetic engineering will be a prerequisite for interstellar colonization. There are probably billions of solutions to species survival more elegant and easier than trying to find and inhabit other planets.
The only plausible "grabby" situation I can think of is an AI that has as it's only goal to increase it's own intelligence. As far as we know, this would require ever increasing amounts of physical matter and energy to use as substrate. It would presumably also get geometrically smarter and therefore better at expanding itself. But even in this scenario, I have to imagine that at some point it would transcend needing the physical universe to continue growing and no longer bother to expand in our universe.
I think this is the first decent argument I've seen against this theory. Although there is also the idea of, "Because we can," so even if your argument is true, I think the possibility of universal expansion is still there.
This is nuts, did not expect to wake up today and find that someone might have solved the damn fermi paradox--or that the answer would be so seemingly obvious
Well yeah, I've played Stellaris.
Also, if we're on that topic, it's possible that many Grabby Alien civilizations have actually existed but have all collapsed or become non-grabby after a while. This would mean they've stopped changing the universe, and we'll only notice them once we make actual contact with them.
I'd guess becoming non-grabby is a possibility - much the same way in human civilizations, when we're just getting going and still striving/struggling, we have a lot of children, and expand our population. The more advanced a civ gets, the fewer children it has, even to the point of a birth rate that isn't population-sustaining anymore. Could happen on a larger galactic scale, too.
What's crazy is that we are probably that weird impossibly advanced alien that can only exist in some super sci-fi habitation suit that other civilizations look up to and aspire to be at some point in the future. We just have to pass the hard step of not blowing ourselves up first.
So one of the bigger problems with this argument is the assumption that alien modifications to their environments would be noticeable by us. This is necessarily not true. Whatever way an alien modified universe looks, we would always be able to invent an alternative 'natural' i.e. non-alien explanation for our observations. That's the nature of astronomy and science in general: make observations then invent and fit models of natural processes to those observations. In astronomy in particular the information in our observations is quite sparse and there is a great deal of room for modelling. The wrong but 'natural' explanation will always be chosen by us until something happens to convince us that an alien explanation is not unthinkable (and has more explanatory power). As a consequence we could be quite happily be living in a galaxy that is already largely 'grabbed' and be blissfully unaware of it.
The bit about grabby aliens taking up all the habitable planets reminded me of how in Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, the titular galactic civilization The Culture lives almost entirely on artificially created habitats. It's not outright forbidden from living on planets, but it's seen as very gauche. I think the idea is that they want to leave planets undisturbed so as not to prevent a native species from developing some day.
The Earth is only habitable by the standards that we experience. By that standard, the Earth is only barely habitable and for us, the Universe isn't habitable at all.
But then why does life, in any form, even exist to begin with? What is the mechanism by which we even ask that question?