Correction/Update: Robin Hanson saw the episode and approves but did have one requested correction [Below] 18:18 [Current] "Note that this is the approach of looking for the most crowded universe that fits the data & model, not the end that says that GCs can’t be even more spread out than that, nor does it imply that Earth isn’t the only place life ever appeared. We may be 1/gajillion, this model is just seeks to say, we are not < 1/quintillion, in terms of stars giving rise to GCs." ****The correction from Robin Hanson: We do actually argue that we have estimate of Earth rareness, not just a lower bound. If Earth was extremely rare, & no other aliens would ever appear near here, then we'd expect to appear trillions of years in the future. Appearing now shows is deadline: aliens will appear soon. and you cna follow him on twitter at twitter.com/robinhanson
For the Loud aliens model at 8:30 there is an unstated 4th condition of when they arrive in an area they prevent new intelligent life emerging. The model strictly speaking still works even if it is assumed that the civilisation is not visible, or prevents life arising only if it has not reached some interesting threshold of development which encourages preservation. However we only have an estimate of how long it'll take them to get here after we're worth preserving. As we don't know when or even if we're worth preserving to a grabby civilisation, and we don't know their expansion speed , we could be inside a gigalightyear spanning civilisation or they could be a billion light years away.
I misread the title to "Crabby" aliens and instantly thought "ohh, there's no aliens because evolution tends to make crabs over and over that never gets into space...
I kinda wanna see some sci-fi where aliens have invaded and then other aliens show up to arrest them and try to repair the damage the invaders caused.... But we're still unable to really communicate with them.... And they basically see us as wildlife that's worth preserving....
There is a Futurama episode where aliens want to acquire human noses, because they think they have sexual enhancing properties, like some people see rhino horns. Although it makes no sense for intelligent aliens to treat other intelligent aliens that way, it is sort of like the concept of good and bad aliens 'cops and robber'-ing each other.
That's a premise I'd read. Only issue is its genuinely implausible any such entities would be unable to communicate with us effectively. Even if its they who have to figure out how because the effort would be too complex for us humans. More like they thought of us as wildlife and so just weren't * interested * in talking.
@@Jevaughn Its not as implausible as you might think because the brains of animals and the way evolution on Earth has driven complex communication in animals physiology effectively involves both frequency tuning and effectively physiological encryption as our brains connect meanings to various sounds in specific combinations(not to mention there are higher order modalities in vocal communication which could be utilized as it appears birds have likely done based on machine learning work. But yeah in the listed scenario it is likely a lack of interest that would best fit logically.
Idk why people think society is more toxic than it was say like 30 years ago. Their is no real reason to think that other than nostalgia for the past cuz i remember the 90s and the 80s were the worst. I prefer the honesty of the current era. Its messy, confused, and refreshing
@@eminentbishop1325 I don't know about the rest of the world, but the US is falling apart at the seams, and it's fueling a culture of bitterness and division. I'm on disability, so I'm near the bottom of the crashing wave of societal collapse. Everyone where I live knows we can't take much more of the constant loss before we're all homeless or dead. People are starting to attack everyone around them in their frustration, rage, and fear. They're preparing for the end of civilization, if in no other way than stocking up on guns and ammo and getting ready to use them. Not that it will do any good. The past sucked, but at least it wasn't devoid of hope and filled with products and services that are an unsatisfying mockery of what came before. I can't even purchase socks at Walmart without being followed by security guards, and none of the three different brands I bought have enough material to be usable at all. They were blatant ripoffs. The same store offers fake SSDs that just have thumb drives inside which lie about their capacity, silently overwriting your old files. Too bad so many local businesses were destroyed for this. No kidding, McDonald's doesn't even offer water anymore. It's just not an option, but they charged me for it anyway. Grabbing money is more important than quality and reputation when everyone else's reputation is already in the toilet. I'm happy for you that you're unable to see how people are changing as things get frighteningly worse. I see the life bleeding out of the world and people becoming toxic with the certainly of their downfall.
Hmm, he didn’t mention the past, though; all he said was that today’s society is increasingly toxic. One could interpret that as an exaltation of the past, but it could just as easily mean that, from his perspective, society has only just begun to become more toxic than it traditionally has been in the past. So, not an exaltation of the past so much as a lamentation of the present, then.
I love how these titles NEVER exactly mean what I think they mean when I click on them. Its like an additional little surprise everytime I decide to watch an Isaac Arthur video, on top of all the amazing science I learn. Kinda like a kinder surprise, you buy it for the chocolate, but that little toy is also cool (or vice versa, and for a kids POV obviously lol). I 100% assumed this was going to be either about Aliens who interbreed with humans, or "little Green Men and their kidnapping space saucer".
This channel is like The History Channel for sci-fi and tech neck beards, lol. Cringey and full of ridiculous impractical ideas. Technology is not what runs a civilisation; *a government and bureaucracies do* . And the biggest problem to running those on a galactic scale is time dilation. Far too much can go wrong on the other side of the galaxy for you to fix in time, and if you don't; your civilisation crumbles and falls apart. How do you maintain an economy, an army, even a building project of any kind? Infrastructure? There's just too much of a delay; too much distance and time to cover. You can't make deals and trade under these types of conditions! In fact, these conditions would force (colony) civilisations to become self sufficient and autonomous. And if they are such; how do you join them into an empire? How do you prevent civil war between them and keep them from destroying what has been built? Our empires and economies simply do not work on such a scale; they are planet sized economies. Thought experiment: let's say there's a bunch of mining planets on the outer rim; say 150 of them. Suppose those 150 planets formed a union, and decided to break away from the galactic empire. Suppose also; that this move would totally wreck the galactic economy; while only benefitting those 150 planets. Lets say it takes years to get there. By the time the governments army arrives to intervene; they are years too late. The economic damage is done. Your space empire falls apart because trade agreements fail, deliveries of goods (ore) fails. All because you can't travel across light years fast enough. But even suppose you could; it would lead to pure chaos. Imagine getting messaged from the future, and informed that the bank is shutting you down because your business has already failed in their part of the timeline 2 years ahead of yours. Not exactly motivational.
My English professor let me do a research paper on the Fermi paradox. I just wanted to thank you for all your content. It’d be magnitude’s harder to write something without you.
By K4 status it's important to note that each GC would effectively have vastly differing observable universes, assuming no GC would ever be at the edge of the universe. So applying the GAC to their observable universe likely includes many more GC which include us and ours only partially. FTL brings time dilation into play a lot too
It’s reasonable to assume that there is no edge to the universe and that the universe is constantly expanding in all directions at once faster than light. This means from a practical standpoint no civilization will ever be at the “edge” and no civilization ever could be at the “edge.”
At the point of K4 GC I'd honestly call it post-civilisation since it's impossible to be a single entity at that scale, and becomes an entire "ecosystem" by itself more than a "civilisation"
@@Dan-dy8zp I mean that must be it, they also assumadly come from the same original place, so it's kinda like saying earth is a single "civilization" which it probably actually will be soon, once we get post poverty and destitution
The piece you had a while ago about the apparent 'Phosphorus Problem' would certainly put a severe limit on the commonness of life (at least of any sort we can imagine/model)! But another limit (at least to possible interstellar expansion) could be easily seen/imagined from a piece of research that JMG presented on his channel. He had on an author of a paper that was examining some recent observations of meteors that had unusual properties, based on 'crunching the numbers' from the observations. These objects showed unusually high velocities (noticeably beyond what is expected in our Solar System), which leads to the conclusion that they are almost certainly extra-Solar in origin. While other observations/calculations show that they are are significantly stronger/harder than what we see in our System, even the highest-content iron asteroids, which would bolster the likelihood of that origin being extra-Solar. But using those same observations to examine 'commonness' leads to the conclusion that these hard, very high-velocity objects are *very* common in interstellar space. In fact, based on the numbers he was using, even a modest-sized interstellar ship on a several-parsec long trip would have a *very* high likelihood (approaching certainty) to be 'intercepted' by one or two of these (multi-kilogram) objects! Given the interception velocities, and the size/weight of these *very* hard/tough chunks of 'debris' (as they are posited to be ejecta of supernovae) - building the ships to be able to overcome this danger could be *extremely* difficult for K-1 civilizations to do. It might very well be a difficult/expensive investment even for K-2 societies to manage on a large-scale mass-production basis, as it's possible that the only 'practicable' solution may be to *massively* 'up-armor' the prows of the ships to be able to absorb these multi-kilogram objects with intercept velocities measuring 1000+ kps! (Perhaps *much* higher, if the ship is traveling at a relativistic velocity!) If the ship were traveling at .7071 of light-speed, the energy-release by a collision would be equal to the conversion of the object's mass into pure energy! So the two above considerations might very well account for a big portion of the Fermi Paradox!
That's a whole lot of exclamation points. But the concern is valid. I suspect that faster ships might be a bit more rare, with slower (and more heavily armed/armored to deal with interstellar debris like this) ships making up the bulk of actual expansion. You might get 'Tendrils' moving out along the less densly packed corridors where it's a bit safer to do so.
There's no reason that's really a barrier to interstellar colonisation, just a time constraint. Interstellar space itself is full of material, comets, asteroids, brown dwarfs, rogue planets, and more, and even if going faster than 10% of light speed is never viable, that's more than fast enough to rapidly colonise other systems by just colonising interstellar space step by step over the course of a few decades. Hell, with life extension technologies, even 1% of light speed is hardly a major hurdle for direct interstellar colonisation. Travel speed restrictions of an order of magnitude or so just isn't significant against the overall Fermi Paradox equation; the universe is old enough that even if colonising a galaxy took millions of years it wouldn't matter.
This issue is solved to some degree in the Interstellar Highways episode, where quick travel happens along corridors of space kept very clean by the laser propulsion stations dotted every light week along a route. If the energy is available, I could imagine spaceships with headlights of one spectrum or another that would be effective and pushing away small particles and gas and maybe even highlighting obstacles at least light hours ahead so they can be avoided or otherwise neutralized.
@@alexv3357 I've always had a problem with the "the universe is old enough" assumption. For all we know life, at least our kind of life, wasn't even possible until the last 4-5 billion years. In which case the entire "paradox" is invalid, it's just what we should expect to see. Add in the filters and even somewhat reasonably rare Earth models, which make sense logically, and it makes even more sense. Furthermore, we're not even sure how likely it is for it to be even possible to get through the bow shock around star systems, most of our radio signals can't be heard even two light years away, we're not creating any significant differences in heat in our system, and that relative to the distances our telescopes aren't great. When our 'scopes can image say... Pluto size planets and evaluate their spectroscopy we'll know more. Until then, I see no reason to assume that there 'should' be galactic scale civilizations.
We are already able to detect and observe them, so an interstellar ship should also be able to detect them and ether simply dodge them or use lasers/particle guns to redirect them by vaporizing a piece of them generating thrust in a desired direction. These will be a non-issue.
Not I. He completely made up the part where the aliens influence our evolution. That's not the hypothesis at all. He is usingreal science to promote fringe unrealistic not science in that video.
FtL that requires you to get there first and set something up (ie some kind of quantum teleportation or artificial wormhole thing) which are the least implausible, would have literally no effect on the maximum expansion speed of the entire species demesne as well
If (for the sake of argument) FTL were achievable, the GCs could be coming right for us, grabbing everything and messing with the stars in spectacular ways but they'll get here before the light signature does. Well, I should wait to watch the whole video before making "smart" comments.
Fast than light travel seem to only have a significant impact on the Fermi paradox if that speed is high or limitless. If FTL is capped at 5 or 10 times faster than light speed, a technological civilization could be speeding towards us from halfway in the observable universe. If they are not significantly older than us, we could still have no idea given we are limited to light speed for observations.
That reminds me of Niven's Known Space setting in which the standard FTL drive travels at 100x lightspeed. It takes about 2 weeks to reach Alpha Centauri and Humanity's 'Known Space' bubble is just 60 lightyears across.
It would also only have any impact if we are either middle or late comers to the intergalactic stage. If the early-bird/firstborn hypothesis for humanity is true, whether or not FTL is possible currently wouldn't matter much to the FP.
Yeah it's possible there's some limiting factor to FTL travel (or even just getting close to light speed). Perhaps the power requirements are just so absurd, like you'd have to haul around a star made of antimatter as your engine just to get to 10 times light speed. Even a K3 civ wouldn't be using ships like that casually, that'd be like your fast response military ships. And since it'd be a whole star-sized engine the 'ship' would be a whole freaking star system and it's big advantage would be just being ten times faster than most other ships. For practical purposes, you'd still be colonizing other galaxies with subliminal travel, even if it is star system sized ships. FTL might be possible, but however you'd make it work, well that technology likely won't fit in the back of a one-person starfighter like an X-wing. I think the most recent power requirement for the Alcubierre drive was like a moon-sized object made of anti-matter as the smallest estimate? Anyway, a cap to FTL would almost certainly be in regards to practicality. Also might work but do side effect shit we have no possible way of predicting, since it is ya know a form of time travel according to our current models. It's a fun question tho, and implementing a cap to FTL is wonderfully useful for writing Hard Sci-fi stories. My own novel implements the classic multiple alien space faring nations all with roughly the same tech level space opera style but explains it away as these are all uplifted species planted in a custom built region of space and left technological 'care packages' from their Precursor benefactors. The main one being FTL drives, but very fine tuned ones that have only go a fixed multiplier above the speed of light. None of the races can out run each other to new systems but travel and contact is still very reasonable between systems. I think that this sort of scenario is plausible in a Grabby Alien civilization, they set aside a single galaxy to be a playground for uplifted creations and just observe what the universe might have been like if they developed with neighbors themselves. At the very least, it'd make a great 'zoo' or even reality tv for some near by Dyson sphere'd up galaxy.
@@Lusa_Iceheart that to could be probable that getting close to light speed is impossible. For all we know nothing with significant mass can go faster than 50% light speed or even less. That would put some dampeners if instead of about 10% nuclear power max out 2% and fusion 6%. I wonder how many technological civilizations would put in the effort if it wasn't absolutely necessary!
@@Entity8473 Exactly, the speeds we'd want might be possible in theory and doable in high-end, experimental vessels, but might be so absurdly costly even vastly powerful Kardashev scale civilizations would find the cost unacceptable to be widespread. Unless it was critical to the civilization, such as maybe military defense or maybe communications between star systems, they'd opt for the slower but more energy efficient speeds. We might be able to eek out an extra percent of light speed, but if that single digit increase doubled out energy input, would we even bother? Or would we just dial our cybernetic brains back enough so we perceive a nice, short week long trip from here to the galactic rim?
I remember requesting you do an episode on this when I first heard about it. I knew Isaac's take would be informative and expansive as usual. Thanks so much
Also hard of hearing and noticed this is happening all over UA-cam, not just here. Back in the day I loved adding subtitles to videos, then YT switched to auto-generated, now it seems they can't even be bothered with that. Thankfully IA's video are mixed and edited to be understood without them for me at least, but it's still frustrating to lose them as an option after they were ubiquitous for so long.
At least with space expansion one doesn't need to take into account for immigration. Or so I currently think. It would be very interesting if I'm wrong on that.
True, but the problem is that if we're talking 10,000 GCs, well there's 10 million superclusters, so even though size would range from less than 1 SC to possibly a hundred thousand or more, the average would be around 1000 SCs each
@@isaacarthurSFIA Might need some extra units of measurement then. Perhaps redefine K4 as a civ occupying something on the scale of the local group of galaxies, and K5 as spanning multiple superclusters.
GC could just be "Grabby Civilization", cut out the 'Alien' part since even their constituent galaxies would be pretty damn alien internally anyway. Alien is relative, and your relatives are aliens.
This won't add anything erudite to the conversation, but I love your regular use of aliens dancin' around, drinking, and otherwise just being funny little guys.
:) No but I obviously agree, I get a kick out of including the funny alien sequences and like ending alien episode on that note. All our Alien Civ episodes are meant to be a little bit tongue in cheek.
Grabby aliens actually implies that 1 of 3 things are true; 1-Grabby aliens exist 2-Smaller mass stars cannot support life 3-The hard steps model of life is wrong Additionally the model actually still works even if we assume we can't see what the grabby aliens are doing, although it vastly increases the predicted density the slower expansion speed is. There is an additional parameter of conditional grabiness (not in the actual paper but something I came up with), where they don't preclude planets developing if they're past a certain development level. This doesn't change the predictions much unless we move the preservation time very far back in time. This allows the zoo hypothesis to be true provided the civilisation is invisible to detection, and the civilisation is grabby provided there is no life in a system.
We can be sure there are no K4s in our light cone (there may be K4s right now in the observable universe but not within the cone). A rate of GC formation of 1:billion giant galaxies in 14 billion year age could be consistent with what is seen. We also can be 90% sure there are no K3s in the local supercluster as most of it's major galaxies are accounted for and studied enough to preclude such anomaly, a K3 would probably look like a galaxy with certain infra-red profile that's tied to distribution of starlight outside of stellar nurseries or a lack of nurseries despite abundant H-I. Single extra-galactic K2 would probably be missed even for Andromeda or Triangulum galaxies though, a sun-like star there has visual magnitude of around 29 and most red dwarfs are undetectable and as a result un-analysable
How does a galactic civilization coordinate across the vast time disparities that are inevitable? I can just barely imagine a species getting out to the stars but each star system seems functionally disconnected from the others in any ongoing sense?
There are good episodes on this topic, its an older video but I'd start with Interstellar Empires. There's several in that series, and some of the videos on economics also talk about this issue.
Coordination is not relevant for the conclusions of the model. It would make the expansion speed faster for sure but that only strengthens the conclusion of the model. Also the model takes inspiration for GC from natural processes we cam observe on earth. Like imagine an invasive species of animals. That species would spread uncoordinated, but they would spread at a constant speed in any direction (assuming the surrounding space does not have any significant obstacles).
I think expansion front speed should generally accelerate. 1. Things tends to optimize over time and there are plenty of areas that could influence the rate of expansion that are susceptible to optimization. 2. Intelligence tends to fine tune itself for what it already does well. This means frontier culture is likely to develop in a cultural evolutionary Lamarckian adaptive process at the expansion front. Also, frontier culture will develop further because of cultural evolutionary Darwinian selective processes. What reproduces reproduces and what doesn't, doesn't. 3. The rate of expansion is likely to increase over time due to the scale law. The expansion front being an area while the civilization inside it is a volume.
I don't disagree Peter, though I suspect there would be no even distribution, with it accelerating very fast early on then slowly creeping toward some specific fraction of c, maybe .99, which I tihnk you would hit by the edge of your first galaxy. I think for modeling purposes though it was way easier to pick that final constant at the supercluster+ scale..
Thats an interesting premise And i guess in some ways actually quite inspiring as well for the future of humanity- The fact that we have evolved as an intelligent species in itself is an indication that short of destroying ourselves in the very near future, we too are destined to claim every one of those stars and galaxies we have gazed upon. That in the evolutionary scale of things of things, the fact that we have made it a million years from fire to rockets, means that we are just as likely, practically guaranteed, to be on track to go from rockets to intergalactic civilization in another million. In a way thats quite inspiring...the fact that we have gotten as far we have, means that statistically we will likely indeed attain that level of civilization. After all it does make sense, the growth of civilzations, especially intelligent civilizations is highly exponential. It took a million years to go from fire to rockets, and it would surmise that if we managed that, we are already well on our oway to becoming an intergalactic civilization in a million years down the road. Which still if you think about, is a tiny fraction of the evolutionary tree even here on earth...most species on earth are older than a million years. So yes, in a way it is rather inspiring, that so long as we dont destroy ourselves, we may be truly destined to reach the stars. Humanity's greatest Great Filter may be indeed behind us. Becuase if you think about it... the greatest barrier of all... is the emergence of intelligence in the first place...for once you have that intelligence, you are then exponentially more capable of overcoming those barriers and of solving those problems on your own agency rather than being at the mercy of random chance or natural selection. Perhaps achieving intelligence itself is the last great barrier to the evolution of Life. For once you have that. The Universe is in a way...in your hands...rarher than the other way around. Even in the present time, humanity has reached a stage where there are very few natural calamities that would render the entirety of the human race completely extinct. With intelligence comes ever greater resilience to extinction, until indeed as mentioned in this model, we become sufficiently widespread enough, accross our cosmic neighboithood, in our own GC that we are essentially past natural extinction. That we do not die. At least not naturally. And to me that is quite an inspiring thought. A worthy goal and vision for humanity to strive for. That for all our trials and sufferings we have been through in our long history, it will not be in vain. We have nearly made it. That the worst is behind us, and that the light at the end of the tunnel is just in sight.
The issue there is they'd get overrun by the cultures that ARE expansionist. Unless we can find a reason that every culture doesn't want to expand or can't expand, we can assume that the aliens we would see would be the ones that did expand.
@@cavemaneca ; Well, if the "Stay at Home" hypothesis is also combined with the "Rare Earth/Intellect/Tech" hypothesis, that would increase the likelihood that most or even all alien cultures forbid expansion. Though, in a non-FTL travel capable universe, while I can see a high likelihood for most and even all spacefaring civilizations forbidding interstellar *colonization* for political, economic, and military purposes; all of them forbidding interstellar *expansion* via low-level automated probes/drones for scientific documentation and resource extraction for things like star-lifting and birch planet construction I am much more skeptical towards in terms of probability.
I have thought of a sensible moral code, where very aggressive aliens would never attack the home world or system of any alien. It makes sense because once an alien is interstellar, every alien knows there will always be someone stronger or smarter. Once you move out of your home, it is a free for all.
@@jsbrads1 ; So basically like how in some PvP games you aren't allowed to fight in the spawn areas. Yeah I could see that, don't know how that could be effectively enforced though.
I think this would come down more to economics. That first colony ship might cost all the resources of a hundred years of work, planet wide, and most countries may just decide its not worth it. If you think about the international space station, it took the space budgets of several countries, and its like 1/1000th the size of a viable interstellar colony ship, and no one knows if such a ship could even make it to its destination. It may be that harvesting solar system resources on a mega scale may be a prerequisite to even be able to build a colony ship, so we could still be 500 years away from even having any viable option in that area.
Interesting that he said bigger stars might have bigger habitable zones but too short a life window due to faster brightening. I wonder if a binary system with smaller stars would get around this problem? Like maybe a medium sun, like star orbited closely be a red dwarf?
Red dwarf stars are unstable, meaning radiation issues. Their habital zone is also going to be tidally locked. Also red shifted photosynthesis is horribly ineffective, and photosynthesis is the only way for life to practically harvest solar energy. Even if it eats meat, it eats an animal that eats plants. So meat eaters still rely upon photosynthesis.
Can you do a video on unconscious intelligence like in the book Blindsight? It’s kind of the idea that life is it’s own on Von Neumann probe. Like the way a seed can blow in the wind and grow far from its parent tree. In theory, consciousness isn’t required for life to colonise the universe. What effect would that have on conscious life expanding into the universe?
I don't see how such intelligence can go to space. Many concepts for space travel require philosophy. It's hard to imagine someone writing Principia Mathematica by instinct. The only way such being can do space travel is if a conscious being developed the tech base for them
@@shlomomarkman6374 read the book? Besides, think about what the chances are of viruses spreading from person to person. In some ways it’s just the sheer number and sheer chance and amount of time and the repeatable processes in place.
@@br3nto I had read it although didn't like the end result. Even then I couldn't believe the creatures on Rosharch were it's builders. They might have been either pets, servitors or degenerate descendents of it's original crew. The environment for my conclusions was a replica of their homeworld environment, like an exo-moon orbitting a gas giant with strong radiation belts or a system that includes a neutron star
@@shlomomarkman6374 I can believe it because after all the mechanisms of biology have created all life on earth. Just lots of small processes working together to create an emergent property of life, and from that life has created complex eco systems that all work together on the whole. I have this personal theory that the universe is only ever going to get more and more complex in its interactions. Biology and life will only get more complex and divers and specialised. There are many things that biology can do that human technology can’t. And sure there are many things that non-human life can’t achieve. Given enough time, maybe biology and ecosystems can evolve to do what we can do but probably in a more biological way. All natural things you see didn’t require philosophy or mathematics or science. This is why I find it interesting to ponder. Is it at all possible? If it is, what would it take? You’re right that there would be no philosophical driver or ambition to get off a planet. It would happen by chance due to random evolution over time. Why would it not be possible for more advanced biological energy systems to develop over time? Randomly, evolved to collect enough energy in one place to have the capability to one day displace the gravitational potential of the earth via mechanisms to release that energy. Maybe it’s simpler than that, maybe trees find a way to become space elevators. The mechanism isn’t going to be rockets. And that’s why I find it interesting. Both the motivation and technology isn’t going to be a human approach. It’d be unique and vastly different and probably considered inefficient and slow by human standards. But maybe it will be vastly superior in different ways. For example, we burn through so much resources to get to space. Maybe life evolves to find an energy efficient way to do it… or in way that supports an entire ecosystem along the way. That ecosystem would be the key, rather than any one thing. The pondering on how it might be possible is what is interesting. We might start with the assumption that it is impossible and through reasoning through the problem come to the conclusion that given enough time and evolution it is entirely possible. And what would that mean for humanity? Would we be a participant? Or would we do what we always do and pillage the resources that maybe took millions or billions of years to build for ourselves because it’s right there for the taking?
The stellar lifetime matters as you expect life to occur stellar lifetime^hard steps, hence the emergence time is either truncated by grabby aliens or requires that habitability falls off rapidly with longer lived stars.
Planets make a natural Zoo size, since it takes a LOT of intelligence and technologies to get off of one, at least if the interstellar Space Whales are not a thing...
@@sprinkle61 ...not if it means somehow filtering out all evidence of a GC from reaching us. Zoo animals are pretty clearly aware that they are in a zoo. Imagine how difficult it would be to keep orangutans in a zoo and letting them think they lived in the wild. I agree it's a silly idea.
Watch some random episodes of the show from at least 3 years ago :) There was a standing joke for a while that I recommended Reynolds at least once a month, so much so that I try to make an effort to think of other scifi authors who have covered certain topics to avoid over-referencing him. I generally prefer to think of the 'trilogy' as Revelation Space, Chasm City, and Redemption Ark, as those 3 to me makeup the informally best trilogy in scifi after Asimov's Foundation - I thought Absolution Gap was good but not great - especially when it comes to big ideas with scientific realism.
Personally I lean toward the idea that the type and speed of the kind of technological development neccessary to develop the sort of space faring, megastructure building civilizations that we could see now requires war as a catalyst to achieve . War itself being the reason such civilizations are so uncommon. I mean, Here WE are right NOW, FINALLY seeing the kind of enthusiastic support and broad public embrace of the realistic goals and technologies needed to GET up there and STAY up there PERMANENTLY. While simultaneously we are closer to a nuclear war - and the self obliteration it could bring - than we have been since the Cuban missile crisis.
Correct but only from the perspective of the capitalist system. A different economic system can have a different conclusion other than war and MAD - Mutually Assured (Nuclear) Destruction.
One complication for the Grabby Aliens theory is the practical difficulty of maintaining political unity over such great distances, even with pretty good FTL travel - they could suffer "expansion shock" as waves of colonization bring more star clusters into the fold of civilization, but the central government would be likely to maintain practical control over them in name only as the centuries pass and cultures diverge. This could cause political and military chaos, depending on their psychology and circumstances, or at least setbacks for a more unified species. Any alien galactic empire running the show may be very real, unaware of us, and may be unwilling to front the resource cost to do much of anything about us even if it was aware, with countless rebellions and brushfire conflicts to put out and other planets with minimal to no resistance to colonize instead. If they are aware of us, they would not be wrong to believe that we are at an alarmingly high risk of blowing ourselves to kingdom come, have massive problems to solve at home, and are therefore no threat to the galaxy as a whole in the timetable they're concerned with.
Imagine the scientific and technological advantages of intelligent life developing on worlds in star systems that naturally have two or more habitable planets. I'm sure somewhere in the universe that has happened or will happen.
This is a pragmatic solution to the Fermi Paradox that seems to make sense but it ignores all the historical evidence spanning the last 5,000 years of possible sightings of strange events in the public domain that only seem to increase with time as we develop technology to detect things. If the galaxy is empty then where are these strange objects from? If they are man made then there is a lot of covering up going on. If they are 'alien objects' then there is a lot of covering up going on.
IS the we can't get off earth episode the one where the sim creators accidentally set the Colonization speed to the speed of sound in space instead of the speed of light?
As a kid I read a book by Charles Lindbergh who was an excellent engineer as well as aviator in which he wrote that exceeding the speed of sound was probably impossible. Who knows, perhaps in the next century or tens of centuries the speed of light may be effectively breached as well.
26:07 I assumed that GC meant "grabby civilizations." I was wrong, but, it seems like an adequate term. And we wouldn't need to 'find & replace' text in older articles to make it work
I just had a (small) lightbulb moment... We see most galaxies as they were millions or billions years ago due to light speed limit.... It doesn't mean those galaxies don't have civilizations in them, it just means we can't see them
The model still works provided we assume that they are noticeable if they do that ,to our telescopes. Even if they're not noticeable the model works provided we assume we would have noticed that we were in a grabby sphere or would not exist if they arrived say 10 million years ago, although the estimates on their density rises dramatically the slower we assume they expand. If we vary the time when they'd declare Earth a nature preserve, from say never a million years ago to 4 billion years ago, the model predicts that they're on the order of a GY away, to having arrived at Earth billions of years ago.(note that the last sentence is just my inference, Hanson didn't vary nature reservation time).
If God said that all this is yours then where's the boundaries of this? That's a question for another time along with what if a very advanced alien had a forgotten myth that they created the Universe? Could their leader be Lucifer and maybe be worse than Hitler expanding, conquering, and imitating God who comes next? Don't be hasty and latch on the first one till you see the second one which may be brighter.
what is the likelihood of an advanced intelligent civilization spreading out in galaxy(s)? does the physical universe lend itself to an expansionist outlook, or is there something in universe that opposes expansion of technological civilization?
There's something about deriving probabilities based on the anthropic principle that seems vaguely disturbing (or perhaps logically flawed). Let's apply the anthropic principle to the perspective of a single human being: I'm a human living in the year 2023, and there are approximately 8 billion other humans alive right now. If humanity is destined to conquer the stars and persist for trillions of years, then the chances of ME existing RIGHT NOW, in these early stages, are extremely low. Being born in say, the Roman Empire or Middle Ages, when less than 1 billion people existed, would be even MORE wildly improbable. Being born in the 21st century is slightly less improbable, but still extremely improbable. So my existence seems very improbable. Why was I not born a trillion years from now, into a population of quadrillions of humans spread out among the stars? Could it be I was born now, in the 21st century, because all humans that will ever exist will exist in an extremely tiny window of time? If all humans are dead by 2300, for example, then there is nothing particularly improbable about me existing NOW, at the peak of civilization when the population is very high. But if humans go on to exist for trillions of years in the future, then me existing right now at this early stage seems absurdly improbable. There might be some deeper logical flaw we make when reasoning about probabilities based on the likelihood of our own existence as observers - there's an implicit assumption that each observer is a discrete entity that "won" a game of chance (where "losing" means not existing) along some non-uniform probability distribution across time. I can't quite verbalize why this seems flawed in some way, but regardless, if we apply the anthropic principle it means that either humanity will be wiped out soon, or being born in the 21st century is absurdly unlikely.
Maybe the reason the physical laws of the universe do not really allow easy interstellar travel is that we are traveling between galaxies and living in a virtual reality to pass the time. But one point I never see discussed is when the "bubble of control" is large enough, what about the population at the center? Discussions always seem to imply it's at the periphery that travel lust takes place and no mention of travel lust of those at the center. Anyway, I suspect human-level intelligence is extremely rare. Yes, there are rather smart species on Earth but their bodies and/or environment don't permit or select for much more advanced intellectual capability. Chimpanzees went their own genetic way at roughly the same time seven million years ago as hominins but have not progressed beyond cracking nuts with rocks. Yes, chimps can learn to use very simple computers but there is an almost unimaginable gulf between cracking nuts and building computers. The notion of interstellar "settlers" via generational ship leaves me cold. You want to sentence generations of off-spring to live in tin cans until that lucky final generation reaches the selected star? I do see explorers traveling star to star to see first-hand what's there...assuming of course life extension and/or suspension during millennium of travel. A more likely future is moving industry off-planet and turning Mars and Venus into more amenable planets. Earth would be turned back into a near perfect world after cleaning up all our industrial wastes. The only time we'd need to contemplate mass travel to another star is when the sun can no longer support life in our solar system.
Mr. Arthur has pointed out in previous videos that it's much easier to build space habitats than to terraform planets, so people who set out for other stars will probably be used to living in such environments. When they arrive at the destination star, they'll just use resources there to build more habs.
Cancer and locusts are perfectly fine, from their own perspectives. That is exactly what life tries to do: instantiate, propagate, survive, dominate. The A, B, C, D of Grabby Aliens reminds me of circle-like bacteria colonies forming, spreading, eventually meeting, on a giant petri dish. Eventually, they use up all the resources, and die in their own offals. Same idea, really.
I read enough Animorphs books as a kid I agree, you do not wait thousands of years to get an email back about what to do about the newly discovered planet with intelligent slugs. You use robotic landers to check if they're the brain parasite variety. If they are, and you're morally opposed to sterilizing the planet, you spend some of the mass of their solar system building a Dyson beam and trillions of killbots to enforce a quarantine. Of course, that response makes a lot of assumptions. Not the least of which is that your civilization is reliant on biological brains.
Very enjoyable videos. I know little of real applied science but it seems to me that we are at the Hellen Keller stage of communication. Hellen Keller was deafblind and had to learn about her surroundings in entirely different ways much like we are limited by our existing communication methods. While there may be civilizations that use tech we can detect, they are likely too far away to detect. We know nothing of life anywhere else but what we do know is that life here either adapts or migrates when the environment becomes untenable. We know that life tends to develop better when there’s a cycle of resource utilization by one species that doesn’t cause neighboring species to go extinct, an equilibrium. We look at the environmental errors we’ve made over time and assume that more advanced aliens either did not learn from their similar errors or used tech to overcome their errors, rather than living in tune with their environment(s). So for example, it is better to design a hurricane proof habitat using resources from surrounding nature than to use tech to stop hurricanes from performing their natural purpose or pollute the environment with tech to protect from hurricanes. Some people call this environmentally conscious lifestyle - leave no trace. Perhaps really advanced aliens use this same logic when populating their corner of the multi-verse. Perhaps advanced aliens migrate from unoccupied place to unoccupied place using some of the resources for a relatively short time before moving on. Perhaps they don’t harvest most of the light from a star depriving the local planets of that light instead harvesting just what they need for their own tech such as a completely incased fusion reactor that has no waste to detect. Perhaps they have nanotech that repairs crop cells and delivers energy directly to crop cells rather than needing photosynthesis. Perhaps they have nanotech that can manipulate atoms so that they don’t even need crops or delivers energy directly to bodily cells rather than food consumption. Perhaps they have transferred consciousness to tech and have little need for all the energy required to maintain an external environment such as we need. On another note, if the speed of light is truly the travel speed limit, then perhaps when a species has overcome all the obstacles to interstellar travel except the travel time needed then they have likely created all the tech they need to survive where they are until their sun begins to die. Is the desire to explore based on something other than finding habitable environments?
I like these videos on grabby aliens, I find the ideas easier to visualize than other youtube videos on the subject. My only question is how can we still say we would be one cohesive civilization expanding through the universe once we get to the point of the distances between stars being more than a human lifespan? Or the distance between Earth and other stars? At half the speed of light, it wouldn't be too long before it was many generations of humans between those that set out and those that colonize the new planet. Just plodding our way between galaxies would require a generation ship on a scale we couldn't even imagine right now. Millions of generations of humans would live and die on the ship before they ever reach the next galaxy to colonize. It's likely at that point they would be as genetically similar to earthlings as we are to our closest chimp relatives. You were talking time scales of billions of years, so the time isn't an issue, it's the fact that they would certainly have long forgotten the planet they came from, so is this idea of grabby aliens simply encountering aliens that in no way resemble the creatures that first expanded from their planet but are still moving out into the galaxy because that's all they know how to do? You can't go a few hours on this planet without hitting another country that identifies very differently from it's neighbors, even though we all share Africa as our common starting point. It would be impossible to run a cohesive civilization and galactic government if communication took thousands of years to get to the new planetary states. And why would we assume all these planets would want to be part of the collective civilization, Alpha Centaurians might want to be independent and start a galactic civil war to break free, then become grabby themselves and kill all the earthlings before colonizing here. Maybe I had a few questions.
It's a maxim of ecology that a single species can become too successful for it's own good. When you take a single, particularly selfish species, that deludes itself that growth economics and nuclear weaponry constitute "progress" well... you already know the rest of that story. Or... you soon will.
I have been telling people for a long time that one sure fire way to end global warming is a nuclear war. So just remember there is a silver lining in all those mushroom clouds.
Keep in mind creatures on other planets also have to gain a knowledge of self and come together to make a society that is then able to control the environment of their own surroundings as we did and decide to look up and out. Alchemy, metallurgy, physics, and consciousness will not be the same as on other planets. We can't build a spaceship in space with the same specs we see on the ground or even our moon. We still have lots to learn. Most missions have complications due to the differences in barometric pressures leaving our atmosphere.
what might a low technological civilization that expands leave behind? maybe there are or were intelligent alien civilizations that made only minimal use of technology, who nevertheless over very long periods of time (hundreds of millions or billions of years) were able to slowly expand in part or all of a galaxy?
I think, GCs could potentionally not live long actually. Assumption 1: Travel between inhabited spaces (Space habitats, planets or solar systems or galaxies. Just changes the magnitude but not the fundamental concept.) takes a long time. Assumption 2: Mutation and Evolution is an universal voncept. Now, within inhabited spaces, ober long periods of time, evolution progresses in different direction, given the random nature of mutations and maybe also different living conditions. If travel would be fast (let's assume near instant), inhabited spaces would always get just slightly updated pathogens (diseases, insects, computer viruses, runaway gray goo, etc) of their neigbours. Like "This ant type is similar to the ant type from a year ago." The local ecosystems could easily adapt to that. But since travel takes time, you'l be facing with centuries of pathogen evolution at once. Lots of pathogens won't even be able to survive in your ecosystem. And out of the remaining ones, your ecosystem might be able to handle lots as well. But sooner or later a completely unpredicted pathogen might be imported to your ecosystem. (Via trade or migration or smuggling or malicious bioweapon infection. Doesn't matter.) That pathogen can either directly affect and kill your population or just disrupt your ecosystem like an invasive species. Wiping out your loud population as result. Now, instead of a rebellion or AI uprising or war takeover or whatever, the "replacing culture" doesn't need to be intelligent or technologically advanced or loud in this concept and therefore could possibly be the cause of the end to a loud and grabby civilization.
If manipulation of the higgs field becomes significantly advanced, it seems improbable that spending enough energy to travel to and colonize other worlds would be preferable to producing the mass where and when we want it. If such a technology as replicators like what we see on Star Trek could exist, theoretically we could build stars wherever we want, given enough time of continually producing hydrogen or whatever element we want to fuel our stars with.
I suspect IF a civilization reaches Kardeshev III or above, they'll give zero craps about any other civilization (from standpoint of 'this is my territory') because they could manipulate the shape/reorganize entire star clusters and its just a hassle of 'taking time'. EVEN if one K1 turned K2 and eventualyl K3 but within the domain of an earlier K3 civilization: at that point diplomacy is probably standard unless the original K3 was planning on using the raw material of the whole galaxy, and even then they'd prob collab tobuild whatever to move the 2nd K3 to a more distant part of galaxy
Correction/Update:
Robin Hanson saw the episode and approves but did have one requested correction [Below]
18:18 [Current] "Note that this is the approach of looking for the most crowded universe that fits the data & model, not the end that says that GCs can’t be even more spread out than that, nor does it imply that Earth isn’t the only place life ever appeared. We may be 1/gajillion, this model is just seeks to say, we are not < 1/quintillion, in terms of stars giving rise to GCs."
****The correction from Robin Hanson: We do actually argue that we have estimate of Earth rareness, not just a lower bound. If Earth was extremely rare, & no other aliens would ever appear near here, then we'd expect to appear trillions of years in the future. Appearing now shows is deadline: aliens will appear soon.
and you cna follow him on twitter at twitter.com/robinhanson
For the Loud aliens model at 8:30 there is an unstated 4th condition of when they arrive in an area they prevent new intelligent life emerging. The model strictly speaking still works even if it is assumed that the civilisation is not visible, or prevents life arising only if it has not reached some interesting threshold of development which encourages preservation. However we only have an estimate of how long it'll take them to get here after we're worth preserving. As we don't know when or even if we're worth preserving to a grabby civilisation, and we don't know their expansion speed , we could be inside a gigalightyear spanning civilisation or they could be a billion light years away.
@@Dan-dy8zp the whole thing does rest on assuming the universe continues to be habitable for many trillions of years yeah
@@Dan-dy8zp Not exactly Hansons model of hard steps implies any volume will produce an intelligent civ proportional to time elapsed^hard steps.
My ideas:
Cosmic Civilization - CC
Universal Civilization - UC
Every time I hear the phrase "grabby aliens" I imagine a species that enjoys the sense of touch a bit too much when you meet them.
Hey! They like to cuddle... 😉
"Handsy" aliens.
The Aliens you don't want to be stuck in an elevator or crowded subway with
An HR nightmare
Oh god, lets hope they look like the Asari from mass effect..
I misread the title to "Crabby" aliens and instantly thought "ohh, there's no aliens because evolution tends to make crabs over and over that never gets into space...
The greatest filter
That's next weeks episode
It's ALL crabs, all the way down! :)
Destroy all humans 2: what makes you think crabs can’t become aliens?
Blisk
@@silent_stalker3687 no doubt that they could, would be a dangerous handshake of we ever meet one
I kinda wanna see some sci-fi where aliens have invaded and then other aliens show up to arrest them and try to repair the damage the invaders caused.... But we're still unable to really communicate with them.... And they basically see us as wildlife that's worth preserving....
There is a Futurama episode where aliens want to acquire human noses, because they think they have sexual enhancing properties, like some people see rhino horns. Although it makes no sense for intelligent aliens to treat other intelligent aliens that way, it is sort of like the concept of good and bad aliens 'cops and robber'-ing each other.
That's a premise I'd read. Only issue is its genuinely implausible any such entities would be unable to communicate with us effectively. Even if its they who have to figure out how because the effort would be too complex for us humans. More like they thought of us as wildlife and so just weren't * interested * in talking.
@@Jevaughn Its not as implausible as you might think because the brains of animals and the way evolution on Earth has driven complex communication in animals physiology effectively involves both frequency tuning and effectively physiological encryption as our brains connect meanings to various sounds in specific combinations(not to mention there are higher order modalities in vocal communication which could be utilized as it appears birds have likely done based on machine learning work. But yeah in the listed scenario it is likely a lack of interest that would best fit logically.
Colony has a plot like that
Wildlife worth preserving … I think that’s reasonable and morally acceptable. 😂
I love the respectful way you approach people's theories. It's refreshing in today's increasingly toxic society.
Idk why people think society is more toxic than it was say like 30 years ago. Their is no real reason to think that other than nostalgia for the past cuz i remember the 90s and the 80s were the worst. I prefer the honesty of the current era. Its messy, confused, and refreshing
@@eminentbishop1325 I agree, and we shouldn’t romanticize a past that we never witnessed nor engaged with. There are pros and cons in every era.
@@eminentbishop1325 it's just effect of information propagation speed most likely.
@@eminentbishop1325 I don't know about the rest of the world, but the US is falling apart at the seams, and it's fueling a culture of bitterness and division. I'm on disability, so I'm near the bottom of the crashing wave of societal collapse. Everyone where I live knows we can't take much more of the constant loss before we're all homeless or dead. People are starting to attack everyone around them in their frustration, rage, and fear. They're preparing for the end of civilization, if in no other way than stocking up on guns and ammo and getting ready to use them. Not that it will do any good.
The past sucked, but at least it wasn't devoid of hope and filled with products and services that are an unsatisfying mockery of what came before. I can't even purchase socks at Walmart without being followed by security guards, and none of the three different brands I bought have enough material to be usable at all. They were blatant ripoffs. The same store offers fake SSDs that just have thumb drives inside which lie about their capacity, silently overwriting your old files. Too bad so many local businesses were destroyed for this.
No kidding, McDonald's doesn't even offer water anymore. It's just not an option, but they charged me for it anyway. Grabbing money is more important than quality and reputation when everyone else's reputation is already in the toilet.
I'm happy for you that you're unable to see how people are changing as things get frighteningly worse. I see the life bleeding out of the world and people becoming toxic with the certainly of their downfall.
Hmm, he didn’t mention the past, though; all he said was that today’s society is increasingly toxic. One could interpret that as an exaltation of the past, but it could just as easily mean that, from his perspective, society has only just begun to become more toxic than it traditionally has been in the past. So, not an exaltation of the past so much as a lamentation of the present, then.
I am glad you're admitting your own biases instead of just letting them be assumed to exist given subject matter.
I love how these titles NEVER exactly mean what I think they mean when I click on them. Its like an additional little surprise everytime I decide to watch an Isaac Arthur video, on top of all the amazing science I learn. Kinda like a kinder surprise, you buy it for the chocolate, but that little toy is also cool (or vice versa, and for a kids POV obviously lol).
I 100% assumed this was going to be either about Aliens who interbreed with humans, or "little Green Men and their kidnapping space saucer".
For real
Factos
This channel is like The History Channel for sci-fi and tech neck beards, lol. Cringey and full of ridiculous impractical ideas.
Technology is not what runs a civilisation; *a government and bureaucracies do* . And the biggest problem to running those on a galactic scale is time dilation. Far too much can go wrong on the other side of the galaxy for you to fix in time, and if you don't; your civilisation crumbles and falls apart.
How do you maintain an economy, an army, even a building project of any kind? Infrastructure? There's just too much of a delay; too much distance and time to cover. You can't make deals and trade under these types of conditions! In fact, these conditions would force (colony) civilisations to become self sufficient and autonomous. And if they are such; how do you join them into an empire? How do you prevent civil war between them and keep them from destroying what has been built? Our empires and economies simply do not work on such a scale; they are planet sized economies.
Thought experiment: let's say there's a bunch of mining planets on the outer rim; say 150 of them. Suppose those 150 planets formed a union, and decided to break away from the galactic empire. Suppose also; that this move would totally wreck the galactic economy; while only benefitting those 150 planets. Lets say it takes years to get there. By the time the governments army arrives to intervene; they are years too late. The economic damage is done.
Your space empire falls apart because trade agreements fail, deliveries of goods (ore) fails. All because you can't travel across light years fast enough. But even suppose you could; it would lead to pure chaos. Imagine getting messaged from the future, and informed that the bank is shutting you down because your business has already failed in their part of the timeline 2 years ahead of yours. Not exactly motivational.
My English professor let me do a research paper on the Fermi paradox. I just wanted to thank you for all your content. It’d be magnitude’s harder to write something without you.
Don't let your English teacher see you using apostrophes in plurals! 😆
@@septegram Do they still care about things like that? It often seems that proofreading is a lost art.
@@jimshockey6789 One would expect an English teacher to care, even if others do not.
@@septegram I would hope that some still do.
Happy ArthursDay!!!
My favorite holiday!
Hey Isaac. Today is my birthday, thanks for this Gift. And before I even press play I wanna say humans are most certainly grabby aliens.
By K4 status it's important to note that each GC would effectively have vastly differing observable universes, assuming no GC would ever be at the edge of the universe. So applying the GAC to their observable universe likely includes many more GC which include us and ours only partially. FTL brings time dilation into play a lot too
It’s reasonable to assume that there is no edge to the universe and that the universe is constantly expanding in all directions at once faster than light. This means from a practical standpoint no civilization will ever be at the “edge” and no civilization ever could be at the “edge.”
I imagine this will be the long term future of the Orion's Arm civilization.
At the point of K4 GC I'd honestly call it post-civilisation since it's impossible to be a single entity at that scale, and becomes an entire "ecosystem" by itself more than a "civilisation"
@@Dan-dy8zp I mean that must be it, they also assumadly come from the same original place, so it's kinda like saying earth is a single "civilization" which it probably actually will be soon, once we get post poverty and destitution
The piece you had a while ago about the apparent 'Phosphorus Problem' would certainly put a severe limit on the commonness of life (at least of any sort we can imagine/model)! But another limit (at least to possible interstellar expansion) could be easily seen/imagined from a piece of research that JMG presented on his channel. He had on an author of a paper that was examining some recent observations of meteors that had unusual properties, based on 'crunching the numbers' from the observations. These objects showed unusually high velocities (noticeably beyond what is expected in our Solar System), which leads to the conclusion that they are almost certainly extra-Solar in origin. While other observations/calculations show that they are are significantly stronger/harder than what we see in our System, even the highest-content iron asteroids, which would bolster the likelihood of that origin being extra-Solar. But using those same observations to examine 'commonness' leads to the conclusion that these hard, very high-velocity objects are *very* common in interstellar space. In fact, based on the numbers he was using, even a modest-sized interstellar ship on a several-parsec long trip would have a *very* high likelihood (approaching certainty) to be 'intercepted' by one or two of these (multi-kilogram) objects! Given the interception velocities, and the size/weight of these *very* hard/tough chunks of 'debris' (as they are posited to be ejecta of supernovae) - building the ships to be able to overcome this danger could be *extremely* difficult for K-1 civilizations to do. It might very well be a difficult/expensive investment even for K-2 societies to manage on a large-scale mass-production basis, as it's possible that the only 'practicable' solution may be to *massively* 'up-armor' the prows of the ships to be able to absorb these multi-kilogram objects with intercept velocities measuring 1000+ kps! (Perhaps *much* higher, if the ship is traveling at a relativistic velocity!)
If the ship were traveling at .7071 of light-speed, the energy-release by a collision would be equal to the conversion of the object's mass into pure energy!
So the two above considerations might very well account for a big portion of the Fermi Paradox!
That's a whole lot of exclamation points. But the concern is valid. I suspect that faster ships might be a bit more rare, with slower (and more heavily armed/armored to deal with interstellar debris like this) ships making up the bulk of actual expansion. You might get 'Tendrils' moving out along the less densly packed corridors where it's a bit safer to do so.
There's no reason that's really a barrier to interstellar colonisation, just a time constraint. Interstellar space itself is full of material, comets, asteroids, brown dwarfs, rogue planets, and more, and even if going faster than 10% of light speed is never viable, that's more than fast enough to rapidly colonise other systems by just colonising interstellar space step by step over the course of a few decades. Hell, with life extension technologies, even 1% of light speed is hardly a major hurdle for direct interstellar colonisation. Travel speed restrictions of an order of magnitude or so just isn't significant against the overall Fermi Paradox equation; the universe is old enough that even if colonising a galaxy took millions of years it wouldn't matter.
This issue is solved to some degree in the Interstellar Highways episode, where quick travel happens along corridors of space kept very clean by the laser propulsion stations dotted every light week along a route. If the energy is available, I could imagine spaceships with headlights of one spectrum or another that would be effective and pushing away small particles and gas and maybe even highlighting obstacles at least light hours ahead so they can be avoided or otherwise neutralized.
@@alexv3357 I've always had a problem with the "the universe is old enough" assumption. For all we know life, at least our kind of life, wasn't even possible until the last 4-5 billion years. In which case the entire "paradox" is invalid, it's just what we should expect to see.
Add in the filters and even somewhat reasonably rare Earth models, which make sense logically, and it makes even more sense. Furthermore, we're not even sure how likely it is for it to be even possible to get through the bow shock around star systems, most of our radio signals can't be heard even two light years away, we're not creating any significant differences in heat in our system, and that relative to the distances our telescopes aren't great. When our 'scopes can image say... Pluto size planets and evaluate their spectroscopy we'll know more. Until then, I see no reason to assume that there 'should' be galactic scale civilizations.
We are already able to detect and observe them, so an interstellar ship should also be able to detect them and ether simply dodge them or use lasers/particle guns to redirect them by vaporizing a piece of them generating thrust in a desired direction. These will be a non-issue.
Ahh that was a great paper. Loved Rational Animation 's take on it too
Thank you so much for mentioning that channel. I had no idea it existed and now am a subscriber.
@@mjk9388 I'm so happy to know you enjoyed it as much as I did. They put a lot of work into it!
Not I. He completely made up the part where the aliens influence our evolution. That's not the hypothesis at all. He is usingreal science to promote fringe unrealistic not science in that video.
FtL that requires you to get there first and set something up (ie some kind of quantum teleportation or artificial wormhole thing) which are the least implausible, would have literally no effect on the maximum expansion speed of the entire species demesne as well
It's great that Issac is uploading this content for sure
If (for the sake of argument) FTL were achievable, the GCs could be coming right for us, grabbing everything and messing with the stars in spectacular ways but they'll get here before the light signature does.
Well, I should wait to watch the whole video before making "smart" comments.
Fast than light travel seem to only have a significant impact on the Fermi paradox if that speed is high or limitless. If FTL is capped at 5 or 10 times faster than light speed, a technological civilization could be speeding towards us from halfway in the observable universe. If they are not significantly older than us, we could still have no idea given we are limited to light speed for observations.
That reminds me of Niven's Known Space setting in which the standard FTL drive travels at 100x lightspeed. It takes about 2 weeks to reach Alpha Centauri and Humanity's 'Known Space' bubble is just 60 lightyears across.
It would also only have any impact if we are either middle or late comers to the intergalactic stage. If the early-bird/firstborn hypothesis for humanity is true, whether or not FTL is possible currently wouldn't matter much to the FP.
Yeah it's possible there's some limiting factor to FTL travel (or even just getting close to light speed). Perhaps the power requirements are just so absurd, like you'd have to haul around a star made of antimatter as your engine just to get to 10 times light speed. Even a K3 civ wouldn't be using ships like that casually, that'd be like your fast response military ships. And since it'd be a whole star-sized engine the 'ship' would be a whole freaking star system and it's big advantage would be just being ten times faster than most other ships. For practical purposes, you'd still be colonizing other galaxies with subliminal travel, even if it is star system sized ships. FTL might be possible, but however you'd make it work, well that technology likely won't fit in the back of a one-person starfighter like an X-wing. I think the most recent power requirement for the Alcubierre drive was like a moon-sized object made of anti-matter as the smallest estimate? Anyway, a cap to FTL would almost certainly be in regards to practicality. Also might work but do side effect shit we have no possible way of predicting, since it is ya know a form of time travel according to our current models. It's a fun question tho, and implementing a cap to FTL is wonderfully useful for writing Hard Sci-fi stories.
My own novel implements the classic multiple alien space faring nations all with roughly the same tech level space opera style but explains it away as these are all uplifted species planted in a custom built region of space and left technological 'care packages' from their Precursor benefactors. The main one being FTL drives, but very fine tuned ones that have only go a fixed multiplier above the speed of light. None of the races can out run each other to new systems but travel and contact is still very reasonable between systems. I think that this sort of scenario is plausible in a Grabby Alien civilization, they set aside a single galaxy to be a playground for uplifted creations and just observe what the universe might have been like if they developed with neighbors themselves. At the very least, it'd make a great 'zoo' or even reality tv for some near by Dyson sphere'd up galaxy.
@@Lusa_Iceheart that to could be probable that getting close to light speed is impossible. For all we know nothing with significant mass can go faster than 50% light speed or even less. That would put some dampeners if instead of about 10% nuclear power max out 2% and fusion 6%. I wonder how many technological civilizations would put in the effort if it wasn't absolutely necessary!
@@Entity8473 Exactly, the speeds we'd want might be possible in theory and doable in high-end, experimental vessels, but might be so absurdly costly even vastly powerful Kardashev scale civilizations would find the cost unacceptable to be widespread. Unless it was critical to the civilization, such as maybe military defense or maybe communications between star systems, they'd opt for the slower but more energy efficient speeds. We might be able to eek out an extra percent of light speed, but if that single digit increase doubled out energy input, would we even bother? Or would we just dial our cybernetic brains back enough so we perceive a nice, short week long trip from here to the galactic rim?
I remember requesting you do an episode on this when I first heard about it. I knew Isaac's take would be informative and expansive as usual. Thanks so much
Wielkie dzięki za wspaniały materiał. Oglądam z zapartym tchem.
O, widzę że Polacy też tu są. xD
@@dariuszgaat5771 Pozdrawiam serdecznie
@@jarosawkalemba2178 Wzajemnie. Śledzę ten kanał już od dobrych 4 lat.
Grabby Aliens? I’ve seen enough Hentai to know where this is going.
☠️☠️☠️😳
Oh no alien-chan!
Human-chan: Na Nani?
Alien-kun: is time for tentacle.
@@jamesamos6565 I just can’t believe people like us are the ones watching this kind of magnificent educational content ☠️☠️☠️
The perfect episode to listen to while playing Terra Invicta :D
Why no subtitles? I've got hearing problems and subtitles are becoming more and more important.
Also hard of hearing and noticed this is happening all over UA-cam, not just here. Back in the day I loved adding subtitles to videos, then YT switched to auto-generated, now it seems they can't even be bothered with that. Thankfully IA's video are mixed and edited to be understood without them for me at least, but it's still frustrating to lose them as an option after they were ubiquitous for so long.
Thomas Jefferson expected it to take 100 generations to fill the Louisiana Purchase.
Predicting expansion is hard.
At least with space expansion one doesn't need to take into account for immigration. Or so I currently think. It would be very interesting if I'm wrong on that.
Great topic, Isaac! Another home run.
Thanks Michael :)
People in Worldanvil certainly mention Isaac Arthur pretty often. Is nice to see Isaac Arthur channel doing the same.
I'll have to google that Foamy Paradox you keep on mentioning...
Must be a bubbly concept!
Could always just call a K4 civilization a Supercluster Civilization, or SC for short. :)
True, but the problem is that if we're talking 10,000 GCs, well there's 10 million superclusters, so even though size would range from less than 1 SC to possibly a hundred thousand or more, the average would be around 1000 SCs each
@@isaacarthurSFIA Might need some extra units of measurement then. Perhaps redefine K4 as a civ occupying something on the scale of the local group of galaxies, and K5 as spanning multiple superclusters.
GC could just be "Grabby Civilization", cut out the 'Alien' part since even their constituent galaxies would be pretty damn alien internally anyway. Alien is relative, and your relatives are aliens.
This won't add anything erudite to the conversation, but I love your regular use of aliens dancin' around, drinking, and otherwise just being funny little guys.
:) No but I obviously agree, I get a kick out of including the funny alien sequences and like ending alien episode on that note. All our Alien Civ episodes are meant to be a little bit tongue in cheek.
@@isaacarthurSFIA it hits, man. Cracks me up every time.
Rational Animations has a good video on grabby aliens!
Grabby aliens actually implies that 1 of 3 things are true;
1-Grabby aliens exist
2-Smaller mass stars cannot support life
3-The hard steps model of life is wrong
Additionally the model actually still works even if we assume we can't see what the grabby aliens are doing, although it vastly increases the predicted density the slower expansion speed is. There is an additional parameter of conditional grabiness (not in the actual paper but something I came up with), where they don't preclude planets developing if they're past a certain development level. This doesn't change the predictions much unless we move the preservation time very far back in time. This allows the zoo hypothesis to be true provided the civilisation is invisible to detection, and the civilisation is grabby provided there is no life in a system.
Looking forward tot the Blabby, Crabby, Dabby. Flabby, Jabby, and Tabby alien episodes.
Tabby’s star was done
@@cosmictreason2242 I was referring to a Browser Tab apocalypses....
We can be sure there are no K4s in our light cone (there may be K4s right now in the observable universe but not within the cone). A rate of GC formation of 1:billion giant galaxies in 14 billion year age could be consistent with what is seen. We also can be 90% sure there are no K3s in the local supercluster as most of it's major galaxies are accounted for and studied enough to preclude such anomaly, a K3 would probably look like a galaxy with certain infra-red profile that's tied to distribution of starlight outside of stellar nurseries or a lack of nurseries despite abundant H-I. Single extra-galactic K2 would probably be missed even for Andromeda or Triangulum galaxies though, a sun-like star there has visual magnitude of around 29 and most red dwarfs are undetectable and as a result un-analysable
How does a galactic civilization coordinate across the vast time disparities that are inevitable? I can just barely imagine a species getting out to the stars but each star system seems functionally disconnected from the others in any ongoing sense?
There are good episodes on this topic, its an older video but I'd start with Interstellar Empires.
There's several in that series, and some of the videos on economics also talk about this issue.
That's the neat part, they don't!
@@DaysDX ok
@@DaysDX what makes them a civilization then? more a collection of local civilizations drifting away from each other, right?
Coordination is not relevant for the conclusions of the model. It would make the expansion speed faster for sure but that only strengthens the conclusion of the model. Also the model takes inspiration for GC from natural processes we cam observe on earth. Like imagine an invasive species of animals. That species would spread uncoordinated, but they would spread at a constant speed in any direction (assuming the surrounding space does not have any significant obstacles).
9 AM upload, and being that I'm a 3rd shifter, bet. Favorite series I think of the channel
Really dig your content, thank you for sharing if you happen to see this - thanks again.
I think expansion front speed should generally accelerate.
1. Things tends to optimize over time and there are plenty of areas that could influence the rate of expansion that are susceptible to optimization.
2. Intelligence tends to fine tune itself for what it already does well. This means frontier culture is likely to develop in a cultural evolutionary Lamarckian adaptive process at the expansion front. Also, frontier culture will develop further because of cultural evolutionary Darwinian selective processes. What reproduces reproduces and what doesn't, doesn't.
3. The rate of expansion is likely to increase over time due to the scale law.
The expansion front being an area while the civilization inside it is a volume.
I don't disagree Peter, though I suspect there would be no even distribution, with it accelerating very fast early on then slowly creeping toward some specific fraction of c, maybe .99, which I tihnk you would hit by the edge of your first galaxy. I think for modeling purposes though it was way easier to pick that final constant at the supercluster+ scale..
Thats an interesting premise
And i guess in some ways actually quite inspiring as well for the future of humanity-
The fact that we have evolved as an intelligent species in itself is an indication that short of destroying ourselves in the very near future, we too are destined to claim every one of those stars and galaxies we have gazed upon.
That in the evolutionary scale of things of things, the fact that we have made it a million years from fire to rockets, means that we are just as likely, practically guaranteed, to be on track to go from rockets to intergalactic civilization in another million.
In a way thats quite inspiring...the fact that we have gotten as far we have, means that statistically we will likely indeed attain that level of civilization.
After all it does make sense, the growth of civilzations, especially intelligent civilizations is highly exponential. It took a million years to go from fire to rockets, and it would surmise that if we managed that, we are already well on our oway to becoming an intergalactic civilization in a million years down the road.
Which still if you think about, is a tiny fraction of the evolutionary tree even here on earth...most species on earth are older than a million years.
So yes, in a way it is rather inspiring, that so long as we dont destroy ourselves, we may be truly destined to reach the stars.
Humanity's greatest Great Filter may be indeed behind us.
Becuase if you think about it...
the greatest barrier of all... is the emergence of intelligence in the first place...for once you have that intelligence, you are then exponentially more capable of overcoming those barriers and of solving those problems on your own agency rather than being at the mercy of random chance or natural selection.
Perhaps achieving intelligence itself is the last great barrier to the evolution of Life. For once you have that. The Universe is in a way...in your hands...rarher than the other way around.
Even in the present time, humanity has reached a stage where there are very few natural calamities that would render the entirety of the human race completely extinct.
With intelligence comes ever greater resilience to extinction, until indeed as mentioned in this model, we become sufficiently widespread enough, accross our cosmic neighboithood, in our own GC that we are essentially past natural extinction. That we do not die. At least not naturally.
And to me that is quite an inspiring thought.
A worthy goal and vision for humanity to strive for.
That for all our trials and sufferings we have been through in our long history, it will not be in vain. We have nearly made it. That the worst is behind us, and that the light at the end of the tunnel is just in sight.
18:40 That picture just blows my mind. Space is so big, my mind can't comprehend it.
I`m obsessed with your channel sir, thank you for the content.✌
Thank you for watching :)
Another informative video as always Isaac.
I always wonder if most alien cultures forbids expanding beyond their own star system.
The issue there is they'd get overrun by the cultures that ARE expansionist. Unless we can find a reason that every culture doesn't want to expand or can't expand, we can assume that the aliens we would see would be the ones that did expand.
@@cavemaneca ; Well, if the "Stay at Home" hypothesis is also combined with the "Rare Earth/Intellect/Tech" hypothesis, that would increase the likelihood that most or even all alien cultures forbid expansion.
Though, in a non-FTL travel capable universe, while I can see a high likelihood for most and even all spacefaring civilizations forbidding interstellar *colonization* for political, economic, and military purposes; all of them forbidding interstellar *expansion* via low-level automated probes/drones for scientific documentation and resource extraction for things like star-lifting and birch planet construction I am much more skeptical towards in terms of probability.
I have thought of a sensible moral code, where very aggressive aliens would never attack the home world or system of any alien. It makes sense because once an alien is interstellar, every alien knows there will always be someone stronger or smarter.
Once you move out of your home, it is a free for all.
@@jsbrads1 ; So basically like how in some PvP games you aren't allowed to fight in the spawn areas.
Yeah I could see that, don't know how that could be effectively enforced though.
I think this would come down more to economics. That first colony ship might cost all the resources of a hundred years of work, planet wide, and most countries may just decide its not worth it. If you think about the international space station, it took the space budgets of several countries, and its like 1/1000th the size of a viable interstellar colony ship, and no one knows if such a ship could even make it to its destination. It may be that harvesting solar system resources on a mega scale may be a prerequisite to even be able to build a colony ship, so we could still be 500 years away from even having any viable option in that area.
Interesting that he said bigger stars might have bigger habitable zones but too short a life window due to faster brightening. I wonder if a binary system with smaller stars would get around this problem? Like maybe a medium sun, like star orbited closely be a red dwarf?
Red dwarf stars are unstable, meaning radiation issues. Their habital zone is also going to be tidally locked.
Also red shifted photosynthesis is horribly ineffective, and photosynthesis is the only way for life to practically harvest solar energy. Even if it eats meat, it eats an animal that eats plants. So meat eaters still rely upon photosynthesis.
Can you do a video on unconscious intelligence like in the book Blindsight? It’s kind of the idea that life is it’s own on Von Neumann probe. Like the way a seed can blow in the wind and grow far from its parent tree. In theory, consciousness isn’t required for life to colonise the universe. What effect would that have on conscious life expanding into the universe?
I don't see how such intelligence can go to space. Many concepts for space travel require philosophy. It's hard to imagine someone writing Principia Mathematica by instinct. The only way such being can do space travel is if a conscious being developed the tech base for them
@@shlomomarkman6374 read the book? Besides, think about what the chances are of viruses spreading from person to person. In some ways it’s just the sheer number and sheer chance and amount of time and the repeatable processes in place.
@@br3nto I had read it although didn't like the end result. Even then I couldn't believe the creatures on Rosharch were it's builders. They might have been either pets, servitors or degenerate descendents of it's original crew. The environment for my conclusions was a replica of their homeworld environment, like an exo-moon orbitting a gas giant with strong radiation belts or a system that includes a neutron star
@@shlomomarkman6374 I can believe it because after all the mechanisms of biology have created all life on earth. Just lots of small processes working together to create an emergent property of life, and from that life has created complex eco systems that all work together on the whole. I have this personal theory that the universe is only ever going to get more and more complex in its interactions. Biology and life will only get more complex and divers and specialised. There are many things that biology can do that human technology can’t. And sure there are many things that non-human life can’t achieve. Given enough time, maybe biology and ecosystems can evolve to do what we can do but probably in a more biological way. All natural things you see didn’t require philosophy or mathematics or science. This is why I find it interesting to ponder. Is it at all possible? If it is, what would it take? You’re right that there would be no philosophical driver or ambition to get off a planet. It would happen by chance due to random evolution over time. Why would it not be possible for more advanced biological energy systems to develop over time? Randomly, evolved to collect enough energy in one place to have the capability to one day displace the gravitational potential of the earth via mechanisms to release that energy. Maybe it’s simpler than that, maybe trees find a way to become space elevators. The mechanism isn’t going to be rockets. And that’s why I find it interesting. Both the motivation and technology isn’t going to be a human approach. It’d be unique and vastly different and probably considered inefficient and slow by human standards. But maybe it will be vastly superior in different ways. For example, we burn through so much resources to get to space. Maybe life evolves to find an energy efficient way to do it… or in way that supports an entire ecosystem along the way. That ecosystem would be the key, rather than any one thing. The pondering on how it might be possible is what is interesting. We might start with the assumption that it is impossible and through reasoning through the problem come to the conclusion that given enough time and evolution it is entirely possible. And what would that mean for humanity? Would we be a participant? Or would we do what we always do and pillage the resources that maybe took millions or billions of years to build for ourselves because it’s right there for the taking?
The stellar lifetime matters as you expect life to occur stellar lifetime^hard steps, hence the emergence time is either truncated by grabby aliens or requires that habitability falls off rapidly with longer lived stars.
Personally, I always hated the Zoo Hypothesis. It's such an unlikely contrivance. What percentage on earth life lives in zoos?
Planets make a natural Zoo size, since it takes a LOT of intelligence and technologies to get off of one, at least if the interstellar Space Whales are not a thing...
@@sprinkle61 ...not if it means somehow filtering out all evidence of a GC from reaching us. Zoo animals are pretty clearly aware that they are in a zoo. Imagine how difficult it would be to keep orangutans in a zoo and letting them think they lived in the wild.
I agree it's a silly idea.
Its not a literal zoo, its the concept of an isolated ecosystem.
An island surrounded by ocean, a planet in the vast emptiness of space...
I can't help but picture a little dog holding a cup of tea with its toes when I hear the phrase 'grabby aliens'.
Brilliant work!
Megastructures idea - mechanical stars
I'm in. Let's take over the knowable universe!
Would love to hear your take on Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitor Trilogy sometime.
Watch some random episodes of the show from at least 3 years ago :) There was a standing joke for a while that I recommended Reynolds at least once a month, so much so that I try to make an effort to think of other scifi authors who have covered certain topics to avoid over-referencing him. I generally prefer to think of the 'trilogy' as Revelation Space, Chasm City, and Redemption Ark, as those 3 to me makeup the informally best trilogy in scifi after Asimov's Foundation - I thought Absolution Gap was good but not great - especially when it comes to big ideas with scientific realism.
Personally I lean toward the idea that the type and speed of the kind of technological development neccessary to develop the sort of space faring, megastructure building civilizations that we could see now requires war as a catalyst to achieve . War itself being the reason such civilizations are so uncommon. I mean, Here WE are right NOW, FINALLY seeing the kind of enthusiastic support and broad public embrace of the realistic goals and technologies needed to GET up there and STAY up there PERMANENTLY.
While simultaneously we are closer to a nuclear war - and the self obliteration it could bring - than we have been since the Cuban missile crisis.
Correct but only from the perspective of the capitalist system. A different economic system can have a different conclusion other than war and MAD - Mutually Assured (Nuclear) Destruction.
One complication for the Grabby Aliens theory is the practical difficulty of maintaining political unity over such great distances, even with pretty good FTL travel - they could suffer "expansion shock" as waves of colonization bring more star clusters into the fold of civilization, but the central government would be likely to maintain practical control over them in name only as the centuries pass and cultures diverge. This could cause political and military chaos, depending on their psychology and circumstances, or at least setbacks for a more unified species. Any alien galactic empire running the show may be very real, unaware of us, and may be unwilling to front the resource cost to do much of anything about us even if it was aware, with countless rebellions and brushfire conflicts to put out and other planets with minimal to no resistance to colonize instead. If they are aware of us, they would not be wrong to believe that we are at an alarmingly high risk of blowing ourselves to kingdom come, have massive problems to solve at home, and are therefore no threat to the galaxy as a whole in the timetable they're concerned with.
Imagine the scientific and technological advantages of intelligent life developing on worlds in star systems that naturally have two or more habitable planets. I'm sure somewhere in the universe that has happened or will happen.
This is a pragmatic solution to the Fermi Paradox that seems to make sense but it ignores all the historical evidence spanning the last 5,000 years of possible sightings of strange events in the public domain that only seem to increase with time as we develop technology to detect things. If the galaxy is empty then where are these strange objects from? If they are man made then there is a lot of covering up going on. If they are 'alien objects' then there is a lot of covering up going on.
Reminded me of Rule of Acquisition #45: expand or die
I hope this future is attainable. I hope they cure aging in the next few decades so I can live long enough to see it.
Great video, love your channel. I pretty much watch it daily.
IS the we can't get off earth episode the one where the sim creators accidentally set the Colonization speed to the speed of sound in space instead of the speed of light?
As a kid I read a book by Charles Lindbergh who was an excellent engineer as well as aviator in which he wrote that exceeding the speed of sound was probably impossible. Who knows, perhaps in the next century or tens of centuries the speed of light may be effectively breached as well.
26:07 I assumed that GC meant "grabby civilizations." I was wrong, but, it seems like an adequate term. And we wouldn't need to 'find & replace' text in older articles to make it work
Love your videos!!
We *are* the Grabby Aliens. Hi SFIA, Love the episode. Excellent as always (cookie monster gif)
I just had a (small) lightbulb moment...
We see most galaxies as they were millions or billions years ago due to light speed limit.... It doesn't mean those galaxies don't have civilizations in them, it just means we can't see them
Yup, can't see them in the now, temporal solution. Andromeda Galaxy observers would see no humans on earth for another 2million years
Here it is! Been waiting for this one 😁
Are Dyson swarms, or spheres practical if they have highly efficient clean nuclear fusion reactors?
The model still works provided we assume that they are noticeable if they do that ,to our telescopes. Even if they're not noticeable the model works provided we assume we would have noticed that we were in a grabby sphere or would not exist if they arrived say 10 million years ago, although the estimates on their density rises dramatically the slower we assume they expand. If we vary the time when they'd declare Earth a nature preserve, from say never a million years ago to 4 billion years ago, the model predicts that they're on the order of a GY away, to having arrived at Earth billions of years ago.(note that the last sentence is just my inference, Hanson didn't vary nature reservation time).
I like the 'Grabby Aliens' sounds like our species...👍👍
just posting here to help engagement happy anniversary!
Great video watched on nebular
If God said that all this is yours then where's the boundaries of this? That's a question for another time along with what if a very advanced alien had a forgotten myth that they created the Universe? Could their leader be Lucifer and maybe be worse than Hitler expanding, conquering, and imitating God who comes next? Don't be hasty and latch on the first one till you see the second one which may be brighter.
These videos are like a home schooled university, keep it up!
This episode should have been sponsored by Stellaris.
what is the likelihood of an advanced intelligent civilization spreading out in galaxy(s)? does the physical universe lend itself to an expansionist outlook, or is there something in universe that opposes expansion of technological civilization?
Excellent work, thanks Issac!
Being chased by uplifted chimps is now one of my fears.
I am happy to learn that Oct 20th happens on Arthursday this year, because that's my birthday. :)
Don't forget to add Even Horizont into the list for warp travelling... 😏😈
Mr Arthur have you read Jupiter by Ben Bova? When you said whales in gas Giants it reminds me of the Leviathan in that story.
There's something about deriving probabilities based on the anthropic principle that seems vaguely disturbing (or perhaps logically flawed). Let's apply the anthropic principle to the perspective of a single human being: I'm a human living in the year 2023, and there are approximately 8 billion other humans alive right now. If humanity is destined to conquer the stars and persist for trillions of years, then the chances of ME existing RIGHT NOW, in these early stages, are extremely low. Being born in say, the Roman Empire or Middle Ages, when less than 1 billion people existed, would be even MORE wildly improbable. Being born in the 21st century is slightly less improbable, but still extremely improbable. So my existence seems very improbable. Why was I not born a trillion years from now, into a population of quadrillions of humans spread out among the stars? Could it be I was born now, in the 21st century, because all humans that will ever exist will exist in an extremely tiny window of time? If all humans are dead by 2300, for example, then there is nothing particularly improbable about me existing NOW, at the peak of civilization when the population is very high. But if humans go on to exist for trillions of years in the future, then me existing right now at this early stage seems absurdly improbable.
There might be some deeper logical flaw we make when reasoning about probabilities based on the likelihood of our own existence as observers - there's an implicit assumption that each observer is a discrete entity that "won" a game of chance (where "losing" means not existing) along some non-uniform probability distribution across time. I can't quite verbalize why this seems flawed in some way, but regardless, if we apply the anthropic principle it means that either humanity will be wiped out soon, or being born in the 21st century is absurdly unlikely.
Ye, nice thinking so GC is technologicly stuck once its start to grow in size? Why its not stuck before?
Next episode should be about Crabby Aliens that just want to be left alone.
Maybe the reason the physical laws of the universe do not really allow easy interstellar travel is that we are traveling between galaxies and living in a virtual reality to pass the time.
But one point I never see discussed is when the "bubble of control" is large enough, what about the population at the center? Discussions always seem to imply it's at the periphery that travel lust takes place and no mention of travel lust of those at the center.
Anyway, I suspect human-level intelligence is extremely rare. Yes, there are rather smart species on Earth but their bodies and/or environment don't permit or select for much more advanced intellectual capability. Chimpanzees went their own genetic way at roughly the same time seven million years ago as hominins but have not progressed beyond cracking nuts with rocks. Yes, chimps can learn to use very simple computers but there is an almost unimaginable gulf between cracking nuts and building computers.
The notion of interstellar "settlers" via generational ship leaves me cold. You want to sentence generations of off-spring to live in tin cans until that lucky final generation reaches the selected star? I do see explorers traveling star to star to see first-hand what's there...assuming of course life extension and/or suspension during millennium of travel.
A more likely future is moving industry off-planet and turning Mars and Venus into more amenable planets. Earth would be turned back into a near perfect world after cleaning up all our industrial wastes. The only time we'd need to contemplate mass travel to another star is when the sun can no longer support life in our solar system.
Mr. Arthur has pointed out in previous videos that it's much easier to build space habitats than to terraform planets, so people who set out for other stars will probably be used to living in such environments. When they arrive at the destination star, they'll just use resources there to build more habs.
I think in the grand scheme of things, if we blow ourselves up today, our "loudess" was so brief as to be a blip.
given rate it takes to develop interstellar travel, what is the likely extent of an advanced intelligent / grabby alien civilization?
Cancer and locusts are perfectly fine, from their own perspectives. That is exactly what life tries to do: instantiate, propagate, survive, dominate. The A, B, C, D of Grabby Aliens reminds me of circle-like bacteria colonies forming, spreading, eventually meeting, on a giant petri dish. Eventually, they use up all the resources, and die in their own offals. Same idea, really.
Happy Arthursday everyone
Grabby like groppy or grabby like "grab 'em" like you're ordering an underlying to kidnap someone
man id KILL for a "universe sized valium"
I read enough Animorphs books as a kid I agree, you do not wait thousands of years to get an email back about what to do about the newly discovered planet with intelligent slugs. You use robotic landers to check if they're the brain parasite variety. If they are, and you're morally opposed to sterilizing the planet, you spend some of the mass of their solar system building a Dyson beam and trillions of killbots to enforce a quarantine.
Of course, that response makes a lot of assumptions. Not the least of which is that your civilization is reliant on biological brains.
HUMANS. CRUDE. PRIMITIVE. BUT CAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING.
Very enjoyable videos. I know little of real applied science but it seems to me that we are at the Hellen Keller stage of communication. Hellen Keller was deafblind and had to learn about her surroundings in entirely different ways much like we are limited by our existing communication methods. While there may be civilizations that use tech we can detect, they are likely too far away to detect. We know nothing of life anywhere else but what we do know is that life here either adapts or migrates when the environment becomes untenable. We know that life tends to develop better when there’s a cycle of resource utilization by one species that doesn’t cause neighboring species to go extinct, an equilibrium. We look at the environmental errors we’ve made over time and assume that more advanced aliens either did not learn from their similar errors or used tech to overcome their errors, rather than living in tune with their environment(s). So for example, it is better to design a hurricane proof habitat using resources from surrounding nature than to use tech to stop hurricanes from performing their natural purpose or pollute the environment with tech to protect from hurricanes. Some people call this environmentally conscious lifestyle - leave no trace. Perhaps really advanced aliens use this same logic when populating their corner of the multi-verse. Perhaps advanced aliens migrate from unoccupied place to unoccupied place using some of the resources for a relatively short time before moving on. Perhaps they don’t harvest most of the light from a star depriving the local planets of that light instead harvesting just what they need for their own tech such as a completely incased fusion reactor that has no waste to detect. Perhaps they have nanotech that repairs crop cells and delivers energy directly to crop cells rather than needing photosynthesis. Perhaps they have nanotech that can manipulate atoms so that they don’t even need crops or delivers energy directly to bodily cells rather than food consumption. Perhaps they have transferred consciousness to tech and have little need for all the energy required to maintain an external environment such as we need. On another note, if the speed of light is truly the travel speed limit, then perhaps when a species has overcome all the obstacles to interstellar travel except the travel time needed then they have likely created all the tech they need to survive where they are until their sun begins to die. Is the desire to explore based on something other than finding habitable environments?
I like these videos on grabby aliens, I find the ideas easier to visualize than other youtube videos on the subject. My only question is how can we still say we would be one cohesive civilization expanding through the universe once we get to the point of the distances between stars being more than a human lifespan? Or the distance between Earth and other stars? At half the speed of light, it wouldn't be too long before it was many generations of humans between those that set out and those that colonize the new planet. Just plodding our way between galaxies would require a generation ship on a scale we couldn't even imagine right now. Millions of generations of humans would live and die on the ship before they ever reach the next galaxy to colonize. It's likely at that point they would be as genetically similar to earthlings as we are to our closest chimp relatives.
You were talking time scales of billions of years, so the time isn't an issue, it's the fact that they would certainly have long forgotten the planet they came from, so is this idea of grabby aliens simply encountering aliens that in no way resemble the creatures that first expanded from their planet but are still moving out into the galaxy because that's all they know how to do? You can't go a few hours on this planet without hitting another country that identifies very differently from it's neighbors, even though we all share Africa as our common starting point. It would be impossible to run a cohesive civilization and galactic government if communication took thousands of years to get to the new planetary states. And why would we assume all these planets would want to be part of the collective civilization, Alpha Centaurians might want to be independent and start a galactic civil war to break free, then become grabby themselves and kill all the earthlings before colonizing here.
Maybe I had a few questions.
Sounds like aliens that enjoy "grope" hugs.
It's a maxim of ecology that a single species can become too successful for it's own good. When you take a single, particularly selfish species, that deludes itself that growth economics and nuclear weaponry constitute "progress" well... you already know the rest of that story. Or... you soon will.
I have been telling people for a long time that one sure fire way to end global warming is a nuclear war. So just remember there is a silver lining in all those mushroom clouds.
Since we going into Oktober, we need an episode about sentient green mushrooms aliens
Keep in mind creatures on other planets also have to gain a knowledge of self and come together to make a society that is then able to control the environment of their own surroundings as we did and decide to look up and out. Alchemy, metallurgy, physics, and consciousness will not be the same as on other planets. We can't build a spaceship in space with the same specs we see on the ground or even our moon. We still have lots to learn. Most missions have complications due to the differences in barometric pressures leaving our atmosphere.
what might a low technological civilization that expands leave behind? maybe there are or were intelligent alien civilizations that made only minimal use of technology, who nevertheless over very long periods of time (hundreds of millions or billions of years) were able to slowly expand in part or all of a galaxy?
I think, GCs could potentionally not live long actually.
Assumption 1: Travel between inhabited spaces (Space habitats, planets or solar systems or galaxies. Just changes the magnitude but not the fundamental concept.) takes a long time.
Assumption 2: Mutation and Evolution is an universal voncept.
Now, within inhabited spaces, ober long periods of time, evolution progresses in different direction, given the random nature of mutations and maybe also different living conditions.
If travel would be fast (let's assume near instant), inhabited spaces would always get just slightly updated pathogens (diseases, insects, computer viruses, runaway gray goo, etc) of their neigbours. Like "This ant type is similar to the ant type from a year ago." The local ecosystems could easily adapt to that.
But since travel takes time, you'l be facing with centuries of pathogen evolution at once. Lots of pathogens won't even be able to survive in your ecosystem. And out of the remaining ones, your ecosystem might be able to handle lots as well. But sooner or later a completely unpredicted pathogen might be imported to your ecosystem. (Via trade or migration or smuggling or malicious bioweapon infection. Doesn't matter.) That pathogen can either directly affect and kill your population or just disrupt your ecosystem like an invasive species. Wiping out your loud population as result.
Now, instead of a rebellion or AI uprising or war takeover or whatever, the "replacing culture" doesn't need to be intelligent or technologically advanced or loud in this concept and therefore could possibly be the cause of the end to a loud and grabby civilization.
Awesome channel as always say🌍❤
If manipulation of the higgs field becomes significantly advanced, it seems improbable that spending enough energy to travel to and colonize other worlds would be preferable to producing the mass where and when we want it.
If such a technology as replicators like what we see on Star Trek could exist, theoretically we could build stars wherever we want, given enough time of continually producing hydrogen or whatever element we want to fuel our stars with.
I suspect IF a civilization reaches Kardeshev III or above, they'll give zero craps about any other civilization (from standpoint of 'this is my territory') because they could manipulate the shape/reorganize entire star clusters and its just a hassle of 'taking time'.
EVEN if one K1 turned K2 and eventualyl K3 but within the domain of an earlier K3 civilization: at that point diplomacy is probably standard unless the original K3 was planning on using the raw material of the whole galaxy, and even then they'd prob collab tobuild whatever to move the 2nd K3 to a more distant part of galaxy