Thanks for watching and thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video. Download unlimited stock media at one set price with Storyblocks at storyblocks.com/CoolWorlds Let me know what you think about the Grabby Aliens video down below. A question I see some of you asking is about the self-sampling issue. It's important to remember that it's a probabilistic statement and certainly doesn't guarantee validity. If I claim I'm in the middle 90th percentile of all humans who ever lived, I can only do so to 90% confidence - which means 10% of the time I am wrong. A much more subtle issue is about which beings qualify as human to begin with, does homo erectus count? Does an advanced cyborg count? These are difficult questions and perhaps deserve their own video in the future. UPDATE Sep 1st: Robin Hanson has posted a response to this video on his blog, please do check it out: www.overcomingbias.com/p/kipping-on-grabby-aliens
@CoolWorldsLab Could a form of life that isn't based on chemistry using an atmosphere evolve on a planet like Mercury? Given enough time and the huge number of worlds close to their high radiation stars, you would think something would evolve that uses that radiation that would kill us as its food source. Could the solution be that the vast majority of aliens live on worlds that are so different from ours that they consider ours as a frozen, barren wasteland? I know, I have no evidence to support this wild conjecture. Yet, it seems plausible to me.
You mention that some planets could remain viable for the development of life for trillions of years, and while that may be true if you only look at the star, I think you may be neglecting the planet itself. I'm a bit rusty on the details, but water and carbon are cycled tectonically. and vulcanism is constantly releasing gas including nitrogen which offsets atmosphere erosion(memory is fuzzy on if this is meaningful for earth or not, but over a trillion years bleed will add up); iirc the earth only has about a billion years left before plate tectonics shuts down and meaningful vulcanism will peter out some time after that; even with an orange sun, or a red dwarf that skips the turbulent planet-atmosphere-stripping phase, life is on the clock if it's to develop civilization. (there's also the more speculative question of how life changed the primordial atmosphere and if the sun's shorter lifespan with it's gradually getting brighter over time was necessary to keep the planet from getting locked into life-induced snowballs alternating with slow volcanically driven thaws that would limit the complexity of life that could develop before the interior cools. Atmosphere plays a huge role in surface temperature, of course, and life alters the atmosphere in major ways; it could be that stars have to warm at a rate within a certain range in order for a planet that is the right temperature for life to really get going(not just confined to volcanic vents/etc but to have the large scale nutrient and energy availability to thrive) to remain the right temperature for complex life to develop before the geological clock runs out), which if true would confine complex life to stars with a certain range of lifespans - presumably similar to the sun. A larger planet with more residual heat would remain active longer, but of course we can only speculate what other issues that may tend to bring with it. The greater mass and initial volcanism seems likely to cause it's own issues, from increased potential to end up like Venus to, well, the Great Dying wasn't the only mass extinction that involved flood basalts(microbial life is near certain to survive unless it's bad enough to boil the planet under the eventually-warmer sun, but if you keep resetting the clock on life it wastes a lot of the extra time that size bought you). There's potentially a range of viable planet and star masses for the evolution of complex life (can you tell I lean towards Rare Earth ?).
Once again there is no Fermi paradox lol kiddo you don't watch news do you or see the thousands of videos of ufos or uap as the government calls them The chuck Schumer amendment calls for transparency on what they call non human intelligence, it is well known by smart people that the US government has a crash retrieval program that has recovered non human technology and craft .. this is a established fact and when you have so many high ranking military and intelligence officials claiming that uap ufos are real and we have recovered their craft and bodies and especially lately have come out yet you and other so called scientist and your bias is only going to make you an example in history as what is wrong with bias science... please save your name and actually do the research and pay attention. Don't you see most of humanity see the truth so most people don't have your ignorance . Why your so popular is unfortunate because many but not most thankfully..follow you and buy into your ignorance. When it comes to aliens your ignorant your absolutely wrong without doubt since we already know without doubt aliens are real. Here and proven
U've stated many times of ur lack of belief in their existence (here ir out there) without definitive proof so YTF would we want2 here more of ur "speculation" on them? I'm an experiencer that my ex-wife &kids saw (which I'm not suggesting is the said extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence Bcause we no wot we saw) but 2flip that coin..... the extraordinary claims of bein alone in universe requires extraordinary evidence (not the 1data point of earth) that we r alone. MayB u coukd explain how these UAP vehicles defy phyics 2bac ur argument of their non existence 🤷
Us being "early" might be unexpected or unlikely, but by definition it cannot be impossible: *someone* has to arrive first, and there's no law of physics that actively blocks us from being that someone. As a person whose last name begins with "A", I have a lifetime of experience being the first person in roll-calls, so while it's true that *most* people's names get called somewhere in the middle I'm here to tell you that being called first is not prohibited. The fact we haven't seen civilizations emerge a trillion years from now around m-dwarf stars has less to do with probability than it does with us just not having waited long enough yet.
Yes, someone has to be early and wonder about that earliness. Also being randomly chosen first out of lets say a hundred is no more surprising than being the 85th chosen, even though we psychologically ascribe more relevance to it.
@@xbox70333I wonder if we only think it’s unlikely because we cannot see everyone else in our class. If my name was Aaron Abby and I was always called first I would know why I’m first in line. It’s the unknowing that drives us crazy. And that we don’t even know what causes us to be first/early in line in the cosmos. I think the point is a good one. It could just as easily be explained that we’re first/early because we’re first/early. I do, however, like to think about the repercussions of why we’re here. It’s just that I can easily grasp this as an explanation. I could be missing something though. I work in consumer software and not anything is heady as philosophy or science.
I've always thought , in a 14 billion yr. old universe , we are way late to the party. 5 billion years ago, earth wasn't even here, but the universe had been here a while. I don't "buy" the early thing. The actual odds of being first are astronomically small , even more so, when you are late.
Couple of fellas sat around a post-harvest Mesopotamian campfire, 11,000BC, sharing a fermented drink or two. "I know this agriculture lark seems to be paying off, but I'm fairly certain we're about to die." "Why's that?" "Well we've been hunting and gathering for tens of thousands of years now, and we've been farming for a few years. If it's a successful future strategy, what are the chances that we're among the very first few to try it?" "Good point, especially when you consider that a successful civilisation based on agriculture could support many hundreds of times the population that hunting and gathering does. That makes it even less likely we're amongst the first few to farm. Statistically it seems fairly certain we're about to die." "Yep."
If everyone did this, a tiny fraction of people (such as these fellas) would be wrong. But the vast majority of people would be correct. The key point about statistical arguments is that they’re not deterministic, sometimes they will be erroneous, but in most cases (whatever confidence interval is employed) they are correct - by construction
Yeah well, it's just a rewritten version of the "what are the probabilities that you'll be first to be called in a lottery?" Problem. The chances of being first are very very small for the vast majority of participants, yet *someone* has got to be the first.
@@CoolWorldsLab I agree with that, and I think the analysis is both fascinating and worthwhile, but I think it's always worth emphasising that the current evidence of our existence is entirely consistent with a whole range of possibilities. That doesn't make it less valid to consider the probability of those possibilities though, and your work is always brilliant when it does this. If I had to bet I'd say that symbiogenesis, or life on Earth becoming multicellular, were locks so hard to pick, the average number of intelligent species per observable universe is < 1. But this is just one possibility among many of those consistent ones, and there's a reason bookmaking is a profitable industry...
@@CoolWorldsLab You are of course correct, but it makes statistical arguments as an explanation also pretty much useless. Statistics are great for predicting, but after the fact the probability function has collapsed, it has no explanatory value to explain why the result we see is in a particular part of the probability distribution.
@@CoolWorldsLab The problem with this line of thinking is that it only makes sense if you're sampling is random, but that's not the case, there since there is only a limited window in which "you" could have been born, since you're parents had to be alive and having kids at that time, and a limited window for each of your parents and so on. So your (individual) time of existence is relatively deterministic rather then being random.
My response to the fermi paradox has always been that space is actually quite big, and our ability to perceive it is miniscule. It's like finding it wierd that you can't see a tree that's five hours drive away, on a foggy night, without your glasses.
like yeah, we dont even know how many planets there are in our next system over. our detection equipment just isnt sensitive enough to get that kind of information, the idea that we would be able to see an alien civilization if we were pointing a telescope at their star is. well we arent there yet
Also the tree, through some quirk of physics, is projecting an image of the area from before it started growing, thereby even if you COULD see that far you would see an empty field.
Yeah and didnt we only disciver more then 100,000 planets? Thats a REAL small number at this point Edit: only 5,000. Thats even smaller then i thought! Even between all of species on earth, only 1 is sentient, and even if were sentient, weve been progressing slowly for 100,000s of years, Whos not to say sentient species can progress even slower then we do And that most alien species arent sentient at all, and is just life?
Been saying this for years. There can be tens of thousands of space traveling advanced intelligent species out there concurrent with ourselves... and that would be a fraction of the number of galaxies out there. So less than 1 intelligent species per 1,000 galaxies or more. And with space the size it is, if you get some level of faster than light travel, you are likely to still be limited to your own galaxy. And even IF you happen to on a very slim chance share a galaxy with another concurrent intelligent species, you are still very likely to never run across each other. As for seeing each other through mega-structures... Doubt it as mega structures are very much inefficient. An advanced species would not waste their time on such other than sheer necessity for one for whatever reason. Space can be full of intelligent life. But we are unlikely to even run across one.
My personal take is that if the unobservable universe is super large or infinite, then we're just dealing with a sampling problem. We have no clue about the distribution density of life as a whole in the same way if you lived in the desert and had never seen a jungle, you might well assume the world is largely barren. Aliens might be super abundant in other parts of the universe, whereas our region might well be the cosmic boondocks just based on sheer randomness. Even if you take our own observation bubble as is, the speed of light produces a cosmic picture of a distant past that is vastly different from what things actually look like in the present, and you don't have to travel very far before this becomes a significant problem. Other parts of the galaxy, never mind the universe, could be extantly colonised and we wouldn't know it for millions of years.
the oldest stars in our galaxy are only about 30,000 light years away. if this hypothesis was correct, that these grabber aliens are colonizing at near the speed of light, and have taken at least as long as us to "unlock the doors", they would have been at it for a few billion years by now. we should be well inside that colonizing bubble.
Our galaxy contains enough stars (100 billion to 400 billion) that it would be a frankly unbelievable statistical anomaly if the distribution of (intelligent) life here is very different from elsewhere in the universe. Unless (intelligent) life is exceedingly rare, which raises other questions.
@@Fluxquark Plenty of other galaxies have highly active black holes or quasars that pump out 10-factor gigatons of ionising radiation over huge distances, as do typically more violent stars in CME events, all of which can easily sterilise a fertile planet with the potential for life, or at least knock it off any trajectory towards intelligence and an advanced civilisation. As far as I know we haven't even found a single exoplanet with truly Earthlike conditions yet - granted that the telescopes capable of searching for them are still relatively new, but the early results haven't been good. Since we only have a confirmed sample of one, we can already assume that unless we just can't see it beyond our own observation bubble where light takes millions of years to travel from the nearest star, life is already an unbelievable statistical anomaly. That then brings us back to the sampling problem of whether its overall distribution is different elsewhere, which it could be - we've found life in extremely isolated places on Earth, and since we can't see beyond the observable universe we can never be sure that its larger superstructure is exactly the same everywhere.
@@alexdenton9176 So you are saying there should be more life here than in other places since we are not near any highly active quasars? The sample is biased in favour of us finding alien life? Anyways, unless (intelligent) life is so rare that it only occurs a few times per hundred galaxies, we should have a reasonable sample size in our galaxy. Enough stars with planets, many hundreds of millions of which will be in a habitable zone (I think assuming alien life needs the same habitable zone as us is silly). How have the results so far not been good? We immediately found hundreds of exoplanets as soon as we figured out a way to find (certain types of) them. The techniques we have now almost guarantee we won't find any exoplanets like earth but the fact most stars appear to have planets means there are a lot of planets out there.
"Future aliens are why we live in the past" is truly an incoherent idea. If there are going to be sentient creatures, then someone has to be the first one. Sentient beings a trillion years from now won't be marveling at what a weird coincidence it was for *us* to be born so early.
So if there's a lottery with one-in-a-billion odds of winning, a billion people buy tickets, and one person wins, that's not surprising. But if there's a lottery with one-in-a-billion odds of winning, only one person buys a ticket, and that person wins, that's very surprising. We are, as far as our current observational ability is concerned, in the second situation. We can only see one lottery ticket, and it happens to be the winning one. It is of course possible that we are just very lucky, and I don't think anybody discussing the topic is dismissing that possibility outright. It's just that the odds of it are, y'know, one in a billion. So in effect the probability is 0.999999 that something else is going on -- that our assumption of a fair one-in-a-billion lottery is wrong somehow.
That's my main problem with the entire concept, and probably why I haven't ever heard of this idea aside from on UA-cam. It's such a weird misinterpretation (or perhaps over-reliance) of the Copernican principle that I don't even know where to start with explaining why it doesn't make sense. Makes me think of the saying "You're not right. You're not even wrong."
@@thecosmickid8025 But what would could as a ticket with that metaphor? is it every star? every planet? When we start looking at just stars we see so many tickets that us having gotten a winning one isn't so strange.
@@JaneDoe-dg1gv The ticket in this metaphor would be a civilization. The winning ticket is the first one. Cards on the table, I am extremely skeptical of this kind of logic too. I'm just trying to give it the fairest hearing possible, and "this is just nonsense" doesn't strike me as a satisfactory refutation.
I'm on the Subjective Rarity = time + distance boat. Let's say every galaxy gets ONE technological civilization. 1. No all civilizations may expand. 2. Not all civilizations last. 3. Not all civilizations that do expand and last make a significant enough mark on their galaxy to be detected from any other galaxy. 4. Not all civilizations that expand, last, or leave a detectable mark have done so long enough ago for that signal to be detectable from any other nearby galaxy, and less so others beyond that. 5. Not all galaxies close enough to detect a detectable signal of a technological civilization have their own technological civilization to even detect a signal. 6. Not all technological civilizations in nearby galaxies that could detect a signal from a neighboring galaxy will exist at a time in their own history where they have the technology to detect that neighboring galaxy civilization signal. It's a rough progression of nopes. All in all, there could be(and/or eventually) Billions of technological civilizations across the known universe, but, because the vast gulfs of both time and distance between galaxies, no civilization may ever exist at a time and distance such they may detect/observe even one other civilization in another galaxy. Let's pretend there's a mirror "Earth" in our neighboring galaxy Andromeda. They're 2.5 Million years away from us, so, unless they've developed a space-faring civilization of significant enough impact to be detectable 2.5 Million years ago, before us, we're not going to see anything. If they're on the same level we are now, We to them and them to us are functionally nonexistent until about 2.5 Million years from now when our respective detectable signals reach us and/or them ... if anyone is still around to even detect either.
Assuming that aliens would even have such a thing as civilization. Which is a pretty big assumption. Humans can only understand human concpets just like ants can only understand ant concepts. Flip that around to where we're the ants and aliens are the humans, we wouldn't even be capable of understanding them or even understanding their siginificance. They would be so far beyond our conprehension to the point that the concept of "aliens" (a human concept) would be completely meaningless.
Very succinct observations, which I happen to agree with. If we look at the timeline of life on Earth and the extremely recent emergence of human technology, life could be abundant but advanced civilization even rarer than one per galaxy throughout all time. -For example, could octopuses create the sort of science that humans have if they lived on an ocean planet?- What if procaryotes selectively made an atmosphere more hostile to eukaryotes development rather than accommodating? Could advanced civilization emerge on a planet that had no predation driving evolution? As for grabby aliens, we haven’t developed any technology that would support practical interstellar travel. It just might be an impossible feat given the fragility of life and the intense energy required and the limitations of material properties. [Edit] Dang it, I paused to read comments too early and he actually mentions the aquatic world limitation at 14:09
@@blacksmith67 - it's very doubtful any species of anything, no matter how "intelligent" that lives on a water planet that's ONLY a water planet with no land masses could ever develop much by way of technology because fire, and the control of it is one of those important steps, as well as a very important tool in the tool bag of technological civilization. A water-world civilization could have "technology" in the sense that we differentiate between types of stone tool technologies like Oldowan and Acheulean. Also, as to fire, a water-locked species could, arguably employ active underwater volcanoes for some rudiments of crafting with fire, but, we have some very real very smart bird species here on Earth that capitalize on brush fires to pick up burning brush, burning branches, and other burning material to actively spread the fire because they've learned brush fires create some free cooked meals, plus it can drive insects, lizards, and other prey out to easier hunting. We've birds that even make and use tools; The Caldonian crow for instance. As to going interstellar, it's less complicated than many think. We could hollow out large asteroids to create rotating habitats as a byproduct of asteroid mining, and all that work could be done by AI-managed mining drone swarms in space. It'd take a mere 100 years to finish one project with internal land mass equivalent to France. Such large habitats could house millions of people, as well as a complete self sustaining sustainable ecosystem of lakes, river systems, full-sized mountains, and even atmospheric depth up to the central axis of spin roughly equivalent to Earth's atmosphere and that would allow for natural weather systems for such bottled worlds. Having a self sustaining sustainable system inside a sectioned and nested multi-levelled world in a bottle squashes most of the problems with space ships. The hardest part would be bolting engines on, and the slow, slow slow sllooooow nudging of such a huge object into slingshot passes at planets around our solar system until it's gained enough momentum to achieve solar system escape velocity. THAT would probably take another 100 years just to build up enough speed. Most humans, however are too short-sighted, corrupt and personally self-interested in power and wealth to invest in such long-term projects that would take several generations to complete, although most of it could be done by AI workforces at very little energy or monetary cost since building such structures could be almost a waste-product of asteroid mining. Travelling the stars in this way would likely be one of the more sensible because any destination does not need to be "habitable", or have a planet that's a good candidate for terraforming. Any system visited would only need to have the raw material to build more large rotating habitats, as well as adding to/remodeling/repairing the original structure. It could all be done with technology available today, except we're not exactly "there" yet for space-based mining bot swarms managed by AI that can be put to work and forgotten. An alternative method of travelling is significantly more spooky science fiction fantasy where we have only the very rudiments of the beginnings of the technologies that could make this happen, but, this alternative would be to send sophisticated AI 3D printers everywhere, and once they arrive, using whatever transmission technologies we have available, we could then (if the technology exists) transmit the digitized consciousness of travelers to the 3D printers on far far away worlds and places, and for them, the travel would be instant, with no requirement for food, life support systems, or any other bothersome stuff meant to protect and sustain life travelling across the stars. Once the traveler consciousness arrives, they print a body that's already pre-adapted for the local environment from local materials without fear of contaminating anything, and they go explore. Of course, this would require several very spooky technologies we only have the very beginnings of, so, it's a thing that might not ever happen. Travelling and exploring without spaceships, using 3D printers would, however, solve a LOT of problems. :)
@@konstantinavalentina3850 Thank you for the long and thoughtful response. I have thought of asteroids as an interstellar vehicle, but the cost of energy to make it possible would be enormous. We have put things in space at enormous cost, and even though the cost has dropped significantly it’s still around $25000 per kilogram. Assume that we can do that for 1 percent of that cost, and we are still looking at trillions of dollars to start a project with no immediate financial return and zero reward for anyone currently living. I absolutely agree that we could do it, but humans would have to change our ways of thinking drastically. It would be actually easier to convince everyone to save the environment here on Earth.
The mere thought of being born into a relatively early universe is both inspiring and horrifying. We could spend our whole existence improving technology to such incredible depths, yet continue drawing conclusive evidence that alien civilizations just aren't out there, or aren't visible. And we'll still keep looking out there anyway, because the search is what drives us in the first place.
I dont agree with that we are born specifically into an early universe. Or i mean i do agree we are early, but it has no meaning because whatever time you pick there is always infinite time that comes after so pick whatever point in time and it will be early. 1000 years is early. 13 billion years is early. 100 googol years is early.
@@RonBest no infinite time, while the universe may be limitless in time each star has a limited lifespan, the stelliferous era (star forming period) is also finite so the timescale is limited for the evolution of both stars and any putative life around them.
I do think it's neat to suppose that we are the ancient aliens, that someone in the future will look upon what we leave behind in the manner that we look upon Stonehenge or the Pyramids or the Antikythera mechanism.
One thing that I notice about Grabby Aliens is that it's very appealing. We want a universe that looks like Star Trek. The answers to the fermi paradox mostly boil down to either life can't colonize the galaxy (which kills a lot of fun SF, so that's no fun), or that there is no aliens (which feels unlikely, and also kills a lot of SF, so that's no fun). Grabby Aliens invokes suggests aliens are roughly at our level of development, and that we're all equally vying for a cool, galaxy-spanning empire and a vibrant, interstellar future that also has interesting aliens. That's fun SF! So, people find it appealing. This is not to comment on the validity of the theory! But why I think it became so popular.
It's not about cool, it's just what life does. It keeps on existing and the way to keep on existing is to expand. If life stays in one place, stagnant, it will disappear. So expanding life keeps on existing. And that us, that's the life that exists today. If we won't expand, we will disappear. If there is a life out there that will expand, it will inherit the universe.
Ever play an rts or halo? If those aliens out macro us and tech up faster or rush us before our macro has paid off we lose. Now imagine a giant free for all where one faction snowballs by beating every other faction and claiming their troops and resources, you get the covenant from halo. lol I would not call that fun just go play halo reach and see how that ends.
One little thing that always sticks in my mind when I think about this is that life on Earth actually very nearly ended during the Permian mass extinction. This is the time before the time before the dinosaurs, when terrestrial vertebrates were dominating the earth for the very first time (and the dominant animals were actually proto-mammals rather than reptiles), and it very nearly all ended right then and there. Its always seemed like just another one of those locks we were lucky to slip through. Just a bit more vulcanism and our ancestors might've perished before they even had a chance.
My take on this "where are the aliens" hypothesis is simply the vast area of space. Space is huge and all. Maybe there are life way far away from us to pick up with any instrument. Maybe there is something preventing lifes from being too close to each other?
There doesn't even need to really be something actively keeping life apart, as simple probability will suffice. There's an unfathomable number of planets in our galaxy alone, and the distances between solar systems is just as incomprehensible. Even if 99% of all planets evolved sentient life, the odds any of those two planets would be close enough for one to observe the other is still fractional, because that 1% would still be billions of planets spanning trillions of lightyears.
Yeah or maybe aliens came here 2 million years ago found these neat bipedal apes that immediately started worshiping them as Gods. So they set up a 30 light year nature reserve around our star system so they wouldn't screwup our evolution.
@@THX..1138 hah! One of my other ideas for this type of theory is that gods were ancient aliens who came to Earth and left, and we are their decesdents or leftover worshippers.
feel like the main philosophical issue with this theory is that its assuming an alien civilization would act similar to the way our human civilization does.
Assuming that there are billions of alien civilizations all, somehow, expanding out in every direction at the speed of light seems like the biggest issue for me. That doesn’t sound like a thing that is possible, let alone reasonable to assume.
That's actually one of the least problematic assumptions. Like us, they must have evolved on a world in which other creatures evolved and they would have evolved to compete for life and resources against those other creatures until, eventually, just like us, they evolved to compete amongst themselves for the available resources and best mates. The laws of differential survival are universal.
I'm still hung up on how most of society believe that if an advanced alien species somehow traveled to our solar system that they'd actually come straight to earth. How heartbroken would humanity really be if said advanced aliens shoot right past earth without even a hello wave and straight to Venus to terraform and settle?
@SmileyEmoji42 except that again presupposes that the environment another life form raises from is even remotely like ours. Ie: a society of silicon based life forms that use a form of photosynthesis for a caloric energy intake with a sentient hive mind, would develop technology in a vastly different form then us. Or imagine an alien race that evolved/acted exactly like humans, but their planet has a substance that provided unlimited clean energy available way back in their caveman days. They would never see the need to devlop non-renewable resources for energy.
@@bossredd-77They'd visit Earth to observe propably because life like this is a very rare thing after all. Also, they aren't stupid lmao. They would know to not distrupt humanity as it is currently not ready for such a phenomen. They could contact some individuals they think are interesting as an experiment but we'd shrugg these people off as freaks anyway so and we wont believe them anyway xD
"Its like showing up to a party very first, and you wonder... is there really a party... are other people even coming?" Of course, given enough time your party will sooner or later have enough people to fill every free square foot.... Even if only 1 in 1 million people want to join your party, given an infinite amount of time, it will still fill up. The question isn't if there are people coming to the party or not, its if we will have gotten bored and left before the real fun guests show up fashionably late at 2 am
"its like dressing up as a CEO and believing that tomorrow you are going to be rich. Just because your bank account isnt full with money already, doesnt mean it wont any second now" this theory in a nutshell. despite there being no evidence to support any of those claims, the theory just ignores everything and goes on to make its hypothesis.
@@CharIie83 I think it may be feasible to reach ONE star/remote habitable planet. Given the length of time and investment it would take to accomplish the feat.....I imagine the settlers on the new planet would stop there, and never consider doing it again.
First time I've heard "Grabby Aliens" being called a "solution" to the Fermi Paradox; before this video it has always seemed like it was just a reinforcement of the paradox itself, showing logic leads to concluding we should indeed be seeing clear signs of aliens and yet we don't; in essence, just a more elaborate formulation of "where is everybody?"...
It's a solution because of the anthropic principle. At any time and place in the universe where you can look up at the sky and see alien life, you most likely wouldn't evolve to observe it. Because the aliens would have transformed your planet, preventing you from existing to observe them.
the original formulation was "why aren't they already here" as in, they should have colonized the entire galaxy or at least visited the solar system by now, not just that we'd be able to see them "out there"
@@RoyWiggins Oh and youd never see a species in space because variety and differences are paramount. If a new species can see you theyll just copy you, no spacefaring species will actually ever allow itself to be known also due to the fact slavery between species is quite. Quite. Common. Earth is lucky its small and only evolved one race at a time. Easy answer. When any species evolves tech follows. As tech advances two things inevitably follow. Artificial intelligence and fear. As the organic species grows in advancement and complexity so too does their capacity for destruction and the ease with which it occurs. Eventually factions will react out of extreme paranoia and fear as technology continues to advance further and further eventually getting to where the weapons of choice for interplanetary warfare is lobbing black holes at each other. Once a species reaches that point the Artificially intelligent beings will deduce that the most appropiate action to continue lifes sustainment is to remove the advanced sapient races. Quite sad that it happens everytime though.
Same here, even amongst human cultures the need for constant expansion isn't even a constant and our modern assumptions that it is comes from a modern post-industrial revolution and colonialism viewpoint.
I already* felt suspicious about this the moment these somehow **``monolithic``** aliens were brought up, and were mainly the focus of such theory from there. Clearly an obligate sapient species comparable to us from there would already be more individual and complex from each other, even in small communities, so why assume that they would all think the same like a stereotypical hive mind???
Literally all life operates on certain assumptions. No life, for example, can exist without replicating itself. None. All it takes is one lifeform to replicate more than another for the replicator to make the one that doesn't replicate as much irrelevant. On Earth, this sort of thing is 'mitigated' by millions of years of back and forth. An ecosystem balance. When one organism starts to expand too much, they run out of resources, and thus start to die off. Balancing their numbers naturally. Because Earth doesn't have infinite resources. In space, things are different. All it would take is a single organism, a single alien species, to start expanding indefinitely. They could move on, constantly, but unlike on Earth, with animals and organisms, there is no self-balancing act. These beings would be too smart for that. All resources would be utilized, all. And if one alien species doesn't do it, then they're irrelevant. They do not matter. because while they're twiddling their thumbs, conservatives, the ones who decide to expand WILL expand into their territory, overwhelming them. Period. This is the core of grabby aliens. Not that we're assuming how ALL aliens behave, but we're looking at how life behaves with near-infinite resources, and then realizing even if ONE out of a million alien species decides to expand, it's over. Everyone else loses.
PBS spacetime goes over why this is reasonable to assume 1. Organisms tend to be expansionist because of natural selection (which applies at cosmic scales as well of course) 2. You only need 1 in a thousand to become expansionist, and the result will be a universe dominated by expansionists, because expansionism grows your numbers and power exponentially. Example: Imperialist countries in the past.
08:11 Evolution has nothing to do with complexity; many species have actually evolved to be simpler than their ancestrals. Evolution simply prioritizes reproduction.
13 днів тому+3
Yes. Though you could perhaps habe the hypothesis that over time life as a whole has a tendency to diversify? So many things you can measure will have a broader and broader probability distribution when taken over all life currently existing. So the size of the currently largest creature will statistically increase over time, and so will the hottest and coldest temperatures tolerable by some life, etc. And perhaps the range of complexity (and simplicity!) and the range of possible levels of intelligence will also increase over time? I don't know if this is true, but it's a testable prediction,.we could investigate. It's also more plausible than the more simplistic 'complexity goes up over time' model, which as you point out, is just wrong.
So thinking of species as analogue to gas particles, and ecological niches as positions/velocities? I wonder if there's some objective way of putting biosphere entropy into numbers...
The evolution of all life, as an overall process, is the sum of all these individual species, so while some species may evolve to be simpler, while others remain constant, in terms of complexity, the NET direction can still be towards greater complexity.
It's less about complexity and more about energy available. Life on earth has consistently evolved to be able to increase the energy that can be used. Replication -> photosynthesis -> oxygen -> multicellularity (and consumption of it) -> fire -> intelligence?????
Yes there's a huge increase in biodiversity over time this is observable data, and yes the blue whale is the largest creature that ever existed, you actually are true in your observation. However, it's good to point out that the largest land creature today is far smaller than in the past and the strategy of being huge on land is simply lost. It's possible that overtime the range of size, intelligence, heat tolerance etc. will be lost over time, considering what humans do now and comparing what algae did in the past, it is possible that we will limit severely this range of diversity the same way that when algae triggered the ice age creatures that liked to live in hot climate simply died.
It doesn't assume that. It's simply a fact. If you're intelligent you can figure out that the universe can be a dangerous place. Entire solar systems can be zapped out of existence. If you want your species to be robust and survive, you colonize space. If you're intelligent, that's easy to figure out. Doesn't matter if you think like humans or not, you'll arrive at the conclusion that the period of time your planet can support your type of life is not eternal, and perhaps more than one would be better than one. It doesn't really matter whether you're an intelligent frog or an intelligent monkey, that logic is pretty simple.
I mean if we accept that Intelligence grants an evolutionary advantage any advanced alien species will at some point realise that their homeworld will be depleted of resources eventually (because of entropy there cant be infinitely regenerative resources). They would have no option but to expand into space. Now if that is possible or if so, if they would change their systems in a way thats visible to us might be another topic.
@@lioneldomland3816 There's a third option. Go extinct. Perhaps despite their best efforts they simply couldn't figure out long distance, high speed space travel, or find a habitable planet in time. And of course if they go extinct the only way we'd ever know they existed would be to go to their planet ourselves.
Much of the Fermi Paradox assumes humans as the norm. The average of sentient life, and that's not a bad stance to take from a statistical, scientific standpoint, especially given the move away from the historical view of human exceptionalism. However, we do need to be open to the idea that maybe we are exceptional, or at least exceptionally lucky.
@@lioneldomland3816 that assumes they don't invent capitalism, in which case it will too expensive to save themselves either with being careful with resource usage or finding ways to move to other planets, and they perish. Like we are doing.
As a bipolar sufferer, thinking about how insignificant I am compared to the universe always helps me put things in perspective. I am a ridiculously improbable conglomeration of strangely behaving bits of mass that can somehow understand the universe I find myself in. I should count myself very lucky to exist. My problems always seem much more manageable after a healthy dose of thinking about the universe.
It's funny how the smallest things, like finding a good creator in you subscription feed, can overshadow every other feeling. Our minds are amazing sometimes. However, for me; no matter what mood i'm in, these videos often replaces it with existential dread. But the soft music and dr. Kippings soothing voice makes it feel like a good thing.
This. I always think of space elevators and solar sails and how complex they would be to build and maintain. I mean, chemistry and physics can only take us so far before we cross into the realm of science fiction rather than feasible concepts.
@@Miguel.LSpace elevators are a fairly readily solvable engineering problem though (there's a clear incremental improvement pathway in materials science to solve the one remaining problem, sufficient tether strength), and solar sails are even easier. Neither of these are Fermi paradox grade stuff though because they primarily facilitate expansion within the solar system, but still
After reading about SAFIRE and the remarkable work with elemental transmutation through Nuclear Plasma reators currently underway by Aureon Ltd I feel our civilization is on the cusp of something grand and transformative
The thing that seems very very weird to me about the grabby aliens statistical argument, is that I just don't understand how it answers the main question that it purports to answer. Provided I understood things correctly, the starting question is: If you and I assume ourselves to be an average observer, then why do you and I see an early and empty universe, while our best theories tell us that the universe has a long and densely populated future ahead of it? Which grabby aliens answers with: That long and densely populated future contains only long-lived "grabby" civilizations. To which my follow-up question remains exactly equal the original question... If we assume ourselves to be an average observer, then why are you and I not members of one of those long-lived grabby civilizations in the far future? As far as I understand it, nothing about grabby aliens even prevents the emergence of new observers in those civilizations. Because fundamentally it is not civilizations that observe, it is sentient beings. To me this seems so obvious that I'm weirded out by so many people discussing grabby aliens without at least touching on the "who are observers?" question. It makes me wonder if I have really completely misunderstood everything, somehow.
I don't know if we're both right or both wrong, but we're in the same boat. Nothing about this argument makes any sense to me on a fundamental level. I'm not even on board with the Copernican Principle being applied this way in general, but people much smarter than me keep doing it, so I guess I'm probably missing something about that too. To me, it just seems like the most obvious case of statistical sampling bias of all time, but physicists keep talking about it like it's one of the universe's great mysteries. Taking a sample size of 1/x where x is unknown and then trying to extrapolate it into anything seems ridiculous. Especially when the 1 is a biased sample. It's like looking outside your window to try to determine what the weather is like everywhere on Earth. It was 75 degrees and overcast outside today and I expect myself to be a typical observer, so it was probably 75 and overcast for a vast majority of people everywhere on the planet, right? For that matter, I bet it was 75F for a majority of conscious observers everywhere in the universe today because I expect my perspective as an observer to be typical. Even talking about the time in which we were born being atypical doesn't make any sense on a fundamental level. Is it pretty unlikely that out of a sample of every possible observer to ever exist, that I would be born in 1993? Sure, that's wildly unlikely. But what if I were born in the year 3,847,219,623? Being born in that exact year is also wildly unlikely. Both of these probabilities are almost zero, but someone using the Copernican Principle in the year 3,847,219,658 would say that it's much more likely that they would be born in the time period of 5,000,000,000-10,000,000,000. Any date you pick is going to have a probability about as close to zero as you can get. Nobody in any perspective would ever come to the conclusion that they are a "typical observer" so this logic would always lead you down a misleading path.
@@firstlast6085 I'm theoretically on board with the statistics of extrapolating from a sample size of one. Of course the result is literally the least trustworthy you can be relying on data, but the pure mathematics of it does make sense. This is called the maximum likelihood estimation, which you can look up on Wikipedia. The Copernican Principle is a slightly less mathematical concept, but it follows similar logic. That's theory, because on a practical level all of it is just way too uncertain. However, even on a theoretical level, I don't understand how the grabby alien solution applies the principle. Sure, we know of only one globally unified civilization, so we are permitted to assume it is average in every way. However, as I see it, we are NOT permitted to view it as average is some ways, but not others. What the grabby aliens solution is doing, is viewing our civilization as average in regards the circumstances of its founding, but then pushes all other ways it could be average aside, merely to make them fit the story. The example I gave is the individual average observer. If grabby aliens is true, then the universe would host trillions of sentient observers in its lifespan, with me being an extreme outlier. Another example is the lifespan of a civilization. The maximum likelihood estimation tells us that we most likely are about halfway through, giving humanity another 250k years or so, for a total of 500k years. That would allow us to colonize the milky way, but would should also assume that 500k years is the normal lifespan for most civilizations, which doesn't match the grabby aliens solution. Of course, all of these assumptions should be taken with a grain of salt, but the point is that all of them are equally valid! Choosing one over all the others - without any justification as far as I can tell - just doesn't convince me. And especially when it is contradicting much more of those assumptions than it is validating, then the entire solution is built on a foundation that actually undermines it.
@@upgradeplans777 I disagree with the lifetime estimate. As we are keeping up, I would be surprised if we survive into the next millenium (although I won't be surprised as I will be long dead in case I am wrong).
Economists have a bad enough track record of predicting the future in their own field of expertise, I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting one to figure out the future of cosmology and alien life.
I think it's an excellent model, but as the video explains, it also has a severe problem in assuming red dwarf systems are habitable. Once you assume there won't be habitable planets sitting around M-dwarfs for trillions of years, everything about the intergalactic Fermi paradox changes because G-type star production is in decline, meaning we may not be nearly as early as its proponents want to believe. I also think it appeals to an anti-Copernican crowd where we are special, and humanity and/or our AIs are "endowed" to own several galactic superclusters.
@@codys447only our robots will have time, and that’s if they still work once they leave the Oort Cloud not to mention the millennia across the depths, if our radiation protection works.
Yes Windmonkey! Just look how long it took Economists to stop their obsession with a model that depends on a "rational actor" when it's obvious that our brains evolved to make quick decisions on limited information.
@@codys447 I think it's funny you say that because, even though the conclusions might appeal to the anti-Copernican, the premises seem like a gross over-application of the Copernican principle. I'm in the 99th percentile for males in the world height-wise, and if I was applying the Copernican principle as much as they are here, I would be trying to find explanations as to why I'm not shorter.
@@jetfuelcantmeltsteelmemes8791 As another commenter said, there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world and only 8 billion humans. Statistically speaking, I should be an ant.
We already have an example of "grabby aliens": all life on Earth is related, because the first succesful organisms took over and made it impossible for any other, independent life to evolve.
But animals are evolving around us all the time, even monkeys. Have you seen that video of a monkey sharpening a rock and then using it to break its enclosure?
@@globin3477 too bad for them Mycelium proves that false as its not native to Eath and is derived from space. We can deduce this from the numerous genetic evolutions mushrooms have that protect them and no other species from space faring travel.
I feel like the Grabby Aliens hypothesis presented in this video is not the same one I have heard before. I think in the version I was told, the reason we don't see grabby aliens isn't because they are spreading close to the speed of light, but because we are just early and no one is there and close enough for us to see. We do not have to assume they can travel at near lightspeed to be grabby either. At 1% speed of light, a civilization can still colonize our whole galaxy in 10 million years, which is still very fast compared to the time for us to evolve. Grabby Aliens is basically saying that because spreading is so fast compared to evolution, an observer can only see either a pre-grabby local region where no one is out there, or a post-grabby region where everywhere is grabbed, and the intermediary state is very short compared to either of the two states. Also factor in the assumption that no civilization can emerge in an already grabbed region, then we would arrive at the conclusion that we could only be at a pre-grabby region, solving the fermi paradox. I think this was the version I heard, and if not, at least this could be a plausible explanation nonetheless.
Yes. I watched the kurzgesagt video and it semed to build around this exact idea that you said. And as you say this idea has been around a while. I see no need for hard locks and red dwarfs for the bones of the theory to be very compelling. Biological creatures fill niches...for that we have N = billions. So if a technological civilisations niche is space, and it can spread quickly then either aliens dont exist or we wouldn't because the earth would have been grabbed by now
This is also my understanding of it. No m-dwarves or speed of light travel required. Just the fact that a civilization occupying a habitable planet would preclude the possibility of other life developing on that planet
yeah this was also my understanding? halfway through the vid i got a vague impression bro is mad his idea didnt grt picked up like grabby aliens has, as well, which makes me find this video's intent a touch more suspect (just a touch)
@evernoon your explanation is the way I remember it and it makes way more sense to me then the video said. The video seems to say the only way we could NOT see them is if the were expanding at the Speed of Light...that makes no sense to me, if they we expanding at 1% of LS we would definitely not see them.
@@joelee3716 near-lightspeed would be inefficient and would need extreme shielding. It could end up being impractical in even the most advanced civilization's standards.
Worth noting: Astronomy and many other areas of research can afford to be magnanimous because "who is right" doesn't have a _known, immediate, and dramatic_ impact on someone's quality of everyday life. Thus cordiality is the norm. When it comes to ethics, morality, politics, & (socio)economics, that is very much not the case, which is why you will see people understandably get upset. This is not to try and turn the conversation to that end. Rather simply to point out that some subjects simply lend themselves to "rational debate" a lot better than others. I suspect if there was the potential for a (known, immediate, dramatic) impending asteroid ending all life on earth, the debate might get considerably more heated.
The oversimplification of the Gigantic task that is space travel is always mind blowing. Imagine trying to meet a person that it’s walking at 828000 km/h and gave you the position he was 30 years ago in a space that is 99.9% empty
I don't like the "expansion as fast as the speed of light" assumption, but I don't think that really affects what I think of the grabby aliens hypothesis. I think that if you make the assumption that grabby civilizations make it impossible for new life to emerge on a planet they've grabbed, the fact that we exist means that we're among the first within our sphere of grabbiness since there's been plenty of time for other worlds to develop grabby aliens and therefore suggests that the density of technological civilizations in a grabbiness sphere is low. This means that if the grabby aliens hypothesis is true, either technological civilizations are rare or grabbiness spheres are small, and doesn't eliminate the possibility that both are true. Meaning we're still left with the Fermi Paradox.
The paper uses 0.3c, IIRC. That's close to light speed in the grand scheme of things. It's necessary for the theory because, if an interstellar civilization were expanding much slower than that, we would see them coming from a long way away. Us not seeing them implies a short window to see them.
Or, that even if such grabby aliens were to exist, there's nothing to say they couldn't have evolved, expanded and eventually gone extinct with their constructs and signals having long since faded out long before Earth was around.
If it wasn't for the asteroid that hit earth appropriately 65 million years ago wiping out the dinosaurs allowing mammals to evolve into modern day humans (us) we simply would not be here so thank that asteroid guys stay safe 👍
@@CoolWorldsLab never! This is one of my favorite channels, thank you to everyone on the Cool Worlds team ~ your videos are always thoughtful and informative, and I appreciate you 👏👏👏👏😘
I have been waiting for you to cover this fascinating hypothesis for a while. The grabby aliens hypothesis seems weird and strange and is yet so much alike biological systems and organisms would actually expand.
That is if they get past the stage we are in. I doubt it very much. They would have exactly the same problems and the biggest problem is wars. Man has too many psychos in power who love money and war. I would place a bet that every civilisation that has been and will be has this exact problem. I am a big believer that we will destroy ourselves one day and if we don’t then nature will. Another thing is space travel to other stars. We already know that it is virtually impossible to get warp drive and to fuel a ship to get to any decent speed is astronomical. People like to dream but that is all it is.
@@CoolWorldsLab I'm so glad that instead of just summarizing it you offered your own well thought out arguments and analysis as well. Love this channel :)
Another explanation for lack of ‘grabby’ aliens so far (that an economist probably should’ve thought of) is that, given available technology, being a ‘grabby’ civilization takes two things: 1. Unification and commitment of an entire planet to one goal 2. Willingness to take enormous risks. An entire planet may not be able to agree with eachother, (as we see on earth) and spreading out your resources throughout space may not bring immediate rewards, and might even bring about the wrath of another civilization, leading to risk aversion. We always imagine aliens attacking out of desire to conquer, or desperation for resources. But if a planet is desperate for resources, they’re not going to spend what little they have to look through space for it. And desire to conquer is only going to possess about half of a planet’s residents at a time (if their version of consciousness is similar to ours and they aren’t a unimind like in 3 body problem). It might just be that if a civilization is smart enough, they decide keep to themselves. Alternatively, we could be in a young universe where we are developing simultaneously with other young civilizations. But think about the things we’ve sent into space. Very few, small and hard to spot rockets and telescopes aren’t even going to make a blip on other planet’s radars. If we assume they are developing at the same pace as us, they also would have sent out probes that are too small to differentiate from an asteroid.
I am not an astrophysicist or evolutionary biologist nor do I hold a PHD in anything. I just have an interest in the sciences, especially those that deal in the existential. For a long time I have pondered the question; "if we see no evidence of other advanced civilisations, what if we are first?". The "because, aliens" trope without strong and irrefutable evidence is to me at least, akin to spiritualism. Its a wish that something you believe is true. We don't want to be alone in the universe. But what if we are? At least in our Galaxy. The potential and also responsibility that gives humanity is immense. The bigger question for me is, what do we do with this power?
I think one of the issues with trying to extrapolate M-dwarf habitability into the far future is that there are so many of these stars and they live for such long periods of time that it is difficult to imagine any form of exclusivity with respect to their nature. It's hard to conclude that ALL of them would remain inhospitable to advanced life for the ENTIRETY of their lifespans. We already know that some M-dwarfs aren't very active, and there remains a possibility that at least some of the ones that are active now will become less active as they age. And there are mechanisms by which a planet around such stars that has lost its atmosphere could regain a new atmosphere later in time. If M-dwarfs in the present era as a whole don't have a high likelihood of hosting grabby civilizations, but can become more so in the future, that would explain why we don't see grabby aliens all over the place in the present era, but it would not preclude a grabby alien scenario happening in the future.
17:26 A wise fictional doctor once said, “it’s never lupus.” I would amend that to say, “it’s never aliens, until it is.” That’s just my take. This theory ultimately doesn’t move the needle for me anywhere on the existence of aliens. Still pressing that x to doubt.
We have a lot of biases that affect our exploration of the unknown. One of them being our propensity to project our own motivations and perhaps instinctual drives onto other hypothetical species. We as a species seem to have a need to conquer and dominate. The evolutionary path of other sentient creatures may result in a different social structure, a different relationship with their environment and a different way of thinking about the cosmos and their place in it. We don't understand our own consciousness, let alone the workings of minds that evolved light-years away. The most alien thing imaginable cannot even be imagined by us.
Possibly.. but you might not be giving us enough credit. There's a lot we don't understand, but I think we can use our imagination and come up with a whole lot of possibilities. If the Alien is a biological creature.. and has somehow found a way to survive for many millions of years.. unless they're popping in and out of different dimensions, they would still likely have certain survival needs. I guess it's possible they are that advanced and just decided.. the universe isn't that interesting and not worth exploring, or don't have any desire to make contact with other species, either because they had done it in the past and it didn't go well, or because they already understand how primitive we are, and are waiting to see if we evolve into something more interesting. I guess maybe if time isn't a concern.. Why not wait until life meets certian technological advancements before you bother making contact. Could be a species unable to even populate their own solar system isn't even at it's infancy stage yet.
True, but it is sufficient for _some_ aliens to become grabby at some point. They may well be 0.1% of all alien species, but due to their grabby nature, they would still occupy most of the universe.
@@cheshire1 eventually, and if a few, given the size - that eventually is going to take a very long time and you are not very likely to encounter them early.
I think that there’s no method for a united civilisation to persist across hundreds of light-years, it’s never some sort of power hungry imperialism. And O’Neill cylinders in a Dyson swarm are more than enough to solve overpopulation if populations don’t expand exponentially (they aren’t). But I can see there being a motivation for sending out self-replicating probes, just for research. It’s definitely possible to make one robust enough so it would sooner self-destruct than go rogue. Though none of this applies to machine civilisations, they absolutely could remain united across hundreds of light years.
Is the assumption that the number of hard steps is a universal value really necessary? Wouldn't the planets with fewer hard steps simply produce life much earlier, which would then expand to occupy the universe, rendering the ones with more hard steps irrelevant?
The steps would seem inherent though. While evolution has tried countless pathways countless times, there seem to be some that were both essential to us being here, and which happened only once in Earth's history. Abiogenesis, symbiogenesis, life becoming multicellular, the emergence of our level of intelligence. Even knowing that to be here we must have been very lucky, we seem to have been *exceptionally* lucky.
Hard steps suggests a defined end goal. We got "here" through a series of hard steps. Someone else doesn't need to get "here," they just need to get somewhere. Their steps are likely very different. The only real universal hard step is probably closer to 1 hard step: a minimum stability over a minimum period of time.
Earth produced life only 200-300 million years after it was formed, an insignificant amount of time on a cosmic scale. I would assume that every habitable planet produces life, the hard steps are found elsewhere.
Agreed. Hard Steps is obviously a very simple model. It seems clear enough there's _something_ which makes it hard/rare to become grabby, otherwise we'd already see the aliens. You can break that something down into multiple "hard steps", but each step doesn't have to be equally hard everywhere, so long as the overall result stays hard
@udishomer5852 There's no way to tell if 'early life' is a universal principle or whether Earth is just an extreme fluke. We only have one data point (Earth), so no statistical conclusions can be drawn.
I think this is making a very simple question way too complicated. The entire premise of the Fermi paradox is based on the idea that we don't see aliens when we look at the cosmos. But... Do we? Maybe we "see" them, but we don't know it and don't detect them with our half assed eyes and technology. Isn't it much simpler to say that at a certain point we will have the tecnology to say "oh, here they are, they were right in front of us this whole time"?
I refuse to call this a paradox for the same reason I don't believe my kids when they can't find something they've barely looked for. If life exists here, it exists elsewhere. Why do i say this? Well, have we ever found a thing, that we can't find more of? Does even one person believe we've found all the life on our own planet? Why do we call this a paradox when we've barely begun to look? Perhaps, we are impatient?
Yes but at least your kid knows the thing he is looking for actually exists. And if you knew anything about the fermi paradox, you would understand that their presence would be obvious by now. But you would rather think in useless platitudes than think critically because it justifies your world view.
@@Stormyano lmfao if I knew anything about it! The hubris on you! Arrogant and insulting. Tell u what Internet know it all, I was just offering an opinion but u seem so in love with your own self that I would love u to explain it all! Go ahead , send me the link of u settling this once and for all. Go ahead I'm waiting on u to do more than be smug, follow it up with action. Can't wait to see u explain it all to the world. You'll likely be celebrated for solving this!
As I said in my reply above: human hubris. Humans will be undetectable in a few decades. Even our modern communications are nearly undetectable, because it's wasteful to blast radio waves in all directions, so most are fairly directional... But precise directional radio is already in labs and will be in wifi and cell phones soon. Either way, there's nothing we're looking for, as signs of life, that would actually make sense for an advanced species to still be using. In other words: SETI will never detect radio waves, because aliens aren't blasting them out, like it's 1960's Earth ratio technology, for the galaxy to see.
@@mitchelcline9759 Did you reply to the wrong person? I was expanding on your f'ck'ng comment, in defense of it, to the other knucklehead's pointless comment. But, if you want to get into what so useless and time-wasting about my comment, than let's do this thing...
I love this channel and the thought provoking and brave stance that says maybe we're alone. Too many people, including well known UA-cam scientists, simply rely on, "Of course we're not alone" without offering proof. I appreciate your methodical and data gathering approach. This is true science. 🤙👍
It's entirely possible that we're the first living beings that could be considered sapient in the universe. We simply don't have enough data to make conclusions on how likely/unlikely the development of life and sapient life is in environments that could theoretically support it.
I think we shouldn't shy away from space exploration, and exposing our presence. We got here by being brave, and i don't see a reason to change. Even if it's incredibly hostile. We'd surely be better off coming out looking scary than looking feeble trying to hide away in a corner, hoping nobody will see us.
im ok if its done in that order. space exploration to somewhere else, then expose ourselves. at least that way if things turn sour they wont know where we live
We may have already announced our presence. When we look at stars sometimes a planet passes in front if it. We can tell what its' atmosphere is made of based on the wavelengths of light absorbed by it. Aliens as advanced as we are could probably tell theres life on Earth if they caught a glimpse of us. An alien advanced enough to detect the fluorinated gasses in our atmosphere would know we're here and be able to guess how advanced we are. Fluorinated gasses have been in our atmosphere for almost 100 years.
Really love David Kipping. He have so great voice and interesting thoughts. Thank you for all the time and effort you and your team put into making these videos.
So "Grabby Aliens" are basically like the Reapers from the Mass Effect video game? They essentially farm civilizations in the galaxy, because they are AI designed to preserve intelligent life. They basically leave a massive space station for other civilizations to discover. Then the civilizations start basing their tech on what they find at the station. They eventually get to a point that it trips some sort of ruins telling the Reapers to come back from deep space, while at the same time transforming life that comes into contact with the artifacts and controlling them. They essentially start purging civilizations above a certain threshold and store their species like a butterfly collection and integrating it as a new reaper vessel. There are also the Brethren Moons from Dead Space. Who seem to not really do the integration thing, but they do leave a marker that kick starts intelligence allowing civilizations to grow. It then causes life to go insane and on a rampage. This is so that it can accumulate biomass(doesn't matter if it is alive or dead) to eventually create another Brethren Moon.
I was very upset that i had to scroll this far to find someone else mentioning the Reapers here. This was exactly what i thought about and found it very intriguing, though not particularly convincing for me to believe in this theory
@@Eden_jasper to be honest. Pretty close. When any species evolves tech follows. As tech advances two things inevitably follow. Artificial intelligence and fear. As the organic species grows in advancement and complexity so too does their capacity for destruction and the ease with which it occurs. Eventually factions will react out of extreme paranoia and fear as technology continues to advance further and further eventually getting to where the weapons of choice for interplanetary warfare is lobbing black holes at each other. Once a species reaches that point the Artificially intelligent beings will deduce that the most appropiate action to continue lifes sustainment is to remove the advanced sapient races. Quite sad that it happens everytime though.
Right off the bat, I think it's peak human hubris to assume that we'd even see aliens out there to begin with. Just for starters: we're still looking for radio signals, today, despite the fact that In another decade, we ourselves will have undetectable radio signals from earth, thanks to the emergence of directional antennae and (eventually) quantum radio. Secondly, as the inventor of the impulse drive, I know that we'll also not be using rockets for much longer either. The impulse drive is cold propulsion and shouldn't be detectable at any distance at all. The only noticeable thing may be the reactor powering the drive, but in 20 to 30 years, we'll probably be able to shield it so well it also becomes undetectable. So, in other words, the whole Fermi "Paradox" is based on aliens having outdated and noisy technology from 1960's Earth, to even be considered seriously.
I feel there is also a thing about (philosophical) Copernician principle that leaves me uneasy: asking "why are we not living trillion years into the future" is ought to have some prior like "I am a random person (human? thinking observer??) in this universe". Why are we using this prior and not something else? - after all it leads to all kinds of weird paradoxes, like Doomsday argument - which is so evidently false that it probably should disqualify the entire line of reasoning that leads to this outcomes... If you refuse to use this prior, then, evidently, there is not much to resolve. (another way of seeing this is observing that surely the first civilization to appear will see the picture similar to us - and, using Copernician principle, will fail; there is not much consolation in knowing that unknown amount of aliens in other situations will use this "logic" correctly)
Although I am not sold on "Grabby Aliens", couldn't there be expanding civilizations out there that we simply cannot see because their arriving photons are simply too old? Meaning, the light reaching us from deep distant space might be from _BEFORE_ they began expanding. And thus, in reality (i.e., now), the could have immense structures and vast colonies whose light won't reach our detectors for millennia. Is that possible, Professor?
Due to the accelerated expansion of hte universe, parts of the universe are already beyond our horizon. We will never be able to observe civilizations in those areas of the universe. And in the far future essentially all galaxies except our own will be beyond this horizon.
Thank you for taking a moment to praise/talk about Hanson's work! I like how you've also mentioned that you actually spoke to him before making this video so that it doesn't sound like you're just roasting (ok, just arguing) with him.
For me, the answer seems simple. I bet no aliens colonize the galaxy because of two factors. 1. Financial incentives are damned. 2. Communication essentially severs the species into two separate factions. What good is collecting resources if it takes you 60 years to collect them and or bring them back "home"? If it takes 20 years for one way messaging you might as well be severed from the home planet. If a species splinters itself to colonize the galaxy, who actually benefits from it? The species doesn't benefit from it because nothing can be shared fast enough to make it beneficial.
Your assuming there is no was to communicate instantly or travel in ways we can't now. Look in to quantum entanglement just as one example. It's like people 500 years ago not believeing people could possibly communicate from one continent to another instantly. Bur they had no concept of a telephone or Internet. You couldn't travel 100 miles in a hour because no concept of a car or aircraft
@@blakecrosby5123 you make a good point. Which also means if that kind of communication is viable then we should be seeing the galaxy colonized. It's not and it's probably because that form of communication actually doesn't work. It would be great if it did though..
I would like to mention that combustion isn't the only form of heat that could be used as an early tool. For example, on those ocean planets, there could be hydrothermal vents similar to the ones on earth that organisms on that planet could learn to harness for energy, no light or fire needed. There are also an uncountable amount of exoplanets that don't orbit stars, so it's possible that we just can't see alien life because the vast majority of extraterrestrial species don't rely on light for communication and, if they were trying to contact us, wouldn't understand why we can't recognize their methods.
Videos like this make me think about millions or billions of years from now, some alien species will come upon earth {if it even still exists) and it will be a desolate wasteland, and they will dig up our ancient ruins. The future is scary to think about
Along those lines, what is the longest lasting relic we could manufacture? And how do we make it easy to find and unlikely to be destroyed by impact or exploding star?
@masterSageHarpuia i'd be of the idea that constructing a pyramid out of hardened and very dense metals waurd be an obvious sign of "intelligent species was here". A pyramid's shape would remain recognizable for hundreds of thousands of years, even after erosion - and if materials are selected correctly, you can create something nobody could mistake for a natural folmation
@@CoolWorldsLab We did. A long time ago. Then we did it again with Rushmore. At least they'll know what we looked like instead of having to figure out what the daym pyramids were about.
What these theories try to predict is so out there from our understanding. Whats frustrating is a lot of these predictions assume all life is smilar to human life. Which we can see isn't true on our own planet
11:23 I really don’t understand why the grabby alien theory requires the hard steps model to be true, if we are the first to emerge at least in our observable region of space
I'm not sure why, but I absolutely LOATHE the word "grabby"! ESPECIALLY in THIS context (which is the only context I've seen the word, lol). It's like it was made by someone too stupid to understand the word "expansionist" or something similar!
hi there, this is my first time visiting the channel, and i just subscribed. i don't see many 'academics' on youtube (with large subscriber counts - yours is approaching 1M soon!), so this is refreshing. i love the way you grab material from other sources (e.g. movies and other youtube channels) and then reference them with a watermark - i think this is a great practice! i like how you have done your own academic peer-reviewed research and have shared it with others, whilst also appearing approachable and 'human' in your presentation of the science. i am looking forward to watching more of your content :)
16:30 There is a way of falsifying grabby aliens with regards to expansion speed - if you can prove that there is an insurmountable cap to the expansion speed that is sufficiently slower than the speed of light, the grabby aliens hypothesis struggles to match the data. If you argue that this is impossible to prove, then your own alternative hypothesis (that aliens simply do not expand in that manner) is also impossible to prove.
The fact that the Grabby Aliens hypothesis uses advanced civilizations with presumably quintillions upon quintillions of individual members actually makes the problem it's trying to explain worse. If the future is populated by so much more consciousness, why do we find ourselves living in a time of relatively extremely scarce consciousness in the universe?
Not a comment on the idea but as a general comment on the timescales in question. Could it not be the case that alien civilisations of immense magnitudes may or may not have evolved but simply due to the distance/time involved, any evidence of their potential varied existences could simply have become consumed by the general process of the galaxies, galactic structures and the like doing what they do over time. A lot of the discussion feels a bit overly relativistic to the perception of time from the perspective of earth or our galaxy. If a civilisation or millions of civilisations arose and even spread across entire galaxies, they could very well exist without ever being aware of each other. In a very real sense most of the universe exists within pockets of information voids, since the distances involved are further/longer than the the observable universe has assumed to have been around. Even an entire galaxy is only ever privy to a small subsect of light from the greater regions of space. There's just so much information that is fundamentally impossible, under the current model of space time, for a region to collect and observe. As though we are commenting on the deepest depths of the ocean by shoving our heads in a bathtub.
If you lived two thousand years in the past in where New York will be I don't think you would find it weird that you don't see 8 million people already. It might just be a matter of "having babies and increasing the population takes quite a while"
First video I’ve seen, and I’m impressed! I love how respectful you are of this odd theory and the man who postulated it. You even talked to him about your criticisms of his theory before you released your video. This was a very interesting video, and I appreciate your highly informative and intelligent remarks. I can’t wait to explore your other videos, and thank you for this one!
I feel like Star Wars saying "A long Time Ago" each time the intro text rolls by is meaning stuff happened in some previous Universe where loads of time has already gone by. It'll be filled someday, but we'll be lonely for a while.
I just don't think we can really impart many if not any human characteristics on aliens, their mind would not evolve like ours, their bodies wouldn't have evolved like ours. So I think it's actually rather strange that we would assume that alien life would look and think anything like us
@@dutchmansmine9053 again that is carbon based lifeforms on earth who all share DNA and common characteristics there is no reason to assume aliens will have bones, nerves, skin or muscle and not some totally alien and unfathomable way of being I think the odds of it looking, acting or thinking like anything we see on earth are nearly impossible this is to say the biggest weakness of the human mind is the inability to think of new things, we always modify or adapt already existing concepts and apply that outwards, it works well for earth but not imagining alien life
This doesn't even sound like a new theory. It sounds like just a combination of the Great Filter and the Dark Forest theories, and neither of those require a certain psychology on other alien life
I think the question "why don't we live a trillion years from now around a red star?" is irrelevant to why we don't see evidence of aliens today. The universe could be teeming with life, including intelligent, technological civilizations, but our ability to detect any sign of it is so limited that it's weird to even be wondering why we haven't detected it yet. Of course we can't. The circumstances required for us to _detect_ life or civilization is probably a far worse statistical bottleneck. It would be an absolute fluke if we did. The farther away we can look, the less detail we see _and_ the farther back in time we see. We can only look at a certain window into the history of any place. So even if there's a civilization identical to ours out there in terms of its timeline, it would be completely undetectable to us more than say 200 light years away. That's a tiny distance on the scale of the universe, but any farther back in that planet's history its civilization wouldn't have produced enough environmental change for us to detect anything other than an atmosphere that _possibly_ harbors life of some kind. Why haven't we seen planets like that? Because the methods we use to detect planets around other stars are not really capable of that. That's why the only rocky planets we see are usually "super earths" with a huge mass, and why the planets we detect are usually whipping around their star with an orbit of days or hours. That's what we can detect. Small terrestrial planets in a slow, stable orbit, that don't noticeably perturb or eclipse their parent star? They might as well be invisible. They might be extremely common, but we don't have a way to know that right now. Also, what are we looking for? Someone like us, about our size, who makes gadgets out of metals and polymers, whose technological processes produce detectable chemical signatures like ours do, and whose life unfolds over a timescale similar to our own? Maybe that's not who is out there in our window of detection. I mean, think about how different we are from every other living thing on Earth, and consider that every living thing on Earth is more closely related to us than any other life form out in the universe. We might just not know what we were looking at, or what we're looking for, as signs of its presence, or signs that it has developed its version of technology. We're probably not going to detect "aliens" until they get here. And even then we might not. We're certainly capable of observing other creatures undetected if we want to, so why couldn't they? I think it's just fundamentally arrogant to think that just because we have some great telescopes, that we should have detected other "people" by now and maybe it means we're alone in the universe, or are superlative in some way like, we're the FIRST. Jeez, we JUST STARTED looking for life on Mars, one of our very nearest rocks, and we're still not sure if we've found any. WHY should we expect to be reliably detecting it any farther away already? Also, it took five billion years on our planet to get to us modern humans, but the random events that led to us aren't on a time limit. A planet doesn't have to exist for three billion years before complex life forms, or have 300 million years of reptile-brained thunderlizards that die in a cataclysm before cleverer rodents can spread out to fill their ecological niches, and so on. Creating THE SAME TIMELINE for how long any other planet takes for the emergence of intelligent life is absurd. And then, if you throw that model away, and assume that any time after the development of complex life, it might only be a few hundred million years worth of evolutionary changes to reach our level of intelligence, you have to guess there could be alien civilizations from a billion years ago or more. If they survived and continued to thrive, how far would their technology advance in that time? Would we even be able to identify their lives or technology if we saw them? If they didn't survive, what traces would they have left of their existence that would still be detectable today? "Why haven't we seen aliens?" It's an interesting question, but the actual answer is disappointingly simple. It would be a miraculous coincidence for us to have seen them yet, even if they live around half the stars in the cosmos. We're not really technologically capable of it yet.
Yup, we're just not that advanced. On top of that, it also makes us much less interesting to visit for aliens.What would a hyper advanced species even gain from visiting a species that are equivalent to amoebas in their evolutionary timeline?
I have this joke thought I like to pull out at times like this: We failed to discover Zorg, and without that knowledge we can't develop nth dimensional communication. Alien life doesn't see this as a bad thing, for whom wants to interact with someone who can't find Zorg?! The core of this joke is still something to keep in mind: Why do we assume other's will use our dominate communication technology? What if they did have access to some technology that we have already missed....
They are called spectral type M luminosity class V (i.e. main sequence stars.) Astrophysicists usually call them "red dwarfs" since all main sequence stars are called dwarfs. Betelgeuse is also a spectral type M star however its luminosity class is 1a-1b (i.e. a supergiant.)
For me, your point on grabby aliens not happening for "whatever reason" is the answer here. And the reason actually seems pretty obvious to me ... being a "grabby alien" species isn't possible because the path to it - ie, the path of continual growth, continual expansion, etc - is actually the great filter that Fermi postulates. Especially in today's perspective, it seems kind of obvious to me that being an "invasive species" which is what grabby alien amounts to, isn't something that is sustainable over millions or billions of years, and intelligent species either change their ways to a more sustainable, but quieter, more contained existence, or they die trying to become "grabby". We are very much already grabby on the planetary scale, but we've only REALLY been that way for ~10k-20k years and it's already going badly for us in many ways like climate change and pollution, economic disparities and social divisions. We have made tons of progress since, say, Gobleki Tepe, but that progress has come with potentially world-ending problems. And we haven't even STARTED to expand off our planet yet. So ya, it seems (to me at least) that very likely that the Great Filter is actually being an invasive, grabby species (like we are right now). Those species, when they evolve as we did, either manage to change their ways, or kill themselves off long before they are advanced enough to be grabby beyond their own system, or maybe a few light years.
A future which doesn't include expanding out to other stars and planets is also not sustainable. We have a mere 500 million or so years before the sun becomes hot enough to boil away our oceans. If intelligent life really is as astonishingly rare as seems to be implied by ideas like grabby aliens, we may be the only chance for life to continue existing in our galaxy for most of its lifetime
Just to be devils advocate, this makes sense if the universe has a limited size, but if it is larger or infinitely sized, odds will not be zero that this can't happen. If the universe is infinite, then it is possible for all sorts of unlikely scenarios to actually eventually happen, given enough chances.
@@chrisblacklock9468 Agreed here, but probably still unlikely within the confines of our finite observable universe, so effectively grand Type-III civs outside of 2x that size will never be known to us ... unless we are also assuming there's a workaround to the speed of light limit. It really depends on how "hard" of a filter being a grabby alien might be. To be fair, I have no idea, but I'm basing it on the notion that we are ALREADY doing more than one thing that potentially threatens to end our existence, so it doesn't feel like it scales much farther than this. I have a feeling this could be a pretty "hard filter" ...
One of the biggest and silliest problems with these types of theories is the core foundational assumption of what 'civilization' looks like... They assume what technological progress is, ignoring our own history. Humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years as foragers. And our ancestors that still had close to human intelligence lived like foragers for millions of years. Our current way of living is basically a fluke. People farmed before, but it was only due to climate changing into a warmer and more stable climate around 10k years ago that we were able to do large scale farming and also made foraging harder. This fluke lead to a lot of pros and cons, one of which is the need to stay in one place for an extended amount of time and thus extract, use, and stockpile resources. Thus our entire 'development' was largely thanks to a fairly unpredictable geological event. Thus its FAR more likely that any aliens that exist are something like foragers and may not ever have the chance to contemplate building
We don't live around an M-dwarf right now for a very obvious reason: the time it takes for evolution to result in civilization is going to be significantly longer on planets with less energy. If they ever reach civilization at all.
Are we just gonna handwave the fact that galactic conquest requires either vast amounts of time or break the laws of physics. Seems more likely that humanity will never come in direct contact with alien life.
A couple million years at sublight speeds. If I remember at current human speeds which seems quite amazing if you think about it. Still, there's no reason to think their development would happen at around the same time as ours. The size of the milky way is 100000 light years. There just needs to be one highly visible civilization within the timeframe of such. That is nothing on cosmic scales.
@eldestfan101 Current technology is a constantly increasing concept. It's not relevant to what we can do next century let alone a thousand years from now or a million. With technology we know for a fact is possible we can do it.
The galaxy has existed for "vast amounts of time", sufficiently for advanced civilizations to have risen before us and reached the spacefaring stage at astronomical scales by now; hence the Fermi Paradox.
I like that most people just assume FTL or near the speed of light travel MUST exist instead of the far more obvious conclusion that it's impossible and therefore exceedingly unlikely that any alien civilizations will ever make contact with eachother
Why do we assume that that the aliens would make contact with us? Why do we assume we'd be able to see evidence of them in a basically infinite universe? We can only observe a tiny fraction of the universe. We're so incredibly arrogant to think we should be able to see them. There's no paradox.
An expansionist alien civilization that has been around for millions of years would inevitably populate most of our galaxy. Even if they weren't expansionist if they are in our galaxy and advanced enough hiding would be tricky since the energy costs would mean they would likely be capturing much of their sunlight via Dyson sphere.
@@tree_eats because there are over a 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. Assuming at least a fraction of those stars have a planet in their habitable zone that's potentially millions of chances for life to develop over the course of several billion years.
if this was a topic on any other channel, *“Respectfully”* this would have not been a video to watch. Honestly, I almost didn’t think to give this video’s topic something worthy of my attention, however *every* video produced from this channel always involves something rare in the non-academia society where the mindset of the uninitiated individual to invoke a form of logical & rational thought process within the eternal pursuit of understanding true knowledge. So thank you for this and a my second mind to watch
For all those commenting that space is really big - Look up Von Neumann probes: "It has been theorized[3] that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years."
My biggest issue with the Grabby Aliens concept is that even if aliens can travel at near-luminal speeds, that doesn't mean they can colonize and terraform planets that quickly. Given that "changing their environment" is a fundamental pillar of the concept too, we can't really just say Grabby Aliens exist as a super-fleet of near-light-speed explorers. This really only leaves the possibility then that not only are these grabby aliens travelling at near light-speed, but they're able to completely, "obviously" terraform or otherwise change whatever system they're in virtually instantly as well. If not, they would zip to a new planet, settle down, and take a few thousand years to change it, so the signs of their expansion would have thousands of years' head start and this is PER PLANET. Even a "small" grabby empire of a few hundred planets would have tens of thousands of years of "broadcasting" their planetary changes before they would even have the need to continue expanding. Yeah, no matter how you skin it, this concept really just makes zero functional sense. Edit: and I know that a civilization wouldn't be limited to settling each system sequentially, but they would be limited by population, resources, and industrial capacity. I imagine their growth rate would increase exponentially with each new planet, but that would just mean "hey we can zip around and colonize 10 planets over the next few thousand years rather than 1-2." But yeah, there's no reason to think light speed travel speeds would correlate to pure magic levels of planetary engineering, and certainly not at first. So even if a civilization could become, like, "The Forerunners" from Halo level advanced, they wouldn't start that way, so the signs of their earliest, slowest, "grabby" efforts would predate their "forerunner" stage by... unimaginably long amounts of time. So yeah, this theory only really makes sense if you argue that aliens can go from single-planetary space faring to Forerunner-level god-level technology levels in... like, a few years. In other terms, it would be like going from a Type 1 Civilization (still relatively hard to detect in the vastness of space), to a Type 2.5 ish civilization within a few years. Honestly, if the theory suggested Grabby Aliens had true super-luminal drives, so they could "catch up" to their previously-sent light/any signs of their civilization, this would almost make sense. But when you almost need "hyper drive" technology as a prerequisite for your theory on interstellar species... it might not be the most robust theory.
I feel like a lot of people forget how big the universe is. It's not like "Oh, there's lights in the distance there's people there." Except the universe is so big we won't be able to see beyond what the laws of physics lets us see. Like just because we can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Observable universe vs actual universe size. On top of that, they act like aliens are smarter than us and will have figured out faster than light travel as well as being able to make dyson spheres and so on, when in reality they're probably just as limited in intelligence than us. And even if they're 10 times smarter, that doesn't mean they can just disregard physics and will be a giant galactic force like scifi stories show them as. With that all being said, aliens aren't always going to be like us, There is assuredly aliens who will just be animals roaming a planet. There is 100% aliens out there, but we'll never see them with how big the universe is, ontop of the hurdles we will have to over come, and what they'll need to overcome.
The best solution to the Fermi paradox was by a guy running for president in 2000 as an alternative candidate. He said aliens just evolved into another dimension like the movie Her and they no longer inhabit this reality. Another really interesting theory I recently came across is ultra-terrestrials. Those are fairies/djinns/gods/angels/demons who co-evolved with humans but are much more advanced and have complete control over physical reality and exist in another dimension/reality. They apparently like to play tricks on people and perform psy-ops on humans. There are hundreds of detailed UFO encounters even before flying craft I was not even aware of, and they present as sailing ships, dirigibles, giant worms, and recently saucers. After the Navy videos I believed aliens exist but was grateful they mostly leave us alone. Now I believe they just mess with us for their amusement and are practically 'ghosts'. They may even act as an 'immune system' to actual physical 'grabby aliens'.
Of all the solutions, dark forest makes most sense. Even if something else turns out to be a solution to the Fermi Paradox, dark forest is still inevitable condition that requires its own solution, one of which might be interdiction hypothesis.
I'm partial to the theory that humans are early to the advanced sapience stage. We're *incredibly* early in the timeline of the universe (on a cosmic scale) and it makes sense to me that we might just have hit whatever low-but-not-zero chance at being one of the first advanced sapiences. If not in the universe, than at least in our detectable region of the universe.
A couple of points. Firstly the laws of physics make it unlikely that Grabby Aliens can travel near light speed. Secondly assuming they are a long distance away ( civilisations are rare so this is likely) the expansion of the universe may make it impossible for them to get close to any rate civilisations or emerging ones.
Came up with my own answer with Chatgpt called the Contentment Hypothesis. Suggesting that intelligent beings eventually create technology that helps them replace their biology, leading to immortality. They would enhance their intelligence with superintelligence, reaching a state of godhood-immortal and omnipotent. It would be the synthesis of a biological being, an artificial intelligence, and replicating solar powered nanites. Once their goals of immortality, omnipotence, energy absorption, and contentment are achieved, they would have no need to conquer or explore, which could explain why we don't see aliens-they might be content staying close to a long-lasting star, no need to travel if you have everything and can experience anything.
The metalicity of the Universe was not high enough to create Earth-like rocky planets until it was ~8B years old¹. Our solar system formed 1.3B years after that. ¹Per Isaac Arthur.
Thanks for watching and thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video. Download unlimited stock media at one set price with Storyblocks at storyblocks.com/CoolWorlds Let me know what you think about the Grabby Aliens video down below. A question I see some of you asking is about the self-sampling issue. It's important to remember that it's a probabilistic statement and certainly doesn't guarantee validity. If I claim I'm in the middle 90th percentile of all humans who ever lived, I can only do so to 90% confidence - which means 10% of the time I am wrong. A much more subtle issue is about which beings qualify as human to begin with, does homo erectus count? Does an advanced cyborg count? These are difficult questions and perhaps deserve their own video in the future.
UPDATE Sep 1st: Robin Hanson has posted a response to this video on his blog, please do check it out: www.overcomingbias.com/p/kipping-on-grabby-aliens
@CoolWorldsLab Could a form of life that isn't based on chemistry using an atmosphere evolve on a planet like Mercury? Given enough time and the huge number of worlds close to their high radiation stars, you would think something would evolve that uses that radiation that would kill us as its food source. Could the solution be that the vast majority of aliens live on worlds that are so different from ours that they consider ours as a frozen, barren wasteland? I know, I have no evidence to support this wild conjecture. Yet, it seems plausible to me.
You mention that some planets could remain viable for the development of life for trillions of years, and while that may be true if you only look at the star, I think you may be neglecting the planet itself. I'm a bit rusty on the details, but water and carbon are cycled tectonically. and vulcanism is constantly releasing gas including nitrogen which offsets atmosphere erosion(memory is fuzzy on if this is meaningful for earth or not, but over a trillion years bleed will add up); iirc the earth only has about a billion years left before plate tectonics shuts down and meaningful vulcanism will peter out some time after that; even with an orange sun, or a red dwarf that skips the turbulent planet-atmosphere-stripping phase, life is on the clock if it's to develop civilization.
(there's also the more speculative question of how life changed the primordial atmosphere and if the sun's shorter lifespan with it's gradually getting brighter over time was necessary to keep the planet from getting locked into life-induced snowballs alternating with slow volcanically driven thaws that would limit the complexity of life that could develop before the interior cools. Atmosphere plays a huge role in surface temperature, of course, and life alters the atmosphere in major ways; it could be that stars have to warm at a rate within a certain range in order for a planet that is the right temperature for life to really get going(not just confined to volcanic vents/etc but to have the large scale nutrient and energy availability to thrive) to remain the right temperature for complex life to develop before the geological clock runs out), which if true would confine complex life to stars with a certain range of lifespans - presumably similar to the sun.
A larger planet with more residual heat would remain active longer, but of course we can only speculate what other issues that may tend to bring with it. The greater mass and initial volcanism seems likely to cause it's own issues, from increased potential to end up like Venus to, well, the Great Dying wasn't the only mass extinction that involved flood basalts(microbial life is near certain to survive unless it's bad enough to boil the planet under the eventually-warmer sun, but if you keep resetting the clock on life it wastes a lot of the extra time that size bought you). There's potentially a range of viable planet and star masses for the evolution of complex life (can you tell I lean towards Rare Earth ?).
Once again there is no Fermi paradox lol kiddo you don't watch news do you or see the thousands of videos of ufos or uap as the government calls them
The chuck Schumer amendment calls for transparency on what they call non human intelligence, it is well known by smart people that the US government has a crash retrieval program that has recovered non human technology and craft .. this is a established fact and when you have so many high ranking military and intelligence officials claiming that uap ufos are real and we have recovered their craft and bodies and especially lately have come out yet you and other so called scientist and your bias is only going to make you an example in history as what is wrong with bias science... please save your name and actually do the research and pay attention. Don't you see most of humanity see the truth so most people don't have your ignorance
. Why your so popular is unfortunate because many but not most thankfully..follow you and buy into your ignorance. When it comes to aliens your ignorant your absolutely wrong without doubt since we already know without doubt aliens are real. Here and proven
@@CoolWorldsLab you have a problem with your intelligence.
U've stated many times of ur lack of belief in their existence (here ir out there) without definitive proof so YTF would we want2 here more of ur "speculation" on them? I'm an experiencer that my ex-wife &kids saw (which I'm not suggesting is the said extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence Bcause we no wot we saw) but 2flip that coin..... the extraordinary claims of bein alone in universe requires extraordinary evidence (not the 1data point of earth) that we r alone.
MayB u coukd explain how these UAP vehicles defy phyics 2bac ur argument of their non existence 🤷
Us being "early" might be unexpected or unlikely, but by definition it cannot be impossible: *someone* has to arrive first, and there's no law of physics that actively blocks us from being that someone. As a person whose last name begins with "A", I have a lifetime of experience being the first person in roll-calls, so while it's true that *most* people's names get called somewhere in the middle I'm here to tell you that being called first is not prohibited. The fact we haven't seen civilizations emerge a trillion years from now around m-dwarf stars has less to do with probability than it does with us just not having waited long enough yet.
Yes, someone has to be early and wonder about that earliness. Also being randomly chosen first out of lets say a hundred is no more surprising than being the 85th chosen, even though we psychologically ascribe more relevance to it.
You misunderstand the problem. No one says its impossible, its just not likely.
@@xbox70333I wonder if we only think it’s unlikely because we cannot see everyone else in our class. If my name was Aaron Abby and I was always called first I would know why I’m first in line. It’s the unknowing that drives us crazy. And that we don’t even know what causes us to be first/early in line in the cosmos. I think the point is a good one. It could just as easily be explained that we’re first/early because we’re first/early.
I do, however, like to think about the repercussions of why we’re here. It’s just that I can easily grasp this as an explanation. I could be missing something though. I work in consumer software and not anything is heady as philosophy or science.
It's a matter of probability though, most people using the logic will be correct
I've always thought , in a 14 billion yr. old universe , we are way late to the party. 5 billion years ago, earth wasn't even here, but the universe had been here a while. I don't "buy" the early thing. The actual odds of being first are astronomically small , even more so, when you are late.
Couple of fellas sat around a post-harvest Mesopotamian campfire, 11,000BC, sharing a fermented drink or two.
"I know this agriculture lark seems to be paying off, but I'm fairly certain we're about to die."
"Why's that?"
"Well we've been hunting and gathering for tens of thousands of years now, and we've been farming for a few years. If it's a successful future strategy, what are the chances that we're among the very first few to try it?"
"Good point, especially when you consider that a successful civilisation based on agriculture could support many hundreds of times the population that hunting and gathering does. That makes it even less likely we're amongst the first few to farm. Statistically it seems fairly certain we're about to die."
"Yep."
If everyone did this, a tiny fraction of people (such as these fellas) would be wrong. But the vast majority of people would be correct. The key point about statistical arguments is that they’re not deterministic, sometimes they will be erroneous, but in most cases (whatever confidence interval is employed) they are correct - by construction
Yeah well, it's just a rewritten version of the "what are the probabilities that you'll be first to be called in a lottery?" Problem. The chances of being first are very very small for the vast majority of participants, yet *someone* has got to be the first.
@@CoolWorldsLab I agree with that, and I think the analysis is both fascinating and worthwhile, but I think it's always worth emphasising that the current evidence of our existence is entirely consistent with a whole range of possibilities. That doesn't make it less valid to consider the probability of those possibilities though, and your work is always brilliant when it does this. If I had to bet I'd say that symbiogenesis, or life on Earth becoming multicellular, were locks so hard to pick, the average number of intelligent species per observable universe is < 1. But this is just one possibility among many of those consistent ones, and there's a reason bookmaking is a profitable industry...
@@CoolWorldsLab You are of course correct, but it makes statistical arguments as an explanation also pretty much useless. Statistics are great for predicting, but after the fact the probability function has collapsed, it has no explanatory value to explain why the result we see is in a particular part of the probability distribution.
@@CoolWorldsLab The problem with this line of thinking is that it only makes sense if you're sampling is random, but that's not the case, there since there is only a limited window in which "you" could have been born, since you're parents had to be alive and having kids at that time, and a limited window for each of your parents and so on. So your (individual) time of existence is relatively deterministic rather then being random.
My response to the fermi paradox has always been that space is actually quite big, and our ability to perceive it is miniscule.
It's like finding it wierd that you can't see a tree that's five hours drive away, on a foggy night, without your glasses.
like yeah, we dont even know how many planets there are in our next system over. our detection equipment just isnt sensitive enough to get that kind of information, the idea that we would be able to see an alien civilization if we were pointing a telescope at their star is. well we arent there yet
Also the tree, through some quirk of physics, is projecting an image of the area from before it started growing, thereby even if you COULD see that far you would see an empty field.
Yeah and didnt we only disciver more then 100,000 planets?
Thats a REAL small number at this point
Edit: only 5,000. Thats even smaller then i thought!
Even between all of species on earth, only 1 is sentient, and even if were sentient, weve been progressing slowly for 100,000s of years,
Whos not to say sentient species can progress even slower then we do
And that most alien species arent sentient at all, and is just life?
We're also early as fuck it looks like.
Been saying this for years. There can be tens of thousands of space traveling advanced intelligent species out there concurrent with ourselves... and that would be a fraction of the number of galaxies out there. So less than 1 intelligent species per 1,000 galaxies or more. And with space the size it is, if you get some level of faster than light travel, you are likely to still be limited to your own galaxy. And even IF you happen to on a very slim chance share a galaxy with another concurrent intelligent species, you are still very likely to never run across each other. As for seeing each other through mega-structures... Doubt it as mega structures are very much inefficient. An advanced species would not waste their time on such other than sheer necessity for one for whatever reason. Space can be full of intelligent life. But we are unlikely to even run across one.
My personal take is that if the unobservable universe is super large or infinite, then we're just dealing with a sampling problem. We have no clue about the distribution density of life as a whole in the same way if you lived in the desert and had never seen a jungle, you might well assume the world is largely barren. Aliens might be super abundant in other parts of the universe, whereas our region might well be the cosmic boondocks just based on sheer randomness. Even if you take our own observation bubble as is, the speed of light produces a cosmic picture of a distant past that is vastly different from what things actually look like in the present, and you don't have to travel very far before this becomes a significant problem. Other parts of the galaxy, never mind the universe, could be extantly colonised and we wouldn't know it for millions of years.
the oldest stars in our galaxy are only about 30,000 light years away. if this hypothesis was correct, that these grabber aliens are colonizing at near the speed of light, and have taken at least as long as us to "unlock the doors", they would have been at it for a few billion years by now. we should be well inside that colonizing bubble.
Our galaxy contains enough stars (100 billion to 400 billion) that it would be a frankly unbelievable statistical anomaly if the distribution of (intelligent) life here is very different from elsewhere in the universe. Unless (intelligent) life is exceedingly rare, which raises other questions.
@@Fluxquark Plenty of other galaxies have highly active black holes or quasars that pump out 10-factor gigatons of ionising radiation over huge distances, as do typically more violent stars in CME events, all of which can easily sterilise a fertile planet with the potential for life, or at least knock it off any trajectory towards intelligence and an advanced civilisation. As far as I know we haven't even found a single exoplanet with truly Earthlike conditions yet - granted that the telescopes capable of searching for them are still relatively new, but the early results haven't been good. Since we only have a confirmed sample of one, we can already assume that unless we just can't see it beyond our own observation bubble where light takes millions of years to travel from the nearest star, life is already an unbelievable statistical anomaly. That then brings us back to the sampling problem of whether its overall distribution is different elsewhere, which it could be - we've found life in extremely isolated places on Earth, and since we can't see beyond the observable universe we can never be sure that its larger superstructure is exactly the same everywhere.
The great voids really big too
@@alexdenton9176 So you are saying there should be more life here than in other places since we are not near any highly active quasars? The sample is biased in favour of us finding alien life?
Anyways, unless (intelligent) life is so rare that it only occurs a few times per hundred galaxies, we should have a reasonable sample size in our galaxy. Enough stars with planets, many hundreds of millions of which will be in a habitable zone (I think assuming alien life needs the same habitable zone as us is silly). How have the results so far not been good? We immediately found hundreds of exoplanets as soon as we figured out a way to find (certain types of) them. The techniques we have now almost guarantee we won't find any exoplanets like earth but the fact most stars appear to have planets means there are a lot of planets out there.
"Future aliens are why we live in the past" is truly an incoherent idea.
If there are going to be sentient creatures, then someone has to be the first one. Sentient beings a trillion years from now won't be marveling at what a weird coincidence it was for *us* to be born so early.
So if there's a lottery with one-in-a-billion odds of winning, a billion people buy tickets, and one person wins, that's not surprising.
But if there's a lottery with one-in-a-billion odds of winning, only one person buys a ticket, and that person wins, that's very surprising.
We are, as far as our current observational ability is concerned, in the second situation. We can only see one lottery ticket, and it happens to be the winning one. It is of course possible that we are just very lucky, and I don't think anybody discussing the topic is dismissing that possibility outright. It's just that the odds of it are, y'know, one in a billion. So in effect the probability is 0.999999 that something else is going on -- that our assumption of a fair one-in-a-billion lottery is wrong somehow.
That's my main problem with the entire concept, and probably why I haven't ever heard of this idea aside from on UA-cam. It's such a weird misinterpretation (or perhaps over-reliance) of the Copernican principle that I don't even know where to start with explaining why it doesn't make sense. Makes me think of the saying "You're not right. You're not even wrong."
@@thecosmickid8025 But what would could as a ticket with that metaphor? is it every star? every planet? When we start looking at just stars we see so many tickets that us having gotten a winning one isn't so strange.
@@JaneDoe-dg1gv The ticket in this metaphor would be a civilization. The winning ticket is the first one.
Cards on the table, I am extremely skeptical of this kind of logic too. I'm just trying to give it the fairest hearing possible, and "this is just nonsense" doesn't strike me as a satisfactory refutation.
@@thecosmickid8025 It really couldn't be civilizations as tickets because a winning ticket is to have civilization in the first place.
I'm on the Subjective Rarity = time + distance boat.
Let's say every galaxy gets ONE technological civilization. 1. No all civilizations may expand. 2. Not all civilizations last. 3. Not all civilizations that do expand and last make a significant enough mark on their galaxy to be detected from any other galaxy. 4. Not all civilizations that expand, last, or leave a detectable mark have done so long enough ago for that signal to be detectable from any other nearby galaxy, and less so others beyond that. 5. Not all galaxies close enough to detect a detectable signal of a technological civilization have their own technological civilization to even detect a signal. 6. Not all technological civilizations in nearby galaxies that could detect a signal from a neighboring galaxy will exist at a time in their own history where they have the technology to detect that neighboring galaxy civilization signal.
It's a rough progression of nopes. All in all, there could be(and/or eventually) Billions of technological civilizations across the known universe, but, because the vast gulfs of both time and distance between galaxies, no civilization may ever exist at a time and distance such they may detect/observe even one other civilization in another galaxy.
Let's pretend there's a mirror "Earth" in our neighboring galaxy Andromeda. They're 2.5 Million years away from us, so, unless they've developed a space-faring civilization of significant enough impact to be detectable 2.5 Million years ago, before us, we're not going to see anything. If they're on the same level we are now, We to them and them to us are functionally nonexistent until about 2.5 Million years from now when our respective detectable signals reach us and/or them ... if anyone is still around to even detect either.
Assuming that aliens would even have such a thing as civilization. Which is a pretty big assumption. Humans can only understand human concpets just like ants can only understand ant concepts. Flip that around to where we're the ants and aliens are the humans, we wouldn't even be capable of understanding them or even understanding their siginificance. They would be so far beyond our conprehension to the point that the concept of "aliens" (a human concept) would be completely meaningless.
Very succinct observations, which I happen to agree with. If we look at the timeline of life on Earth and the extremely recent emergence of human technology, life could be abundant but advanced civilization even rarer than one per galaxy throughout all time. -For example, could octopuses create the sort of science that humans have if they lived on an ocean planet?- What if procaryotes selectively made an atmosphere more hostile to eukaryotes development rather than accommodating? Could advanced civilization emerge on a planet that had no predation driving evolution?
As for grabby aliens, we haven’t developed any technology that would support practical interstellar travel. It just might be an impossible feat given the fragility of life and the intense energy required and the limitations of material properties.
[Edit] Dang it, I paused to read comments too early and he actually mentions the aquatic world limitation at 14:09
Wrong. Humans can only understand human concepts. Civilization is a human concept. We would not be able to comprehend true "aliens"
@@blacksmith67 - it's very doubtful any species of anything, no matter how "intelligent" that lives on a water planet that's ONLY a water planet with no land masses could ever develop much by way of technology because fire, and the control of it is one of those important steps, as well as a very important tool in the tool bag of technological civilization.
A water-world civilization could have "technology" in the sense that we differentiate between types of stone tool technologies like Oldowan and Acheulean. Also, as to fire, a water-locked species could, arguably employ active underwater volcanoes for some rudiments of crafting with fire, but, we have some very real very smart bird species here on Earth that capitalize on brush fires to pick up burning brush, burning branches, and other burning material to actively spread the fire because they've learned brush fires create some free cooked meals, plus it can drive insects, lizards, and other prey out to easier hunting. We've birds that even make and use tools; The Caldonian crow for instance.
As to going interstellar, it's less complicated than many think. We could hollow out large asteroids to create rotating habitats as a byproduct of asteroid mining, and all that work could be done by AI-managed mining drone swarms in space.
It'd take a mere 100 years to finish one project with internal land mass equivalent to France. Such large habitats could house millions of people, as well as a complete self sustaining sustainable ecosystem of lakes, river systems, full-sized mountains, and even atmospheric depth up to the central axis of spin roughly equivalent to Earth's atmosphere and that would allow for natural weather systems for such bottled worlds.
Having a self sustaining sustainable system inside a sectioned and nested multi-levelled world in a bottle squashes most of the problems with space ships. The hardest part would be bolting engines on, and the slow, slow slow sllooooow nudging of such a huge object into slingshot passes at planets around our solar system until it's gained enough momentum to achieve solar system escape velocity. THAT would probably take another 100 years just to build up enough speed.
Most humans, however are too short-sighted, corrupt and personally self-interested in power and wealth to invest in such long-term projects that would take several generations to complete, although most of it could be done by AI workforces at very little energy or monetary cost since building such structures could be almost a waste-product of asteroid mining.
Travelling the stars in this way would likely be one of the more sensible because any destination does not need to be "habitable", or have a planet that's a good candidate for terraforming. Any system visited would only need to have the raw material to build more large rotating habitats, as well as adding to/remodeling/repairing the original structure.
It could all be done with technology available today, except we're not exactly "there" yet for space-based mining bot swarms managed by AI that can be put to work and forgotten.
An alternative method of travelling is significantly more spooky science fiction fantasy where we have only the very rudiments of the beginnings of the technologies that could make this happen, but, this alternative would be to send sophisticated AI 3D printers everywhere, and once they arrive, using whatever transmission technologies we have available, we could then (if the technology exists) transmit the digitized consciousness of travelers to the 3D printers on far far away worlds and places, and for them, the travel would be instant, with no requirement for food, life support systems, or any other bothersome stuff meant to protect and sustain life travelling across the stars. Once the traveler consciousness arrives, they print a body that's already pre-adapted for the local environment from local materials without fear of contaminating anything, and they go explore. Of course, this would require several very spooky technologies we only have the very beginnings of, so, it's a thing that might not ever happen. Travelling and exploring without spaceships, using 3D printers would, however, solve a LOT of problems. :)
@@konstantinavalentina3850 Thank you for the long and thoughtful response. I have thought of asteroids as an interstellar vehicle, but the cost of energy to make it possible would be enormous. We have put things in space at enormous cost, and even though the cost has dropped significantly it’s still around $25000 per kilogram. Assume that we can do that for 1 percent of that cost, and we are still looking at trillions of dollars to start a project with no immediate financial return and zero reward for anyone currently living. I absolutely agree that we could do it, but humans would have to change our ways of thinking drastically. It would be actually easier to convince everyone to save the environment here on Earth.
The mere thought of being born into a relatively early universe is both inspiring and horrifying. We could spend our whole existence improving technology to such incredible depths, yet continue drawing conclusive evidence that alien civilizations just aren't out there, or aren't visible.
And we'll still keep looking out there anyway, because the search is what drives us in the first place.
Eventually we'd split into countless sub species both organic and cybernetic.
I dont agree with that we are born specifically into an early universe. Or i mean i do agree we are early, but it has no meaning because whatever time you pick there is always infinite time that comes after so pick whatever point in time and it will be early. 1000 years is early. 13 billion years is early. 100 googol years is early.
@@RonBestGood point!
@@RonBest no infinite time, while the universe may be limitless in time each star has a limited lifespan, the stelliferous era (star forming period) is also finite so the timescale is limited for the evolution of both stars and any putative life around them.
I do think it's neat to suppose that we are the ancient aliens, that someone in the future will look upon what we leave behind in the manner that we look upon Stonehenge or the Pyramids or the Antikythera mechanism.
One thing that I notice about Grabby Aliens is that it's very appealing. We want a universe that looks like Star Trek. The answers to the fermi paradox mostly boil down to either life can't colonize the galaxy (which kills a lot of fun SF, so that's no fun), or that there is no aliens (which feels unlikely, and also kills a lot of SF, so that's no fun). Grabby Aliens invokes suggests aliens are roughly at our level of development, and that we're all equally vying for a cool, galaxy-spanning empire and a vibrant, interstellar future that also has interesting aliens. That's fun SF! So, people find it appealing. This is not to comment on the validity of the theory! But why I think it became so popular.
It's not about cool, it's just what life does. It keeps on existing and the way to keep on existing is to expand. If life stays in one place, stagnant, it will disappear. So expanding life keeps on existing. And that us, that's the life that exists today. If we won't expand, we will disappear. If there is a life out there that will expand, it will inherit the universe.
Ever play an rts or halo? If those aliens out macro us and tech up faster or rush us before our macro has paid off we lose. Now imagine a giant free for all where one faction snowballs by beating every other faction and claiming their troops and resources, you get the covenant from halo. lol I would not call that fun just go play halo reach and see how that ends.
By the way, theories are never described as valid or invalid, only arguments are.
Grabby aliens is much the same as the "boring" no aliens case. It suggests we're alone in our galaxy and all nearby galaxies
Just because you said Star Trek just before I read Ferengi Paradox instead of Fermi 😅
One little thing that always sticks in my mind when I think about this is that life on Earth actually very nearly ended during the Permian mass extinction. This is the time before the time before the dinosaurs, when terrestrial vertebrates were dominating the earth for the very first time (and the dominant animals were actually proto-mammals rather than reptiles), and it very nearly all ended right then and there. Its always seemed like just another one of those locks we were lucky to slip through. Just a bit more vulcanism and our ancestors might've perished before they even had a chance.
Plot twist: We're the first grabby aliens.
And if so, given our current course of grabbing resources and converting them into pollutants, we won't be grabbing much beyond this fragile sphere.
😮😂
It's the reason we need the ending of Raised by Wolves. I have bets that was the target main plot to-be-revealed
@Charles-Darwin man was I upset with the second season, the new producers totally dropped the balm on that show. Season 1 was amazing
@@astyanax905 warner got all mythraic on us, realizing the show would make them look bad 😆
My take on this "where are the aliens" hypothesis is simply the vast area of space. Space is huge and all. Maybe there are life way far away from us to pick up with any instrument. Maybe there is something preventing lifes from being too close to each other?
Hot take here but I think the aliens purposely ended their existence.
There doesn't even need to really be something actively keeping life apart, as simple probability will suffice. There's an unfathomable number of planets in our galaxy alone, and the distances between solar systems is just as incomprehensible. Even if 99% of all planets evolved sentient life, the odds any of those two planets would be close enough for one to observe the other is still fractional, because that 1% would still be billions of planets spanning trillions of lightyears.
@@trianglemoebius yeah people often forget how huge the observable universe is. And we still don't know if it even has a limit or not.
Yeah or maybe aliens came here 2 million years ago found these neat bipedal apes that immediately started worshiping them as Gods. So they set up a 30 light year nature reserve around our star system so they wouldn't screwup our evolution.
@@THX..1138 hah! One of my other ideas for this type of theory is that gods were ancient aliens who came to Earth and left, and we are their decesdents or leftover worshippers.
feel like the main philosophical issue with this theory is that its assuming an alien civilization would act similar to the way our human civilization does.
Assuming that there are billions of alien civilizations all, somehow, expanding out in every direction at the speed of light seems like the biggest issue for me. That doesn’t sound like a thing that is possible, let alone reasonable to assume.
That's actually one of the least problematic assumptions. Like us, they must have evolved on a world in which other creatures evolved and they would have evolved to compete for life and resources against those other creatures until, eventually, just like us, they evolved to compete amongst themselves for the available resources and best mates. The laws of differential survival are universal.
I'm still hung up on how most of society believe that if an advanced alien species somehow traveled to our solar system that they'd actually come straight to earth. How heartbroken would humanity really be if said advanced aliens shoot right past earth without even a hello wave and straight to Venus to terraform and settle?
@SmileyEmoji42 except that again presupposes that the environment another life form raises from is even remotely like ours.
Ie: a society of silicon based life forms that use a form of photosynthesis for a caloric energy intake with a sentient hive mind, would develop technology in a vastly different form then us.
Or imagine an alien race that evolved/acted exactly like humans, but their planet has a substance that provided unlimited clean energy available way back in their caveman days. They would never see the need to devlop non-renewable resources for energy.
@@bossredd-77They'd visit Earth to observe propably because life like this is a very rare thing after all. Also, they aren't stupid lmao. They would know to not distrupt humanity as it is currently not ready for such a phenomen. They could contact some individuals they think are interesting as an experiment but we'd shrugg these people off as freaks anyway so and we wont believe them anyway xD
"Its like showing up to a party very first, and you wonder... is there really a party... are other people even coming?"
Of course, given enough time your party will sooner or later have enough people to fill every free square foot.... Even if only 1 in 1 million people want to join your party, given an infinite amount of time, it will still fill up.
The question isn't if there are people coming to the party or not, its if we will have gotten bored and left before the real fun guests show up fashionably late at 2 am
But what if they are on a road that expands faster than the car allows them to get there?
"its like dressing up as a CEO and believing that tomorrow you are going to be rich. Just because your bank account isnt full with money already, doesnt mean it wont any second now" this theory in a nutshell. despite there being no evidence to support any of those claims, the theory just ignores everything and goes on to make its hypothesis.
@@kierhudson1328sounds like you should have had a road trip rather than a party
maybe its impossible to reach the stars, and every civilization just stops at their own doorstep
@@CharIie83 I think it may be feasible to reach ONE star/remote habitable planet.
Given the length of time and investment it would take to accomplish the feat.....I imagine the settlers on the new planet would stop there, and never consider doing it again.
First time I've heard "Grabby Aliens" being called a "solution" to the Fermi Paradox; before this video it has always seemed like it was just a reinforcement of the paradox itself, showing logic leads to concluding we should indeed be seeing clear signs of aliens and yet we don't; in essence, just a more elaborate formulation of "where is everybody?"...
"where is the rent?" - grabby glork from C32LV
It's a solution because of the anthropic principle. At any time and place in the universe where you can look up at the sky and see alien life, you most likely wouldn't evolve to observe it. Because the aliens would have transformed your planet, preventing you from existing to observe them.
the original formulation was "why aren't they already here" as in, they should have colonized the entire galaxy or at least visited the solar system by now, not just that we'd be able to see them "out there"
@@RoyWiggins
Oh and youd never see a species in space because variety and differences are paramount. If a new species can see you theyll just copy you, no spacefaring species will actually ever allow itself to be known also due to the fact slavery between species is quite. Quite. Common. Earth is lucky its small and only evolved one race at a time.
Easy answer.
When any species evolves tech follows. As tech advances two things inevitably follow.
Artificial intelligence and fear.
As the organic species grows in advancement and complexity so too does their capacity for destruction and the ease with which it occurs.
Eventually factions will react out of extreme paranoia and fear as technology continues to advance further and further eventually getting to where the weapons of choice for interplanetary warfare is lobbing black holes at each other.
Once a species reaches that point the Artificially intelligent beings will deduce that the most appropiate action to continue lifes sustainment is to remove the advanced sapient races.
Quite sad that it happens everytime though.
The issue I took with this theory is assuming intentions of lifeforms we haven't found.
Isn't everyone else in the universe exactly like us? Or are we just a planet full of narcissists.
Same here, even amongst human cultures the need for constant expansion isn't even a constant and our modern assumptions that it is comes from a modern post-industrial revolution and colonialism viewpoint.
I already* felt suspicious about this the moment these somehow **``monolithic``** aliens were brought up, and were mainly the focus of such theory from there.
Clearly an obligate sapient species comparable to us from there would already be more individual and complex from each other, even in small communities, so why assume that they would all think the same like a stereotypical hive mind???
Literally all life operates on certain assumptions. No life, for example, can exist without replicating itself. None. All it takes is one lifeform to replicate more than another for the replicator to make the one that doesn't replicate as much irrelevant. On Earth, this sort of thing is 'mitigated' by millions of years of back and forth. An ecosystem balance. When one organism starts to expand too much, they run out of resources, and thus start to die off. Balancing their numbers naturally. Because Earth doesn't have infinite resources.
In space, things are different. All it would take is a single organism, a single alien species, to start expanding indefinitely. They could move on, constantly, but unlike on Earth, with animals and organisms, there is no self-balancing act. These beings would be too smart for that. All resources would be utilized, all. And if one alien species doesn't do it, then they're irrelevant. They do not matter. because while they're twiddling their thumbs, conservatives, the ones who decide to expand WILL expand into their territory, overwhelming them. Period.
This is the core of grabby aliens. Not that we're assuming how ALL aliens behave, but we're looking at how life behaves with near-infinite resources, and then realizing even if ONE out of a million alien species decides to expand, it's over. Everyone else loses.
PBS spacetime goes over why this is reasonable to assume
1. Organisms tend to be expansionist because of natural selection (which applies at cosmic scales as well of course)
2. You only need 1 in a thousand to become expansionist, and the result will be a universe dominated by expansionists, because expansionism grows your numbers and power exponentially. Example: Imperialist countries in the past.
I like your videos. You don't blow smoke or try to provide false hope. But you're very thought provoking and your voice is so relaxing.
He also ignores a whole shit ton of circumstantial evidence because he has no understanding of it or inability to apply a scientific method.
08:11 Evolution has nothing to do with complexity; many species have actually evolved to be simpler than their ancestrals. Evolution simply prioritizes reproduction.
Yes. Though you could perhaps habe the hypothesis that over time life as a whole has a tendency to diversify? So many things you can measure will have a broader and broader probability distribution when taken over all life currently existing.
So the size of the currently largest creature will statistically increase over time, and so will the hottest and coldest temperatures tolerable by some life, etc. And perhaps the range of complexity (and simplicity!) and the range of possible levels of intelligence will also increase over time?
I don't know if this is true, but it's a testable prediction,.we could investigate. It's also more plausible than the more simplistic 'complexity goes up over time' model, which as you point out, is just wrong.
So thinking of species as analogue to gas particles, and ecological niches as positions/velocities? I wonder if there's some objective way of putting biosphere entropy into numbers...
The evolution of all life, as an overall process, is the sum of all these individual species, so while some species may evolve to be simpler, while others remain constant, in terms of complexity, the NET direction can still be towards greater complexity.
It's less about complexity and more about energy available. Life on earth has consistently evolved to be able to increase the energy that can be used. Replication -> photosynthesis -> oxygen -> multicellularity (and consumption of it) -> fire -> intelligence?????
Yes there's a huge increase in biodiversity over time this is observable data, and yes the blue whale is the largest creature that ever existed, you actually are true in your observation. However, it's good to point out that the largest land creature today is far smaller than in the past and the strategy of being huge on land is simply lost.
It's possible that overtime the range of size, intelligence, heat tolerance etc. will be lost over time, considering what humans do now and comparing what algae did in the past, it is possible that we will limit severely this range of diversity the same way that when algae triggered the ice age creatures that liked to live in hot climate simply died.
The most important part of the Fermi Paradox is that aliens would act EXACTLY like humans would expect them to, because we not-aliens said so.
It doesn't assume that. It's simply a fact. If you're intelligent you can figure out that the universe can be a dangerous place. Entire solar systems can be zapped out of existence. If you want your species to be robust and survive, you colonize space. If you're intelligent, that's easy to figure out. Doesn't matter if you think like humans or not, you'll arrive at the conclusion that the period of time your planet can support your type of life is not eternal, and perhaps more than one would be better than one. It doesn't really matter whether you're an intelligent frog or an intelligent monkey, that logic is pretty simple.
I mean if we accept that Intelligence grants an evolutionary advantage any advanced alien species will at some point realise that their homeworld will be depleted of resources eventually (because of entropy there cant be infinitely regenerative resources). They would have no option but to expand into space. Now if that is possible or if so, if they would change their systems in a way thats visible to us might be another topic.
@@lioneldomland3816 There's a third option. Go extinct.
Perhaps despite their best efforts they simply couldn't figure out long distance, high speed space travel, or find a habitable planet in time. And of course if they go extinct the only way we'd ever know they existed would be to go to their planet ourselves.
Much of the Fermi Paradox assumes humans as the norm. The average of sentient life, and that's not a bad stance to take from a statistical, scientific standpoint, especially given the move away from the historical view of human exceptionalism. However, we do need to be open to the idea that maybe we are exceptional, or at least exceptionally lucky.
@@lioneldomland3816 that assumes they don't invent capitalism, in which case it will too expensive to save themselves either with being careful with resource usage or finding ways to move to other planets, and they perish. Like we are doing.
I'm having one of my many depressed days, stuff like this showing up lights it up just a bit more. Thanks for making these.
Stick with it then.There is light.
As a bipolar sufferer, thinking about how insignificant I am compared to the universe always helps me put things in perspective.
I am a ridiculously improbable conglomeration of strangely behaving bits of mass that can somehow understand the universe I find myself in. I should count myself very lucky to exist.
My problems always seem much more manageable after a healthy dose of thinking about the universe.
Your comment did the same for me
It's funny how the smallest things, like finding a good creator in you subscription feed, can overshadow every other feeling. Our minds are amazing sometimes.
However, for me; no matter what mood i'm in, these videos often replaces it with existential dread. But the soft music and dr. Kippings soothing voice makes it feel like a good thing.
You're gonna make it... you're best day ever hasnt happened yet. It's coming . Be excited for whats coming ❤
One simple assumption solves the Fermi paradox: There's a hard limit to technological advancement.
YES! We take the assumption of unending development for granted
This. I always think of space elevators and solar sails and how complex they would be to build and maintain. I mean, chemistry and physics can only take us so far before we cross into the realm of science fiction rather than feasible concepts.
@@Miguel.LSpace elevators are a fairly readily solvable engineering problem though (there's a clear incremental improvement pathway in materials science to solve the one remaining problem, sufficient tether strength), and solar sails are even easier. Neither of these are Fermi paradox grade stuff though because they primarily facilitate expansion within the solar system, but still
After reading about SAFIRE and the remarkable work with elemental transmutation through Nuclear Plasma reators currently underway by Aureon Ltd I feel our civilization is on the cusp of something grand and transformative
@@CoolWorldsLabbrilliant way to summarize it
The thing that seems very very weird to me about the grabby aliens statistical argument, is that I just don't understand how it answers the main question that it purports to answer.
Provided I understood things correctly, the starting question is: If you and I assume ourselves to be an average observer, then why do you and I see an early and empty universe, while our best theories tell us that the universe has a long and densely populated future ahead of it?
Which grabby aliens answers with: That long and densely populated future contains only long-lived "grabby" civilizations.
To which my follow-up question remains exactly equal the original question... If we assume ourselves to be an average observer, then why are you and I not members of one of those long-lived grabby civilizations in the far future?
As far as I understand it, nothing about grabby aliens even prevents the emergence of new observers in those civilizations. Because fundamentally it is not civilizations that observe, it is sentient beings. To me this seems so obvious that I'm weirded out by so many people discussing grabby aliens without at least touching on the "who are observers?" question. It makes me wonder if I have really completely misunderstood everything, somehow.
I don't know if we're both right or both wrong, but we're in the same boat. Nothing about this argument makes any sense to me on a fundamental level. I'm not even on board with the Copernican Principle being applied this way in general, but people much smarter than me keep doing it, so I guess I'm probably missing something about that too. To me, it just seems like the most obvious case of statistical sampling bias of all time, but physicists keep talking about it like it's one of the universe's great mysteries.
Taking a sample size of 1/x where x is unknown and then trying to extrapolate it into anything seems ridiculous. Especially when the 1 is a biased sample. It's like looking outside your window to try to determine what the weather is like everywhere on Earth. It was 75 degrees and overcast outside today and I expect myself to be a typical observer, so it was probably 75 and overcast for a vast majority of people everywhere on the planet, right? For that matter, I bet it was 75F for a majority of conscious observers everywhere in the universe today because I expect my perspective as an observer to be typical.
Even talking about the time in which we were born being atypical doesn't make any sense on a fundamental level. Is it pretty unlikely that out of a sample of every possible observer to ever exist, that I would be born in 1993? Sure, that's wildly unlikely. But what if I were born in the year 3,847,219,623? Being born in that exact year is also wildly unlikely. Both of these probabilities are almost zero, but someone using the Copernican Principle in the year 3,847,219,658 would say that it's much more likely that they would be born in the time period of 5,000,000,000-10,000,000,000. Any date you pick is going to have a probability about as close to zero as you can get. Nobody in any perspective would ever come to the conclusion that they are a "typical observer" so this logic would always lead you down a misleading path.
@@firstlast6085 I'm theoretically on board with the statistics of extrapolating from a sample size of one. Of course the result is literally the least trustworthy you can be relying on data, but the pure mathematics of it does make sense. This is called the maximum likelihood estimation, which you can look up on Wikipedia. The Copernican Principle is a slightly less mathematical concept, but it follows similar logic.
That's theory, because on a practical level all of it is just way too uncertain. However, even on a theoretical level, I don't understand how the grabby alien solution applies the principle. Sure, we know of only one globally unified civilization, so we are permitted to assume it is average in every way. However, as I see it, we are NOT permitted to view it as average is some ways, but not others. What the grabby aliens solution is doing, is viewing our civilization as average in regards the circumstances of its founding, but then pushes all other ways it could be average aside, merely to make them fit the story.
The example I gave is the individual average observer. If grabby aliens is true, then the universe would host trillions of sentient observers in its lifespan, with me being an extreme outlier.
Another example is the lifespan of a civilization. The maximum likelihood estimation tells us that we most likely are about halfway through, giving humanity another 250k years or so, for a total of 500k years. That would allow us to colonize the milky way, but would should also assume that 500k years is the normal lifespan for most civilizations, which doesn't match the grabby aliens solution.
Of course, all of these assumptions should be taken with a grain of salt, but the point is that all of them are equally valid! Choosing one over all the others - without any justification as far as I can tell - just doesn't convince me. And especially when it is contradicting much more of those assumptions than it is validating, then the entire solution is built on a foundation that actually undermines it.
@@upgradeplans777 I disagree with the lifetime estimate. As we are keeping up, I would be surprised if we survive into the next millenium (although I won't be surprised as I will be long dead in case I am wrong).
Economists have a bad enough track record of predicting the future in their own field of expertise, I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting one to figure out the future of cosmology and alien life.
I think it's an excellent model, but as the video explains, it also has a severe problem in assuming red dwarf systems are habitable. Once you assume there won't be habitable planets sitting around M-dwarfs for trillions of years, everything about the intergalactic Fermi paradox changes because G-type star production is in decline, meaning we may not be nearly as early as its proponents want to believe. I also think it appeals to an anti-Copernican crowd where we are special, and humanity and/or our AIs are "endowed" to own several galactic superclusters.
@@codys447only our robots will have time, and that’s if they still work once they leave the Oort Cloud not to mention the millennia across the depths, if our radiation protection works.
Yes Windmonkey! Just look how long it took Economists to stop their obsession with a model that depends on a "rational actor" when it's obvious that our brains evolved to make quick decisions on limited information.
@@codys447 I think it's funny you say that because, even though the conclusions might appeal to the anti-Copernican, the premises seem like a gross over-application of the Copernican principle. I'm in the 99th percentile for males in the world height-wise, and if I was applying the Copernican principle as much as they are here, I would be trying to find explanations as to why I'm not shorter.
@@jetfuelcantmeltsteelmemes8791 As another commenter said, there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world and only 8 billion humans. Statistically speaking, I should be an ant.
Nothing better than opening my laptop to discover a new Cool Worlds video. Thank you professor Kipping!
Happy Friday!
Cheers! 🍻
Brown noser.
Nothing better then a brown noser
Cool Worlds, John Michael Godier, and History of the Universe are automatic clicks for me.
We already have an example of "grabby aliens": all life on Earth is related, because the first succesful organisms took over and made it impossible for any other, independent life to evolve.
Are you talking about humans, chickens or bacteria? 🤣
But animals are evolving around us all the time, even monkeys. Have you seen that video of a monkey sharpening a rock and then using it to break its enclosure?
@@THX..1138 Bacteria, I'm pretty sure.
@@globin3477 too bad for them Mycelium proves that false as its not native to Eath and is derived from space.
We can deduce this from the numerous genetic evolutions mushrooms have that protect them and no other species from space faring travel.
I feel like the Grabby Aliens hypothesis presented in this video is not the same one I have heard before. I think in the version I was told, the reason we don't see grabby aliens isn't because they are spreading close to the speed of light, but because we are just early and no one is there and close enough for us to see.
We do not have to assume they can travel at near lightspeed to be grabby either. At 1% speed of light, a civilization can still colonize our whole galaxy in 10 million years, which is still very fast compared to the time for us to evolve. Grabby Aliens is basically saying that because spreading is so fast compared to evolution, an observer can only see either a pre-grabby local region where no one is out there, or a post-grabby region where everywhere is grabbed, and the intermediary state is very short compared to either of the two states. Also factor in the assumption that no civilization can emerge in an already grabbed region, then we would arrive at the conclusion that we could only be at a pre-grabby region, solving the fermi paradox.
I think this was the version I heard, and if not, at least this could be a plausible explanation nonetheless.
Yes. I watched the kurzgesagt video and it semed to build around this exact idea that you said. And as you say this idea has been around a while.
I see no need for hard locks and red dwarfs for the bones of the theory to be very compelling.
Biological creatures fill niches...for that we have N = billions.
So if a technological civilisations niche is space, and it can spread quickly then either aliens dont exist or we wouldn't because the earth would have been grabbed by now
This is also my understanding of it. No m-dwarves or speed of light travel required. Just the fact that a civilization occupying a habitable planet would preclude the possibility of other life developing on that planet
yeah this was also my understanding?
halfway through the vid i got a vague impression bro is mad his idea didnt grt picked up like grabby aliens has, as well, which makes me find this video's intent a touch more suspect (just a touch)
@evernoon your explanation is the way I remember it and it makes way more sense to me then the video said. The video seems to say the only way we could NOT see them is if the were expanding at the Speed of Light...that makes no sense to me, if they we expanding at 1% of LS we would definitely not see them.
@@joelee3716 near-lightspeed would be inefficient and would need extreme shielding. It could end up being impractical in even the most advanced civilization's standards.
The world needs so much more of 18:46 . We need to recapture that in all fields, and make it the norm again.
Feel like it's pretty much the norm
It is the norm, it's just that the exceptions that break it are more memorable
Worth noting: Astronomy and many other areas of research can afford to be magnanimous because "who is right" doesn't have a _known, immediate, and dramatic_ impact on someone's quality of everyday life. Thus cordiality is the norm. When it comes to ethics, morality, politics, & (socio)economics, that is very much not the case, which is why you will see people understandably get upset.
This is not to try and turn the conversation to that end. Rather simply to point out that some subjects simply lend themselves to "rational debate" a lot better than others. I suspect if there was the potential for a (known, immediate, dramatic) impending asteroid ending all life on earth, the debate might get considerably more heated.
The oversimplification of the Gigantic task that is space travel is always mind blowing. Imagine trying to meet a person that it’s walking at 828000 km/h and gave you the position he was 30 years ago in a space that is 99.9% empty
I don't like the "expansion as fast as the speed of light" assumption, but I don't think that really affects what I think of the grabby aliens hypothesis. I think that if you make the assumption that grabby civilizations make it impossible for new life to emerge on a planet they've grabbed, the fact that we exist means that we're among the first within our sphere of grabbiness since there's been plenty of time for other worlds to develop grabby aliens and therefore suggests that the density of technological civilizations in a grabbiness sphere is low. This means that if the grabby aliens hypothesis is true, either technological civilizations are rare or grabbiness spheres are small, and doesn't eliminate the possibility that both are true. Meaning we're still left with the Fermi Paradox.
To me the problem of expansion at the speed of light is that it assumes all grabby aliens expand at the speed of light.
The paper uses 0.3c, IIRC. That's close to light speed in the grand scheme of things.
It's necessary for the theory because, if an interstellar civilization were expanding much slower than that, we would see them coming from a long way away. Us not seeing them implies a short window to see them.
The paradox is only a paradox is you assume we could even detect technological civilisations at massive distances, let alone shorter ones
Or, that even if such grabby aliens were to exist, there's nothing to say they couldn't have evolved, expanded and eventually gone extinct with their constructs and signals having long since faded out long before Earth was around.
ua-cam.com/video/Amb5ee2x9DY/v-deo.html
If it wasn't for the asteroid that hit earth appropriately 65 million years ago wiping out the dinosaurs allowing mammals to evolve into modern day humans (us) we simply would not be here so thank that asteroid guys stay safe 👍
True! But perhaps dinosaurs would have developed civilisation themselves eventually?
@@CoolWorldsLab That's one theory 👍
@@CoolWorldsLabThat sounds like heresy against doctrine. (Star Trek Voyager reference.)
There is still a chance for civilizations of hyper intelligent techno-crows after we are gone :)
maybe with no asteroid there would have evolved 3 species of 'intelligent' life who knows
Different people testing the same hypotheses and getting different results is what makes science so interesting.
Professor Kipping has one of the best voices in this genre. Great video, as always ~ I was hoping CW would weigh in on "Grabby Aliens".
Hope it didn't disappoint!
@@CoolWorldsLab never! This is one of my favorite channels, thank you to everyone on the Cool Worlds team ~ your videos are always thoughtful and informative, and I appreciate you 👏👏👏👏😘
@@CoolWorldsLabofc it didn’t
I have been waiting for you to cover this fascinating hypothesis for a while. The grabby aliens hypothesis seems weird and strange and is yet so much alike biological systems and organisms would actually expand.
Ye I've wanted to tackle this one for a while too!
That is if they get past the stage we are in. I doubt it very much. They would have exactly the same problems and the biggest problem is wars. Man has too many psychos in power who love money and war. I would place a bet that every civilisation that has been and will be has this exact problem.
I am a big believer that we will destroy ourselves one day and if we don’t then nature will.
Another thing is space travel to other stars. We already know that it is virtually impossible to get warp drive and to fuel a ship to get to any decent speed is astronomical.
People like to dream but that is all it is.
@@CoolWorldsLab I'm so glad that instead of just summarizing it you offered your own well thought out arguments and analysis as well. Love this channel :)
Another explanation for lack of ‘grabby’ aliens so far (that an economist probably should’ve thought of) is that, given available technology, being a ‘grabby’ civilization takes two things: 1. Unification and commitment of an entire planet to one goal 2. Willingness to take enormous risks. An entire planet may not be able to agree with eachother, (as we see on earth) and spreading out your resources throughout space may not bring immediate rewards, and might even bring about the wrath of another civilization, leading to risk aversion. We always imagine aliens attacking out of desire to conquer, or desperation for resources. But if a planet is desperate for resources, they’re not going to spend what little they have to look through space for it. And desire to conquer is only going to possess about half of a planet’s residents at a time (if their version of consciousness is similar to ours and they aren’t a unimind like in 3 body problem). It might just be that if a civilization is smart enough, they decide keep to themselves. Alternatively, we could be in a young universe where we are developing simultaneously with other young civilizations. But think about the things we’ve sent into space. Very few, small and hard to spot rockets and telescopes aren’t even going to make a blip on other planet’s radars. If we assume they are developing at the same pace as us, they also would have sent out probes that are too small to differentiate from an asteroid.
I am not an astrophysicist or evolutionary biologist nor do I hold a PHD in anything. I just have an interest in the sciences, especially those that deal in the existential. For a long time I have pondered the question; "if we see no evidence of other advanced civilisations, what if we are first?".
The "because, aliens" trope without strong and irrefutable evidence is to me at least, akin to spiritualism. Its a wish that something you believe is true. We don't want to be alone in the universe.
But what if we are? At least in our Galaxy. The potential and also responsibility that gives humanity is immense. The bigger question for me is, what do we do with this power?
@@DazzleRebel
Spread life through the barren universe, of course.
I think one of the issues with trying to extrapolate M-dwarf habitability into the far future is that there are so many of these stars and they live for such long periods of time that it is difficult to imagine any form of exclusivity with respect to their nature. It's hard to conclude that ALL of them would remain inhospitable to advanced life for the ENTIRETY of their lifespans. We already know that some M-dwarfs aren't very active, and there remains a possibility that at least some of the ones that are active now will become less active as they age. And there are mechanisms by which a planet around such stars that has lost its atmosphere could regain a new atmosphere later in time. If M-dwarfs in the present era as a whole don't have a high likelihood of hosting grabby civilizations, but can become more so in the future, that would explain why we don't see grabby aliens all over the place in the present era, but it would not preclude a grabby alien scenario happening in the future.
I did not expect Clark Kent to explain the Fermi Paradox today.
Just want to say thank you dr.kipping for doing what you do. You truly are absolute national treasure!
17:26 A wise fictional doctor once said, “it’s never lupus.” I would amend that to say, “it’s never aliens, until it is.” That’s just my take. This theory ultimately doesn’t move the needle for me anywhere on the existence of aliens. Still pressing that x to doubt.
What about "grabby aliens" plus "simulation theory" PLUS an all-powerful deity?
The idea that we may be the only sentient life forms in the universe really puts a lot of responsibility on humanity.
We have a lot of biases that affect our exploration of the unknown. One of them being our propensity to project our own motivations and perhaps instinctual drives onto other hypothetical species.
We as a species seem to have a need to conquer and dominate. The evolutionary path of other sentient creatures may result in a different social structure, a different relationship with their environment and a different way of thinking about the cosmos and their place in it.
We don't understand our own consciousness, let alone the workings of minds that evolved light-years away. The most alien thing imaginable cannot even be imagined by us.
Well said
Possibly.. but you might not be giving us enough credit. There's a lot we don't understand, but I think we can use our imagination and come up with a whole lot of possibilities. If the Alien is a biological creature.. and has somehow found a way to survive for many millions of years.. unless they're popping in and out of different dimensions, they would still likely have certain survival needs.
I guess it's possible they are that advanced and just decided.. the universe isn't that interesting and not worth exploring, or don't have any desire to make contact with other species, either because they had done it in the past and it didn't go well, or because they already understand how primitive we are, and are waiting to see if we evolve into something more interesting. I guess maybe if time isn't a concern.. Why not wait until life meets certian technological advancements before you bother making contact. Could be a species unable to even populate their own solar system isn't even at it's infancy stage yet.
True, but it is sufficient for _some_ aliens to become grabby at some point. They may well be 0.1% of all alien species, but due to their grabby nature, they would still occupy most of the universe.
@@cheshire1 eventually, and if a few, given the size - that eventually is going to take a very long time and you are not very likely to encounter them early.
I think that there’s no method for a united civilisation to persist across hundreds of light-years, it’s never some sort of power hungry imperialism. And O’Neill cylinders in a Dyson swarm are more than enough to solve overpopulation if populations don’t expand exponentially (they aren’t). But I can see there being a motivation for sending out self-replicating probes, just for research. It’s definitely possible to make one robust enough so it would sooner self-destruct than go rogue.
Though none of this applies to machine civilisations, they absolutely could remain united across hundreds of light years.
Is the assumption that the number of hard steps is a universal value really necessary? Wouldn't the planets with fewer hard steps simply produce life much earlier, which would then expand to occupy the universe, rendering the ones with more hard steps irrelevant?
The steps would seem inherent though. While evolution has tried countless pathways countless times, there seem to be some that were both essential to us being here, and which happened only once in Earth's history. Abiogenesis, symbiogenesis, life becoming multicellular, the emergence of our level of intelligence. Even knowing that to be here we must have been very lucky, we seem to have been *exceptionally* lucky.
Hard steps suggests a defined end goal. We got "here" through a series of hard steps. Someone else doesn't need to get "here," they just need to get somewhere. Their steps are likely very different. The only real universal hard step is probably closer to 1 hard step: a minimum stability over a minimum period of time.
Earth produced life only 200-300 million years after it was formed, an insignificant amount of time on a cosmic scale.
I would assume that every habitable planet produces life, the hard steps are found elsewhere.
Agreed. Hard Steps is obviously a very simple model. It seems clear enough there's _something_ which makes it hard/rare to become grabby, otherwise we'd already see the aliens. You can break that something down into multiple "hard steps", but each step doesn't have to be equally hard everywhere, so long as the overall result stays hard
@udishomer5852 There's no way to tell if 'early life' is a universal principle or whether Earth is just an extreme fluke. We only have one data point (Earth), so no statistical conclusions can be drawn.
I think this is making a very simple question way too complicated.
The entire premise of the Fermi paradox is based on the idea that we don't see aliens when we look at the cosmos. But... Do we?
Maybe we "see" them, but we don't know it and don't detect them with our half assed eyes and technology. Isn't it much simpler to say that at a certain point we will have the tecnology to say "oh, here they are, they were right in front of us this whole time"?
I refuse to call this a paradox for the same reason I don't believe my kids when they can't find something they've barely looked for. If life exists here, it exists elsewhere. Why do i say this? Well, have we ever found a thing, that we can't find more of? Does even one person believe we've found all the life on our own planet? Why do we call this a paradox when we've barely begun to look? Perhaps, we are impatient?
Yes but at least your kid knows the thing he is looking for actually exists. And if you knew anything about the fermi paradox, you would understand that their presence would be obvious by now. But you would rather think in useless platitudes than think critically because it justifies your world view.
@@Stormyano lmfao if I knew anything about it! The hubris on you! Arrogant and insulting. Tell u what Internet know it all, I was just offering an opinion but u seem so in love with your own self that I would love u to explain it all! Go ahead , send me the link of u settling this once and for all. Go ahead I'm waiting on u to do more than be smug, follow it up with action. Can't wait to see u explain it all to the world. You'll likely be celebrated for solving this!
As I said in my reply above: human hubris.
Humans will be undetectable in a few decades. Even our modern communications are nearly undetectable, because it's wasteful to blast radio waves in all directions, so most are fairly directional... But precise directional radio is already in labs and will be in wifi and cell phones soon.
Either way, there's nothing we're looking for, as signs of life, that would actually make sense for an advanced species to still be using.
In other words: SETI will never detect radio waves, because aliens aren't blasting them out, like it's 1960's Earth ratio technology, for the galaxy to see.
@@roberthoople dude u offer nothing, nothing at all that's new or interesting to me. Waste of everyone's time.
@@mitchelcline9759 Did you reply to the wrong person?
I was expanding on your f'ck'ng comment, in defense of it, to the other knucklehead's pointless comment.
But, if you want to get into what so useless and time-wasting about my comment, than let's do this thing...
I love this channel and the thought provoking and brave stance that says maybe we're alone. Too many people, including well known UA-cam scientists, simply rely on, "Of course we're not alone" without offering proof. I appreciate your methodical and data gathering approach. This is true science. 🤙👍
It's entirely possible that we're the first living beings that could be considered sapient in the universe.
We simply don't have enough data to make conclusions on how likely/unlikely the development of life and sapient life is in environments that could theoretically support it.
We are not even the first sapient things on earth. We are the first with advanced technology though.
I think we shouldn't shy away from space exploration, and exposing our presence. We got here by being brave, and i don't see a reason to change. Even if it's incredibly hostile. We'd surely be better off coming out looking scary than looking feeble trying to hide away in a corner, hoping nobody will see us.
im ok if its done in that order. space exploration to somewhere else, then expose ourselves. at least that way if things turn sour they wont know where we live
We may have already announced our presence. When we look at stars sometimes a planet passes in front if it. We can tell what its' atmosphere is made of based on the wavelengths of light absorbed by it. Aliens as advanced as we are could probably tell theres life on Earth if they caught a glimpse of us. An alien advanced enough to detect the fluorinated gasses in our atmosphere would know we're here and be able to guess how advanced we are. Fluorinated gasses have been in our atmosphere for almost 100 years.
Really love David Kipping. He have so great voice and interesting thoughts. Thank you for all the time and effort you and your team put into making these videos.
So "Grabby Aliens" are basically like the Reapers from the Mass Effect video game? They essentially farm civilizations in the galaxy, because they are AI designed to preserve intelligent life. They basically leave a massive space station for other civilizations to discover. Then the civilizations start basing their tech on what they find at the station. They eventually get to a point that it trips some sort of ruins telling the Reapers to come back from deep space, while at the same time transforming life that comes into contact with the artifacts and controlling them. They essentially start purging civilizations above a certain threshold and store their species like a butterfly collection and integrating it as a new reaper vessel.
There are also the Brethren Moons from Dead Space. Who seem to not really do the integration thing, but they do leave a marker that kick starts intelligence allowing civilizations to grow. It then causes life to go insane and on a rampage. This is so that it can accumulate biomass(doesn't matter if it is alive or dead) to eventually create another Brethren Moon.
I was very upset that i had to scroll this far to find someone else mentioning the Reapers here. This was exactly what i thought about and found it very intriguing, though not particularly convincing for me to believe in this theory
@@Eden_jasper to be honest. Pretty close.
When any species evolves tech follows. As tech advances two things inevitably follow.
Artificial intelligence and fear.
As the organic species grows in advancement and complexity so too does their capacity for destruction and the ease with which it occurs.
Eventually factions will react out of extreme paranoia and fear as technology continues to advance further and further eventually getting to where the weapons of choice for interplanetary warfare is lobbing black holes at each other.
Once a species reaches that point the Artificially intelligent beings will deduce that the most appropiate action to continue lifes sustainment is to remove the advanced sapient races.
Quite sad that it happens everytime though.
Reddit
@@BrandonDenny-we1rwYou're making things up. Space travel isn't even possible.
@@Ottselracing According to your extremely shallow and limited viewpoint of scientific progress.
Riiight.
4:52 What if We earthlings are the grabby aliens ? 👽
Right off the bat, I think it's peak human hubris to assume that we'd even see aliens out there to begin with.
Just for starters: we're still looking for radio signals, today, despite the fact that In another decade, we ourselves will have undetectable radio signals from earth, thanks to the emergence of directional antennae and (eventually) quantum radio.
Secondly, as the inventor of the impulse drive, I know that we'll also not be using rockets for much longer either. The impulse drive is cold propulsion and shouldn't be detectable at any distance at all. The only noticeable thing may be the reactor powering the drive, but in 20 to 30 years, we'll probably be able to shield it so well it also becomes undetectable.
So, in other words, the whole Fermi "Paradox" is based on aliens having outdated and noisy technology from 1960's Earth, to even be considered seriously.
I feel there is also a thing about (philosophical) Copernician principle that leaves me uneasy: asking "why are we not living trillion years into the future" is ought to have some prior like "I am a random person (human? thinking observer??) in this universe". Why are we using this prior and not something else? - after all it leads to all kinds of weird paradoxes, like Doomsday argument - which is so evidently false that it probably should disqualify the entire line of reasoning that leads to this outcomes...
If you refuse to use this prior, then, evidently, there is not much to resolve.
(another way of seeing this is observing that surely the first civilization to appear will see the picture similar to us - and, using Copernician principle, will fail; there is not much consolation in knowing that unknown amount of aliens in other situations will use this "logic" correctly)
So what you're saying is that grabby aliens mined all the antimatter out of our universe, hence the baryon asymmetry.
Provocative
I like the idea!
Although I am not sold on "Grabby Aliens", couldn't there be expanding civilizations out there that we simply cannot see because their arriving photons are simply too old? Meaning, the light reaching us from deep distant space might be from _BEFORE_ they began expanding. And thus, in reality (i.e., now), the could have immense structures and vast colonies whose light won't reach our detectors for millennia. Is that possible, Professor?
Doesn't take a professor. Yeah, it's possible. We look out into the stars, and we see ONLY the past.
Due to the accelerated expansion of hte universe, parts of the universe are already beyond our horizon. We will never be able to observe civilizations in those areas of the universe. And in the far future essentially all galaxies except our own will be beyond this horizon.
He literally said that in the video.
Thank you for taking a moment to praise/talk about Hanson's work! I like how you've also mentioned that you actually spoke to him before making this video so that it doesn't sound like you're just roasting (ok, just arguing) with him.
It's never aliens, until such time when their presence becomes undeniable.
For me, the answer seems simple. I bet no aliens colonize the galaxy because of two factors.
1. Financial incentives are damned.
2. Communication essentially severs the species into two separate factions.
What good is collecting resources if it takes you 60 years to collect them and or bring them back "home"?
If it takes 20 years for one way messaging you might as well be severed from the home planet.
If a species splinters itself to colonize the galaxy, who actually benefits from it? The species doesn't benefit from it because nothing can be shared fast enough to make it beneficial.
Great point. The communication/faction issue seems like quite an important factor that isn't often mentioned
It might also be plain impossible to do interstellar travel.
Your assuming there is no was to communicate instantly or travel in ways we can't now. Look in to quantum entanglement just as one example. It's like people 500 years ago not believeing people could possibly communicate from one continent to another instantly. Bur they had no concept of a telephone or Internet. You couldn't travel 100 miles in a hour because no concept of a car or aircraft
@@blakecrosby5123 you make a good point. Which also means if that kind of communication is viable then we should be seeing the galaxy colonized.
It's not and it's probably because that form of communication actually doesn't work. It would be great if it did though..
@@blakecrosby5123 Quantum entanglement does not allow for travel or meaningful communication, by its nature.
I would like to mention that combustion isn't the only form of heat that could be used as an early tool.
For example, on those ocean planets, there could be hydrothermal vents similar to the ones on earth that organisms on that planet could learn to harness for energy, no light or fire needed.
There are also an uncountable amount of exoplanets that don't orbit stars, so it's possible that we just can't see alien life because the vast majority of extraterrestrial species don't rely on light for communication and, if they were trying to contact us, wouldn't understand why we can't recognize their methods.
Videos like this make me think about millions or billions of years from now, some alien species will come upon earth {if it even still exists) and it will be a desolate wasteland, and they will dig up our ancient ruins. The future is scary to think about
I think this is more plausible than most people give credit to. I think we should build a relic for them to find...
Along those lines, what is the longest lasting relic we could manufacture? And how do we make it easy to find and unlikely to be destroyed by impact or exploding star?
@masterSageHarpuia i'd be of the idea that constructing a pyramid out of hardened and very dense metals waurd be an obvious sign of "intelligent species was here". A pyramid's shape would remain recognizable for hundreds of thousands of years, even after erosion - and if materials are selected correctly, you can create something nobody could mistake for a natural folmation
@@CoolWorldsLab We did. A long time ago. Then we did it again with Rushmore. At least they'll know what we looked like instead of having to figure out what the daym pyramids were about.
@@CoolWorldsLab But the future archeologists ascribing those relics to an ancient civilization will just be ridiculed ;-)
Dark Forest? Yes, please.
If you're talking about a cake, then yes I agree
shhhhh the sophons might put a trget on your back!!
Dark forest is one of the most UNLIKELY scenarios
@@JP-rg1yj have you read the trilogy? it makes a convincing case so... "never ask an alien where "it" is from. it's impolite"
Another terrible myopic 'theory'
What these theories try to predict is so out there from our understanding. Whats frustrating is a lot of these predictions assume all life is smilar to human life. Which we can see isn't true on our own planet
11:23 I really don’t understand why the grabby alien theory requires the hard steps model to be true, if we are the first to emerge at least in our observable region of space
Grabby aliens? 👾 I’m intrigued
Always nice to see fellow Brits here!
So, we’re the grabby aliens. Our whole species is addicted to expansion, maybe it’s just us.
Good afternoon from a Sunny UK David. Look forward to watching this. Hope all is well. Big up the notification gang 👍🏻
Always nice to see fellow Brits here!
@@CoolWorldsLab Thanks David!
I'm not sure why, but I absolutely LOATHE the word "grabby"! ESPECIALLY in THIS context (which is the only context I've seen the word, lol). It's like it was made by someone too stupid to understand the word "expansionist" or something similar!
Same thing but with a classier tone to it. ;-)
@@ertymexx Huh? I'm not sure what you mean. Which word are you saying is "classier"?
hi there, this is my first time visiting the channel, and i just subscribed. i don't see many 'academics' on youtube (with large subscriber counts - yours is approaching 1M soon!), so this is refreshing. i love the way you grab material from other sources (e.g. movies and other youtube channels) and then reference them with a watermark - i think this is a great practice! i like how you have done your own academic peer-reviewed research and have shared it with others, whilst also appearing approachable and 'human' in your presentation of the science. i am looking forward to watching more of your content :)
A CoolWorlds Alien related video? What more can you ask for!
16:30 There is a way of falsifying grabby aliens with regards to expansion speed - if you can prove that there is an insurmountable cap to the expansion speed that is sufficiently slower than the speed of light, the grabby aliens hypothesis struggles to match the data. If you argue that this is impossible to prove, then your own alternative hypothesis (that aliens simply do not expand in that manner) is also impossible to prove.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
The fact that the Grabby Aliens hypothesis uses advanced civilizations with presumably quintillions upon quintillions of individual members actually makes the problem it's trying to explain worse. If the future is populated by so much more consciousness, why do we find ourselves living in a time of relatively extremely scarce consciousness in the universe?
Not a comment on the idea but as a general comment on the timescales in question. Could it not be the case that alien civilisations of immense magnitudes may or may not have evolved but simply due to the distance/time involved, any evidence of their potential varied existences could simply have become consumed by the general process of the galaxies, galactic structures and the like doing what they do over time.
A lot of the discussion feels a bit overly relativistic to the perception of time from the perspective of earth or our galaxy. If a civilisation or millions of civilisations arose and even spread across entire galaxies, they could very well exist without ever being aware of each other. In a very real sense most of the universe exists within pockets of information voids, since the distances involved are further/longer than the the observable universe has assumed to have been around.
Even an entire galaxy is only ever privy to a small subsect of light from the greater regions of space. There's just so much information that is fundamentally impossible, under the current model of space time, for a region to collect and observe. As though we are commenting on the deepest depths of the ocean by shoving our heads in a bathtub.
If you lived two thousand years in the past in where New York will be I don't think you would find it weird that you don't see 8 million people already. It might just be a matter of "having babies and increasing the population takes quite a while"
ua-cam.com/video/Amb5ee2x9DY/v-deo.html
First video I’ve seen, and I’m impressed! I love how respectful you are of this odd theory and the man who postulated it. You even talked to him about your criticisms of his theory before you released your video. This was a very interesting video, and I appreciate your highly informative and intelligent remarks. I can’t wait to explore your other videos, and thank you for this one!
David's great! He's an actual professor in Astronomy so he always sets the bar exceptionally high.
I feel like Star Wars saying "A long Time Ago" each time the intro text rolls by is meaning stuff happened in some previous Universe where loads of time has already gone by.
It'll be filled someday, but we'll be lonely for a while.
Of course aliens are grabby they've been probing unsuspecting rural folks' poopholes for a long time 😂
I'm both glad and saddened the prof didnt "love" your comment lol
@@astyanax905 a man in his position cannot afford to look ridiculous.
I just don't think we can really impart many if not any human characteristics on aliens, their mind would not evolve like ours, their bodies wouldn't have evolved like ours. So I think it's actually rather strange that we would assume that alien life would look and think anything like us
You could consider convergent evolution, while unlikely it's not impossible.
@@dutchmansmine9053 again that is carbon based lifeforms on earth who all share DNA and common characteristics
there is no reason to assume aliens will have bones, nerves, skin or muscle and not some totally alien and unfathomable way of being
I think the odds of it looking, acting or thinking like anything we see on earth are nearly impossible
this is to say the biggest weakness of the human mind is the inability to think of new things, we always modify or adapt already existing concepts and apply that outwards, it works well for earth but not imagining alien life
This doesn't even sound like a new theory. It sounds like just a combination of the Great Filter and the Dark Forest theories, and neither of those require a certain psychology on other alien life
I think the question "why don't we live a trillion years from now around a red star?" is irrelevant to why we don't see evidence of aliens today. The universe could be teeming with life, including intelligent, technological civilizations, but our ability to detect any sign of it is so limited that it's weird to even be wondering why we haven't detected it yet. Of course we can't. The circumstances required for us to _detect_ life or civilization is probably a far worse statistical bottleneck. It would be an absolute fluke if we did.
The farther away we can look, the less detail we see _and_ the farther back in time we see. We can only look at a certain window into the history of any place. So even if there's a civilization identical to ours out there in terms of its timeline, it would be completely undetectable to us more than say 200 light years away. That's a tiny distance on the scale of the universe, but any farther back in that planet's history its civilization wouldn't have produced enough environmental change for us to detect anything other than an atmosphere that _possibly_ harbors life of some kind.
Why haven't we seen planets like that? Because the methods we use to detect planets around other stars are not really capable of that. That's why the only rocky planets we see are usually "super earths" with a huge mass, and why the planets we detect are usually whipping around their star with an orbit of days or hours. That's what we can detect. Small terrestrial planets in a slow, stable orbit, that don't noticeably perturb or eclipse their parent star? They might as well be invisible. They might be extremely common, but we don't have a way to know that right now.
Also, what are we looking for? Someone like us, about our size, who makes gadgets out of metals and polymers, whose technological processes produce detectable chemical signatures like ours do, and whose life unfolds over a timescale similar to our own? Maybe that's not who is out there in our window of detection. I mean, think about how different we are from every other living thing on Earth, and consider that every living thing on Earth is more closely related to us than any other life form out in the universe. We might just not know what we were looking at, or what we're looking for, as signs of its presence, or signs that it has developed its version of technology.
We're probably not going to detect "aliens" until they get here. And even then we might not. We're certainly capable of observing other creatures undetected if we want to, so why couldn't they?
I think it's just fundamentally arrogant to think that just because we have some great telescopes, that we should have detected other "people" by now and maybe it means we're alone in the universe, or are superlative in some way like, we're the FIRST. Jeez, we JUST STARTED looking for life on Mars, one of our very nearest rocks, and we're still not sure if we've found any. WHY should we expect to be reliably detecting it any farther away already?
Also, it took five billion years on our planet to get to us modern humans, but the random events that led to us aren't on a time limit. A planet doesn't have to exist for three billion years before complex life forms, or have 300 million years of reptile-brained thunderlizards that die in a cataclysm before cleverer rodents can spread out to fill their ecological niches, and so on. Creating THE SAME TIMELINE for how long any other planet takes for the emergence of intelligent life is absurd. And then, if you throw that model away, and assume that any time after the development of complex life, it might only be a few hundred million years worth of evolutionary changes to reach our level of intelligence, you have to guess there could be alien civilizations from a billion years ago or more.
If they survived and continued to thrive, how far would their technology advance in that time? Would we even be able to identify their lives or technology if we saw them? If they didn't survive, what traces would they have left of their existence that would still be detectable today?
"Why haven't we seen aliens?" It's an interesting question, but the actual answer is disappointingly simple. It would be a miraculous coincidence for us to have seen them yet, even if they live around half the stars in the cosmos. We're not really technologically capable of it yet.
Yup, we're just not that advanced. On top of that, it also makes us much less interesting to visit for aliens.What would a hyper advanced species even gain from visiting a species that are equivalent to amoebas in their evolutionary timeline?
I have this joke thought I like to pull out at times like this:
We failed to discover Zorg, and without that knowledge we can't develop nth dimensional communication.
Alien life doesn't see this as a bad thing, for whom wants to interact with someone who can't find Zorg?!
The core of this joke is still something to keep in mind:
Why do we assume other's will use our dominate communication technology?
What if they did have access to some technology that we have already missed....
They are called spectral type M luminosity class V (i.e. main sequence stars.) Astrophysicists usually call them "red dwarfs" since all main sequence stars are called dwarfs. Betelgeuse is also a spectral type M star however its luminosity class is 1a-1b (i.e. a supergiant.)
For me, your point on grabby aliens not happening for "whatever reason" is the answer here. And the reason actually seems pretty obvious to me ... being a "grabby alien" species isn't possible because the path to it - ie, the path of continual growth, continual expansion, etc - is actually the great filter that Fermi postulates. Especially in today's perspective, it seems kind of obvious to me that being an "invasive species" which is what grabby alien amounts to, isn't something that is sustainable over millions or billions of years, and intelligent species either change their ways to a more sustainable, but quieter, more contained existence, or they die trying to become "grabby".
We are very much already grabby on the planetary scale, but we've only REALLY been that way for ~10k-20k years and it's already going badly for us in many ways like climate change and pollution, economic disparities and social divisions. We have made tons of progress since, say, Gobleki Tepe, but that progress has come with potentially world-ending problems. And we haven't even STARTED to expand off our planet yet.
So ya, it seems (to me at least) that very likely that the Great Filter is actually being an invasive, grabby species (like we are right now). Those species, when they evolve as we did, either manage to change their ways, or kill themselves off long before they are advanced enough to be grabby beyond their own system, or maybe a few light years.
THIS.
A future which doesn't include expanding out to other stars and planets is also not sustainable. We have a mere 500 million or so years before the sun becomes hot enough to boil away our oceans. If intelligent life really is as astonishingly rare as seems to be implied by ideas like grabby aliens, we may be the only chance for life to continue existing in our galaxy for most of its lifetime
Very interesting!
Just to be devils advocate, this makes sense if the universe has a limited size, but if it is larger or infinitely sized, odds will not be zero that this can't happen. If the universe is infinite, then it is possible for all sorts of unlikely scenarios to actually eventually happen, given enough chances.
@@chrisblacklock9468 Agreed here, but probably still unlikely within the confines of our finite observable universe, so effectively grand Type-III civs outside of 2x that size will never be known to us ... unless we are also assuming there's a workaround to the speed of light limit. It really depends on how "hard" of a filter being a grabby alien might be. To be fair, I have no idea, but I'm basing it on the notion that we are ALREADY doing more than one thing that potentially threatens to end our existence, so it doesn't feel like it scales much farther than this. I have a feeling this could be a pretty "hard filter" ...
One of the biggest and silliest problems with these types of theories is the core foundational assumption of what 'civilization' looks like... They assume what technological progress is, ignoring our own history. Humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years as foragers. And our ancestors that still had close to human intelligence lived like foragers for millions of years.
Our current way of living is basically a fluke. People farmed before, but it was only due to climate changing into a warmer and more stable climate around 10k years ago that we were able to do large scale farming and also made foraging harder.
This fluke lead to a lot of pros and cons, one of which is the need to stay in one place for an extended amount of time and thus extract, use, and stockpile resources.
Thus our entire 'development' was largely thanks to a fairly unpredictable geological event.
Thus its FAR more likely that any aliens that exist are something like foragers and may not ever have the chance to contemplate building
@2:00 You haven't seen The Lockpicking Lawyer's channel, have you?
I've always thought that LL voice sounds like Robert Picardo.
Lockpickinglawyer is why our species made it and he even had enough time to do it again to show us it was not a fluke
I was thinking McNally
@@PatThePerson lol
We don't live around an M-dwarf right now for a very obvious reason: the time it takes for evolution to result in civilization is going to be significantly longer on planets with less energy. If they ever reach civilization at all.
That was not Star Trek Voyager, that was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Are we just gonna handwave the fact that galactic conquest requires either vast amounts of time or break the laws of physics. Seems more likely that humanity will never come in direct contact with alien life.
A couple million years at sublight speeds. If I remember at current human speeds which seems quite amazing if you think about it. Still, there's no reason to think their development would happen at around the same time as ours. The size of the milky way is 100000 light years. There just needs to be one highly visible civilization within the timeframe of such. That is nothing on cosmic scales.
@@eldestfan101
We can colonize the entire galaxy in a million years. That's nothing on a cosmic timescale.
@MrNote-lz7lh No, we couldn't with current technology, and a millions of years, we couldn't even get an object out of our galactic arm.
@eldestfan101
Current technology is a constantly increasing concept. It's not relevant to what we can do next century let alone a thousand years from now or a million. With technology we know for a fact is possible we can do it.
The galaxy has existed for "vast amounts of time", sufficiently for advanced civilizations to have risen before us and reached the spacefaring stage at astronomical scales by now; hence the Fermi Paradox.
So calming
I like that most people just assume FTL or near the speed of light travel MUST exist instead of the far more obvious conclusion that it's impossible and therefore exceedingly unlikely that any alien civilizations will ever make contact with eachother
Bro just played Mass Effect and said "yeah that's my idea"
Dark forest, please!
A video of the "Dark forest" theory would be awesome!
Why do we assume that that the aliens would make contact with us? Why do we assume we'd be able to see evidence of them in a basically infinite universe? We can only observe a tiny fraction of the universe. We're so incredibly arrogant to think we should be able to see them. There's no paradox.
An expansionist alien civilization that has been around for millions of years would inevitably populate most of our galaxy. Even if they weren't expansionist if they are in our galaxy and advanced enough hiding would be tricky since the energy costs would mean they would likely be capturing much of their sunlight via Dyson sphere.
@@WanderingMendicant-qd7mv Why would galaxy? There are countless galaxies out there, why assume the one we are currently apart of would be colonised?
@@tree_eats because there are over a 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. Assuming at least a fraction of those stars have a planet in their habitable zone that's potentially millions of chances for life to develop over the course of several billion years.
"Why are we live so early" sound like "Why wasn't I born in 800 AD" - I don't know, coincident?
if this was a topic on any other channel, *“Respectfully”* this would have not been a video to watch. Honestly, I almost didn’t think to give this video’s topic something worthy of my attention, however *every* video produced from this channel always involves something rare in the non-academia society where the mindset of the uninitiated individual to invoke a form of logical & rational thought process within the eternal pursuit of understanding true knowledge. So thank you for this and a my second mind to watch
For all those commenting that space is really big - Look up Von Neumann probes:
"It has been theorized[3] that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years."
My biggest issue with the Grabby Aliens concept is that even if aliens can travel at near-luminal speeds, that doesn't mean they can colonize and terraform planets that quickly.
Given that "changing their environment" is a fundamental pillar of the concept too, we can't really just say Grabby Aliens exist as a super-fleet of near-light-speed explorers.
This really only leaves the possibility then that not only are these grabby aliens travelling at near light-speed, but they're able to completely, "obviously" terraform or otherwise change whatever system they're in virtually instantly as well.
If not, they would zip to a new planet, settle down, and take a few thousand years to change it, so the signs of their expansion would have thousands of years' head start and this is PER PLANET.
Even a "small" grabby empire of a few hundred planets would have tens of thousands of years of "broadcasting" their planetary changes before they would even have the need to continue expanding.
Yeah, no matter how you skin it, this concept really just makes zero functional sense.
Edit: and I know that a civilization wouldn't be limited to settling each system sequentially, but they would be limited by population, resources, and industrial capacity. I imagine their growth rate would increase exponentially with each new planet, but that would just mean "hey we can zip around and colonize 10 planets over the next few thousand years rather than 1-2."
But yeah, there's no reason to think light speed travel speeds would correlate to pure magic levels of planetary engineering, and certainly not at first.
So even if a civilization could become, like, "The Forerunners" from Halo level advanced, they wouldn't start that way, so the signs of their earliest, slowest, "grabby" efforts would predate their "forerunner" stage by... unimaginably long amounts of time.
So yeah, this theory only really makes sense if you argue that aliens can go from single-planetary space faring to Forerunner-level god-level technology levels in... like, a few years.
In other terms, it would be like going from a Type 1 Civilization (still relatively hard to detect in the vastness of space), to a Type 2.5 ish civilization within a few years.
Honestly, if the theory suggested Grabby Aliens had true super-luminal drives, so they could "catch up" to their previously-sent light/any signs of their civilization, this would almost make sense.
But when you almost need "hyper drive" technology as a prerequisite for your theory on interstellar species... it might not be the most robust theory.
I feel like a lot of people forget how big the universe is. It's not like "Oh, there's lights in the distance there's people there." Except the universe is so big we won't be able to see beyond what the laws of physics lets us see. Like just because we can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Observable universe vs actual universe size. On top of that, they act like aliens are smarter than us and will have figured out faster than light travel as well as being able to make dyson spheres and so on, when in reality they're probably just as limited in intelligence than us. And even if they're 10 times smarter, that doesn't mean they can just disregard physics and will be a giant galactic force like scifi stories show them as. With that all being said, aliens aren't always going to be like us, There is assuredly aliens who will just be animals roaming a planet. There is 100% aliens out there, but we'll never see them with how big the universe is, ontop of the hurdles we will have to over come, and what they'll need to overcome.
The best solution to the Fermi paradox was by a guy running for president in 2000 as an alternative candidate. He said aliens just evolved into another dimension like the movie Her and they no longer inhabit this reality. Another really interesting theory I recently came across is ultra-terrestrials. Those are fairies/djinns/gods/angels/demons who co-evolved with humans but are much more advanced and have complete control over physical reality and exist in another dimension/reality. They apparently like to play tricks on people and perform psy-ops on humans. There are hundreds of detailed UFO encounters even before flying craft I was not even aware of, and they present as sailing ships, dirigibles, giant worms, and recently saucers. After the Navy videos I believed aliens exist but was grateful they mostly leave us alone. Now I believe they just mess with us for their amusement and are practically 'ghosts'. They may even act as an 'immune system' to actual physical 'grabby aliens'.
Of all the solutions, dark forest makes most sense. Even if something else turns out to be a solution to the Fermi Paradox, dark forest is still inevitable condition that requires its own solution, one of which might be interdiction hypothesis.
I'm partial to the theory that humans are early to the advanced sapience stage. We're *incredibly* early in the timeline of the universe (on a cosmic scale) and it makes sense to me that we might just have hit whatever low-but-not-zero chance at being one of the first advanced sapiences. If not in the universe, than at least in our detectable region of the universe.
A couple of points. Firstly the laws of physics make it unlikely that Grabby Aliens can travel near light speed. Secondly assuming they are a long distance away ( civilisations are rare so this is likely) the expansion of the universe may make it impossible for them to get close to any rate civilisations or emerging ones.
Came up with my own answer with Chatgpt called the Contentment Hypothesis. Suggesting that intelligent beings eventually create technology that helps them replace their biology, leading to immortality. They would enhance their intelligence with superintelligence, reaching a state of godhood-immortal and omnipotent. It would be the synthesis of a biological being, an artificial intelligence, and replicating solar powered nanites. Once their goals of immortality, omnipotence, energy absorption, and contentment are achieved, they would have no need to conquer or explore, which could explain why we don't see aliens-they might be content staying close to a long-lasting star, no need to travel if you have everything and can experience anything.
The metalicity of the Universe was not high enough to create Earth-like rocky planets until it was ~8B years old¹. Our solar system formed 1.3B years after that. ¹Per Isaac Arthur.