What Will Humanity Do If We Ever Discover Aliens? 

I really hope you enjoy this supercut! Parts of 12 different episodes have gone into this one, plus a lot of extra content made specifically for this video. I know this is a very long video, so I'm curious to know how you get on with it, so I can gauge whether I should ever do something like this again in the future. Thanks for watching! Alex

My wife and I are about to celebrate our 55th anniversary. We have set this video as our movie for the night. Thanks for putting this together.

Hello Alex, I’m a grandma from Manchester UK and I really enjoy your videos. I think they’re extremely well done and your delivery is perfect for me. You explore and explain things with a direct, clear manner. Plus, I enjoy the topics you share - even in my sixties I still love to learn.

This has given me nearly 2 weeks of content to fall asleep to. Everytime I go to bed I resume the video to the point I last remember. Theres few things more comforting in my life than being able to watch this channel and a few other similar ones most nights.

*"Temperature can affect size"* "I WAS IN THE POOL"

Once I understood the scale of the observable universe I came to a realization that discovering or contacting any potensial extra terrestrials was a slim one. Then I also realized the the scale of time and how small we are in that dimension as well. Even within our own galaxy there doesnt seem to be any reasonable setting for us to make any contact with others if they exist, have existed or will exist. In astronomical timescale, we just came into existence and are likely to be just about to vanish. Lets just make sure to fully appreciate the moment as long as it lasts.

Hey Alex, thank you. I hope you see this and know how much you've helped so many. It's neither here nor there what I, or anyone else is going through, or has been through but your contributions have helped countless people get through some seriously tough times and been a wonderful escape from our struggles here on Earth and pointed our eyes toward the skies. Toward things greater than ourselves and anything we could possibly imagine. Much love, bud.

This was really interesting, but the question "What Will Humanity Do If We Ever Discover Aliens?" was barely touched? The title should be: "What we know about-, and how we look for alien life"

Astrum, your voice is so calming that I always try listening to them to go to sleep, the only issue is that the content is so interesting I can’t help but to stay awake so that I can enjoy it in it’s entirety. By far one of my favorite channels man, please keep them coming.

This is what creator content is meant to be. Thank you.

I love space so much dude

I'll quote somebody else "when you walk close to an an anthill, do you stop and try to communicate with the ants!? Do you exchange knowledge and technology with them, or do step on a few and be on your way!" This will most likely be the outcome of discovering aliens, we have this weird thing where we projecting human traits onto non-human organisms, what we consider "aliens" might have a totally different agenda than we could ever imagine...

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ― Arthur C. Clarke

thank you for the incredible work you do

Awesome commentary, extremely thought provoking. I have heard a lot of the arguments and theories before but to have them presented together in a well thought out progression was very helpful. Thanks for your hard work, well worth listening to the whole way through, look forward to further content.

As always, informative and beautiful. I almost shed a tear towards the end. How can so many people still want to cause suffering by being so violent instead of working together to form a more perfect union? If only there was a way to skip ahead to the part in our existence where we are part of the Galactic Union and living the dream!

Koalas should have copied our brain wrinkles instead of our fingerprints.

The scale was originally designed in 1964 by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev (who was looking for signs of extraterrestrial life within cosmic signals). It has 3 base classes, each with an energy disposal level: Type I (10¹⁶W), Type II (10²⁶W), and Type III (10³⁶W). Other astronomers have extended the scale to Type IV (10⁴⁶W) and Type V (the energy available to this kind of civilization would equal that of all energy available in not just our universe, but in all universes and in all time-lines). These additions consider both energy access as well as the amount of knowledge the civilizations have access to.

Note on the lack of a dynamo for a magnetic field: Tidally locked planets are not without rotation. They do in fact rotate because there would be a night/day cycle based on theplamet's yearly orbit. Tiddal locking is not due to rotation ceasing, but by the rotation matching the orbit around the star. Additionally, due to the close in orbits of a tidally locked planet, its year would be much shorter than our Earth year, potentially only a couple weeks or even a few days. Would this be enough of a dynamo for some, all be it weaker, magnetic field?

Fabulous! Wonderful end-to-end summary of everything to do with this subject. Love to see more of this.

The work you, SEA, Cool Worlds, History of Universe/Earth, Sci Show do carries in what Carl Sagan did, & this brings me great joy! Thank you ❤️

Amazing video. I just recently discovered your channel and you've already hit the top of the list. Looking forward for everything to come as I make my way through your older videos.

10:00 In a low gravity environment, it would also be advantageous to grow wider and stouter than others grow, in order to make for easy feeding: Just bowl over however much of whichever ones you want to eat. And, if they're tall, thin animals rather than tall, thin trees, then it makes feeding even more so simple, and much less risky. Just bowl over the animals, crippling them, and then return to chow on them at your leisure...lol... 😀

We will bring them democracy

Outstanding! Many thanks for the long form today, needed something to listen to while getting chores done and getting to learn stuff while I do it makes it win win! I will gladly watch more of these.

Great Job Alex! You actually made me feel less certain that meeting other intelligent life is unlikely and I appreciate that. I like the long format.

Do you guys think aliens would prefer Pepsi or Coca Cola?

Okay.... This was way more info than I was expecting..... And I absolutely love it! This is what I've been looking for thank you!

We would be happy with bacteria. It would whisper of more to find.... We most seek life, though, that will "respond" to us. That is our... heart's desire. Thank you for this message, and including the part on aliens. I listened all the way through, when I did not intend to, originally. It was very well done.

Nice long-format video! Well done! I've loved your channel fore years and now will search out your podcast!

this is by far one of the most interesting videos i have ever watched on you tube. THANK YOU.

Thank you for your work!!! Such amazing neutrality and conciseness when it comes to your explanations. It's a goldmine for people looking to understand the Universe better.

omg I LOVE YOU! Going to sleep and just checked out your channel as I normally do, AND I FOUND THIS GEM!!! Love you

Bravo Alex! This is definitely one of the best, if not the best video covering this fascinating topic. I love your content and hope you will continue to provide us with these outstanding investigations and commentaries. Here's wishing you continued success moving forward.

I really loved this documentation! Very carefully edited and extremely informative while also being very entertaining. My new favorite documentary! Thanks a lot for this masterpiece!

I challenge your suggestion that human brains are any more or less complex than say.... An elephant brain.

Yay popcorn time! thank you Alex ;)

This was excellent! It gave the pros and cons of every aspect of "life". Thank you very much for this incredibly thought provoking video!

I absolutely love the long form content. Keep it coming!

The first time I have come across ur channel. I found this documentary genuinely fascinating and really informative. Thanks man! Will defo be watching again. First time I've seen the Drake equation be calculated 2. Amazing. I'm definitely on the optimistic side of that!

You had me at: About Life Beyond Earth. I enjoy your content very much. I share what I can synthesize with my sons, aged 7 and 5. Keep up the good energy!

Amazing compliation and something i'll be using in future to show to people in as roundup in as much detail on the subject without taking a degree in it 😄, well done and thank you 👽💗

Great vid!! I found myself nodding in agreement a lot!! However.. consider that galaxies merge regularly and yet there are likely *no*star collisions at all; it’s the infernal *distance that will keep us permanently isolated; us from “them” and them from us

Even if the galaxy is bursting with planets full of life, we are still alone and we’ll be alone probably forever. Distances in between these worlds are just too immense….

Minor correction at 11:18, desert animals have a higher surface area to body mass ratio

Thanks for providing this. It's not often when one can find this level of thought in this medium.

Thanks for this video. I always wondered a lot of these same questions regarding the habitability and the likelihood of intelligent life evolving on tidally locked planets that orbit a red dwarf.

"Do aliens exist? Do they look like us?" Well, visit any New York City subway, and the answer becomes clear instantly.

In addition to the celestial mechanics mentioned as factors that may be requisites for life--a habitable distance from a stable star, within a protective magneto-sphere--we should probably add: * the near-ideal periodicity of orbit and rotation--length of years and days; * our orbital eccentricity, nearly circular, not extremely elliptical; * orbital obliquity--our 24-degree tilt of planetary axis; * plate tectonics, preventing atmospheric or evolutionary stasis; * fractions of elemental carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, nitrogen, iron, sodium, calcium, potassium, zinc, silica, magnesium and, of course, water; * a single, hefty moon, to induce tidal cycles that oxygenate the seas, humidify the air and regularize circulation between thermal and mineral concentrates; * weather that circulates the atmosphere and erodes topography, again defying stasis, distributing isostatic compression and rebound, and correcting derangements of temperature & turbulence toward terrestrial equipoise. Then there are nearly endless contingencies that retrospectively seem necessary for complex intelligence to emerge: * An abiogenic event that birthed a first ancestor of all vital beings, with a double-facing hydrophillic/hydrophobic lipid membrane capable of cell individuation from hostile externalities, and an exchange of nutrients and waste for internal metabolism, and a mode of reproduction that consequently launched an enduring germ-line for every species for the following 4,000,000,000 years, * cell nuclear complexity (the eukaryota), * RNA, DNA or a similar molecule for highly condensed archiving of reproductive information, * random assortment of genes in meiosis, * sexual reassortment of parental alleleic sequences, * photosynthetic potential, * endothermy and oxygen for optimal metabolism and energy expenditure, * motility with jawed skeletal, sufficient circulatory and neuromuscular anatomy for intentional directionality, sensation, perception and prey/predator dynamism, * something like fungal species to recycle environmental nutrients, * a robust dynamic like natural selection for best-adapted phenotypes and their default proliferation constantly refining vigorous genotypes, * omnivory, bipedality & dexterity, and neoteny balanced by mortality & longevity, * consciousness, cognition and sentient volition, an inextinguishable reflex for survival, reciprocal regard of conspecifics, loyalty to kith & devotion to kin, * a number sense, innate geometric form recognition, pulse, tone interval and metric patterns for generating lyrical sounds of music, * concepts of ciphers, zero, triangulation, symmetry and proportion, * capacity for imagined projectile trajectories, navigation of gravity, leverage, rotary motion, inclines, pulleys and cantilevers, * gymnastic tumbling, running, swimming and brachiation, * intellectual inquiry, experimentation, productive skepticism, * valence of logic, access to deduction & induction, intuition & counter-intuition, * a sense of play, creativity, exploration, discovery and invention, * anatomy & social compulsion for syntactical language, noun/verb/object world apprehension, metaphorical schemata, poetic generativity, fictional drama and story-telling, * writing systems for consensus proclamations and extra-somatic archives of civilization, * notions of wonder, truth, beauty, art, initiative, fairness, transgression, cruelty, transcendence, magnanimity and the sublime, * memory and the appreciation and veneration of ancestry, * empathy, love, social ethics, integrity of character, self-sufficiency & cooperation, individuality and culturally defined virtue, * arc of life achievement, shared resources & future anticipation of progeny, legacies and an ancient vestigial impulse to make one's mark on civilization, and leave a better world than the one that greeted us. In other words, anyone who cultivates a cavalier certainty of life on other planets hasn't understood the forbidding threshold of life's requisite circumstances. And I think they have particularly neglected the above requirements whose absence would make improbable a world permitting our own existence, and its web of complex, compound contingencies. That web of fortuities has hosted preposterously wonderful examples of humanity, like: Sappho, Cyrus, Thucydides, Eratosthenes, Pythias, Arminius, Quintillian, Mencius, Viriathus, Lucretius, Tacitus, Hadrian, Zenobia, Hypatia, Boethius, Ibn Rusd, Frederick II, Ibn Sina, Hildegard, Al-Haithm, Alcuin, Casimir, Ibn Battuta, Leonardo, Kepler, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Bruegel & Bruegel, Jahan, Fibonacci, Bartolome, Dossi, Murasaki, Balboa, Rembrandt, Descartes, Bernini, Bellini, Velasquez, Purcell, Bolivar, Rameau, Bach, Levoisier, Kant, Euler, Powhaten, Lafayette, Tecumseh, Pushkin, Hokusai, Geronimo, Dumond, Volta, Montesquieu, Goya, Linnaeus, Ingres, Sacajawea, Tubman, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Byron, Lovelace, Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn & Mendelssohn, Saint-Saens, Darwin & Darwin, Borodin, Humboldt & Humboldt, Brahms, Koch, Soule, Ramanujan, Sargent, Pasteur, Dvorak, Husserl, Ravel, Ataturk, Joplin, Modigliani, Lili'uokalani, DuBois, Whitman, Zola, Hubble, Dewey, Cavafy, Bartok, Melville, Vavilov, Sibelius, Curie, Maxwell, Woolf, Ramon Y Cajal, Marti, Sun Yat Sen, Wilde, Keller, Stein, Prokofieff, Bohr, Joyce, Mahler, Turing, Lemaître, Sanger, Bonhoeffer, Katchaturian, Chang, Cassin, Malek, Roosevelt, Anderson, Saroyan, Lorca, Barber, Gandhi, Trilling, Berlin, Ginastera, Boulanger, Tagore, Renoir, Renoir & Renoir, Forster, Akhmatova, Wittgenstein, Luxembourg, Elgar, Gropius, Puccini, Gershwin, Beckstein, Atlee, Brecht, Salk, Perkins, Faulkner, Armstrong, Kollwitz, Saarinen, de Beauvoir, Nabokov, Garbo, Crick, Franklin, Liuzzo, Carson, Vargas Llosa, Bishop, Meir, Biko, Sontag, Henze, Garcia Marquez, Simone, Lessing, Bhutto, Ashrawi, Calder, Alvarez & Alvarez, Folkman, Pamuk, Bischoff, Callas, Chomskey, Gorbachev, Tutu, Goodall, Fairuz, Chatergee, Merkel, Mantel and Ardern. That is the smallest, glancing fraction of all the powerful but humble humans of blistering intelligence and surpassing conviction, historical characters of geared comprehension of the world and deeply plumbed self-knowledge. They typified our profoundly emotional yet stubbornly rational encephalons; an entity of intentional, self-propelled understanding that can emerge only in social obligates who maximize neoteny and the generational accumulation of knowledge, who manage to keep aggression and arrogance less destructive than incurious ignorance, and who insist on empathy over selfishness, justice over rage, equanimity over cruelty and nobility of sapient agency over self-indulgent isolation, to steward the sustained vigor of our garden planet and cherish the fortune of our evolutionary endowment. Those sorts of creatures don't pop up everywhere; in fact, they are probably occupying the one cosmic circumstance they seem least prepared to accept: A lone existence on the distant shores of the only world that ever countenanced animated vitality and reasoned intentionality; moreover they are the only 8,000,000,000 bundles of such wonder that evolution produced in all of spacetime. I say stop tilting at exoplanets and revel in our singular, exuberant, self-determined lives.

You'd think they would send up pilots with quality cameras with telephoto lenses when they send jets to investigate a sighting

One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted RU-vid personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Hey Alex, at 7:51 you say photosynthesis has evolved dozens of times, but my understanding is that it occurred only once. Theres convergence in the carbon concentration mechanisms and a bit of debate re oxygenic vs anoxygenic but even there it looks like there's a shared origin or at least co-evolution muddled with horizontal gene transfer, which still isn't de novo convergent evolution. Either way, I absolutely love the content so please keep it coming! Cheers

I would just like to point out that even if we are alone, eventually other intelligent life forms will evolve on earth if we are around long enough. Some have argued, for example, that certain primates are currently in their stone age. I'm inclined to agree. We have discovered in recent years that many animals are far more intelligent than previously thought. A lack of opposable fingers for fine motor control could be the only reason we don't see similar species to our own in technological advances. Maybe because of that there aren't other species as intelligent, but there could well be a species on earth capable of communicating on our level or close. There already is depending on how you define communication on our level.

Astonishing work, came to listen to one subject got to see beautiful video with a ton of information about so many things

Imagine the headlines: "It is confirmed, life outside our planet exists!" I wonder about the impact 🙏❤️.

If we found them The U. S will send Money to them.....

the sentence "form follows function" make so much sense ! thank you so much for this video

Best alien video ever! Thanks for creating such amazing content 👏

Neil Tyson.. Ppppttthhhhhh...

The world lost the ability to think straight when the flu virus hit in 2020 .

True that red dwarfs provide "our" problems for life, but one of the constituents for creating life is "distillation" occurring . This would be something that is super far beyond what could happen around a red dwarf, along with the constant of "time". This process over time, that includes a tidal lock is even more pronounced. Also, heat can be generated in a planet specifically from gravity forces internally, which gives these aspects over time better odds at life being created and sustaining. We also have a negative bias here on earth, because when one type of life begins, it may destruct all other promise of a different start to a different type of life. We do know so little. Gr8! Peace ☮💜

There is one thought I rarely stumble upon when it comes to all those considerations about Types of Civilizations or possible Filters etc. which is that all the scaling is based on our current incomplete understanding of Everything. As of now the absence of such an advanced Alien Civilization might as well indicate that Progress happens in a different way. Makes for a nice filter I believe

As far as I know, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope doesn’t have actually have a specific mission objective at this point, let alone a timeframe. While they have ideas of what they’d like to do and a timeframe for launch, similar story to JWST, it won’t launch on time.

I did fall asleep alien story telling is a big win ... ..I am grateful for you sharing this entertaining experience

1:33:04 this is actually most likely a Boeing 737. The flashing sequence of the lights and flight path at that time both match a certain flight taken by one of those planes.

Beautiful work, my friend. Inspiring and informational!

Could another system have developed a complex life form adapted to live happily in, for example, a 1,000 degC environment? Using eg lead as the solvent fluid, titanium to form cell walls, diamond as skeletal structure, etc? Energy to operate would simply be a matter of finding a cold sink to initiate energy flow. If it developed an analog of neurons, they could operate thousands of times faster than ours, and have little concern for energy requirement . Spaceships would be very different (unlimited cold sink, how to keep the body hot?)

This is one of the best videos ever uploaded to RU-vid.

Such a great video, thank you for making my day better!

I like how you frame the question as “when” not “if” like it’s inevitable even though we have no idea or evidence as to how life formed.

I enjoyed your narration my friend..... Very smoothing as I hit my weed bowl......God Bless

Absolutely great doc/analysis of "Aliens" issue. Well balanced, logically structured, without annoying sensationalism. Love it! Will share on X!

Going all the way back to the 1970s, I was confident the world could cope. But the past 5 to 10 years in this country have changed my mind completely. We’re deeply awash with masses of people who can’t seem to handle or process much of anything. We seem to live in Gooberville, and there will be no quick way out of it.

Thank you very much for this thought-provoking and awe-inspiring video. Too long? I was sad when it ended! You could announce an asteroid was hurtling to Earth to end us all, and I would probably think, "Goodness, isn't his accent lovely!" Oh, please, YES! Do MORE! Thank you 💖💖💖

Great message and excellent production! Thank you.

The David Attenborough of space ✨ This is my favourite video of yours so far!!! Thank you 🦠⛰️💫🌌🪐

omg a astrum podcast tyvmmm!!

Probably my fav example of speculative biology, the Birrin project proves that intelligent life doesn’t have to converge to a humanoid shape. The Birrin species is depicted as capable of creating tools and everything that is required to develop and change their environment like a intelligent species does.

*This man is the David Attenborough of space!* Someone give him an Oscar!! Really enjoying the vid.

Great episode! Thanks for all your diligent and thoughtful work👏👏

You guys are the best! Very informative videos

Awesomely put together ❤️

Last night my night sky was immensely enjoyable. I could perceive at least a hundred stars, plus the ISS, & a couple planets, for sure one 😊. I love the outer space realm. I wonder if people on the ISS consider their sleeping positions comfortable 🤔. Thanks for the upload 🙂😊

Thanks for putting in this hard work Alex, great video

The Moon is tidally-locked to the Earth, but the Moon, relative to the Sun, is constantly rotating, while constantly revolving around the Sun, as well. When it comes to revolving around the Sun, the Moon is never in a state of retrograde. The Moon is constantly "tracing out" a spirograph sinusoid, as the Moon revolves around the Sun. Of all the planetary bodies, Earth's Moon seriously has the coolest planetary path. What's fascinating is that no one ever questions WHY it is possible for the Moon, when seen from Earth, to always exhibit the same Moon-phase, per Earth-day, no matter what earthly Time Zone you might be standing in.

"They are not building massive structures that might tip us off to their existence", he says, completely oblivious of the fact that megalithic construction has occurred throughout the world, and the best guess of who was involved in that construction has got to be some aspect of the NHI currently interacting with humanity. We've been "tipped".

Your videos are the best. So informative. Awesome editing

This was absolutely amazing.

I'm glad you add the phrase "as we know it" to the term "life." It drives me nuts when people talk about potential alien life as if we know for certain that carbon/water life is the only possibility. We only have ourselves to look at for now as the basis for our knowledge. We clearly don't know a lot about the universe, to think Earth is the only possible template is frankly narcissistic.

Everyone always asks "Where are they" but they never stop to think "When were they." Humanity has been around for such a small fraction of time in comparison to the Milky Way, that the odds of intelligent life existing at the same time as us would be astronomically low.

This was an excellent episode! Thank you! 🌹🤙🏼

Well done for including the Nimitz encounter

It's worth mentioning that there actually a few species of bacteria that do live and reproduce in environments entirely bereft of water. They are the most extreme of the extreme found in natural asphalt, tar pits and heavy oil. Most microbes that live in oil deposits still need tiny amounts of water that's present but their tarpit relatives discovered in California recently live in environments totally bereft of water. They seem to use the hydrocarbons and what oxygen is available locked up in other compounds to produce any of the water they use in their internal chemistry. They also are extremely long lived and slow with some spending their lives on a timescale longer than most plants.

Another great episode from Astrum 🎉🎉

I do share all of your hopes Alex. You can be proud. It's a wonderful video

I LOVE this channel and Alex does an amazing job all the time. It does sound like he might not quite understand evolution, though. Animals don’t learn to have bigger beaks so they can eat bigger food. The form changes as a random mutation and grants them an advantage so it’s more likely they won’t die before reproductive age.

1:24:48 Blue Book was the first. Since then we’ve had AATIP, AAWSAP, and AARO. Quite a lot of investigations for something that “doesn’t exist”.

“2.5 billion times without breaking”. Alex I really didn’t want or have a need to know that number 🤣 5:39

I think I may have a work around. Use electromagnetic rings were its set rotational path has electromagnets pulsing at a matching polarity to produce repulsive magnetic forces. Having static generating gas inside the rings, both the ring and gaseous contence will generate energy to cycle back into electro magnetic velocity. The rings won't lose momentum in 0g allowing for an ever increasing velocity until speed of light is reached or the structure is increased in mass till it breaks apart if a strong enough compound material is found for construction.

Awesome commentary, extremely thought provoking Thank you.