Yes Isaac is incredible. It really takes a long amount of focused time to understand his arguments though. I've been reading about these arguments for two decades and he somehow still blows my mind with new insights when I really pay attention.
He meant that he has knowledge, or have been learning about the subject, for two decades and Isaac still menaged to impress him. It doesn't take two decades of video watching to understand him :).
Correction. Possible solutions. The fact is we do not know yet why we can have not seen any other intelligence out there. But there are a lot of ideas. And the more we learn the more we can hone in on the right solution by discarding what we know is not true. (Like now we know that there are other planets around other stars and that there pretty common. Go back 50 years and there where still those that though that planets may be extremely rare. Maybe even so rare that only our solar system had them. But now we know that is not true.)
@@Xeno455 Not if you're applying it to all humans. How can that be offensive if everyone is included, and no superficial group or individual singled out? Creationists in the early 20th Century were offended by the idea we descended from primates on religious grounds, to the point there was a trial, but if people want to be offended by well-established science, that's on them and we can also see in such an example why the idea of holding back speech because it might be "offensive" to someone can quickly become destructive to reason.
@@JET7C0 Alright, a few things. 1: Humans are not even closely related to monkeys. Your "established" science falls flat, immediately. Because YOUR science isn't based on real science. We're not even on the same evolutionary branch. At all. We're both primates, sure. Yet the difference between us is like that of grass and trees. 2: The creationist story that you told was all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that we live in a current socially accepted cancel-culture. I don't like it as much as you, and as an individual I do what I want regardless. That being said, I'm not famous. I'm guaranteed to not get canceled because of that fact. Yet a medium sized youtube channel is literally the perfect avenue for people that do accept it to attack. 3: I never made it a race thing. At all. I said "Someone". Your presumptions are ridiculous and you're arguing against straw men from that point forward.
I'd like to see one of these Fermi videos about how difficult it would be to develop recognizable technology on different kinds of worlds. If your gravity is too high, then getting things into space could be a big problem. If your species is aquatic, then how do you move past the stone age? What kind of air do you need to achieve combustion?
Excellent summary as always. However, there is one factor, that is probably underestimated. Most people don't have a real idea about the distances we're talking about, which are beyond huge. And with the hard limitation of the speed of light, the statistic probability of receiving signals boils down to next to nothing. It's like the probability of two little fishes jumping into the Ocean from two sides to meet each other in their lifetime.
Exactly. And space is expanding so the universe is just getting bigger. Now add the vastness of time as well. What if one of those little fishies lived a a hundred million years ago. So yeah ...
It's more accurate if you use intelligent fish. Possibly more advanced than us by unimaginable amounts. I think they would probably have the capability to find each other, or in the case of one dumb and one smart the smart one locate their less intelligent future buddy
@@josephhall5681 In the end it doesn't matter how intelligent the fish are. The speed of light is the hard limitation of everything, sight, communication, any kind of wave.
The biggest dream of mine is to be alive the day we discover life in the cosmos (if we do). i imagine myself sitting by my computer, getting a notification from any of the news-sites here in sweden saying "first evidence of life has been found". The media coverage will last for weeks etc.. imagine a photo from one of our great telescopes of a world where we can SEE the building of a advanced civilization, or like the movies, a giant alien spaceship enters our atmosphere to make first contact. These are the things that i want more than anything, to know, that we are not alone.
@@medexamtoolscom There might be a difference worth mentioning, which would be he's most likely not basing his current and future actions and beliefs on this hope. It's just a hope to be able to see because it'd be a cool experience of collective global excitement.
media coverage last for weeks? Try years. If we find conclusive proof of aliens it will be the biggest discovery of humanity, although I could see half the population thinking it's some kind of government conspiracy. That would be incredible. I just want to be alive when that comet comes back when I'm in my 70s.
My greatest hope is to see significant steps of our species moving beyond our basic tribalism towards something better. I agree that knowing that alien intelligent life would be cool, but I would rather see real growth of our species by more than just our technological progress.
I always had this idea of aliens being in the same situation as us in the sense that they are also asking if there is life beyond their planet and that they have the same hurdles to overcome.
I don't think the Fermi paradox is that paradoxical once you truly comprehend the vast distances involved, and the immense timescales it takes to send a beam of light across even 1% of this enormous galaxy. And the fact that we have not sampled enough space with a high enough resolution to make an informed determination. Terrestrial strength transmissions would NOT be visible past 4 or 5 LYs. You can find an online calculator for Free Space Path Loss (FSPL), and see about that after that distance, the signal would be indistinguishable from cosmic microwave background radiation. So no, there are no alien civilizations watching our I Love Lucy broadcasts. The ONLY transmission we would detect would be one deliberately aimed at Earth with very directional and very high-strength beam. And by the way, they would have to send a sustained beam for at least several years to hope that we would even notice it. Why would any civilization bother wasting so much power sending a sustained beam to Earth, which is just one of at least tens of billions of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy. Not all hope is lost. With better telescopic resolution, we could however infer alien life by detecting oxygen and methane in spectrograms of exoplanet atmospheres. We don't yet have the tools to see the contents of exoplanet atmospheres, so deducing whether alien civilization are common or rare in our galaxy is getting ahead of ourselves. The only thing that is still paradoxical about the Fermi paradox is the absence of Von Neumann probes. Yes, they could have spread throughout the galaxy by now. But it's not so strange that alien civilizations have better things to do than have machines spread out and potentially destroy the galaxy on their behalf, for no good reason. Von Neumann probes are of no tangible benefit to a planet-based civilization. Combine this with the fact that complex life may be rare and intelligence may be even more rare, and I don't see any paradox at all.
You're thinking far to small with regards to the benefits of Von Neumann probes. If you're reasonably advanced you've probably got AGI which you can get to act in alignment with your goals (if not then you've probably been replaced by AGI which are likely to be no less expansionist) then making Von Neumann probes which do what you want and can self replicate without diverging over time in values isn't hard. So given the very possible threat of being subsumed by other more expansionist civilizations and the fact expanding now lets you save more energy for pushing back the heat death of the universe (and you can do computing and thus run minds much faster in the degenerate era: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Qam5BkXIEhQ.html) there's very compelling reasons for an advanced civilization to expand and for them not to would require them to be extremely authoritarian since you need to be able to prevent any group or even just individual from going off and doing so. It's also worth noting that for a immortal civilization their population is going to increase exponentially, so particularly if they are forward thinking they will probably want to develop some real estate before that becomes an issue in millions of years (or likely less since those factions who breed the fastest will come to dominate future population growth eventually).
@@vakusdrake3224 The Von Neumann idea is for unlimited exploration returning information thousands to millions of years after the deaths of the builders if not immortal. Yours referring to local area exploration at least at this time in Universe history so the probes would be limited in how far out they went if no faster than light travel. Probes also might avoid or stay cloaked traveling though occupied systems.
@@RedRocket4000 I'm actually thinking of the sorts of maximally expansionist Von-Neumann probes, which disassemble nearly every system they come upon to make more Von-Neumann probes as well as to turn the material into other useful stuff and store matter in a form that will conserve it for the degenerate era as previously mentioned. I'm very much not thinking just local area exploration since the probes may well transform nearly everything in that civs future light cone into stuff which is useful to the parent civ. As for being limited to lightspeed that's still pretty rapid over cosmic timescales so you'd expect any civilization we randomly saw to have already "consumed" most or all of their local galactic cluster since they would be unlikely to not have a head start of at least millions of years on us.
@@vakusdrake3224 I'm not completely sure but as population grow goes, after a phase of exponential explotion it's likely that the number stabilizes after some conditions are met. This is already happening here, where develping countries still grow in population atva quick rate while more stablished ones like EU economic core or Japan are below the 2 children per couple (Kurzgesagt video on overpopulation). So, with some global planning, overpopulation is not an issue. For me, the strongest argument for colonizing other planets is to avoid extiction in case some natural or self-induced catastrophe strikes the original home planet.
Imagine what they must think when they see who our leader is? That's why they are not sharing the warp drive with us, we were almost ready, but they were like : "Oh maybe they are not that great a decision making after all, on to the next star system Zortorg"
@@daveb5041 The alien leader be all like: When Earth sends its humans, they’re not sending their best...They’re sending humans that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good humans.
@@kendomyers Well can't we build a space wall? I know that most UFO's come here through legal space boarder crossings, space ports, or just overstay their space visas, a wall still might help but we need to make sure no quantum tunneling, the tunneling is great tremendous and amazing. The tunneling is very instant its tunneling and its instant its tunneling instantly. But the UFO's on the south peninsula below the Space DMZ needs to de-space-nuke. Most ufo's are Clinton supporters full of space drugs.
I'd feel very sorry for that alien watching us wipe ourselves out for a particular bartering method (money). It's truly sad that the scale of the universe makes people so uncomfortable they entirely forget it
@@georgeperalta936 maybe this alien thinks that his planet had to go through all these mistakes too. To learn from them. Is it possible for his race to jump the steps in their evolution?
I think one of the great biological filters for developing intelligent life may be the development of complex multicellular life. No matter which way multicellular life developed, whether it be thru symbiosis, cellularization, etc., it all seems to be exceptionally difficult to jump from anything more than a slime-mold sized organisms up to something as basic as a sea slug. Unicellular life existed for BILLIONS of years before the first simple multicellular life took form, and it took until the Cambrian explosion before some real complexity existed. I feel like given the amount of time it took for multicellular life it develop, and given the likely number of multicellular species compared to unicellular species, multicellular development is an extremely rare and difficult event, that takes such a wide range of circumstantial sequence of events and factors to occur, that it is very possible that Earth may be one of just a few hundred, maybe a thousand, or so planets which have developed multicellular life in the Galaxy. Most all of the small and iffy evidence we have for life on places like Mars is focused on unicellular life almost exclusively. Given that even after developing multicellular life, a species must evolve intelligence (which took ~550 million years from the Cambrian explosion on Earth) I feel like multicellularity may be a large enough limiter, not even considering other limiting factors (such as the planet's parent star being the right type so as to not emit too much radiation, the star being in the right neighborhood of the Galaxy to avoid excess radiation, the presence of a large planet like Jupiter to limit asteroid impacts, the planet not being too large so spaceflight is impossible, the presence of a magnetic field to further limit radiation, existence of the right materials on the planet (i.e. planet is from correct stellar generation) and the planet is old enough to allow for the evolution of intelligent life), is enough to limit Earth to the only or one of only a few planets with intelligent species in the Galaxy.
Another factor to consider is that Sun has increased in brightness by about 40% during the development of life on Earth. And yet Earth has maintained similar temperature on its surface during all that time. How did that come to be? Maybe there is some really simple and well-understood reason behind this, but I have not really heard of one. Is this reason somehow unique to Earth, or can it be common to every planet? After all, all stars get brighter during their life, although very small stars brighten up significantly slower. But very small stars exhibit substantial instability in their radiation output. Larger stars, on the other hand, increase in brightness much faster, leaving much less time for life to develop around them. In any case, I'm not an expert in physics not in biology, so I can only throw somewhat blind guesses out there
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I think that single celled organisms probably are fairly common. The multi-cellular one is probably the biggest 'filter'. And the fact that the dinosaurs could have easily ruled today, if that meteor didn't wipe them out. And they were not the greatest thinkers. I mean, the did rule the earth for over 200.000.000 years. So my guess is: 1. Single cellular life = common. 2. Multi cellular life = extremely rare. 3. Stupid animals = incredibly rare. 4. Intelligent animals = nearly zero chance. 5. Space-faring animals = practically one pr galaxy.
lvl1 multicellular organism lvl2 multiorganism hive lvl3 multihive mind An organism is emergent from cells A hive is emergent from organisms A mind is emergent from hives The third level made little sense stated this way initially, but I had an idea. I googled "hive neurons" and got that as a second result: "A Bee Colony Closely Parallels the Neurons of the Brain". So if a single brain acts sort of as a hive of neurons, a multi-brain entity is not a hivemind, it's a mind of hives. A multi-hive mind. A civilization ... perhaps? One can go from there and develop some rather interesting philosophical concepts. That our higher level thinking is civilized, but the term 'civilized' has a specific meaning there. It indicates that our thinking is not really our own. We haven't created it, merely learned. A quote from a movie that I liked: "Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others" I'm bit tired and perhaps not entirely rational at this point, and perhaps I should not write this comment, but maybe someone can see something interesting there for themselves ... just maybe. Disclaimer: I'm aware that analogies are good only up to a certain point. The brain is not actually a hive, it may only resemble it in some ways. Great care is needed not to submerge in bs while following such flashes of ... ideas.
I watched something recently that speculated that Oxidation may be the big eureka factor in biological development. So if the rest of the galaxy is developing anaerobically then we likely have a big head start.
Or not even that. Even with all the time many things dontake sense or aren't solved. Not to mention the fact or we haven't even considered. It's a crapshoot. And the fact that more and more papers are written describing certain parameters have to be just right for life to exist we can probably expect that there are many more factors which determining e the possibility for life to exist will be discovered. Rendering the hypothesis of the rare earth more impossibly rare than before. It's already coming into focus. We are the only life permitting planet in the universe. And once that is realized the next realization will be that development of intelligent life is only possible by the transcendent Creator and His will. After all we are based on a code. And we have mutation correcting codes in our DNA. and no code has ever been shown to arise without intelligent agency. Let alone an error correction code. How do mutations randomly create a code that corrects mutations. And virtually all mutations degrade the genome. And these mutations are shown to be degrading us by 60-100 per generation
It is unlikely that extra terrestrial life forms would find our bodies to be a suitable environment for their survival. This is why different species on Earth are usually not susceptible to the same pathogens. It's usually hard enough to be able to survive in just one species. Of course, there are some exceptions (e.g. corona virus made the leap from bats to humans, HIV made the leap from other primates to humans), but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.
To me I still think there's a bit of "Dark Forest" theory to be considered. It may be that any group which does pass the great filter also comes to understand that broadcasting their existence is not the best idea, and that survival is best accomplished when you don't have other groups coming after you.
@@PersimmonHurmo yeah I'm sure that's true. But it might explain why things are "quiet" and we don't already have clear evidence of being in the midst of a galaxy-wide cultural explosion. I think it is likely that eventually if it's out there we would notice things. We might not see ships or societies or great works: but there might be ruins or leftover oddities that start to point to a narrative that requires an intelligence at one end. If something like Dark Forest theory is in effect, I would liken our situation as being happy, simple, island people on the shore of our beach, looking out into the ocean for a ship, or even some fish. Now, maybe it happens that those smart enough to be out there are aware of each other but in the midst of a great Cold War. Their ships are submarines, designed to hide from each other. Lesser species such as ours, our existence may be obvious to such beings, but they won't have any reason to bother with us. They could probably slip in and out of our system, gathering supplies or just some gravity boost, with no one knowing better. Or it's just optics and we need better lenses. Maybe it's all quite plain if you knew which of the millions systems to scrutinize closer.
To me the most significant thing to keep in mind is that there could be hundreds or thousands of civilisations exactly as advanced as we are in the milky way who look for others the exact same way we do and we'd not have found each other. The fact that our own search might well not be enough yet to even find ourselves at a realistic distance puts things into perspective.
The universe is 14 billion years old. it's highly unlikely that there are thousands of civilizations EXACTLY as advanced as ours and none of more advanced.
I think you missed the point of this guy's comment. Our own search is dedicated to the larger/more advanced civilizations as of right now and we honestly have no way of detecting civilizations at our own level. The same would also be true in reverse, because our own radio signal we've been emitting (since the invention of radio) is so hopelessly diffuse that it would be unlikely any equivalent level species would be able to notice it, let alone decipher it (at any significant distance).
There’s also the notion that perhaps advanced intelligent life is incredibly common. After all, if the universe is absolutely packed full of life, then we have no baseline to compare it to.
So we observed around 2.700 planets. The milky way is said to have 40 billion. 2.700 planets is 0.00000675% of all the planets. :P we gotta chill a bit
That works for not finding life on ONE planet. Limited pond-scum life. But if any of those planets developed interstellar tech at 1% light speed, it takes a million years or so to colonize the whole galaxy. Dyson spheres, star mining, MOVING stars... we see none of this, and nobody has left us a welcome mat. So is all life single-planet? Why?
Listen to @@garethdean6382 . Literally the first person I have found on the internet who understands the Fermi Paradox. 1 million years you can colonise the entire galaxy. Our galaxy has existed for nearly as long as the universe itself. It's 13.5 billion years old! That's a lot of opportunities to colonise our galaxy!
Gareth Dean The time at 1% the speed of light even assuming instant acceleration to that speed and in deceleration, is 10 million years not one million and that's to just reach from one side of the galaxy to the other. That's not including the fact that you have to essentially travel 100,000 light years in distance diameter, travelling that far in EVERY direction. Now that's very rough and not at all a scientific measurement but gives some idea of the distance. Then you have to slow down and get to any and every inhabitable planet along the way and spend hundreds or thousands of years colonising those before moving on to the next. You could spend 20,000 years on just one or two planets. You also wouldn't head out to most far off planets until you know for sure that they are habitable and if you sent out probes, by the time they get there and send a signal back, your entire civilisation could be gone and dead meaning you never even got off the one or two rocks in your own solar system or the surrounding solar systems. You might not even need to go beyond one or two planets you find and colonise because your population isn't even big enough to warrant it for another 30,000 years or more because you already live on four or five planets nearer you. 1% of light speed is absolutely nothing and I'm pretty sure we have many means at the moment that could actually get us up even faster than that and we'd still all die before reaching our nearest solar system because of radiation in space, muscle atrophy and bone density decreases due to lack of gravity and the fact that we wouldn't have enough food or supplies/resources and money to build a ship large enough to carry enough people to colonise a planet and feed them and hydrate them and stop them from killing each other in transit due to space madness, spending 400 years in space at the 1% light speed value you gave just to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest interstellar neighbour. There'd have to be generations of self sustaining people that don't go mad from lack of grass and wildlife and the sound of wind or water and the feeling of being entrapped on this one way journey. Hell, over such distances, because it would take so long, the entire ship's engines or internal life support systems could easily breakdown killing everyone aboard. You'd also need about 40,000 people for a good range of genetic diversity to get to that one planet to colonise it, meaning either a ship that can hold and sustain that population and much more (kids, grandkids etc.) or many large ships carrying them all (a more viable and safeguarded option) and that's all if you can solve the gravity problem and the radiation problem, feeding problem, water problem etc. To colonise the galaxy would take hundreds of billions of years and due to all the hurdles might not ever be possible and most civilisations would die out long before they get the chance or shortly after they begin.
Jhakaro *Problem 1 - Techological advancement* You're assuming that a technological civilisation that has existed for millions of years could would have the same level of technology and therefore the same problems to overcome as our civilisation that has been around for 100 years. But the biggest problem with your counter-argument is that it assumes the colonisation is a linear process. It starts out slow, but occurs at an exponential rate. *Problem 2 - Exponential rate of colonisatino* Once the first planet is colonised, you have two bases from which to send colonies. Even if every base only sends two successful expiditions you soon have 4 bases, then 8, then 16, then 32, then 64, then 128, then 256, then 512, then 1024, then 2048, then 4096, then 8192, then 16384, then 32768, then 65536, then 131072, then 262144, then 524288, then 1048576, then 2097152, then 4194304, then 8388608, then 16777216, then 33554432, then 67108864, then 134217728, then 268435456, then 536870912, then 1,073,741,824. 30 doublings and you have 1 billion civilisations and that assumes each colony only sends two successful expeditions. The milky way is 13.5 billion years old. Plenty of time for 30 doublings. *Problem 3 - The assumption that the aliens send themselves* Many of the challenges you outlay assume that humans are sent. The Fermi paradox does not require this. It just expect to see evidence of alien civilisations. This can take the form of robotic missions, which could also propagate exponentially if the robots are self replicating. This was mentioned in the video.
Self annihilation i think thats the filter we have to overcome 1st.. we already got tech and weapons to annihilate ourself imagine when we become type 1 civilization we might be capable of such destruction to destroy all evidence of our existence.(Elon musk is smart guy thinking to put some of us away from humans i.e. on mars).one more better plan might be creating robots AI to do the space labour work like journey and waiting till some one else we see. and when they spot something worth visit then we download our conciseness(saved millions of year ago into these robots into some biological or mechanical humanoid. Imagine Evolution as ladder unfortunately it doesn't care where the next step of ladder is comming from a good or evil idea. it just want to go up. Super advance AI without feeling will do the same. But humanity.. i believe its in choosing the most good ways and ideas to climb the ladder of evolution (MOST 100% is not possible). JUST DONT WANT AT THE END STUPID ROBOTS AND AI MEETING AND GREETING created by diffrent aliens.
If I was the first to contact aliens, the first thing I would ask is, do you want a cup of tea? They just travelled a along way and the least you can offer them is tea. It is a sign of civility and should avoid war.
@@bornkinggamer3347🙄Take your edgelord anti-theism to some other comment. Given the timescales involved, the complete and total lack of evidence, and the number of unlikely factors that went into human evolution, the overwhelming likelihood is that there is no one. The only religion here is the baseless science fantasy belief in aliens.
I would love for one of the rovers on Mars to casually run into a small bug or something walking around on a rock. That small little insect will be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind.
The fact of the matter is that space is so profoundly massive that there could be an intelligent civilization 200 light years from us and we would never know. That is relatively close on a cosmic scale. The universe is just too damn massive, and the speed of light is just too damn slow. We are like ants separated by miles.
Panzrom, good point. But do ants of Europe know of existence of ants in America? What if we ourselves are the "self-replicating probe" of a spreading galactic civilization?
Did you not watch the video? Even if civilizations didn't spread beyond their home start we would definitely notice any dyson swarms within 200 light years of us.
You mentioned that the "WoW" signal was probably explained by a couple of comets. If that is the case, how come we do not have not a single additional example of this? Also didn't the author of that say his ecplanation most likely isn't the answer.
It's lack of repetition points to a natural anomaly. If it was alien communication we would have seen more of it and more complex versions of it. It's very hard to draw a conclusion of alien existence based upon one set of numbers, we would need more substantial evidence. It's sad, the paradox is persistent.
There are many discoveries left to be made. I've made a few myself. They're not eye-opening except to the previously unscientific mind and are very accessible experiments. You too are capable of these.
I always think we forget to take into account laziness. Some year soon, we may have the option to plug into virtual reality and live a dream life while machines keep us alive. Those machines could be as efficient as they wanted because we would not care. We would be in a fantasy dreamland. By comparison, all of the issues that travelling these astronomical distances bring with them are very difficult. Spend your life investing in a project that may or may not pay off in a thousand years, or just accept the fantasy of doing all of these things virtually? Then there is the rabbit hole of just how many times we may have made this decision already.
I feel like the life development bottleneck is actually the sheer rarity of very specific combinations of molecule that create self sustaining, self replicating and adapting life, let alone the fact that the first organism would have to be extremely lucky to increase population. It's probably more likely a robotic/computer intelligence would develop in the crystalline structure of a rare element due to particles bouncing around, acting like our neurons in our brain, at least they wouldn't have to self replicate. Also this would be a good idea for a super computer, don't know how you would do it but it would be more compact than our brain.
I don’t expect aliens to ever meet us, or for us to get to another star system, but to think we are the only life in this immense universe is depressing.
There is life, and then there is us. Life is likely pretty common. Life that evolves into _intelligent_ complex organisms like us, likely much less so.
Another plausible theory is that science follows a certain trajectory and inevitably leads to technology that is extremely hard to detect. There might be communication methods way more efficient than we have yet to envision, that would be practically invisible to us. And we are assuming that civilizations are centered around solar systems. If they lived in deep space between the stars, it would be almost impossible to detect(at least for some time). Or uploading/robotic transformation is the natural path to take once you want to "get out there". That would throw a serious wrench in our calculations as it would open up a much broader range of possible habitats/ways to form societies.
That line of reasoning assumes there is some reason not to use abundant and easy to use starlight for energy by Dyson swarms. As it stands, all stars shine away hard-to-imagine amounts of energy, that basically goes to waste from the standpoint of civilizations. Sun alone converts about a million metric tons of rest mass into perfectly usable electromagnet radiation each second. Why would a civilization opt out from that source? There might e reasons, perhaps, it's just it's hard to come up with some. And that keeps people wandering, it seems to me.
that asumtion still falls into what most fremi paradox "solutions" fail at, asuming that all of the supoused civilisations took the same path in their technological advanacement, imagining a couple of them having technologies that are vritualy imposible for as to detect with currrent technologies its one thing, imaging all civilistions having thoes technologies its another
Well if they do exist where are they ? At least one of those civilization will be in the spirit of colonizing the galaxy. We will do so for sure if we survive to reach required tech level. With life extending technology that allows us to live around 1000 years old and space ships that can travel 10-20% of the speed of light it would take us around 1 million years to colonize most of habitable planets in milky way. Our own galaxy is one of the oldest ones in the universe at least 12 billion years old , if we have started colonizing then we could do it 120000 times by now even if we do not advance technologically at all from that point on. We can if fact clam for sure than in the past 12 billion years there was not a SINGLE ONE alien civilization that wanted to colonize this galaxy , because if there was we would see it by now without question. And that is the core of Fermi paradox. Where are everybody ?
+Cristian Verdugo Galaz Depends on how many filters a species need to pass before that point. But I get what you are saying. I'm merely proposing a hypothetical to get a conversation going.
+Pärismaalane I guess we will see for ourselves once we get that far. My point was just to point out that there are a few assumptions we make that could possibly be due where we are technologically right now. There are a lot of unknowns.
I would honestly laugh my ass off if we found out one day that life originated on Mars. But before the planet could be transformed into the desert world we see today, a lone rock was blasted off from Mars do to a asteroid impact, carrying that chunk to earth and fertilizing this planet. I mean, they found some Martian rocks in Antarctica not too long ago... We're the Martians, and we succeeded in invading this planet after all :P
I am curious why I never hear anyone dive deeper into the odds of our own intelligent life evolving out of billions of years. It is kind of washed over by saying 'even if 0.1% of the planets could produce intelligent life". We have tens of millions of species over billions of years of life to use for base numbers to figure out the odds for humanity. Humans have zero expectations of finding any intelligent life on Earth, now or in the past. There are creatures on Earth with an extremely complex communications system and we can't even figure out what they are saying or how they communicate. Curiosity may be the great filter that we happen to break through in order to use a rock and burn a log.
Paper Dragon check out Isaac Arthur's video on Rare Intelligence. He explores all the things that need to line up perfectly for something like human intelligence and tech to be possible. Spoiler: there's a lot of them
I agree. There are countless reasons why we haven't found them yet. One of that is communication. Our technology doesn't match the alien civilizations out there. Radio is pretty much a crude technology and advanced civs must have got rid of it for a long time. Another thing that video did not discussed is the possibility that we are the most advanced survivor of an alien civ which are going annihilation. It also did not discussed the possibility of survival of the fittest where complex beings can't defeat the annihilating power of nature or harshness of space. Another is fiction. Advanced civs could be a fragment of literature to something greater than us; the concept of gods, then turned monsters, ghosts, and now aliens. I'm just not holding my breath that we'll find each other within this century.
Well said, and a good way of considering how rare intelligent life may be. Earth has countless little attributes that make it aminable to inteillgent life and advanced civilization, and if it was missing any one of them, advanced civilizations may not have arose. For instance, if flint or chert didn't exist on Earth (and are not common on Earth as it is), early humans would not have had a rock with the right properties to make the hand ax, which was the only tool that hominids had for millions of years and which drove our evolution until the neolithic era. If you add all the unlikely qualites that Earth has to make it friendly to advanced civilization, the chances of finding something similar is extremely rare, even 1 in a trillion could be optimistic. If that is the case, advanced civilizations could be very few and far between.
It's not just the fact that flint was here that drove us to develop technology. There were a whole lot of other factors at play too. Like our weird curiosity that causes us to sail into the middle of oceans we know nothing about. Or our obsession with creating stories that explain the world around us, and getting others to believe them too. All of these things are pretty unique, we don't see dolphins trying to crawl around on land just to see what's up there. We were a pretty stable species that lived a hunter gatherer lifestyle for millions of years, we didn't really have any environmental pressure to develop rocket ships or even agriculture. For whatever reason we were curious enough to try new ideas that sometimes went horribly wrong, and then try them again and again until they worked. IDK if that's very common since we are the only example of a truly "innovative" species on earth.
In the late 60's I witnessed a classic ''flying saucer" pass directly over my house and I at about 10 at night. Although it was dark, my unshielded front porch light lit it up quite well.
In the tradition of PBS Space Time comments, I shall now nitpick the graphics: Specifically, your Dyson swarm was a bit wonky. They weren't really orbiting the sun, it was more like they were just all stuck to a vertical pole that was rotating or something. Definitely not orbiting the center of mass of the sun. Your universe has broken gravity. :)
Also, the orbiting binary system at 5:43 is wobbling the wrong way. The larger star should be wobbling *away* from the smaller one, not towards it. (The center of mass of the system has to not be wobbling.)
@@brianellis7716 That assumes a "camera" perspective that doesn't move relative to the center of mass... a reasonable assumption, but not guaranteed. The Dyson swarm however can't be explained away like this.
There always seems to be the assumption that advanced civilisations will be noisy and messy. Maybe there's a Galactic Union, that has rules about radio pollution, blocking suns and buzzing emerging civilisations, a bit like we leave Amazon tribes to themselves. Maybe enlightened civilizations have no need of huge amounts of energy.
Hahahaaa. Leave them to themselves? We're wiping them out by the dozen each year. I don't like the idea of all civilizations being magically good and not altering the universe one bit. It's like an invisible God who exists only you can't disprove him because everything He does looks natural. It's too perfect.
Curiosity and discovery always has leads to exploitation! I view as the free floating rationale of curiosity. They could be wary and vigilant of other intelligences out there. We may even become a nuisance if we discover them among other things! Alien technology would become an ark of the covenant ( something looted and sought after). they would or will eventually just wipe us out!
Gareth Dean Thats the point...the more conscious your are the more you going to leave things at their place and just let nature take its course. Its our stupidity and arrogance that is disturbing the harmony within the universe.
@@Ging_10 the darwiniian rules of survival will always apply! if we became pests or got in the way of their own expansion, they would wipe us out! they would constantly be under our microscope and we may even start to get touchy feely. there is nothing they need from us
Zoophilia Consultant Am not saying that they wouldnt ever think about wiping is out. Am saying that given our current circumstance there is no need for them to show us they exist. We are still too primitive to handle this kind of truth. Still a large portion of humanity literally believes in 2000 years of fairy tales...what makes you so sure that the Aliens want to waste their energy and time trying to communicate with self centered beings who still kill each other over stupid beliefs?
Seeing what we see is limited by the speed of light and knowing how life on earth is only 500Ma yrs old (which could be visible from space), isn't it possible that we are staring at hundreds of life inhabited planets yet we are too far away to detect the traces of life?
It's so good to have someone so educated talk about this topic, rather than just listening to the paranoid rantings of conspiracy theorist types who have no understanding of the actual science behind the topic.
Yes, it's only a matter of time. A better question is "Will we ever find *inteligent* alien life?" because microbes are easy, tool users and civilization builders are hard
It depends on when you place the moment were it became inevitable that we ended up being a technologically advanced civilization. Once agriculture is invented, maybe its inevitable that sooner or later a civilization gets to the point of having an industrial revolution.
You're saying microbes are easy without any evidence to back up your claim. We haven't even found microbes yet, it could be that life itself, any live, is exceedingly improbable.
+Michael Bishop _"... or stone age, like ... Africa was, ..."_ Actually, Africa (by which I assume you mean sub-Saharan Africa) skipped the Bronze Age and went straight to iron.
@Michael Bishop I don't know why people think Africa as a whole or sub-Saharan Africa in particular was stone age. Just like there was a time when the Middle East was at the forefront of astronomy and Math(Algebra is an arabic term), believe it or not, there was a time when the West Africans were at the forefront of medical science in particular. In the late Medieval and early Renaissance era they already had inoculations for infectious diseases like smallpox, they could do c-sections and even cataract removal surgery. Also like Michael Sommers said, they were also pretty advanced in metallurgy. In fact their iron furnaces could get hotter than most European ones until the Industrial Revolution
Hell at this point I'd settle for a planet with insects or fish levels of complexity. Even simple plant vegetation would be great. Giraffes rule Andromeda so I'd stay out of there.
this is the second video I see from the channel, I'm about to subscribe love it so far. One thing I notice from the first video (released 2015) to this one IDK why but I see Peter Dinklage in your face 😂.
@@pierfrancescopeperoni lol I think you misunderstood, I am referring to the time it takes the light to reach us. We are looking at very old light hence old pictures.
@@laughingatu3699 "Only" is totally relative. 10^5 is literally nothing compared to the distance of the other galaxies. If intelligent beings can occupy the galaxy in millions of years with serif-replicating robots, and we don't see anything of this, it means two possibilities: A) there is no other intelligent life in the galaxy, or it becomes extinct before being able to produce those robots; B) We are the first intelligent life in the galaxy which will reach that technology. Given that the age of our galaxy is of the order of billions of years, instead of millions, it is very unlikely that we would be the first given that we are not the only ones. So we conclude that we are probably the only ones.
I think the question is somewhat different to people who have seen strange phenomenon in the sky that can’t easily be explained as natural events. When I was much younger in the mid 90s during a baby shower in the late evening, probably closer to 9pm, the adults and some kids, including me, in my neighborhood saw a big glowing orange orb in the sky. We couldn’t make out the structure of it but we can tell it was very hot because the light around it was warping around it from the heat it was giving off. It was pretty big and completely silent. The lady those baby shower it was noticed it first and pointed out the stationary orb in the sky. After we all looked up and were observing it for a few seconds, it took off instantly into the distance , still not making a sound. At the time I lived in the high desert of California and we lived close to military bases and have seen all kinds of planes and helicopters.However, this was something we have never seen before and were quite shocked about it after. It’s been so long since it happened yet I remember this event so vividly. Everyone in my old neighborhood has moved away and I sometimes wonder if they still think about what happened on this night too.
You guys should look into/do an episode on the azotosome and potential exotic types of biology like what may be possible on Titan. I think it's a better and more interesting spot to colonize over Venus or maybe even Mars. Loved this video, cheers!
An option not usually talked about: The boundaries of technology are a lot closer to where we are than we think. Although there's no current sign of it, there's nothing to rule out that 100 years from now our technology becomes rather fixed because it would just take too many resources to advance any further. So those aliens out there? Like us. Doing a whole lot of listening, not a whole lot of talking, and certainly not affecting their galactic backyards in any way that we could spot.
2:51 James Webb telescope to launch in a year from upload date... Still not up as of comment date (August 5th 2020) Sometime this decade, probably...this century for sure, if nothing else, this millenium (assuming low earth orbit doesn't turn into a prison door of junk)
I think that the acceleration of the universes expansion is decreasing our chances of finding intelligent life. They might be out there but we are moving away and will never find them
Someone has to be first and its us. Age of universe, age of Earth, two sun cycles, only enough time for one emergent inteligence? One day we will be called the Ancients! Unless we destroy ourselves.
By using the sun's gravitational lens and telescopes at 550 astronomical units, you could scan planets as small as Mercury with quite a good resolution across all the galaxy. It's called Fast Outgoing Cyclopean Astronomical Lens (FOCAL).
Not necessarily THE first, but perhaps part of the first (or second) _generation_ of civilisations to evolve in our galaxy, potentially explaining why there _appear_ to be fewer than you'd expect given the age of the galaxy.
Could be, as in possible, but not probable. People keep forgetting how vast this one galaxy is, and how little and how close and how narrow we've searched so far.
I am a strong proponent of the we are "early" theory. The Earth is about 1/3 the age of the universe, and it took a certain amount of time for there to be sufficient metalicity in the gas clouds to form planets where sufficiently complex chemistry necessary for life could occur. This could eliminate many stars which are older than Earth and all stars which are much older. Further, if it took 4 billion years for Earth to develop intelligent life, and almost that long to develop multi-cellular life, that time frame, if "typical," could eliminate most or all stars that are younger than the sun, and all stars with lifespans which are shorter. Yes there are a lot of stars in the galaxy, but in the galactic core, you are so close to so many stars, that the odds of a sterilizing event, or just too much radiation could well rule out most of the stars in the galaxy. If we speculate and say that only K and M class stars of at least 4 billion years in age in this galaxy are the only potential places for intelligent life to arise, and make the assumption that maybe we were just quicker than "average" in getting from lava-ball to multi-cellular biosphere, then we could certainly be first in the galaxy. Any life outside the galaxy is so far away as to be virtually irrelevant, extremely hard to detect, and impossible to reach or communicate with.
doesn't matter much now, the great magellan telescope is build on earth if american's don't hurry the europeans will have something with the power of tens of times hubble and europe will get the credits with the discoveries JWT could have made. although JWT is working in infrared unlike the GMT.
@Joe Average The evidence is NOT mounting we're alone. Yea, it is possible. But did you know if a species like ours existed only a dozen light years away and we pointed our most powerful radio telescopes at them we would not be able to detect them unless it was something like a radar pulse. But even that wouldn't be detectable from much further. When you say the evidence is mounting we're alone, it's like taking a bucket, tipping it in the ocean and saying "no fish in that bucket full, the evidence is mounting there is no fish in the sea"
If you represent the entire lifetime of the universe with a human calendar, humanity was born in the last second of new year's eve. It seems unlikely that we're the first because there's been so much time and space before us. So much.
Santiago Restrepo-Castillo ... it may seem like there’s enough time but you have to remember the early universe was made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. Even today 75% of our solar system is hydrogen with nearly 25% being helium leaving only .1% as all of the other elements! This .1% of other elements needed for life, had to wait for supernovas to forge them within a star before being blasted out for new stars to form and gather them into their own gas clouds. Our own sun is probably a 3rd generation star. I’m guessing it took at least 9 billion years to build up these elements in sufficient amounts for advanced life to form. Then it was just a matter of time until a star of the right size that had 10 billion years of life was in the Goldilocks zone. Once you deduct all the other stars from the yellow dwarfs we know can produce advanced life, 7%. We can then deduct the 90% that are in the galactic center which is to radioactive for life to form. Leaving us with about a billion stars that still meet the criteria for advanced life. Then it’s just a matter of finding a planet of the right size with all of the elements and in the Goldilocks zone? Even if only 1% meet this criteria then it’s possible that there are 10 million possible planets in the Milky Way alone? So if we and these aliens needed 4.5 billion years to reach the same level of technology that we’re at, they may be also working on this paradox? Perhaps we and everyone else still need many more years to build the technology to escape our solar system. I’m pretty sure that aliens didn’t show up here some 4000 years ago to teach the Egyptians a better way to stack rocks on top of each other!??
Just started reading “I Contain Multitudes” by Ed Yong. Maybe we are alone because in our case a bacterium only merged with an archaeon once in 4 billion years? With those odds it does seem pretty unlikely that there is a lot of advanced life in the universe.
My guess is that the galactic federation has a non interference policy for developing civilisations and that our view of the galaxy is filtered somehow.
Exactly. Developing species are quarantined to prevent any malignant technology they might develop from infesting the galaxy, and when they become advanced enough they figure their own way out of quarantine and can be welcomed into the community. Or obliterated if need be. But I tend to think that any inclination towards unnecessarily destructive behavior is inversely correlated with level of advancement. (Yes ... we're not very advanced. Yet....)
I mean, the von Neumann machine nanotech of others civilizations would be all over space, there's no way we'd miss it unless it deliberately hid itself. I'm sure there's a swarm of alien nano-ASI all around us monitoring our development.
Humanity needs to colonize space, other planets, and other star systems as soon as possible -- before a nuclear war, large asteroid impact, pandemic, or some other extinction event wipes us out.
transfering 'the problem with humanity' to another location is not the same thing as addressing and resolving it. until we can address our self-destructive issues we don't deserve to go anywhere else, because we will just end up doing more harm than good to that new place. there seems to be something wrong with us as a species at a fundamental level. call it egomania, in a word. by an overwhelming majority, human beings seem intellectually and emotionally totally incapable of living in harmony with other species or the environment. and those with the will and resoruces to do most damage of all, inevitably hold most power and inevitably devote all their will and resources to trying to dominate and control the few who try to live otherwise.
people die but if you have many people the species lives on, it's not exporting our problems it's hoping that some will survive. if an super bug or supernova or other extinction level event goes of on earth it's bye bye human race for now. But if we export ourselves to other planets outside our solar system such events won't kill us off. if we settle on mars like elon musk wants to do we would have better odds to survive as species.
A couple problems here. We do not currently have a viable other planet proven to be able to keep us alive. Mars gets a lot of hype, but realistic terraforming is a 10,000+++ year proposition which may actually be impossible without a home base planet to work from (you need generations of stable and flourishing social prosperity to produce the will to accomplish a task like that) so colonizing mars requires the same thing that saving the earth requires. We need to figure out how to treat each other well. Without terraforming the likelihood that humans can survive and flourish on mars becomes vanishingly small. The risk of superbugs developing is vastly more likely in the type of monoculture food production that we would engage in on mars, and the spread of a pathogen would be unstoppable in an enclosed air system. The vast majority of the microbiome that we would bring with us would already be intimately familiar with us from living in our guts and on our skin. Extremely high selection pressure from the constant need to clean every surface within the habitat would exacerbate the “Island Effect” of the already closed system. To avoid the extreme pressure of a tiny biosphere, we could build massive engineering projects, couldn’t we? Domes the size of cities. Unfortunately the best material for the job, given the martian context (no petroleum, no limestone) is steel. Aluminum and magnesium would play a part, sulfur concrete and ferrock could play a part, certainly silicon. But all of these materials currently require hydrocarbon reserves to generate the kind of energy concentration to work. Solar energy could cut it, but the build up to go from what we can feasibly bring to mars and what we would need to make any impact would take multiple generations of engineers. Mars is not a new frontier to be conquered by sheer force of manliness. It would require cooperation and logistics on the same scale as making our own planet safe and secure. We have the technology now to prevent super bugs, and to save ourselves from climate change. These are not someday-in-the-future techniques, we can keep our one and only home safe, and teach the next generation how to care for a planet, which ever planet they choose to live on.
But we would need only two or three more planets for that. Really no point in spreading out over hundreds of planets. Especially when you assume that rich societies tend to have shrinking populations because they don't need children to grow into new workers. Robots can do that.
"We've been actively watching for radio transmission from other worlds for half a century. We've seen nothing". That's exactly what you can expect if you're looking for ineffective old-fashioned carrier-wave transmissions. We have abandoned that technique ourselves and replaced it with spread-spectrum coding which is much more energy efficient and furthermore is more or less impossible to eavesdrop unless you know the coding sequence.. Also notice that "5G" technology relies on directing transmitted power toward the receiver instead of wasting energy on omnidirectional transmission.. Altogether this will make our radio transmissions from earth very difficult to detect by any listener more than a few light years away. Unless they were lucky to listen in short time window (a blink of an eye in a cosmic perspective) when our civilization used high power AM transmitters. Well there are a few still in service but in a longer time perspective they will surely be gone.. 😁 Besides that, technological civilizations seem to have a tendency to destroy themselves within only a few hundred years, at least judging from what is going on here on earth right now. So the chance to happen to listen in their active time window might simply be negligible.
I mean, by simply looking at the probability of life based on the billions of stars in our galaxy alone, let alone the trillions in our own local group and possibly quadrillions in our own Virgo supercluster (all of which are gravitationally bound and will one day merge into one giant galaxy of some sort), totally. That’s if we survive the next few hundred years without destroying ourselves If there isn’t another civilization within the 100,000 other galaxies that we’re gravitationally bound to, I would be confused
You miss the point Emre. Something out there is preventing intelligent life from acting intelligent. Maybe from living. We have no idea what it may be.
Naaaaa, it's probably the fact that we're a type 0 civilization who think we're all that even though we're not. We haven't even scratched the surface. It was only 200 years ago that we were fighting with muskets in line warfare... In galactic terms, the fact that the first man to go into space achieved this feat in 1961, is but a blip compared to galactic terms. There might be civilizations BILLIONS of years more advanced for all we know. What was life doing billions of years ago? Oh yeah, getting started. Our star is a g type yellow dwarf. It's 4.6 billion years old, there were probably 3 generations of stars predating our sun. Civilizations around those stars could have already been space fairing by the time the first hydro-thermal vents spawned life on earth. Maybe they just A. Honestly don't think we're intelligent. I like Kaku's example where he equates us to ants and aliens as humans. Do we try to communicate with ants? No. We're intelligent from our own perspective, but we can be non sapient to other more advanced civilizations for all we know. Or B. (which is more likely), we just haven't looked long enough, hard enough, or have the technology capable of detecting them. I don't think it's some galactic plot preventing intelligence from acting, it's our own ignorance.
Who says galactic expansion is intelligent? You're basically sending people to probably die and if they end up on a new planet, they're just going to do their own thing. The only thing that can be exchanged between systems in a practical amount of time is data...and even then the lag is between years and centuries. How do you hold a conversation? WHY do that? It's a sci-fi trope, there's no reason to believe it's tethered in reality.
Probably we have the probability wrong. We can somewhat accurately estimate habitable planets, but have no idea of the probability of life actually forming on them. Could be way too rare? Maybe the probability of life forming is so low, that it only happens anout once per 1 billion universes. I HOPE NOT THOUGH!
I do not fully understand the need of dyson swarms and spheres. Even though a star outputs a lot of energy it might not be the best source to power the civilization. Why not fusion? Or a way that we have yet to discover? All this research is based on physics and engineering that we know and use ( or planning to use) but applied to an advanced civilization that might have a way better understanding of the world and has engineered sources that dont make it visible to us.
The thing is, solar power IS nuclear power to a certain extent. It's just from very far away, ultra sustainable, and requires zero maintenance. Why buy the cow when you get the milk, literally, for free?
Sure, that's a possibility, but Dyson swarms or spheres are often brought up because they're the most efficient way we know of maximizing the energy output of a star. Why not fusion? The sun is fusion. As for energy sources we have yet to discover, we could speculate about that, but it's probably best to stick to the physics that we know when thinking about this issue in a scientific way.
Konstantinos Chatzieffraimides One reason they may use a dyson swarm over fusion is that the tech for energy capture would be the exact same (the sun is fusion powered after all), just scaled up in the case of the sun. And given that you wouldn’t need a continuous supply of fuel if you used the sun, it would probably be more sustainable in the long term. As far as other options go, some, such as creating and maintaining a keugelblitz (black hole made from light; super cool btw, look it up) require a massive amount of energy to kick start them, so you could use a full or partial dyson swarm to create keugelblitz engines.
A star is a very efficient fusion reactor with a ridiculous amount of fuel built in. The sun produces 4 million tons of mass energy per second and it will continue doing so for billions of years. Even with a 100% efficient energy source, we simply can't beat the mass of the sun.
Or there is the dark forest theory. In that we don’t hear anything because no civilization is stupid enough to broadcast their existence. This is because you can’t know if those who receive a signal are benevolent or malevolent. And those who are receiving also don’t know if the broadcaster is benevolent or malevolent. So the safest option for any civilization would be to destroy any alien civilization they encounter or risk being destroyed themselves. I’m not sure I believe this theory. But it is one of my favorites.
Alternatively there is a galactic 'prime directive' going on, and aliens won't interfere with our development, but they just watch over us to study our development. Sometimes someone spots a UFO by accident, but fortunately they are never believed.
There's one big problem with dark forest theory. It would be trivial for an alien civilisation to detect life even from across the galaxy, no need for radio. If you want to hide, you don't hide in your homeworld. Your homeworld is already in someone's databank. If you are genocidal, you leave no chances and sterilise any planet long before anything leaves the oceans.
If there were many civilizations it would just take one aggressive expansive species to spread across the galaxy. They would be unlikely to keep radio silence.
This is certainly the most frightening of solutions to the Fermi paradox. At least assured self-destruction by an Earth-bound "wacko" is ultimately of our own doing. But getting wiped out by a super advanced alien species who just wants to ensure we won't wipe them out a million years from now, which can only be avoided by not exploring the galaxy or broadcasting radio signals? That's terrifying.
If they are intelligent enough to detect the smallest radio signals, travelling would be unwise due to asteroids. How strong should a signal be in order to detect real information in the first place?
why is it THE great filter? isnt life more like continously overcomming such "a filter" (or rather filters)?! also given the vast amount of stuff in the vast amount of nothingness out there, i kinda find it funny to assume we would have found alien life in the few decades we actively search for it - especially given that we only "just now" start to develop sufficiently precise instruments.
Probably pretty unlikely, but possible I guess. One thing that was DEFINITELY lucky for us at least, is that dinosaurs were wiped out before we came along, so our early ancestors didn't have to contend with such massive, prolific, and plentiful predators.
Here's my take on this - what if life is extremely unlikely to occur, I mean what are the chances of some molecules coming together and creating a self replicating structure? _Maybe_ we are the only ones. One might argue then that the chance of us happening is just too small for all this to be true, but wherever in this universe such an event would have occurred, we would have been there to ask just this question.
But we now know that rudimentary life popped up on Earth almost immediately after it formed and began cooling... which suggest that elementary life is pretty easy to get going. I'm a fan of the "many bottlenecks" theory. Evolving simple life is easy, but evolving intelligent life is extremely hard. There are many things that can wipe out life, or alter its course, before it reaches an 'intelligent' state: gamma ray bursts, supernovas, comet and asteroid impacts, other natural (or self-inflicted) planetary extinction events. It's not even clear that 'intelligence' is a trait that promotes survival in the very long term. Serendipity also plays a big part. Just looking at the history of the Earth, there are tons of things had to "go right" for humans to evolve. Foe example, if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs had never hit then dinosaurs would probably still be around... which means humans probably wouldn't.
@@AbbeyRoadkill1 life popping up almost immediately suggests absolutely nothing in a universe where we have no other examples to observe... We absolutely could be the only of life in the universe. I'm not necessarily committed to that argument but until life can either be artificially created from benign materials or an example is found elsewhere it is as viable hypothesis as any other as far as I can tell.
lol...I'd also argue that all this dribble and excitement over such a silly thing as a DYSON sphere is completely ludicrous...think about it....why would an alien race with such advanced technology bother with building a object like this ? on this scale ? are we really supposed to believe that a race capable of building something the size of a STAR for energy purposes would use something as messy as a star? it makes no sense, a star is immobile, and it's energy output is spread across a massively wide part of the EM spectrum...if they were that far advanced, antimatter or some other unknown to us form of energy would be used, and it would be completely at their convenience, mobile and able to go anywhere as they needed, a DYSON sphere is the concept of 1960's era of thinking, and for that very reason it, and any other modern ideas of alien civilization's means of power production is more than likely to be absurdly and embarrassingly wrong, on so many different levels.
Then we can expect them to demolish stars, to destroy wasteful stellar furnaces and rearrange entire galaxies to suit their whims. We should see anything but the extremely natural looking universe that faces us now.
Even if they have some clarketech energy well to pull from, they could very well still end up with a dyson swarm purely for room purposes, since building in space is so much more mass efficient than building on planets. It'd also help with waste heat management which is a lot harder on a planet, and would eventually become a concern depending on how much of that energy they use.
The main reason I see for Dyson is for energy storage. The closer we put solar panels to sun, the smaller the solar panel becomes. Hence, we can use dyson spheres to store massive energy and maybe even convert it to antimatter and store it on a planet. The second reason is helium. Nuclear fusion's fuel is helium which comes out of sun. The same rule applies as before, the closer you are to sun, the more you capture.
What cracks me up are these people who say that anyone who doesn't believe intelligent life out there is ignorant. They even get angry about it and try to punish you if you refuse to say that you believe. Sound like any other group you ever heard of? The fact of the matter is we simply don't know at this point in time.
