Event Horizons and the channel John Michael Godier are the two best channels on TH-cam in my opinion. I have 2 grandchildren in California that are in High School and I turned them on to these channels and they love it. Thank you John and Eryn, and your team. Super great videos. Thank you so much! 🌎
Enjoy your family, dude! 😊 Have you ever seen a video about the build of rc airplanes? Take a look, it could be a fantastic thing to enjoy with them. 😊
Totally agree. Astrum and SEA (sea_space) are pretty good space related channels too, but these discussions here are so good they really get into the weeds of topics.
@@MCsCreations Thanks! I will check it out. I pretty much have subscribed to all of the aviation videos. I like Green Dot, 74 Gesr, Montour Pilot, etc. Air planes simply amaze me. Take care!
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
The assumption that we would clearly see advanced civilizations is a useful one for the model, but it is still an assumption. We can't predict how technology is going to unfold and there could be modes of expansion that don't have a massive impact on the natural environment.
Agree. If they’re so much more advanced than us they might not be broadcasting their existence at full volume….they might be damn near invisible to us in the cosmos. I mean as we perfect and refine our own technology it becomes more efficient and less detectable…
It would hardly matter what they did - we couldn't see it. They'd have to do something truly huge, like rearrange galaxies to spell dirty words or something. And we might not notice even that. You don't need to imagine they would stop using radio - we couldn't detect them at any reasonable distance even if they used lots and lots of radio. We don't have big enough telescopes.
8:03 More ridiculous guess work. Again sounds like you are looking for modern human civilization rather than ANYTHING alien. Its time you thought about forests in a similar way to thinking of civilization. Living breathing consuming forests, hundreds of thousands of individuals working and living together in harmony. Clearly intelligent, capable of interspecies communication across vast networks. But not conscious as far as WE can tell. You can't see the civilization for the trees.
4:00 "We know how long ago the big bang was" Nope... That's just another GUESS. we don't know that "the big bang" if it happened at all, was 13.8 (or whatever) billion years ago. What does 13.8 billion YEARS even mean? One year is the time it takes for our planet to travel around our nearest star (the sun). But in another solar system a year might be much more or much less "time". Then there's the time problem... Is time uniform? Does it have multiple dimensions? Was time created at the big bang or did time exist before the big bang? So many unanswered questions... But you're gonna claim to KNOW the age of the universe? The arrogance is STUNNING.
Interesting discussion… thank you. I am always perplexed by the assumption that alien civilizations do not exist because we ‘don’t see anything’ in our galaxy. We haven’t been looking for very long, and our most powerful telescopes cannot resolve even the nearest exoplanets beyond a pixel of light. I have always felt that the Fermi Paradox has been given too much credence by the scientific community. I think we need to wait a few decades - or maybe centuries - before we conclude that our galaxy is devoid of advanced technological civilizations. Maybe the question we need to ask is what percentage of advanced alien civilizations would alter their galactic neighborhood in a way that could be easily observed across the galaxy? The assumption that alien civilizations would build mega structures around stars and other easily observed interstellar infrastructure seems more informed by sci-fi than actual science. The more I hear experts talk about this subject, the more I am convinced it’s mostly guesswork at present.
Yeah, when we see the night sky it looks full of information, but if you were up close to the real size thing but with only the information we can see even putting Hubble images real size a few light years away it becomes a pixelated or blurry mess where stars are less than a single pixel. We have less info on the space in the nearest few light years than we do for the oort cloud. Reminds me of iron lung how little we really see our surroundings on the galactic scale.
Same. I am always struck by the arrogance. "We know the age of the universe" "We observe stars with similar chemical makeup" Nonsense. Our entire perception of time is based on local solar mechanics and our size and the scale of the environment around us. Then there are other unknowns about time, does time have multiple dimensions? How would we know? Did time begin when the universe did? Did time predate the universe? Is time uniform? So many unanswered questions. But I hear so much certainty from people who are basing guesses on other people previous guesses.
@@Anon-xd3cf Time doesn't have "dimensions". Time is not physical object, doesn't interact with anything, therefor: time doesn't exist. Time is just a placeholder for "duration of event", basically an abstract concept, a tool we use. So, your questions are not relevant to anything discussed here.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
Waitaminute! 30:20 Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun - it is in a 3/2 spin-orbit resonance, rotating 3 times for each 2 revolutions around the Sun.
Look very different how ? I still don't understand how different the universe should ' look' if there are alien civilizations out there. Why should they colonize , build gigantic structures , etc as if they'r some alien Roman Empire ? Who knows what they do or don't do .
JMG has garnered a reputation of an interviewer who studies up on the subject matter, and research papers that the guest has published. So many times the surprise inflection of a guest voice can be heard in answering an insightful question JMG has just asked.
That really depends on some of the heresay around it. If the interdimensional traveler talk was the case then it might not change the model at all, except for having to maybe account for seeded life. If UAP’s came from another dimension or universe then what we observe through this model might not be as effected. However if the UAP’s had an origin point within this universe and use other dimensions for travel rather than habitation that likely changes the model a lot. Firstly the question would be if they can move faster than light. I’m inclined to believe that no they cannot, because of the time travel issues of FTL. But if they could it basically throws reality and known physics out of the window. If they can’t travel FTL but just at very high speeds then their top speed- say .9999c- that’ll factor into the model and greatly increase alien expansion rates. However the biggest way it changes the model is by fundamentally altering the question from where aliens are to why we don’t see aliens altering anything out there. Imo if UAP’s turned out to be of alien origin the most likely thing would be that they aren’t biological entities and are instead machines or bio-organic. In this explanation they might be ubiquitous throughout our galaxy or even our universe and yet not necessarily conform to the same expectations of a civilization. They could be self replicating drones traveling at much much higher speeds than the expansion wave of their civilization of origin. Perhaps they act like a vanguard in that way, going forth and learning about civilizations- or even influencing them. Then when their originator civilization becomes visible in the night sky and long after that actually arrives within earth space we’ll have already learned about them through their probe UAP’s. I have no idea though. A lot of the things said about UAP’s are so off the wall and beyond known science that if even a fraction of what’s said turns out to be true it sort of throws our whole basis of reality out a window and we’d have to pretty much rethink everything.
I think a dark forest universe is the most likely answer if there are indeed civilizations out there. A civilization can't possibly know if there are predators hiding out there. If you speak up too loudly, you don't know they won't respond by launching an attack and you can't know how advanced they are. If there are aliens here, they would probably be prepping the battlefield, or stationing an insurance policy here. Technology grows explosively. You couldn't monitor us from afar because with the speed of light, we could surpass them before they could see it. If we advance to become a threat, they can act immediately.
There is also the possibility that if UAP are of nonhuman origin, they come from within the Earth. I have been noticing a lot of UAP sightings where the witness claims they have flown into the ocean. In fact, one of the telltale signs that UAPs are not man-made, is that they can both fly in the air and dive underwater, something no human craft can do. The Earth is mostly covered in oceans, and we are even told that we know more about outer space than the depths of our planet's oceans. I think it's possible UAPs originate from deep underwater/underground and if so, they might even pre-date humanity. This would also explain the paradox "If aliens are so advanced and can travel through light-years of space to reach us, why do they seem to crash so often?" Maybe they are not traveling that far at all, maybe they're simply underneath us.
Another theory is that the grabby aliens were beat back by a relatively peaceful alliance of non-grabby aliens. Perhaps the grabby aliens still exist in pockets of the galaxy and the peaceful aliens choose stealth (as a defensive strategy). This scenario could, in some ways, mirror earth's history in times when a single empire (eg. Napoleon's France or Hitler's Germany) sought to conquer the whole world and a bunch of nations were forced to ally with one another in order to beat the would-be conquerors into submission.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
You're really not respecting the spirit of Robin Hanson's work if you take that kind of thing seriously. Just please consider the odds of how coordination of the sort you're describing could happen. It's like saying "a lighthouse can stop a tidal wave" - which is sort of true, in that it stays standing and isn't "defeated" by the wave. But the wave goes around it. What you're talking about would require a spherical coordinated impermeable front that contains the wave in all three dimensions... oh god, why am I even writing this when I have other things to do, and you obviously put less thought into the issue than the time it took me to write this?
While it's entertaining, I can't count how many erroneous assumptions I heard here. I mean, if you're a life form on a water planet, then it's likely that you will literally never possess any sort of conceptualization of what fire is. Your species will *never* learn to smelt ore, because the idea of fire would never have a reason to occur to you. Or "life expands everywhere it can"... This does NOT apply to intelligent life. There are a great many places that we could go that we don't, and for far more reasons than that some religious prohibition prevents us from doing so. This is a common problem in this field, I think. We *have to* make assumptions in order to get anywhere, but our own bases unavoidably taint those assumptions.
@@alexczajka5623 Do you mean *intelligent life*? Because that's what I said. Why aren't we on the moon right now? We could have bases there by now, but we don't. Why don't we inhabit the oceans as well? We could build cities there, but we don't. Why don't we tend to flock to deserts? We could do that, but we don't. There are a TON of places where intelligent life may choose not to go for a lot of reasons - it's expensive, it's uncomfortable, we'd have to use technology to survive, it's boring / uninteresting to us... Microbes may mindlessly inhabit any space that they physically can. Intelligent beings do not behave that way.
@@festivus7065 Not really. Microbes preferentially colonise niches of best fit before investing resources expanding. You said "life expands where it can" was erroneous. The expansion of life, intelligent or otherwise, is limited by available resources, so life cannot expand to everywhere all at once. Meaning, we *can't* have moon bases right now, because we're still using our resources to fully colonise our primary niche. Also, I find it wild that you sight 3 places man has gone, which we either do live in or have plans to expand too, as evidence that intelligent life doesn't go everywhere it can.
@@alexczajka5623 Do you honestly believe that resources are the sole constraint? I didn't just list three places that man has been (but tends to not go to), I listed potential reasons for that behavior and NONE of them mentioned resources. That is not the only factor impacting behavior lol. Interest? Desire? Calculation of risk or benefit? How about fear? Are we all just little automatons governed solely by resource availability? No, we are not. Resource availability is not preventing us from building moon bases, or building cities in the desert or ocean. It's a problem of resource *allocation*, not availability - and allocation is a result of choice. We have plenty of human capital and raw material to put bases on the moon. And Mars. What we lack is sufficient desire to expend the resources - that is why we have no moon bases. We don't like to build cities in the desert or the ocean because 1) living there isn't fun or cheap for masses of people, and 2) there's not enough incentive otherwise for people to decide that it would be a worthwhile expenditure. It's human decision, not resources, that determine this. If you simply look around, it should be obvious that intelligent life does not expand every place that it potentially could. For a variety of reasons, ranging to the above to simple decisions of how to allocate one's limited time in this life, intelligent beings decide to go some places and avoid others for more reasons than we could count. I'm of the personal opinion that we're living in some sort of dark forest situation, and that other species simply tend to avoid contact because some of them are hostile, and it simply isn't worth the risk. But I may well be wrong, who knows. But if it's not something like that, then it's something similar, or we really would see intelligent life everywhere. Obviously, we don't.
Mate, you're really missing the point. Life can't expand to everywhere at once, so going to the places it can, then going to the others later, is still sufficient to meet the assumption. Also, you've set an arbitrary timeline by which to judge expansion. No where does the assumption say "life goes where it can, as soon as possible, and dedicates all resources to accelerating expansion".
John asked how a waterworld can build spaceships and his guest said it's a matter of time. But could it build spaceships if it stays a waterworld‐-or would continents have to develop?
@@UFO-Ark nothing sea-dwelling on Earth did anything over the last billion years since the Cambrian Explosion (probably 😥) . That aids in the assumption that sea-dwelling life is more-or-less incapable of "civilizations."
I agree with most of the reasonings by Robin Hanson, given the assumptions, but I don't agree with this assumption at all: "We are assumed to be a random sample from the distribution ..." Why would the sentient observer Robin Hanson make this assumption? Wouldn't it make much more sense to assume that the sentient observer Robin Hanson is a random sample from the distribution of sentient observers that will ever exist? With this improved assumption things change completely. Robin Hanson will be much more likely to appear within one of the civilizations with the total highest population of sentient observers during its lifetime than in one of the smaller ones, and more likely to appear within a time when many such sentient observers start existing rather than one where few do. That would seem to mean that much larger populations of sentient observers in the future is unlikely, e.g. due to non-sentient machine civilizations taking over or something like that. There's also the hypothesis presented by a physicist whose name I've forgotten: When a civilization reaches a certain level, it performs certain unwise experiments, unleashing false vacuum decay that destroys the universe at the speed of light, thereby ending the possibility of future life in its future light cone. It would remove the need for grabby aliens from the equation. You could of course come up with any possible future calamity that ends the possibilities for life, e.g. some physical constant shifting over time in a way that we currently don't understand, and so on. So, while there are scenarios where Robin Hanson's Grabby Alien model make sense, it's not at all clear that we're in such a scenario, and assuming mediocrity for our civilization doesn't make much sense.
even if they're visible it would be extremely easy to over look we cant look at every single planet and havent even looked at every single planet in our general vicinity and thats not even factoring in the idea that they could be living in artificial space habitats and dont even live on planets anymore There's a chance we already have seen them but explained it away as a natural phenomenon
@@destinmorrissey6058 I would focus on star systems with in maybe 10 light years. Closer to see and communicate with. Then more time could be focused on them to resolve whats there. Then I would focus on the activity going on in our own atmosphere.
I was surprised right off the bat to hear him say “no” to the question of if there’s a solid candidate for a great filter. Interesting…. As the guy who coined the term i was expecting like 50 of them haha
@@MCsCreations for sure. as JMG is always rightly quick to point out, until we actually find anything out there, we have a sample size of exactly 1, which in science you can’t draw many conclusions from. It’s all speculating (but informed and thought out speculating) until then
Idk it's hard for me to take the guy seriously. You know none of these guys ever seem to have a solid grounding in material realities. Let's say you wanna conquer the galaxy. How do you get enough material off your planet and into space without completely destroying your planet and it's ability to support your civilization? Because in 200 years of industrial activities which pale in comparison to what it would take to conquer the galaxy we are already pushing our planets ability to support our civilization.
@@TraditionalAnglicany great filter is material reality. Let's say you have the Demi Urge to be a grabby civilization. In your attempt to get enough material off your planet and into space to conquer the galaxy, you almost certainly destroy your planets climate and it's ability to support your civilization. Dead dumb civilizations don't conquer the galaxy.... Smart civilizations realize probably shouldn't kill ourselves trying to go to a place where everything is trying to kill you. They probably realize shit we're on our Eden. It's the only one we're ever gonna get. Satellites? Probably right? Research expeditions? Why wouldn't you. I mean seriously we're about 50-60 years away from seriously altering our planets ability to support our civilization. Our industrial activity is small potato's compared to getting trillions of tons of material into space.
Why would the expansion rate be at half the speed of light? Why would a technological civilization advance so fast? I'd like to know where that number comes from. ...
It's convenient. Just like the assumption that highly complex and advanced civilisations and species are unchanging over geologic timescales and expand to other gravity wells. Take one of these two assumptions away and the concept stops working.
According to the Fermi paradox, we should be seeing signs of alien civilizations everywhere. Now that the military is saying that they are seeing UAP's all the time, scientists are saying that it's extremely unlikely to be aliens. Well, which is it??
Could be alien civilization arose, went grabby, but also went great zoo keepers. Stuck us in a pocket universe or completely digitize us in a really good simulation. And now, humans technology is just getting to a point of saying something not right. And the JWST is starting to show us this.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
I feel as though we are a civilization standing on the shoreline of an ocean, fire lit and sending smoke signals. Asking ourselves why we don't see anyone else's smoke signals. We are a few short millennia from the stone age, thinking we are advanced.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
If there were a million civilizations just like ours in this galaxy, we surely wouldn't know it - unless one of them was miraculously, improbably, very close by. (Even if they had all been using radio for a billion years.) We don't have big enough telescopes. They'd be invisible. Even if very fancy high tech aliens existed in the galaxy, how would we know? What should we expect to see? I think we are seeing exactly what we should expect to see - either way, whether we're alone or it's crowded. Maybe we're alone, IDK. But the Great Silence could easily be just our great deafness.
I don’t even think you can characterize it as “silence” or “deafness.” It’s just the way things are. The universe is absolutely massive beyond our comprehension. Ergo, things are just really far apart. Are there aliens out there? Almost certainly. Will we ever encounter them? Almost certainly not. With regard to the UAP issue that is at the forefront of the news, if they aren’t human, I don’t think they’re alien. It’s more likely that they’re interdimensional and local to Earth than it is that they are extraterrestrials who traveled the universe/galaxy and happened upon us.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
I found it irritating it comes across as arrogant especially as his view of how aliens would behave is based on the motivations of humans from industrial revolution to today which is but a cosmic blink.
Oh my gosh I have been waiting for this one! I'm not sure if my "check out grabby aliens" comment from a year ago started John down this path but if it did that is freaking awesome.
I'm certain that Mr. Hanson is far smarter than I, but it seems to me, the issue with his hypothesis is aliens would be a lot like us and progress just as we do. I find that highly unlikely.
"What you may not understand is that each year thousands of people are taken and not returned to the world. These people are not simply conditioned. They are kept. Some of them perish in captivity. Some of them do not survive the process of their capturing. Some become sick and die. Those that cannot survive and are still seen as useful to the Intervention are used as a biological resource. That means that their blood, their body parts, everything is used according to its value in the Greater Community." _The Allies of Humanity Briefings_
I find it odd that scientist assume that alien civilizations would expand to fill the galaxy. Its not a fact and it seems evident that it has not happen at least in this galaxy.
I get a feeling they would be interested in not being seen. We would not want to stop evolution occuring on a planet if we found it occuring so we would have to leave it. We understand if any civilisation on these planets could see us we would create cargo cults and we would want to be subtle. I don't see why these galactic civilizations need to be so visible.
The logic is that its congruent with how life behaves in general. It extremely plausible to me (because evolution favours adaptability and fecundity) but all assumptions are, just that: assumptions. I don't think however that there is a lack of awareness of the fact that this is an assumption.
@@jopearson6321 Hm. It's not plausible to me at all. There's a difference between life itself and individual species. While life as a general phenomenon tends to fill every available ecological niche, individual species do not. The whole idea just smells like Lamarckism in new clothes, it's a metaphysical conjecture rather than a scientific concept.
Isn't it obvious that there is no one filter, but many? The more complicated the form of life, the more hurdles it has to overcome in order to flourish. Technological, space-faring lifeforms have to overcome so many hurdles, or filters, that it almost never happens, or has happened just once so far. Thus we're alone at the moment.
There's an old saying in Tennessee-I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee-that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me-you can't get fooled again.'
Call me a skeptic but the three parameters or data points that this calculation relies upon just don't cut the mustard. Okay so Drakes Equation may be based on 'best guesses' but this Grabby Alien calc' malarkey depends entirely upon an event that is a theory and a number with no value so that's the first two data points: The Big Bang Theory and a number with zero value literally. The third point I can't remember but I don't think it really matters. That aside, Hanson's enthusiasm for his Grabby Aliens is impressive
This was a really good interview, but at around the 23 minute mark, JMG asks a very valid question on if this theory rules out the idea that alien civilizations are observable, but that our current instrumentation isn’t advanced enough to detect them yet. Hansen never really answers the question, he answers as if JMG asked if the apparent absence of alien civilizations can be explained by them choosing not to interact with baryonic matter. Maybe i missed something when listening, but it seemed like Hansen side stepped the question there
Mercury takes 59 Earth days to make one full rotation. But a year on Mercury goes fast. Because it's the closest planet to the sun, it goes around the Sun in just 88 Earth days.
I don't mind if they come and study Earth or even live here - it's a cool place - but if they are a threat to the cats? then we've got to build a space wall.
Honestly don't mean this as a political comment, but could you imagine the "build the wall" types reaction to a whole alien race showing up at our doorstep and wanting to live on the same planet as us? Edit: Reminds me of that old movie/tv series (Alien Nation?) that had that same scenario.
@@CosmicClericive always wondered this in sci fi universes like star trek or star wars. Aliens that have an even slightly higher rate of reproduction would totally dominate the Earth after a few centuries. At most. And all the other planets around. Same issue with artificial beings that can be mass produced. Realistically humans shouldn't even exist anymore in those worlds. It really is a good metaphor for our current problems.
That’s very pseudo-intellectual of you. A lot of good science is reframing the parameters, looking at data in new ways, and forming models that serve as a better basis for future questions. What grabby aliens does is useful to the discussion and it’s silly to downplay it as flourish.
@@urnad12345 acting as if a subtle adjustment of one variable matters in a complex equation with potential infinities & admitted gaps with ADDITIONAL POTENTIAL INFINITIES? you are an ineffective comment-bot.
@@Followme556 science is the process of testing hypotheses by either falsifying or supporting them with verifiable evidence. A model such as grabby aliens is useful to science because it represents both a model discerning hypotheses from and a method for analyzing them. It's useful for how it can reframe the limited data available to us, and it is useful because it continues the process of thought on the subject. Why are you so against it? Are you in the sciences? Or are you just going with whatever current seems to most support your own views?
@@vapormissile The model does not claim to be a final definitive or fully comprehensive answer to the Fermi paradox, but rather a useful and testable framework for making predictions and generating hypotheses. The model is based on empirical data and logical reasoning, not on hand-waving or curlicues. The model also acknowledges its limitations and uncertainties, and invites further research and refinement. Your comment was poorly worded so I'm really not sure what you're attempting to get across with "a subtle adjustment of one variable matters in a complex equation with potential infinities & admitted gaps with ADDITIONAL POTENTIAL INFINITIES?" but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume english is not your native language, in which case I'll guess that maybe you're referring to the choice of three defined variables, such as speed of expansion, time to cross hard steps, and the age of the universe. But you're definitely being a bit rude and obtuse, I think you should read the full paper to re-evaluate your conclusions and biases. Your dismissiveness of the model without any nuance tells me you dont work in the sciences so I'll just encourage you to perhaps reflect on how your comments might feel towards Robin or other scientists who dedicate their lives towards broadening human thought. Even when you disagree with someone it's not right to attack their motivations or character no matter how poetic you might think the words sound.
John, I'm always going to keep it a buck with you, I have never in the history of Event Horizon disliked a guest, and that still remains true. However, for some odd reason I didn't really gel with this topic/perspective. Regardless, thank you for being the most consistent content creator on this amazing planet in which we liiiiiiveee!!!
@@EventHorizonShow Absolutely, love listening to him! I've listened to him speak on a couple other podcasts. Wouldn't mind having him back on in the future as well! Again, I don't know of any other content creator on the platform that consistently uploads such thought provoking and in depth content as you! Thank you for that!
This fellow is one of those folks that when they find out alien life has been zipping around in our skies for the past 10,000 years He's going to stop drop and throw up
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
@@EventHorizonShow Well, he also said a data point is look up in the sky--we now have reports from aircraft carriers that UAPs/UFOs are buzzing them on a daily basis.--so how does that chive with that data point:)
The idea is not a bad one. The math works. But like the cake, the math is a lie. You lost me the moment it was implied that a red dwarf would as a function of time produce advanced civilizations. Show me a single red dwarf orbital that isn't tidal locked and either stripped barren or a hellish hot Jupiter (which would be stripped barren after billions of years anyway). I'm patient, but.. we'll need to wait for a different universe with different physics to spawn into existence before something like that is possible me thinks. Math is amazing, one of the prime (heh) achievements of our species.. but it can lead you astray deep into the realms of fantasy. It all begins with, "is it possible.." the answer is always YES, assuming an infinite universe, but that right there is the sickly sweet trap that ensnares many a great mind.
"what are the three pieces of data you use?" *cue 6 minutes of hemming and hawing* 1. age of the universe 2. age of life on earth 3. Do we see alien civilizations in the sky? This is as bullshit wonky as the Drake Equation.
So glad I'm not alone in this feeling. One minute these points are "parameters" the next they are "data" and none of them anything more than guesswork built on the assumptions of others. This is covid science applied to the search for aliens.
I agree and even if they're visible it would be extremely easy to over look we cant look at every single planet and havent even looked at every single planet in our general vicinity and thats not even factoring in the idea that they could be living in artificial space habitats and dont even live on planets anymore There's a chance we already have seen them but explained it away as a natural phenomenon
I am on the home stretch of the final book in the dark forest trilogy. It's SO good. Before listening to them I thought I understood it and honestly didn't really put much stock into the theory but now it really makes you wonder.
A dark forest theory seems the most plausible. If you acknowledge that the dark forest theory is plausible, then to ensure the safety of your civilisation, you need to act like it is true and be silent. It is to risky to be crying like a baby when we've barely opened our eyes.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
25:49 What if Dark Matter itself would be the alien life we miss? What if it is a necessary hard step for any spacefaring intelligence to either overcome the limitation that observable matter has or use a technological induced way of living/existing that shields you from the electro-magnetic effects and thus appear as dark matter to us? "Perfect Dyson Spheres" maybe? Maybe it is a rule, but none there you would have to reason to find a consensus but a limiting nonnegotiable force of nature itself, where becoming invisible or not interacting that much with baryonic matter becomes an unavoidable norm or side-effect? What if it is just inevitable to use/to be dark matter, since success and survival is dependent on that effect and gives you an advantage or fulfills all the needs to be more efficient in doing/being that, so that baryonic centred observable civilization are struggling on a former state or even fail at certain filter-events. What if we humans on earth are more of an unexpected accident or "artificial" experiment of some sort, implying here that baryonic lifeforms are not the norm and that we might be an exotic creation and actually most life forms began within the realm of dark matter? Maybe we are the first of our kind, but not the first of any other kind of life. I am a little bit disappointed, that dark matter and the expansion of the universe is not much taken into account when it comes to explanations of the fermi paradox. Might have missed it somewhere, but I can not recall any approach focusing or actually expanding on it. Only in the Three Body Problem series I stumbled upon an fantastic explanation for Dark Matter!
@@EventHorizonShow Honestly John, after reflecting on your response overnight, it is beneath you and you should honestly be embarrassed. alien life, which your whole channel is essentially based on, was/were the epitome of an extreme outlier from consensus until very recently.
I think you would also have to factor in not just peak star formation, but also when was peak star formation for the types of stars that create the heavier elements needed for life and civilization
I have a friend with whom we share the jokey saying "What's an order of magnitude amongst friends?" when referring to being off in an estimation slightly. The difference between 3 and 30 dollars. This eventually became "whats an order of magnitude of order of magnitudes between friends" when somebody was really far off (The difference between $3 and $30B) I think that Robin has been scientifically humble, but committed a faux pas with scientific communication. He says that his model is calibrated by three values, two of which have relatively solid numbers. However, his use of the power law value of 6 hides a lot of uncertainty. On the surface, a range of 3 to 12 is relative innocuous. However, since this is a power law number, that is a gigantic range. Picking six, even if it's the best fit is like saying, we're not sure how much water is the well. It's somewhere between a drop and an ocean, but we are just going to claim it's about a swimming pool. He's talking about orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude differences in that range and just claiming the best fit.
The pressure at the bottom of our oceans is many times greater than the difference between sea-level air and vacuum - the pressure is the most trivial problem for even us. I don't think being masters of high pressure would automatically give them an advantage in space or the air. From their perspective? high pressure is the default state - so in space they'd have to maintain that pressure inside their ships for their biology. That's a huge differential of many atmospheres, when we in air? only have to maintain 1 atmosphere. I think there's a good case to make for it being harder for them than it is for us.
It's a large assumption that all civilizations expand at a constant rate over a constant time but this simply is not reality if we are to take our own civilization as an example. Humanity has had waves of growth and exploration but it was never a constant, and there have always been waning events where growth slows down for many reasons. We cannot assume that intelligent life will be free from internal strife, or plague or any other event that would slow growth or prevent large-scale exploitation of their slice of the galaxy. If growth and colonization isn't constant then there may be time enough for more species to grow into their own without being overtaken by another species. The thing I love about Fermi Paradox is the reality of our universe is we may see multiple solutions to the paradox at any one time.
While I can't say this isn't the case I feel I should point out that this argument takes a lot of assumptions which are looking increasingly unlikely to be correct. For example there is a pretty strong line of evidence against habitability of red dwarf stars which doesn't get enough attention compared to other explanations and relates to the quantum mechanical properties of oxygen. Aerobic photosynthesis produces oxygen as a byproduct because the reaction itself uses water as a source for neutral hydrogen which requires enough energy to strip the electron with the hydrogen atom from oxygen. This thanks to quantum mechanics requires a minimum energy level for the reaction to occur and it just so happens that this corresponds with *blue light* and less energetic photons or chemosynthetic mechanisms are unable to power this reaction. Now Life has found a way to convert 3 lower energy "red" photons into an equivalent "blue" photon equivalent thus giving rise to the familiar green plants but this is more complicated to evolve with lower energy photons so this becomes statistically implausible to evolve without the simpler prerequisite. Thus if biological production of oxygen is needed for multicellular complex life then the availability of blue light is critical and thus G type stars like the Sun become the most likely class of star to host a civilization as less massive stars have far less blue photons. Its possible more massive K dwarfs might be enough depending on whatever organisms need but that is a trickier prospect as its less likely. I don't see any other way around this if oxygen is necessary.
Grabby Aliens are implausible. The perfection of politics, engineering, resource management, and energy generation required for interstellar travel are so great that we can't even imagine it. The energy required for significant mass to travel even short distances near light speed would require most of the energy mankind has generated with electricity since our beginning of energy generation. If you can generate that much energy, then most of the reasons to colonize other worlds are moot -- interstellar colonization would cost more time and energy than just creating your own mini-planets in your own neighborhood -- how many space stations could we set orbiting our sun? If we built one a day capable of housing 1 billion people comfortably, we could keep putting those things in orbit without any practical end. As for colonizing a planet: you'd have to perform a genocide so horrific that any civilization capable of that monstrosity would've absolutely destroyed itself long before ever getting even to the planet next door. Even humans aren't that monstrous and we're barely out of the trees in evolutionary time. We invented the concept of human rights, animal rights, and war crimes. Even we wouldn't allow members of our species to do what would be required to colonize a planet which already had a biosphere. Life from other worlds wouldn't be compatible with ours. All life on Earth is literally related. Earth life must consume and live among Earth life. Everything we eat uses roughly the same chemistry that we do. The types and shapes of molecules have been tightly tuned to the specific code of Earth life -- even DNA may be chemically unique to Earth. Even the proteins must be shaped correctly -- mad cow disease results from a weirdly shaped neural protein. It's called a prion disease because it's not caused by virus, bacteria, or fungus. Even our viruses, bacteria, and fungi are working within the same paradigm. Our immune systems are designed such that no one pathogen can wipe out the whole species -- some people are literally immune to HIV -- they can't get sick with it. When Europeans came to the New World, the diseases they were immune to wiped out most of the indigenous Americans. An alien race would be immediately assaulted by trillions of virus, bacteria, and fungi on Earth. Our biology would be inedible. They wouldn't be able to breathe the air or drink water or anything else in the environment. How do you economically solve this problem for colonists? You genocide all life on the planet -- right down to the viruses... from the top of the atmosphere all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. Even life similar to humans would see that kind of extermination as an abomination -- the highest crime that could ever be committed. It strains credulity that any species which is cooperative and conscientious enough to generate virtually limitless energy and explore the universe, would also be genocidal in pursuit of resources it can already create with the energy its capable of generating. It would literally cost more to travel and genocide a planet than to just create your own artificial planet in your local neighborhood. You'd have to be willfully malignant en masse to perform such an act. If you had enough malignant leaders that they'd give orders to commit planetary genocide, they'd have set to work doing it locally long before they became interstellar. Interstellar travel requires so many resources that it would only occur after a very long stretch of global peace and prosperity as well as environmental and cosmic calm in the system. Creatures go to war and commit genocides to gain resources. You can only perform interstellar travel after you've solved the problem of resource scarcity. Once you can do that, the only other motive to destroy a planet is just plain malignance. But such malignance would've prevented any civilization from performing the cooperation required of an interstellar exploration. Intelligent life would posses the same instincts as Earth life. Why? Because scarcity defines all matter in this reality. Anything that has a brain capable of engineering would've evolved under the identical pressures that our brains evolved -- to cope with scarcity. No matter the form of life, the resources it requires to remain alive will be competed for by all other forms of life in its environment. A mind evolves out of necessity, not "just 'cause". The selection pressures required to evolve an intelligent brain will necessarily exist everywhere in the universe -- no matter the substrate. Intelligent brains evolve because of interdependence upon other members in the species -- cooperation. But high-level cooperation requires morality and the ability to view other people as important enough to protect. But once this morality evolves, it will extend to other animals outside your own species. Laws would initially apply to only your own species but they would soon extend to protect other animals. As resources become more plentiful, genocides begin to slow down and eventually cease altogether. Even so, there are always aberrations. People who lack conscience. Such people unfortunately take advantage of the trust of others and gain power over them. They create artificial scarcity where there's no natural scarcity. This is what the climate movement is today -- a political tactic to create unnecessary scarcity. Fortunately, the fiction is wearing very thin. Never trust anyone who demands that you live in scarcity while they live in opulence. They're lying to you -- always and forever.
Issue is that we don’t have a complete understanding of physics. What seems insurmountable today could be child’s play tomorrow. An example is maybe dark matter is an unfathomably good and efficient energy source that dwarves even fusion by many orders of magnitude. Once humanity figures out dark matter, maybe we leapfrog from a type 0.72 to a type 2.5 civilization in just a few hundred years. That’s the issue with arguments about whether or not humans will travel at relativistic speeds across the cosmos. It relies on the assumption that our current physics will not be challenged or changed in the future, and there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that physics 100 years from now will look very different from physics today.
@@gravoc857 Dark matter may only be gravity from masses outside the observable universe. Just because our universe was born of a singularity doesn't imply that our universal singularity is the only one. In fact, it's implausible to assert that our universal singularity could be unique.
AFAIK there is no evidence that advanced ETs are rare, let alone imperiled by great filters. It's not obvious that they are right here, right now (although we dont know it as a fact), and that's pretty much all we know. The idea that ET must colonize the galaxy is imho poorly considered. Imho nobody colonizes galaxies, or even creates large interstellar civs, because there's nothing to be gained. (There are also positive reasons to stay small/compact.)
I've always suspected that the more advanced you get the smaller you go...not bigger. If you have some magical spacial metric engineering capability... You can have more time and space inside a dense tiny environment. At the scale of proteins for example, 1 human macro scale year equates to thousands of years equivalent time at that much smaller scale. Conversely, an observer at a scale 2,000x larger than human scale would experience time similarly. One equivalent year at that scale would be 2000 human years. It would take more energy and space to go big... But I seems intuitive that if you have the capability... Going small is the most practical. I just get the feeling that spacial metric engineering isn't actually that difficult... But we aren't really trying to do it. There are examples of it everywhere though...
@@Anon-xd3cf IDK how possible it might be, but I agree it would be desirable / economical. By small / compact I mostly meant close to Earth, like everyone living on Earth and in Earth orbit. Mostly because of communication speed. Even the moon is already too far for convenient real time communication. (Crippling 16000ms latency.) I imagine it will be even more important in the future. A few trillion people could live in orbit without crowding anything. I think it's maybe even more true for our supposed AI descendents, for whom a millisecond would be a long time.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
If we observe a star system that's 1000 light years away, aren't we seeing it as it was 1000 years ago (looking back in time)? And if this is true then maybe 1000 years ago that star system didn't have an Alien technosignature due to lack of observable technology. However, in the true present time an Alien technosignature does exist there because they've evolved... but we won't "see" it for a thousand years...In other words, looking back in time only shows a primitive Universe before Alien technologies evolved.
I can't help but think that there really are allot of alien species out there, and we'll discover them when we invent the quantum galactic internet modem. Distances wouldn't be an issue for such a device.
@@vls3771 Science and progression tends to go in one direction, so I would definitely not be surprised if different species in different parts of the galaxy invent the same quantum galactic internet technologies. It just seems like a logical conclusion direction to me.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
I’ve stated my theory on here before, but maybe the specific extinction events we had, and when they occurred, that led to us having and finding vast amounts of fossil fuels may in fact make us one of the most advanced civilizations around (ability to escape our gravity well with propellants). Because really, there could be an ancient Egypt level civilization in every star system near us and we’d never know. And they could have existed for a very long time, but will never advance into space. Just a theory though like any other idea.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
The multiverse could easily be teeming with interconnected life and our experience on Earth could be an outlier, so they are aware of us but we aren’t aware of them, and frankly we may not be that important but perhaps interesting. Currently looking out to sea but seeing that it looks empty.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
no thought or idea should be swallowed whole. one has to masticate ones food, taste it, feel it, before consuming it. sometimes bad tasting meals consist of individual components that are delicious, and vice versa for many a delicious meal. rarely does anything taste completely awful or totally perfect.
From what I understand about UAP, they don't travel at the speed of light, their top speed as recently measured by scientists is around mach 20. So they came here trough teleportation and for this they most likely use quantum entanglement. The quantum realm also gives access to other realities/universes, so when you achieve this level of technology, it's unlikely you start exploring the space around you, you most likely would pick specific targets to visit or leave the universe you started in all together because other universes are more interesting and perhaps provide unknown materials to expand your tech.
"We start with the assumption that the Earth is a random sample of life in the universe." That's not a logical assumption. You have to have more than one sample to pick one randomly.
Any life form capable of engineering interstellar travel is also capable of creating producing elements by artificial nucleosynthesis and therefore has no need of Earth's resources.
assuming they have the energy capable of creating the amount of mass they require. Presumably they can't create more energy than exists in all matter - so somewhere along that line? is an amount of matter they'd collect - even if it were just for energy to make different matter.
@@JohnnyWednesday Just as we currently view interstellar travel as impossible, we also view artificial nucleosynthesis as impossible now. Obviously there are some tricks we have yet to learn regarding what we know of physics.
@@hydrorix1 - absolutely - but I believe it's true that matter contains insane amounts of energy - hence nuclear bombs when matter gets turned into energy So while they could definitely create matter using energy - it they wanted to build a planet worth of matter? that's an energy requirement on an insane level - there might be a cut-off point where they'd just collect matter on such a scale.
@@JohnnyWednesday May I introduce you to the concept of Star Lifting (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting). Since stars are hundreds of thousands of times more massive than most planets (e.g. our Sun is ~330,000 Earth masses), you can build thousands of planets from them. The Sun is ~0.16% iron, for example, so that's 500 Earth masses worth of just iron right there. There's many more useful elements, from vast amounts of oxygen and carbon to platinum group metals. Theoretically, a civilisation could - over geological time scales - not only build hundreds of new worlds using star lifting, but also prolong the life of the star to trillions of years at the same time. Personally, I find this concept to be *much* more plausible than the going through the process of finding a suitable planet, getting to it, terraforming it or genetically remodelling your own species plus engineering an entire ecosystem around it, all while being practically isolated from the former home world once you arrived.
Please NEVER change your intro music OR the “You have fallen into event horizon” moment It’s become a catalyst for serotonin and comfort for me 😁
When I hear « you have fallen into the event horizon » , I scream noooooooo lol
The anticipation gets me every time
"In this universe that we liiiiiiiive..."
Same
It's an awesome intro
Event Horizons and the channel John Michael Godier are the two best channels on TH-cam in my opinion. I have 2 grandchildren in California that are in High School and I turned them on to these channels and they love it. Thank you John and Eryn, and your team. Super great videos. Thank you so much! 🌎
Enjoy your family, dude! 😊
Have you ever seen a video about the build of rc airplanes? Take a look, it could be a fantastic thing to enjoy with them. 😊
Totally agree. Astrum and SEA (sea_space) are pretty good space related channels too, but these discussions here are so good they really get into the weeds of topics.
@@MCsCreations Thanks! I will check it out. I pretty much have subscribed to all of the aviation videos. I like Green Dot, 74 Gesr, Montour Pilot, etc. Air planes simply amaze me. Take care!
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
Thank you so much for your kind words! It's wonderful to hear of science being passed on to the next generation. They are literally the future!
The assumption that we would clearly see advanced civilizations is a useful one for the model, but it is still an assumption. We can't predict how technology is going to unfold and there could be modes of expansion that don't have a massive impact on the natural environment.
This is the correct opinion.
Agree. If they’re so much more advanced than us they might not be broadcasting their existence at full volume….they might be damn near invisible to us in the cosmos. I mean as we perfect and refine our own technology it becomes more efficient and less detectable…
It would hardly matter what they did - we couldn't see it. They'd have to do something truly huge, like rearrange galaxies to spell dirty words or something. And we might not notice even that.
You don't need to imagine they would stop using radio - we couldn't detect them at any reasonable distance even if they used lots and lots of radio. We don't have big enough telescopes.
8:03
More ridiculous guess work.
Again sounds like you are looking for modern human civilization rather than ANYTHING alien.
Its time you thought about forests in a similar way to thinking of civilization.
Living breathing consuming forests, hundreds of thousands of individuals working and living together in harmony. Clearly intelligent, capable of interspecies communication across vast networks.
But not conscious as far as WE can tell.
You can't see the civilization for the trees.
4:00
"We know how long ago the big bang was"
Nope...
That's just another GUESS.
we don't know that "the big bang" if it happened at all, was 13.8 (or whatever) billion years ago.
What does 13.8 billion YEARS even mean?
One year is the time it takes for our planet to travel around our nearest star (the sun).
But in another solar system a year might be much more or much less "time".
Then there's the time problem... Is time uniform?
Does it have multiple dimensions?
Was time created at the big bang or did time exist before the big bang?
So many unanswered questions...
But you're gonna claim to KNOW the age of the universe?
The arrogance is STUNNING.
Interesting discussion… thank you. I am always perplexed by the assumption that alien civilizations do not exist because we ‘don’t see anything’ in our galaxy. We haven’t been looking for very long, and our most powerful telescopes cannot resolve even the nearest exoplanets beyond a pixel of light. I have always felt that the Fermi Paradox has been given too much credence by the scientific community. I think we need to wait a few decades - or maybe centuries - before we conclude that our galaxy is devoid of advanced technological civilizations. Maybe the question we need to ask is what percentage of advanced alien civilizations would alter their galactic neighborhood in a way that could be easily observed across the galaxy? The assumption that alien civilizations would build mega structures around stars and other easily observed interstellar infrastructure seems more informed by sci-fi than actual science. The more I hear experts talk about this subject, the more I am convinced it’s mostly guesswork at present.
👏 thank you couldn't agree more, we are way too early too be making assumptions.
Yeah, when we see the night sky it looks full of information, but if you were up close to the real size thing but with only the information we can see even putting Hubble images real size a few light years away it becomes a pixelated or blurry mess where stars are less than a single pixel. We have less info on the space in the nearest few light years than we do for the oort cloud. Reminds me of iron lung how little we really see our surroundings on the galactic scale.
Same.
I am always struck by the arrogance.
"We know the age of the universe"
"We observe stars with similar chemical makeup"
Nonsense.
Our entire perception of time is based on local solar mechanics and our size and the scale of the environment around us.
Then there are other unknowns about time, does time have multiple dimensions?
How would we know?
Did time begin when the universe did?
Did time predate the universe?
Is time uniform?
So many unanswered questions.
But I hear so much certainty from people who are basing guesses on other people previous guesses.
@@Anon-xd3cf Time doesn't have "dimensions". Time is not physical object, doesn't interact with anything, therefor: time doesn't exist. Time is just a placeholder for "duration of event", basically an abstract concept, a tool we use. So, your questions are not relevant to anything discussed here.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
Waitaminute! 30:20 Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun - it is in a 3/2 spin-orbit resonance, rotating 3 times for each 2 revolutions around the Sun.
Look very different how ? I still don't understand how different the universe should ' look' if there are alien civilizations out there. Why should they colonize , build gigantic structures , etc as if they'r some alien Roman Empire ? Who knows what they do or don't do .
Too many people seem to be looking for human civilization rather than alien life.
Exactly, no one knows what they do for fun,..
What if the aliens aren't from another planet and this planet gave birth to two advanced species. Hey it could happen.
Person: gets a degree in science, has sciencey accomplishments
JMG: *can I get* *an interview*
sciencey
JMG has garnered a reputation of an interviewer who studies up on the subject matter, and research papers that the guest has published.
So many times the surprise inflection of a guest voice can be heard in answering an insightful question JMG has just asked.
Interesting how the equation will change if UAP are counted as aliens
That really depends on some of the heresay around it. If the interdimensional traveler talk was the case then it might not change the model at all, except for having to maybe account for seeded life. If UAP’s came from another dimension or universe then what we observe through this model might not be as effected.
However if the UAP’s had an origin point within this universe and use other dimensions for travel rather than habitation that likely changes the model a lot. Firstly the question would be if they can move faster than light. I’m inclined to believe that no they cannot, because of the time travel issues of FTL. But if they could it basically throws reality and known physics out of the window.
If they can’t travel FTL but just at very high speeds then their top speed- say .9999c- that’ll factor into the model and greatly increase alien expansion rates.
However the biggest way it changes the model is by fundamentally altering the question from where aliens are to why we don’t see aliens altering anything out there.
Imo if UAP’s turned out to be of alien origin the most likely thing would be that they aren’t biological entities and are instead machines or bio-organic. In this explanation they might be ubiquitous throughout our galaxy or even our universe and yet not necessarily conform to the same expectations of a civilization. They could be self replicating drones traveling at much much higher speeds than the expansion wave of their civilization of origin. Perhaps they act like a vanguard in that way, going forth and learning about civilizations- or even influencing them. Then when their originator civilization becomes visible in the night sky and long after that actually arrives within earth space we’ll have already learned about them through their probe UAP’s.
I have no idea though. A lot of the things said about UAP’s are so off the wall and beyond known science that if even a fraction of what’s said turns out to be true it sort of throws our whole basis of reality out a window and we’d have to pretty much rethink everything.
I think a dark forest universe is the most likely answer if there are indeed civilizations out there. A civilization can't possibly know if there are predators hiding out there. If you speak up too loudly, you don't know they won't respond by launching an attack and you can't know how advanced they are. If there are aliens here, they would probably be prepping the battlefield, or stationing an insurance policy here. Technology grows explosively. You couldn't monitor us from afar because with the speed of light, we could surpass them before they could see it. If we advance to become a threat, they can act immediately.
Such a model will change every 5 years, its a pointless exercise
There is also the possibility that if UAP are of nonhuman origin, they come from within the Earth. I have been noticing a lot of UAP sightings where the witness claims they have flown into the ocean. In fact, one of the telltale signs that UAPs are not man-made, is that they can both fly in the air and dive underwater, something no human craft can do. The Earth is mostly covered in oceans, and we are even told that we know more about outer space than the depths of our planet's oceans. I think it's possible UAPs originate from deep underwater/underground and if so, they might even pre-date humanity.
This would also explain the paradox "If aliens are so advanced and can travel through light-years of space to reach us, why do they seem to crash so often?" Maybe they are not traveling that far at all, maybe they're simply underneath us.
Another theory is that the grabby aliens were beat back by a relatively peaceful alliance of non-grabby aliens. Perhaps the grabby aliens still exist in pockets of the galaxy and the peaceful aliens choose stealth (as a defensive strategy). This scenario could, in some ways, mirror earth's history in times when a single empire (eg. Napoleon's France or Hitler's Germany) sought to conquer the whole world and a bunch of nations were forced to ally with one another in order to beat the would-be conquerors into submission.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
Cool theory
What an infantile understanding of war and history.
You're really not respecting the spirit of Robin Hanson's work if you take that kind of thing seriously. Just please consider the odds of how coordination of the sort you're describing could happen. It's like saying "a lighthouse can stop a tidal wave" - which is sort of true, in that it stays standing and isn't "defeated" by the wave. But the wave goes around it. What you're talking about would require a spherical coordinated impermeable front that contains the wave in all three dimensions... oh god, why am I even writing this when I have other things to do, and you obviously put less thought into the issue than the time it took me to write this?
While it's entertaining, I can't count how many erroneous assumptions I heard here. I mean, if you're a life form on a water planet, then it's likely that you will literally never possess any sort of conceptualization of what fire is. Your species will *never* learn to smelt ore, because the idea of fire would never have a reason to occur to you.
Or "life expands everywhere it can"... This does NOT apply to intelligent life. There are a great many places that we could go that we don't, and for far more reasons than that some religious prohibition prevents us from doing so.
This is a common problem in this field, I think. We *have to* make assumptions in order to get anywhere, but our own bases unavoidably taint those assumptions.
Please name one place life could have gone to but hasn't.
@@alexczajka5623 Do you mean *intelligent life*? Because that's what I said.
Why aren't we on the moon right now? We could have bases there by now, but we don't.
Why don't we inhabit the oceans as well? We could build cities there, but we don't.
Why don't we tend to flock to deserts? We could do that, but we don't.
There are a TON of places where intelligent life may choose not to go for a lot of reasons - it's expensive, it's uncomfortable, we'd have to use technology to survive, it's boring / uninteresting to us...
Microbes may mindlessly inhabit any space that they physically can. Intelligent beings do not behave that way.
@@festivus7065 Not really. Microbes preferentially colonise niches of best fit before investing resources expanding.
You said "life expands where it can" was erroneous. The expansion of life, intelligent or otherwise, is limited by available resources, so life cannot expand to everywhere all at once. Meaning, we *can't* have moon bases right now, because we're still using our resources to fully colonise our primary niche.
Also, I find it wild that you sight 3 places man has gone, which we either do live in or have plans to expand too, as evidence that intelligent life doesn't go everywhere it can.
@@alexczajka5623 Do you honestly believe that resources are the sole constraint?
I didn't just list three places that man has been (but tends to not go to), I listed potential reasons for that behavior and NONE of them mentioned resources. That is not the only factor impacting behavior lol.
Interest? Desire? Calculation of risk or benefit? How about fear? Are we all just little automatons governed solely by resource availability? No, we are not.
Resource availability is not preventing us from building moon bases, or building cities in the desert or ocean. It's a problem of resource *allocation*, not availability - and allocation is a result of choice. We have plenty of human capital and raw material to put bases on the moon. And Mars. What we lack is sufficient desire to expend the resources - that is why we have no moon bases.
We don't like to build cities in the desert or the ocean because 1) living there isn't fun or cheap for masses of people, and 2) there's not enough incentive otherwise for people to decide that it would be a worthwhile expenditure. It's human decision, not resources, that determine this.
If you simply look around, it should be obvious that intelligent life does not expand every place that it potentially could. For a variety of reasons, ranging to the above to simple decisions of how to allocate one's limited time in this life, intelligent beings decide to go some places and avoid others for more reasons than we could count.
I'm of the personal opinion that we're living in some sort of dark forest situation, and that other species simply tend to avoid contact because some of them are hostile, and it simply isn't worth the risk. But I may well be wrong, who knows.
But if it's not something like that, then it's something similar, or we really would see intelligent life everywhere. Obviously, we don't.
Mate, you're really missing the point. Life can't expand to everywhere at once, so going to the places it can, then going to the others later, is still sufficient to meet the assumption. Also, you've set an arbitrary timeline by which to judge expansion. No where does the assumption say "life goes where it can, as soon as possible, and dedicates all resources to accelerating expansion".
This episode blew my mind.
Thanks John very enjoyable.
👍🇮🇪👍
John asked how a waterworld can build spaceships and his guest said it's a matter of time. But could it build spaceships if it stays a waterworld‐-or would continents have to develop?
But could it run Crysis?
I agree it's a matter of time
Read Larry Niven's Fleet of Worlds books, about the Gwoth.
Why would they need to be land based?
We extract oil from beneath the sea, maybe a sea based society would develop engineering faster than us ?
@@UFO-Ark nothing sea-dwelling on Earth did anything over the last billion years since the Cambrian Explosion (probably 😥) . That aids in the assumption that sea-dwelling life is more-or-less incapable of "civilizations."
I agree with most of the reasonings by Robin Hanson, given the assumptions, but I don't agree with this assumption at all:
"We are assumed to be a random sample from the distribution ..."
Why would the sentient observer Robin Hanson make this assumption? Wouldn't it make much more sense to assume that the sentient observer Robin Hanson is a random sample from the distribution of sentient observers that will ever exist? With this improved assumption things change completely. Robin Hanson will be much more likely to appear within one of the civilizations with the total highest population of sentient observers during its lifetime than in one of the smaller ones, and more likely to appear within a time when many such sentient observers start existing rather than one where few do.
That would seem to mean that much larger populations of sentient observers in the future is unlikely, e.g. due to non-sentient machine civilizations taking over or something like that.
There's also the hypothesis presented by a physicist whose name I've forgotten:
When a civilization reaches a certain level, it performs certain unwise experiments, unleashing false vacuum decay that destroys the universe at the speed of light, thereby ending the possibility of future life in its future light cone. It would remove the need for grabby aliens from the equation.
You could of course come up with any possible future calamity that ends the possibilities for life, e.g. some physical constant shifting over time in a way that we currently don't understand, and so on.
So, while there are scenarios where Robin Hanson's Grabby Alien model make sense, it's not at all clear that we're in such a scenario, and assuming mediocrity for our civilization doesn't make much sense.
The great blindness is the real issue, maybe in 2050 the Carl Sagan space telescope might find someone near by.
even if they're visible it would be extremely easy to over look we cant look at every single planet and havent even looked at every single planet in our general vicinity and thats not even factoring in the idea that they could be living in artificial space habitats and dont even live on planets anymore
There's a chance we already have seen them but explained it away as a natural phenomenon
@@destinmorrissey6058 I would focus on star systems with in maybe 10 light years. Closer to see and communicate with. Then more time could be focused on them to resolve whats there.
Then I would focus on the activity going on in our own atmosphere.
I was surprised right off the bat to hear him say “no” to the question of if there’s a solid candidate for a great filter. Interesting…. As the guy who coined the term i was expecting like 50 of them haha
The biggest issue, I guess, is to find evidence for any of them. Because I'm sure there are lots of ideas about it...
@@MCsCreations for sure. as JMG is always rightly quick to point out, until we actually find anything out there, we have a sample size of exactly 1, which in science you can’t draw many conclusions from. It’s all speculating (but informed and thought out speculating) until then
Remember, a great filter is something that kills off 90+% of life that come up against them.
Idk it's hard for me to take the guy seriously. You know none of these guys ever seem to have a solid grounding in material realities. Let's say you wanna conquer the galaxy. How do you get enough material off your planet and into space without completely destroying your planet and it's ability to support your civilization? Because in 200 years of industrial activities which pale in comparison to what it would take to conquer the galaxy we are already pushing our planets ability to support our civilization.
@@TraditionalAnglicany great filter is material reality. Let's say you have the Demi Urge to be a grabby civilization. In your attempt to get enough material off your planet and into space to conquer the galaxy, you almost certainly destroy your planets climate and it's ability to support your civilization.
Dead dumb civilizations don't conquer the galaxy....
Smart civilizations realize probably shouldn't kill ourselves trying to go to a place where everything is trying to kill you. They probably realize shit we're on our Eden. It's the only one we're ever gonna get.
Satellites? Probably right? Research expeditions? Why wouldn't you.
I mean seriously we're about 50-60 years away from seriously altering our planets ability to support our civilization. Our industrial activity is small potato's compared to getting trillions of tons of material into space.
Why would the expansion rate be at half the speed of light? Why would a technological civilization advance so fast? I'd like to know where that number comes from. ...
It's convenient. Just like the assumption that highly complex and advanced civilisations and species are unchanging over geologic timescales and expand to other gravity wells.
Take one of these two assumptions away and the concept stops working.
According to the Fermi paradox, we should be seeing signs of alien civilizations everywhere. Now that the military is saying that they are seeing UAP's all the time, scientists are saying that it's extremely unlikely to be aliens. Well, which is it??
I think at some point we are going to have to start listening to our Military Members. They clearly are here.
Auto Like, ... you had me at grabby aliens.... (wraps tinfoil around butt,... too)
great. one more piece of wardrobe to add to my ensemble, the tinfoil gitch.
Could be alien civilization arose, went grabby, but also went great zoo keepers. Stuck us in a pocket universe or completely digitize us in a really good simulation. And now, humans technology is just getting to a point of saying something not right. And the JWST is starting to show us this.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
well maybe we cant see anything.... but that doesn't mean its not there.
I feel as though we are a civilization standing on the shoreline of an ocean, fire lit and sending smoke signals. Asking ourselves why we don't see anyone else's smoke signals. We are a few short millennia from the stone age, thinking we are advanced.
A half a dozen millennia removed would be more accurate.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
@@AndrewStevens-fh9zv It's a reasonable guess, but not at all a reasonable conclusion.
If there were a million civilizations just like ours in this galaxy, we surely wouldn't know it - unless one of them was miraculously, improbably, very close by. (Even if they had all been using radio for a billion years.) We don't have big enough telescopes. They'd be invisible.
Even if very fancy high tech aliens existed in the galaxy, how would we know? What should we expect to see? I think we are seeing exactly what we should expect to see - either way, whether we're alone or it's crowded.
Maybe we're alone, IDK. But the Great Silence could easily be just our great deafness.
I don’t even think you can characterize it as “silence” or “deafness.” It’s just the way things are. The universe is absolutely massive beyond our comprehension. Ergo, things are just really far apart. Are there aliens out there? Almost certainly. Will we ever encounter them? Almost certainly not.
With regard to the UAP issue that is at the forefront of the news, if they aren’t human, I don’t think they’re alien. It’s more likely that they’re interdimensional and local to Earth than it is that they are extraterrestrials who traveled the universe/galaxy and happened upon us.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
Perfectly said
31:55 ocean worlds can't evolve technological civilizations because of electricity.
I love John Micheal Godier. I listen to him probably more than anyone else on TH-cam.
I like the way he constantly chuckles to himself while expounding his thoughts.
I found it irritating it comes across as arrogant especially as his view of how aliens would behave is based on the motivations of humans from industrial revolution to today which is but a cosmic blink.
Oh my gosh I have been waiting for this one! I'm not sure if my "check out grabby aliens" comment from a year ago started John down this path but if it did that is freaking awesome.
We always appreciate recommendations. Thank you!
Heck yes!! Love the channel.
Hanson is a bright light in the darkness of Fermi's paradox.
I'm certain that Mr. Hanson is far smarter than I, but it seems to me, the issue with his hypothesis is aliens would be a lot like us and progress just as we do. I find that highly unlikely.
John! What’s truly the worst (if they’re not the same thing) the zoo hypothesis being true or us having close grabby aliens.
"What you may not understand is that each year thousands of people are taken and not returned to the world. These people are not simply conditioned. They are kept. Some of them perish in captivity. Some of them do not survive the process of their capturing. Some become sick and die. Those that cannot survive and are still seen as useful to the Intervention are used as a biological resource. That means that their blood, their body parts, everything is used according to its value in the Greater Community." _The Allies of Humanity Briefings_
Enjoyed this, some excellent ideas in there. Even though its speculation.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I find it odd that scientist assume that alien civilizations would expand to fill the galaxy. Its not a fact and it seems evident that it has not happen at least in this galaxy.
Scientists often develop inescapable obsessions with the worst ideas they have at any given time.
I get a feeling they would be interested in not being seen.
We would not want to stop evolution occuring on a planet if we found it occuring so we would have to leave it.
We understand if any civilisation on these planets could see us we would create cargo cults and we would want to be subtle.
I don't see why these galactic civilizations need to be so visible.
The logic is that its congruent with how life behaves in general. It extremely plausible to me (because evolution favours adaptability and fecundity) but all assumptions are, just that: assumptions. I don't think however that there is a lack of awareness of the fact that this is an assumption.
the word 'fill' is skipped over a lot - they may spread out in small numbers for reasons unknown regardless of how much space they have available
@@jopearson6321 Hm. It's not plausible to me at all. There's a difference between life itself and individual species. While life as a general phenomenon tends to fill every available ecological niche, individual species do not. The whole idea just smells like Lamarckism in new clothes, it's a metaphysical conjecture rather than a scientific concept.
Isn't it obvious that there is no one filter, but many? The more complicated the form of life, the more hurdles it has to overcome in order to flourish. Technological, space-faring lifeforms have to overcome so many hurdles, or filters, that it almost never happens, or has happened just once so far. Thus we're alone at the moment.
Remember: ANY revisions of physics or physics discoveries (even if minor) can-and-will (likely) invalidate any current projections or models.
Your best chance of finding aliens is to stick with the David Grush situation and/or Avi Lobe
Nah.
@@johnmackay3136 🤣okay
@@biosphere8488 Knew you'd see sense, glad we had this talk lol
There's an old saying in Tennessee-I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee-that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me-you can't get fooled again.'
@@johnmackay3136 I gather the area of the UFO debate rubs you the wrong way
Call me a skeptic but the three parameters or data points that this calculation relies upon just don't cut the mustard.
Okay so Drakes Equation may be based on 'best guesses' but this Grabby Alien calc' malarkey depends entirely upon an event that is a theory and a number with no value so that's the first two data points: The Big Bang Theory and a number with zero value literally. The third point I can't remember but I don't think it really matters.
That aside, Hanson's enthusiasm for his Grabby Aliens is impressive
Finally bringing some sense into the discussion
This was a really good interview, but at around the 23 minute mark, JMG asks a very valid question on if this theory rules out the idea that alien civilizations are observable, but that our current instrumentation isn’t advanced enough to detect them yet. Hansen never really answers the question, he answers as if JMG asked if the apparent absence of alien civilizations can be explained by them choosing not to interact with baryonic matter. Maybe i missed something when listening, but it seemed like Hansen side stepped the question there
I'll match and raise you three assumptions.
Very good episode. I like the guest statistic based arguments on alien contact
Man, talk about the art of not answering questions.... jeesh
The great filter is great at its job
This is the "great filter" guy? I got a bone to pick.
Mercury takes 59 Earth days to make one full rotation. But a year on Mercury goes fast. Because it's the closest planet to the sun, it goes around the Sun in just 88 Earth days.
Exactly.
How many "years" old is the universe if your perspective comes from Mercury?
Your possum skit at the end made me laugh
😆 That got me too.
It’s mesmerizing to hear this guy ramble. Phenomenal show would love to hear him on again!
Not me, its a lot of fan fiction and handwaving of really complicated things.
I don't mind if they come and study Earth or even live here - it's a cool place - but if they are a threat to the cats? then we've got to build a space wall.
Honestly don't mean this as a political comment, but could you imagine the "build the wall" types reaction to a whole alien race showing up at our doorstep and wanting to live on the same planet as us?
Edit: Reminds me of that old movie/tv series (Alien Nation?) that had that same scenario.
@@CosmicCleric Aliens drinking blue gel and going berserk as far as I remember. I love that film.
I'm cool with them wiping us out to save the planet. The cats will be fine.
Cats are lame
@@CosmicClericive always wondered this in sci fi universes like star trek or star wars. Aliens that have an even slightly higher rate of reproduction would totally dominate the Earth after a few centuries. At most. And all the other planets around. Same issue with artificial beings that can be mass produced.
Realistically humans shouldn't even exist anymore in those worlds. It really is a good metaphor for our current problems.
Very informative guest, please have him back on again John 😊
He did nothing except he added a flourish to the hand-waving, and he added a curlicue to the question mark.
That’s very pseudo-intellectual of you.
A lot of good science is reframing the parameters, looking at data in new ways, and forming models that serve as a better basis for future questions.
What grabby aliens does is useful to the discussion and it’s silly to downplay it as flourish.
@@urnad12345 acting as if a subtle adjustment of one variable matters in a complex equation with potential infinities & admitted gaps with ADDITIONAL POTENTIAL INFINITIES? you are an ineffective comment-bot.
@@urnad12345 When you said science, you meant guess work.
@@Followme556 science is the process of testing hypotheses by either falsifying or supporting them with verifiable evidence. A model such as grabby aliens is useful to science because it represents both a model discerning hypotheses from and a method for analyzing them. It's useful for how it can reframe the limited data available to us, and it is useful because it continues the process of thought on the subject.
Why are you so against it? Are you in the sciences? Or are you just going with whatever current seems to most support your own views?
@@vapormissile The model does not claim to be a final definitive or fully comprehensive answer to the Fermi paradox, but rather a useful and testable framework for making predictions and generating hypotheses. The model is based on empirical data and logical reasoning, not on hand-waving or curlicues. The model also acknowledges its limitations and uncertainties, and invites further research and refinement.
Your comment was poorly worded so I'm really not sure what you're attempting to get across with "a subtle adjustment of one variable matters in a complex equation with potential infinities & admitted gaps with ADDITIONAL POTENTIAL INFINITIES?" but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume english is not your native language, in which case I'll guess that maybe you're referring to the choice of three defined variables, such as speed of expansion, time to cross hard steps, and the age of the universe. But you're definitely being a bit rude and obtuse, I think you should read the full paper to re-evaluate your conclusions and biases. Your dismissiveness of the model without any nuance tells me you dont work in the sciences so I'll just encourage you to perhaps reflect on how your comments might feel towards Robin or other scientists who dedicate their lives towards broadening human thought. Even when you disagree with someone it's not right to attack their motivations or character no matter how poetic you might think the words sound.
Very interesting take given the cancer analogy people always use to describe us.
Sorry but the music was way too loud. I had to turn it off at 10:37.
John, I'm always going to keep it a buck with you, I have never in the history of Event Horizon disliked a guest, and that still remains true. However, for some odd reason I didn't really gel with this topic/perspective. Regardless, thank you for being the most consistent content creator on this amazing planet in which we liiiiiiveee!!!
To each their own. He is the most highly requested guest we’ve ever had. Extremely nice and fun to talk to as well.
@@EventHorizonShow Absolutely, love listening to him! I've listened to him speak on a couple other podcasts. Wouldn't mind having him back on in the future as well! Again, I don't know of any other content creator on the platform that consistently uploads such thought provoking and in depth content as you! Thank you for that!
This fellow is one of those folks that when they find out alien life has been zipping around in our skies for the past 10,000 years He's going to stop drop and throw up
Nope... Likely to become a hermit or end their life...
Imagine having to contend with all of your certainties being removed all at once.
You either adapt or not. Now where have I heard that before? ;)
Exactly. People who say we haven't "seen" anything are going to have to re-evaluate soon.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
Latest news says the universe is twice as old as we thought...like 26 billion years old..so how does that impact your theory of where aliens are now?
That theory is unproven.
@@EventHorizonShow Well, he also said a data point is look up in the sky--we now have reports from aircraft carriers that UAPs/UFOs are buzzing them on a daily basis.--so how does that chive with that data point:)
Great a new eposide!
The idea is not a bad one. The math works. But like the cake, the math is a lie. You lost me the moment it was implied that a red dwarf would as a function of time produce advanced civilizations. Show me a single red dwarf orbital that isn't tidal locked and either stripped barren or a hellish hot Jupiter (which would be stripped barren after billions of years anyway). I'm patient, but.. we'll need to wait for a different universe with different physics to spawn into existence before something like that is possible me thinks. Math is amazing, one of the prime (heh) achievements of our species.. but it can lead you astray deep into the realms of fantasy. It all begins with, "is it possible.." the answer is always YES, assuming an infinite universe, but that right there is the sickly sweet trap that ensnares many a great mind.
Yes, stellar type is just as important as stellar age.
"what are the three pieces of data you use?"
*cue 6 minutes of hemming and hawing*
1. age of the universe
2. age of life on earth
3. Do we see alien civilizations in the sky?
This is as bullshit wonky as the Drake Equation.
So glad I'm not alone in this feeling.
One minute these points are "parameters" the next they are "data" and none of them anything more than guesswork built on the assumptions of others.
This is covid science applied to the search for aliens.
I agree and even if they're visible it would be extremely easy to over look we cant look at every single planet and havent even looked at every single planet in our general vicinity and thats not even factoring in the idea that they could be living in artificial space habitats and dont even live on planets anymore
There's a chance we already have seen them but explained it away as a natural phenomenon
Love you John, please don’t stop.
I am on the home stretch of the final book in the dark forest trilogy. It's SO good. Before listening to them I thought I understood it and honestly didn't really put much stock into the theory but now it really makes you wonder.
A dark forest theory seems the most plausible.
If you acknowledge that the dark forest theory is plausible, then to ensure the safety of your civilisation, you need to act like it is true and be silent. It is to risky to be crying like a baby when we've barely opened our eyes.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
25:49 What if Dark Matter itself would be the alien life we miss?
What if it is a necessary hard step for any spacefaring intelligence to either overcome the limitation that observable matter has or use a technological induced way of living/existing that shields you from the electro-magnetic effects and thus appear as dark matter to us? "Perfect Dyson Spheres" maybe?
Maybe it is a rule, but none there you would have to reason to find a consensus but a limiting nonnegotiable force of nature itself, where becoming invisible or not interacting that much with baryonic matter becomes an unavoidable norm or side-effect? What if it is just inevitable to use/to be dark matter, since success and survival is dependent on that effect and gives you an advantage or fulfills all the needs to be more efficient in doing/being that, so that baryonic centred observable civilization are struggling on a former state or even fail at certain filter-events.
What if we humans on earth are more of an unexpected accident or "artificial" experiment of some sort, implying here that baryonic lifeforms are not the norm and that we might be an exotic creation and actually most life forms began within the realm of dark matter? Maybe we are the first of our kind, but not the first of any other kind of life.
I am a little bit disappointed, that dark matter and the expansion of the universe is not much taken into account when it comes to explanations of the fermi paradox.
Might have missed it somewhere, but I can not recall any approach focusing or actually expanding on it.
Only in the Three Body Problem series I stumbled upon an fantastic explanation for Dark Matter!
We do NOT know how long ago the big bang was. In fact it now appears as if previous *guesses* might be off by 12 billion years.
That claim and paper is an extreme outlier from consensus.
@@EventHorizonShow Consensus has a TERRIBLE track record.
@@EventHorizonShow so was Big Bang.
@@EventHorizonShow Honestly John, after reflecting on your response overnight, it is beneath you and you should honestly be embarrassed.
alien life, which your whole channel is essentially based on, was/were the epitome of an extreme outlier from consensus until very recently.
There are some awfully big assumptions holding his analysis together...
I think you would also have to factor in not just peak star formation, but also when was peak star formation for the types of stars that create the heavier elements needed for life and civilization
Very knowledgeable and animated guest. Great to listen to.
I have a friend with whom we share the jokey saying "What's an order of magnitude amongst friends?" when referring to being off in an estimation slightly. The difference between 3 and 30 dollars. This eventually became "whats an order of magnitude of order of magnitudes between friends" when somebody was really far off (The difference between $3 and $30B)
I think that Robin has been scientifically humble, but committed a faux pas with scientific communication. He says that his model is calibrated by three values, two of which have relatively solid numbers. However, his use of the power law value of 6 hides a lot of uncertainty. On the surface, a range of 3 to 12 is relative innocuous. However, since this is a power law number, that is a gigantic range. Picking six, even if it's the best fit is like saying, we're not sure how much water is the well. It's somewhere between a drop and an ocean, but we are just going to claim it's about a swimming pool. He's talking about orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude differences in that range and just claiming the best fit.
Was a brilliant episode. Very good watch over my lunch. Thank u robin for coming on the show you was very interesting.
If they could build spaceships in water then air would be basically nothing for them and space would be like the water
The pressure at the bottom of our oceans is many times greater than the difference between sea-level air and vacuum - the pressure is the most trivial problem for even us. I don't think being masters of high pressure would automatically give them an advantage in space or the air. From their perspective? high pressure is the default state - so in space they'd have to maintain that pressure inside their ships for their biology.
That's a huge differential of many atmospheres, when we in air? only have to maintain 1 atmosphere. I think there's a good case to make for it being harder for them than it is for us.
Agreed
It's a large assumption that all civilizations expand at a constant rate over a constant time but this simply is not reality if we are to take our own civilization as an example. Humanity has had waves of growth and exploration but it was never a constant, and there have always been waning events where growth slows down for many reasons. We cannot assume that intelligent life will be free from internal strife, or plague or any other event that would slow growth or prevent large-scale exploitation of their slice of the galaxy. If growth and colonization isn't constant then there may be time enough for more species to grow into their own without being overtaken by another species.
The thing I love about Fermi Paradox is the reality of our universe is we may see multiple solutions to the paradox at any one time.
While I can't say this isn't the case I feel I should point out that this argument takes a lot of assumptions which are looking increasingly unlikely to be correct.
For example there is a pretty strong line of evidence against habitability of red dwarf stars which doesn't get enough attention compared to other explanations and relates to the quantum mechanical properties of oxygen.
Aerobic photosynthesis produces oxygen as a byproduct because the reaction itself uses water as a source for neutral hydrogen which requires enough energy to strip the electron with the hydrogen atom from oxygen. This thanks to quantum mechanics requires a minimum energy level for the reaction to occur and it just so happens that this corresponds with *blue light* and less energetic photons or chemosynthetic mechanisms are unable to power this reaction.
Now Life has found a way to convert 3 lower energy "red" photons into an equivalent "blue" photon equivalent thus giving rise to the familiar green plants but this is more complicated to evolve with lower energy photons so this becomes statistically implausible to evolve without the simpler prerequisite.
Thus if biological production of oxygen is needed for multicellular complex life then the availability of blue light is critical and thus G type stars like the Sun become the most likely class of star to host a civilization as less massive stars have far less blue photons. Its possible more massive K dwarfs might be enough depending on whatever organisms need but that is a trickier prospect as its less likely. I don't see any other way around this if oxygen is necessary.
Interesting interview! Thanks for the episode!
Great introductory music
Grabby Aliens are implausible. The perfection of politics, engineering, resource management, and energy generation required for interstellar travel are so great that we can't even imagine it. The energy required for significant mass to travel even short distances near light speed would require most of the energy mankind has generated with electricity since our beginning of energy generation.
If you can generate that much energy, then most of the reasons to colonize other worlds are moot -- interstellar colonization would cost more time and energy than just creating your own mini-planets in your own neighborhood -- how many space stations could we set orbiting our sun? If we built one a day capable of housing 1 billion people comfortably, we could keep putting those things in orbit without any practical end.
As for colonizing a planet: you'd have to perform a genocide so horrific that any civilization capable of that monstrosity would've absolutely destroyed itself long before ever getting even to the planet next door. Even humans aren't that monstrous and we're barely out of the trees in evolutionary time. We invented the concept of human rights, animal rights, and war crimes. Even we wouldn't allow members of our species to do what would be required to colonize a planet which already had a biosphere.
Life from other worlds wouldn't be compatible with ours. All life on Earth is literally related. Earth life must consume and live among Earth life. Everything we eat uses roughly the same chemistry that we do. The types and shapes of molecules have been tightly tuned to the specific code of Earth life -- even DNA may be chemically unique to Earth. Even the proteins must be shaped correctly -- mad cow disease results from a weirdly shaped neural protein. It's called a prion disease because it's not caused by virus, bacteria, or fungus.
Even our viruses, bacteria, and fungi are working within the same paradigm. Our immune systems are designed such that no one pathogen can wipe out the whole species -- some people are literally immune to HIV -- they can't get sick with it. When Europeans came to the New World, the diseases they were immune to wiped out most of the indigenous Americans.
An alien race would be immediately assaulted by trillions of virus, bacteria, and fungi on Earth. Our biology would be inedible. They wouldn't be able to breathe the air or drink water or anything else in the environment. How do you economically solve this problem for colonists? You genocide all life on the planet -- right down to the viruses... from the top of the atmosphere all the way down to the bottom of the ocean.
Even life similar to humans would see that kind of extermination as an abomination -- the highest crime that could ever be committed. It strains credulity that any species which is cooperative and conscientious enough to generate virtually limitless energy and explore the universe, would also be genocidal in pursuit of resources it can already create with the energy its capable of generating. It would literally cost more to travel and genocide a planet than to just create your own artificial planet in your local neighborhood. You'd have to be willfully malignant en masse to perform such an act.
If you had enough malignant leaders that they'd give orders to commit planetary genocide, they'd have set to work doing it locally long before they became interstellar. Interstellar travel requires so many resources that it would only occur after a very long stretch of global peace and prosperity as well as environmental and cosmic calm in the system. Creatures go to war and commit genocides to gain resources. You can only perform interstellar travel after you've solved the problem of resource scarcity. Once you can do that, the only other motive to destroy a planet is just plain malignance. But such malignance would've prevented any civilization from performing the cooperation required of an interstellar exploration.
Intelligent life would posses the same instincts as Earth life. Why? Because scarcity defines all matter in this reality. Anything that has a brain capable of engineering would've evolved under the identical pressures that our brains evolved -- to cope with scarcity. No matter the form of life, the resources it requires to remain alive will be competed for by all other forms of life in its environment. A mind evolves out of necessity, not "just 'cause". The selection pressures required to evolve an intelligent brain will necessarily exist everywhere in the universe -- no matter the substrate. Intelligent brains evolve because of interdependence upon other members in the species -- cooperation. But high-level cooperation requires morality and the ability to view other people as important enough to protect. But once this morality evolves, it will extend to other animals outside your own species.
Laws would initially apply to only your own species but they would soon extend to protect other animals. As resources become more plentiful, genocides begin to slow down and eventually cease altogether.
Even so, there are always aberrations. People who lack conscience. Such people unfortunately take advantage of the trust of others and gain power over them. They create artificial scarcity where there's no natural scarcity. This is what the climate movement is today -- a political tactic to create unnecessary scarcity. Fortunately, the fiction is wearing very thin.
Never trust anyone who demands that you live in scarcity while they live in opulence. They're lying to you -- always and forever.
Issue is that we don’t have a complete understanding of physics. What seems insurmountable today could be child’s play tomorrow. An example is maybe dark matter is an unfathomably good and efficient energy source that dwarves even fusion by many orders of magnitude. Once humanity figures out dark matter, maybe we leapfrog from a type 0.72 to a type 2.5 civilization in just a few hundred years.
That’s the issue with arguments about whether or not humans will travel at relativistic speeds across the cosmos. It relies on the assumption that our current physics will not be challenged or changed in the future, and there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that physics 100 years from now will look very different from physics today.
@@gravoc857 Dark matter may only be gravity from masses outside the observable universe. Just because our universe was born of a singularity doesn't imply that our universal singularity is the only one. In fact, it's implausible to assert that our universal singularity could be unique.
Yes!!🎉 I've been waiting for this conversation! Im excited to listen to it.
Third time listening to this episode. It's one of my favorites.
Would you like another episode with Robin Hanson?
Of course. He's a great guest with fascinating ideas . And how can you _not_ love his warm, breathy half-laugh?
AFAIK there is no evidence that advanced ETs are rare, let alone imperiled by great filters.
It's not obvious that they are right here, right now (although we dont know it as a fact), and that's pretty much all we know.
The idea that ET must colonize the galaxy is imho poorly considered. Imho nobody colonizes galaxies, or even creates large interstellar civs, because there's nothing to be gained. (There are also positive reasons to stay small/compact.)
I've always suspected that the more advanced you get the smaller you go...not bigger.
If you have some magical spacial metric engineering capability... You can have more time and space inside a dense tiny environment.
At the scale of proteins for example, 1 human macro scale year equates to thousands of years equivalent time at that much smaller scale.
Conversely, an observer at a scale 2,000x larger than human scale would experience time similarly. One equivalent year at that scale would be 2000 human years.
It would take more energy and space to go big... But I seems intuitive that if you have the capability... Going small is the most practical.
I just get the feeling that spacial metric engineering isn't actually that difficult... But we aren't really trying to do it.
There are examples of it everywhere though...
@@Anon-xd3cf IDK how possible it might be, but I agree it would be desirable / economical.
By small / compact I mostly meant close to Earth, like everyone living on Earth and in Earth orbit. Mostly because of communication speed. Even the moon is already too far for convenient real time communication. (Crippling 16000ms latency.) I imagine it will be even more important in the future. A few trillion people could live in orbit without crowding anything. I think it's maybe even more true for our supposed AI descendents, for whom a millisecond would be a long time.
If you've had more than one encounter with a ufo. Then its likely not by mistake. They probably see you as their pet. 😂
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
If we observe a star system that's 1000 light years away, aren't we seeing it as it was 1000 years ago (looking back in time)? And if this is true then maybe 1000 years ago that star system didn't have an Alien technosignature due to lack of observable technology. However, in the true present time an Alien technosignature does exist there because they've evolved... but we won't "see" it for a thousand years...In other words, looking back in time only shows a primitive Universe before Alien technologies evolved.
I can't help but think that there really are allot of alien species out there, and we'll discover them when we invent the quantum galactic internet modem. Distances wouldn't be an issue for such a device.
Providing they are using quantum communication it's guesswork what could be happening out there.....
@@vls3771 Science and progression tends to go in one direction, so I would definitely not be surprised if different species in different parts of the galaxy invent the same quantum galactic internet technologies. It just seems like a logical conclusion direction to me.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
I’ve stated my theory on here before, but maybe the specific extinction events we had, and when they occurred, that led to us having and finding vast amounts of fossil fuels may in fact make us one of the most advanced civilizations around (ability to escape our gravity well with propellants). Because really, there could be an ancient Egypt level civilization in every star system near us and we’d never know. And they could have existed for a very long time, but will never advance into space. Just a theory though like any other idea.
Yep, the Earth's relatively turbulent history may have sped evolution and provided more resources for us to develop faster
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
Everything we have is so rare. It's amazing we are still here at all.
The multiverse could easily be teeming with interconnected life and our experience on Earth could be an outlier, so they are aware of us but we aren’t aware of them, and frankly we may not be that important but perhaps interesting. Currently looking out to sea but seeing that it looks empty.
Check out the Allies of Humanity Briefings, They give good explanation of why aliens are here and why they don't want to be seen. They attempt to remain hidden with the goal to subvert human authority quietly without people knowing it is happening. The Briefings are free to read online.
Off topic but I Wonder if Robin has ever heard he has a somewhat visual resemblance to John Lithgow
Love this episode 😊
Watching this in the morning, wish me luck
Mercury is not title locked
Very interesting concept. Will have to watch again to get the understanding of this one.
Excellent,fascinating interview
Man this is the most interesting podcast I’ve ever listened to!!!!!!!
I need more of this. Most please
Ain't that the truth. People will find small differences in other people and hate them for it.
i love these deep dives into what if
Thanks EH! 👍
Really interesting and fun episode!! Love this podcast 😁
Been kind of obsessed with Robins work lately. Glad you had him on, John. ❤
Id love to hear Isaac Arthur very politely eviscerate this guy’s postulated ideas
We learn something new everyday ,but we no nothing!
no thought or idea should be swallowed whole. one has to masticate ones food, taste it, feel it, before consuming it. sometimes bad tasting meals consist of individual components that are delicious, and vice versa for many a delicious meal. rarely does anything taste completely awful or totally perfect.
Oh it this that thing where we say things that didn't happen?
From what I understand about UAP, they don't travel at the speed of light, their top speed as recently measured by scientists is around mach 20. So they came here trough teleportation and for this they most likely use quantum entanglement. The quantum realm also gives access to other realities/universes, so when you achieve this level of technology, it's unlikely you start exploring the space around you, you most likely would pick specific targets to visit or leave the universe you started in all together because other universes are more interesting and perhaps provide unknown materials to expand your tech.
Thanks
Thank you, Glenn! Much appreciated.
"We start with the assumption that the Earth is a random sample of life in the universe."
That's not a logical assumption. You have to have more than one sample to pick one randomly.
For the model’s purposes it’s perfectly fine.
Any life form capable of engineering interstellar travel is also capable of creating producing elements by artificial nucleosynthesis and therefore has no need of Earth's resources.
assuming they have the energy capable of creating the amount of mass they require.
Presumably they can't create more energy than exists in all matter - so somewhere along that line? is an amount of matter they'd collect - even if it were just for energy to make different matter.
@@JohnnyWednesday Just as we currently view interstellar travel as impossible, we also view artificial nucleosynthesis as impossible now. Obviously there are some tricks we have yet to learn regarding what we know of physics.
@@hydrorix1 - absolutely - but I believe it's true that matter contains insane amounts of energy - hence nuclear bombs when matter gets turned into energy
So while they could definitely create matter using energy - it they wanted to build a planet worth of matter? that's an energy requirement on an insane level - there might be a cut-off point where they'd just collect matter on such a scale.
@@JohnnyWednesday May I introduce you to the concept of Star Lifting (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting). Since stars are hundreds of thousands of times more massive than most planets (e.g. our Sun is ~330,000 Earth masses), you can build thousands of planets from them.
The Sun is ~0.16% iron, for example, so that's 500 Earth masses worth of just iron right there. There's many more useful elements, from vast amounts of oxygen and carbon to platinum group metals. Theoretically, a civilisation could - over geological time scales - not only build hundreds of new worlds using star lifting, but also prolong the life of the star to trillions of years at the same time.
Personally, I find this concept to be *much* more plausible than the going through the process of finding a suitable planet, getting to it, terraforming it or genetically remodelling your own species plus engineering an entire ecosystem around it, all while being practically isolated from the former home world once you arrived.