Are We The Only Life Form In The Universe? [4K] | Our Infinite Universe | Spark

since the very beginning of time man has looked to the night sky and asked the same questions where are we how far do the stars go and are we alone today these same questions linger in the minds of every human with an inquisitive nature is our world just a speck in an infinite universe surrounded by many other worlds and species or is it possible that we are the only intelligent life in the universe [Music] if our universe is truly infinite then it is thought that anything that could happen has happened an infinite number of times there will be infinite worlds and infinite intelligent life forms even infinite copies of ourselves but we may also exist in an infinite universe which is one of infinitely many universes each existing impossibly infinite dimensions we all explored the many theories and ideas as to where we all are in this immense system which seemed to come from nothing in the big bang 13.8 billion years ago new understanding says this may not be the full story we look at the ideas and theories from a human perspective and hear from our best scientific minds who spend their lives trying to understand these monumental concepts how do we try and understand what may be simply beyond human comprehension [Music] [Music] are we the only life in the universe given that the universe is thought to be spatially infinite then it would seem impossible that our world is the only world to have started life if life exists elsewhere in the universe then will we ever meet another intelligent race unfortunately we have to go back to the sheer scale of the universe to realize that even our closest neighbors would take many light years to reach life could exist in so many forms that we would not even recognize it to be a living entity life might be so short-lived that it has come in and out of existence in less time than we can conceive of it [Music] or so vast and old that it is part of the universe itself without us even knowing of its existence life could exist in different dimensions to ours and again we will never know of its presence as humans we yearn to know if we're the only intelligent life but what would it mean if we did discover another superior life form we consider ourselves to be sophisticated intelligent beings but to another more advanced race we could appear to them as ants do to us at the heart of all humans is the fear of being alone [Music] i hope there is more out there than just us because otherwise it kind of makes us assume this big ego and i think we have taken on this big ego that we are all there is and we are all that will ever be maybe it's stupid that we are thinking that there only is one world where we are living in because it's infinity so maybe it's like thousands and thousands miles away another world with other people on it and we cannot reach them or see them but maybe they are there [Music] in an infinite universe other life has course got to exist everything has got to exist but whether there's other intelligent life out there that becomes a much more difficult question i i believe that there's more than that we can see now maybe aliens i don't know because we also popped up in ones with the big bang so they can also be on other planets and maybe they are hiding for us you don't know that they don't want to show them so we certainly are not the only form of life we just can't be not when you look at the vastness of what is the cosmos the universe is filled with stars and galaxies and supermassive black holes the universe is filled with dark energy that we're not really sure what it is maybe dark energy is some type of alien that we haven't figured out what it is all the aliens have evolved into dark matter virtual particles and they just fluctuate around and talk to each other and do whatever they do and we just think it's the structure of the vacuum in the 1960s an equation was formulated to try to answer the question of the probability and frequency of contactable intelligent life in our galaxy it was called the drake equation and it predicted that there would be conservatively 4 000 planets with intelligent life in our galaxy alone since then the estimate of this figure has increased by an amazing amount [Music] what is our new understanding of the possibility that there is other life in our universe i think the prospect of life out in the universe is is reasonably high because the conditions here and the conditions out there are probably going to be quite similar we would expect similar chemistry we'd expect water etc it's probably tricky to get exactly the right conditions to get life going so it's unlikely to be absolutely everywhere but i wouldn't be surprised if there is other life around in our own universe it would be a kind of massive freak in a way if the only place where there was life happen to be here on earth if the universe is infinitely large then one of the things that can happen appears to be life and so unless there's something really special about us and there's really no physical evidence anyway that we're special then yes intelligent life should exist elsewhere life perhaps more intelligent than us should exist elsewhere if it really is spatially infinite then i am certain that we're not alone if it's basically finite i'm just almost certain that we're not alone almost certain why well for all the usual reasons because there are plenty of planets in the goldilocks zone as we start to look for the planetary bodies every star we've looked at over the last decade has turned out to have planets around it we've already discovered a few relatively close stars that have planets in the roughly in the goldilocks zone and that's just from a tiny sample so there must be very very many of them in our galaxy and our galaxy is only one of an incredible number of galaxies in the bit of the universe that we can see [Music] so if nothing else the sheer size of the universe makes it hard to imagine that we are the only example of intelligent life to date and the more we improve our technology and telescopes the more we can see the vastness of the universe has only just started to reveal itself [Music] 10 thousand years ago we we had earth we had the sun we had other things in the sky which appear to be stars we didn't realize that those stars were actually new solar systems and nowadays we pretty much know that every star in the night sky has at least a planet and if not more so if our galaxy alone has 300 billion stars there's probably at least 300 billion planets so there's lots of planets out there even the finite universe that we see is vast the number of stars in the sky just an hour one galaxy is hundreds of billions but then we realized there's actually other galaxies that contain billions of stars and those stars each have planets and those planets each may or may not have life [Music] so then we have a a large thing which we call the universe which has 175 billion galaxies with all these stars and all these planets in the last decade we have found so many alien worlds exoplanets around other stars that we can be pretty confident that on average every star in the night sky has a planet if you run the numbers it's potentially four billion earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone so to say that ours is the only place that life has arisen is to take a four billion to one gamble now those those odds seem pretty pretty steep and i i'm not a gambler even if i were i think that might be a bit of a punch a bit of a stretch too far one of the variables in the drake equation that has given the formula a lot of criticism is the number of times life starts on other planets i don't even have to talk about infinite for life i think with almost certainty that we are not alone that there is life in our galaxy [Music] it is a theoretical possibility that we are the only life in the universe and we still don't know of any other life forms no matter how crude [Music] so is life starting on other planets a likely probability or an incredibly rare occurrence recently we analyzed data from the kepler space telescope we analyzed stellar systems that have multiple planets and we predicted how many planets would be in the habitable zones around other stars so when you look up at night you will see a star our results tell us that there should be on average about two planets in the habitable zone so that implies that there's a lot of real estate a lot of things that are vaguely like the earth rocky planets with some water on it so rocky planets with water on it are everywhere in the universe everywhere probably an infinite number of them and the carbon and water is everywhere amino acids are everywhere matter of fact they're falling from the sky right now in carbonaceous chondrites so the ingredients for life are everywhere and not just in the origin of our earth but in the origin of all the earth the infinite earth that i just referred to but now comes the question should we expect life there well there doesn't seem to be an ingredient bottleneck but maybe there's what you call a recipe bottleneck maybe there had to be some very unlikely coincidence of this coming into contact with this and then had to be sulfur sprinkling over here and then you have a tide going here and you had that dehydration in other words such a complicated recipient that life is very very rare and therefore we don't see any aliens that have conquered our galaxy i think life has to exist somewhere else now firstly we have to think of what life is so bacteria plants animals those are all life i would say it's nearly guaranteed that some form of life exists in our own solar system right now if you look at titan uh the largest amino saturn it has liquid ammonia so it has rivers and lakes essentially of ammonia now we can't live off of that but there's no reason you can't have something else that does with mars and the polar ice caps i i believe that we'll find evidence that life has existed at some point in mars well within at least a decade if not sooner so that's just our little very very very very very small clump of our galaxy which is just one of 175 billion if you look at mathematically it has to has to exist but how does life start some new ideas suggest that asteroids are like planet seeding systems that carry the formula for life around the universe but if that isn't the case then chemistry evolved here on earth in what has been termed the primordial soup but we still don't know for certain it seems unlikely that we are very very improbable and so the best guesses are that is that there are many other civilizations in our galaxy but you get back to the question what causes life we don't know we don't know how life starts but we do know that life started on our earth fairly soon after the earth cool down which suggests to you either life starts fairly easily or else there's some divine intervention again all bets are off there's divine intervention life seemed to start on earth as soon as the earth cooled down this does suggest that life is relatively easy to start but this is a sample size of one until we confirm another life form we still don't know for sure life appears to have emerged here on earth pretty much as soon as the conditions were even vaguely hospitable so if life emerged so quickly on earth maybe it is simple for it to emerge elsewhere i actually think life might be relatively easy to kick-start because we don't know the exact mechanism by which life arose it's very difficult to put a number my suspicion is it might not be as hard as we're thinking and potentially a lot of these habitable worlds could well be inhabited now whether that life can communicate whether it's intelligent life again it's just unknowable until we pect it one of the exciting things with astronomy at the moment is that we're really legitimately looking now for life on other planets and it's something that within a decade or so there's a very good chance that we might be able to measure and i'm not talking about listening for radio signals from aliens what i'm talking about is looking at the atmospheres of planets that exist around other stars and looking for traces of life in those atmospheres things like oxygen which we know is unstable if you have o2 then it has to be being created by something because it's very unstable it will rust it will burn and it won't hang around for long so if you can see something like o2 in the atmosphere then something's producing it and that thing could be life [Music] intelligent life is still one of the big questions for us to answer as yet all the searching we have done has only shown us what a vast lonely place the universe appears to be but other intelligent life could take many forms and looking for versions of ourselves could be entirely the wrong approach so we'd like to know how convergent human life is our whether we should expect humanoids on other planets for example if there's an infinite number of of life forms out there what is their diversity how different will they be from us some biologists think that they will be completely different there's not a remote chance in hell of finding a humanoid out there like they do every week on the star trek other biologists think that no there are convergent features that produces humanoids and produce an elephantoid or produce a dogoid again and again and again so if we go back 500 million years and then let it run again we will find similar species again and again and again biologists say no if you run the tape of life again you will get very very different things every time so the branching of life is very uncertain at any point life could take a turn from one species to another in another world man may never have evolved past the ape stage so what is the likelihood of another human species on another planet how unlikely are we are we infinitely unlikely i don't think so but i don't know so so the question is how often is there life out there there's reasons to go out and look for et because that would kind of prove it on the other hand it's worthwhile contemplating whether or not you know we might be it and so that is a question we can go out and answer by literally looking what's going on on other planets and seeing if there are signs of life and then looking out and listening and seeing if we can hear the moral equivalence of ourselves i don't know what the likelihood is of us finding something the universe is very big it's very hard for humans to even find ourselves we've only existed for a hundred thousand years on a planet and so that's like in a 24-hour day two seconds in a 24-hour day and of course we've only been able to send radio signals and receive them for 40 or 50 years of to any you know degree at all the human species is in its absolute infancy in terms of being able to be detected by other intelligent beings the first signs that we existed were our first radio and television signals [Music] foreign [Music] these signals have only just begun in the time scale of the universe the first strong radio signals that humans broadcasted our first radio waves that have been going through space and traveling have only reached 11 000 stars and they're about 300 billion stars in our galaxy alone and there's 175 billion galaxies we having touched a percent of a percent of a percent of a percent of communicating with these people so even if they have just gotten a radio broadcast from the 1900s they didn't have to return that signal back so we're going to be waiting hundreds of years and this is the problem the vast distances of the universe make it impossible to communicate with even our closest neighbours unless another form of communication is discovered then our efforts to communicate are unfortunately still in the science fiction realm this it seems is like the ultimate tease as our best science tells us that the universe must be full of other intelligent beings the worry of course is that these things are so widely separated that we'll never meet these other creatures so it might be that the universe is um infinitely big in which case there's going to be lots of civilizations that are just far far too far away to ever get in contact with us that that you know will be totally outside their their litecoin even i see no doubt that every galaxy has at least one planet with intelligent life like this right now so it's like 175 billion right there but we're never going to be able to talk to these people unfortunately it's the same physics that we use to figure it out they're there tells us it's going to be too long to talk to them or travel to not to say that we can't figure out something new to do but aliens may be much more advanced than us they may have found a way to travel faster than the speed of light so if they exist why have we not heard from them is it possible that civilizations only exist for a short time and therefore finding an intelligent civilization in our neighborhood that is in the technological stage of its evolution is maybe just too rare akin to finding a needle in a haystack so maybe life on this planet has actually emerged at the earliest point that it could in our galaxy in which case why haven't we heard from anybody else because they've only just started as well we've only been around for two million years out of four four and a half billion years on this planet so lots of planets could have had life at different times that we've never experienced or never will experience the universe is almost 14 billion years old so you could have had advanced civilizations that live 1.3 billion years ago and have long disappeared maybe will disappear within a few hundred thousand years the rate we're going maybe much less so i think life could be all through the universe but for a practical person i'd ask a different question what's the likelihood that we'll ever have contact with another form of life that's a very different question and that now gets us to the finite speed of light speed of light is not infinitely fast so if you were to try to communicate to anyone within some distance you wouldn't get very far that signal would have to travel for thousands of years to have much chance of of making contact with intelligent life so you'd have to be around a very long time maybe thousands maybe tens of thousands of years as an intelligent race advance race to have any chance of contacting these other forms of life so there's two questions there does life exist throughout the universe i'm sure it does is the life contactable could you make contact with it and communicate with it in a reasonable time frame being thousands of years i think the chances are very very small if not zero so communication seems impossible as yet but what about travelling to the stars to discover new worlds one obvious drawback to this idea is that our lifespan is simply too short a trip to mars our local planet will take four years a trip to our closest star will take over 150 years so again still seems delegated to the science fiction realm for now but anything is possible given enough time in an infinite universe we'll probably never experience another intelligent life form unfortunately so i believe that intelligent life form exists maybe it doesn't look like exactly what we think of in the movies but maybe it does maybe they're identical to me and you so perhaps life is a common occurrence in the universe but what about human life how rare could it be and if not human life what other kinds of diverse life could exist how about humanik intelligence if there's all this life elsewhere they would surely get intelligent build spacecrafts and then colonize the entire galaxy there's been plenty of time to do that but we don't see spacecraft around here or we don't see uh alien signals when we listen with the radio telescopes well that might be that maybe human-like intelligence is not something that is a natural part of evolution there are many millions of other species on this planet and they are not evolving to become human-like they don't want to become human any more than we want to become an elephant chimpanzees don't become human humans don't want to become chimpanzees there's a relativity there's not human superiority and so humans are not some type of convergent feature of evolution so that might be to explain why we don't see all of these there could be life everywhere but it wouldn't be space faring it wouldn't produce radio signals or maybe it does but then they get so fancy they build both kinds of bombs have big wars and they kill themselves it's the self-destruction bottleneck so there's many scenarios you can think of that are consistent with no visible aliens and lots and lots of habitable planets two billion years ago we literally were amoebas and we evolved over two billion years into what we are today so if you imagine that something similar happened on other earth-like planets and they have had two billion more years to evolve then they're looking at us and they're thinking hey we're amoebas you know they wouldn't and we don't even understand what what they are or we no hope of talking you don't talk to amoebas and so maybe that's the situation we're in and that's why we think there's no other life form in the universe what if life is everywhere in our universe but it is so unrecognizable to us that we don't even realize it could life exist on such small quantum levels that we can never see it or such huge scales that again we could never perceive of it is it possible that their the universe is filled with aliens that we just don't know about because they're made out of dark energy for example or they communicate with neutrinos or they communicate with radio wavelengths that are so long that we don't know about them well you can easily imagine that you know before 200 years ago we didn't have radio communication so imagine if the universe were filled of radio-communicating civilizations we wouldn't even know it until we invented the radio this ditto for any other technology you can think of but what if we did have communication with another intelligent life form this has been the stuff of science fiction for the last century and in most cases the plots portray a fear of the unknown and war with the aliens ensues is this indicative of our likely behavior are all aliens to be feared or would we take a more intelligent scientific approach [Music] if there were conscious beings then that would be such a threat to humanity because we had this assumed ego that we are all there is anything that is unknown is a threat to our stable fragile existence [Music] you know and i think it would be vastly exciting to be able to try to understand life forms that were massively different to us we've evolved in a very particular way but other forms of life might have done something totally different and that would be quite exciting if we could indeed wrap our minds around it it's actually very difficult to get your head around what the possible implications would be of discovering and communicating with some other sort of alien life form i think that people would be incredibly excited and it would change people's way of thinking about their lives and their role in the sort of the universe while humans on earth are kind of the top predator and we pretty much do what we like whenever we like and there are serious consequences arising from that but nevertheless uh you've got to think we wouldn't be the top predator necessarily when we just start discovering other intelligent life forms and you know it might turn out that things don't go entirely our way the discovery of life intelligent life somewhere in our universe our galaxy would be at once the most terrifying thought and yet most satisfying and relieving discovery simply because the burden of keeping this unique wonderful phenomenon of life and all this infinite variety and possibilities is no longer ours alone to carry an asteroid could come and wipe aside the sun will one day eventually sterilize the earth by expanding towards the end of his life and right now that burden is on us and we're doing a terrible job of it we are not very good custodians of this but if there were aliens out there and they were intelligent and they were able to spread between the stars and suddenly you would think well i guess it's not so bad that it that us humans are kind of dropping the ball on this this idea of trying to sustain life as a very beautifully weird and unexpected consequence of basic laws of physics and chemistry but with infinite possibility where the laws of physics are essentially boring and restrictive from a scientific point of view i would want to know what their science is to see how theirs compares to us do they describe electromagnetic radiation the same way we do do they know about the existence of electrons or whatever you know is there something they're doing that we're not i personally think that we've already detected life elsewhere and we just don't recognize it and you do this by generalizing the definition of life if you define life as a far from equilibrium dissipative structure then you include fires and whirlpools and hurricanes as part of life i think when we realize that we will then consider we've already found life but that's a little bit of a mind-bend that's more of a mind-bend that most people are con are willing to entertain and so they're much more happy with thinking that maybe dark matter is aliens and that they have big brains and they talk english what is life this is a question that is surprisingly hard to answer the definition of life has science divided some going as far as suggesting the weather to be a form of life what is the purpose of life if there is one from an evolutionary point of view or is life purely a byproduct of random chemistry i think life is that well you're not dead obviously but i kind of think that life is that you're breathing but sincerely i think that um i don't know that's a difficult question what is life i believe life is about being a servant to other people so i believe that this life on earth is just like a mini reflection of what we're going to do in heaven for eternity i think the meaning of life is the journey that you make of that life that gives that life meaning life matters because it's an adventure for good or bad there's always growth in life and if if we are infinite beings we're infinitely growing and we're infinitely trying to have experiences that that that we benefit from what is life life is something that we define here on earth it's hard to define as a matter of fact if you go to the biology department and ask biologists are viruses alive you know half of them will say yes and half of them will say no and another third will say huh so we're not quite sure whether viruses are alive and i take that as a warning signal a big red warning signal saying do we really know what life is because if you think the viruses are alive then they outnumber all of their life forms on this planet and if you think they're not alive well then you're excluding the thing that outnumbers all other life forms when we think about life we think about things that have properties that are kind of like us so we're very good at detecting kind of middle-sized living things we see elephants and we're pretty clear that they are kind of living things like us and then we start to learn about things that are a little bit smaller at some point we discover there are kind of molecules and bacteria and they're a little bit more difficult to get your head around because they're so small and they're really very different from us but we kind of we manage it but of course there might be things that have lives just so radically dissimilar to us that it's hard for us to even recognize them as having lives i'm a scientist so i think there was some type of molecular evolution which led to auto catalytic processes which led to rape replication which led to some type of hey i'm going to preserve myself and then et cetera et cetera darwinian evolution if you have that type of notion then you have a way to at least hand-wavingly describe how non-life evolved and life emerged well here's the thing where do you draw this boundary from non-life to life and this evolved naturalistically is there a boundary that we should put there and say oh this is life and this is not life i think the answer is no it's a little like you know you have a mother and you hold your mother's hand and she holds her mother's hand and richard dawkins pointed out that there's an here's this train of mothers and going into the past and if you go back four billion years you're essentially having one bacteria hold another bacteria's hand right and so the question is well where in this chain do you cut it and say here's a human being and here's a pre-human being therefore you can't put a boundary inside everything on this side of his life and everything because this is non-life that's a silly idea in the light of evolution and i think we should get rid of it we realize that actually the fundamentals reason the point for a lot of what we see around us simply for that animal or organism to have more offspring actually it the meaning of life is self-replicating molecules that's what life means life means molecules that manage to self-replicate and subject themselves to evolutionary processes i suppose that's what life is life is incredibly complicated chemical reaction and the fact that you and i have the experiences that we do and the lives that we do is all the massive by-product of that fundamental simple thing chemistry that locally creates order at the expense of globally creating more disorder our brains are a byproduct of an evolutionary pressure in other words to get smarter meant that you would have more babies so they're more smarter babies that drive has led us to these wonderful adaptable inquiring minds that have now unlocked so many of the mysteries of our universe [Music] that to me gives a point to one's life to inquire to understand to explore those give meaning and our interactions with our friends and our family those give me and that gives the point of life [Music] the fact that from your genes perspective they just want to replicate they just want their particular set to go on okay that's maybe the underlying drive and it certainly is when you're a basic organism like a bacteria but as humans we can do better and we often do if you have an infinite number of rocky planets that are wet you could have an infinite number of life forms the problem is we don't know what that means for example no one can predict the direction of evolution or if you go back rewind the tape of life on earth and let's say hey let's rewind the tape and let it play again would you get humans or would you get any of the species that you see today that's a big debate in biology steven j gool said no way would you get anything remotely close to being a human another guy simon conway mar says oh yes you'd get some kind of humanoid because there are valleys in this adaption space where that where each species lives and that would do it again and again and again our bodies are made from billions of atoms which are all billions of years old so the saying we are made from stardust is literally true at the deepest level we are the universe in human form ultimately life emerged out of the universe and so for me before i go to bed most nights i sit down we have a hot tub and i peer to the heavens and i look up at the stars i look at the milky way i look at the galaxies that orbit our own and i think of the dark spots between the stars where there are countless galaxies and i realized just how rich the universe is and how we are one small planet around one pretty ordinary star in one reasonably ordinary galaxy in a vast sea and the fact that we're able to go through and contemplate and realize our place and how all this order works is amazing it is to me the great amazing story for humanity and it intersects with you know philosophy and art just trying to come to terms with it that's how humans are going to interact with that type of experience you

Channel: Spark

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Keywords: alien life documentary 2019, is there anybody out there, alien life, extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial life (film genre), alien documentary 2019, extra terrestrial, alien conspiracy, conspiracy aliens, alien documentary, documentary aliens, are aliens real, aliens, aliens caught on tape, aliens caught on camera, aliens caught on tape 2018 real footage, ufo documentary, aliens documentary, ufo documentary 2019, Is anybody out there, multiverse, parallel universe

Id: 1-VfsSNRfcI

Length: 41min 49sec (2509 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021