This episode is sponsored by Brilliant
Stephen Hawking once said “If the government is covering up knowledge of aliens, they are
doing a better job of it than they do at anything else.” As we’ll see today, we might want to consider what that would imply about alien governments too. In a previous episode of our Alien Civilizations
series we looked at Hidden Aliens, hypothetical civilizations that try to hide from their
neighbors, usually out of fear or a desire to be left alone. Today I thought we’d take a look at the
flip side of that, ones hiding themselves but who are actively involved with their neighbors,
the obvious example of which would be flying saucers visiting modern Earth regularly but
keeping their presence a secret from us, or at least from most of us. We’ll focus mostly on that today but we
won’t be limiting ourselves just to examples of aliens visiting civilizations like our
own, far less advanced than theirs and stuck on one lonely planet in a vast galaxy. Now if you’re a regular of the channel,
you know SFIA spends a lot of time discussing the Fermi Paradox, the apparent contradiction
between the vast size and age of the Universe, and the seeming absence of any other intelligent
life in it. As we’ve stated before, none of the proposed
solutions is without some major flaws, and we tend to group most solutions into a few
loose categories. The first is that life, or at least intelligent
life, hasn’t been detected because it’s incredibly rare, either because life itself
is rare, or the pathway to intelligence and technology is rare, or such civilizations
don’t last long, victims of their own technology, or some combination thereof. As with most of our solutions, combinations
are possible, for instance life might emerge rarely, one in a million worlds, produce intelligence
rarely when they do, and that civilization might not last long, adding up to an extreme
improbability. We normally call these filters, and Great
Filters when discussing one that vastly drops the odds. Our first category of solutions, Category
1, focuses on such options and is fundamentally the most physical, you don’t have to guess
at alien psychologies and motivations to justify any of its solutions, only late stage filters
like developing advanced technology, accidentally destroying themselves, or a desire to colonize
the galaxy, have any real dependence on their psychology. Our second category, that we cannot detect
them but they’re out there, often still focuses on the strictly physical, and we analyze
and deconstruct solutions like the notion that aliens are common but only recently emerged
everywhere, or we just can’t hear them because they use something other than radio to talk. But it also begins to move into motivations
and psychology, such as why they might all hide from us. Our third category, that aliens aren’t just
around but actually here already, and we don’t recognize them, similarly tends to rely on
motivations, as do most of the solutions that fall into our fourth category for miscellaneous
solutions that don’t fit well into the other categories. For the most part the Alien Civilizations
series tries to look at those solutions that are focused around behavior and psychology,
and often we tend to take a bit of tongue in cheek approach because generally these
ones are popular in science fiction but tend to fall apart on serious inspection. Not necessarily, though, as things you’d
not expect a civilization to do: many involve behaviors that are not only plausible but
likely, such as leaving primitive civilizations alone, hiding from other civilizations, blowing
oneself up, deciding you just don’t want to colonize the galaxy, or make a lot of noise. These all have additional problems we discuss
in various episodes but they hit something we call Non-Exclusivity, essentially the concept
that any behavior that relies on everyone doing it, every civilization and often every
member of that civilization, doesn’t work for the Fermi Paradox. Even if 99% of alien civilizations hide from
each other or don’t make contact with humanity because they don’t want to interact with
us or think it unethical, it only takes that 1% to break the Great Silence. Furthermore, it doesn’t take the whole civilization,
who might be coerced or cajoled into some treaty banning contact with us, it would just
take a handful of individuals who wished to make contact. And that’s where we get into the specific
solution of Aliens visiting us covertly, the various flying saucers and little green men. What’s more, this is not exactly a Fermi
Paradox solution, because the whole notion of the Fermi Paradox is to ask where all the
aliens are, whereas this approach usually says “Right in front of us, most of you
just refuse to believe it”. In many ways it shares that non-solution status
with the one we tend to label as the most likely solution here on SFIA, or least unlikely
anyway, that the pathway from inorganic chemicals to technological civilization is probably
just incredibly improbable and rare, that there is no paradox. We’re just assuming without evidence that
however low the odds are, they can’t be so low that it doesn’t happen decently often
around all the billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies. That’s another good comparison between these
two non-solutions though, because one of the most common but weakest arguments for aliens
among us is that so many people have reported seeing these that even if we assume virtually
all of them were lying or wrong, surely some must be true. That’s a popular argument but also one we
can toss out. First, it’s ignoring that even if millions
made that claim, while that seems like a huge number, it also means billions have not, often
including folks who should have seen a reported event. It’s very seductive to hear ‘surely they
can’t all be lying and wrong’, but it carries no weight, because even if we assumed
quantity of evidence beat our quality of evidence, millions of folks claiming their horoscopes
are accurate while billions claim they don’t work would expose the bad reasoning there. Surely all those billions saying it doesn’t
work can’t all be wrong either. But before we start getting more into this
topic, let me add a caveat. Fundamentally this solution, while greatly
maligned, isn’t any worse than most Fermi Paradox solutions. It’s actually a good deal better from a
logical perspective than most others are. Its big weakness isn’t the concept, it’s
that all the other solutions can counter an absence of evidence by pointing out that they
can’t realistically obtain evidence for or against at this point, since it’s all
on distant times and places we can’t see or investigate in a serious way. Alternatively, them being among us and right
now in modern times has the issue of lacking hard evidence from the one place in all of
creation we can mostly easily gather it from. And we can say lacking hard evidence because
even though there’s much evidence offered, it obviously isn’t super-compelling since
most people aren’t convinced, though that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true. We can point to countless theories over the
years where even after most experts came to accept it as true, most of the public did
not. So this point and counterpoint are just as
a bad as our ‘surely they can’t all be wrong’ argument of a moment before. The sheer quantity of evidence, defining that
simply as things offered as evidence, does not constitute proof any more than the quantity
of witnesses or believers, but so too, that the evidence is not considered compelling
by most people does not in any way invalidate it. Bad evidence also doesn’t mean something
is incorrect, anymore than a lot of bad evidence adds up to good evidence. A debunked UFO sighting does not mean aliens
don’t visit us, just that that case was wrong, and it’s just as wrong to assume
a hundred debunked claims invalidates them all as to assume a hundred shaky sighting
means at least one was true. I should also note another bad line of reasoning
from the skeptic side, a saying popularized by the late, great Carl Sagan is that “Extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence”, which is catchy but I think Laplace said it
better centuries ago with "The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned
to its strangeness." Here’s the problem with alien visitors:
it’s not an extraordinary claim at all. Indeed, one of the reasons so many of us,
even though we grew up on scifi and would love to meet aliens, don’t think they’re
out there is exactly because it isn’t weird that aliens would visit us, it would be weird
if they did not. And why is that so? As we’ve discussed before, we can’t use
the reasoning that Earth is boring to them, Kansas is almost proverbially boring yet still
gets tons of visitors who seem to disagree, and we have non-exclusivity again, there are
endless groups of people who are devoted enthusiasts or even professionals on topics that most
of us do not care about even a little bit. In a vast interstellar empire, you would expect
an even more varied array of interests. Nor can we use the ‘we would just be ants
to them’ line of reasoning, because intelligence doesn’t scale well to apathy or indifference,
humans try to talk to and interact with things much less intelligent than themselves all
the time, far more than critters less intelligent than us do. It’s not vanity to assume aliens would be
interested in us, it’s implying cats or cows would be more interested in trees than
us since they’re closer to them in intelligence than we are. And while I suppose we can’t take as a given
that intelligence and curiosity are exclusive, that the one always brings the other, this
is a case where it only has to be true in a minority of cases, you’d have to argue
virtually every intelligent species out there either wasn’t curious or didn’t find us
interesting, not that most are or would. We also should not assume a civilization of
god-like super-intelligences doesn’t also include lots of members who didn’t opt for
such massive enhancement, something we’ll discuss more another time, but fundamentally
it seems like intelligence should be very interesting to other intelligence, higher
or lower. So we have an obvious motivation to come check
in on Earth, and indeed most motives for not doing so are the flawed ones. Again, those of us in the Rare Civilization
camp don’t view such behavior as improbable, quite to the contrary we tend to consider
it very likely aliens would visit, and them not doing so is viewed as the strongest indicator
they don’t exist, putting us closer to the Aliens Amongst Us crowd in that respect than
most other Fermi Paradox solution camps. But this doesn’t imply a single motive for
the visit, and as we review some of those it’s worth noting that not only would each
motive tend to result in different approaches, but that it would be quite likely several
groups, either different species or different factions of one species, could be operating
at the same time with different goals and methods. We are going to argue from the advocate position
for the most part, though we’ll point out weaknesses as we go. We should start with Hollywood’s favorite
one, that they want to take over Earth. Now alien invasions with a large scouting
force or covert vanguard mostly don’t make sense on surface inspection because they’re
not really needed. It always helps to know your enemy but anyone
capable of interstellar flight already enjoys an obscene advantage, and so we can only rule
out this scenario for the specific cases of wanting to utterly sterilize our planet or
outright conquer us through sheer intimidation and force. What little intel they need even for the latter
could be harvested from our old radio transmissions. They would have no need to send ships in for
decades in advance exposing themselves to risk of detection. Though on the flip side of even that, as valuable
as shock and awe are to winning conflicts, they don’t need it, and if conquest rather
than extermination is their goal, exposing themselves enough to make folks think about
the existence of aliens and ponder these scenarios could be beneficial since there’s a strong
chance they don’t want us all to have total mental breakdowns when they arrive, rendering
us useless. Of course that raises the question of what
we’re actually useful for. In terms of raw materials, while Earth has
plenty, none are unique or particularly dense here, and we know nobody is low on these because
we can’t see the Dark Wave that would accompany a civilization expanding ever outward grabbing
all the resources they can, see the Dyson Dilemma for details, but we can say with near
certainty that no existing civilization is out trying to hoard all the galactic resources
up. That’s another example of a conclusion though
that tends to add to the Rare Intelligence argument, since it would seem logical to do
so. If they did want those materials though, they
need not scout us, they could simply sterilize the planet and harvest it. It has to be something Earth has, or life-bearing
planets in general, that makes them of interest. That’s noteworthy too because as we mentioned,
while it would seem like intelligent life would be curious about other life on principle,
whoever is showing up here definitely has an interest in Earth. Not necessarily humans, but probably, so even
if there are aliens who take no interest in us, even if they were the majority, they aren’t
the majority of the ones visiting us. So what do we have? And furthermore, what do we have that would
require landings? Samples of flora and fauna would be a good
one, and indeed would require many landings to collect. Evolution has so many outcomes that each planet
really should possess totally unique ecosystems. This does have the problem of scale though,
forgetting just how huge space and time are compared to human civilization. We don’t mutate that much in a few thousand
years and odds are if civilizations are decently common, folks have been free to swing by and
collect samples for many millions of years without fear of causing problems by being
seen. And now they need not do so, since we collect
such things ourselves and they could be confident that we’d grab samples and keep them stored
as digital versions too, they’d already have everything from prehistoric times so
even if we nuked or grey-gooed ourselves before creating such archives, they’d only be out
a little bit of data. But data’s a big reason too, which we’ll
get to in a moment. But the same applies to medical data regarding
humans, they’d doubtless want their own collection of medical knowledge, having better
instruments and skills than us, but they’d already have it, or even if they were new
on the scene themselves, some other older civilization nearby probably has it available. As to the behavioral stuff, we obviously differ
a lot from our prehistoric ancestors in that respect, but they really can pick that up
from TV and radio, though we can’t rule out they’d want to grab people for some
intense brain scanning in some very high tech version of an MRI machine. But if they’re willing to do lots of landings
and abductions, why not be a bit more clever, and not taint the experiment by using someone
either in a panic or drugged up condition, by just sneaking little assembler robots in
to people’s houses to build covert scanners? If you want human DNA, why not abduct a mailbox
and pull thousands of samples from the letters? If you want very direct observations of behavior,
why not hit a delivery warehouse when it’s closed and replace a bunch of items with duplicates
with built in cameras or scanners? Or even hit a grocery store, where they could
whip up a scanner that could be hidden in a can of beef stew and would be destroyed
during digestion to hide evidence of it. We always should assume any species smart
enough to build spaceships will be decent at strategy and tactics, and a lot of motivations
that fit a given assumed behavior go down the drain because we can instantly spot better
and less risky approaches. We can’t take for a given that they could
easily mimic our behavior for instance, even after having tons of radio and TV to emulate,
but if they could, why not just land a small team of androids with a few metric tons of
gold somewhere and have them go off and form a server farm, using the access and revenues
from that to buy copies or originals of anything that wasn’t easily available online? So probably not information. The internet is much younger than UFO sightings
to be sure, but they are still ongoing based on claimed sightings. If they just want our art or literature or
history, they at most only need to land a few times to establish an internet connection. We can paint one plausible scenario for that
though, because it is very easy to imagine Earth’s on a quarantine list of local civilizations
or whichever empire we border on or are actually inside of. A strong motivator for that would be to preserve
the local culture as something unique as long as possible, and that implies a value on that
which would also encourage surveillance or sneaking out cultural artifacts. If we’re anything to go by, it would be
easy to imagine there was such a ban but it wasn’t enforced terribly well, and that
there was a big trade in artifacts from primitive civilizations. We’re now contemplating small, often short
term operations that are trying to avoid drawing too much attention from us or the local officials,
and who likely have competitors. So an alien conspiracy to acquire high value
objects, run on the shoestring of resources of smugglers, each not sharing with each other,
could actually generate something like the observations we see. Heck, they might have rather shoddy ships,
Millenium Falcon style, and take potshots at each other to run off the competition. Considering one of the major objections to
UFO sightings being genuine aliens is that you’d think they’d not crash or get spotted
so often with their advanced technology, the notion that they’re harassing competition
and trying to draw attention to each other to scare them off makes some sense. Interestingly it actually gives a good motivation
to covertly work with governments too, after all, the Smithsonian or British Natural History
Museum would have to be absolute gold mines for any illicit dealers in human artifacts,
as would any law enforcement agency that tried to track regular old human black market dealings
in such things. It would explain the inconsistencies in motives
too, I could easily see some alien smuggler spinning stories of invasions and a need for
secret cooperation to some senior government official. It would be really amusing if the conspiracy
theories all turned out mostly right, but in reality it was a bunch of different groups
of unethical alien smugglers hoodwinking various departments into helping them, thus resulting
in a crazy cluster of apparently contradictory motivations and the very senior-most officials
genuinely not thinking it was going on. It’s funny because I can’t think of a
novel or film where someone’s done, or suggested this scenario before, and it’s probably
one of the better ones. I suspect that maybe it’s just not melodramatic
or sinister enough to draw the interest of writers or conspiracists. Aliens don’t need us for food or labor,
they could always clone us for meat and ought to have very good robots, they certainly don’t
need us for soldiers. They’d have evolved too and Darwin doesn’t
tolerate wimps, so even if they don’t like fighting they’re likely to be very good
at it, especially if they’re on top of this region of the galaxy enough to be enforcing
quarantines on primitive planets. We always have to remember when discussing
alien civilizations that there’s an implied plurality there, one thinking about exterminating
us has to worry about repercussions from neighbors, but for specific behavior here, we can contemplate
that we probably would be inside or on the edge of one specific civilization that claimed
oversight of our world. And that might shift over time too, changes
within themselves in terms of policy or someone else gaining local dominance. A species dedicated to protecting primitive
worlds might lose interest in that path after several millennia and leave a gap in their
enforcement or turn it over to someone else with slightly different policies. They will have neighbors to worry about, since
if we assume we arose near them than others would have too, so hobbies like eating intelligent
species when they could just clone them or hunting aliens for sport when they could use
virtual reality are likely to be curtailed from diplomacy even if their own ethics don’t. And it is very easy to imagine inhabited primitive
worlds being labeled no-go zones but that enforcement being sup-optimal, especially
when it’s getting obvious a world won’t be in isolation much longer, you can shrug
at minor and mostly ignored visitations since they only encourage folks to think on aliens
more and get a bit more psychologically ready for when the Mothership arrives to open formal
official talks. Any artifact smuggling cartel that gets too
energetic or visible gets slapped down, the rest mostly get ignored. Lazy and underfunded but with an appearance
of high-minded ethics, which would certainly describe a lot of government regulatory bodies. So we can see some fairly plausible motives
and behaviors do exist that could permit the UFO sightings folks report, though I can’t
say even those are fairly likely, again we’ve got the core issue of seemingly inevitable
expansion and non-exclusivity we discussed in the Dyson Dilemma and Compendium episodes,
so I can’t call it a good solution but I actually do think it’s better than most
of the ones people throw into the ring, amusingly while often mocking the folks that subscribe
to this one. And after years of doing episodes and running
forums that discuss this topic, I think I’ve heard every one ever dreamed up. Please don’t take that as encouragement
toward Flying Saucers though, again most such theories are terribly weak. They rely on evidence that gets shouted from
every rooftop when found, and ignored when someone debunks it or offers up a solid but
mundane alternative. And all the witnesses don’t really help,
since there’s less excuse for such typically low quality evidence, especially in this era
of smartphones. But whether the evidence is good enough or
not, it still has to link together to create a decent explanation of goals, motives, and
behaviors. Mind you, it need not be flawless, we don’t
perfectly execute our objectives by always choosing the most logical action and faultlessly
adhering to it, but any time a scenario is suggested you need to poke at it and ask what
the ultimate objective would be and if you could think of an easier way to do it. So if someone suggests the aliens end goal
is to replace us with hybrids of us and aliens for instance, you have to stop and ask why
they’d want to do that instead of, say, dropping a virus down on us that killed only
humans and just landing their own colonists, regular or bioformed to our environment, down
on the planet a month later and mopping up any survivors. Any conspiracy to suppress knowledge of them
needs to be examined for why our own officials, militaries, and scientists would go along
with it, and needs to rely on something better than raw greed or personal survival if it
would represent a threat to humanity itself. A motivation for secrecy like those folks
keeping it secret because we’ll all die otherwise might make sense, but it’s really
hard to concoct a scenario where aliens would reach out to us when they didn’t want us
to know but needed some to know. There are some though, sadly they aren’t
terribly melodramatic or sinister so rarely get discussed, like the Orion department of
education reaching out to governments and saying they need our help collecting anthropological
data, but don’t want to screw our culture up by an overt and undeniable presence, and
in exchange for some help suppressing the information enough that most folks will doubt
it, they’ll make sure no asteroids whack us or anything really terminal happen to us
like a runaway greenhouse effect, so we can relax and continue to evolve naturally, but
if it gets out to the point everybody knows and believes its going on, they’re out of
there because their studies are wrecked, no more covert safeguard against extreme disasters
or pay offs of their patronage when we hit the galactic stage. I don’t think that’s too probable either,
but it’s semi-viable and plausible, again it’s just not sinister and exciting. And while it’s true that reality is often
stranger than fiction, paranoia often results from ignoring the mundane simply because one
wants it to be more exciting. The notion that the flying saucers are abducting
mailboxes or people’s attic collection of baseball cards and comic books to sell on
the black market just isn’t thrilling, but thrilling or not, it’s probably more likely
than them having an obsession with proctology or damaging crops. So we’ve been talking about aliens and logical
fallacies today and it reminded me how important it is to develop our own logical faculties
to make sense of the world. And the best way for that is to actively practice
it. So, I thought we’d end today with a fun
puzzle about aliens from our friends over at Brilliant to give you something to puzzle
over till next week. Here it is:
The Alien King has servants with six, seven, or eight legs. The servants with seven legs always lie, but
the servants with either six or eight legs always say the truth. One day, 4 servants met : The blue one says: “Altogether we have 28
legs”; The green one says: “Altogether we have
27 legs”; The yellow one says: “Altogether we have
26 legs”; The red one says: “Altogether we have 25
legs”. What is the colour of the servant that says
the truth? Again that puzzle is from Brilliant, and one
of my favorite features are their Daily Problems in math, science, and engineering, which I
often enjoy as morning brain warm-ups with my coffee. These puzzles are great learning tools, and
if you like the daily problem, then there's more like it in the course on the left, so
that you can explore the concept in great detail and further develop your framework. If you’d like to see some more puzzles,
go to brilliant.org/IsaacArthur and sign up for free, and gain access to their huge catalog
of daily problems, interactive quizzes, and courses. And also, the first 200 people that go to
that link will get 20% off the annual Premium subscription, so you can view all the Daily
Problems in the archives and unlock every course. We spend a lot of time on the channel talking
about moving colonists to brand new worlds, or how to move millions of folks through the
interstellar void, but next week we’ll explore how a single traveler might make their way
from world to world, in Hitchhiking the Galaxy. The week after that we’ll look at Clarketech,
hypotheticals technologies so advanced they are indistinguishable from magic. And three weeks from now, we’ll at long
last return to the Civilizations at the End of Time series, in Dying Stars
For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel
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have a Great Week!
Always a good day when there is a new SFIA to watch
I really do now want to read a scifi story with alien smugglers. It might not be sinister, but it is very engaging.
I don't believe in secret aliens or flying saucers, but I do feel our Isaac is a little close minded with regards to the possibility of ETI in the Galaxy and or Universe.
how long have we been looking for aliens?
Yay! I’ve missed the alien series, and I just recently found out you post the voice only versions on soundcloud, making my nightshifts 100% better. Thank you!
Finished playing Stellaris, watched this episode... With music from the Stellaris soundtrack. My evening has been made 😁
I am not so sure that I agree with assumption made that aliens would always or likely choose some sort of covert or sneak attack to take us out/take over.
Brute force can work wonders.
Let's talk about why aliens might invade/visit Earth to begin with:
They view as as a potential threat, and want to take us out before we can threaten them.
The want simply want the galaxy all to themselves.
Earth has a resource they want or need. (intelligent beings, large amounts of liquid water, the Earth itself, biological samples, human memorabilia)
A. Humans could be used for hosts, slave labor, and perhaps even pets.
B. There are certainly other sources of water to be had, but most of it is frozen, are requires some form of mining to extract.
C. The Earth itself is similar to the alien home world, and would make for a great colony.
D. They wish to study the flora or fauna of Earth.
E. They wish to collect some form of non biological trinkets or memorabilia.
The aliens are predatory by nature and want to eat us.
The aliens view us as inferior and needing of their "help".
Some of these scenarios would either benefit from or require some what of a large alien presence in and around Earth.
I guess that might explain why the USA is so nonchalant about global warming.
You know what our the chances that life on Earth evolved from random chemical reactions versus directed Panspermia? For example if we terraformed a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and then evolved to a point where we didn't need Earth like planets anymore, the life we left on the planet would continue to evolve so long as that planet remained habitable to life, eventually another intelligent species may evolve from it. Humanity is potentially a kind of bridge to the stars across which DNA based Earthlife may travel. That Earthlife will continue to evolve into other creatures as DNA based life has that evolution potential. Humans could travel across the galaxy and seed billions of planets with DNA based life.
I think the biggest hurdle life has is evolving the ability to evolve through mutation, What is the probability that we are the first life around rather than having evolved from somewhere down the chain as I described? When I look at my own life for instance, I wonder why I was born at this time and place and not sometime long ago amongst a tribe of stone age hunter gatherers? I think Earth's population is much higher than it has ever been, but the estimate is that around 100 billion people have lived over the past 200,000 years, averaging that out about 500,000 people have lived any given year. The chance of me living here and no as opposed to some other time is around 7% I guess with a 93% chance that I would have grown up in some stone age cave and be taught how to hunt.
Why do we appear to be the first civilization in the observable Universe? There must be a reason for this, as opposed to us being the offspring of some other civilization sometime in the future? Any theories as to why that is?