Only in Hollywood can an alien armada cross
the vastness of interstellar space, in ships the size of mountains, yet be dumb enough
not to install anti-virus software. So today we begin Year 3 of Science and Futurism
with Isaac Arthur, and I am your host, the aforementioned Isaac Arthur. If you are new to the channel, possibly having
clicked on the somewhat click-bait-ey episode title of Stupid Aliens, there are a couple
things you should know coming in. First, I don’t have an accent, it is a speech
impediment, I have problems pronounce the letter R, as in Rascally Rabbits. For that reason, every episode includes closed
captions subtitles you can turn on. Second, this channel does very in-depth looks
at topics, the average run-time tends to be about 20-40 minutes, so it is usually a good
idea to grab a drink and snack beforehand. One of our major topics for this year is going
to be contemplating and discussing what alien civilizations might be like. This is a tricky topic because there are not
many things we can predict about alien civilizations, especially that would tend to be universal
traits to all alien civilizations. We can say for instance that they are very
likely to value knowledge, at least if they are technologically advanced spacefarers,
because it is hard to travel in space without technology, a lot of it, and it’s hard to
have that without valuing knowledge. We can’t be sure that would be a universal
trait with no exceptions, but it ought to be common one. Alternatively there are a lot things we can
say ought to be uncommon, that we would not expect to encounter much in alien civilizations,
basically because it is stupid. Sadly we have an awful lot of these in science
fiction. Aliens who are technologically advanced but
fundamentally stupid. The film Independence Day is a well-known
example, aliens smart enough to construct and maintain a massive interstellar fleet
but incapable of dealing with a simple computer virus. Now to be fair, any solution to any alien
invasion is going to have to be a headscratcher that needs a lot of suspension of disbelief
by the audience, because there isn’t one. If an alien armada shows up in orbit of Earth
with the intent of killing us, especially if they don’t care about preserving the
ecology and can use a Scorched Earth strategy, we will lose. Quickly too. No ship able to get itself up to near light
speed lacks the energy to just torch the surface of a planet, and any technology that allowed
them to circumvent those energy needs would have a weaponizable component that permitted
the same thing. Your typical interstellar craft ought to have
energy supplies that let it shoot nukes at a planet like it was bullets from a machinegun. If they want the planet intact they whack
it with a targeted virus that just kills humans or just dump tons of nerve gas down from orbit. So the writers have to take some liberties
if they want to do a story about an alien invasion, unless it is intended to be a black
comedy, and a short one at that. Unfortunately we tend to absorb that, folks
don’t realize it is flawed or if they do, it still wriggles its way into the brain by
repetition. Now our focus today is not on Invading Earth
but we will start with that. There are basically 4 reasons to visit Earth
if you are aliens that I can think of and here they are:
1) To talk with us and get to know each other 2) To get our planet’s raw materials
3) To obliterate us 4) To acquire things unique to Earth
Now the first one, that they want to talk with us, we will look at next week in the
First Contact episode, though there are a lot of popular ideas for how that would go
down that imply the aliens are pretty stupid too. Starting with the notion that after encountering
them at random face-to-face, which ought to never happen, they’d misunderstand us and
open fire. We’ll do that next time, but just to continue
the theme for today, if you are an advanced alien species and you show up on doorstep
uninvited hoping to have a conversation, the onus is on you to do some basic research first
about language, customs, and psychology. We certainly would, and we broadcast tons
of TV and radio they could listen to first. The second one is Earth’s raw materials. Problem is that Earth does not have any raw
materials that are not more abundant and more easily accessible elsewhere. Clearly no one is going around strip mining
our area of the galaxy or we wouldn’t be able to planets around other nearby stars,
heck we shouldn’t be able to see any stars if they were doing that, considering what
we looked at in the Star Lifting and Dyson Dilemma episodes. There ought to be a chunk of the sky where
there are very few stars and some visibly disappearing in recent centuries if someone
is doing that and about to arrive here as the edge of an expanding sphere of mining
activity. A few years back the movie Oblivion came out,
and it was a pretty decent film, but in that the aliens had gone through an elaborate and
unnecessarily stupid effort in order to get an even stupider prize. They were mining Earth for it water, sucking
the oceans clean. Apparently for the hydrogen which is even
sillier, since hydrogen is the most abundant thing in the Universe. Earth is not the best place to get hydrogen
from, as it has way less than the gas giants and also a much steeper gravity well then
all the comets and small icy bodies on the periphery of the solar system. Anyone who just needed that much hydrogen
ought to be leaving behind a Dark Sky in its wake because they clearly want all of it. The same is true of any raw material, metals,
oxygen, etc. Earth would not be your last stop to find
those things but there are so many better ones that you’d have to be a moron to come
here before you exhausted all of those other easier sources and it would be blisteringly
obvious if someone was doing that. It would be like people living in the Sahara
desert invading Australia to steal sand from their beaches. The third reason is to obliterate us and that’s
actually the most logical. They don’t care about our resources they
just want us dead, maybe they don’t want the competition for the galaxy and kill that
off before it gets advanced. Maybe they just don’t like us specifically. I already discussed how easy that is to do
without ever landing and we’ve talked about weapons before, like the Nicoll-Dyson Beam
or Relativistic Kill Missiles, that would make it so you didn’t even have to come
into the solar system but could instead commit genocide from the comfort of your own homeworld. The last one though is that there is something
unique about Earth they want, and that presumably needs to be life itself or something made
by life. This is science though not a comic book so
Galactus isn’t going to show up to suck out our life energy, we haven’t got any. There’s not going to be any space vampires
that feed on humans draining away their life essence and leaving them old withered husks. For the sake of fiction we could assume maybe
they want to eat our souls or something. I mean I like to think I have a soul, that
would be neat, but I never seen much evidence for that let alone anything definitive, and
I’d really hate to get definitive evidence of that from Cthulu showing up saying he’d
like to eat mine. As to non-supernatural options, what have
we got? You can rule out that they want to eat humans,
even if their biochemistry allowed them to digest us humans are an awful source of meat,
and they could just grow us in a lab. I mean if I were an alien species who developed
a freaky fondness for the taste of people I’d just ask for a sample of our DNA to
help humanity research medicine, then use that to clone up some long-pig back at my
homeworld of Cannibala 3 in the Gastronomy Sector. Everything on Earth can be replicated, so
you don’t need to harvest people or cows or trees, you just come by and ask for two
of every animal, or maybe a dozen or so for the genetic diversity, and you wouldn’t
need or want to keep them just take a sample so you could get their DNA. You don’t even need big freezer banks to
store that in, not that even a billion samples of DNA takes up much space, because you could
just record the sequence digitally and print it back home. Faster that way too, a digital recording of
DNA can travel at light speed, a frozen sample cannot, and they are the same thing. Your DNA is not physical, any more than a
book is, it is a sequence of information whether its on a hard drive, a paper printout, or
a clay tablet. If you’ve got that you can build yourself
some rotating habitats back around some star you own and fill them up Earth-life as a nature
preserve, or a farm, whatever your civilization is into. The same applies for our art and literature,
unless you’ve got some weird Collector complex that requires you have the original copy of
everything or the only copy, you could just ask and we would give up copies of all our
music and TV and such. I suppose they might be coming by to obliterate
our art, but even as bad as Reality TV is I have difficulty believing anyone would invade
us just to destroy that. They could offer it in trade for technology,
or just demand it at gunpoint, though the former would seem more logical. If you are species that will spend centuries
cruising to other planets to acquire their genetic diversity or art it kind of implies
you aren’t the genocidal types. The other common one is they want to stop
humanity destroying our own environment, which is usually based on insane-troll-logic. Humans damage our own environment mostly because
we are trying to survive. We burn fossil fuels because we have nothing
better, we knock over forests to grow food, there are not many people who get kicks out
damaging the environment outside of the strawman villains from stuff like Captain Planet. In the 2008 remake of the Day the Earth Stood
Still we get an example of that. They don’t like how we’ve treated our
environment, fair enough, most of us don’t either, and both their means of arrival and
punishment are things whose very existence allows them to easily fix the problem. I would love to see film or show sometime
where the aliens show up, notice the environmental damage, and just shrug and say ‘yeah we
had the same problems, here’s some technology that will fix that, and if you’ve got samples
from any extinct species we can help you clone them back up too.’ If aliens show up here to lecture us on not
burning fossil fuels, that had better be followed five seconds later by them saying ‘oh, yeah,
we also brought you blueprints for these easy to build fusion power plants, like the one
on our ship and back on our homeworld, Smugness 4 in the Self-Righteousness Sector.’ Of course this invokes the notion that they
might not want to give us their technology because we are not ready for it yet and might
destroy ourselves, which seems like pretty strange logic when you have just shown up
to express your dismay about how we are destroying ourselves already. I’d really like to meet the jerk who would
go to third world village, point out that they have contaminated drinking water as a
result of their farming and sanitation methods, but then refuse to share with them the blueprints
for the various water purifiers we have on the grounds that the technology might destroy
them. That’s another example of Stupid Aliens,
with the invasion options complete, or arguably Hypocritical Aliens or downright Evil Aliens. We all get the reason why you handing people
dangerous technology isn’t such a good idea, the problem is the specific justification
is pretty bad. I did not invent the Atomic Bomb, neither
did you, neither in all likelihood did the alien who shows up talking about how dangerous
they are. We all three of us know how dangerous they
are. Lots of scifi writers advance the ‘too dangerous’
philosophy, but I can’t recall any of them that were actual scientists, though I’d
imagine some are. From my own anecdotal observations the writers
who tend to have strong science backgrounds generally think more science is good, even
if it was acquired from aliens rather than invented by us. Probably because it occurs to them that it
does not matter who discovered it, alien or human, because the other 7 billion humans
did not. You don’t have to be a physicist or optometrist
to know better than to shine a laser pointer in people’s eye, and you don’t have to
have an advanced knowledge of viruses to know not to juggle fragile test tubes labeled Ebola
over a concrete floor. The upshot of being a scientists is you are
pretty much always surrounded by folks who use stuff from your field that you know they
do not understand, and that you also used to not understand, and yet they are using
it safely and so did you back when you didn’t. That and it makes you acutely aware of how
many critical components of your own civilizations operate using technology you don’t even
vaguely understand either. Or other aspects of knowledge, not everything
is technology. There probably are technologies our minds
can’t handle, but odds are neither could the original alien brains of that civilization
and they can handle them now because they cyborged up their brains, which would presumably
work just fine for us too. You certainly don’t invade a planet for
slave labor, not if your goal is actual labor anyway, that’s what robots are for. If you just like conquering people and oppressing
them because you are a bit of Ming the Merciless or Emperor Palpatine sort, then yeah it makes
sense. Of course you might stop by Earth because
you need an army, and humans are aggressive and warlike and your species is much too enlightened
for that. I’m fairly sure removing the ability to
defend yourselves from your species does qualify as stupid, especially if you went so far with
it you can’t even make robots to do your actual fighting for you. These are presumably the same aliens that
huddle on their homeworld quietly for eons in a row, I could see that. An occasional answer to the Fermi Paradox
about where all the aliens are is that everyone is afraid that if they send out signals some
big bad space monster is going to come by and eat their homeworld. Not an unreasonable fear on face value, but
quite stupid. As we’ve discussed before, the cat is out
of the bag about your civilization the moment you broadcast your first radio signals, there’s
no point being silent after that. If you are planning to build a secret bunker
on the outskirts of town, it’s not a good idea to use heavy machinery and dynamite in
the excavation process. Nobody is going to miss you doing that or
forget you did it. So you might as well build your civilization
up so it can have a lot more scientists discovering a lot more fancy weaponry you can put on all
your many, many ships constructed around your many, many planets and space stations. Of course the genocidal aliens are always
stupid too. I have no idea why they opt to linger in the
dark spaces between solar systems and galaxies in the first place, I mean beyond the obvious
Lovecraftian overtones of scary ancient hungry monsters. If I had an enormous irresistible armada and
was trying to destroy all life in the galaxy, I’d have them spend their free time swinging
by planets every few million years to sterilize them. Or better yet just cannibalize the planets
to make more ships in my armada. I certainly would not wait for intelligence
to develop, let alone radio signals. I mean all those roads and canals and pyramids
we built thousands of years ago already are quite visible from orbit. So if I did want to have my extermination
fleet sleeping in between purges for some reason, I just park them around planets instead
of the cold depths of space. Or even on the planet, just waking up every
few thousand years to eyeball their environment for signs of intelligence. I probably would put them to sleep in between
exterminations though, it would help to avoid their ethics mutating while they are sitting
around with nothing to do but think about whether or not genocide was a good career
choice. Pretty stupid hobby anyway, I’m never clear
exactly why any of the critters want to wipe out all intelligent life. They obviously do not want all the raw materials
in the galaxy for themselves, a full blown genuine galactic empire, a Kardashev 3 civilization,
something we looked at last year, takes very little time to setup in the grand scheme of
things and definitely prevents new life arising on planets since by default you don’t have
any planets in a K3 civilization. I mean to a K3 civilization a planet just
look like a giant lumber store, it’s not a place you live, its place you go pick up
material to build places to live. And any given one of those trillions of planets
in this galaxy has enough raw materials in it to construct not just a big ship for each
solar system in the galaxy, but a pretty impressive fleet for each one. There’s enough iron in Earth alone to make
several hundred trillion aircraft carrier sized ships. And you want big ships, that way you can include
a robust IT department to prevent you from having your fleet destroyed by a computer
virus made by a bunch of primitives who just invented computers in the last century. I’m just going to skip over any examples
of aliens who travel across the length of galaxy for no other apparent purpose but to
abduct people and probe their rectums. Perhaps proctology is a much more scientifically
useful field than I assume. There’s a few of these examples I want to
save for next week’s episode since they are great examples of stupid aliens but specifically
in first contact situations. Like the Minbari from Babylon 5, who apparently
think the best approach to greeting people is to wave a gun around while shining a flashlight
in their eyes. Or the Buggers from Ender’s Game, who apparently
believed functioning spaceships were not a sign of intelligence. Both are explained as tragic misunderstandings
that resulted in attempted genocide against humanity. We’ll look at those next week. But one that comes to mind for today is aliens
that wipe themselves out. I think the classic example of this is from
the Forbidden Planet. This 1956 film helped make science fiction
movies something other than low-budget B-movies they’d always been until then, and is still
a great film even today, so if you haven’t seen it, prepare for spoilers. The movie features an alien race, the Krell,
or rather a machine they built as they have gone extinct, from their own stupidity too
which is ironic since they actually had a device that could boost intelligence. In spite of that they built a giant machine
that could give physical form to their very thoughts. Apparently no one stopped to consider that
our thoughts include a lot of very nasty subconscious demons and nightmares. The Krell were exterminated by their own subconscious
thoughts in less than 24 hours. We get something similar from the most recent
Superman reboot, the Man of Steel. I don’t mean the invasion plot itself, of
needlessly picking a fight with Superman and humanity when their giant terraforming machine
ought to have worked just as well on Mars or Venus. I mean more my surprise that they could even
build a terraforming machine when in this incarnation of the destruction of Planet Krypton
it was done by them over-mining their own planet core till the planet exploded… I also have no idea how such a thing would
be possible, digging holes in a planet generally does not make them explode. Of course maybe they had long since converted
their home planet into a shellworld, a concept we discussed early last year, but if they
had it shouldn’t have been a civilization ending event, since you only do something
like that to supply raw materials for construction of a Dyson Swarm, which kind of implies your
home planet is just a very small if very significant chunk of your solar system’s population. You get similar examples with civilizations
that wipe themselves out from cloning fatigue, as we saw happen to the Asgard in Stargate,
or the Mariposans from the Star Trek: the Next Generation Episode up the Long Ladder,
one of the worst episodes of the series. Ignoring for the moment that it should not
be tricky to keep original samples of DNA on ice, or stored digitally, to use to avoid
copy fatigue, or even fix the problem after you have somehow ignored these options, you
have to pretty stupid not to see them coming right from the outset. My general notion is that any alien species
that could be so stupid as to kill themselves off by any method that flat out guarantees
extinction and should be noticed as a problem by even a random ten year old, probably should
be assumed not to exist. It is sort of like with War of the Worlds
– Pick your version, aliens again killed by viruses, only this time the old-fashioned
biological kind. The only reason to land on a planet to attack
it is if you want to keep the biology of the planet intact, rather than just nuking it
from orbit till it glows in the dark. So you would think some consideration would
be given to what that local biology might do to you. Ignoring that for the moment, I do wonder
how they crossed the vastness of space without having airtight spaceships and spacesuits
that would presumably protect them from infection. Such being the case I can only assume the
Martian invaders occasionally took smoke breaks in the middle of the invasion and didn’t
want to smell up the air inside their war machines so they went outside to light up. Okay, we will wrap up there. While obviously a lot of our examples today
were decidedly over the top, in order to contemplate what we can know about alien civilizations,
which includes what we can say they would not do, we need to rule out the incredibly
stupid. By and large anyway, obviously civilizations
do often act in stupid fashions, just look at us. The key point is that we always want to look
at any cliché or stereotype about alien civilizations – and we will have more next week – and
ask ourselves if it actually makes any sense, and if not, why we would expect them to do
it. Particularly if that expectation goes to include
all civilizations not just one or two that are being bloody-minded about it. Because for anything to be a common trait,
let alone universal one, among alien civilizations it has to make a lot of sense. Something we have discussed a lot in terms
of Exclusivity and non-Exclusivity for the Fermi Paradox. Next week we will continue this forward by
looking at possible first contact scenarios with alien civilizations, both the first one
we meet and from the perspective of it being their first meeting but not ours. To get alerts when that and other episodes
come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to like
it and share it with others, and leave a comment or come join us over at the Channel’s Facebook
Group, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, to discuss the topic more. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
Just a quick note of interest. There's little evidence to suggest that DNA samples suffice, even if you have all of them. DNA is the program, but a program is useless without a computer for the language it's written in.
It's theoretically possible that one might be able to go from DNA to everything else, but I'd bet that doing so is extremely hard. Chances are you need an at least somewhat sophisticated environment, in which I'm including both high level things like wombs and low level things like cellular machinery, to produce animals from DNA.
Interesting take and I agree with a lot of what he said but I do think he was being a bit arrogant/presumptuous about what we can reasonably expect from an alien civilization. Reasonable explanations are all about context and we have almost none for alien races. Intelligence doesn't always equate to a human definition of reasonable.
I read part of an ok erotic fiction once about a race of aliens that had bred themselves pacifists coming to earth to recruit them into an army because humans were in the sweet spot between how savage primitives are and how docile and bad-at-war advanced civs were. Didn't seem too stupid.
What is that accent.