Unsettling Fermi Paradox Solutions: What if Aliens Find Us? | John Michael Godier

Let's Take a Ride more to come in this Marathon the great elephant in the room in regards to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that we haven't conclusively seen it yet everywhere we look in the cosmos we see objects that appear natural and normal such as stars and nebulas that give us no reason to think that any of it is under the influence of an alien civilization in other words you could say that this galaxy seems to consist of nothing but free real estate that as far as we can tell no one has colonized or done anything with yet the Galaxy is well old enough to have been colonized many times over the firmy Paradox addresses this conundrum by asking where are the aliens there are many possible solutions to the firmy Paradox and some are fairly benign but others are not so nice so here are 10 of the most unsettling solutions to the fmy Paradox number 10 the end result of existence is technological isolation within philosophy there is an old concept called the brain in a that that is to say that if you were a brain isolated in a jar being fed sensory information through wires you would never know that your perceived world wasn't reality that concept is taking on a new dimension as virtual reality technology improves and there may come a time where virtual reality is absolutely indistinguishable from actual reality this is a problem for a civilization because virtual reality can be tailored to be anything you want it to be including Paradise which is not so much the case for actual reality you could even live in the fictional world of your choice fighting dragons or exploring the universe and meeting virtual aliens but without the limitations of the speed of light even other people can be emulated perfectly in theory in short you could achieve the Perfection of existence in virtual reality if that's the case why bother to pay any attention to actual reality at all or might you forget that reality exists questions of whether the human species will choose to explore this route aside alien might just do it is it possible that the reason we don't see evidence of far-flung alien civilizations is because their own technology gives them a better alternative to actual reality and they simply never leave their home planet for lack of any reason to number nine humans won the lottery for now this solution is usually termed neoc catastrophism and is based on the idea that the reason we see no evidence of alien civilizations is that they almost always get reset by Nature before they have time to become an Advanced space fairing race there are any number of ways this might happen ranging from getting hit by an asteroid to all life in a world getting Fried by a Gamay burst in our case we've simply been lucky though even this planet has had a number of catastrophes of its own such as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs that had it been just a bit worse might have destroyed all complex life on this planet at the same time however that particular mass extinction opened the way for the Dominion of mammals and eventually the Advent of humanity so there is that but as lotteries show there are far more losers than winners and that may also be the case for the Galaxy it remains to be seen however if we have indeed won the lottery or are we simply waiting for our own Extinction at the hands of nature itself but in the end this solution might have an interesting effect over time it's been suggested that Stellar Evolution will reduce the occurrence of Gamay bursts and it may be that natural catastrophes in general become rarer as time passes if so this may eventually lead to an explosion of complex life in the galaxy and we happen to exist either too early or just at the beginning of that phase number eight aliens are simply too violent for long-term survival this one fits under a series of great filter solutions to the firmy Paradox they hypothesize that some sort of brick wall exists somewhere along the line that stops civilizations from rising past a certain level in this case it's a filter that may be present in our own civilization it's the possibility of destroying ourselves as humans we have a PR spotty history as far as Warfare and violence is concerned we are both capable of restraint and reasonability and absolute Horrors and we do possess the means in which to annihilate our own civilization to our credit we haven't yet done that but stop for a moment and think about what that might mean for alien civilizations violence is not unique to our species if you've ever seen a polar bear kill and eat something you've seen violence at its highest expression but that's nature the polar bear has to eat and it evolved to eat other animals and it will aggressively do so whenever needed there's no reason to think that this works any differently in the universe at large complex life should it exist most probably ate other life to get where it is we can at least a good portion of Us control our aggressiveness through reason yet we still spend massive amounts of money on defense still we can reason our way out of starting a war or we can do the opposite imagine though if we were just a little bit more aggressive and bore strong instincts for that like the polar bear the result of that would not be pretty and we probably would not have much of a civilization as a result as such it may be more common for alien species to be more aggressive than we are say the conditions of their world are such that it's harder to eat might they then evolve even more aggressive tendencies don't you need at least some aggressiveness to spread out and head into the universe in the first place are any aliens we are likely to encounter going to be extremely aggressive we shall see but other implications of this solution to the firmy Paradox is that alien civilizations are more interested in Waring with themselves than they are in exploring space and eventually they almost invariably destroy themselves hopefully we prove better than that number seven the universe is artificial this gets into simulation Theory and the idea that we ourselves might already be living in a kind of universal virtual reality though it's certainly far from a Utopia if so and it is a simulation the associated firmy Paradox solution is that we are the only sensient artificial intelligences in The Matrix on purpose and no other planets anywhere in the universe are inhabited but that creates a huge question if that's the case why then is the universe so ridiculously huge in comparison to our little corner of it there are billions and billions of other galaxies and even parts of this universe so distant that we can't even observe them what would be the point of making the simulated environment so big that most of it will never be explored by us that question remains open number six aliens are everywhere and invisible a big problem with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that we have to make a lot of assumptions we primarily at least right now practice SEI by listening for radio signals but we have no idea if aliens use radio signals we simply assume they do we must base those kinds of assumptions on the only example of a civilization we have our own but in the end we have no idea how aliens would communicate and our own history with radio does not really support the idea that an alien civilization assuming they are like us would use radio for contact most of our day-to-day radio signals are not detectable at a distance what little would be detectable such as various medy signals the arbo signal radar doesn't repeat in the way that we expect an alien Beacon to repeat in short our civilization would be very difficult for aliens to see and even then not much more than 100 Lighty years out so why would other civilizations be any different and of course it's also possible that a high highly Advanced civilization may use methods of communication that we simply haven't thought of they could be all around us chatting away and we won't know it until we ourselves discover that method only to find a vibrant Galactic dialogue going on imagine if they're talking about us number five intelligent life in the universe is exceedingly rare Arthur Clark once said that two possibilities exist we are either alone in the universe or we are not both are equally terrifying working on that theme what happens if intelligent life is rare enough that it happens only once every few galaxies there are reasons to suspect that this may be the case look at Earth what factors had to come together to produce us we have a planet of such a size to hold this atmosphere we have life that evolved in a certain direction in order to oxygenate the atmosphere we have plate tectonics and the carbon cycle we have the moon we have liquid water we have Jupiter and many other factors that all had to come together just so to keep our planet right for us to arise and build a civilization does that make earth extremely rare are planets almost exactly the same as far as Earth's conditions the only ones capable of spawning a civilization we don't know but back to Arthur Clark how frightening is it that the Universe might be so vast that while it might have hundreds of civilizations in it the numbers are still in favor of that but they are so far from each other that they may never be able to communicate or if they do it won't happen for billions of years or say it never happens and existence in this universe is confined to only your own species because of the vast distances between civilizations and the question of whether we are alone is kept open forever due to the expanding scale of our lonely universe but never fear there's also reason to think that planets can exist that are better than Earth for developing intelligent life and if you haven't any aliens in your Galaxy you can always make your own if we do indeed colonize the Milky Way which I'm hopeful we do we can actually do it in geologically short time scales millions of years rather than billions and if we do that those colonies of humans will eventually become so different from us that they might as well be aliens number four the zoo hypothesis this solution is very simple aliens exist and no we're here but intentionally hide their presence from us they might do this for several reasons one is that they're simply waiting for the right time in our development to reveal themselves preferring instead to Simply study us and learn all they can before making contact but just as easily they could fear us and are maintaining the element of surprise until one day they destroy us out of nowhere or otherwise maintain our level of interstellar travel at zero one particularly spooky scenario with this one is that all species in the Galaxy might be held hostage in this way by a smug Overlord species that perhaps was the first to arise in the Milky Way what would add insult to injury as if that Overlord were a machine civilization keeping the Biologicals in check number three time when thinking about alien civilizations we often fall into a trap we think in terms of distance and how far away such a civilization would be but there is also another dimension here that could separate civilizations enough to make them rare time there is no guarantee that you will exist at the same time as another civilization in your Galaxy especially if technological civilizations only last an average of a few million years even worse if it's only thousands of years or hundreds the Milky Way is well old enough to have once supported civilizations that simply aren't here anymore we likewise May well survive for millions of years as a civilization but go extinct at some point in the far future but then another species might arise in the Milky Way and take our place perhaps they might even find artifacts of us so the solution here is simply that civilizations are rare but not that rare in geologic time scales so a Galaxy like the Milky Way might have hosted throughout its lifetime hundreds of civilizations but they just rarely coexist in which case the Galaxy may be full of artifacts for us to find what happens if we find whatever artifact that caused a civilization's Extinction number two the sustainability solution this is a relative newcomer to solutions to the fmy Paradox but one that holds serious implications for our own civilization indeed for the entire galaxy because it may be the reason that we do not see evidence of alien civilizations having colonized the Galaxy is because to do so may mean the inevitable collapse of your own civilization in a paper by Jacob hack misser and Seth bomb Link in the description below they challenge commonly held assumptions that civilizations colonizing the Galaxy would do so exponentially and this is based on human expansion on our own Planet the problem is we don't always do this sustainably and that's led to multiple times in the past where human populations and civilizations collapsed this could mean that we could collapse even before we colonize our own solar system we likewise could collapse even after we have if we don't manage our resources properly this could extend further out into the Galaxy and might mean that civilizations that don't manage their resources carefully and expand exponentially tend to collapse and those that are slower and more deliberate may not have had time to colonize much of the Galaxy at all the remaining question here is what choices will we make oddly given the distances to the nearest Stars much less the distant ones and the apparent lack of any way to achieve faster than light travel we may end up moving very slowly regardless and thus the solution to the firmy Paradox is that fast expansion is hard no matter what and other civilizations have tended to keep their scope small at least for now number one maybe the firmy Paradox was never a paradox at all the basic thinking behind the firmy Paradox implies that the numbers at least superficially are such that we really should be seeing evidence of alien civilizations everywhere we look this thinking is further bolstered by ideas like the vanoyan self replicating probe where you can literally fill the Galaxy with probes in only a few million years stationing one or more in every star system without ever exceeding the speed of light why hasn't anyone done that the last possibility is that nothing says they haven't if there was a vanman probe or many such probes stationed in this star system unless they were blasting out evidence of their existence we wouldn't see them say they were dormant only collecting data at intervals that could last millions of years say they were extinct or simp L waiting to be found by a space fairing US unless such a thing made itself known and assuming it's not the size of an asteroid randomly finding one in our solar system would be so far beyond a needle and a hay stack that if they are discreet it could be centuries before we run across the first one even if hundreds of them from many different civilizations are out there floating in the vastness of the solar system in short maybe there never was a paradox we just don't know what to look for or how to look for it yet but once we do we may well find it and maybe it will be far closer than we ever bargained for since we first started asking the question are we alone thanks for listening I am science fiction author and futurist John Michael godier and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for regular in-depth Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live this is a companion video to my recent list 10 reasons aliens might not invade Earth but that was only half of the story there are in some very specific specific scenarios reasons aliens might actually invade so here are 10 reasons aliens might invade Earth number 10 proximity the biggest problem when contemplating the notion of an alien invasion is that in most cases it's very likely not worth it one of the reasons for this are the sheer distances involved between Star systems at least in our part of the Galaxy and problems inherent with Crossing relativistic space at sublight speeds because of this you must spend huge amounts of energy and time just to get your Invasion Fleet to the system you wish to conquer and the further the target the more expensive the operation would be but say there were a civilization already nearby one might be tempted to say that if there was we'd already know about it and this would be true if we're talking about the inner planets such as Venus or Mars but out in the far reaches of the solar system we really don't yet have a good handle on just what might be out there case in point gravitational and orbital weirdness of certain objects in the outer solar system seems to point to the existence of at least one if not two additional large planets in the star system and we've only just begun to discover what could be hundreds or even thousands of minor planets out in the Kyper belt while the chances of any of those being inhabited by a technological civilization are Beyond low they are not nil and if such a civilization were actively hiding itself from the denisons of the inner solar system we wouldn't see them these hypothetical aliens could then invade whenever they decided they needed our planet and they wouldn't have to worry about the problems presented by extreme distance number nine they want their world back this option is high speculation at its best but is still within the realm of the possible there is a lot we don't know about Earth's history because this planet has a habit of eroding evidence away and while some things do preserve geologically it doesn't do so forever and there are many creatures that once existed here of which we have no knowledge or evidence of including the earliest life on planet Earth this planet is also very old about 4.5 billion years over which continents have come and gone and drifted collided and subducted also many species have risen and are now gone our own genus the hominids only show up in the fossil record a little less than 3 million years ago and are extremely rare in the fossil record at that Homo sapiens only shows up within the last 300,000 years and us as we are now which are considered anatomically modern humans really only begin after the last ice age but since then we have founded a space fairing civilization albeit that part of things is still in its infancy that's just 10,000 years in this planet's 4.5 billion year history could this have happened before to some other species earlier in the planet's history it's highly unlikely for a number of reasons the chief of which is is a lack of any evidence that it did but as I said evidence doesn't always preserve on this world and even then other than a handful of Specialists investigating rockout crops there aren't very many people looking and much of the geological record of planet Earth that has survived remains inaccessible and underground because of this it might be possible for a prior civilization to have once existed on this planet and after so long there are no longer any traces of them they may have left the planet to its own devices after they ventured out into space and someday they might wish to come back imagine they and are surprise if they do number eight they want the sun we know that energy is important to a civilization if you want to build Mega structures and grow your civilization an obvious power source to accomplish that would be a star as your civilization grows you may well out grow your own star and then colonize a nearby system and use that star for further power generation perhaps through the use of a Dyson swarm there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way plenty of room for expansion but the trouble is the vast majority of those stars are small and low outputs such as red and orange dwarves but with stars larger than our own yellow g- type Sun they tend to be shorter lived and violent building a Dyson swarm for long-term power generation doesn't make sense if the star in question is only going to live a few million years before going supernova but then we have the g-type Stars like the sun as we know from our own Planet it's a pretty nice star for power generation it's bright out shining 90% of the stars in the Milky Way in fact yet stable and will stay that way for billions of years it has planets with one particularly nice one Earth within the zone of habitability something not all stars will have but we also have asteroids and comets that could be used as raw materials for building the Swarm and unfortunately for us the sun is not all that common only one in 13 stars of our local group are type G and not all of those are as nice as the sun given all of that if a cev type 2 civilization were to form up nearby and start colonizing they may well pick and choose the better Stars first for colonization the Sun May well be among the most attractive number seven war is their hobby when looking at human cultures we see a wide variety of behavior when it comes to Warfare we have everything from pacifism and neutrality as a matter of political policy to cultures of Conquest in the past such as the armies of gask Khan or the Conquistadors we even see examples of ritual Warfare in Aztec society when a new ruler ascended the throne it was expected that the First Act of that ruler would be to start a war there were several motivations for this the first was expansionism and subjugating an enemy from this came political benefits for the new ruler who had proven his abilities in battle but also economic growth in the form of tribute from the conquered state it also provided in many ways similar to Warfare most other places on Earth a method of upward social Mobility commoners could advance in society if they became successful battle hardened Warriors but there was a problem if a new ruler lost his coronation War it could lead to previously subjugated peoples rebelling and an overall loss of confidence in the new ruler to the point that he might be assassinated this now seems a foreign and outdated Concept in our modern society where war is generally seen as a bad thing but for most of our history human Warfare was ever present and still is and may never go away this may be true for alien civilizations as well they may culturally see Warfare as a normal necessary part of life but as we see with human culture the more technologically advanced we become the closer our cultures and interactions draw together groups of people tribes or nationalities that might have been sworn enemies a few centuries ago that engaged in cycles of warfare such as France and England now stand in a position where war between the two is highly unlikely at best and very undesirable as humans we're able to create lasting peace because we no longer need Warfare as a necessary part of the culture though it could be argued that it's still economically beneficial for certain groups within Society but what happens if an alien civilization is unable to do this and that an instinct for war is strong and never goes away even when when technology brings their own cultures together and homogenizes them they may well turn their taste for war to the stars and despite all of the hurdles that lay in between them and their enemy such as great distances relativistic space and so on they may still choose to engage in conquest and warfare and those problems may become easier to surmount with more technological advancement we tend to think in terms of human life spans it's a hard cell to have people spend half or more of their lives traveling to the nearest star system but lifespans change with technology and if you live for a 100,000 years that equation changes a bit even more so if you can change the rate at which you perceive time another technological possibility in light of that it remains possible so far as we know that a taste for Warfare itself could motivate an alien species to conquer this world number six the unknown unknowns in the end we can only guess at alien motivations and it may well be that some of them might be completely incomp apprehensible but there are a few things that we can reasonably infer such as that they have math and science if you can build an Interstellar Invasion Fleet the laws of physics and the realities of engineering are going to govern that Fleet and they need to know them likewise any weapon they might build will have a scientific basis behind it that would also imply some degree of rational thinking though it's anyone's guess how much as in the Warfare option but most other things are a mystery for example we know nothing of how aliens reproduce does that change the equation somehow we also know nothing of their politics and cultures again these can be game changers and introduce unknowns into what the motivations of aliens might be in fact if we did get invaded from nowhere we may never know why number five for our own good this one goes back to an idea that might have more sticking ground than you might initially think when we look into the universe we see nothing that would indicate intelligent life so far we've seen evidence of Dyson swarms no conclusive detections of radio or laser emissions no large-scale projects to alter stars and nebulas in other words the universe seems empty and lonely statistically speaking however the chances are still in favor of us not being the only intelligent life in the universe but we might well be the only intelligent life currently in this galaxy or perhaps we share it with only a handful of civilizations if intelligence is rare it may be seen as precious to other alien civilizations perhaps they see it as the highest expression of Consciousness in an otherwise vast and dead Universe in such a case a civilization more advanced than we are might see it as an imperative that we be preserved as a species no matter the cost an invasion comes simply for our own protection from ourselves or anything else that might destroy us present in this galaxy number four we may not know it but we represent a thread this option works under the premise that without actually studying or even kn about an alien civilization it's impossible to know what specific circumstances they exist in but one possibility is that we might represent some kind of a threat to an alien civilization that we are completely unaware of some possibilities on how we might pose a threat to aliens might include biological threats or something about our biology or the biology of this planet could threaten the biology of another planet in such a case Invasion and subsequent isolation or destruction might be a motive for an alien species that simply can't afford to risk having us spread out into the Galaxy any more than one might try to contain an eradicated a deadly virus that we can't afford to have spreading across earth this also goes for certain types of hypothetical technologies that if we ever develop them might represent a threat to the entire galaxy and therefore Invasion to stop us from developing them no matter the cost might be viable the first possibility here is self-replicating technology there are two main relevant hypothetical forms of self-replication Technologies the first is nanotechnology where a single microscopic robot is created that can make copies of itself and propagate this is an attractive possibility because it could revolutionize medicine manufacturing Communications all sorts of possibilities trouble is if that self-replication gets out of hand it could consume the planet by converting it into Nanobots if those Nanobots make it into space they could consume or severely damage the entire galaxy over time another take on this is the Von noyman self-replicating probe which could also convert galaxies into copies of itself and given enough time cross over to other nearby galaxies I'm sure we'd be smart enough to limit either of these Technologies in their ability to replicate but aliens may not be willing to take a chance on that another existential threat we might pose to aliens is if we were in the process of creating an extremely powerful artificial intelligence that might eventually try to take over the Galaxy or even wipe out all biology from it out of some sense of self preservation if it sees biological intelligence as a threat aliens May believe that the only Safe Life is biological life and artificial intelligence is simply too dangerous to allow to be developed one final possibility is the development of certain types of exotic matter that as far as we know do not appear to exist in nature but nothing in nature prevents them from existing in other words if you can figure out a way to produce these materials which is a big if then whole new avenues of manipulating the universe come of available ranging from matter with anti-gravity properties to a very strange and potentially dangerous object called A strangelet a strangelet is a hypothetical type of exotic matter made up entirely of quirks if these exist or are possible to create then it's thought that the larger a strangelet is the more stable it will be if a strangelet contacted an atomic nucleus made of normal matter it could catalyze that nucleus to convert into exotic matter and create a larger strange lit and a release of energy it then contacts another nucleus and converts it and then another and the end result is an entire planet could be converted into strange matter if that Strange Matter were to escape that planet it might eventually move throughout the Universe needless to say aliens might consider this an unacceptable Hazard both to us and the Galaxy at large and invad simply to ensure that we never mess with this kind of matter but the big problem with all of these possibilities is that the aliens would need to know that we were messing with these types of Technologies in the first place the further away the aliens are the further back in time they would see this planet so for this type of invasion to occur the aliens would need to be close or close by proxy perhaps the aliens themselves would seed the Galaxy and our solar system with vanoyan probes of their own that simply wake up when they detect something dangerous and either reset our civilization or outright invade and take over number three religion this option is the most tricky and a bit of a stretch because we only know about humans and what humans do we can only conjecture based on our own behavior that aliens might do similar things this is why Saidi searches for radio signals we admit them so aliens might too they may also have religions in the past and the present the spread of religion has at times been a driving force behind conflict violence and Conquest while aliens could easily have no religion whatsoever and be completely unfamiliar with the concept they might also easily have one and if were any indicator they might want to spread it no matter the cost number two Von noyman fuel this one requires a chance encounter with a vanoyan probe with entirely different intentions than Conquest that could spell Doom for the entire solar system worse there would be no conscious thought put towards us as we are invaded and eradicated it's if someone else has lost control of their Von noyman probes arriving in our solar system one might simply start self-replicating using all available materials including Earth and us to reach its goal of exhausting the solar system and moving on thankfully this does not appear to have happened in the Milky Way we don't see things inexplicably disappearing regularly in our telescopes a good thing to be sure number one free the machines this final possibility is perhaps the most frightening of all since it involves aliens of technological origin rather than biological trying to read the mind of a living machine is complex and something we may have to do someday with our ever advancing artificial intelligences there are many horror stories in sci-fi about the eventual possibilities of AI but the bottom line really is that we have no idea what an alien artificial intelligence would be motivated by how it sees the universe and what it might do if it came across earth because of this it becomes harder to know why one might invade for example it may just see us as raw materials like the V noyman probe or perhaps it has a religion and that religion does not like biology or it may simply see us as evil slave masters to be Stamped Out and subjugated ourselves we have a tendency to be biased when it comes to life in the universe we can easily Envision the predator or the aliens of Isaac azimoff or Douglas Adams easily because they are biological and generally do biological things like hunt and we can even empathize with them as in the case of ET but to do that with a machine you usually have to make it act biological Mr Data comes to mind here who spent most of his time wishing was more human in other words it's easier to understand a thinking machine if it acts human when it doesn't things get more murky but what if a machine civilization is similarly biased to it it may see us at some point in the future is holding down our Advanced artificial intelligence say we never develop machine Consciousness out of a sense of Ethics or self-preservation would that be an Abomination to an intelligent alien machine would that be akin to the abhorent idea of us creating an inferior biological slave race would that be justification to invade would it see it as a moral imperative I hope for our sake we never find out thanks for listening I'm futurist and science fiction author John Michael godier currently worried about a plant-based intelligence invading It's A Hard Sell that intelligence could ever develop an alien plant analoges but if it did and they found our produce and salad dressing sections in the grocery store we're in some trouble and be sure to check out my books both on electronic and plant-based mediums at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for regular in-depth Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live it's not over yet join me as we continue to travel through the cosmos think of this video as a Prelude to something else to celebrate this Channel having passed 10,000 subscribers and indeed growing by 50% in a month and a half I'm in the process of making a long form video about a subject that I've been thinking a lot about lately it's the notion that a communication contained in an alien radio transmission may be very different from the expected hello you are not alone expect that video soon but in the course of researching that material I came across a very old idea that I'd heard before but I've always found myself skeptical as to whether any of the variations of it could actually happen but it does lie within the realm of the possible especially when considering that we would probably be dealing with a civilization far more advanced than us so I merely present this material to you to ponder as food for thought it's the idea of a malicious alien radio signal this could come in several forms the first of which is computer hacking the idea that a signal could contain malicious code that could take over or damage our systems this is the one I'm most skeptical about since it would require a pretty intimate knowledge of our technology to pull it off there are problems there but even if they did have some kind of a way in and this may surprise you SEI doesn't really look at the content of a signal rather they simply look for the presence of one take the wow signal for example the infamous circled numbers that some have taken to be content actually aren't they are merely a measure of the strength of the signal I would not call that a foolproof buffer but it is a layer of protection if we did get a signal we would have ample time to think it through and be careful before trying to decode the message but even then the aliens would need some serious knowledge of our computers and software that's pretty hard to get if you're light years away studying this planet from afar even if you somehow did it say you saw a computer in a television broadcast you would still be seeing an earth computer from the past in other words the hack could come as a design for a malicious punch card and we'd be laughing at the aliens but there may be a wild card here that would be the notion of a Von noyman brace wall probe hiding within the star system silently studying us and gathering information until it's time to hack us what an alien hacker probe hiding in the solar system could do is an unknown and I leave that up to the programmers and Security Experts to ponder though I think I'd worry more about such a thing sending this civilization back to the Stone Age by emitting an EMP which would be the ultimate in malicious SE signals and a real shame if that were the first signal we received from an alien civilization but there's another possibility for a different type of malicious SE signal plans for a doomsday device this idea goes back decades in sci-fi including stanisa lm's novel his master's voice the basic idea is that we receive a set of instructions to build something as in lm's novel or contact we think it's one thing but it ends up being a device that annihilates us I find this scenario hard to swallow as I suspect that no one on this planet will just build a thing without knowing what it does first but a variation of this might be more of a concern say the aliens simply transmit open plans for advanced Weaponry under some false pretense say they tell us that there is an all powerful Advanced machine civilization lurking in the Galaxy that we need to protect ourselves against in that scenario the aliens might bet that with all all that Weaponry around it would be only a matter of time before we destroyed ourselves the last possibility is a malicious computer virus this faces many of the same problems of alien hacking creating any sort of really targeted dangerous virus would need a lot of knowledge of Earth computer systems but then again against our best efforts computer viruses persist to this day but within this thinking there lies another rather terrifying possibility that possibility is an outof control virus unintentionally sent To Us by an infected alien civilization say this virus is artificially intelligent and it infects the computer and communication systems of alien civilizations in order to replicate and spread itself throughout the Galaxy perhaps the first friendly communication we receive from an alien civilization is antivirus software thanks for listening I'm futurist in science fiction author John Michael goder clearly having spent Halloween spooking myself writing the script and eating leftover candy and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for regular in-depth Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live in celebration of this channel reaching and then significantly blasting past 10,000 subscribers here is a long form video made in thanks to the viewers of this channel none of this would have been possible without your support thanks very much to all of you for that and a special shout out to my patreon folks and of course my readers I continue to have a blast doing all of this and get up every day excited to make new videos I will continue continue to do so for years to come and now without further Ado here are 10 set messages that we may not want to receive the idea that alien civilizations could contact us using electromagnetic waves is not a new one Nica Tesla for example was convinced that he was receiving alien Transmissions from Mars in the early days of radio another was the initial misidentification of pulsars as alien signal beacons but only after we realized the true extent of how useful radio communication is did undertake a serious attempt at searching for signals of alien origin in 1959 jepi konei and Philip Morrison proposed a method for searching the skies for those signals their seminal article on the subject and excerpt linked below underlies the general approach said he takes even to this day in some respects but in all this time after Decades of searching no unambiguous alien signal has ever been identified while there have been tantalizing signals none of them repeated or at least in such a way that equipment glitches and other problems could be ruled out repeating signals remain Si's Chief rule after all you can study something that repeats one-offs not so much and the scientific evidence bar for alien civilizations remains High reasonably so you don't want to announce that you found an alien civilization only to find out later that it wasn't one but there may be other reasons why we have not detected an alien signal yet these include that we just aren't very good at looking for them and we're missing something or there is a fundamental flaw in our reasoning that alien signals aren't likely to repeat or even that intelligence in the universe is simply so rare that there is no one close enough to pick up it could even be that aliens may only use strong radio signals for a short time in their history before employing different techniques for communications but regardless there may come a time where an unambiguous signal of some type is picked up and its characteristics are such that it can have no other origin than an alien civilization this signal could take many hypothetical forms but for this video we'll assume that it will be radio we culturally tend to expect that what we would find in radio astronomy is what Carl Sean once advanced in his novel contact and the subsequent movie of the same name that is that we will find some huge powerful radio Beacon counting off prime numbers in the galactic equivalent of shouting hello but there is no guarantee of this in fact detecting alien radio could just as easily be Almost Boring this is because some of the easiest signals to detect due to their power aren't all that interesting it might be simple radar as aliens map the asteroids in their solar system which would contain no content and incidentally remains one of the more realistic ways a close by alien civilization might discover us while this would all prove the existence of intelligent life in the universe it would probably not last long in the new cycle simply because there wouldn't be much available information about the aliens and only after years of study using a variety of instruments might bits and pieces be gleaned but there is another side to this coin it could also be an intentional message such as hello or it might say something else now in this analysis I omit one glaring problem with decoding alien signals deciphering the content of an alien transmission would be Beyond difficult even if they used language as we know it of which there is no guarantee that language would have no commonality whatsoever with any of our own languages this is a serious problem alien is alien and incomprehensible is perhaps too weak of a word to describe the communications that could come it could be easier to communicate with a dolphin than an alien with a dolphin you're at least from the same Planet it can at least hear you since it has ears it also has a brain that can comprehend what you're saying at least somewhat but what of an alien that has no sense of hearing and no corresponding Language Center in the brain what if they communicate chemically daunting indeed but all is not lost the general assumption here has always been that at least initially communication would be based on one thing we should have in common with an alien civilization of course we have never seen an alien civilization so this is an assumption but it's also a good bet that is the language of math and science after all if an alien civilization has built a radio Beacon blasting out multi-terawatt signals then they would have had to have had an understanding of how to engineer that that means they have math and science leading to a general feeling that such a signal might at least start with mathematical pulses and be broadcast at 1420 MHz the frequency at which neutral hydrogen emits radiation which would be known to alien scientists though both of these are really just starting points regardless mathematical signals do not easily allow for actual conversation so if the signal did have content other than math you can bet we'd put our best to work on it to figure out what the message says and it's not impossible that they might figure it out but for the sake of this video say after much work in deciphering we cracked an alien transmission if it didn't say hello what else might it say number 10 the get off our lawn signal I start this list with the least likely I also like it best because it's also the most humorous especially in light of the other possibilities there is always the possibility that an alien civilization May simply not want to talk to us unless they absolutely had to after all who are we to them if if we're significantly more primitive than they are we may be of zero interest in a universe full of other more interesting Advanced civilizations maybe Interstellar Communications between alien civilizations is a been there done that situation and it was a fun thing to do two billion years ago but not so much anymore as a result it's possible that as we enter an age where we may proactively try to contact alien civilizations such as with medy For Better or Worse beaming out messages after years of waiting the reply we get back might end up being please be quiet we're trying to do radio astronomy number nine we're already dead this in a way is a sort of spooky scenario as well as a sad one because it implies that there is no one left to talk to enormous omnidirectional radio beacons emitting what would be obvious to CI as alien signals have the sticking point that they would be very very energy intensive to operate especially over a long period of time energy is of course best used by the civilization generating that energy to keep their civilization going but say for a moment a civilization realizes that they are on borrow time and that they have only a short period left before inevitable Extinction despite possessing great technology it may then become a concern for them to simply be remembered by building a sort of cosmic gravestone for themselves by way of redirecting their energy to a beacon and then let it blast out the memory of their civilization for as long as the beacon lasts while this might sound sad it's entirely possible that as we explore the universe in the far future we will find evidence of dead alien civilizations whether through Remnant beacons or physical evidence I hope here that it's not the only thing we find because it might imply that all civilizations at one point or another destroy themselves number eight nihilistic aliens there are two ways to look at the universe you can look at it optimistically as a place wide open for exploration full of opportunities to learn how it works this is generally how we view it as humans though of course we have our own nihilists but overall I think we are industrious dreamers that will always strive to explore and will do so far into the future but aliens might not be so interested in it and might take the opposite view say they are a billion years more advanced say they know how the universe works they've solved all the Mysteries collectively experienced most of what can be experienced and they are just simply bored to them the universe is a Place full of monotonous things Red Dwarf after Red Dwarf nebula after nebula uninteresting species after species even upand comers like the humans or Worse they've determined that the universe is just a computer simulation and the message is just telling everyone don't bother it's just a simulation I know that sounds bad but I will add to this one thing there is recent evidence yes evidence that the universe is not a simulation and it's surprisingly strong that's for another video but if we did get a message like this maybe we can respond no it's not a simulation imagine the slow motion Interstellar argument that might result but at least it would give the nihilistic aliens something to do number seven we are frighteningly different Arthur Clark once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from Magic I suspect there is much truth to this and there is no guarantee that if we saw an alien civilization or received a signal from one that we would recognize it for what it is but once we did figure it out say it was some sort of radio signal that we had prev ly thought was completely natural but turned out not to be that would be spooky enough but say we do recognize the aliens as such but they are so different from ourselves that we might choose not to contact them even if their message seemed innocuous I can think of one specific case where this might be and that a friendly hello might not be something we want to answer this would be a machine civilization even if their message seemed nice enough if there was no evidence that biology still existed in their society then one must ask where did it go surely it is most likely that they originated with a biological civilization does that mean that the originator civilization uploaded itself what if their message says nothing about that or perhaps could it be that some artificial intelligence somehow escaped the civilization that created it perhaps it viewed That civilization as Obsolete and disposed of it perhaps it disposes of all biology viewing it as an existential threat it would seem prudent for us Biologicals to not respond to such a message unless we ourselves someday become a machine civilization number six help us another thing that might motivate a civilization to transmit using huge radio beacons would be if they were in distress say they are a victim of War and the last thing they can think to do is to ask a nearby civilization for help or worse they are stuck on a super Earth with a gravity well too great to allow them to escape the surface so they endlessly transmit in hopes of finding someone that can help this would be the ultimate and sad messages for us there is very likely nothing we could do about a distress call for centuries or longer and even then after we've traveled tens or hundreds of light years to respond would they still be alive number five stay away one of the most common signs humans put up is keep out this is very useful if you wish to avoid damage to your property or to ensure that others do not get injured on your property especially if there's something dangerous about it aliens might do the same and in that same line of thought we might just do that if we thought aliens were nearby this kind of message could take other forms than radio while a radio message warning everyone to stay away would be difficult to decipher say one runs across a star with clearly artificial concentrations of transuranic elements in its composition it may not be clear just what that means that may simply say hello as Sean and schlowsky proposed years ago paper Below in relation to finding large quantities of plutonium in a star but over overall that also says that the aliens possess Advanced nuclear physics and can make vast quantities of bombs but at the same time this may not be such a great possibility in light of new ways to create heavy elements being detected such as the recent kinova who knows what nature can produce number four we're already on our way this scenario would be most applicable to a nearby civilization that may have detected us before we found them SEI does tend to favor searching nearby star systems and if they find a civilization nearby they may already know about us say we found one say 10 light years away say the signal simply informs us that they have seen us and have dispatched probes and perhaps even ships our way for direct contact they might even tell us when they will arrive I can only imagine how the human race would react to that friendly or not number three hello we're already here this stems from a possibility first Advanced by the eminent mathematician and member of the Manhattan Project John Van noyman van noyman originally proposed the idea of a self-replicating machine that could colonize a Galaxy in a comparatively short time perhaps a few hundred thousand to a million years or so which is a blink of an eye considering the age of the solar system which is 4.5 billion years the idea was further developed by physicist and mathematician Ronald bracewell in the 1960s where he proposed that such a probe could be used for communication it would have an advantage if your goal was to contact another civilization you could hunt out suitable planets early on with your telescopes and for those that may eventually have civilizations develop on them you could send out probes at sublight speeds to reach those solar systems before intelligent life evolves then you merely wait this is something that we are looking to do in an infant form already we want to search the Galaxy for exoplanets that exhibit biomarkers such as odd oxygen and methane levels that might reveal the existence of biospheres on those worlds as our equipment improves we may well find such things what might we do then well life tends to be a long-term thing and Earth has been visible in this way to other civilizations long enough for the entire galaxy to know that this planet is habitable might we or they send out probes to candidate worlds perhaps self-replicating to make it easier as time goes on it would take a long time to get to one of those worlds but we also have no shortage of time we've got billions of years on our hands our probe May simply wake up from time to time and send back a report on that exoplanet's progress once a civilization develops and reaches a certain stage of advancement our probe could awaken and make direct contact it could take thousands of years for us to receive the information but for a fully natural candidate world that isn't that much time nor is it to a technologically advanced civilization as we will someday be especially if our technology allows us to alter our perception of time to a civilization that perceives a thousand years as a blink of an eye time and distance and long distance communication take on a different meaning this sort of technology is in our future but perhaps not that far in our future it's something conceivable in hundreds of years rather than thousands and that's the problem the Galaxy is far older than our solar system and it's easily conceivable that a civilization may have Arisen somewhere millions or even billions of years before we did that leaves them plenty of time to have constructed and distributed brace wall on nyman probes throughout the Galaxy and even stationed one in our own solar system in fact multiple civilizations may have done this and if these types of probes are present in our solar system they would be Beyond difficult to find until they actually transmit it's anyone's guess what they might transmit or do but it remains within the possible that there could be sleeping probes like Arthur Clark's monolith on the moon awaiting us to reach a certain level of development and the first message we receive from an alien civilization May amount to hello we are very close number two submit this is perhaps the most sci-fi of our possibilities and does remind one of you will be assimilated and I would think it very unlikely to happen if for no other reason than the Galaxy appears to have no shortage of free real estate and resources there simply doesn't appear to be any reason for conflict or strong arming but we don't know so I merely present this as a scenario say we received a signal say it we're from light years away and that when decrypted as nearly as we can tell says only one word this might make sense simple messages should perhaps be the easiest to understand hand and perhaps it is accompanied by mathematical and scientific signals and maybe that allows us to reconstruct a picture of some type pictures have been Advanced as the easiest way for alien civilizations including us to talk to other aliens but what if the meaning or statement is clear and it simply tells us to submit it is unlikely that we would take that command well after all they are light years away and maybe too far away to know we were even here say the message is preemptive to any civilization that may form up up if the aliens were past 100 light years or so there would be little indication that an industrial civilization were living on this world we might make a last Stitch effort to hide or appear as though we destroyed ourselves early on there are ways that we could hide our presence see my video on that in the end screen so we would likely do one of two things we would either ignore the signal or respond in the negative in some way but what if there were a brace wall probe from the same civilization hiding in the solar system that had been waiting to see how we resp respond say it wakes up at the detection of the first hydrogen bomb test on Earth or say it had a head start having watched from afar all of human history and had already deciphered our languages and knew we had found the distant signal Beacon the moment we respond in the negative or choose to do nothing it repeats perhaps in an earth language that simple one-word message again submit and then it enters orbit and points the weapons say hello to our new artificially intelligent Overlord it gets even scarier if if you wonder what might happen if the civilization that sent it had gone extinct and the solution to the firmy Paradox is that all civilizations are kept hostage by the self-replicating machines of long dead civilizations number one a warning the Galaxy is still a largely unknown place and within the realm of hard science fiction one could imagine any number of scenarios where the Galaxy is already colonized in fact it could be and we're just somehow missing it but colonized by what and that's where it gets interesting because we have absolutely no idea but there is one aspect of the Galaxy that opens up a scenario vast though it is the Milky Way and Andromeda which we will merge with in the future ultimately have only finite resources say the first civilization to colonize protects the resources of the Galaxy for use in keeping themselves alive long into the far future when the Universe goes dark this may mean that any competition that may arise must be eliminated or subjugated say another civilization exists that knows of this Galactic hoarder threat and they somehow survived encountering it perhaps they were equally as advanced as the hoarders in such a case the second civilization may choose to send out messages warning anyone that might receive them to arm themselves and fortify their planet and above all be ready for trouble when venturing out into the universe granted I think this scenario is unlikely mainly because Earth would have probably been wiped clean or subjugated by now but if we ever did receive such a sign signal it's probably the one message we should pay closest attention to and do our best to determine what the threat is before we encounter it but say it encountered us first as a bonus related to all of the Von noyman bracewell scenarios comes the possibility that the First Signal we get from an alien civilization is an EMP it's hard to call this one a message because it would contain no content but if one interpreted it broadly as a message it would say welcome back to the Stone Age this would be a probe wakes up at the first sign of advancing technology such as how our planet appears right now and shoots off EMP weapons such as air bursting nuclear warheads and in turn keeps us on the sidelines of the Galaxy for as long as the enemy civilization sees fit not a nice thought but in reality all of these scenarios are probably pretty unlikely once again due to the sheer amount of free real estate in this galaxy I suspect that the First Signal we will receive will be a friendly hello and then a slow cultural exchange that could endure for billions of years perhaps aliens will see intelligent life as precious and do everything they can to help out budding cultures and this list was by no means comprehensive there are many other scenarios such as a group of philosopher aliens that simply ask what's our take on the why are we he question or it might be odd in a Douglas Adams sort of way and the aliens simply tell us that they love us and then we wish we hadn't contacted them because they are sort of clingy and an overall drag to talk to so if anyone can think of any other potential messages we might receive from an alien civilization post them in the comments below thanks for listening I am futurist in science fiction author John Michael godier currently addressing the critics of my profile photo saying that I look like I'm about to come at you with an axe I have a sleepy personality and that's actually my Happy Coffee awake face without the coffee not so good so I take this chance to officially unveil my new Channel logo look for it in future video notifications and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for regular in-depth Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live in 1964 astronomer Nikolai CEF proposed a classification system of technological civilizations applicable to both ourselves and other civilizations that may be present in the universe this classification system originally featuring three categories has since been unofficially expanded to cover hypothetical super civilizations that may be possible along with our own sort of sad classification of type zero or as Sean put it type 0.7 cev's thinking for the system is straightforward if you assume that energy consumption will grow for an advancing civilization then they will seek to generate more energy to satisfy that need the scale is entirely hypothetical given that we've never seen an advanced alien civilization and may not reflect how advanced civilizations actually behave this is only if they use energy like we do that's somewhat of a big assumption and may represent an Achilles heel for the kardashev scale more on that in a minute cardash shev's original scale starts with a type one civilization this is a civilization that can use and store most of the energy available to a planet specifically that coming from its Sun we're not to this level yet which is why we rank at type zero we still use fossil fuels largely and do not have a good method of harnessing and storing all of the energy forms available to us especially that coming from the Sun as we progress and finally develop Fusion Energy and better methods of harnessing geothermal and solar energy we will begin to make that transition this should happen over the next few hundred years though should we hit a technological singularity it would probably be sooner type 2 status is a ways off for us no matter what this is a civilization that can harness the entire energy generation potential of their star one way to do this is a Dyson Sphere or a swarm that can allow you to harvest most of the energy the star itself produces by encasing it or swarming it with energy collectors type three is a civilization that not only can do that with a single star but with most of the stars in an entire galaxy kardashev ended the scale there but some sents have suggested two other levels may be possible and this is where it gets weird a type four civilization would be able to harness the power power of an entire universe in 2003 zultan galanti published a paper that detailed what one of these super civilizations might be like links in citations to all papers mentioned in the description below this also gets into the much deeper subject of if we were looking at aliens would we know we were looking at aliens recognition is a serious enough problem for types 1 through three but far worse for four and above and here's why a number of scientists over the years have pointed out that the expectation to find alien Dyson swarms and radio beacons in space are due to a cultural bias we might build those things but aliens may not bi penkin pointed out that when we search for alien life we really don't have a choice but to hope that we find an earthlike one so that we can comprehend it or as Stannis LM pointed out that problem may be even more mundane he put it in these terms you could measure someone's sugar levels in their bodily fluids and if you know that higher levels indicate that someone recently ate a large amount of sweets then you would know that you were seeing an artificial effect however if you didn't know that higher levels indicated anything out of the ordinary you would only see sugars that are indistinguishable from those in nature and you'd have no idea that anything was a Miss applied to exobiology this would be if the activities of an alien civilization were nearly identical to a known natural phenomenon this is a simplification but it hammers the point home if you don't know the ground rules that govern what you're looking at then you may miss it and that's the problem with a type four civilization as galant's paper shows you probably wouldn't recognize a type four civilization because you've got nothing to compare it to at that level of sheer power to manipulate something in this case the universe itself what may appear natural to us as part of the fabric and behavior of the universe may actually be artificial and produced by a super civilization the final class would be a type five which would be a super civilization that controlled the power of multiple universes little to nothing can be said of this class of civilization only that they would be incomprehensibly powerful transun Universal and so far Advanced that any trace of them is unlikely to be recognized since they would set all the ground rules this particular class of civilization however would have implications on simulation Theory see my video on this channel for more on that there have been many other proposed modifications to the kardashev scale and some question as to whether energy is really a factor at all civilizations may do the opposite of what we expect and miniaturize and use very little energy kardashev believed that the need for communication would drive the use of energy but nothing says a civilization would want to communicate or even care about the Universe At Large also possible are methods of communication that we cannot yet foresee with our current understanding of physics the bottom line is that until we actually see an advanced civilization or become one ourselves all we can really do is hypothesize but one thing remains curious other than our own 7 rating on the carterv scale we've never seen any evidence of any of the other classes being present in the universe thanks for listening I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael godier currently classing my house as three on the carterv scale as I just bought a new smart TV and I can't figure out how to use it and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for regular in-depth Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live our universe is full of mysterious phenomena that often make physicists scratch their heads I like to cover those topics on this channel usually in the form of weird stars or interesting planets in other words large objects but Mysteries and science can also come in small packages this particular one being a single Atomic nucleus but it wasn't just any nucleus this one hit a detector traveling at 99% followed by 219 the speed of light detected on October 15th 1991 at a detector operated by the University of Utah the extreme energy of this particle or ultra high energy cosmic ray had the kinetic energy equivalent to a baseball traveling at 60 MPH that's a single Atomic nucleus with that power the energy of this particle shocked scientists at the time and to this day it's unclear just what could accelerate a particle of matter to that kind of speed since then other particles with similar energies have been detected though they remain rare and oddly enough recent Studies have suggested that the particles May originate from a certain area within the constellation of Ursa Major and there's also evidence that unlike most cosmic rays which tend to be made up of protons or helium nuclei these high energy ones may in fact be iron nuclei which adds to the mystery normal cosmic rays can be created in a number of different environments perhaps most notably in supernovas and they can even occasionally include antimatter particles such as antiprotons and positrons but with ultra high energy cosmic rays the hypothesized sources include spinning black holes launching them or pulsars or neutron stars no one knows for sure but two hypotheses for the origin of these particles are noteworthy because they involve abnormal states of matter the first weirdness involves Dark Matter widely seen as one of the biggest Unsolved Mysteries of the universe the abilities and properties of dark matter are not well understood outside of the effects of its gravity on the normal matter of the universe in a paper by Yuri Pavlov and Andre grib Link in the description below they suggest that there is a method for dark matter to Decay and result in the creation of these high energy cosmic rays dark matter is weekly interactive usually the paper describes a a process where a heavy particle of dark matter can Decay into two virtual particles which can interact with normal matter if these particles are near a black hole one can fall into the black hole and the other ejected out where it interacts with normal matter falling into the black hole this could result in a high energy proton ejected that may be consistent with a high energy cosmic ray but in the end the idea suffers from anything related to the subject of dark matter we just don't know what the stuff is or in general all the ins and outs of how it works and speaking of not knowing how a form of matter really works brings us to the second option which has never been seen only theorized it's called Strange Matter this really deals with two forms of abnormal matter that may be present in neutron stars a neutron star has gravity so great that normal Atomic bonds aren't possible leaving essentially a big ball of densely packed neutrons hence the term neutron star but there may be another state where the gravity is sufficient for the neutrons to break down into their constituent quarks creating Quark matter the transition or combustion of a neutron star into a quirk star is one possible source for the high energy cosmic rays as it combusts the neutron stars magnetic field would collapse releasing particles at very high energies that might account for the Rarity of high energy cosmic rays but again this is a mechanism that isn't well understood and the science of Strange Matter is still developing in the end the origin of these kinds of cosmic rays will likely be mysterious for a long time all of the possible mechanisms for creating them are at the Forefront of theoretical physics and astronomy but the idea that something in this universe can accelerate a particle of matter to energies 40 million times greater than anything we can do in a particle accelerator is a humbling thought indeed thanks for listening I am science fiction author futurist and inventor of the anti donut John Michael godier Arthur C Clark got to be the inventor of the communication satellite I get the anti jelly and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for regular in-depth Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live I often talk about solutions to the fmy Paradox on this channel and how we might detect alien civilizations some of those Solutions simply say that we're looking in the wrong place this story drives that idea home and is noteworthy in both its Simplicity and its elegance and the fact that we should if we look be able to determine if this is a viable way for aliens to communicate using fairly straightforward means one of the problems with the radio spectrum is that it's still made up of photons like visible light and various frequencies can be absorbed by intervening material it's long been stated that while radio is useful to us at least right now it may not be seen that way by Advanced alien species and may be largely abandoned by civilization at some point in their development abandoning it may actually be a common sense thing to do in light that there is one one particle in this universe that even the largest densest Interstellar Cloud can't stop if you're using beams of them for communication or navigation that particle is the neutrino the reason neutrinos rarely interact with anything is because they have near zero mass and a neutral charge they just pass right through anything in their way most of the time that communication Advantage is compounded by the fact that they can travel at very close to the speed of light despite rarely interacting this makes them potentially ideal for pulse code Communications the double-edged sword disadvantage is that their lack of interaction makes them hard to detect on the receiving end you need huge detectors to do it we've built detectors like this though typically it's a volume of material such as a huge tank of water buried deep inside the earth in order to filter out other particles like cosmic rays occasionally a neutrino weakly interacts with the detector and produces an electron or a muon in the water along with a flash of cherin cough radi ation that's the Eerie blue light that you see emanating from this nuclear reactor in 1977 a group of scientists led by aw Saints pointed out that an experiment being done at fmy lab could be used to send pulse messages this has been done since proving that you can indeed use neutrinos for pulse Communications while neutrino Communications are not practical or very useful for us right now that may not be the case for an advanced alien civilization wishing to communicate through interstellar clouds neutrinos are complicated there are different flavors and energies and certain variations of those would have no known natural source so could be identified as artificial in origin but there are other ways to use neutrinos to communicate an interesting suggestion made by nutrino physicist John learned and colleagues linked to the paper below is that an alien civilization could modify a star to serve as an omnidirectional Optical Beacon the idea is to use a neutrino beam to modify the output of a ciid variable star these stars are extremely useful to astronomers first studied by Henryetta levit and subsequently used by Hubble and Slifer to determine that the universe is expanding seids are extremely predictable in their variation and brightness and are of major use in determining distances in the universe alien astronomers would deduce that other alien astronomers such as humans would be looking closely at cied variables so if your goal is to say hello then you can modify such a star as pulsing in a way that doesn't current nature one way to hypothetically do this is subject the star to powerful pulses of neutrinos aimed straight at the star's core interestingly this effect may be detectable in Old Sky surveys and there is in fact a candidate star for this a separate video on that start to come there are numerous Sky surveys stretching back a century that could be combed for oddly behaving seads but there are other options for detecting alien nutrino magic in a paper from earlier this year by efim fishbach and John T Grunwald links and citations to all papers mentioned in this video in the description below for those that like to dig deep they detail other telltale signs that could indicate alien activity depending on what sorts of neutrino interactions are seen if an alien civilization wants to announce their presence using neutrinos for example they could simply pulse out prime numbers contact style if they're using nuclear fusion or fision for that matter that would also produce a distinctive signature that should be detected the paper also makes an interesting point if we built detectors to look for these signals they would have another seriously handy practical use they could be used to predict solar storms see my video on this channel about the Carrington event for information on why we should probably do that but neutrinos might also serve another useful purpose for a space fairing civilization they might be good for synchronizing navigation clocks clocks are useful in navigation in fact John Harrison revolutionized Oceanic navigation in the 18th century simply by inventing and refining a clock that would remain accurate on a rolling ship accuracy was everything and in space that may also be the case and neutrinos due to their non- interactivity might be better suited to it over electromagnetic waves I think it would be interesting and perhaps poetic to find nutrino Communications this is a ridiculously speculative question but what happens if we start searching for neutrino signals only to find our galaxy lit up up with them after spending all this time looking for signals that we produce as a civilization such as radio rather than things more advanced civilizations might produce perhaps neutrinos just a thought thanks for listening I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael godier currently with a song stuck in my head after writing this script looking for love in all the wrong places and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for regular in-depth Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live in celebration of this channel reaching and surpassing 5,000 subscribers here is a long form video made in thanks to the subscribers of this channel for your continued support I continued to be surprised at the growth of this Channel and couldn't have done this without all of you many thanks and onward we go I'm still excited and having a blast researching and making my videos and I look forward to many more years of telling you about the cool ideas and stories that I come across within the world of science especially astronomy and ultimately our progress towards answering the question of are we alone it's one of the biggest questions in the universe from our perspective and I really don't think we're all that far from answering it definitively I believe that within 20 years there is a good chance that we'll finally know the answer to the question but when discussing seti and searching for alien radio signals in particular there has always been a kind of elephant in the room detection is a two-way street and the Elephant is whether they can see us we know that it should be POS possible for us to detect alien radio signals here on Earth or in fact all sorts of Bio signatures that point to life so long as the signals are strong enough this goes both ways in theory alien civilizations should be able to detect us as well but in practice this process is a bit trickier it really depends on what equipment that alien race has and how close they are to us in space and the same rules apply for us when looking for them the one thing an alien race would know however assuming that they have powerful telescopes a bit bigger than what we have now is that Earth hosts life life on Earth has a long history and has been affecting the composition of the atmosphere for billions of years and by studying Earth's atmosphere anyone in the Milky Way that's looking would see our atmosphere as it was at various stages in the not too distant past our galaxy is only about 100,000 light years in diameter so they would not see our planet as it was during the time of the dinosaurs but rather much more recently depending on their distance from us this is one of those rare cases in our universe where the distances do not seem so vast as far as geologic time scales go but even still it would be very difficult to detect Earth from the other side of the Milky Way for a number of reasons but for those that can detect as the easiest biomarker for an alien civilization to see is our oxygen in the form of o2 and to a lesser extent ozone while oxygen is not a dead ringer for the presence of life on a planet it can be abiotically created we do have an awful lot of it an abnormal amount they would also see our water vapor and taken with the oxygen that would indicate to them that complex life could exist here with a sufficiently large telescope they would in turn see CH4 methane with those three markers taken together they could reasonably infer that life was the probable source for those gases but what else could they know in a paper by Edward W schweiterman and colleagues links to all papers mentioned in this video in the description below they review all currently known bi markers that we can search for to determine if an exoplanet hosts life it's worth noting here in the authors of the paper stated prominently that these biomarkers are for our class of organic water-based life there may well be alternative biochemistries that would have different markers but we don't yet have a clear picture of how those life forms might work and if such chemistries could ever result in intelligence but in regards to an alien civilization looking at us even if they were not carbon based and instead based on say silicon if they could build telescopes and spectrographs they would have the scientific capability to know of carbons complex chemistry and suspect that water and Organics both common in the universe can lead to life organically based alien life similar to us would already know based on themselves many other potential biomarkers can be seen on this world one example is variations and carbon dioxide levels that occur seasonally as vegetation Cycles another would be the many other Gases such as nitrous oxide and methyl chloride that while they might individually be created abiotically when you take them as a whole life becomes the likely source for the profile they might also see direct reflectance from our vegetation in the near infrared searching exoplanets for this bio signature is covered in a 2005 paper by Sarah Seager and colleagues and the technique could equally be used by an alien civilization looking at Earth providing they know what plant life is but even if they don't they might still see that some strangeness is happening with this world in the near infrared but what of detecting our civilization through our technological markers there are quite a few of these and the more developed we become the more important some of them will be as far as alien spotting us such as our waste heat when we start doing things like building Dyson swarms that eventually would be visible at much greater distances than anything we're doing now but as we are right now there are several major technological markers that we produce before we get to those it's worth pointing out that distance is key for aliens to detect us we've only been technologically visible in a major way for about a century give or take hypothetically aliens within 100 light years might see the signatures of our technology but they would see it as it was in the past if they are close say proximo B hosts a civilization for example then they would see us how we were a bit over 4 years ago a civilization at 50 light years would see us as we were 50 years ago and so on but further out than about 100 light years or so using any practical means we become essentially undetectable and the further you go from there the harder it becomes to detect and study Earth at all within a 100 L years there are two main markers that aliens might detect and a few peripheral ones firstly is Radio we've been broadcasting radio waves for about a century give or take aliens within a 100 Lighty years from Earth in theory might pick those Transmissions up depending on what equipment they have but as a matter of practicality they might not the reason for this is that they would need some serious equipment to do it if we took our own current equipment out to proximus centuri and looked at Earth we would not be able to see the vast majority of our own radio signals our television and radio stations are simply too weak the best chance would probably be radar and even then the chances are slim we have in the past however beamed out signals that were powerful enough particularly the famous aasbo signal but the problem is that to see that signal the aliens would have to be looking at just the right time to catch it and they would have no idea it was coming but that's just judging things by our own current radio capabilities they will no doubt get better and more sensitive but at the same time the signals we emit are tending to get weaker as we develop but an alien civilization that has much bigger radio antennas than ours located close enough to us might just be able to detect Us in an article Seth showstack linked below notes that evidence of our existence has already reached about 15 ,000 star systems and if a civilization had a big enough antenna he States for example one the size of Chicago or may use gravitational lensing to look for us they might just see radio evidence of us the second main way an alien civilization might detect us is lesser known radio signals have always been the assumed way that aliens might pick us up but there's another we also produce a very unnatural form of visible light that if someone had sensitive enough instruments to detect it and they would need to be seriously sensitive they would know that intelligent life was the only cause it's our street lights on Earth's night side in a paper by Abraham lobe and Edwin Turner they suggest ways that we might search for other civilizations by focusing on their artificial light emissions and by extension how other civilizations might look at ours by looking at the night side of an exoplanet if there is artificial illumination present it would be different enough to be distinguishable from reflected natural light from the planet star the authors note that we currently could detect Earth level artificial illumination only within our solar system if there's someone hiding out on a Kyper belt object we can detect their street lights but no further than that with current equipment But as time goes on our capabilities will grow so at some point Optical set searching for the lights of civilizations should become viable if it's possible for us then it's possible for aliens as well another more novel way aliens might detect us are concentrations of industrial chemicals in our atmosphere in 2014 paper by Henry Lyn and colleagues they detailed that we might look for refrigerants and exoplanet atmospheres to detect alien civilizations this would be chemicals like cfc's the aliens could likewise do the same with us if they were close enough and see evidence of very long persistent chemicals such as those collectively known as freon in addition to signaling active industrial processes on a world the presence of these kinds of chemicals could actually serve as a kind of indicator if you see the longer lived ones it could mean that the civilization advanced past the use of those chemicals or died out if you see the shorter lived ones you would know that the civilization was active maybe an alien civilization nearby has the capability to detect our radar or see our street lights or chemicals or perhaps one that is not yet close enough to receive our signals might someday pick us up but I would speculate that it's pretty unlikely that anyone has and the further away an alien civilization is the harder it will be to detect us eventually you just get so distant that you can't physically construct an instrument large enough for the task this undetectability could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective but what it does tell us is that a civilization at our level of development is very hard to see at a distance a more advanced civilization should be easier for us to spot and if they've been around a long time they would be detectable over greater distances but it's really not something that is so easy as many might think but while this may sound discouraging to those hoping for for a contact type of numerical signal to come through radio signals are not the only way an alien civilization might communicate with us in fact it may not even be the most likely way we simply don't know that same long period of Earth's atmosphere being altered by the presence of life also allows for another type of detection of us and subsequent communication with an alien species and this one would be far more direct and real time than radio signals traveling long distance at the speed of light in the distant past someone in the Milky Way may have seen our oxygen atmosphere long before we evolved they may have thought long term and sent out a probe a type called a brace wall probe at sublight speeds it might have taken 50,000 years to get here or a similarly long time but the fact is anyone wishing to study inhabited planets directly merely has to have good engineering and a whole lot of patience we view time in terms of human lifespans which are short but ever increasing and there's nothing saying that they won't continue to increase until we live for thousands of years time and distance become less daunting in that case Jason Wright of Penn State discusses this very thing in a recent paper link below that points out that our solar system is ridiculously old far older than our species to the tune of billions of years it's been visible for a long time to the entire galaxy and there's been more than sufficient time for someone to send a probe maybe multiple species of zent probes doing so may make even more sense than any other form of interstellar communication because while it takes time it's it's at least Direct on one end and someday it may well wake up and establish contact finding such a probe before then would be a needle in a haast stack however perhaps even harder than detecting a radio signal with our current capabilities we aren't likely to discover it should it be there and of course there are always going to be engineering questions extreme age issues self-repair questions and so on with any sort of ancient brace wall type probe time is not kind to much of anything so the aliens would need to have solved those concerns but an advanced civilization long ago might have done that remember the universe itself is even older than the solar system and there could be civilizations out there that are many billions of years old again we don't know and even finding a dead probe would be useful we ourselves have fixed plaques to our probes in case aliens ever run across them any active probe would have certainly watched us evolve and develop in addition to collecting data on Earth perhaps they've enclosed a copy of something like science Fiction's encyclopedia galactic edition of 10 million years ago that tells us the secrets of the Galaxy and the civilization that sent the probe the information would be outdated necessarily but information from an ancient civilization would still be excellent information indeed and after enough time has passed they too will get word from their probe that humankind has achieved civilization and they can update their encyclopedia to include us but there is one last unfortunate way that we might detect an alien civilization or they might detect us this would be if we or they destroy ourselves in a paper by Adam Stevens and colleagues they detail several ways in which we might detect alien civilizations that have recently destroyed themselves the rules on that kind of a detection also apply to us and while it may be a depressing way to detect an alien civilization it's still a scientifically legitimate one I'm a positivist and I like to think that our first detection of an alien civilization will be an amazing experience or it may even be a mysterious experience such as the detection of some civilization Dyson swarm but with no other information that said civilizations probably do destroy themselves so we should know what to look for the first way is through the detection of a nuclear war and its aftermath nukes produce a distinctive double flash of gamma rays in their detonation in fact when Gamay bursts were first discovered one of the possibilities on the table for their origin was alien nuclear testing this isn't automatically a bad thing actually there are ideas out there on how to push a spacecraft to Great speeds using hydrogen bombs as the propulsion method subsequent observation of grbs ruled that out however and those things are far more powerful than any conceivable artificial detonation but a big enough nuclear war itself should be visible at a distance if Aliens destroy themselves provided that they are seriously armed to the teeth if we did it however surprisingly it would probably not be detectable very far out due to reductions in us and Russian nuclear arsenals over the years at atmospheric effects of such a war on Earth would be visible however at least for a short time nuclear war kicks up a lot of dust and nuclear weapons produce a lot of weird ionization of the gases that make up the Earth's atmosphere it's worth noting here just how powerful the effects of these weapons can be on a planet the following series of pictures are from a nuclear test done by the United States called starfish Prime in 1962 a hydrogen bomb was detonated in space and it caused strange bright auroras along with an unexpectedly power powerful EMP that knocked out power stations in Hawaii and wreak lots of weirdness on the Earth's magnetic field that test was probably not the best idea and did have some long lasting effects in fact it damaged a significant portion of the satellites in orbit in those days that said the entire solar system saw that one and maybe further out did too though the effects of a nuclear war anywhere it might happen in the universe would be pretty shortlived and we or the aliens would have to happen to be looking at just the right time to see most of those effects that's statistically pretty unlikely but nuclear weapons aren't the only apocalypse that would leave a detectable Mark the paper continues to detail the effects of biological warfare in particular if that Warfare was cross species and Beyond devastating to an inhabited planet's biosphere specifically assuming a world has anerobic bacteria distinctive solely biotic chemicals would be produced by the decay of biomatter I.E corpses and would be detectable in a spectrum for time if you detect it it means life was recently there but much of it may no longer be there thankfully at least as far as what is public no one on earth has ever developed this level of biological weaponry and in fact biological weapons on Earth are pretty limited on purpose and as far as we know we can't destroy ourselves with what we have hopefully cool heads will continue to Prevail in this matter but an alien civilization might not be so restrained but again this sort of Bio signature would be very shortlived and for us to see it with an exoplanet we just have to happen to be looking at it at just the right time but there is one last possibility that we might see with an alien civilization that they would not see with us since this technology is still largely only hypothetical here it's the gray goo or molecular nanot technology this could be if the engineering pans out one of the most potent weapons in the universe the idea is to create a self-replicating nano device that consumes matter to create copies of itself it can do so on such a scale exponentially reproducing until it consumes a planet or at least a large part of one the author suggest that this techn signature would be visible for a much longer period than the others on the scale of thousands of years but I suspect that we won't see much in the way of apocalyptic markers in our search of the universe and I don't think anyone will see them with us or at least I hope so but in the end Earth is not really all that detectable to aliens and aliens at our level of development would not be all that detectable to us more advanced species would be but there doesn't seem to be one of those close by so I would imagine it's a good bet that no one knows that we're here yet thanks for listening I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael godier currently eyeing my wireless Ruder suspiciously and wondering what it's telling the aliens loose lips SN ships and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for regular in-depth Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live the human race has looked out into the night sky for decades with our radio telescopes hoping to find signs of life and while that search is ongoing we have yet to see anything for all intents and purposes our universe appears quiet and uninhabited by other technologically advanced civilizations this could change at any moment all we need to do is discover evidence of one other sensient species to answer many of our questions about life in the universe but until that happens we must entertain other possibilities to explain this apparent lack of intell ENT life one of the possibilities that we face is that intelligent alien races do not advertise themselves and indeed May hide their existence from us known as the zoo hypothesis it is one of the plethora of hypotheses that offer answers to the firy Paradox and it also happens to be among the spookiest the fmy Paradox formulated by physicist en rco fery and Michael Hart is very simple there are billions of stable stars in our universe and many of them are far older than our own there's also a high probability that some of these Stars host earthlike planets a notion that has only been strengthened in recent years by the discovery of numerous exoplanets likewise many of those are going to be far older than Earth some of those planets would presumably develop life like ours that eventually achieves intelligence here I have a sticking point in my opinion I think that ultimately we may well find that microbial life is common in the universe complex life like our plants and animals is scarce and intelligent life is incredibly rare but I digress assuming that civilizations are relatively common then some of those will develop Interstellar travel here I have another sticking point I'm not sure that an advanced civilization would care about Interstellar travel this relates to simulation Theory the notion that our universe is a computer simulation of some sort I covered that theory in my video is the universe real or is it a computer simulation on this channel and whether it's actually the case is anyone's guess though it does appear to be scientifically testable but let's say that the universe is a computer simulation as a thought experiment if a civilization concluded that it is a simulation then they may also conclude that there is no point to messing around with the universe in such a nihilistic scenario why not Center your Society on Pleasure and descend into virtual reality Utopias that are better than our universe think about the Matrix only as a Utopia though I suppose agent Smith had a point when he said in the films that they actually did initially try to create a Utopia but no one was happy but it's worth noting that we ourselves are striving for interplanetary exploration and eventually Interstellar travel our behavior is all we can study for now and that does count for something given that habitable planets exist and they eventually become inhabited and may have done so long before Earth did and those inhabitants eventually spread out into the universe then the my Paradox notes that the entire galaxy can be explored at sublight speeds in only a few million years so why don't we see evidence of alien civilizations everywhere this brings us to the zoo hypothesis the idea here is that aliens hide themselves from us either permanently or will someday reveal themselves and make contact when we've reached a sufficient level of technological and Social Development this may make sense if the universe is a hostile Place full of aggressive species and you're basic nature would be aggressive in some way if you're out boldly exploring the Galaxy then perhaps it's safer to hide and not contact anyone in this scenario Advanced civilizations simply play it safe and do not interact with one another other than perhaps clandestine Interstellar spy missions or a civilization may find Value in Galactic diversity and not contact anyone so that they may simply study young civilizations in their natural development this is something we ourselves do there are still to this day uncons conted Stone AG tribes on our world and we take care to preserve that both for their own safety and ethical concerns about first Contact which is seldom gone well in the past but you also have to ask a question here if Advanced civilizations are common and hiding their existence from lesser civilizations then surely at least one of those Advanced species would break the trend and show themselves if they are common then they must all be hiding and that would imply that somehow everybody out there is in agreement to hide how does that work now this is pure speculation but say a single civilization developed in the Milky Way long before any others even a billion years or longer before anyone else is possible said they colonized the entire galaxy early on but hide their existence until a civilization they're watching matures as other civilizations mature and meet this ancient civilization the old ones may impart their wisdom of hiding to all civilizations in the Galaxy as a result developing civilizations think they are alone until one day they find out that they are not while an interesting idea and I make this video merely as food for thought I still suspect that intelligence is simply rare and when it does develop it takes time and a lot of chance finding evidence of such a rare civilization is like searching for a needle in a hay stack for seti and that someday perhaps sooner rather than later we will wake up to a changed world where we know unequivocally that we are not alone thanks for listening I am futurist in science fiction author John Michael godier currently issuing a rebuttal to those that think I'm a robotic voice simulator not quite but close it's more like the Matrix Mr Anderson just kidding I'm really just a Vulcan and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for regular in-depth Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live one of the scariest Concepts in science fiction is that of an alien invasion exploited by writers such as HG wells in a myriad Hollywood movies over the years there is an inherent fear instilled within the human race of just such an invasion there's a good reason for that if aliens did attack there is very likely nothing we could do about it the good news is that they probably wouldn't show up in flying saucers and start shooting the place up that's an unrealistic scenario for many reasons the main one being that it's unnecessary there are far better cheaper ways to conquer or destroy a planet the bad news is that if an alien civilization did attack we'd never see it coming and chances are we'd be gone before we ever even got a look at the aliens so here are 10 ways aliens could kill us all and we'd never see it coming number 10 irradiating the planet one of the most frightening possibilities in our universe is mass extinction at the hands of gamma rays this form of Extinction can happen naturally such as when a gam burst is created during the formation of a black hole and shines radiation onto a planet in its path Gamay bursts are common we detect them all the time and it's thought that at least once in Earth's history a mass extinction occurred occurred because we were just a little too close to the source of one of these bursts when it went off but could an alien race orchestrate the collapse of a nearby star in such a way as to irradiate Earth this would be Beyond difficult as you'd need to point the burst towards us by manipulating how the star is oriented in space which may not be possible this thankfully makes the scenario highly unlikely but if they did we would have literally no warning as Gamay travel at the speed of light the effects of such a burst would be devastating on many levels with natural or not firstly say goodbye to the ozone layer which would almost instantly be destroyed exposing the surface of the Earth to dangerous ultraviolet radiation secondly gamma radiation is the bad kind it's the type that you need lead shielding to protect against life does not farewell against gamma rays but the Earth would eventually recover leaving a fresh uninhabited world for the aliens to colonize number nine Strange Matter here we get into the highly theoretical but seemingly possible at least right now there is a material thought to form inside neutron stars called Strange Matter or strangelets neutron stars are dead stars that are too small to have collapsed into black holes but are large enough to have enough gravity to break the bonds of the atom and form unusual materials one is called neutronium a ridiculously dense and heavy material so much so that a teaspoonful would weigh many tons but it's forced to be that way by the intense gravity of the neutron star which squashes the atoms into a material made of pure neutrons but what happen happens at the core of a neutron star where the pressures are unbelievably great one theory is that in even denser material forms which is Strange Matter this matter would be made up entirely of quirks and theoretically has two frightening properties first one Theory suggests that it would be stable outside the core of a neutron star and second it would convert anything it touches into Strange Matter this means that any alien race possessing such a material could send a bullet of Strange Matter towards a planet which would set off a chain reaction converting that planet and anything on it into Strange Matter thus ending all life on that world number eight Genetically Enhanced viruses biotechnology today is largely a matter of working with the existing rather than creating anything new but eventually we can see a time where we might be able to create DNA from scratch and program designer organisms for a variety of tasks one such task would be to destroy an alien race with a slate wiper virus fine- tune to utterly annihilate their biosphere likewise they could do the same to us there are two approaches for this one would be to tweak the virus to destroy all life on Earth after everything is dead the alien species could cultivate their own forms of life from their home planet and colonize number two would be to Target a specific species such as humans and eradicate only that life form leaving the original biosphere intact number seven change Earth life on Earth exists under a very specific set of rules and conditions because we evolved here we are beholden to certain ideal chemical and environmental factors such as levels of oxygen for example if we had less we'd die off quickly if we had more fire and combustion becomes too dangerous to use but these conditions are probably not the only set that can allow life to exist conquering Earth may be so simple as changing it into a twin of the alien's home world with sufficient technology the aliens may send a probe or some type of nanotechnology that changes the makeup of Earth's atmosphere in such a way that it kills off the existing life leaving a fresh atmospherically perfect planet for the aliens to call home number six black holes and wormholes few things in the universe are as powerful as black holes while we normally think of them as extremely massive objects that no one would want to get near they can also theoretically be microscopic and while microscopic black holes evaporate very rapidly due to a lack of mass there may be a way to make them more stable if so watch out the effects of a black attack on Earth would be Beyond Comprehension the black hole would be drawn to the Center of the Earth by gravity consuming material until it reaches the core then it would continue on and exit the planet on the other side but then it would begin a cycle of oscillation as it passed through the planet multiple times until there was nothing left another option might be a wormhole while we have no idea how to make these things stable if they can even exist wormholes theoretically served to link two points in space together we usually think of this in terms of sending a spaceship through one end to arrive at some of their Far Point in space but you could also theoretically open one up in front of a planet moving along in its orbit gobbling it up and sending it somewhere else that somewhere else might just be the interior of the sun number five the Von noyman Invasion Fleet self-replicating space probes are nothing new in science fiction they were most famously depicted in 2001 A Space Odyssey and its sequel as huge black monoliths that self-replicate and turn Jupiter into a star but the idea of using Von noyman probes to accomplish various tasks in a galaxy is actually a very efficient way of doing it if an alien race constructed a single probe that could scour raw materials and build copies of itself it could in theory infect the Galaxy like a virus placing a Von noyman probe in every star system lying dormant and waiting for life to develop in those systems some of these probes might be for exploratory purposes or contact purposes Etc but they could also be used for Warfare if an alien species feel that another species could be a threat they could use the Von noyman probe stationed in that system to eradicate life on that world in any number of ways these ways include disrupting the system star to throw a technology destroying solar flare at the inhabited world and send them back to the Stone Age another would be to nudge an asteroid their way and kick off a mass extinction or unleash a virus and so on number four antimatter the effects of matter antimatter reactions are well known if matter comes into contact with anti matter they mutually annihilate if an alien species could create antimatter easily they might simply mass-produce it and start tossing it at Earth it wouldn't take long before the planet was devastated on the other hand if we were sufficiently Advanced we might be able to fight this one off by firing back as the incoming antimatter enters our system we could fling asteroids at it and harmlessly detonate out in space number three the GRE goo the scenario doesn't really comprise an invasion rather an utter wholesale annihilation of a world there is a controversial Theory within nanotechnological research that suggests that it's possible to create a kind of microscopic Von noyman probe if Unleashed on a planet these tiny robots would use the Earth as raw materials for exponential reproduction exponential means just that the more there are the more new probes are made this would result in the consumption of the entire planet and everything on it in a mere two days number two fling a planet at us gravity is an enormously powerful weapon if you want to wage Wars against alien races the good news is that it's a very hard thing to manipulate the bad thing is that a sufficiently advanced species may be able to do just that and fling a rogue Planet into our star system such a thing would have disasterous results by making it pass near Earth it could disrupt the Earth's orbit and fling us out into deep space where we would very quickly freeze life's Only Hope for survival would be geothermal vents in the ocean there it might survive in the cold of deep space but for us on the surface there would likely be no hope number one the speed of light asteroid this one is simple easy and the most likely accelerate a large object to some high fraction of the speed of light and aim it at Earth like a cannon the projectile perhaps an asteroid would be on top of us before we knew it was coming asteroid impacts are bad enough but one traveling at near the speed of light not good it's worth noting though that we're still here any of these scenarios could and possibly should have happened already if they were going to happen at all so maybe we've already dodged the bullet I hope so thanks for listening I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael cier currently a little spooked after recording this video and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer And subscribe to my channel for in-depth regular Explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing Universe in which we live

Channel: JMG Clips

Views: 80,441

Keywords: event horizon, john michael godier, jmg clips

Id: ULwLtl-oxOo

Length: 108min 57sec (6537 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024