Let's Find Out - The Fermi Paradox (Where are the Aliens?) | ASMR soft-spoken [space, astronomy, science fiction]

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

The Fermi paradox, or Fermi's paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.

confronted with a nearly limitless universe billions of years old, with an almost infinitely vast number of opportunities for life to develop. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, while sitting for lunch at Los Alamos with some of his colleagues in 1950, asked this question that still perplexes us as we look up into the night sky. Where is everybody? Enrico Fermi. The Fermi paradox. It's one of my personal favorites in the science fiction, yeah, maybe futurism genre. And this brilliant physicist who came up with the idea that it's kind of paradoxical, that the universe seems

pluming with stars and what we can only assume is accompanying planets in the respective solar systems of the literally trillions of observable stars in our universe so he he wanted to know what could the possible reasons for the fact that we haven't detected alien life be And we're going to discuss some of these. Assumes that we should definitely have detected intelligent life by now. An all-time most bedeviling lunchtime remark. It lies on four fairly short.

It's revolving around those stars. Scientists now believe there are billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way alone. Exoplanets being any planets outside. As intelligent life developed, there are billions of Earth-like planets. We have every reason to believe that, of course, intelligent life could develop on those other planets. 3. After millions of years of technological progress, millions, an alien civilization would likely have the technology to travel to other stars. Third years after all, man has gone from the record of only about 20 seconds at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina with the Wright brothers to walking on the moon 100,000 miles away.

I guess you could even say that was 60 years. About 50 years, if you count orbiting the moon. So time span of millions of years, 50 years is quite inconsequential. Yeah, it just really hammers the point home. Number four, to elaborate on the possibilities of an advanced civilization and their behavior. Given a few other, a few more million years, an alien civilization could, most likely, populate an entire galaxy. So how exactly would an alien civilization, colonize a galaxy. So this is going to elaborate ideas with the Carter Chef video. If you've seen that video, most likely you have because Carter Chef was a famous Soviet Russian astronomer.

Nikolai Carterchev developed a scale that It's a hypothetical classification system for alien civilizations. The physicist Michi Okaku famed guy, he's on TV a lot nowadays. Physicists, I would say he's up three different types. Sub type 1, so were something currently less than a type 1. Type 1 would be a civilization that could harness the energy of an entire civilization could most likely control the weather, so they would have a very firm grasp on their own planet. The 2 is scaling up by roughly in order of magnitude.

A civilization could harness the energy output of an entire star and generates about 10 billion times. Oh, sorry. I was way off. 10 billion times the energy output of a type 1 are accelerating a type 2 civilization so they would be able to Dyson sphere. If you've never heard of that, it's an idea conceived by Freeman Dyson,

a famous physicist. This type of civilization would potentially be able to build, which is a structure that would essentially encompass an entire star. and individual objects, material machines that create some sort of spherical encapsulation of the star, or it could be an actual solid, unified structure, spherical structure, you know, roughly encompassing the entire star. Either way, it would be...

It would be, uh, so type 3 would be 10 billion times. The energy, sufficiently advanced civilization, sufficiently evolved civilization could eventually get to. If human technological growth continues at an average of 3% a year, Kaku posits that our own civilization may attain type 1 status, 200 years Type 2 and a few thousand and type 3

and reaches type 2 and enjoys the energy of an entire star new forms of travel of course become possible and very to the material

reality to travel through space and our concept of how to travel through space even I'm sure by then we'll be radically altered, you know, so to me it's just really thought-provoking

and there's so many questions. Many possibilities, I guess, is what inspires me to want to pursue and look into this stuff. According to the mathematicians Duncan Forgan

and Arwin Nicholson from Udenberg, self-replicating spacecraft traveling at one tenth the speed of light admittedly a quick speed could travel the entire Milky Way leads us to Fermi's paradox intelligent life has every chance

of existing his channel on science and futurism on YouTube on here is uh it's just really brilliant it's well thought out pretty darn good editing for an amateur production. He's a physicist himself and a lot of videos on this exact topic.

So if you haven't, I would suggest going to check him out. So the three of them today, if you guys enjoy it, just leave a comment and I'll pick up the other three and, you know, maybe more, of course, because there's so many more out there. but we're at least gonna tackle half the list today. These are the solutions potentially to why we haven't been able to detect life outside of Earth, intelligent life. This one's first one's called the Zoo Hypothesis. Like the Federation from Star Trek, super-intelligent alien life may answer to a prime directive. This is a non-interference directive.

Essentially urges or requires people following those orders not to interfere with civilizations. A threshold of technological advancement. Now I guess there could be many diverging theories about this. You know, at what point do they pass? the threshold, zoo hypothesis, and this theory was formally proposed as a solution to the Fermi paradox by John Ball at Harvard at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the age of the universe. Ball, multiple civilizations may have actually appeared, millions or even billions of years ago. With such a vast head star, these

civilizations would have complete control over essentially our entire known universe. They'd be able to destroy or control less advanced life forms, just like humans have done on Earth, like we did to Neanderthals and Neanderthals and all the other advanced. Civilizations, they'd have to still grapple with the same ethical question. as the Federation and Star Trek. What's the right way to interact with less advanced civilizations? Some millions of years behind

decided to create nature reserves in national parks. Of course, you can imagine, extrapolate that into space in the galaxy. Maybe that's where we are right now. maybe there's some sort of highly advanced force field undetectable to us that's filtering out any sort of communications or maybe there's a subspace communication

being observing our progress from afar hiding from us until they decide that we're ready to join the galactic civilization is also just like the idea behind 2001 of Space Odyssey or maybe in conjunction with technology waiting to see if our morality and see if about your rationality and maybe to the point where empathy with each other it's such a way that would reflect

on our possible interaction among the galactic as a single entity. That's always another possibility. So number two. Now, second solution to the Fermi paradox is that we're living in a simulated universe. Both them crazy, but renowned scientists, philosophers, engineers. They're developing increasingly creative,

some would say delusional ideas about how a simulated universe would actually work and if you guys haven't seen it I'm gonna point you to really good documentary very well in a really entertaining manner just type in the simulation hypothesis and should show up it's really brilliant that's a whole another episode in itself. It's a little bit here, obviously. Their arguments are logical, perhaps, even convincing, been debated by serious academics, serious journals, for now, for a while now. Future of Humanity Institute. My favorite argument argues that at least one of the following, are likely to go extinct before they are post-human, and able to create entirely simulated reality. i.e. an entirely simulated universe. 2 is a post-human civilization with the ability to run such a simulation would likely not run many simulations

because of other ethical considerations. For instance, if you did run a simulation, you would imagine, you would imagine. that it would be running beyond quicker than real time and if you created sentient life forms in that simulation and they were subject to torture and well just general suffering there would be an ethical dilemma there to even if they weren't suffering the dilemma would be Should you, in essence, delete them from existence by turning your simulation off? If they really were just ones and zeros.

Which at that point, I don't, I think we'd be at the level of quantum computing. So I don't think we would actually ever, you know, think it would be as simple as cut and dry as binary, literally. as ones and zeros. The third one is in a bit of mathematical fiddling. Bostrom concludes that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become post-human who run ancestor simulations, briefly outlined. The belief that there's a significant chance will do this is false

unless we are currently living in a simulation. Remember, this is a philosopher at Oxford speaking. Civilizations have potentially already evolved, you know, even millions of years ago, you know, let alone the fact that if, you know, if we evolved over about 4 billion years, 4.5, there's a good chance that something else could have evolved billions of years ago. technology that would have manifested, been created, would be so advanced that if it was highly probable that they could reach and would run those simulations, it would have already happened. Of course, that could be counterargued by the fact that, or the potential fact that, that we are indeed the first intelligent life forms in at least our galaxy, or at least our quadrant, local area of the galaxy so far. Would such a simulation be created?

Writers have long tried to speculate that something called a Matryoshka be developed by a type 2 or type 3 civilization, an almost inconceivably huge computer system that runs on the entire energy output of a star using a Dyson sphere. It's a shell that could surround the star. Using a shell, like we said earlier, that would surround the star and be able to harness pretty much all of its heat

and other radiation as energy. Matriosk, brain matrioshka matrioshka could have the computational power to create a simulated universe that believe it or not does not appear to violate any laws of physics that we know about Isaac Arthur has a really really good um video on black hole farming which i might try to use some material to make a little video about that myself from him It's so fascinating and you know he's a physicist so he makes it that much more credible than it could happen with his ideas of mathematics behind potential construction and engineering of such a device that

I'm out like a Matryoska brain. Matryoshka could, uh, so large and so powerful that it could effectively run on for infinity for our relative perspectives inside the simulation.

A black hole sound. It's not gonna make sense. But yeah, so we'll skip that, but it's a very fascinating concept that. that we could potentially ultimately harvest a black hole at the center of the Milky Way, for instance, for us, if we ever lived long enough to see the universe expand so far that there were no other galaxies in sight.

And the source of energy was actually from black holes. We somehow be able to tap into the ambient. energy of still space time. So the last one I'm going to tackle is that aliens are broadcasting. SETI Institute, search, restrial. This is exactly what they're counting on. With a little imagination, it's easy to think of a number of reasons why we haven't been able to communicate. might not be broadcasting using radio waves.

They might be using different frequencies than the one said he is currently listening on. So, the frequencies from such a powerful source that they don't radially propagate of a sort of galactic internet depression algorithms that we don't understand, gamma ray bursts that we can't detect,

modulation methods that we haven't discovered. And the list goes on. In 1985, Carl Sagan gave a an especially compelling reason for why we're missing alien signals. Speculated that aliens may communicate at a rate so slow

or conversely so fast that we don't even recognize their efforts. Alien civilization takes years to broadcast a single sentence or even a single word. We might not be able to recognize that. That's what we're hearing. They may be communicating with Matrioshka brains or even more advanced technologies. and imagine and may never discover. We've been searching for signals for only less than 100 years, which we did thousands of years,

and then paper to electricity. That took another, you know, a thousand years, 2,000 years or so. It's that our method of communication aligns perfectly with aliens begins to look really slim. This is a topic that's near-duty. dear to my heart so I'm more than likely well I'm sure you guys will enjoy this too hopefully I made it relaxing I'm sorry if you heard some traffic in the back I hope you guys enjoyed it you'd like to give me maybe something I'm doing different I could be

doing different to evolve if you guys enjoy what I do and all I look at it as is a genuine kindness and I'm just really humbled that you guys would even take the time out of your day to leave a comment and I'll help you guys relax, get to sleep, spread good vibes. And like I always say, I don't want any negativity. So I just hope you guys have a great night. You sleep well. Then you wake up feeling, as my morning jacket would say, have a great night and an even better day tomorrow, guys.

See you next time.