the universe is magnificent and vast hundreds of billions of galaxies trillions of stars and even more planets if even the tiniest fraction are habitable then the universe should be teaming with life and yet we see nothing only vast to emptiness where is everyone else the answer to this riddle could be as exciting as it is creepy we are early born before almost all other life but very soon this may change not only might aliens appear they could quickly surround us an irreversible competition for the universe might be about to [Music] begin while this video is
based on scientific papers we're presenting interesting ideas based on little data and lots of extrapolation so take them with a grain of Sal okay we need to look at three essential questions to understand the galactic competition one how fast can bacteria build spaceships to become a starfaring civilization Life as we know it needs to master a number of very hard steps it starts with dead stuff turning into the building blocks of life then it needs to organize into self contained cells those cells have to learn to work together to form multicellular organisms this keeps going
until complex creatures with big brains learn to use tools and language civilization has to be formed from cultures that value progress and technological development and then they need to actually venture out beyond their home planet on Earth life appeared basically as soon as the oceans formed but then it took 2 billion years to make the step from single cells to multicellular organisms and 2 billion more for us to appear culture civilization and space travel developed super quickly though do things always take that long or was this actually exceptionally fast also passing One Step does not
mean the next one is guaranteed multicellularity evolved over 25 times independently on Earth but there's only one species that builds spaceships we don't know how many steps life needs to pass and how long they take to give rise to a technological civilization but there are probably many and it's likely that on trillions of planets life has been trying for billions of years since we don't see any other technological civilizations out there it might well be that we are a rare exception we might be among the first or even the first technological civilization in the Milky
Way but this is just one piece of the puzzle on top of that we may have just hit the perfect time window why does Humanity exist now now the universe is already 13.8 billion years old but it's unlikely that many other technological civilizations had a chance to appear before us because in the earlier universe life would have had a pretty hard time to emerge let alone Thrive because it was such a hostile environment early Stars constantly blew up galaxies crashed into each other and super massive black holes vomited massive amounts of radiation a enough to
sterilize galaxies over and over again our son was born right at the end of this Cosmic death show the universe has never been more welcoming to life than it is now so Humanity has arrived at a very convenient spot in time maybe the earliest reasonably possible for life to thrive what about the future the sun burns brighter than 90% of the stars in our galaxy and will keep getting brighter in about a billion years it will boil all of Earth's oceans and then become a giant that swallows it whole so in the galactic context the
sun is very shortlived most stars are red dwarves that can sustain habitable planets for tens of trillions of years life on these planets has an incredibly longtime window to appear and pass the hard steps even knowing nothing about how rare or common life is this makes it way more likely for technological civilizations to appear sometime in the the future than in the past because if civilizations appear at random in the Milky Way within a Time window of a trillion years then very few if any would appear before today then a couple more arrive in this
period of a billion years that we're in before all starfaring civilizations that could ever exist emerge all together this weird tsunami like distribution is the result of both the hard steps model and something else a sort of deadline for any space fairing civilization any civilization coming after will find it hard to have room to survive so all potential life has to cram in before it Humanity exists now because otherwise we might have missed this deadline what or who creates this deadline why aren't aliens already on Earth humans are curious expansionist and hungry for we've spread
over the world and made it our own our technology has been improving over time first slowly then breathtakingly fast if these things don't change drastically and our descendants want to prosper they will expand into space we could construct a Dyson SW for Endless energy and transform planets into new homes we could cross Interstellar distances allowing us to reach for planets around distant Stars if we have the most motivation we can become a Galactic Civilization a civilization that does this sort of stuff can be called Loud because its activity creates noise signs that can be detected
from far away imagine someone in a forest cutting down trees starting fires and laying down roads the more intense their work the easier they are to notice an expanding technological civilization would probably be hard to miss our telescopes would pick up all that energy and we would clearly identify artificial interference with stars and planets another consequence of this business is that it's very disruptive to the environment clearing a forest means the end of its Wildlife human activity has left no chance for a squirrel civilization to appear not because we hated squirrels it's simply that the
thought that they might want to do that at some point never crossed our minds and we needed work similarly if loud civilizations were running around the G in the past terraforming planets or harvesting the energy of stars they may have prevented our existence had aliens started colonizing Earth while we were still sludge in the oceans that sludge would never have turned into humans this is how loud aliens create a deadline for new civilizations appearing the Galaxy may have trillions of years to create life but there may only be a short window for it to spread
and Thrive even if a loud civilization respects planets with natural occurring life and expands around them like humans do with Wildlife reserves any civilization on such a planet would not be able to expand ever trapped Forever on a tiny Island but here we are so loud aliens will probably never he what about aliens that don't expand they would be quiet aliens they're probably limited to one star system and don't have a noticeable impact on their Cosmic surroundings humanity is like this right now we wouldn't be able to detect ourselves from the other side of the
Milky Way if they stay quiet forever maybe because of their culture or abilities then they are not really a concern for us we only have one sample to draw from humanity and right now we are on the path to becoming loud if we're not special and succeed anyway then any other civilization with the motivation and resources to would eventually expand Beyond its planet of origin oh okay what are the consequences of all these assumptions and ideas grave consequences race to the Stars if we are really early then eventually others will catch up with us civilizations
will emerge all over the place and these new aliens will look at space see no signs of life and come to the same conclusion they exist because loud civilizations have not yet taken over everything but it only takes one loud civilization to crowd them out of the entire Galaxy they like us will face an important decision do they stay quiet take it easy and tend to their planet for as long as possible or do they start expanding to take a chunk of the Galaxy before someone else arrives meeting others does not necessarily mean War or
conflict but it means that new borders will arise limits that may persist forever in the worst case a civilization could be completely enveloped by the empires of other eternally doomed to be a galactic Backwater without control over their fate so if we want to seat at the galactic adults table we best get to work if we really are early we have an incredible opportunity to mold thousands or even millions of planets according to our vision and dreams and one day when we meet others we can greet them and meet them as equals wouldn't that be
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