Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking, and Welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that
Speaker 1: looks at the future and says things just haven't been
Speaker 1: the same since that blind Saucer came. I'm Jonathan Strickland
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going to do
Speaker 1: yet another listener request episode from the old Inbox. Awesome.
Speaker 1: So who requested? What? Well? This is an episode that
Speaker 1: faced them an email that came in from our listener, Brett.
Speaker 1: All right, and what does the email ask us to do? Well?
Speaker 1: Should I read it? Or should want to be here?
Speaker 1: I'll read it. I'm reading all right, here we go. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Brett says, I've watched my share of alien invasion movies.
Speaker 1: Far too many of them have an absurd America mentality
Speaker 1: and don't seem to realize that Martians will not be
Speaker 1: stopped by explosive shells, battleship, the common flu War of
Speaker 1: the World's or my MacBook no reference needed. Additionally, aliens
Speaker 1: would not wait a few days before deploying some sort
Speaker 1: of air vehicle were the world's as well as Battle
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. I know that you've tackled similar subjects before,
Speaker 1: and even devoted an entire episode Independence Day alone. Or
Speaker 1: was that tech stuff? Not sure? Side note that was
Speaker 1: totally text stuff. I am sad about that fact because
Speaker 1: I wish I could have been there. I think I
Speaker 1: think that there's enough material to revisit it. What is
Speaker 1: the future of Independent watch it again? Back to Brett. Okay,
Speaker 1: but I think that you guys could make an outstanding
Speaker 1: episode on this topic. We could assume that they want
Speaker 1: our resources like oxygen or water. Would they try to
Speaker 1: kill off the human population with a nuke or biological weapon,
Speaker 1: or would they even bother even bother themselves? Obviously there
Speaker 1: would be nothing that humanity could do to fight back,
Speaker 1: much less win. Just don't tell me that we should
Speaker 1: hijack an ironclad from the nineteenth century and use it
Speaker 1: to blow up the mothership. You utilizing our innate ability
Speaker 1: to drop an anchor battleship was a terrible movie. You'll
Speaker 1: lose no geek cred for not getting that reference. Thanks
Speaker 1: for reading well, Brett. Thank you so much for this
Speaker 1: email because I am so excited about talking about this
Speaker 1: topic because it's true what you say. The ways that
Speaker 1: humans fight back against alien invasions in the movies are
Speaker 1: so stupid. Yeah, not would not be effective in real life.
Speaker 1: D minus would not fight with again. To be fair, though,
Speaker 1: we don't have any real historical battles with aliens we
Speaker 1: can point to and say, see, look where they got
Speaker 1: it wrong. You know, I do have a great idea
Speaker 1: for an alien invasion movie. Though. It would be kind
Speaker 1: of like Battleship. But I haven't seen how battleship. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen battleship, but I get the gist. Okay, but
Speaker 1: it wouldn't involve modern battleships. We would get into wooden
Speaker 1: Spanish galleons and fight the aliens in those. So you're
Speaker 1: essentially thinking of like Pirates of the Caribbean mixed with
Speaker 1: War the World. Yeah, like a like a man O
Speaker 1: war versus a flying saucer. You know what. In my book,
Speaker 1: pirates always win. So I'm on board. I mean I
Speaker 1: would watch that movie. I guess on board literally in
Speaker 1: this case. Yeah, I mean I would be in that movie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about this. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously we're gonna be talking all on hypotheticals here, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is gonna be a tricky episode because
Speaker 1: we can't really base our answer. In fact, we can
Speaker 1: just sort of look at some facts and then try
Speaker 1: to speculate. We can make intelligent conjectures. Yes, uh so
Speaker 1: Brett has already covered some of the ways in which
Speaker 1: science fiction has already addressed this. Of course, we've got
Speaker 1: Independence Day where you know, aliens come in and they
Speaker 1: hover over our cities for a while. I don't know
Speaker 1: why they just wait around before they attack. Well, they
Speaker 1: have to coordinate that attack so that all happens at once,
Speaker 1: and for reasons that we can't understand, and I have
Speaker 1: to scare us, yeah, by blowing up monuments that mean
Speaker 1: a lot to us personally, right, right, So instead of
Speaker 1: attacking major population centers, they attack things that you would recognize. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes sense, especially if they're trying to get their
Speaker 1: word out through a major motion picture. It's terrorism, not
Speaker 1: uh yeah, First, let's scare them into subjugation, and then
Speaker 1: we're just gonna you know what finished them off. Actually, Aliens,
Speaker 1: if you're listening, you should probably just go ahead and
Speaker 1: blow up like like coffee farms first, because that is
Speaker 1: going to be the most terrified. I love Hawaii, don't
Speaker 1: don't blow up, Hawi, you don't. I think it's funny
Speaker 1: that Brett dismisses the answer in War the Worlds, and
Speaker 1: I think with pretty good reason. I mean, you can
Speaker 1: kind of imagine that. Again, it's hard to speculate about
Speaker 1: the nature of alien minds, and we'll talk more about
Speaker 1: that later, but it's kind of hard to imagine that
Speaker 1: they would mount a sophisticated military attack on Earth without
Speaker 1: being aware of germs and their susceptibility to germs. Similarly speaking,
Speaker 1: you would think that any alien race that came down
Speaker 1: to conquer Earth would also be aware that it's most
Speaker 1: plentiful resource that covers most of its surface is also
Speaker 1: the stuff what will kill you. Oh, you're referring to
Speaker 1: signs a little. Yeah, that's problematic. That was just water
Speaker 1: vapor in the air. You guys dumb, incredibly dumb. But yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I guess it would have made more sense if they'd
Speaker 1: invaded a desert region. But yeah, they show up in
Speaker 1: a nice moist countryside. It's got fog and everything. It
Speaker 1: would make more sense if they had invaded a planet
Speaker 1: that was devoid of water. That it was not right,
Speaker 1: so but anyway, Yeah, these are lots of of course
Speaker 1: variations in science fiction, and usually the alien invasion stories
Speaker 1: not always, but usually that's just the dressing and the
Speaker 1: actual like themes or whatever are more embedded in the
Speaker 1: characters and how they react. There are exceptions. Independence day,
Speaker 1: I don't think there's really much more going on other
Speaker 1: than stuff what blows up. Well, I do think that
Speaker 1: I do think that frequently these kind of alien invasion
Speaker 1: movies are thinly veiled metaphors for other foreign invasions, be
Speaker 1: they cultural or products of of of whatever not international
Speaker 1: conflict is going at the time, like like, certainly, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of the classic Cold War era movies
Speaker 1: were about the communists. O MG, the communists, right, you
Speaker 1: have an invasion of the body snatchers or any kind
Speaker 1: of other Nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties invasion movies were
Speaker 1: very much, I think, often concerned with the infiltration of
Speaker 1: dangerous ideas, be that communism from you know, actual acting
Speaker 1: communist agents around the world like the Soviet Union, or
Speaker 1: merely fear of changing culturals like guys like in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties. Well, let's talk a little bit about how
Speaker 1: likely is something like this to happen in the first
Speaker 1: place before we talk about how it would turn out. Right,
Speaker 1: So in this is an area, like pretty much everything
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to say in this episode, where we
Speaker 1: don't really know an answer. We can just kind of
Speaker 1: make some guesses based on what we do know. So
Speaker 1: how but there are some really good numbers about like
Speaker 1: possible alien life out there. We've we've covered this a
Speaker 1: little bit on the podcast before, right, So I think
Speaker 1: a good thing to start with would be how many
Speaker 1: alien civilizations are out there? I mean, again, we don't know,
Speaker 1: but we could start by looking at how many habitable
Speaker 1: planets are there, probably in the Milky Way galaxy. So
Speaker 1: in November, I was just trying to look for some
Speaker 1: of the most recent updates because they keep updating this
Speaker 1: number as as telescopes continually scope out more and more.
Speaker 1: In November, dot com reported that about twenty percent of
Speaker 1: Sun like stars observed by the Kepler telescope had had
Speaker 1: earthlike planets. That is defined as a planet roughly Earth
Speaker 1: size in the habitable zone. So that's the zone where
Speaker 1: it's not so hot that you know, water would be vaporized,
Speaker 1: and it's not so cold that all the water would
Speaker 1: be frozen. So you extrapolate from that and say, well,
Speaker 1: if this is indicative of a broader trend throughout our galaxy,
Speaker 1: that ends up being a lot of planets that could
Speaker 1: potentially support life. And that's just life as we know it, right, So, yeah,
Speaker 1: as far as we can imagine life, the kind of
Speaker 1: life that's based on liquid water, which you know, on
Speaker 1: one hand, that seems like a pretty reasonable metric for
Speaker 1: judging whether a planet could have life, but we don't
Speaker 1: really know. Uh, that's a lot of Earth's Seth show Stack,
Speaker 1: who we've referred to on the podcast before. He's a
Speaker 1: senior astronomer and director of the Cet Institute. He said
Speaker 1: last year that the number of habitable planets in our
Speaker 1: galaxies in the tens of billions minimum, and that's not
Speaker 1: even including moons, which could also harbor life. So I've
Speaker 1: seen estimates of around forty billion or sixty billion planets
Speaker 1: in our galaxy, see that could host life. So there's
Speaker 1: a lot of potential real estate out there for life.
Speaker 1: But we're not like getting text messages from civilizations there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So if there's sixty billion planets out there that could
Speaker 1: have an alien civilization on them, why haven't we heard
Speaker 1: a single word from anybody. This comes up with the
Speaker 1: Fermi paradox, right, the whole idea that, uh, in fact,
Speaker 1: if there is this this abundance of life, or at
Speaker 1: least the potential for it, why is it then that
Speaker 1: we have not actually observed that? Right? So the Fermi
Speaker 1: paradox sort of draws attention to this idea of the
Speaker 1: Drake equation, which we devoted a whole podcast to one time.
Speaker 1: If you haven't heard that, I recommend going back to
Speaker 1: check it out. It's a really fun problem in exploring
Speaker 1: the sort of the the numbers game of astrobiology. So
Speaker 1: the direct equation says, look, you know, we've got all
Speaker 1: these planets out there. Um, yeah, we haven't heard anything.
Speaker 1: So there must be some limiting factor that's interfering with
Speaker 1: us hearing from all these planets. It's either the fact that, say,
Speaker 1: life doesn't actually arise all that often, or it's the
Speaker 1: fact that maybe life arises fairly frequently, but intelligence doesn't
Speaker 1: develop all that often. Or maybe it's the fact that, uh,
Speaker 1: technology doesn't necessarily develop with intelligence, or maybe it's the
Speaker 1: fact that, uh, the technological civilizations are likely to only
Speaker 1: transmit for a short period of time to transmit electromagnetic
Speaker 1: radiation we would detect for a small period of time.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of scary one because it implies that
Speaker 1: for some reason, species that develop radios pretty soon after
Speaker 1: that go extinct. Uh, And we don't know what the
Speaker 1: answer is there, but for some reason, we're not hearing
Speaker 1: anything from these planets. And then there are all these
Speaker 1: other crazy theories like who knows how crazy they actually are,
Speaker 1: but there's like the zoo theory. There could be alien
Speaker 1: civilizations out there that are using their vast technological powers
Speaker 1: to literally prevent us from detecting them. So it's jammed, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly right. They're they're keeping us in a protective little shell,
Speaker 1: maybe for our benefit, maybe for theirs. Who knows. We
Speaker 1: don't know the answers to these questions, but what we
Speaker 1: have to go on right now is that we haven't
Speaker 1: heard word one right. And also another thing to keep
Speaker 1: in mind, another part that's going to really come into
Speaker 1: this discussion as we go along, is that, as Douglas
Speaker 1: Adams once observed, space is big, really big. You think
Speaker 1: it's a jot down to the chemist shop on the counter,
Speaker 1: that's peanuts compared to space. You are quite right on that,
Speaker 1: and so was so was our our dear departed friend. No,
Speaker 1: there is a ridiculously huge distance between stars. So when
Speaker 1: we're talking about space being big, we're not just saying
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff in it. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of space in it, a lot of space between where
Speaker 1: things are. So I'm gonna lift some notes that I
Speaker 1: came up with from our old episode how to Discover
Speaker 1: an exo planet, because back when we were talking about
Speaker 1: exo planets, I wanted to think, like, what would it
Speaker 1: actually involve to get to one to yeah, to travel
Speaker 1: from one solar system to another? Like does it make
Speaker 1: sense to say we could colonize an exo planet in
Speaker 1: another solar system? And I kind of came to the
Speaker 1: conclusion that unless we develop like near light speed travel,
Speaker 1: especially faster than light travel, it really doesn't make a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. Or we find some means of allowing
Speaker 1: a ship that could support multiple generations of people so
Speaker 1: that the people who land at the exo planet are
Speaker 1: the descendants of the ones who took off from Earth. Right,
Speaker 1: But but but how many generations are we talking about?
Speaker 1: Like how what kind of time length are we looking at? Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: let me look at my math here. Okay, So the
Speaker 1: Milky Way is about a hundred thousand light years in diameter,
Speaker 1: so light takes a hundred thousand earth years to get
Speaker 1: from one part to the other, or from one end
Speaker 1: to the other. Sorry. And the average distance between stars,
Speaker 1: I've seen a few figures for this, but it's typically
Speaker 1: I would say the average estimate here is that it's
Speaker 1: more than four light years. So it's maybe five light
Speaker 1: years or four points something light years between every star
Speaker 1: in our galaxy. That's so much space that it takes
Speaker 1: light four years or more to travel between these stars.
Speaker 1: And we have nothing that allows us to remotely approach
Speaker 1: that speed. And moreover, based upon our knowledge of physics, uh,
Speaker 1: at least from what we know, there's no way to
Speaker 1: go as fast, let alone faster than that speed. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the nearest star to our Solar system is Proximus Centauri,
Speaker 1: and it's about four point two light years away. That
Speaker 1: means it would take something traveling at the speed of
Speaker 1: light four point two years to get here from there. Right.
Speaker 1: Uh So nobody knows exactly how many stars are in
Speaker 1: the Milky Way, but you can sort of guess by
Speaker 1: estimating the total mass of the galaxy. Though this is
Speaker 1: also difficult because then you have to divide that by
Speaker 1: what size you think the average star is taking into
Speaker 1: account the effects of dark matter and other normal matter
Speaker 1: in the galaxy. So it's hard to get a good
Speaker 1: number on that. But I've seen astronomers guests from between
Speaker 1: two hundred billion stars two up to a trillion or
Speaker 1: more stars in our galaxy. So if we put the
Speaker 1: number at one trillion, just for argument's sake, if you
Speaker 1: grant that there are a hundred other technological alien species
Speaker 1: in this galaxy, that leaves a one in ten billion
Speaker 1: chance that any of them are in the Solar System
Speaker 1: nearest to us. Yeah, So what I'm getting at is
Speaker 1: that if they're out there, they're probably really really really
Speaker 1: far away. And and right, going back to that to
Speaker 1: that travel speed thing, like, I'm not sure what the
Speaker 1: fraction of the speed of light that we can travel
Speaker 1: at is, but it's a small fraction. Well, let's look
Speaker 1: at the fastest spacecraft we've ever created. So right now,
Speaker 1: the fastest thing we can think of in terms of
Speaker 1: spacecraft is the voyager, And the voyager is kind of
Speaker 1: a special case because it's traveling it more than thirty
Speaker 1: five thousand miles prow. Actually there are two of them,
Speaker 1: Voyager one Voyager two. If you look at like Voyager one,
Speaker 1: it's going more than thirty five thousand miles prour, maybe
Speaker 1: like thirty eight thousand miles per hour as it's exiting
Speaker 1: the Solar System. This is the one you've heard about
Speaker 1: that it actually exited the Solar System. It's going out
Speaker 1: into interstellar space. How did it get it? Did that
Speaker 1: like twelve times? Right? How did it get to that fast? Well,
Speaker 1: it had to use some really special maneuvers to achieve
Speaker 1: that that speed. It had the slingshot around Jupiter and
Speaker 1: then think also sling shot around Saturn. I believe you're correct.
Speaker 1: So it had to use the massive power of the
Speaker 1: gravity wells of these planets, the gravity wells and the
Speaker 1: and the planetary motion itself, like the planetary motion around
Speaker 1: the Sun, in order to sling shot out that fast, right,
Speaker 1: And nobody's on it, So it's not like they're experiencing
Speaker 1: extravagant g forces or any kind of time dilation or
Speaker 1: anything like that. Yeah, God, I wonder what the G
Speaker 1: forces would be like if you were to put a
Speaker 1: person on the voyage or I mean, it seems like
Speaker 1: I would guess I don't have a number for this,
Speaker 1: I would guess it might kill you. Uh. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so even if you so, that's like more than thirty
Speaker 1: five thousand. But let's just round up to fifty miles
Speaker 1: per hour, which is a big old chump, but for
Speaker 1: the sake of argument and mathematics, especially for the sake
Speaker 1: of mathematics. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, let's say you're going
Speaker 1: at fifty thousand miles per hour in a an alien
Speaker 1: made space craft. I'm sure that we'll have that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they're traveling from GLI S six six c C,
Speaker 1: which has been declared one of the closest highly earth
Speaker 1: like exoplanets that we've yet discovered. It's only about twenty
Speaker 1: two light years away, so it's very very close compared
Speaker 1: to most stars in the galaxy. Um, you do a
Speaker 1: little math on that twenty two light years, that's like
Speaker 1: one point twenty nine times ten to the fourteen miles,
Speaker 1: or about a hundred and twenty nine trillion miles. If
Speaker 1: fifty thousand miles per hour, Uh, that would take two
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety four thousand, three hundred and twenty five years,
Speaker 1: that's a better pack of snack. Yeah, some coloring books,
Speaker 1: a couple of activity books maybe dames. Yeah yeah, slug
Speaker 1: Bug would get really old, as I pointed out, As
Speaker 1: I pointed out the last time we talked about traveling
Speaker 1: this distance, that's longer than we've been a species that's
Speaker 1: longer than Homo sapiens have existed. At this rate, you're
Speaker 1: talking about an alien invader that would really be more
Speaker 1: a native of the spacecraft it traveled in than a
Speaker 1: native of the planet it came from, because it would
Speaker 1: have to. I mean, in in that long you'd be
Speaker 1: talking about evolutionary time, they would adapt to the spacecraft
Speaker 1: and become a native of that environment. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: again like based off of life as we know it,
Speaker 1: because I personally cannot conceive of being I guess other
Speaker 1: than maybe like a virus that lives in any kind
Speaker 1: of time span that would understand what you know, two
Speaker 1: years even me the equivalent of that, of course, because
Speaker 1: we're talking Earth years. Yeah, absolutely, I mean that that's
Speaker 1: being generous to the invasion hypothesis because, as I said,
Speaker 1: that's a really close s exoplane. And keep keep in
Speaker 1: mind that this is all also dependent upon. You know,
Speaker 1: we're making some assumptions, but we have to. Let's assume
Speaker 1: the aliens are going to need some sort of source
Speaker 1: of energy for themselves to survive, so they have to
Speaker 1: get hold of that on the trip, or be able
Speaker 1: to carry it with them. How about the energy to
Speaker 1: power the space That would be a huge thing too.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're they're there's such huge and seemingly insurmountable
Speaker 1: challenges at least for as we see it, the way
Speaker 1: we travel through space, that these are some of the
Speaker 1: reasons why we feel that an alien invasion is is
Speaker 1: is unlikely to happen. But we'll we'll explain more in
Speaker 1: a bit. Okay, so we've established why we think it's unlikely,
Speaker 1: but and that's not the only reason unlikely. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about more later there in terms of perhaps alien motivation.
Speaker 1: But you'd have to assume that if you just play
Speaker 1: the probability game, any alien species getting to us in
Speaker 1: any reasonable amount of time probably is going to have
Speaker 1: to have a faster than light mode of transport, and
Speaker 1: as far as we know, that's not possible physically impossible. Now,
Speaker 1: it'm not saying what's out there in the realms of physics,
Speaker 1: Maybe you could engineer a faster than light travel system
Speaker 1: by creating some kind of warp drive where instead of
Speaker 1: moving through space faster than light, you move the space
Speaker 1: around you. Right, yeah, yeah, we've discussed that before on
Speaker 1: the show a little bit too, and things like worm
Speaker 1: holes and all this kind of stuff. But all this
Speaker 1: is really theoretical, and even the theorists say there may
Speaker 1: be no real, real equivalent to this stuff. We're showing
Speaker 1: it maybe that you know, mathematically this is possible, but
Speaker 1: practically it's impossible. That's always a chance for that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, the only point I want to make there
Speaker 1: is I think it's pretty safe to assume if an
Speaker 1: alien species gets to us there, they probably have such
Speaker 1: incredible technological capability we can't even comprehend how powerful their
Speaker 1: technology is, which which is to suggest that if they
Speaker 1: if they got guns, we're done for, because I mean,
Speaker 1: if they've got to if they've got the ability to
Speaker 1: travel faster than like, can you only imagine what their
Speaker 1: weaponry must be like. Uh So, before we go into
Speaker 1: more of that, let's talk about some of the different
Speaker 1: scenarios that could potentially serve as motivators to an alien
Speaker 1: species invading the Earth. Yeah, I think a good point
Speaker 1: Brett brings up in the email is what are they
Speaker 1: looking for? Like, why do they invade Earth? So the
Speaker 1: answer Brett gives is they want our consumable resources. I
Speaker 1: think Brett says they want like oxygen or water. Right.
Speaker 1: This seems very implausible to me, simply because if we're
Speaker 1: talking about that same number we mentioned earlier, the vast
Speaker 1: host of potentially habitable planets out there, you have to
Speaker 1: assume that at least many of them, if not most
Speaker 1: of them, do not have any sort of intelligent life,
Speaker 1: just based on the fact that we haven't detected anything. Granted,
Speaker 1: some of them are so far that we wouldn't have
Speaker 1: picked up any signals if their development was on the
Speaker 1: same time scale as Earth's. But you know, making these
Speaker 1: kind of assumptions, you have to say, well, there's got
Speaker 1: to be plenty of space out there that you could
Speaker 1: go to, or you wouldn't even have to bother with
Speaker 1: any kind of civilization that would be there. Either there
Speaker 1: there it may be a plant that's capable of supporting life,
Speaker 1: but there's no life on it, or it may have
Speaker 1: life on it, but there might not be any intelligent
Speaker 1: life on it. So why would you go through the
Speaker 1: trouble of bothering a planet that has intelligent life on
Speaker 1: it when you've got other options open to you, especially
Speaker 1: if ultimately what you're looking at doing is building a
Speaker 1: giant pipeline back to your home planet or what. Because
Speaker 1: even if it's a resources thing, how do you harvest
Speaker 1: those resources and get them back to wherever they need
Speaker 1: to go? Because presumably, you know, that's the reason why
Speaker 1: you're going to a new planet, or maybe maybe they're
Speaker 1: you know, traveling and they like run out of gas
Speaker 1: and what they use for gases? People be people. You
Speaker 1: heard it here. First it's like a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.
Speaker 1: You just shove a couple of people in there. That's
Speaker 1: nothing like a hydrogen fuel people. It's like it's like
Speaker 1: Mr Fusion. But yeah, suddenly back to the Future too
Speaker 1: becomes a horror movie. This is so morbid. Exploring all
Speaker 1: the reasons they might want to kill us. No, we
Speaker 1: we are going to explore reasons they might not want
Speaker 1: to kill us. But this, but this, this particular one,
Speaker 1: the resources one, is what I find implausible. There are
Speaker 1: so many other ways of gathering Yeah, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: You make a good point there, especially again, if we're
Speaker 1: assuming the level of technological capability it would require to
Speaker 1: travel between stars, they're probably in a post scarcity in exactly,
Speaker 1: they probably don't need to yeah, harvest other I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe they are harvesting other planets. But yeah, well okay,
Speaker 1: so that's yeah, that's the smash and grab scenario. But
Speaker 1: what what y'all they got re box, let's go. I'm
Speaker 1: just thinking back to my high school days. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's the sort of like looting Earth scenario. But what
Speaker 1: if they want to settle down? I mean, what if
Speaker 1: they don't just want our our removable resources, but they
Speaker 1: actually want our real estate, They want to come live
Speaker 1: on this planet. Now, this one also seems implausible to
Speaker 1: me for multiple reasons. One is that, um, we as
Speaker 1: human beings, have largely shaped our planet. Right, we have
Speaker 1: to suit us, right, Yeah, We've we've built cities, we've
Speaker 1: got we're very specific beings. Yeah, and unless the aliens
Speaker 1: happened to be like the Star Trek style aliens, where
Speaker 1: they look almost, but not quite exactly like human beings,
Speaker 1: almost as though they're merely wearing makeup, right, or perhaps
Speaker 1: a couple of bumps on their foreheads or maybe some
Speaker 1: pointy ears in there. Unless that's the case, then obviously
Speaker 1: moving in here Earth would be a major fixer upper,
Speaker 1: Like you're talking like it would be like if I
Speaker 1: if I bought a house that was built and designed
Speaker 1: by a guy who's eight feet tall, it would not
Speaker 1: suit my needs. Nothing would be good for me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another thing I would think about this is that Earth's
Speaker 1: environment is very specific in a natural way as well.
Speaker 1: I mean we didn't It's not just like all the
Speaker 1: ways in which we polluted and shaped the land to
Speaker 1: our desires. Earth also has, for example, an atmosphere of
Speaker 1: a particular composition. It's breathable to us, but probably not
Speaker 1: breathable to another species that came about on a planet
Speaker 1: that had a different atmospheric composition. The same thing could
Speaker 1: be true about things that are edible or not edible,
Speaker 1: or if the alien species has its own for example, uh, agriculture,
Speaker 1: whether or not the soil composition could support it. I
Speaker 1: mean there are a lot of like Earth's soil composition
Speaker 1: doesn't always to try to grow stuffs that we can eat,
Speaker 1: So so yeah, I mean you would have to, You
Speaker 1: would have to have aliens that are incredibly similar to
Speaker 1: human beings for it to be like, oh, let's move
Speaker 1: into this name it and and specifically that are like
Speaker 1: I don't know, like like looking for like, oh man,
Speaker 1: check out those condos, Like look at those sick rides.
Speaker 1: We need that planet. This this thing is awesome. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's the real estate bubble burst. The prices are is
Speaker 1: a steel pinball machines and hoes? Yeah? Oh um, no, no,
Speaker 1: I want to hold Yeah, So I don't know. I
Speaker 1: I agree with you also that this one seems kind
Speaker 1: of implausible to me. I mean, if there are so
Speaker 1: many planets out there that are in the habitable zone,
Speaker 1: that seems like that would be the basic requirement for
Speaker 1: a new colony if they wanted to live there. Like,
Speaker 1: why would Earth be preferable to any number of dead
Speaker 1: mars like planets out there that you could terraform to
Speaker 1: your knees? Yeah, if you've got all of this amazing technology,
Speaker 1: you can use that to make your own ho hoes.
Speaker 1: You don't need to take ours, right, Okay, So here's
Speaker 1: another possibility I thought of, What about a preemptive strike
Speaker 1: so they see us as a current or maybe not current,
Speaker 1: but future threat or competitor, and they're trying to knock
Speaker 1: us out of the running while we're still relatively weak.
Speaker 1: This is sort of the day the Earth Stood Still
Speaker 1: scenario where the invaders there, I mean, they don't have
Speaker 1: a particularly malicious intent, but Clattu comes and tells us like, look,
Speaker 1: you guys are about to get nuclear weapons and proliferate
Speaker 1: them a lot and have the capability of really causing
Speaker 1: damage in the galaxy. And I represent a sort of
Speaker 1: council of aliens who who are here to tell you
Speaker 1: you need to cool it or we're going to destroy you.
Speaker 1: So I also think this is implausible, at least in
Speaker 1: any reasonable time frame, simply because our ability to affect
Speaker 1: anything outside of our Solar system is next to nothing
Speaker 1: at the moment. Like we were saying earlier, Voyager one
Speaker 1: and two or leaving the Solar system, I left the
Speaker 1: Solar system, but those are unmanned probes. It's the only
Speaker 1: man made objects that have ever exited the Solar System.
Speaker 1: And even if there were a target anywhere remotely close
Speaker 1: to us, it would take you know, centuries millennia for
Speaker 1: anything we would send to get there. So I think
Speaker 1: any uh alien race, intelligent enough to recognize where we
Speaker 1: are technologically would also recognize we're nowhere close to being
Speaker 1: a threat. Now, obviously that's dependent upon the state of
Speaker 1: affairs right now. If you jump ahead where we suddenly
Speaker 1: have better to well, not suddenly we have developed this
Speaker 1: incredible technology, and this could be again millennia in the future,
Speaker 1: the story might be different, But then humans could be
Speaker 1: fundamentally different. By then we might we the people sitting
Speaker 1: in this room and talking to you, the people listening,
Speaker 1: might not even recognize the beings that would be humanity
Speaker 1: at that point. So it's you know, this is one
Speaker 1: of those where I think, assuming that the alien race
Speaker 1: in fact able to recognize our level of technological sophistication,
Speaker 1: they would come up with the idea of you know,
Speaker 1: these guys, these guys aren't any any problem. The example
Speaker 1: I gave is it's kind of like if I identified
Speaker 1: there was an ant colony in New Zealand that really
Speaker 1: I just like, man, I don't want those ants to
Speaker 1: invade my house in Atlanta. I fly all the way
Speaker 1: to New Zealand, poison that ant hill and fly all
Speaker 1: the way back and think who headed that one off
Speaker 1: of the past. And that's how I justify my trips
Speaker 1: to New Zealand. Again, I have to agree with you.
Speaker 1: I think like you do that this is also a
Speaker 1: pretty implausible scenario, at least at this point. I mean again,
Speaker 1: as we will have to keep saying, just to always
Speaker 1: have the disclaimer out there, it's hard to understand alien minds.
Speaker 1: I mean, we can't predict how they might behave and
Speaker 1: that's actually going to figure into one of our scenarios here.
Speaker 1: But based on what we know now, it seems implause.
Speaker 1: I don't know why they would really do that. But
Speaker 1: here are a couple that I think might be a
Speaker 1: little more understandable to us. What if they're doing some science.
Speaker 1: I'll have science to do, right right. I I love
Speaker 1: doing some science on my own. You know, go poke
Speaker 1: around in the back of the fridge at work and
Speaker 1: see what's been in there for months. I can tell
Speaker 1: you right now the cake is a lie. Well there
Speaker 1: in some way maybe fulfilling their curiosity about us. And
Speaker 1: in this scenario, I think it's less likely that they'd
Speaker 1: want to exterminate us or something like that, but they
Speaker 1: might wish to study us in ways that are harmful
Speaker 1: or unpleasant for the selected subject. Our survival is a
Speaker 1: species at at least our comfort. Yeah. So it's the
Speaker 1: classic gray alien kind of you know, you're probing territory, right,
Speaker 1: And this is one that I agree with you, Joe.
Speaker 1: I think this is one that that if such an
Speaker 1: alien race were to exist, I would imagine curiosity would
Speaker 1: have to be part of their intellectual makeup. It might
Speaker 1: not be defined that way by them, but if you're
Speaker 1: talking about a race that has already developed something like
Speaker 1: faster than light travel, I would I would, I would
Speaker 1: pause it that that means they are curious enough to
Speaker 1: have developed the technology. Sure, sure, well, I mean also
Speaker 1: I would I would say that curiosity is one of
Speaker 1: the ways that we define intelligence to begin with, especially
Speaker 1: hum Yeah, human intelligence. I would say, it's it's a
Speaker 1: very central factor. Yeah. And then there's just the last scenario,
Speaker 1: which is that they have reasons that simply aren't rational
Speaker 1: to us. And I think this is possible too. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a huge problem for us in trying to predict
Speaker 1: the basic nature of alien minds, let alone the more
Speaker 1: complex structures of like alien culture or alien beliefs. I
Speaker 1: don't know how you'd even begin to speculate about what
Speaker 1: those beliefs or cultural values might be. So it's possible
Speaker 1: that and while I don't necessarily think this, I do
Speaker 1: think we have to entertain the possibility that they might
Speaker 1: simply find us to disgusting or repulsive, or they might
Speaker 1: have something like a religious belief that says we're bad
Speaker 1: and need to be destroyed, or they might simply regard
Speaker 1: other life forms of all kinds with jealousy and paranoia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the the Halo universe. Yeah. Yeah. The Covenant
Speaker 1: had this huge kind of like well that's bad, let's
Speaker 1: kill it right mentality about humans as an alien coalition,
Speaker 1: and they had identified humans as being this sort of heretical,
Speaker 1: demon like race that needed to be wiped clean of
Speaker 1: the of the galaxy. And uh, you know, granted, that's
Speaker 1: a little video games science fiction, little video games, big
Speaker 1: video games, science fictions, big video game that I have
Speaker 1: in love. Um, but it's it's the science, very science fiction,
Speaker 1: the idea. But at the same time, you could say,
Speaker 1: all right, well that could be a motivation and so
Speaker 1: and that's one that you cannot have any sort of
Speaker 1: rational approach to say, hey, don't kill us if they
Speaker 1: if they say, you know, you specifically are offensive to
Speaker 1: our site. There's you know, nothing you can do because
Speaker 1: it is what you are. Right. So it'd be like
Speaker 1: if if my wife spotted a cockroach in our kitchen,
Speaker 1: she'd say, Okay, I want you to kill that. You know,
Speaker 1: I know it's a living thing, but I don't want
Speaker 1: it here, and if you don't kill it, I will
Speaker 1: divorce you. It could be some alien wife somewhere saying, hey,
Speaker 1: these things that are in this corner of our galaxy,
Speaker 1: they are disgusting and you've got to get rid of them,
Speaker 1: get them out. That's when you've got the alien organ
Speaker 1: man coming this way. You can't I mean, cockroach couldn't
Speaker 1: argue with me about it. I don't think I'm not
Speaker 1: kafka esque enough for that. Yeah, yeah, that that is
Speaker 1: our next point. Could we I mean, could we argue
Speaker 1: with them? Would this necessarily mean certain doom for humanity? Well,
Speaker 1: so here's my feeling. Again, we're not at this part yet,
Speaker 1: but I am going to talk in a minute about
Speaker 1: why I think we shouldn't necessarily assume that any aliens
Speaker 1: we encountered would be hostile. I don't necessary really have
Speaker 1: that point of view, but if they were, my intuition
Speaker 1: says that it would not go well for us. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This kind of goes back to that whole thing about
Speaker 1: if we've if we encounter a race that's capable of
Speaker 1: interstellar travel on a on a you know, a decent
Speaker 1: time scale, something that they're able to within their life
Speaker 1: times traverse. Yeah, then we can assume that some of
Speaker 1: their other technologies are equally developed, well beyond what we
Speaker 1: can do. And in that case, you know, granted, we're
Speaker 1: going to assume that they they're going to obey the
Speaker 1: laws of physics. I mean, we can't. If we throw
Speaker 1: that out, then there's no point in even having a conversation,
Speaker 1: like they have a magic switch that makes you go away. Um. So,
Speaker 1: assuming that they do obey the laws of physics, uh,
Speaker 1: they could still be well beyond our capabilities to the
Speaker 1: point where they might be able to flood our planet
Speaker 1: with radiation that would kill us. For example, that can
Speaker 1: sort of like planet wide neutron yeah something, I mean,
Speaker 1: this this is and with that, there's like, well, that's
Speaker 1: there's a zero percent chance of us coming out on
Speaker 1: top on that s Yeah. Yeah, so we can try
Speaker 1: to hear for a minute explore, well, what are some ways,
Speaker 1: because this is basically what Brett I think was asking.
Speaker 1: The core of Brett's question was about is there any
Speaker 1: way you could actually stand up to aliens? Or is it?
Speaker 1: Is it all just a no go? So I think
Speaker 1: the most obvious option for self defense is, well, we
Speaker 1: just use our most powerful weapons against them immediately, So
Speaker 1: nuke them the second they show up. This this works
Speaker 1: so well in movies like Independence Day or The Fifth Element. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this seems like an incredibly bad idea, Like
Speaker 1: just a horrible, horrible idea. So here's my thinking. A
Speaker 1: first strike against an interstellar species in addition to being immoral,
Speaker 1: I mean like really immoral, like like, look there's another
Speaker 1: life form, kill it now, that's what we're afraid that
Speaker 1: they would do to us. Yeah, that's not nice. So no,
Speaker 1: that is not a moral way to behave. I think
Speaker 1: it could also be suicidal. Yeah, Like, it has the
Speaker 1: potential to turn a friendly encounter into an interstellar war
Speaker 1: if you make a first strike, and then that's an
Speaker 1: interstellar war that again I really don't think we could win, right,
Speaker 1: I Mean, you're this is, of course, assuming that the
Speaker 1: aliens don't make the rookie mistake of piling their entire
Speaker 1: civilization into a single ship that is that is vulnerable
Speaker 1: to nuclear weapons, in which case we're fine, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but but there's a good chance there's at least a
Speaker 1: few folks back home who are like, Okay, we gave
Speaker 1: you guys, We gave you guys a chance. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna have to slap you. Right, you make a good
Speaker 1: point there. I am not an alien invasion commander, but
Speaker 1: if I were, my scouting or vanguard forces sort of
Speaker 1: the forward uh spacecraft that first arrived at your target
Speaker 1: planet probably wouldn't be manned or alien, right exactly. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of of of speculation that says if we
Speaker 1: were to encounter alien life likely our first encounter would
Speaker 1: be with things that were built by the alien life forms,
Speaker 1: because sending out probes is you know that that's something
Speaker 1: that is much easier than having to send out and
Speaker 1: support a life form. Right, We wouldn't encounter them, we'd
Speaker 1: encounter their technology, right, And and that might be purely
Speaker 1: mechanical or electronic like our robots. It could be biological.
Speaker 1: It could be that they've engineered an organism that is
Speaker 1: essentially a robot. It's just that it's an organic robot
Speaker 1: that it could be a combination of both. It could
Speaker 1: be a Dale kind of thing, which which case we
Speaker 1: just run up the stairs, unless you're paying attention to
Speaker 1: the season's nine through whatever, exactly exactly. Yeah. So, in
Speaker 1: addition to it being deeply immoral and the wrong thing
Speaker 1: to do, I don't think just an all out, you know,
Speaker 1: first strike would work well for us at all. That
Speaker 1: that's just not an option, alright, So Joe, let's say,
Speaker 1: let's say we're doing the the classic uh situation where
Speaker 1: the cops have closed in, there's a guy who's in
Speaker 1: the bank who's trying to rod the bank, and they're
Speaker 1: they're saying, uh, uh, come out or we're going to
Speaker 1: start tear gassing the place. And the robber comes out
Speaker 1: holding a gun to himself and says, if you come
Speaker 1: any closer, I shoot, and they all say, who WHOA,
Speaker 1: He's serious. I've watched a lot of comedies recently, but
Speaker 1: the idea being that, you know, if you make a move,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna take myself out. What if we
Speaker 1: did that with the whole earth? What if if the
Speaker 1: aliens came and said we want your stuff and we
Speaker 1: said you can't have our stuff, and they said, we're
Speaker 1: gonna kill you. And you say, if you kill us,
Speaker 1: we're gonna wipe out all our stuff. Wouldn't that be
Speaker 1: a good idea? Yeah? This is Actually, though I think
Speaker 1: this is an incredibly horrible idea. I think this is
Speaker 1: the best idea I could come up. So I I
Speaker 1: wrote about this in the notes. It's to hold our
Speaker 1: resources hostage. Like I say, I couldn't think of a
Speaker 1: more effective strategy than this. Even though this is one
Speaker 1: of the worst ideas I've ever heard of effective strategy,
Speaker 1: I think so we The reason this would be a
Speaker 1: really bad idea is if you've ever seen the movie
Speaker 1: Doctor Strange Love many times, part one of the scenarios
Speaker 1: in that movie is that there is a perimeter system,
Speaker 1: or sort of what's what's known in Cold war technology
Speaker 1: circles as a dead hand system, where you create a
Speaker 1: defensive structure that detects automatically when there has been an
Speaker 1: attack and launches a counter attack without human intervention, and
Speaker 1: it's irreversible. Yeah, and so in in Dr Strange Love,
Speaker 1: the Soviets announced, uh, yeah, we've just put in place
Speaker 1: this dead hand system where if if you know, bombs
Speaker 1: get detected in Russia, it nukes all of the Allied
Speaker 1: cities or all the NATO. I guess, uh, whatever the
Speaker 1: opposing power was the United States and NATO probably uh
Speaker 1: nukes all their cities immediately, and there's no way to
Speaker 1: intervene or turn it off, right and uh. And the
Speaker 1: real key here is that they only announced this after
Speaker 1: a crazed American has launched a preemptive strike against personal
Speaker 1: unilateral attack. Yeah. So, and that exposes one of the
Speaker 1: main problems with this. I mean, there are a big
Speaker 1: problems with this kind of thing. But the crucial fact
Speaker 1: is your enemy has to know that this system is
Speaker 1: in place for it to be effective, right, right, which
Speaker 1: means that we have to be in some kind of
Speaker 1: very clear communication with this alien civilization, which I'm not
Speaker 1: positive is going to be the case. Yeah. You you'd
Speaker 1: have to have the aliens know for a fact. But
Speaker 1: if they attempted to harm humans, there would be an
Speaker 1: automatic system response that destroyed all the resources on Earth
Speaker 1: that they wanted, and it would have to be a
Speaker 1: you know, assuming that they want something like water or oxygen,
Speaker 1: you'd have to damn it because you can't destroy water oxygen.
Speaker 1: I'd say the best you could do is dirty bomb. Yeah,
Speaker 1: dirty bomb the whole planet, cover everything in radioactive dust.
Speaker 1: That would make it just incredibly toxic and you couldn't
Speaker 1: get near it unless they like radiation, in which case, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a problem. Okay. So, as I said, I think
Speaker 1: this is maybe the most effective plan that that I
Speaker 1: could think of, But there's so many problems with it.
Speaker 1: I mean, again, this is just horrible. What if you
Speaker 1: have a false trigger and it destroys Earth by mistake?
Speaker 1: It depends on the aliens knowing what's going on. How
Speaker 1: would we advertise this device in a way that you
Speaker 1: know that we were sure that the aliens would understand,
Speaker 1: welcome to Earth, don't touch our stuff, or we blow
Speaker 1: it up? Right? Yeah, I think that this is my
Speaker 1: best idea, and a truly deeply rubbling, disturbing, horrible idea.
Speaker 1: I don't think. Yeah, I don't think it would be
Speaker 1: an effective means of preventing any sort of alien attacks,
Speaker 1: should such a thing actually be plausible, I don't think
Speaker 1: it would help at all. The best you can hope
Speaker 1: for is that it's kind of spoiling what they wanted,
Speaker 1: and that's or that maybe they would go like, oh,
Speaker 1: oh they're crazy and back away slowly from Earth forever, right,
Speaker 1: if they could figure out what it was we were
Speaker 1: saying that maybe maybe, But you know again, it's it
Speaker 1: seems like if we were to pour a lot of
Speaker 1: resources into developing something like that, the potential for something
Speaker 1: going horribly wrong along the way that has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with any aliens anywhere, that's enough for me to say,
Speaker 1: let's don't do that. Yeah, yeah, I know, like the
Speaker 1: best case scenario there is for the aliens just kind
Speaker 1: of like put a marker outside of Earth that says
Speaker 1: like caution, here be monsters, and that turns turns bad neighborhood, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it would make us sort of bad guys
Speaker 1: in the galaxy, right, I mean, we don't want to
Speaker 1: be the bad guys. The whole point here is us
Speaker 1: talking about we want to try to be the good
Speaker 1: guys and make sure that we're not threatened by bad guys.
Speaker 1: But another question is are we sure that the aliens
Speaker 1: out there are bad guys? Right? Right? Right? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: mean because it didn't know less than Carl Sagan say
Speaker 1: that he hoped or that he felt, because he felt
Speaker 1: so many things yeah, um, that that aliens would not
Speaker 1: be Yeah. He his his opinion was that any civilization
Speaker 1: that would evolve to the point capable of interstellar travel,
Speaker 1: it shows at a capacity for cooperation and innovation and curiosity.
Speaker 1: That would mean that they had likely evolved beyond hostility. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've got some reasoning about that I want to explore
Speaker 1: at the very end. But before we get to that,
Speaker 1: I guess we should talk also about the fact that
Speaker 1: some will actually wrote a book, yeah, about how to
Speaker 1: fight against an alien Not just people, I mean aerospace
Speaker 1: engineers who have like a collection of PhDs between the
Speaker 1: four of them, wrote a book. It was published, I
Speaker 1: think back in two thousand seven. It's called an Introduction
Speaker 1: to Planetary Defense, a Study of Modern Warfare applied to
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial invasion. And it takes a serious look at this question.
Speaker 1: It's not menace comedy. It's meant to say, all right,
Speaker 1: what's the likelihood? They kind of follow the same path
Speaker 1: that we have, what's the likelihood that this would happen?
Speaker 1: And they go through the math they draw different conclusions
Speaker 1: than what we have. Um. One thing they say is, look,
Speaker 1: even if you go at bare minimum and you say
Speaker 1: that we are the only intelligent civilization in the Milky
Speaker 1: Way galaxy, then maybe it stands to reason that every
Speaker 1: single galaxy has at least one intelligent civilization in it,
Speaker 1: and there are billions of them. But if you thought
Speaker 1: the distance between stars was here, here, galactic travel, well
Speaker 1: is essentially like if if there's an alien race pepable
Speaker 1: of intergalactic travel, I'm pretty sure it's game over. I
Speaker 1: don't know that any kind of of of of clever
Speaker 1: warfare is going to help us. Yeah, yeah, because because
Speaker 1: that's what they wound up suggesting. Yeah, they were talking
Speaker 1: about like kind of a French resistance underground effort to
Speaker 1: use guerilla tactics to to resist the alien invasion. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure exactly how they envisioned the actual alien invasion
Speaker 1: taking place where this would be an effective means of
Speaker 1: fighting back. Others have suggested that perhaps the best approach
Speaker 1: would be to develop um space weaponry, so weapons where
Speaker 1: we could go out and engage alien invading forces in
Speaker 1: space before they got to the planet. I do not
Speaker 1: want our research and development in space to be based
Speaker 1: around blow and stuff up me neither. It's not what
Speaker 1: I want that that kind of pollutes that it was
Speaker 1: one of the coolest things about space in the twentieth
Speaker 1: century was this was the place where war stopped, you know,
Speaker 1: collaboration happened. Ye was curiosity that was driving it, right, Sure,
Speaker 1: well you could totally, um, I guess explain some space
Speaker 1: projects as an outgrowth of rivalry between nations, like you
Speaker 1: can you can look at the space race is something
Speaker 1: that resulted from the Cold War. Absolutely a motivation to
Speaker 1: be like check out how big my rockets are. I
Speaker 1: can reach you. Yeah, but at least we were never
Speaker 1: fighting up there, you know, we were never putting weapons
Speaker 1: in space to fight each other with. There was a
Speaker 1: place of peace basically, and then and then eventually we
Speaker 1: really did get collaboration, like with the International Space Station,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of a beautiful thing. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: I would prefer that. I mean, I just think back
Speaker 1: about the space race in the Cold War and how
Speaker 1: closely related they were. But but the ultimately, yeah, we've
Speaker 1: really been more about research. There's been not really that
Speaker 1: much of an emphasis on militarization, apart from some satellites. Obviously,
Speaker 1: gp US was a military technology that eventually got uh
Speaker 1: decommissioned enough that will not decommission, but but passed so
Speaker 1: that we civilians could actually use it um. So, I
Speaker 1: mean I would hope that we would follow that pathway
Speaker 1: and treat space as this is the the truly the
Speaker 1: final frontier. This is where we can really explore, learn
Speaker 1: more about our place in the galaxy, all that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff, and less about y'all. There could be aliens
Speaker 1: coming here any day now, so let's figure out how
Speaker 1: to have our our millennium falcons up there to make
Speaker 1: sure they blows them up. Actually, there are a bunch
Speaker 1: of French theorists who insist that that the world's governments
Speaker 1: are possibly just the US government or I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: like corporations or something like that, are are planning on
Speaker 1: faking an alien invasion um in order to convince like
Speaker 1: we the people that we need to continue building out
Speaker 1: our military industrial complexes. I'm not sure that we need
Speaker 1: that justifications. I mean, yeah, they've been working on them
Speaker 1: without an alien invasion for a while. Yeah, it's to
Speaker 1: me that's something that ends up because it's not up
Speaker 1: to the individual, it's not up to the people. It's
Speaker 1: not that we vote on that. That's that's those are
Speaker 1: decisions made by politicians that we do vote into office.
Speaker 1: I guess, just so that we don't overthrow the politicians
Speaker 1: when they suggest that we need more weapons. I think,
Speaker 1: I think food or healthcare. I think finding out that
Speaker 1: the politicians that that the n s A Is spying
Speaker 1: on everybody and that didn't cause enough people to get
Speaker 1: upset about it, that we're pretty okay. We don't need
Speaker 1: to worry about overthrowing at this point. Um. But also
Speaker 1: I love the idea of faking the alien invasions so
Speaker 1: that you can foster a sense of global community here
Speaker 1: on Earth and settle our differences a k a. The
Speaker 1: Watchman defense exactly. Giant psychic squid have to attack was
Speaker 1: in New York something like that. Well, it's a decent point,
Speaker 1: actually though, I think. I mean, if we were going
Speaker 1: to resist any kind of alien hostility again, seems like
Speaker 1: kind of a lost cause. But if we're going to
Speaker 1: go in, we better go in together, right, we need
Speaker 1: to collect collective united effort. Yeah. Yeah, And that's that's
Speaker 1: another thing. I was reading a bunch of of fringe
Speaker 1: theory kind of stuff about alien invasion and preparation for
Speaker 1: this podcast episode, and uh, I want to start my
Speaker 1: my little this kind of section about what a lot
Speaker 1: of them said, because that is one of the points
Speaker 1: that they made, that that like, we we need to
Speaker 1: be collective in our in our efforts, um if we
Speaker 1: are going to possibly fight an alien invasion. Uh. But
Speaker 1: but I I do also want to say like, because
Speaker 1: I may or may not slip into a little bit
Speaker 1: of snark h and as as we all might during
Speaker 1: this this brief foray into fringe fringe, but um so,
Speaker 1: so I want to start out by saying that that
Speaker 1: I respect everyone's processes of ideation and imagination, and that
Speaker 1: I do not want to off the bat disc at
Speaker 1: it any of my fellow humans, because it is in
Speaker 1: fact the far out thinkers and and creatives who give
Speaker 1: us the really world changing important stuff. That being said,
Speaker 1: that being said, a lot of what they say seems
Speaker 1: a little bit on the incredible side, and like the
Speaker 1: literal meaning of the word, it is not necessarily credible,
Speaker 1: perhaps poorly thought out. But yes, yeah, I I am
Speaker 1: going to go with Patton Oswald who says, I don't
Speaker 1: need to I don't have to respect your opinion. I
Speaker 1: just have to acknowledge that you have one. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: they do have some interesting ideas that that I think
Speaker 1: are are decent ones. So um so so yeah, collective effort.
Speaker 1: Let us be united as humans, just like that brief
Speaker 1: sequence and Independence Day where you have the four people
Speaker 1: from the Americans. Bloody hell yeah that's on my playlist.
Speaker 1: Um So that's one thing. Because one thing, sure, we
Speaker 1: they say that we're going to need to position ourselves
Speaker 1: as part of the native Earth environment. You know, like
Speaker 1: convince any potential invaders, um that whatever they want to
Speaker 1: do with Earth, they should let us keep hanging out
Speaker 1: here because we're an important part of Earth. I like,
Speaker 1: we're we're an integral part of what this planet's ecology is.
Speaker 1: Another point to be green to you know, take care
Speaker 1: of our planet in order to like a you know,
Speaker 1: unite humanity. By stopping, for example, fossil fuel wars and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, we can present a more pristine gift
Speaker 1: to our new insect overlords. Yeah, exactly, to be like,
Speaker 1: see we're good at taking care of this planet. Checking
Speaker 1: you right. It's more it's more not so much like
Speaker 1: look how awesome our places, why don't you move in?
Speaker 1: But but along the lines of if their motivations are
Speaker 1: in fact, you guys are awful and we need to
Speaker 1: squish you like a bug. We could say, no, look,
Speaker 1: we're great stewards of our planet. Yeah. Uh. We could
Speaker 1: try on the offensive and biological warfare, sort of like
Speaker 1: if the Native Americans had given the European invaders smallpox blankets.
Speaker 1: But this one, of course, is is difficult because we
Speaker 1: have no way of knowing what alien physiology is going
Speaker 1: to be, or if there's any sort of compatibility with Earth,
Speaker 1: you know, germs or toxins with alien physiology. This is
Speaker 1: again assuming that they're not exploring with unmanned right. I've
Speaker 1: tried to. I tried to infect a robot like for
Speaker 1: four hours the other day, and it was just a
Speaker 1: fruitless effort. Look, everyone needs a hobby. Yours is sneezing
Speaker 1: on robots, you know. I thought I'd give it a try. Okay,
Speaker 1: what else, Lauren? Uh? And and yeah, and also I guess,
Speaker 1: guess on the offensive measures, just you know, keep building
Speaker 1: our satellite presence and working on rocket technology and build
Speaker 1: those weapons out in space, which means since space nobody
Speaker 1: nobody wants weapons, and well, some people want weapons in space,
Speaker 1: we do not, I think, I think again, going back
Speaker 1: to the the fact that we find the possibility of
Speaker 1: an alien invasion to be so low on the probability
Speaker 1: meter means that pouring actual resources into into that sort
Speaker 1: of thing would be premature at best. Yeah, Jonathan, I
Speaker 1: think that's a pretty good segue into what I want
Speaker 1: to finish with, which is why I think that even
Speaker 1: if we encounter an alien civilization, or even if we don't,
Speaker 1: we're just really not very likely to encounter an hostile
Speaker 1: invasion scenario. And so one of the things I want
Speaker 1: to start with is the idea that we mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: that that great filter idea. So here's the reasoning. The
Speaker 1: great filter is sort of the idea that powerful technology
Speaker 1: could in most cases lead to the ability to commit
Speaker 1: it a species level murder suicide. Right. So essentially, the
Speaker 1: great filter states that you get all these different you know,
Speaker 1: assume that you have all these different types of life forms,
Speaker 1: there is a point a wall where those life forms
Speaker 1: will not evolve further in intelligence, uh for the most part,
Speaker 1: and only occasionally will you ever get one that actually
Speaker 1: breaks through that filter. Uh. And there could be many
Speaker 1: different reasons for that, one of which being that once
Speaker 1: you once you reach a certain point of technological development,
Speaker 1: assuming that the aliens are like people where we have
Speaker 1: differences of opinion amongst our own species. When you develop
Speaker 1: the capability of causing worldwide devastation with your technological attacks,
Speaker 1: it could just be a matter of time before someone
Speaker 1: does it, which is a pretty terrifying way of looking
Speaker 1: at things, but it could be true. Yeah. Well, the
Speaker 1: idea is that along with supremely powerful technology, you almost
Speaker 1: certainly get the ability to wipe your elf out, and
Speaker 1: you can observe this just in our history. It's the
Speaker 1: one case we know of of of what technological development
Speaker 1: looks like, and in our case we got radio communications,
Speaker 1: space travel, and nuclear weapons all within a few decades
Speaker 1: of each other. And it seems plausible that whatever species
Speaker 1: you're talking about, those discoveries probably will sort of go
Speaker 1: hand in hand, just because they're all sort of linked
Speaker 1: up in a similar stage of development and the sophistication
Speaker 1: of chemistry and physics, just for one example, if you're
Speaker 1: imagining alien technology, it seems hard to imagine that aliens
Speaker 1: could have faster than light travel, if that's even possible,
Speaker 1: and it very well might not be, as we've said,
Speaker 1: If they're able to have that, they pretty much have
Speaker 1: to understand relativity. In physics. Relativity is the same principle
Speaker 1: that gives us atomic weapons equals mc squared the mass
Speaker 1: energy equivalence. It says, oh, you can split an atom
Speaker 1: and turn that into a bomb. So we have to
Speaker 1: assume this species that can fly around really fast through space,
Speaker 1: since in radio messages probably has really powerful weapons. He
Speaker 1: knows how to stu up real good. Right. But the
Speaker 1: longer a species has the technological capability to wipe itself
Speaker 1: out and doesn't, I think, the more we can assume
Speaker 1: it has developed internal psychological and cultural resources for avoiding
Speaker 1: war and violence. This is getting closer to what Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan was saying. Yeah, and so in other words, we
Speaker 1: might have good reason for thinking a technologically powerful alien
Speaker 1: species that hasn't either destroyed itself or knocked itself proverbially
Speaker 1: back into the stone age is peaceful. Another thing to
Speaker 1: consider is that I think a huge percentage, if not all,
Speaker 1: violent conflicts can be traced to an underlying competition for
Speaker 1: scarce resources. But one of the things advanced technology does
Speaker 1: is help eliminate scarcity. Right once you get into those
Speaker 1: higher levels of civilization that we talked about in another
Speaker 1: podcast as well, Um, you start realizing that, yeah, everyone
Speaker 1: would have to eat that that part of that technological
Speaker 1: advancement is based upon having the resources to do the technology. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so there there is a caveat I should state,
Speaker 1: which is that, you know, I think there's a pretty
Speaker 1: decent case for saying a highly technological species wouldn't be
Speaker 1: violent against itself if it's been around for a while.
Speaker 1: I suppose you could imagine a species is internally peaceful
Speaker 1: but unsympathetic towards alien species. But intuitively that doesn't seem right.
Speaker 1: I mean, it seems like at a certain point you
Speaker 1: would be able, you would have any species that can
Speaker 1: communicate and empathize with itself, recognizes the presence of intelligence
Speaker 1: in general, Like that's what it's responding to. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: that having world peace and then going out and kicking
Speaker 1: another planet would be just very undue. Well and yeah,
Speaker 1: and and just the just that ability to recognize that
Speaker 1: another species happens to possess some of the same qualities
Speaker 1: you do. It's just those qualities maybe manifest themselves in
Speaker 1: remarkably different ways, but you recognize that it's there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: another little bit less sweet and touchy feely but still
Speaker 1: perhaps comforting possibility is that the aliens would be cautious.
Speaker 1: I mean so Stephen Hawking famously sort of advised that
Speaker 1: we should mind our own business in the galaxy, Like,
Speaker 1: we don't know how advanced these alien civilizations could be
Speaker 1: if they exist, and we can't just assume they'll be friendly.
Speaker 1: He compared it to sort of the brutal colonization of
Speaker 1: the Americas by the Europeans just a few hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: within the same species. And he so he makes a
Speaker 1: pretty good point there. You know, it might be worth
Speaker 1: being cautious. Uh, And it might also work out in
Speaker 1: our favor if any potential alien rivals followed the same principle,
Speaker 1: just for reasons of simple prudence, they might want to
Speaker 1: hang back and avoid contact on the off chance that
Speaker 1: the encounter goes badly. They might be, like the spider,
Speaker 1: as scared of us as we are of them. Sure sure,
Speaker 1: they might be sitting in their homeworld thinking like, oh, like,
Speaker 1: like what if other planets are filled with horrible, two legged,
Speaker 1: two eyed creatures that walk around creating atomic energy and
Speaker 1: irresponsible ways. There could be three of them doing a
Speaker 1: podcast right now about what it would be like to
Speaker 1: invade an alien planet and it would be the sister
Speaker 1: episode of this one if this, if this were a
Speaker 1: video show, well, I mean not that we don't have
Speaker 1: a video show, but if this were a video show,
Speaker 1: what we would need to do is have a little
Speaker 1: and cut to the three of us and like really
Speaker 1: shoddy aliens, right, like maybe with a little antenna from
Speaker 1: the early star Dragon. Okay put at any rate? Sorry, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: well maybe in the end. It's naive of me, but
Speaker 1: I kind of do feel like we could favor the
Speaker 1: better angels of alien nature as opposed to the more
Speaker 1: base in stinks, just because of what you'd have to
Speaker 1: assume an alien mind must be like. In order to
Speaker 1: achieve highly advanced technological civilization, you can't create technology without cooperation.
Speaker 1: No technology occurs from one individual. It's based on you know,
Speaker 1: collaboration and previous and improving on previous designs. You can't
Speaker 1: have that kind of cooperation without the kind of thing
Speaker 1: we would refer to as a theory of mind, the
Speaker 1: ability to sort of imagine what other people are thinking,
Speaker 1: to run simulations of what's going on in other people's heads.
Speaker 1: And then if you have that, it seems like that
Speaker 1: almost necessarily entails something like empathy the feelings for other
Speaker 1: feeling beings. Sure, I think ultimately though, it may just
Speaker 1: come down to come back to that whole space is
Speaker 1: big thing, and yeah, yeah, just just the practical, impositive
Speaker 1: improbability that anything is going to come knocket on our door. Right,
Speaker 1: It may just be that it's big enough and we're
Speaker 1: spread out are enough that we just don't have the
Speaker 1: opportunity to find each other. Well, yeah, that would be
Speaker 1: my ultimate guests. So all this stuff about alien nature
Speaker 1: is probably not even relevant, right, because the thing that
Speaker 1: I would fall back on is we're just not going
Speaker 1: to run into each other, not only not within our
Speaker 1: lifetime certainly. What what would be more likely is that
Speaker 1: we encounter a transmission from a far away alien civilization
Speaker 1: in the form of you know, radio signal, some kind
Speaker 1: of electromagnetic radiation. Now, if tomorrow probe lands somewhere on
Speaker 1: Earth containing a VHS tape from some alien civilization, will
Speaker 1: be sure to update the blog to reflect that. But
Speaker 1: we feel fairly confident that this is this is going
Speaker 1: to be the state of affairs. So we gotta thank
Speaker 1: Brett for sending in that email. This was a blast
Speaker 1: to talk about. Joe and I had a nice long
Speaker 1: conversation in the in the break room us when we
Speaker 1: were debating on whether we should tackle this one or not,
Speaker 1: and then we ultimately decided that we were having so
Speaker 1: much fun talking about that the three of us had
Speaker 1: to do this. I mean, it was just it's too
Speaker 1: much fun to to avoid. So, uh, thank you very
Speaker 1: much Brett for sending that suggestion. And remember if you
Speaker 1: have a suggestion, whether it's a question about a previous episode,
Speaker 1: a suggestion for a future topic, maybe you just want
Speaker 1: to pick our brains about something that you wonder. You know,
Speaker 1: how is that going to be in the future. Let
Speaker 1: us know. Send us an email and I addresses f
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