 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? Good evening guys. Tonight we're going to talk about Enrico Fermi, the Fermi paradox. It's one of my personal favorites. Science fiction, yeah, maybe, futurism genre. And this is 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 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 headphones in. Let's relax and let's find out about this paradox. The Fermi paradox, which assumes that we should definitely have detected intelligent life by now, remains an all-time most bedeviling lunchtime remark and relies on four fairly short assumptions. There's nothing special about our sun. It's ordinary, relatively young and there are billions of stars in our galaxy that are much older. It's the question, too. There must be planets like ours revolving around those stars. Fact scientists now believe there are billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way alone. Exoplanets being any planets outside our anthropocentric cause intelligent life developed. We have every reason to believe that, of course, intelligent life could develop on those other planets as well. Three, after millions of years of technological progress, millions in alien civilization would likely have the technology to travel to other stars. In less than 100 years after all, man has gone from flying for a few seconds at Kitty Hawk in North Kiss. You could even say that was barely 60 years. Probably only about 50 years if you count. The time span of millions of years, 50 years is quite inconsequential and just really hammers the point home. Number four, to elaborate on the possibilities of an advanced civilization and their behavior. Given a few other, 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. If you've seen that video, most likely you have because if you haven't, briefly, Kardashev was a famous Soviet Russian astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev, and he developed a scale that, it's a hypothetical classification system for alien civilizations based on their energy. The physicist Michio Kaku, famed guys on TV a lot nowadays, famous physicists, I would say he's up there, he elaborated it, elaborated on it and defined it precisely or more generally as three different types, technically four if you count us as a sub-type one. So we're something currently less than a type one. Type one would be a civilization that could harness the energy of an entire planet. That means wind, solar, volcanic, plate tectonic energy, and solar radiation that hits the planet for our energy consumption. And this civilization could most likely control the weather, so they would have a very firm grasp on their own planet. Type two 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, that was way off, 10 billion times the energy output of a type one. So they're accelerating, they're increasing by a factor of 10 billion, which would be a billion times less. But it's a type, type two civilization, so they would be able to own a famous 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 made up of trillions of 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 incredible. So a type three would be 10 billion times the energy harnessing, able to harness that much more than a type two, which at this point would be on a galactic level. This would, for me, thought a sufficiently advanced civilization, sufficiently evolved civilization could eventually get to. So if human technological growth continues at an average of 3% a year, Kaku posits that our own civilization may attain type one status about 200 years, type two, in a few thousand in type three, and no more than a civilization reaches type two and enjoys the energy of an entire star. New forms of travel, of course, become possible. And, you know, concept of, or our binary concept, I mean, binary two, the layman like me, you know, it's the lines between matter and energy start to get blurred out of what matter or material reality really is. I'm sure in a thousand years, I'm sure even in a hundred years, material reality and accordance with that ability to travel through space and our concept of how to travel through space even, I'm sure by then will be radically altered, you know, so to me it's just really, really thought-provoking and so many questions, so many possibilities, I guess, is what inspires me to want to pursue and look into this stuff. According to the mathematicians, Duncan Forgen and Arwen Nicholson from Udenberg, self-replicating spacecraft traveling at one tenth the speed of light, admittedly a quick speed, could travel the entire Milky Way, which leads us to Fermi's paradox. Intelligent life has every chance of existing and has had plenty of time to develop beyond anything imaginable today, so why haven't we observed science? Here's six, there are actually a lot more people have taken this and ran with it and if you're interested, maybe I'll put a link, hopefully I'll remember to put a link to Isaac Arthur, his channel on science and futurism on YouTube and here is, it's just really brilliant, it's well thought out, pretty darn good editing for an amateur production, he's a physicist himself and has a lot of videos on this exact topic, so if you haven't I would suggest going to check him out, so only gonna get three of them, if you guys enjoy it, just leave a comment and I'll pick up the other three and you know, maybe more of course, cause 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 outside of Earth intelligent life, this one, this first one is 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 on planets below 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 called the Zoo Hypothesis and this theory was formally proposed as a solution to the Fermi Paradox by John Ball at Harvard, at the Harvard Smithsonian, Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, given the age of the universe, Ball, multiple three civilizations may have actually appeared millions or even billions of years ago, with such a vast head start 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 sabertooths, and these 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, we've decided to create nature reserves and national parks, so of course you can imagine, extrapolate that into space and 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 type of technology that we haven't been able to understand comprehend or even detect primitive phase of technological innovation right now, so they might be observing our progress from afar, hiding from us until they decide that we're ready to join the galactic civilization, and of course this is also just like the idea behind 2001 Space Odyssey, they're observing us closer than we think and instead of technology or maybe in conjunction with technology, they're waiting to see if our morality, see if our passion and not be overcome by your rationality and maybe to the point where empathy greater than individual with each other in such a way that would reflect on our as a single, that's always another possibility. So number two, second solution to the Fermi paradox is that we're living in a simulated universe, all the 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 going to point you to this concept very well in a really entertaining manner, just type in the simulation hypothesis and it should show up, it's really brilliant, that's a whole another episode in itself, so we'll elaborate on it a little bit here obviously. Some of their arguments are logical, perhaps even convincing and they've been debated by serious academics, serious journals for now, for a while now. Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, has developed my favorite argument in a paper, obviously I'm reading right now but still a good argument, a computer simulation, he argues that at least one of the following must be true, one out of three, first is humans are likely to go extinct before they are post-human and able to create entirely simulated realities, i.e. an entirely simulated universe, two is a post-human civilization with the ability to run such a simulation would likely not run many simulations because of the immense amount of resources and perhaps because of other ethical considerations about the simulation, for instance if you did run a simulation you would imagine that it would be running beyond quicker than in 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 another goal 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 think we'd be at the level of quantum computing so I don't think we would actually ever you know I don't think it would be as simple as cut and dry as binary literally as ones and zeros the third one is that we're currently living in a computer simulation using extremely clever logic and a bit of mathematical fiddling using extremely clever logic and a bit of mathematical fiddling Bostrom concludes that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become post human and ancestor simulations similar to the one I just briefly outlined the belief that there's a significant chance we'll do this is false unless we are currently living in a simulation remember this is a philosopher at Oxford speaking it's pretty wild so if the universe 15 billion years old and civilizations have potentially already evolved you know even millions of years ago you know let alone the fact that 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 the level of 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 now of course that could be counter argued by the fact that or the potential fact that we are indeed the first so to speak first intelligent life forms in the universe or at least our galaxy or at least our quadrant local area of the galaxy so far such a simulation be created riders of long try to speculate that something called a matryoshka brain might be developed by a type 2 or type 3 civilization and 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 you know 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 mathematicians have calculated that a matryoshka brain matryoshka matryoshka could have the computational power to create a simulated universe with all of us living inside this idea believe it or not does not appear to violate any laws of physics that we know about Isaac Arthur has a really really good video on black hole farming which I might try to use some material to make a little video about that myself from him this is 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 the potential construction in engineering of such a device that I'm not like a matryoshka brain matryoshka could be so large and so powerful that it could it could effectively run on for infinity for our relative our relative perspectives inside the simulation and black hole and you know what I won't go into it because I forget too much of it it's not gonna sound it's not gonna make sense but yeah so we'll skip that but it's a very fascinating concept that we could potentially ultimately harvest a black hole at the center of the Milky Way for instance for us if we ever live long enough to see the universe expand so far that there were no other galaxies in sight and the only remaining source of energy was actually from black holes but we'll probably somehow be able to tap into the ambient energy of still space time so the last one I'm gonna tackle today is that aliens are broadcasting but like I mentioned earlier we might not have the technology to even detect the form of communication that they're using so you've all heard of the SETI Institute the search for extraterrestrial intelligence 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 aliens might not be broadcasting using radio waves they might be using different frequencies than the one SETI is currently listening on they might use neutrinos or lasers so the frequencies might be from such a powerful source that they don't radially propagate through space so there might be that form of a sort of galactic prussian 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 an especially compelling reason for why we're missing alien signals he speculated that aliens may communicate at a rate so slow or conversely so fast that we don't even recognize their efforts if 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 we can't even imagine and may never discover so we've been searching for signals for only less than 100 years if you think about and even radically changed the paper which we did you know that took thousands of years and then paper to electricity that took another you know a thousand years two thousand years or so we've been using electricity to communicate, store, transmit data, communicating using radio waves it might be so antique antiquated obsolete at that point that you know that's why we're not detecting them over years ago or perhaps skip them all together the chance that our method of communication along perfectly with an aliens begins to look really slim this is a topic that's near 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 bad time of day but it's the only time I could make I hope you guys enjoyed it and as always thank you all for your love subscriptions your likes comments have any advice you'd like to give me maybe something I'm doing different I could be doing different to evolve as I told Cameron last night Patreon of mine was it was afraid that of criticism who want to see me succeed so if you guys enjoy what I do and all I look at it as is genuine kindness and I'm just really humbled that you guys would even take the time out of your day to leave a comment constructive criticism so I'll help you guys relax get to sleep and just spread good vibes and like I always say I don't want any negativity from me on my channel so yeah 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 bye