Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter - video Dailymotion

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Why Alien Life Would Be Our Doom - The Great Filter

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00:00Imagine NASA announced today that they found aliens.

00:04Bacteria on Mars.

00:06Weird alien fish in the oceans of Europa.

00:09And also, ancient alien ruins on Titan.

00:12Wouldn't that be great?

00:14Well, no. It would be horrible news.

00:17Devastating even.

00:19It could mean that the end of humanity is almost certain,

00:22and that it might be coming soon.

00:25Why?

00:26Why would the most exciting discovery of our lifetime be bad?

00:30Let us imagine the development of life from its inception to us today as a flight of stairs.

00:36The first step is dead chemistry that needs to assemble itself into self-replicating patterns,

00:41stable and resilient, but also able to change and evolve.

00:46The second step is for our early life to become more complex,

00:50able to build more complicated structures,

00:52and use the available energy much more efficiently.

00:55On the next step, these cells combine to become multicellular beings,

01:00enabling unbelievable variety and further complexity.

01:04The step above sees the species evolve big brains,

01:08enabling the use of tools, culture, and shared knowledge,

01:11which creates even higher complexity.

01:14The species can now become the dominant life form on its planet,

01:17and change it according to its needs.

01:20First, shy attempts to leave its planet are happening.

01:23This is where we are now.

01:25It's in the nature of life as we know it to reach out,

01:29to cover every niche it can.

01:31And since planets have a limited carrying capacity and lifespan,

01:35if a species wants to survive, it will look for more places to spread to.

01:40So the steps above the current ones seem logical.

01:43Colonize your own solar system,

01:45then spread further to reach other stars,

01:48to the possible final step, becoming a galaxy-wide civilization.

01:53It's very likely that this is a universal principle for civilizations,

01:57no matter where they're from.

01:59If a species is competitive and driven enough to take control over its planet,

02:03they'll probably not stop there.

02:06We know that there are up to 500 billion planets in the Milky Way,

02:10at least 10 billion Earth-like planets.

02:13Many have been around billions of years longer than Earth.

02:16But we're observing zero galactic civilizations.

02:20We should be able to see something.

02:23But there's nothing.

02:24Space seems to be empty and dead.

02:27This means something is preventing living things from climbing the staircase

02:32beyond the step we're on right now.

02:35Something that makes becoming a galactic civilization extremely hard,

02:40maybe impossible.

02:43This is the Great Filter,

02:45a challenge or danger so hard to overcome

02:48that it eliminates almost every species that encounters it.

02:53There are two scenarios.

02:55One means we are incredibly special and lucky.

02:58The other one means we are doomed and practically already dead.

03:03It depends on where the filter is on our staircase.

03:07Behind or ahead of us?

03:10Scenario 1.

03:11The filter is behind us.

03:13We are the first.

03:15If the filter is behind us,

03:17that means that one of the steps we passed is almost impossible to take.

03:21Which step could it be?

03:23Is life itself extremely rare?

03:26It's very hard to make predictions

03:28about how likely it is for life to emerge from dead things.

03:31There is no consensus.

03:33Some scientists think it develops everywhere where the conditions are right.

03:37Others think that Earth might be the only living place in the universe.

03:42Another candidate is the step of complex animal cells.

03:46A very specific thing happened on this step,

03:49and as far as we know, it happened exactly once.

03:53A primitive hunter cell swallowed another cell,

03:56but instead of devouring it, the two cells formed a union.

04:00The bigger cell provided shelter,

04:02took care of interacting with the environment and providing resources,

04:06while the smaller one used its new home and free stuff

04:09to focus on providing a lot of extra energy for its host.

04:13With the abundant energy, the host cell could grow more than before

04:17and build new and expensive things to improve itself,

04:20while the guest became the powerhouse of the cell.

04:24These cells make up every animal on the planet.

04:27Maybe there are billions of bacteria-covered planets in the Milky Way,

04:31but not a single one, apart from us, has achieved our level of complexity.

04:36Or intelligence.

04:37We humans feel very smart and sophisticated with our crossword puzzles and romantic novels,

04:42but a big brain is, first and foremost, a very expensive evolutionary investment.

04:47They are fragile, they don't help in a fistfight with a bear,

04:51they cost enormous amounts of energy.

04:53And despite them, it took modern humans 200,000 years

04:57to get from sharp sticks to civilization.

05:00Being smart does not mean you get to win automatically.

05:04Maybe intelligence is just not so great, and we're lucky that it worked out for us.

05:13Plenty of others died already.

05:16A great filter before us is orders of magnitude more dangerous than anything we encountered so far.

05:22Even if a major disaster killed most of us or threw us back thousands of years,

05:27we would survive and recover.

05:29And if we can recover, even if it takes a million years,

05:32then it's not a great filter, but just a roadblock to an eventual galactic civilization.

05:37On universal timescales, even millions of years are just the blink of an eye.

05:42If a great filter really lies before us, it has to be so dangerous,

05:46so purely devastating and powerful,

05:49that it has destroyed most, if not all, advanced civilizations in our galaxy over billions of years.

05:56A really daunting and depressing hypothesis

05:59is that once a species takes control over its planet,

06:02it's already on the path to self-destruction.

06:06Technology is a good way to achieve that.

06:09It needs to be something that's so obvious that virtually everybody discovers it,

06:14and so dangerous that its discovery leads almost universally to an existential disaster.

06:20A large-scale nuclear war.

06:22Nanotechnology that gets out of control.

06:25Genetic engineering of the perfect superbug.

06:28An experiment that lights the whole atmosphere on fire.

06:31It might be a super-intelligent AI that accidentally or purposely destroys its creators.

06:38Or things that we can't even see coming right now.

06:42Or it's way simpler.

06:44Species competitive enough to take over their planet

06:47necessarily destroy it while competing with each other for resources.

06:51Maybe there are runaway chain reactions in every ecosystem

06:55that once set in motion are not fixable.

06:58And so once a civilization is powerful enough to change the composition of its atmosphere,

07:03they make their planet uninhabitable 100% of the time.

07:08Let's hope that that's not the case.

07:10If the filter is ahead of us, our odds are really bad.

07:14What we can hope for.

07:17This is why finding life beyond Earth would be horrible.

07:21The more common life is in the universe, and the more advanced and complex it is,

07:26the more likely it becomes that a filter is in front of us.

07:29Bacteria would be bad.

07:31Small animals would be worse.

07:33Intelligent life would be alarming.

07:35Ruins of ancient alien civilizations would be horrible.

07:40The best case scenario for us right now is that Mars is sterile.

07:45That Europa's oceans are devoid of life,

07:48that the vast arms of the Milky Way harbor only empty oceans hugging dead continents.

07:54That there are billions of empty planets waiting to be discovered and to be filled up with life.

08:00Billions of new homes waiting for us to finally arrive.

Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter

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