What If We're Remnants of a Type III Civilization?

Unveiled

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00:00An advanced Type 3 civilization has the potential to seed younger civilizations all over the

00:06galaxy.

00:07Type 3s may have also developed ways to manipulate time, space, and matter at scales far beyond

00:14anything we can currently imagine.

00:16So could our entire species simply be the product of them?

00:23Do you think it's possible?

00:27For those unaware, a Type 3 civilization is a classification from the Kardashev Scale.

00:33Proposed by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, the scale organizes theoretical

00:38civilizations into classes based on the energy they can harness.

00:42Originally containing three levels, it was later expanded to five.

00:46Briefly, a Type 1 can harness all planetary energy sources with 100% efficiency.

00:52Type 2 can harness all energy from a nearby star, via megastructures like a Dyson sphere.

00:57Type 3, the original upper limit, and the civilization we're exploring today, would

01:02have the ability to harness all energy in a galaxy.

01:05And beyond that, you have Type 4, which has all the energy in the universe, and Type 5,

01:10which would basically be God-mode, with the ability to manipulate even the fabric of the

01:14universe itself.

01:15So where does that leave us?

01:17Well, we're somewhere between zero and one… a roughly 0.7-level civilization, according

01:23to calculations made by Carl Sagan.

01:25We're no longer Stone Age hunter-gatherers at around 0.2 on Kardashev's scale, but

01:31we also cannot harness the full potential of our planet yet.

01:34The physicist Michio Kaku figures that within 100 to 200 years, humans might advance beyond

01:40Type 1.

01:42But for today's question, if we're still not even beyond the first level, how could

01:46we possibly have descended from a Type 3 time?

01:49Well, while we might suppose an extremely advanced civilization, like a Type 3, would

01:54live in the far reaches of outer space, far away from our world and reality… there's

01:59a chance they could be a lot closer.

02:01Like, right here on Earth, close.

02:03Broadly speaking, if everything we've ever known was to constitute the remnants of another

02:09society, then it would mean that a Type 3 civilization must have either long since died

02:13off on this planet, or at least in this galaxy, or long since moved away, leaving only traces

02:19of themselves behind.

02:21And while that may all sound a lot like science fiction or a conspiracy theory, some legitimate

02:26questions are being raised within the scientific community about what the planet was like long

02:31before we arrived.

02:33One problem is that it's difficult to find direct evidence of extremely old things.

02:39While it stands to reason to expect remnants of an ancient civilization to be buried in

02:43the Earth, that's not likely to be the case.

02:46Artifacts from thousands or tens of thousands of years ago are relatively easy to find.

02:51But when looking for something that's millions or tens of millions of years old, it's almost

02:55impossible.

02:56That's because the geological record is only really preserved back to the beginning

03:01of the Quaternary Period, which is about 2.6 million years ago.

03:05There are fossils from earlier, of course, but they become rarer and rarer.

03:10And we have, on extremely rare occasions, uncovered tools that are more than three million

03:15years old.

03:16But because of how Earth works to refresh its crust over long periods of time, the suggestion

03:21is that some things may have been erased, wiped out by a long game of nature and forgotten

03:27about.

03:28Here's where today's what-if scenario comes in.

03:30And under the ground isn't the only place we can look to, either.

03:34We can also peer into the atmosphere to find, for example, that there are certain similarities

03:39between the climate modelling of today and that of around 55.5 million years ago.

03:45In both periods, there's a spike in the global temperature.

03:48Our spike can be attributed to human activity, but the question is, what about the spike

03:53from 55.5 million years ago?

03:55Might that also be human, or something similar to human, activity?

04:00For two academics in 2018, there were grounds at least to investigate.

04:04The director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, and the astrophysicist

04:10Adam Frank were intrigued enough to publish a paper exploring the possibility of a pre-human

04:15civilization.

04:16They call the idea the Silurian Hypothesis, with a name inspired by a classic episode

04:22of Doctor Who.

04:23The Silurian Hypothesis has since become a key point of study.

04:27Was the spike in temperature more than 50 million years ago the result of something

04:30natural, or was it something else?

04:33Because blatant physical evidence will have long been wiped out, Schmidt and Frank proposed

04:37that we need other signifiers to look into this incredibly ancient period.

04:42Were we to transport ourselves 55 million years into the future, to look back at our

04:46time, then some evidence of plastics and fertilizers may still be detectable, for example.

04:51So, we need, then, a Type Three version of that.

04:55Perhaps an advanced society would leave behind similar chemical traces, and that would, if

04:59nothing else, tell us something about our own progress.

05:02But more likely, a Type Three civilization will have used technology that's completely

05:06alien to us, so we need to look for something we've never seen before.

05:11But herein lies something of a paradox.

05:14Because there's some argument that an advanced enough society will have also completely and

05:18deliberately removed all evidence of itself from any given planet or star system it had

05:23existed in.

05:25Whether underground, in the air, or embedded in the very fabric of the life it may have

05:29left behind, a Type Three would be knowledgeable enough to know that it could never be revealed

05:34that it was here.

05:35For this reason, many believe that the best probability of us being descendants from an

05:40advanced civilization may involve extraterrestrials.

05:44Given that a Type Three force will have mastered all the energy in the galaxy, the imagined

05:49links between us and it may well exist not on this planet, which has hidden or erased

05:54them, but somewhere else within the Milky Way.

05:57Of course, the big question when it comes to aliens, advanced or not, is where are they?

06:03In the 1950s, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi encapsulated the problem in the now-famous

06:08Fermi Paradox.

06:10And here the issue is that if we are the remnants of a Type Three world, then there should be

06:14other, easily identifiable remnants in the galaxy around us, too.

06:19Megastructures, interstellar ships, signs of terraforming on distant planets, and on

06:23Earth.

06:24But, so far, nothing.

06:26Could our proposed Type Three ancestors possibly have been efficient enough to hide all evidence

06:31of themselves from all the skies above?

06:33Or is something else going on?

06:35In the 1970s, the US scientist Michael Hart proposed four potential reasons why we haven't

06:41encountered aliens on Earth yet.

06:43One, it's physically impossible for them to traverse space.

06:46Two, they're simply choosing not to visit us.

06:49Three, it's too early in their development for interstellar travel.

06:53And four, most significantly for today's video, they have visited us, but in our distant

06:59past, perhaps at a time when humans didn't exist.

07:03In this version of events, for those who suggest that we came from some other advanced group,

07:08this is the key moment.

07:10The key window for when the emergence of life could have been kick-started by the arrival

07:14of an early, advanced civilization.

07:16It's the theory of panspermia, but on a massive scale, where we're not just imagining

07:21stray microbes on a far-off probe, but whole, intelligent creatures specifically leaving

07:26their seed.

07:28In a recent video, we found how it may be possible for life to survive embedded in asteroids…

07:33and how it could also be possible for that life to be picked up by a chunk of space rock

07:38just in passing, without even the need for an impact event.

07:42But now, what we're picturing is neither accidental panspermia nor a biological boom

07:47following an asteroid strike.

07:49It's alien colonization, and we're the results of it.

07:53Finally, consider the headline-making 2020 multi-authored paper that suggested that the

07:58Milky Way may actually be full of long-dead civilizations.

08:02The four researchers behind the claim found that the factors for emerging life may have

08:07peaked about eight billion years after our galaxy formed, and about 13,000 light-years

08:12from its centre.

08:13Humans arose some 13.5 billion years after the galaxy formed, and Earth today is located

08:19about 25,000 light-years from the galactic core.

08:23So, in the context of our question, in many ways we can be considered relative newcomers

08:28to this corner of space, with perhaps many advanced civilizations rising and falling

08:34before we ever came to be.

08:36For now, it should be remembered that scientists are confident that they have a reasonably

08:41solid understanding of how and where life originated.

08:45And yet, there's certainly some mystery remaining.

08:48Could it be, then, that rather than emerging here, we were put here?

08:52Could it be that we're carrying on the torch from a long-dead civilization?

08:56As it stands, these are hypothetical questions and alternate realities only.

09:01But that's what would happen if we were the remnants of a Type Three civilization.

09:06What do you think?

09:07Is there anything we missed?

09:08Let us know in the comments, check out these other clips from Unveiled, and make sure you

09:11subscribe and ring the bell for our latest content.

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