Are There Ancient Humans Living In The Milky Way?

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00:00The universe is 13.8 billion years old.

00:03Modern humans have walked the Earth for only the last 300,000 years of that.

00:08There's still 13 and a half billion years that's wholly unaccounted for,

00:13along our personal timeline as a species.

00:16So what are the chances that we have never happened before?

00:20How likely is it that humanity is spread further out than we tend to believe?

00:26According to some interpretations of our story thus far,

00:31we might date back far, far further than even the age of the Earth itself.

00:38A headline-making study in June 2020 claimed that there could be dozens of alien civilizations

00:44living in our galaxy, the Milky Way. 36 was the most often-sighted figure, although the

00:49upper estimate went past 200. That's 200 individual alien societies reportedly living

00:55on our doorstep… in cosmological terms. Now, let's be clear. There's so far

01:00zero actual proof that there are any alien civilizations out there. The general scientific

01:05consensus is that there must be, but we've so far found nothing by way of hard, irrefutable

01:10evidence. The Fermi Paradox continues to plague our search for extraterrestrial life.

01:15The 2020 study, though, was inspired by various projections and predictions,

01:19including the Drake Equation. Its claim of 36 neighbouring alien groups has since been debated

01:24and disputed. We ourselves released a video, and there's a link at the end of this episode.

01:29But, say there are other bands of living beings… and say they really are not so far away from us…

01:35then what are they doing there? Some theories, most notably the Zoo Hypothesis,

01:39argue that nearby, superior alien groups are busy watching and possibly experimenting on us.

01:45Others, like the Dark Forest Theory, suggest that any alien society trying to survive

01:50will wisely remain as quiet and undetectable as they possibly can.

01:54There are, though, some more unconventional theories to suggest that if there are aliens

01:58out there, they might not be all that different from us at all. One study, published in December

02:032020 by researchers at Caltech, aimed to map the potential for life in the Milky Way

02:08more precisely than ever before. Paying close attention to the probability that life will,

02:13and does eventually self-annihilate, as well as the likelihood of the emergence of life

02:18of abiogenesis in the first place, it delivered some interesting results. It found that life was

02:24most likely in the Milky Way around eight billion years after it formed, and around 13,000 light

02:29years from the galactic centre. Considering that we appeared more than 13.5 billion years after

02:34galaxy formation, and that we're now 25,000 light years from the galactic centre, this would

02:39suggest that humans are doing quite well for themselves. According to the study, we're here

02:44far too late, in completely the wrong place, and are therefore way past the peak of life in this

02:48galaxy. And yet, we're surviving. Well done, us! But what do these conclusions infer about the rest

02:55of life in the Milky Way? One takeaway is that, if the study rings true, there should be a band

03:00of space almost halfway between us and the heart of the galaxy, 13,000 light years from the centre,

03:05wherein life is much more likely to exist than anywhere else. But another is that most life in

03:10this galaxy should've emerged more than 5.5 billion years before we did. And, if that's true,

03:16then what happened to it? The short answer is, it killed itself off. The Caltech study highlights

03:22the key role self-annihilation likely plays in how far any civilization can reasonably spread.

03:28Away from the study, the general idea is that all life dies before it gets big enough to be noticed.

03:33The slightly frightening assumption, then, is that the same thing will happen to human beings…

03:38that we'll only ever get so far before we destroy ourselves from within. But, still, if even just one

03:44such civilization did manage to survive, then they would certainly be considered ancient to our lowly

03:49minds. Recorded human history barely goes back five and a half thousand years… but now we're

03:54imagining life that's five and a half billion years old. Not that such a hypothetical lifeform

04:00should ever automatically be billed as ancient human… even if we could prove that it exists.

04:05The chances of anything else separately evolving to be even slightly recognisably similar to us are

04:10extremely low. The aliens we see in movies and read about in books are all too often humanoid

04:16in nature, with eyes and hands and heads and some kind of audio language… but, in reality,

04:22they'd probably look nothing like us, and according to some theories, might not even be

04:26carbon-based. The picture gets a little stranger, though, when ideas on panspermia get thrown into

04:32the mix. Subscribers to various ancient alien theories argue that biological material could

04:37have been distributed all across the universe in the time since its inception… that we think we're

04:42rare on Earth, but that actually we're just one of countless locations that life has reached.

04:47And this is what panspermia amounts to. The spreading of life throughout the cosmos,

04:51usually via space dust, asteroids and colliding planets. Directed panspermia, though, brings a

04:57degree of agency to the table… the idea now being that life is deliberately spread to other worlds

05:03by advanced, travelling alien species. Again, there's little by way of credible, mainstream

05:08science to suggest that this is what actually happened here on Earth. But, with such a long

05:13time gap to fill between the start of this planet and the start of humankind on this planet,

05:17fringe theories abound that ancient humans either seeded here or arrived and settled here

05:22millions or billions of years ago. In this version of life, the universe and everything,

05:27it's as though we're a colony established in the distant past by an older, more advanced version of

05:32ourselves. Through the lens of the Caltech study, we might imagine that those older, superior humans

05:38had emerged long ago, out of the optimum region for life in the Milky Way, 13,000 light-years away

05:43from the galactic centre, and 12,000 light-years away from us. They then brought their human

05:48civilisation here before carrying on their merry way into the rest of the galaxy. But one final

05:54consideration for today's question is, what if we aren't the product of panspermia, but were

05:59actually the ones facilitating it? Another popular fringe theory is that life did originate on Earth,

06:04but the history of human evolution isn't what we generally think of it as. Instead of the earliest

06:10hominins emerging around nine million years ago, and modern humans about 300,000 years ago,

06:15some claim that there were humans before this, and that they became advanced enough to leave Earth

06:20forever. Importantly, there is, again, precious little scientific or historical evidence that

06:26this really is the case. It's an idea, an unsubstantiated theory, but one that's captured

06:31the imagination of many a science fiction writer before now. Again, it allows us to imagine that

06:36the Milky Way is actually full of life, perhaps boasting far more than just the thirty-six

06:41civilisations suggested by the June 2020 study. Only, in this version of events, many of those

06:46could be our ancestors. It's just that they started on Earth and then set off to the stars,

06:51just as we're trying to do today. The biggest argument against this line of thinking, however,

06:56is that it assumes that Earth is basically the centre of everything. That's despite the

07:01overwhelming statistical likelihood that it isn't. If either Panspermia theory is true,

07:06that we were spread by others, or that we started on Earth and are now spreading elsewhere,

07:10it's much more likely the first one. To bring in the Caltech study one final time,

07:15even had humans somehow instantly appeared on this planet at the moment that Earth was born,

07:20an obvious impossibility, then they'd still be only 4.5 billion years old… which would still

07:25place us as arriving later than the optimum time for life in the Milky Way, eight billion years

07:30after it formed. The idea becomes marginally more palatable if we imagine that humans didn't

07:35start on Earth, but were seeded here instead by other humans. Then, theoretically, we'd have so

07:41much more time to play with across the history of the universe. Our story could be pushed further

07:47back, to a time before Earth and a time within Caltech's optimum parameters. And it can be

07:52pushed further forward, because we're no longer confined to just one world. Earth becomes just one

07:58of many that we might have visited in the past, or in the future. And, suddenly, the rest of the

08:02Milky Way is our playground. But, ultimately, all of those stipulations require us to make

08:08some gigantic leaps in our understanding of why we're here, what it takes for us to survive,

08:13and how significant we really are in the universe. More and more scientists are growing to accept

08:18that alien life must exist somewhere in space… but human life? Perhaps we'll only believe that

08:24when we see it. What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments,

08:29check out these other clips from Unveiled, and make sure you subscribe and ring the bell for

08:33our latest content.

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