Our First Contact with Aliens Will Be Their Last Words

0:02 If alien civilizations are out there,

0:05 what will humanity's [music] first contact with them most plausibly look like?

0:10 What kind of civilizations are we most [music] likely to detect?

0:15 What signature will betray their presence to us?

0:20 I've [music] spent many years pondering this question

0:23 and today I present to you a new theory,

0:27 one which [music] you will not find in any Hollywood movie or TV show.

0:31 An idea which I [music] call the Escation hypothesis.

0:36 The secret source to this idea comes

0:38 from thinking about the history of observational astronomy.

0:42 The most prestigious groundbreaking astronomical detections are

0:46 those that detect entirely new [music] types of astrophysical phenomena.

0:50 A good example and subject to my own research is exoplanets.

0:55 Even before their discovery,

0:56 it was widely recognized what a big deal their discovery

1:00 would be and multiple teams were trying to pull this off.

1:03 Many looked at the solar system as a kind of template as to what to expect.

1:08 And thus they built instruments designed to detect

1:11 Jupiter-like planets on wide distant orbits around their star.

1:16 But some radical [clears throat] thinkers looked in the most unexpected places.

1:21 It was Alexander Walshan and his team who

1:23 started finding the first confirmed exoplanets in 1990.

1:28 But these were bizarre worlds, planets orbiting pulsars.

1:33 A few years later, the first exoplanets around normal stars were found.

1:37 But again, they shocked the scientific community

1:39 with a discovery of so-called hot Jupiters.

1:43 You see, for decades,

1:44 it was assumed that gas giants like Jupiter would form [music] in the outer

1:48 regions of solar systems where it was cool enough for ices to remain stable.

1:53 But in the late '9s,

1:54 astronomers kept finding Jupiterized [music] planets 10 times closer

1:58 to their star than Mercury's orbit around the sun.

2:01 Planets with temperatures of thousands of Kelvin.

2:04 Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight,

2:06 we now understand that both hot Jupiters and pulsar

2:09 planets are in fact very unusual rare types of planets.

2:15 For example, although most stars indeed have planets of one kind or another,

2:19 less than 1% of them have hot Jupiter type planets.

2:23 Now, you might be wondering, if they are so rare,

2:25 then how come they dominated this early

2:28 phase of exoplanet detection back in the '90s?

2:30 Well, the reason is simple.

2:33 Can you guess it?

2:34 It's because of detection bias.

2:37 The reason why we found so many of them

2:39 is just because they're so damn obvious and loud.

2:41 You can hardly miss them in spite of their intrinsic rarity.

2:46 Perhaps the most poignant example of detection bias in astronomy

2:50 is just to look up at the night sky.

2:53 On a clear night, you can see a couple thousand stars above you.

2:57 And remarkably, about a third of those are giant stars, essentially dying stars.

3:03 The sun, too, will one day enter this stage.

3:06 in roughly 5 billion years from now,

3:09 ballooning so large it will likely engulf the Earth.

3:12 But this is a transitory phase lasting for less than 10% of its total lifetime.

3:18 Indeed, only about 1% of all stars in the universe are in this giant phase.

3:24 And yet, despite representing just 1% of the population,

3:28 they make up about a third of the stars that you can

3:31 see with a naked eye when you look up at the sky.

3:34 And of course the reason for that is again detection

3:37 bias or technically in astronomy we call it mommquist bias.

3:41 [music] Stars become so brilliant as giants that we

3:44 can see them from far far further away.

3:47 For example, Danb [music] in the constellation Signis is easily

3:50 visible by eye despite being roughly 2,000 lighty years away.

3:55 But the nearest star Proxima Centuri just four

3:58 light years away isn't visible by eye at all.

4:02 And to cap this argument off,

4:04 my favorite example of a detection bias would have to be supernovi.

4:09 The most common type of supernova is a core collapse event.

4:13 Very massive stars, those greater than 8 times the sun's mass,

4:17 have different fates to most stars, much more violent destiny.

4:22 Stars are in essence a balancing act

4:25 of outward radiation pressure and inward gravitational pull.

4:29 When the fuel starts to run dry, gravity wins out and the star implodes.

4:35 The outer layers collapse inwards and bounce off

4:38 the inner dense core leading to a spectacular supernova explosion.

4:44 Now, these events are so energetic that [music] for a few days,

4:48 this one single star can outshine the other stars in its galaxy combined.

4:54 But like hot Jupiters, these are very rare events though.

4:58 A Milky Waysized galaxy gets just one supernova every half century or so.

5:03 But despite their staggering rarity,

5:06 astronomers routinely detect thousands of these things every year.

5:12 Why?

5:13 Because they are so damn bright that we can

5:16 see them from essentially the other side of the universe.

5:19 So the history of astronomy teaches us that often the easiest

5:24 examples of astronomical phenomena to detect are in fact highly atypical.

5:29 Pulsar planets, hot Jupiters, giant stars,

5:32 and supernovi are all freaks, extreme examples of their broader class.

5:38 They are the loud, obnoxious twits at the cocktail

5:41 party that suck up all the oxygen.

5:44 Most people don't act that way,

5:46 but you can bet the rare few who do get noticed by everyone.

5:51 So, by extension, we should expect the first detection

5:55 of an alien civilization to be someone who was being unusually loud.

6:00 Their behavior will probably be quite atypical,

6:03 but their enormous volume makes them

6:06 the most likely candidate for first discovery,

6:08 as the history of astronomy has taught us time and time again.

6:13 Now, the idea sounds simple, but there is a lot to unpack here.

6:17 Before we discuss that, I just want to say

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7:40 Now, back to the video.

7:43 Recall our analogy of a supernova.

7:46 But that raises the question,

7:47 what is the civilization equivalent of a supernova?

7:51 Well, consider that a supernova is really just a phase of disequilibrium.

7:55 For eons, the star was perfectly stable and quite unremarkable.

8:00 Gravity and radiation pressure in harmony with one another.

8:03 The whole reason why this star became so

8:06 detectable was because of this terminal phase of disequilibrium.

8:10 So we might imagine that a civilization

8:13 in disequilibrium with its environment would

8:16 represent one [music] of the easier types of signals for us to detect.

8:19 This instability is really any phase

8:21 where a civilization's energy [music] throughput, environmental forcing,

8:24 or technological interventions depart sharply from long-term equilibrium,

8:29 generating disproportionate waste heat, radiative leakage,

8:33 surface modification, or high energy transients.

8:36 As an example, one proposed method that an alien

8:39 could potentially detect us is anthropogenic climate change,

8:42 [music] unnaturally rapid changes in appliance temperature, weather,

8:46 and atmospheric chemistry, [music] which is obviously not sustainable.

8:50 Perhaps the most extreme dicular room we can think of is nuclear war.

8:54 Detonate all the nukes on Earth and we'd light up

8:57 like a Christmas tree for the whole galaxy to [music] see.

9:00 Indeed, astronomer James Elliot explicitly suggested

9:04 doing this in space as a way

9:05 of saying hello and also getting rid of all of the nukes back in 1971.

9:10 Such an act maximizes our volume,

9:13 our detectability, albeit only for a brief period.

9:17 This is perhaps the closest analogy of a supernova

9:20 that I think we're [music] capable of.

9:22 This is all particularly potent because

9:24 detectability scales with luminosity to roughly [music]

9:27 the three halves power because the observable volume grows as the radius cubed.

9:32 [music] Explanation is on screen for that.

9:34 But most critically, what this really means is that a civilization that is

9:38 100 times louder becomes roughly a thousand times more detectable.

9:42 [music] And this causes these brief supernovi phases

9:45 to be vastly over represented in our detections.

9:48 The exact method of disequilibrium isn't [music] important.

9:52 What really matters is the principle.

9:54 The greater the imbalance, the louder they become.

9:58 And [music] this idea gels neatly with a previously

10:01 published idea in astronomy known as the sustainability solution.

10:05 To [music] see this, consider the thermal image of a housing complex.

10:09 All those red areas are waste heat inefficiencies.

10:13 So developers tried to improve the designs to minimize such wastage.

10:17 [music] And of course, the ultimate goal will be a building

10:19 that was completely indistinguishable from its environment.

10:22 And so, the more sustainable we become,

10:25 the less detectable [music] we are to other alien species.

10:28 As a twist on Arthur C.

10:30 Clark's famous words, science fiction author Carl Schroeder once wrote,

10:34 "Any sufficiently advanced civilization is

10:37 indistinguishable from nature." So advanced,

10:41 mature alien civilizations could be out there,

10:44 but we would never know about them because they become so

10:48 sustainable that there's no signature left us to grab onto anymore.

10:52 The Escation hypothesis leans into this idea and suggests

10:57 that the most detectable alien civilizations will be the unstable ones.

11:01 The ethmology comes from the Greek escatos which translates as the last the end

11:07 of all things because baked into this is

11:11 the recognition that [music] instability is inherently unsustainable.

11:15 One way or the other this signal

11:17 and plausibly the entire civilization will soon end.

11:21 Like a supernova, this tumultuous [music] period simply cannot last.

11:27 The open question with this hypothesis and one which I gladly

11:31 concede is whether [music] these periods

11:34 of disequilibrium are sufficiently common,

11:37 loud and prolonged to make them more detectable than the other

11:42 population of quiet and presumably more

11:45 numerous quasi sustainable civilizations out there.

11:48 Broadly speaking, their detection probability will

11:51 be a product of those three factors.

11:53 the fraction of civilizations which are loud,

11:56 just how detectable they become during that period,

12:00 and how long this phase actually lasts for.

12:03 That combination competes with the detectability of quiet civilizations.

12:07 [music] The Escation hypothesis thus suggests

12:11 that the former will beat out the latter.

12:14 And to be clear, I'm not claiming that this is definitively true,

12:18 merely that we should take this idea seriously,

12:22 especially given the context of historical astronomical detections

12:25 that we have seen [music] in this field.

12:27 There is an undeniable tragedy to [music] this notion.

12:32 Hollywood has preconditioned us to expect one of two types of alien contact.

12:36 Either a hostile invasion force

12:39 or a benevolent species bestowing wisdom to humanity.

12:43 But the Escatian hypothesis is neither.

12:46 Here, first contact is with a civilization in its death throws,

12:50 one violently flailing before the end.

12:53 As an extension to this idea,

12:56 such a species may even recognize his imminent demise and decide to consciously

13:00 [music] send out messages into the void as a kind of lastditch resort.

13:04 The late Steven Hawking often warned against sending

13:07 [music] messages into space for fear of destruction,

13:11 a concept foundational to the dark

13:13 forest theory in Lucia Shin's threebody problem.

13:16 But in this case, any fears

13:18 of external threat dissolve when facing internal annihilation.

13:22 There's nothing to lose and everything to gain.

13:25 So whereas thus far in this video I

13:28 have presented the Escatian hypothesis as a kind

13:30 of generic disequilibrium signature in this modification

13:34 it takes the form of a deliberate transmission.

13:37 Perhaps a radio signal for instance.

13:40 Who knows?

13:40 Perhaps the infamous wow signal was indeed such a last cry for help.

13:46 See our previous video for more [music] on that.

13:48 But it has to be said that the picture I've painted for you

13:51 fully undermines the classic [music] Hollywood portrayal

13:54 that we've become all so used to.

13:56 In this contact scenario, we [music] are not the vulnerable party,

14:00 but rather we are the ones who serenely bear

14:03 witness [music] to a train wreck of a civilization,

14:06 one who is desperately screaming out into [music] the night.

14:10 In the same way that we can gaze through

14:12 our telescopes at older sunlike stars turning into giants,

14:16 [music] a preview of our own solar systems fate,

14:19 these civilizations could be a premonition

14:21 of what lies ahead [music] for humanity.

14:24 I personally have three solutions right now in my head

14:27 for the Fermy paradox and the [music] Ecatian hypothesis is one of those.

14:32 I don't know if I'd call it my favorite,

14:34 but I do believe it is a plausible solution.

14:37 And the ramifications are important [music] because

14:39 it would actually influence our search strategy.

14:42 If true, we should search continuously broad and deep

14:46 for short transient events as generically [music] as possible.

14:50 That's a tall order, but it exemplifies the direction of many

14:54 modern astronomical surveys [music] like the Reuben telescope

14:57 that aims to capture a video

14:58 of the sky in multiple wavelength bands every night.

15:02 Perhaps this is our best [music] bet just

15:04 to keep our eyes peeled for the anomalies,

15:07 the weirdos, the loud shouts in the night.

15:10 Indeed, a [music] recipe that astronomers

15:12 have followed for centuries with great success.

15:15 So, please let me know what you think about this idea.

15:18 And as [music] always, stay thoughtful and stay curious.

15:32 Happy holidays everybody.

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15:55 See you around the galaxy.