The Aliens Are Coming!

How likely is an alien invasion in our future and what would our options be if it happened? We explore this science fiction idea and debate our best course of action.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, and Welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that
looks at the future and says things just haven't been
the same since that blind Saucer came. I'm Jonathan Strickland

(00:21):
and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going to do
yet another listener request episode from the old Inbox. Awesome.
So who requested? What? Well? This is an episode that
faced them an email that came in from our listener, Brett.
All right, and what does the email ask us to do? Well?
Should I read it? Or should want to be here?

(00:44):
I'll read it. I'm reading all right, here we go. Okay,
So Brett says, I've watched my share of alien invasion movies.
Far too many of them have an absurd America mentality
and don't seem to realize that Martians will not be
stopped by explosive shells, battleship, the common flu War of
the World's or my MacBook no reference needed. Additionally, aliens

(01:07):
would not wait a few days before deploying some sort
of air vehicle were the world's as well as Battle
Los Angeles. I know that you've tackled similar subjects before,
and even devoted an entire episode Independence Day alone. Or
was that tech stuff? Not sure? Side note that was
totally text stuff. I am sad about that fact because
I wish I could have been there. I think I

(01:28):
think that there's enough material to revisit it. What is
the future of Independent watch it again? Back to Brett. Okay,
but I think that you guys could make an outstanding
episode on this topic. We could assume that they want
our resources like oxygen or water. Would they try to
kill off the human population with a nuke or biological weapon,
or would they even bother even bother themselves? Obviously there

(01:51):
would be nothing that humanity could do to fight back,
much less win. Just don't tell me that we should
hijack an ironclad from the nineteenth century and use it
to blow up the mothership. You utilizing our innate ability
to drop an anchor battleship was a terrible movie. You'll
lose no geek cred for not getting that reference. Thanks
for reading well, Brett. Thank you so much for this

(02:12):
email because I am so excited about talking about this
topic because it's true what you say. The ways that
humans fight back against alien invasions in the movies are
so stupid. Yeah, not would not be effective in real life.
D minus would not fight with again. To be fair, though,
we don't have any real historical battles with aliens we

(02:35):
can point to and say, see, look where they got
it wrong. You know, I do have a great idea
for an alien invasion movie. Though. It would be kind
of like Battleship. But I haven't seen how battleship. I
haven't seen battleship, but I get the gist. Okay, but
it wouldn't involve modern battleships. We would get into wooden
Spanish galleons and fight the aliens in those. So you're

(02:59):
essentially thinking of like Pirates of the Caribbean mixed with
War the World. Yeah, like a like a man O
war versus a flying saucer. You know what. In my book,
pirates always win. So I'm on board. I mean I
would watch that movie. I guess on board literally in
this case. Yeah, I mean I would be in that movie. Yeah,

(03:20):
So let's talk a little bit about this. I mean,
obviously we're gonna be talking all on hypotheticals here, right,
I mean, this is gonna be a tricky episode because
we can't really base our answer. In fact, we can
just sort of look at some facts and then try
to speculate. We can make intelligent conjectures. Yes, uh so
Brett has already covered some of the ways in which

(03:41):
science fiction has already addressed this. Of course, we've got
Independence Day where you know, aliens come in and they
hover over our cities for a while. I don't know
why they just wait around before they attack. Well, they
have to coordinate that attack so that all happens at once,
and for reasons that we can't understand, and I have
to scare us, yeah, by blowing up monuments that mean
a lot to us personally, right, right, So instead of

(04:03):
attacking major population centers, they attack things that you would recognize. Yeah,
it makes sense, especially if they're trying to get their
word out through a major motion picture. It's terrorism, not
uh yeah, First, let's scare them into subjugation, and then
we're just gonna you know what finished them off. Actually, Aliens,
if you're listening, you should probably just go ahead and

(04:25):
blow up like like coffee farms first, because that is
going to be the most terrified. I love Hawaii, don't
don't blow up, Hawi, you don't. I think it's funny
that Brett dismisses the answer in War the Worlds, and
I think with pretty good reason. I mean, you can
kind of imagine that. Again, it's hard to speculate about

(04:47):
the nature of alien minds, and we'll talk more about
that later, but it's kind of hard to imagine that
they would mount a sophisticated military attack on Earth without
being aware of germs and their susceptibility to germs. Similarly speaking,
you would think that any alien race that came down
to conquer Earth would also be aware that it's most
plentiful resource that covers most of its surface is also

(05:09):
the stuff what will kill you. Oh, you're referring to
signs a little. Yeah, that's problematic. That was just water
vapor in the air. You guys dumb, incredibly dumb. But yeah, no,
I guess it would have made more sense if they'd
invaded a desert region. But yeah, they show up in
a nice moist countryside. It's got fog and everything. It

(05:29):
would make more sense if they had invaded a planet
that was devoid of water. That it was not right,
so but anyway, Yeah, these are lots of of course
variations in science fiction, and usually the alien invasion stories
not always, but usually that's just the dressing and the
actual like themes or whatever are more embedded in the

(05:54):
characters and how they react. There are exceptions. Independence day,
I don't think there's really much more going on other
than stuff what blows up. Well, I do think that
I do think that frequently these kind of alien invasion
movies are thinly veiled metaphors for other foreign invasions, be
they cultural or products of of of whatever not international

(06:17):
conflict is going at the time, like like, certainly, I
think a lot of the classic Cold War era movies
were about the communists. O MG, the communists, right, you
have an invasion of the body snatchers or any kind
of other Nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties invasion movies were
very much, I think, often concerned with the infiltration of

(06:37):
dangerous ideas, be that communism from you know, actual acting
communist agents around the world like the Soviet Union, or
merely fear of changing culturals like guys like in the
nineteen sixties. Well, let's talk a little bit about how
likely is something like this to happen in the first
place before we talk about how it would turn out. Right,

(06:59):
So in this is an area, like pretty much everything
we're gonna have to say in this episode, where we
don't really know an answer. We can just kind of
make some guesses based on what we do know. So
how but there are some really good numbers about like
possible alien life out there. We've we've covered this a
little bit on the podcast before, right, So I think
a good thing to start with would be how many

(07:22):
alien civilizations are out there? I mean, again, we don't know,
but we could start by looking at how many habitable
planets are there, probably in the Milky Way galaxy. So
in November, I was just trying to look for some
of the most recent updates because they keep updating this
number as as telescopes continually scope out more and more.

(07:43):
In November, dot com reported that about twenty percent of
Sun like stars observed by the Kepler telescope had had
earthlike planets. That is defined as a planet roughly Earth
size in the habitable zone. So that's the zone where
it's not so hot that you know, water would be vaporized,

(08:04):
and it's not so cold that all the water would
be frozen. So you extrapolate from that and say, well,
if this is indicative of a broader trend throughout our galaxy,
that ends up being a lot of planets that could
potentially support life. And that's just life as we know it, right, So, yeah,
as far as we can imagine life, the kind of
life that's based on liquid water, which you know, on

(08:27):
one hand, that seems like a pretty reasonable metric for
judging whether a planet could have life, but we don't
really know. Uh, that's a lot of Earth's Seth show Stack,
who we've referred to on the podcast before. He's a
senior astronomer and director of the Cet Institute. He said
last year that the number of habitable planets in our
galaxies in the tens of billions minimum, and that's not

(08:50):
even including moons, which could also harbor life. So I've
seen estimates of around forty billion or sixty billion planets
in our galaxy, see that could host life. So there's
a lot of potential real estate out there for life.
But we're not like getting text messages from civilizations there. Yeah,

(09:12):
So if there's sixty billion planets out there that could
have an alien civilization on them, why haven't we heard
a single word from anybody. This comes up with the
Fermi paradox, right, the whole idea that, uh, in fact,
if there is this this abundance of life, or at
least the potential for it, why is it then that

(09:32):
we have not actually observed that? Right? So the Fermi
paradox sort of draws attention to this idea of the
Drake equation, which we devoted a whole podcast to one time.
If you haven't heard that, I recommend going back to
check it out. It's a really fun problem in exploring
the sort of the the numbers game of astrobiology. So
the direct equation says, look, you know, we've got all

(09:54):
these planets out there. Um, yeah, we haven't heard anything.
So there must be some limiting factor that's interfering with
us hearing from all these planets. It's either the fact that, say,
life doesn't actually arise all that often, or it's the
fact that maybe life arises fairly frequently, but intelligence doesn't

(10:15):
develop all that often. Or maybe it's the fact that, uh,
technology doesn't necessarily develop with intelligence, or maybe it's the
fact that, uh, the technological civilizations are likely to only
transmit for a short period of time to transmit electromagnetic
radiation we would detect for a small period of time.

(10:37):
That's the kind of scary one because it implies that
for some reason, species that develop radios pretty soon after
that go extinct. Uh, And we don't know what the
answer is there, but for some reason, we're not hearing
anything from these planets. And then there are all these
other crazy theories like who knows how crazy they actually are,

(10:58):
but there's like the zoo theory. There could be alien
civilizations out there that are using their vast technological powers
to literally prevent us from detecting them. So it's jammed, yeah,
exactly right. They're they're keeping us in a protective little shell,
maybe for our benefit, maybe for theirs. Who knows. We

(11:19):
don't know the answers to these questions, but what we
have to go on right now is that we haven't
heard word one right. And also another thing to keep
in mind, another part that's going to really come into
this discussion as we go along, is that, as Douglas
Adams once observed, space is big, really big. You think
it's a jot down to the chemist shop on the counter,

(11:40):
that's peanuts compared to space. You are quite right on that,
and so was so was our our dear departed friend. No,
there is a ridiculously huge distance between stars. So when
we're talking about space being big, we're not just saying
there's a lot of stuff in it. There's a lot
of space in it, a lot of space between where

(12:03):
things are. So I'm gonna lift some notes that I
came up with from our old episode how to Discover
an exo planet, because back when we were talking about
exo planets, I wanted to think, like, what would it
actually involve to get to one to yeah, to travel
from one solar system to another? Like does it make
sense to say we could colonize an exo planet in

(12:24):
another solar system? And I kind of came to the
conclusion that unless we develop like near light speed travel,
especially faster than light travel, it really doesn't make a
lot of sense. Or we find some means of allowing
a ship that could support multiple generations of people so
that the people who land at the exo planet are

(12:44):
the descendants of the ones who took off from Earth. Right,
But but but how many generations are we talking about?
Like how what kind of time length are we looking at? Okay, yeah,
let me look at my math here. Okay, So the
Milky Way is about a hundred thousand light years in diameter,
so light takes a hundred thousand earth years to get
from one part to the other, or from one end

(13:06):
to the other. Sorry. And the average distance between stars,
I've seen a few figures for this, but it's typically
I would say the average estimate here is that it's
more than four light years. So it's maybe five light
years or four points something light years between every star
in our galaxy. That's so much space that it takes

(13:28):
light four years or more to travel between these stars.
And we have nothing that allows us to remotely approach
that speed. And moreover, based upon our knowledge of physics, uh,
at least from what we know, there's no way to
go as fast, let alone faster than that speed. Yeah.

(13:49):
So the nearest star to our Solar system is Proximus Centauri,
and it's about four point two light years away. That
means it would take something traveling at the speed of
light four point two years to get here from there. Right.
Uh So nobody knows exactly how many stars are in
the Milky Way, but you can sort of guess by

(14:09):
estimating the total mass of the galaxy. Though this is
also difficult because then you have to divide that by
what size you think the average star is taking into
account the effects of dark matter and other normal matter
in the galaxy. So it's hard to get a good
number on that. But I've seen astronomers guests from between
two hundred billion stars two up to a trillion or

(14:31):
more stars in our galaxy. So if we put the
number at one trillion, just for argument's sake, if you
grant that there are a hundred other technological alien species
in this galaxy, that leaves a one in ten billion
chance that any of them are in the Solar System
nearest to us. Yeah, So what I'm getting at is

(14:54):
that if they're out there, they're probably really really really
far away. And and right, going back to that to
that travel speed thing, like, I'm not sure what the
fraction of the speed of light that we can travel
at is, but it's a small fraction. Well, let's look
at the fastest spacecraft we've ever created. So right now,

(15:17):
the fastest thing we can think of in terms of
spacecraft is the voyager, And the voyager is kind of
a special case because it's traveling it more than thirty
five thousand miles prow. Actually there are two of them,
Voyager one Voyager two. If you look at like Voyager one,
it's going more than thirty five thousand miles prour, maybe
like thirty eight thousand miles per hour as it's exiting

(15:38):
the Solar System. This is the one you've heard about
that it actually exited the Solar System. It's going out
into interstellar space. How did it get it? Did that
like twelve times? Right? How did it get to that fast? Well,
it had to use some really special maneuvers to achieve
that that speed. It had the slingshot around Jupiter and

(15:59):
then think also sling shot around Saturn. I believe you're correct.
So it had to use the massive power of the
gravity wells of these planets, the gravity wells and the
and the planetary motion itself, like the planetary motion around
the Sun, in order to sling shot out that fast, right,
And nobody's on it, So it's not like they're experiencing

(16:20):
extravagant g forces or any kind of time dilation or
anything like that. Yeah, God, I wonder what the G
forces would be like if you were to put a
person on the voyage or I mean, it seems like
I would guess I don't have a number for this,
I would guess it might kill you. Uh. But yeah,
so even if you so, that's like more than thirty

(16:41):
five thousand. But let's just round up to fifty miles
per hour, which is a big old chump, but for
the sake of argument and mathematics, especially for the sake
of mathematics. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, let's say you're going
at fifty thousand miles per hour in a an alien
made space craft. I'm sure that we'll have that. Yeah,

(17:03):
And they're traveling from GLI S six six c C,
which has been declared one of the closest highly earth
like exoplanets that we've yet discovered. It's only about twenty
two light years away, so it's very very close compared
to most stars in the galaxy. Um, you do a
little math on that twenty two light years, that's like

(17:24):
one point twenty nine times ten to the fourteen miles,
or about a hundred and twenty nine trillion miles. If
fifty thousand miles per hour, Uh, that would take two
hundred and ninety four thousand, three hundred and twenty five years,
that's a better pack of snack. Yeah, some coloring books,
a couple of activity books maybe dames. Yeah yeah, slug

(17:49):
Bug would get really old, as I pointed out, As
I pointed out the last time we talked about traveling
this distance, that's longer than we've been a species that's
longer than Homo sapiens have existed. At this rate, you're
talking about an alien invader that would really be more
a native of the spacecraft it traveled in than a

(18:10):
native of the planet it came from, because it would
have to. I mean, in in that long you'd be
talking about evolutionary time, they would adapt to the spacecraft
and become a native of that environment. Yeah. I mean
again like based off of life as we know it,
because I personally cannot conceive of being I guess other

(18:31):
than maybe like a virus that lives in any kind
of time span that would understand what you know, two
years even me the equivalent of that, of course, because
we're talking Earth years. Yeah, absolutely, I mean that that's
being generous to the invasion hypothesis because, as I said,
that's a really close s exoplane. And keep keep in

(18:52):
mind that this is all also dependent upon. You know,
we're making some assumptions, but we have to. Let's assume
the aliens are going to need some sort of source
of energy for themselves to survive, so they have to
get hold of that on the trip, or be able
to carry it with them. How about the energy to
power the space That would be a huge thing too.

(19:14):
I mean, they're they're there's such huge and seemingly insurmountable
challenges at least for as we see it, the way
we travel through space, that these are some of the
reasons why we feel that an alien invasion is is
is unlikely to happen. But we'll we'll explain more in
a bit. Okay, so we've established why we think it's unlikely,

(19:36):
but and that's not the only reason unlikely. We'll talk
about more later there in terms of perhaps alien motivation.
But you'd have to assume that if you just play
the probability game, any alien species getting to us in
any reasonable amount of time probably is going to have
to have a faster than light mode of transport, and

(19:59):
as far as we know, that's not possible physically impossible. Now,
it'm not saying what's out there in the realms of physics,
Maybe you could engineer a faster than light travel system
by creating some kind of warp drive where instead of
moving through space faster than light, you move the space
around you. Right, yeah, yeah, we've discussed that before on

(20:20):
the show a little bit too, and things like worm
holes and all this kind of stuff. But all this
is really theoretical, and even the theorists say there may
be no real, real equivalent to this stuff. We're showing
it maybe that you know, mathematically this is possible, but
practically it's impossible. That's always a chance for that. Yeah.

(20:42):
So anyway, the only point I want to make there
is I think it's pretty safe to assume if an
alien species gets to us there, they probably have such
incredible technological capability we can't even comprehend how powerful their
technology is, which which is to suggest that if they

(21:02):
if they got guns, we're done for, because I mean,
if they've got to if they've got the ability to
travel faster than like, can you only imagine what their
weaponry must be like. Uh So, before we go into
more of that, let's talk about some of the different
scenarios that could potentially serve as motivators to an alien
species invading the Earth. Yeah, I think a good point
Brett brings up in the email is what are they

(21:25):
looking for? Like, why do they invade Earth? So the
answer Brett gives is they want our consumable resources. I
think Brett says they want like oxygen or water. Right.
This seems very implausible to me, simply because if we're
talking about that same number we mentioned earlier, the vast
host of potentially habitable planets out there, you have to

(21:49):
assume that at least many of them, if not most
of them, do not have any sort of intelligent life,
just based on the fact that we haven't detected anything. Granted,
some of them are so far that we wouldn't have
picked up any signals if their development was on the
same time scale as Earth's. But you know, making these
kind of assumptions, you have to say, well, there's got

(22:09):
to be plenty of space out there that you could
go to, or you wouldn't even have to bother with
any kind of civilization that would be there. Either there
there it may be a plant that's capable of supporting life,
but there's no life on it, or it may have
life on it, but there might not be any intelligent
life on it. So why would you go through the
trouble of bothering a planet that has intelligent life on

(22:31):
it when you've got other options open to you, especially
if ultimately what you're looking at doing is building a
giant pipeline back to your home planet or what. Because
even if it's a resources thing, how do you harvest
those resources and get them back to wherever they need
to go? Because presumably, you know, that's the reason why
you're going to a new planet, or maybe maybe they're

(22:53):
you know, traveling and they like run out of gas
and what they use for gases? People be people. You
heard it here. First it's like a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.
You just shove a couple of people in there. That's
nothing like a hydrogen fuel people. It's like it's like
Mr Fusion. But yeah, suddenly back to the Future too

(23:15):
becomes a horror movie. This is so morbid. Exploring all
the reasons they might want to kill us. No, we
we are going to explore reasons they might not want
to kill us. But this, but this, this particular one,
the resources one, is what I find implausible. There are
so many other ways of gathering Yeah, yeah, I think
You make a good point there, especially again, if we're
assuming the level of technological capability it would require to

(23:38):
travel between stars, they're probably in a post scarcity in exactly,
they probably don't need to yeah, harvest other I mean,
maybe they are harvesting other planets. But yeah, well okay,
so that's yeah, that's the smash and grab scenario. But
what what y'all they got re box, let's go. I'm

(24:03):
just thinking back to my high school days. Yeah, so
that's the sort of like looting Earth scenario. But what
if they want to settle down? I mean, what if
they don't just want our our removable resources, but they
actually want our real estate, They want to come live
on this planet. Now, this one also seems implausible to
me for multiple reasons. One is that, um, we as

(24:26):
human beings, have largely shaped our planet. Right, we have
to suit us, right, Yeah, We've we've built cities, we've
got we're very specific beings. Yeah, and unless the aliens
happened to be like the Star Trek style aliens, where
they look almost, but not quite exactly like human beings,
almost as though they're merely wearing makeup, right, or perhaps
a couple of bumps on their foreheads or maybe some

(24:47):
pointy ears in there. Unless that's the case, then obviously
moving in here Earth would be a major fixer upper,
Like you're talking like it would be like if I
if I bought a house that was built and designed
by a guy who's eight feet tall, it would not
suit my needs. Nothing would be good for me. Yeah.
Another thing I would think about this is that Earth's

(25:07):
environment is very specific in a natural way as well.
I mean we didn't It's not just like all the
ways in which we polluted and shaped the land to
our desires. Earth also has, for example, an atmosphere of
a particular composition. It's breathable to us, but probably not
breathable to another species that came about on a planet

(25:29):
that had a different atmospheric composition. The same thing could
be true about things that are edible or not edible,
or if the alien species has its own for example, uh, agriculture,
whether or not the soil composition could support it. I
mean there are a lot of like Earth's soil composition
doesn't always to try to grow stuffs that we can eat,

(25:51):
So so yeah, I mean you would have to, You
would have to have aliens that are incredibly similar to
human beings for it to be like, oh, let's move
into this name it and and specifically that are like
I don't know, like like looking for like, oh man,
check out those condos, Like look at those sick rides.
We need that planet. This this thing is awesome. I mean,
it's the real estate bubble burst. The prices are is

(26:13):
a steel pinball machines and hoes? Yeah? Oh um, no, no,
I want to hold Yeah, So I don't know. I
I agree with you also that this one seems kind
of implausible to me. I mean, if there are so
many planets out there that are in the habitable zone,
that seems like that would be the basic requirement for

(26:35):
a new colony if they wanted to live there. Like,
why would Earth be preferable to any number of dead
mars like planets out there that you could terraform to
your knees? Yeah, if you've got all of this amazing technology,
you can use that to make your own ho hoes.
You don't need to take ours, right, Okay, So here's
another possibility I thought of, What about a preemptive strike

(27:00):
so they see us as a current or maybe not current,
but future threat or competitor, and they're trying to knock
us out of the running while we're still relatively weak.
This is sort of the day the Earth Stood Still
scenario where the invaders there, I mean, they don't have
a particularly malicious intent, but Clattu comes and tells us like, look,

(27:21):
you guys are about to get nuclear weapons and proliferate
them a lot and have the capability of really causing
damage in the galaxy. And I represent a sort of
council of aliens who who are here to tell you
you need to cool it or we're going to destroy you.
So I also think this is implausible, at least in

(27:42):
any reasonable time frame, simply because our ability to affect
anything outside of our Solar system is next to nothing
at the moment. Like we were saying earlier, Voyager one
and two or leaving the Solar system, I left the
Solar system, but those are unmanned probes. It's the only
man made objects that have ever exited the Solar System.

(28:04):
And even if there were a target anywhere remotely close
to us, it would take you know, centuries millennia for
anything we would send to get there. So I think
any uh alien race, intelligent enough to recognize where we
are technologically would also recognize we're nowhere close to being

(28:25):
a threat. Now, obviously that's dependent upon the state of
affairs right now. If you jump ahead where we suddenly
have better to well, not suddenly we have developed this
incredible technology, and this could be again millennia in the future,
the story might be different, But then humans could be
fundamentally different. By then we might we the people sitting

(28:46):
in this room and talking to you, the people listening,
might not even recognize the beings that would be humanity
at that point. So it's you know, this is one
of those where I think, assuming that the alien race
in fact able to recognize our level of technological sophistication,
they would come up with the idea of you know,

(29:07):
these guys, these guys aren't any any problem. The example
I gave is it's kind of like if I identified
there was an ant colony in New Zealand that really
I just like, man, I don't want those ants to
invade my house in Atlanta. I fly all the way
to New Zealand, poison that ant hill and fly all
the way back and think who headed that one off

(29:27):
of the past. And that's how I justify my trips
to New Zealand. Again, I have to agree with you.
I think like you do that this is also a
pretty implausible scenario, at least at this point. I mean again,
as we will have to keep saying, just to always
have the disclaimer out there, it's hard to understand alien minds.

(29:50):
I mean, we can't predict how they might behave and
that's actually going to figure into one of our scenarios here.
But based on what we know now, it seems implause.
I don't know why they would really do that. But
here are a couple that I think might be a
little more understandable to us. What if they're doing some science.
I'll have science to do, right right. I I love

(30:12):
doing some science on my own. You know, go poke
around in the back of the fridge at work and
see what's been in there for months. I can tell
you right now the cake is a lie. Well there
in some way maybe fulfilling their curiosity about us. And
in this scenario, I think it's less likely that they'd
want to exterminate us or something like that, but they
might wish to study us in ways that are harmful

(30:36):
or unpleasant for the selected subject. Our survival is a
species at at least our comfort. Yeah. So it's the
classic gray alien kind of you know, you're probing territory, right,
And this is one that I agree with you, Joe.
I think this is one that that if such an
alien race were to exist, I would imagine curiosity would

(30:56):
have to be part of their intellectual makeup. It might
not be defined that way by them, but if you're
talking about a race that has already developed something like
faster than light travel, I would I would, I would
pause it that that means they are curious enough to
have developed the technology. Sure, sure, well, I mean also
I would I would say that curiosity is one of

(31:17):
the ways that we define intelligence to begin with, especially
hum Yeah, human intelligence. I would say, it's it's a
very central factor. Yeah. And then there's just the last scenario,
which is that they have reasons that simply aren't rational
to us. And I think this is possible too. I mean,
there's a huge problem for us in trying to predict
the basic nature of alien minds, let alone the more

(31:40):
complex structures of like alien culture or alien beliefs. I
don't know how you'd even begin to speculate about what
those beliefs or cultural values might be. So it's possible
that and while I don't necessarily think this, I do
think we have to entertain the possibility that they might
simply find us to disgusting or repulsive, or they might

(32:02):
have something like a religious belief that says we're bad
and need to be destroyed, or they might simply regard
other life forms of all kinds with jealousy and paranoia. Yeah,
this is the the Halo universe. Yeah. Yeah. The Covenant
had this huge kind of like well that's bad, let's
kill it right mentality about humans as an alien coalition,

(32:25):
and they had identified humans as being this sort of heretical,
demon like race that needed to be wiped clean of
the of the galaxy. And uh, you know, granted, that's
a little video games science fiction, little video games, big
video games, science fictions, big video game that I have
in love. Um, but it's it's the science, very science fiction,
the idea. But at the same time, you could say,

(32:46):
all right, well that could be a motivation and so
and that's one that you cannot have any sort of
rational approach to say, hey, don't kill us if they
if they say, you know, you specifically are offensive to
our site. There's you know, nothing you can do because
it is what you are. Right. So it'd be like

(33:06):
if if my wife spotted a cockroach in our kitchen,
she'd say, Okay, I want you to kill that. You know,
I know it's a living thing, but I don't want
it here, and if you don't kill it, I will
divorce you. It could be some alien wife somewhere saying, hey,
these things that are in this corner of our galaxy,
they are disgusting and you've got to get rid of them,

(33:28):
get them out. That's when you've got the alien organ
man coming this way. You can't I mean, cockroach couldn't
argue with me about it. I don't think I'm not
kafka esque enough for that. Yeah, yeah, that that is
our next point. Could we I mean, could we argue
with them? Would this necessarily mean certain doom for humanity? Well,

(33:49):
so here's my feeling. Again, we're not at this part yet,
but I am going to talk in a minute about
why I think we shouldn't necessarily assume that any aliens
we encountered would be hostile. I don't necessary really have
that point of view, but if they were, my intuition
says that it would not go well for us. Yeah.

(34:09):
This kind of goes back to that whole thing about
if we've if we encounter a race that's capable of
interstellar travel on a on a you know, a decent
time scale, something that they're able to within their life
times traverse. Yeah, then we can assume that some of
their other technologies are equally developed, well beyond what we

(34:31):
can do. And in that case, you know, granted, we're
going to assume that they they're going to obey the
laws of physics. I mean, we can't. If we throw
that out, then there's no point in even having a conversation,
like they have a magic switch that makes you go away. Um. So,
assuming that they do obey the laws of physics, uh,
they could still be well beyond our capabilities to the

(34:51):
point where they might be able to flood our planet
with radiation that would kill us. For example, that can
sort of like planet wide neutron yeah something, I mean,
this this is and with that, there's like, well, that's
there's a zero percent chance of us coming out on
top on that s Yeah. Yeah, so we can try

(35:14):
to hear for a minute explore, well, what are some ways,
because this is basically what Brett I think was asking.
The core of Brett's question was about is there any
way you could actually stand up to aliens? Or is it?
Is it all just a no go? So I think
the most obvious option for self defense is, well, we
just use our most powerful weapons against them immediately, So

(35:37):
nuke them the second they show up. This this works
so well in movies like Independence Day or The Fifth Element. Yeah,
I think this seems like an incredibly bad idea, Like
just a horrible, horrible idea. So here's my thinking. A
first strike against an interstellar species in addition to being immoral,
I mean like really immoral, like like, look there's another

(36:00):
life form, kill it now, that's what we're afraid that
they would do to us. Yeah, that's not nice. So no,
that is not a moral way to behave. I think
it could also be suicidal. Yeah, Like, it has the
potential to turn a friendly encounter into an interstellar war
if you make a first strike, and then that's an
interstellar war that again I really don't think we could win, right,

(36:23):
I Mean, you're this is, of course, assuming that the
aliens don't make the rookie mistake of piling their entire
civilization into a single ship that is that is vulnerable
to nuclear weapons, in which case we're fine, yeah, yeah,
but but there's a good chance there's at least a
few folks back home who are like, Okay, we gave
you guys, We gave you guys a chance. Yeah, we're

(36:44):
gonna have to slap you. Right, you make a good
point there. I am not an alien invasion commander, but
if I were, my scouting or vanguard forces sort of
the forward uh spacecraft that first arrived at your target
planet probably wouldn't be manned or alien, right exactly. There's
a lot of of of speculation that says if we

(37:06):
were to encounter alien life likely our first encounter would
be with things that were built by the alien life forms,
because sending out probes is you know that that's something
that is much easier than having to send out and
support a life form. Right, We wouldn't encounter them, we'd
encounter their technology, right, And and that might be purely

(37:28):
mechanical or electronic like our robots. It could be biological.
It could be that they've engineered an organism that is
essentially a robot. It's just that it's an organic robot
that it could be a combination of both. It could
be a Dale kind of thing, which which case we
just run up the stairs, unless you're paying attention to

(37:49):
the season's nine through whatever, exactly exactly. Yeah. So, in
addition to it being deeply immoral and the wrong thing
to do, I don't think just an all out, you know,
first strike would work well for us at all. That
that's just not an option, alright, So Joe, let's say,
let's say we're doing the the classic uh situation where

(38:12):
the cops have closed in, there's a guy who's in
the bank who's trying to rod the bank, and they're
they're saying, uh, uh, come out or we're going to
start tear gassing the place. And the robber comes out
holding a gun to himself and says, if you come
any closer, I shoot, and they all say, who WHOA,
He's serious. I've watched a lot of comedies recently, but

(38:34):
the idea being that, you know, if you make a move,
I'm gonna I'm gonna take myself out. What if we
did that with the whole earth? What if if the
aliens came and said we want your stuff and we
said you can't have our stuff, and they said, we're
gonna kill you. And you say, if you kill us,
we're gonna wipe out all our stuff. Wouldn't that be
a good idea? Yeah? This is Actually, though I think
this is an incredibly horrible idea. I think this is

(38:56):
the best idea I could come up. So I I
wrote about this in the notes. It's to hold our
resources hostage. Like I say, I couldn't think of a
more effective strategy than this. Even though this is one
of the worst ideas I've ever heard of effective strategy,
I think so we The reason this would be a

(39:19):
really bad idea is if you've ever seen the movie
Doctor Strange Love many times, part one of the scenarios
in that movie is that there is a perimeter system,
or sort of what's what's known in Cold war technology
circles as a dead hand system, where you create a
defensive structure that detects automatically when there has been an

(39:43):
attack and launches a counter attack without human intervention, and
it's irreversible. Yeah, and so in in Dr Strange Love,
the Soviets announced, uh, yeah, we've just put in place
this dead hand system where if if you know, bombs
get detected in Russia, it nukes all of the Allied
cities or all the NATO. I guess, uh, whatever the

(40:05):
opposing power was the United States and NATO probably uh
nukes all their cities immediately, and there's no way to
intervene or turn it off, right and uh. And the
real key here is that they only announced this after
a crazed American has launched a preemptive strike against personal
unilateral attack. Yeah. So, and that exposes one of the

(40:27):
main problems with this. I mean, there are a big
problems with this kind of thing. But the crucial fact
is your enemy has to know that this system is
in place for it to be effective, right, right, which
means that we have to be in some kind of
very clear communication with this alien civilization, which I'm not
positive is going to be the case. Yeah. You you'd

(40:50):
have to have the aliens know for a fact. But
if they attempted to harm humans, there would be an
automatic system response that destroyed all the resources on Earth
that they wanted, and it would have to be a
you know, assuming that they want something like water or oxygen,
you'd have to damn it because you can't destroy water oxygen.

(41:11):
I'd say the best you could do is dirty bomb. Yeah,
dirty bomb the whole planet, cover everything in radioactive dust.
That would make it just incredibly toxic and you couldn't
get near it unless they like radiation, in which case, yeah,
that's a problem. Okay. So, as I said, I think
this is maybe the most effective plan that that I

(41:33):
could think of, But there's so many problems with it.
I mean, again, this is just horrible. What if you
have a false trigger and it destroys Earth by mistake?
It depends on the aliens knowing what's going on. How
would we advertise this device in a way that you
know that we were sure that the aliens would understand,
welcome to Earth, don't touch our stuff, or we blow

(41:53):
it up? Right? Yeah, I think that this is my
best idea, and a truly deeply rubbling, disturbing, horrible idea.
I don't think. Yeah, I don't think it would be
an effective means of preventing any sort of alien attacks,
should such a thing actually be plausible, I don't think
it would help at all. The best you can hope

(42:14):
for is that it's kind of spoiling what they wanted,
and that's or that maybe they would go like, oh,
oh they're crazy and back away slowly from Earth forever, right,
if they could figure out what it was we were
saying that maybe maybe, But you know again, it's it
seems like if we were to pour a lot of

(42:36):
resources into developing something like that, the potential for something
going horribly wrong along the way that has nothing to
do with any aliens anywhere, that's enough for me to say,
let's don't do that. Yeah, yeah, I know, like the
best case scenario there is for the aliens just kind
of like put a marker outside of Earth that says
like caution, here be monsters, and that turns turns bad neighborhood, right,

(43:02):
I mean, it would make us sort of bad guys
in the galaxy, right, I mean, we don't want to
be the bad guys. The whole point here is us
talking about we want to try to be the good
guys and make sure that we're not threatened by bad guys.
But another question is are we sure that the aliens
out there are bad guys? Right? Right? Right? Yeah? I

(43:23):
mean because it didn't know less than Carl Sagan say
that he hoped or that he felt, because he felt
so many things yeah, um, that that aliens would not
be Yeah. He his his opinion was that any civilization
that would evolve to the point capable of interstellar travel,
it shows at a capacity for cooperation and innovation and curiosity.

(43:48):
That would mean that they had likely evolved beyond hostility. Yeah.
I've got some reasoning about that I want to explore
at the very end. But before we get to that,
I guess we should talk also about the fact that
some will actually wrote a book, yeah, about how to
fight against an alien Not just people, I mean aerospace
engineers who have like a collection of PhDs between the

(44:11):
four of them, wrote a book. It was published, I
think back in two thousand seven. It's called an Introduction
to Planetary Defense, a Study of Modern Warfare applied to
extraterrestrial invasion. And it takes a serious look at this question.
It's not menace comedy. It's meant to say, all right,
what's the likelihood? They kind of follow the same path

(44:31):
that we have, what's the likelihood that this would happen?
And they go through the math they draw different conclusions
than what we have. Um. One thing they say is, look,
even if you go at bare minimum and you say
that we are the only intelligent civilization in the Milky
Way galaxy, then maybe it stands to reason that every
single galaxy has at least one intelligent civilization in it,
and there are billions of them. But if you thought

(44:53):
the distance between stars was here, here, galactic travel, well
is essentially like if if there's an alien race pepable
of intergalactic travel, I'm pretty sure it's game over. I
don't know that any kind of of of of clever
warfare is going to help us. Yeah, yeah, because because
that's what they wound up suggesting. Yeah, they were talking
about like kind of a French resistance underground effort to

(45:18):
use guerilla tactics to to resist the alien invasion. I'm
not sure exactly how they envisioned the actual alien invasion
taking place where this would be an effective means of
fighting back. Others have suggested that perhaps the best approach
would be to develop um space weaponry, so weapons where
we could go out and engage alien invading forces in

(45:41):
space before they got to the planet. I do not
want our research and development in space to be based
around blow and stuff up me neither. It's not what
I want that that kind of pollutes that it was
one of the coolest things about space in the twentieth
century was this was the place where war stopped, you know,

(46:02):
collaboration happened. Ye was curiosity that was driving it, right, Sure,
well you could totally, um, I guess explain some space
projects as an outgrowth of rivalry between nations, like you
can you can look at the space race is something
that resulted from the Cold War. Absolutely a motivation to
be like check out how big my rockets are. I

(46:23):
can reach you. Yeah, but at least we were never
fighting up there, you know, we were never putting weapons
in space to fight each other with. There was a
place of peace basically, and then and then eventually we
really did get collaboration, like with the International Space Station,
and that's kind of a beautiful thing. Yeah, yeah, and
I would prefer that. I mean, I just think back

(46:45):
about the space race in the Cold War and how
closely related they were. But but the ultimately, yeah, we've
really been more about research. There's been not really that
much of an emphasis on militarization, apart from some satellites. Obviously,
gp US was a military technology that eventually got uh
decommissioned enough that will not decommission, but but passed so

(47:07):
that we civilians could actually use it um. So, I
mean I would hope that we would follow that pathway
and treat space as this is the the truly the
final frontier. This is where we can really explore, learn
more about our place in the galaxy, all that sort
of stuff, and less about y'all. There could be aliens

(47:30):
coming here any day now, so let's figure out how
to have our our millennium falcons up there to make
sure they blows them up. Actually, there are a bunch
of French theorists who insist that that the world's governments
are possibly just the US government or I'm not sure,
like corporations or something like that, are are planning on
faking an alien invasion um in order to convince like

(47:52):
we the people that we need to continue building out
our military industrial complexes. I'm not sure that we need
that justifications. I mean, yeah, they've been working on them
without an alien invasion for a while. Yeah, it's to
me that's something that ends up because it's not up
to the individual, it's not up to the people. It's
not that we vote on that. That's that's those are

(48:14):
decisions made by politicians that we do vote into office.
I guess, just so that we don't overthrow the politicians
when they suggest that we need more weapons. I think,
I think food or healthcare. I think finding out that
the politicians that that the n s A Is spying
on everybody and that didn't cause enough people to get
upset about it, that we're pretty okay. We don't need
to worry about overthrowing at this point. Um. But also

(48:37):
I love the idea of faking the alien invasions so
that you can foster a sense of global community here
on Earth and settle our differences a k a. The
Watchman defense exactly. Giant psychic squid have to attack was
in New York something like that. Well, it's a decent point,

(48:57):
actually though, I think. I mean, if we were going
to resist any kind of alien hostility again, seems like
kind of a lost cause. But if we're going to
go in, we better go in together, right, we need
to collect collective united effort. Yeah. Yeah, And that's that's
another thing. I was reading a bunch of of fringe
theory kind of stuff about alien invasion and preparation for

(49:18):
this podcast episode, and uh, I want to start my
my little this kind of section about what a lot
of them said, because that is one of the points
that they made, that that like, we we need to
be collective in our in our efforts, um if we
are going to possibly fight an alien invasion. Uh. But
but I I do also want to say like, because

(49:40):
I may or may not slip into a little bit
of snark h and as as we all might during
this this brief foray into fringe fringe, but um so,
so I want to start out by saying that that
I respect everyone's processes of ideation and imagination, and that
I do not want to off the bat disc at
it any of my fellow humans, because it is in

(50:02):
fact the far out thinkers and and creatives who give
us the really world changing important stuff. That being said,
that being said, a lot of what they say seems
a little bit on the incredible side, and like the
literal meaning of the word, it is not necessarily credible,

(50:23):
perhaps poorly thought out. But yes, yeah, I I am
going to go with Patton Oswald who says, I don't
need to I don't have to respect your opinion. I
just have to acknowledge that you have one. Yeah, And
they do have some interesting ideas that that I think
are are decent ones. So um so so yeah, collective effort.
Let us be united as humans, just like that brief

(50:45):
sequence and Independence Day where you have the four people
from the Americans. Bloody hell yeah that's on my playlist.
Um So that's one thing. Because one thing, sure, we
they say that we're going to need to position ourselves

(51:06):
as part of the native Earth environment. You know, like
convince any potential invaders, um that whatever they want to
do with Earth, they should let us keep hanging out
here because we're an important part of Earth. I like,
we're we're an integral part of what this planet's ecology is.
Another point to be green to you know, take care
of our planet in order to like a you know,

(51:30):
unite humanity. By stopping, for example, fossil fuel wars and
stuff like that, we can present a more pristine gift
to our new insect overlords. Yeah, exactly, to be like,
see we're good at taking care of this planet. Checking
you right. It's more it's more not so much like
look how awesome our places, why don't you move in?
But but along the lines of if their motivations are

(51:51):
in fact, you guys are awful and we need to
squish you like a bug. We could say, no, look,
we're great stewards of our planet. Yeah. Uh. We could
try on the offensive and biological warfare, sort of like
if the Native Americans had given the European invaders smallpox blankets.
But this one, of course, is is difficult because we

(52:12):
have no way of knowing what alien physiology is going
to be, or if there's any sort of compatibility with Earth,
you know, germs or toxins with alien physiology. This is
again assuming that they're not exploring with unmanned right. I've
tried to. I tried to infect a robot like for
four hours the other day, and it was just a

(52:32):
fruitless effort. Look, everyone needs a hobby. Yours is sneezing
on robots, you know. I thought I'd give it a try. Okay,
what else, Lauren? Uh? And and yeah, and also I guess,
guess on the offensive measures, just you know, keep building
our satellite presence and working on rocket technology and build

(52:56):
those weapons out in space, which means since space nobody
nobody wants weapons, and well, some people want weapons in space,
we do not, I think, I think again, going back
to the the fact that we find the possibility of
an alien invasion to be so low on the probability
meter means that pouring actual resources into into that sort

(53:21):
of thing would be premature at best. Yeah, Jonathan, I
think that's a pretty good segue into what I want
to finish with, which is why I think that even
if we encounter an alien civilization, or even if we don't,
we're just really not very likely to encounter an hostile
invasion scenario. And so one of the things I want

(53:45):
to start with is the idea that we mentioned earlier,
that that great filter idea. So here's the reasoning. The
great filter is sort of the idea that powerful technology
could in most cases lead to the ability to commit
it a species level murder suicide. Right. So essentially, the
great filter states that you get all these different you know,

(54:07):
assume that you have all these different types of life forms,
there is a point a wall where those life forms
will not evolve further in intelligence, uh for the most part,
and only occasionally will you ever get one that actually
breaks through that filter. Uh. And there could be many
different reasons for that, one of which being that once

(54:28):
you once you reach a certain point of technological development,
assuming that the aliens are like people where we have
differences of opinion amongst our own species. When you develop
the capability of causing worldwide devastation with your technological attacks,
it could just be a matter of time before someone
does it, which is a pretty terrifying way of looking

(54:50):
at things, but it could be true. Yeah. Well, the
idea is that along with supremely powerful technology, you almost
certainly get the ability to wipe your elf out, and
you can observe this just in our history. It's the
one case we know of of of what technological development
looks like, and in our case we got radio communications,

(55:11):
space travel, and nuclear weapons all within a few decades
of each other. And it seems plausible that whatever species
you're talking about, those discoveries probably will sort of go
hand in hand, just because they're all sort of linked
up in a similar stage of development and the sophistication
of chemistry and physics, just for one example, if you're

(55:32):
imagining alien technology, it seems hard to imagine that aliens
could have faster than light travel, if that's even possible,
and it very well might not be, as we've said,
If they're able to have that, they pretty much have
to understand relativity. In physics. Relativity is the same principle
that gives us atomic weapons equals mc squared the mass

(55:53):
energy equivalence. It says, oh, you can split an atom
and turn that into a bomb. So we have to
assume this species that can fly around really fast through space,
since in radio messages probably has really powerful weapons. He
knows how to stu up real good. Right. But the
longer a species has the technological capability to wipe itself
out and doesn't, I think, the more we can assume

(56:16):
it has developed internal psychological and cultural resources for avoiding
war and violence. This is getting closer to what Carl
Sagan was saying. Yeah, and so in other words, we
might have good reason for thinking a technologically powerful alien
species that hasn't either destroyed itself or knocked itself proverbially

(56:36):
back into the stone age is peaceful. Another thing to
consider is that I think a huge percentage, if not all,
violent conflicts can be traced to an underlying competition for
scarce resources. But one of the things advanced technology does
is help eliminate scarcity. Right once you get into those
higher levels of civilization that we talked about in another

(57:00):
podcast as well, Um, you start realizing that, yeah, everyone
would have to eat that that part of that technological
advancement is based upon having the resources to do the technology. Yeah. Yeah,
And so there there is a caveat I should state,
which is that, you know, I think there's a pretty
decent case for saying a highly technological species wouldn't be

(57:23):
violent against itself if it's been around for a while.
I suppose you could imagine a species is internally peaceful
but unsympathetic towards alien species. But intuitively that doesn't seem right.
I mean, it seems like at a certain point you
would be able, you would have any species that can
communicate and empathize with itself, recognizes the presence of intelligence

(57:47):
in general, Like that's what it's responding to. Yeah, that
that having world peace and then going out and kicking
another planet would be just very undue. Well and yeah,
and and just the just that ability to recognize that
another species happens to possess some of the same qualities
you do. It's just those qualities maybe manifest themselves in

(58:07):
remarkably different ways, but you recognize that it's there. Yeah,
another little bit less sweet and touchy feely but still
perhaps comforting possibility is that the aliens would be cautious.
I mean so Stephen Hawking famously sort of advised that
we should mind our own business in the galaxy, Like,

(58:28):
we don't know how advanced these alien civilizations could be
if they exist, and we can't just assume they'll be friendly.
He compared it to sort of the brutal colonization of
the Americas by the Europeans just a few hundred years ago,
within the same species. And he so he makes a
pretty good point there. You know, it might be worth
being cautious. Uh, And it might also work out in

(58:50):
our favor if any potential alien rivals followed the same principle,
just for reasons of simple prudence, they might want to
hang back and avoid contact on the off chance that
the encounter goes badly. They might be, like the spider,
as scared of us as we are of them. Sure sure,
they might be sitting in their homeworld thinking like, oh, like,

(59:10):
like what if other planets are filled with horrible, two legged,
two eyed creatures that walk around creating atomic energy and
irresponsible ways. There could be three of them doing a
podcast right now about what it would be like to
invade an alien planet and it would be the sister
episode of this one if this, if this were a

(59:31):
video show, well, I mean not that we don't have
a video show, but if this were a video show,
what we would need to do is have a little
and cut to the three of us and like really
shoddy aliens, right, like maybe with a little antenna from
the early star Dragon. Okay put at any rate? Sorry, yes, yeah,
well maybe in the end. It's naive of me, but
I kind of do feel like we could favor the

(59:52):
better angels of alien nature as opposed to the more
base in stinks, just because of what you'd have to
assume an alien mind must be like. In order to
achieve highly advanced technological civilization, you can't create technology without cooperation.
No technology occurs from one individual. It's based on you know,

(01:00:14):
collaboration and previous and improving on previous designs. You can't
have that kind of cooperation without the kind of thing
we would refer to as a theory of mind, the
ability to sort of imagine what other people are thinking,
to run simulations of what's going on in other people's heads.
And then if you have that, it seems like that

(01:00:35):
almost necessarily entails something like empathy the feelings for other
feeling beings. Sure, I think ultimately though, it may just
come down to come back to that whole space is
big thing, and yeah, yeah, just just the practical, impositive
improbability that anything is going to come knocket on our door. Right,

(01:00:57):
It may just be that it's big enough and we're
spread out are enough that we just don't have the
opportunity to find each other. Well, yeah, that would be
my ultimate guests. So all this stuff about alien nature
is probably not even relevant, right, because the thing that
I would fall back on is we're just not going

(01:01:17):
to run into each other, not only not within our
lifetime certainly. What what would be more likely is that
we encounter a transmission from a far away alien civilization
in the form of you know, radio signal, some kind
of electromagnetic radiation. Now, if tomorrow probe lands somewhere on
Earth containing a VHS tape from some alien civilization, will

(01:01:41):
be sure to update the blog to reflect that. But
we feel fairly confident that this is this is going
to be the state of affairs. So we gotta thank
Brett for sending in that email. This was a blast
to talk about. Joe and I had a nice long
conversation in the in the break room us when we
were debating on whether we should tackle this one or not,

(01:02:03):
and then we ultimately decided that we were having so
much fun talking about that the three of us had
to do this. I mean, it was just it's too
much fun to to avoid. So, uh, thank you very
much Brett for sending that suggestion. And remember if you
have a suggestion, whether it's a question about a previous episode,
a suggestion for a future topic, maybe you just want
to pick our brains about something that you wonder. You know,

(01:02:25):
how is that going to be in the future. Let
us know. Send us an email and I addresses f
w Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop
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(01:02:51):
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