Are We Really Alone In The Universe? | Answers With Joe

This video backed by the science of the curiosity stream is good for anything, it is to break the illusion that we have some kind of special or privileged place in the

universe

, as a great Carl Sagan once said, astronomy is an experience Humbling and character-building, we go from believing that the Sun, Moon, and stars revolved around us to understanding that we are just one of several planets around a star that is one of billions of stars in a galaxy that It is one of the billions of galaxies to which we went from believing that we were separate from the animal. kingdom and created in the likeness of an all-powerful deity to understanding that we have a common ancestor with the apes and that we descended from dirt and slime billions of years ago we went from believing that our planet is some kind of special bastion for life to understand that we are just part of a sea teeming with life that spans the cosmos except wait, we don't actually know about that last part, in fact, we spent decades searching the stars for any proof that we are not

alone

and this is as far as we have come .

There are no radio signals that ambiguously prove that there is extraterrestrial life out there. There are no signs in the composition of the thousands of exoplanets we found that indicate there is life on them yet, but the numbers don't lie in billions and billions of stars. out there, all with their own planetary systems, the idea that we are the only planet in the entire

universe

that hosts life simply flies in the face of all logic. I mean, how is that possible? Could it be that we are right all along? Is it possible for the required conditions to be met? to create life are so incredibly specific that this planet and the conditions that formed it are the only place in the entire universe that allows life to survive long enough to become intelligent.

This is the basis of the rare earth hypothesis. The video I made on The Fermi Paradox, a long time ago on this channel, was the first big video that took off and became something and

really

, if that hadn't been the case, this channel probably wouldn't be what it is today, It was a very random topic. It was a kind of channel back then, but after the Fermi Paradox video did well, a lot of scientists came and asked questions and everything was like that, so if it weren't for the Fermi Paradox thing, This channel would not exist as it exists now, that is my way of explaining everything about myself.

The point is that the Fermi paradox is a fascinating topic and if you are not aware of that topic, you can watch my video from a long time ago on my YouTube channel here or just search YouTube for the millions of videos there are on this topic , but here's just a quick refresher, so the Fermi paradox was attributed to physicist Enrico Fermi, who apparently in a conversation about aliens asked a very simple question: where are all the ones we can now see? How vast is the University of so many billions of stars that exist, the numbers are so gargantuan that no matter how low the possibility of life arising as it did here on Earth, no matter how small that percentage is, there is still a lot of civilizations that should be bouncing around and yet we see no evidence of them, so why are there now a million different solutions to the Fermi Paradox, from super predators hunting other civilizations to that other aliens keep us in a galactic zoo? but if you're going to take the Fermi Paradox seriously, you have to consider what the most obvious answer

really

is, which is the reason we don't see aliens is because they just aren't there when it comes to @ro biology we have a size of sample of one and that's life on Earth, that's all we know, there could be all kinds of life out there that doesn't fit our definition of life, any life that doesn't depend on DNA or carbon. or water, in fact all we can do is look at the life that arose here in the specific conditions of life on Earth, which actually started quite quickly in a few hundred million years as single-celled MUCs, just organic machines macroscopic self-replicating and stayed that way.

The path lasted more than two billion years before eukaryotes appeared. This means that they developed organelles that performed specialized functions like the nucleus in mitochondria. Single-celled organisms became complex. It only took 2 billion years to get there. 600 million years ago. Multicellular life appeared 87% of the time. Life has existed on this Earth, they were simple single-celled organisms, after 3.9 billion years it finally took that leap, but look what happened next. 540 million years ago, just 60 million years after multicellular life appeared, we reached the Cambrian explosion, hundreds of millions of different species. Swimming in the oceans, plants and animals appeared on the scene out of nowhere.

Today, every plant and animal can trace its evolution back to those creatures that appeared here. Well, look how quickly it happened after four billion years of sitting there doing nothing. boom when people talk about the Greek filter we have to consider the jump from unicellular to multicellular life as one of the great filters through which life must pass how strange it is how stable planet B must be to remain there for four thousand millions of years before it becomes That leap of humans arose here because of the way this question prompts many scientists to consider what if we are

alone

, what if the conditions required to create intelligent life are so incredibly specific that only can it happen here and if so, what are those conditions?

It was proposed in 2000 by Peter Ward and David Brownlee in their book Rare Earths why complex life is rare in the universe. This is known as the rare earth hypothesis and these are some of the conditions that the rare earth hypothesis poses. our place in the Milky Way and we're all familiar with the Goldilocks zone, the distance from a star a planet must be to have liquid water, we'll talk more about that in a second, but there's also the possibility of a Goldilocks galactic zone and we happen to be in it. The Milky Way is actually on the larger side as galaxies go and for a long time it was considered more likely that life would appear near the core of the Milky Way because that's where all the action is. was the problem is that this action produces massive amounts of radiation is this incredible video made from a Hubble photo of the Andromeda galaxy that shows that the center of galaxies is an absolute cauldron of massive stars and supernovas hypernova gamma ray explosions and yes, black holes, all of this activity spews out massive amounts of radiation that could render nearby planets sterile.

At least you can say goodbye to the night if you live there, while we don't, we are close to the core and in fact, between two spiral arms, this is located. We're far enough from the chaos of stellar factories and spiral arms, but close enough to take advantage of all the heavy elements shooting out of the supernovae next door, plus being in the place where the lowest density of stars offers far fewer opportunities. for a star to pass by and its gravity to ruin all of our orbits, could it be that we are located in a nice little Goldilocks zone in our galaxy because, if that is necessary, that rules out the vast majority of stars in our galaxy ?

Type of Sun Our Sun is classified as a g2 main sequence star, which means that it remains very stable for a very long period of time. It may also be the right size and temperature for life. Larger, hotter stars would also have habitable zones but they would also go out. much more ultraviolet radiation that would ionize the atmosphere and smaller red dwarf stars require their planets to orbit so close that they become tidally locked, which is not very good for life, but even stars exactly like our Sun have a time factor earliest limiting in The development of the star is much more volatile, varying in luminosity and intensity and then softening for a long time before it eventually becomes a red giant and collapses, so it is in that intermediate period that is the point ideal for life.

Fortunately, it is now several billion years, but still, once you remove all the stars in the really active regions of galaxies and then remove the stars that are not like our Sun and then remove the stars that are too young or too old to be likely to have life, you're getting rid of the vast majority of stars and we're just beginning to move away from the Sun. Once you've got your hands on the right kind of star, you should have the right kind of planet. at the correct distance. the star meaning a rocky planet in the habitable zone now our solar system is configured with four inner rocky planets and four outer gas giants and we thought this was normal.

I mean, it makes sense. The rock is denser, so you imagine it would gravitate. towards the center of the solar system and then the gas giants would form further away, so we expected to see that as we started to find exoplanets in the universe we thought we would see this same pattern, no, a team led by Lauren Weiss at The University of Montreal studied 355 stars containing 909 planets using data from the Kepler space telescope and what they discovered was that, in fact, in most of these cases the planets were about the same size and very evenly distributed, while in our solar system we have everything. from Mercury which is the size of our moon to Jupiter which is a thousand times larger than the Earth and Saturn is as far from Jupiter as Jupiter is from the Sun and Uranus is as far from Saturn as Saturn is from the Sun, it almost moves exponentially further away.

The further you go, this extreme variation in size and distance makes our solar system a little strange and makes us have to rethink how our solar system formed and why it is so different from all the others we know. In fact, what we're seeing out there, judging by the planetary pattern that we're seeing around other stars, is almost as if we have two different solar systems, the inner solar system and the outer solar system, and then in the inner solar system we have a planet that just happens to be in the habitable zone, but could the fact that we have this unique configuration of planets be one of the factors that created life here on Earth?

Maybe that's why we have Jupiter in space, which is a shooting gallery for asteroids and comets, and as we're discovering. We are discovering interstellar objects, any of which could have collided with Earth and disrupted this very important stability necessary for life to form. Fortunately, we have Jupiter out there, being very big and absorbing all of these objects like a big interplanetary Roomba in 1994, Comet Shoemaker. Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter and we could actually see it in real time with the Hubble Space Telescope. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, we'd never seen anything like it before and it left scars on Jupiter the size of it. of Planet Earth and another impact site appeared again in 2009, so this vacuum cleaner phenomenon is real.

In fact, some studies have shown that Jupiter is hit by comets and asteroids between 2,000 and 8,000 times more than Earth and if it weren't for that. Being out there, we would be bombarded with these things all the time, that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs would be like a pretty common event and life would have receded again and again and again and again, while Jupiter is the biggest one. That's just one of four gas giants that are absorbing a lot of these objects, so we have multiple layers of protection here on our Moon. Ironically, while we have benefited from these, you know, the gatekeepers of the solar system that prevent impacts from hitting our Earth.

It turns out that the biggest impact that ever happened to Earth may have been the best thing that ever happened to us. I'm talking, of course, about the impact that formed our Moon. I won't spend a lot of time on this because I've already covered this in a previous video, you can see it down here in the description, but it turns out that our moon is unique in the solar system and may play a very important role in why life was able to arise on this planet, stabilized our rotation and caused The tides, which it turns out may have played a very important role in the formation of life because it is believed that they come from tide pools that evaporated and concentrated organic compounds or that we are the first cells in replication, but the question for this video is how rare this phenomenon is and all.

We can say that we do not see anything like it in our solar system. There are now moons around Jupiter and Saturn that are larger than our Moon, butIn terms of the proportion and size between the planet and the moon there is nothing similar. From what we've seen, Mars is the only other rocky planet that has moons and they actually look more like captured asteroids and before anyone says anything about Pluto and Charon, they actually look more like two dwarf planets that meet and they rotate. among themselves, this is such an unusual situation that the only thing we can think of that could have caused this would be a Mars-sized protoplanet glancing at our planet and breaking off and forming a moon that way, one theory.

That's been backed up by evidence from moon rocks and if that's the case, think about how perfect this angle had to be to create this moon, if they had been steeper it could have blown up the entire planet. bits or it could have simply sunk and created a gigantic planet. Either way, it's something we've only seen happen in our solar system once and it's still early to say if we might find something like it around other stars. We only found one EXO moon last October and it was a Neptune-sized moon orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet. Well, there are a few more things I'm going to go through here.

I'm going to go through them very quickly. Strong magnetic fields. You are the only rocky planet in our solar system that has a strong magnetic field produced by an internal dynamo of liquid and solid iron-nickel alloy spheres in the core of our Earth and this strong magnetic field plays a very important role in protecting life on the planet. Our strong magnetic fields are most common on rocky planets around other stars. We have no way of knowing at this time, but we judge. of our own solar system there is no reason to think that they would be tectonic plates.

We are also the only planet with plate tectonic activity and most rocky planets and moons have at least a layer of liquid rock below the surface, but Earth is the only one. which has these tectonic plates with cracks that allow superheated gas to escape into the atmosphere and thicken the atmosphere enough to support life. Mars, for example, doesn't have tectonic plates, but it does have magma beneath the surface, so when it emerges it just sort of appears in one place over and over again for billions of years. Do you want a Mount Olympus because that's what it is? as you get to Mount Olympus, but here on Earth the crust is in this constant state of renewal, sublimating underneath and melting taking with it, all your organic molecules from life on the surface melting into the crust that comes back through those fissures and this is believed to help remineralize and make the soil more fertile and easier for life to grow.

It changed the atmosphere as plants absorbed carbon dioxide and nitrogen, converting it into oxygen. Animals did the same thing in reverse, but earlier in the life cycle of our planet it was totally different. The early Earth had a toxic atmosphere of methane, sulfur, ammonia and carbon. Monoxide and even hydrochloric acid aren't exactly the kind of place you'd want to go on vacation, but they could be the perfect combination of ingredients for life to form and this specific group of ingredients could be extremely rare among the planets, the point is a lot. Very specific things had to happen for intelligent life to form on this planet, things that have existed since the beginning and it's all we've ever known, so we think it's normal, we think it's common, but the more we look at our around, we realize.

We're starting to realize that it's actually not normal and it's actually quite uncommon; in fact, it could be so infinitely unique that these specific conditions might not exist anywhere else in the universe and we are completely and utterly alone. It's a sobering thought, but we have no evidence to the contrary, now it has to be said that not everyone is so down with Debbie on this, there are a lot of people who refute the rare earth hypothesis, one of those things they say is which is a very human-centered look at life, you know? As I mentioned earlier, we have a sample of one and we are looking for places that create the kind of life we ​​know, but there may be all kinds of life out there that goes completely against our knowledge and understanding, in fact we live on such a planet. weird, maybe we're the weird species in the universe, you know, maybe they stumbled upon us and we're like, okay, what's that?

And fundamentally, for many people it just goes back to that numbers thing, you know, there's such an unimaginably huge planet. There are so many stars in the universe that the possibility of us being alone is simply impossible. Let's go back to the end, we dramatize an image for just a second. Each point in this image is a star, a star with possibly multiple planets around it. Is it really possible that none of these stars have rocky planets with atmospheres? Is it really possible that none of these stars have planets with a stable large moon in the Goldilocks zone?

So none of these planets have tectonic activity or magnetic shielding. Is it really possible that none of these stars have rocky planets with atmospheres? Of these millions of stars in this corner of this galaxy developing as ours did with a large gas giant surrounding a ring of rocky planets, is it really possible that the Venn diagram of the chemicals necessary for life and conditions necessary for life never touch each other? any of these stars I think it's naive to think that life could never have formed in all this vastness, but that doesn't mean I think the universe is teeming with intelligent life.

Intelligent life has only existed for the blink of an eye in cosmic history. It took 4.6 billion years for our planet to get here and there is no guarantee that we will last the extra billion years for the Sun to support life on this planet before it gets too hot, making it impossible to live here. In fact, depending on who you ask, we're doing everything we can to end this as quickly as possible, so millions of stars may have been able to create intelligent life throughout their life cycles, but those forms of life they did not do it.

You won't make it and you can go down the rabbit hole, the big filter here to explain that, but the stars don't have to die and maybe interstellar travel just isn't possible, maybe the distances are too great, maybe the history of our galaxy. and the universe as a whole is just a series of bursts of life that appear like twinkling lights on a Christmas tree, two never appear at the same time. Therefore, if we could find it, it would be the most amazing discovery in all of history. microbes somewhere else in our solar system we were able to dig under the ice of Europa and find a little rope in bacteria swimming around that would make us completely rethink everything we know about life if life could arise twice in one solar system the The possibility of our being does not increase exponentially, but until that happens, let us do our best to treat this planet like the rare and precious gem that it is.

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