There Are Thousands of Alien Empires in The Milky Way

What if there are

thousands

of

alien

empires

in the Milky Way, each spanning anywhere from a few to perhaps dozens of star systems, chatting, exchanging, sometimes shooting at or politely ignoring each other? And if so, why doesn't anyone visit us? While the Milky Way is ancient and gigantic, even traveling at 10% the speed of light, any civilization could take over the entire galaxy in a million years.   But we haven't seen anyone yet. So it seems we are alone in the Milky Way. But this idea is based on many assumptions. Typically, when scientists speculate about where all the

alien

civilizations are, they assume that technology will progress to a point where colonizing all of space will be easy.

But what if we think about this incorrectly? What if the universe is full of life, but no matter how technologically advanced you are, space is never easy? What would happen if aliens slowly crawled through space, expanding like humans did over the ocean? Let's look at the only data we have: ourselves. Available real estate in the galaxy Oceania is a region with tens of

thousands

of islands spread over millions of square kilometers, separated by an unforgiving and deadly sea. Something like a galaxy. About 5,000 years ago the first people set out to colonize Oceania. Especially the Polynesians achieved amazing feats.  Without any modern technology, they set out into the vast nothingness in hopes of finding a new island to claim or die far from home.

But most Pacific islands are just a few wet rocks or corrals, maybe some palm trees and, if you're lucky, birds stopping by.  Others with more vegetation are often hostile, lack the resources to truly support many people, and remain uninhabited even today. And then there are the good islands. The Polynesians colonized them, spreading their culture and society to dozens of remote islands of all sizes. Some were united into kingdoms spanning many islands, others were independent, and many were home to warring and competing tribes. And, although they were separated by thousands of miles, even the most remote islands were connected with at least some trade and exchange.

A microcosm of humanity. But it didn't always work. The extremely isolated Pitcairn Islands were inhabited for hundreds of years and relied on trade with each other and with larger islands hundreds of miles away. And then the local population disappeared. We don't know why, perhaps because the islanders did the human thing and devastated the natural resources until they were unsustainable. Perhaps the decline in larger, distant islands cut off important connections. All we know is that their culture declined and they left or disappeared. What if space was an ocean for us? A hostile place that is difficult to conquer?   Would extraterrestrial civilizations spread like the Polynesians?

The Universe is a horrible place. The Milky Way has about 200 billion star systems and it seems that almost all of them have planets.   Estimates vary, but there may be between 300 million and tens of billions of rocky Earth-like planets in the habitable zone around a star, where water can be liquid. Amazing! Except most of them are terrible. Lava hells, dead and frozen worlds, bare rocks barren by radiation, enveloped by toxic atmospheres. It's easy to forget, but Venus and Mars are also "Earth-like." Mars is the next human frontier and quite exciting, but Mars dust is poison and the deadly radiation and low gravity will make you sick.  Mars is the worst.

Except Venus is even worse: she crushes you to death, burns you, and dissolves you in acid. If humanity was really motivated and had the resources and energy, both could be terraformed in about a thousand years, as we show in other videos. But the thing is, we already have a pretty good planet, so currently humanity's motivation is not very strong. Now let's think about this in terms of galactic expansion. If the Milky Way is like a vast ocean full of islands, most of them are planets like Mars and Venus, arid rocks or corals, where nothing grows and the elements kill you.

Imagine boarding a generation ship to travel for 100 years or more, only to arrive at a new star and then get...Mars. Or worse yet, a Venus.  What a disappointment. Terraforming them is such a resource-intensive investment that it's worth spending the time traveling to the stars in search of bad planets. Perhaps the simple reason we don't see galaxy-spanning civilizations is that the economics simply don't add up for almost every star system out there. But wait, you might say: it's actually easy!  A high-tech race with unlimited resources could automate this process, sending thinking machines to report every few thousand years with new planets ready for new colonists or automated ships with embryos.

But if it were that easy, someone would have done it already. So either we are really alone or it is not easy. When thinking about extraterrestrial civilizations, you have to make a lot of assumptions, and for this video, we assume that space is tough, even for high-tech civilizations that have broken free from the limitations we have today. Now things are getting exciting. So what if alien civilizations actually ignore the bad islands and just choose the best ones? Unite island

empires

like the Polynesians? Thousands of galactic empires Each star moves in its own orbit through the galaxy and most stellar neighborhoods are only temporary.

At any given time, some regions will have more good islands than others. Although simply due to bad luck, other regions will be quite isolated. Earth could currently be in one of these backwaters, surrounded by really bad islands dozens of light years away in all directions. We may be Pitcairn Island, so isolated that no one knows we are here or cares to establish a colony in such a remote place. But in other parts of the Milky Way good islands may be more common! There it would be relatively easy for a high-tech civilization to jump from one good star system to another, creating connected empires.

Chains of worlds, with all the adventure and challenges of expanding even to really good planets. Do they need to animate dead worlds with oceans? How do they deal with strange microorganisms or strange ecosystems? Do they need to burn everything down and create a mirror of their home world, or do they adapt? How many centuries do they need for a planet to truly be their home? Empires that expanded into regions full of good islands would likely find each other. Maybe they negotiate, maybe they fight. Maybe you'll have coffee and chat about what it all means. And like some of the Polynesian islands, many of these planets would likely be abandoned or empires broken up for several reasons: First, most of the large neighborhoods would dissolve over time and the connected islands would become remote. .

It may then be that the nature of civilization becomes unsustainable or self-destructive: humanity is extremely young and we have already flirted with extinction. There are numerous existential, cultural, technological and environmental risks that any civilization has to face. And smaller colonies on new planets would likely be less resilient than their home worlds and in greater danger of disappearing. Whenever this happens, a good island will once again be free for others to rediscover and colonize. Furthermore, the space is simply a different stadium.  The enormous distances between the stars make it difficult to maintain a consistent civilization; Just think about how many cultures we have on Earth alone.

Imagine if sending a message between continents took decades to arrive.   Would the colonies care what the home world wants from them, if it can't help them or really impose its will on them? This would also make interstellar war, except of the genocidal kind, completely uneconomical. Would you go to war with someone because his great-grandfather killed yours? Anyway, at these distances, it's not like anyone can sneak up on another. And at a much more fundamental level, if island empires do not exchange relevant amounts of genetic information (if there are no connections between worlds), sooner or later these populations will develop in different directions and eventually become different species.

Making it less likely that they will want to be under a common government. Therefore, the idea of ​​enormously large and connected empires may simply not be feasible if the galaxy is an ocean where good islands are few and far between. But this also means that new civilizations can constantly arise, spread, and become partially or completely extinct, even if simply by dividing into different factions. Islands can be recolonized and abandoned again and again. What would this mean for us? We might think that we are alone just because we are on an isolated island right now.   But there could be thousands of worlds filled with diverse civilizations elsewhere, which we would eventually approach.

Does this make the Milky Way scarier or less scary? Is it good that we have time to get our act together before facing off against someone else? Or is it a great tragedy that we will not have the opportunity to meet our neighbors from beyond for a long, long time? Well, we don't know, but it's something you should reflect on tonight when you look at the sky again.   Let's hope that humanity is still in its beginnings and we are learning a little more about the universe every day; someday, we might spot a good island. And if we're lucky, many more nearby.

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