The world is definitely going to end one day.
All of this will be gone and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
Everything is temporary and we’re all going to die.
Throughout history, humanity has looked to the stars and wondered,
are we alone?
Is there something else out there grander than us
that we’ll never understand?
Are they looking down at us and thinking the same thing?
And if so,
are they going to come down here and just…kill us all?
If motherships suddenly appear over the major cities of the world,
governments will frankly have to wing it.
There is no war plan.
There’s no contingency plan.
If they can come here and they have malevolent intensions,
then I think it’s, you know, game over.
A: there’s a technological power that is far more formidable than anything
we’re used to dealing with.
And B: can we trust that the authorities actually know what they’re doing?
I’m at The Allen Telescope Array for SETI,
The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
They use these dozens of radio telescopes to scan the skies
for any messages that something up there might be sending down.
I’m going to talk to the guy that runs it to see if they’ve heard anything
that sounds like a plot to destroy us all.
But first, let’s go talk to Nick Pope.
He ran the British government’s UFO program for years—
working with the ministry of defense to investigate all kinds of sightings
in the skies.
He’s basically the closest thing the Brits have
to their very own Fox Mulder.
In those files,
in those real life X-files, as we called them,
there were sightings from police officers,
from military personal,
there were sightings backed up with military radar.
Is invasion something that personally concerns you at all?
Is it something that you worry about?
Any civilization that has developed viable interstellar travel,
is gonna have better technology that we do.
In a universe nearly 14 billion years old,
what are the chances that alien invaders
are going to have a technology just a couple of hundred years ahead of ours?
And as the Sci-Fi writer, Arthur C. Clarke once said,
any technology sufficiently advanced from our own
will be indistinguishable from magic.
That is what we will be facing.
And it’s not just going to be robots and death rays,
it will perhaps be technologies that we haven’t even conceived of.
And almost certainly have zero defense against.
Do you think the world’s governments are putting enough
resources into UFO studies?
I don’t think enough is being done about this.
I’m not sure if there’s a neat fix here.
I don’t think there’s a simple way to defeat an alien invasion.
there are 1 or 2 people who have put down a few ideas on paper.
The obvious one is the SETI institute.
They have something called 'The Declaration of Principles,'
but really this says little more than what they will do if they pick
up a radio signal
from another civilization.
And that Declaration of Principles really only says,
we will verify the signal and then we will publish the information.
To see what SETI has to say about their research and protocols
and if they’ve heard anything so far,
I met up with SETI's senior astronomer, Seth Shostak.
And the guy that actually runs these dishes, Jon Richards.
He’s the first person that would notice if they found something.
We’re interested in the idea of life beyond earth, life and space.
And we’re pointing at various objects in the sky,
trying to read their radio signal,
searching for a radio signal from somewhere that may be a distant civilization.
We think that we could pick up something as far as
200 lightyears, more possibly 50 lightyears would be
an easier—
depending on the transmission strength from their end.
And, but so far, and I feel like I would’ve heard about this if this is true,
nothing yet, right?
Nothing yet.
So, do you feel optimistic that humanity will find life somewhere else in the universe?
Well of course I do, otherwise why would I do this job really?
I bet everybody a cup of coffee that we’ll find E.T. or a signal from E.T.
within 20 years.
How long ago did you make that bet?
That was 8 years ago, so I got another dozen years before I have to stock up on coffee.
I think in my lifetime, there’s a good chance because the public interest is growing.
What we need is more funding.
And more funding is starting to slowly dribble in for several projects.
Maybe Mars developed life very early on—
even before the earth, it could have been.
And in that case, some of it may have come to earth,
you know, not in a rocket, but just in a rock.
Rock, not rockets.
Because you know, rocks are hitting the planets all the time.
And it kicks off a bunch of dirt—
including clubs of dirt that may have some microbes in them.
And most of them just fall right back down,
but some of them might be kicked off fast enough
to actually go into space and a few of those might make it to earth.
So maybe we’re just the result of an infection by Mars
3 or 4 billion years ago and in fact, we’re all martians.
What do you think about—do you think humanity is ready?
For?
Contact.
Well it depends on the kind of contact.
If you talk about what we’re doing here at the SETI institute, picking up a radio signal.
K, that’s clearly not a threat in any sense.
There is a potential danger there if you could understand the message eventually, if there is a message.
Maybe they’ve got, you know, information that’s
a hundred thousand years more advanced than yours and it disrupts everything.
You know, if you talk about contact,
in the sense of somebody actually sending space craft to earth and landing,
well, if that happened, I think I would lose my optimism very quickly.
I would just, you know, head for the hills.
I think that if we were being visited actually, I think we’d know.
It wouldn’t be something that the government could cover up,
because every government would have to cover it up,
frankly I’m not that the government has the capability of cover it up.
SETI is skeptical that UFOs have visited us already,
but obviously lots of people believe that they have.
The national UFO reporting center says they’ve logged over one hundred thousand sightings since 1905,
when a buzzing sphere-shaped object was sighted over Portland.
The center also says that sightings are on the rise.
From just 5,000 in 1980,
to 45,000 in 2010.
But no matter what evidence there is, the concept of alien invasion
is still totally fantastical and outside my comprehension.
So let’s get real,
what would it be like if it actually happened?
Instead of going to an alien guy, I went to talk to Dan Drezner.
He’s a highly respected professor of international relations at Tufts University.
And he’s written about fantastical situations before.
I got him to talk about how world governments react in an alien invasion.
Well the first question would be: where exactly do they appear?
In other words, do they appear on someone’s airspace?
Or do they appear over the Atlantic or Pacific?
Or are there multiple ships or so on and so forth.
The first question is: would you have governments cooperating or not?
Um, and it’s not clear, frankly which way it would go.
Like if they landed in the DMZ.
Oh God.
That would be bad on a whole number of levels.
In the case of the DMZ for example,
would everyone actually recognize that it was an alien?
Or would the North Koreans assume this must be some plot from the perfidious United States,
or would the South Koreans assume that the North Koreans have been working on this forever, so on and so forth.
You’d actually have to have everyone agree—yeah this is an alien.
Say, so we just see some giant Independence Day large craft hovering over Chicago.
What does the United States do in that situation?
Well, the key thing the government would want to do in that moment
would be to try to get people in Chicago and outside of Chicago not to panic.
And also, if you’re talking about an alien attack—an alien race that would presumably be technologically sophisticated
enough to get to earth would presumably also not just immediately land.
They wouldn’t immediately be able to wipe us off the face of the earth.
If they were able to recognize that fact, then presumably they would want
more intelligence before they were to actually move in on it.
The proper historical parallel would be,
to previous colonists from Europe who then went to the new world,
went to Africa, went elsewhere and
wound up gobbling up large swaths of territory
and killing large numbers of indegenous people
from a variety of ways.
If I had to bet, is there a plan somewhere,
in some file cabinet in the Pentagon saying “this is what we’re going to do if the aliens show up,"
Yeah, I would put my money on that plan existing.
Seth and Nick had way less faith in world governments having effective UFO plans.
There is not, I should say,
a single document anywhere that I’ve seen in government—
UK or elsewhere
that is an alien invasion war plan.
Of course I don’t know what’s going on in the center of the Pentagon.
Who knows?
But I—my guess is: No.
Because there’s not much you can do about it, right?
If they really come here, if they can get here,
they are so much more advanced that, you know,
it doesn’t matter what your plan is, right?
But maybe being destroyed by aliens isn't the scariest thing.
Maybe the scariest thing is never meeting them at all.
There’s a theory that says there’s a certain limit that civilizations can reach and then its destroyed.
It’s called "The Great Filter"
People talk about great filters where a society, an intelligent species
gets to some point where they become a danger to themselves and may wipe themselves out.
I find it a very indeed dystopian point of view.
There might be some super predator out there—
perhaps biological that perhaps some machine
by a long dead intelligence out there, wiping out civilizations
as they emerge becaus that’s what it was programmed to do,
by creators that might now themselves be extinct.
Maybe the alien exterminators turned on their own creator.
Maybe that happened to alien life billions of years ago
and maybe we’re next.
Perhaps the universe is littered with civilizations that die too soon
to ever meet another.
But, Seth at SETI had a more optimistic outlook about what aliens could say about the future of our civilization.
One thing that you might potentially learn out of picking up a signal—
given that the guys at the other end, whatever they are, are more advanced than you are whatever these aliens are
they’re more advanced than you are because
you’re picking up their signals rather than the other way around.
That tells you something that says
well look,
these guys are technically more advanced than we are
and consequently they must also have developed things like
bombs, or they may have had problems with climate change.
I mean, they may have had all the kind of problems that our own technologies produce for us
and yet, they’re still there.
They’re still there broadcasting, or at least the signal—
when the signal left, they were still broadcasting.
So maybe that’s a reason for optimism, to say, “you know, we can survive our own technological adolescence,"
as Carl Sagan used to call it.
For the most part, all the experts I talked to had solutions to these apocalyptic scenarios.
From effective legislation to nuclear disarmament—
an alien defeating super weapon,
washing your damn hands.
The world's gonna end one day, but
if we’re smart, it doesn’t have to happen anytime soon.
Unless it’s something totally out of our control.
Like a solar flare,
or an asteroid,
or a blackhole,
or a super volcano,
or all the animals rising up against us and killing us,
or reality being a simulation that suddenly shuts off,
or a supernova,
or the universe just breaking apart,
or even the eventual heat death of the universe,
the sun burning out—that would suck,
the earth just cracking apart suddenly—this doesn’t look that sturdy,
another planet just crashing into earth,
Mars crashing into Earth, Venus crashing into Earth,
that electromagnetic jawn—whatever that is,
galaxy just breaking apart...