What if you found out
that you had a long-lost relative?
And what if that long-lost relative
was from a different planet in our galaxy?
And what if this faraway planet
was home to billions of humans,
just like Earth?
But these "humans"
don't look anything like us.
Because they're from the future.
Could aliens be future versions of humans?
In 1947,
a mysterious object crashed
in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.
You all know this story.
But could it really be aliens?
The mysterious object was officially declared
to be a U.S. Army Air Force balloon.
But then, decades later,
U.S. Navy Commander George W. Hoover,
who had top secret clearance,
revealed that the mysterious crash
involved time-traveling humans.
Somehow, these future humans
had developed the technology
to overcome the technological limitations
that prevent us present-day humans
from making the same type of trip.
Some theories suggest that
these future humans travel back in time
in order to understand their biological past.
Maybe these same time travelers
helped our ancestors to make huge leaps
in scientific and technological knowledge
in a relatively short amount of time.
But if any of these theories are true,
should we be prepared
for another alien-human visit
sometime in the near future?
And what might we expect
from this close encounter of the third kind?
If aliens,
I mean future humans,
were to come and visit us again,
they would probably look similar
to how they appear in movies.
Like us, they'd still walk on two feet.
But their heads and their eyes
would be much larger.
This fits with predictions
of how present-day humans
will continue to evolve.
We can expect our heads to be bigger
and our upper skull become more rounded
to accomodate a larger brain.
And as our civilization advances enough
for interplanetary travel,
our eyes would get bigger
so we can see better in dimmer environments
that are further away from the Sun.
Future humans might also find a way
to slow the ageing process.
So it would be possible to make several trips
to places thousands of light-years away
within one lifetime.
If we want to travel somewhere
that's 60,000 light years away,
and if our technology could do it,
then it would be a 60-year flight
for anyone onboard
But when they got back to Earth,
60,000 years would have passed.
We'd like to think that humans of the future
would solve this problem,
so they could visit Earth and come home
to tell their family and friends about their trip.
But if future humans find a way
to live for thousands of years,
would that lead to a massive overpopulation
on whichever planet they inhabit?
Chances are,
if they make it possible to live that long,
they will probably succeed
in optimizing their existence before that.
Their civilization would undoubtedly
be a lot more efficient than ours.
The reason being is they could be centuries,
if not millenia,
ahead of us in evolutionary terms.
Future humans would be a lot smarter,
and they'd have better technology
to maximize their space,
and live in densely populated worlds
without producing the same
high levels of pollution that we do on Earth.
In fact, you could bet that future humans
wouldn't just have better technology,
they'd be technology.
Just like some humans today have implants
to perceive sound
or to detect atmospheric pressure,
the humans of the future
would likely have
dozens of technological implants
to make their lives easier.
Think about everything
your cell phone does for you.
Now, imagine that you could command it
with your thoughts,
and that it would only be
a small chip in your brain.
A chip, or an implant like that,
might also explain why those who claim
to have encountered aliens,
have said that the aliens spoke to them
in their native language.
Could future humans
simply have automatic language translators
implanted in their brains?
Or would humans of the future
evolve past different languages?
Instead, using one universal language
like Esperanto.
If you think this topic
has more to it than just a What If,
why don’t you join us
on the What If Discussed Podcast?
We go further in-depth with the possibilities
of Aliens actually being humans from the future,
with Dr. Mike Masters of Montana Tech University,
who has written a book postulating that Aliens
are actually future humans,
traveling back in time
to better understand their past
by better understanding us.