Do you ever feel like
you're being watched?
Not by a creepy stalker,
but by aliens.
It might be happening.
Just like we watch animals at the zoo,
aliens may be out there watching us,
like we're the zoo animals.
Imagine being trapped in a zoo.
If we really do live in a galactic zoo,
then you'd already be in one!
Aliens could be out there watching your every move.
They may want to study the human race,
learn from our technology,
or maybe they're planning to attack us.
But what if instead of attacking us,
the aliens are afraid of us attacking them?
Wait, what?
If you've watched any sort of sci-fi movie,
you may think of aliens as the bad guys.
The ones who attack our planet and steal all our resources.
But nevermind humans being afraid of aliens,
they may be afraid of us.
Think about it.
It's entirely possible that
aliens have been watching Earth since the birth of humanity.
If aliens have been hanging around since the beginning,
think of all the horrible destruction they've seen humans cause.
Deforestation, pollution
and let's not forget about war.
Lots of war.
Humans are constantly trying to kill each other.
It's estimated that almost 1 billion people have died from war throughout history.
So from the aliens perspective,
humans might seem like an incredibly violent, scary species.
They may not want to make contact
because they're afraid of how we might react.
Which could very well be with violence.
And while aliens might be watching us,
we aren't confined to a zoo.
We have left the Earth and gone to the Moon.
But are we sure intelligent life is even out there?
Well, the odds are pretty good.
The existence of alien life could be explained by the Fermi paradox.
We have our Sun,
but in the Universe, there are
billions of other suns,
and they're billions of years older than our solar system.
Orbiting these other suns could be Earth-like planets.
And on Earth-like planets,
there's a good chance of there being highly intelligent life.
With so many worlds out there,
there's an even better chance that
at least one of them has developed interstellar travel.
The Fermi paradox suggests that
with interstellar travel
it would take a few million years to travel through the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
You may think that sounds like an incredibly long time.
But if there's a civilization that is billions of years older than us,
it would just be a tiny fraction of their history.
So if all this is true, which is very likely,
the aliens may have already found us.
And apart from us being a pretty violent species,
we may not be interesting enough for them to make contact with us.
We may just be another life-form out of the
thousands or millions that the aliens have seen.
After all, if you see an ant colony on the ground,
do you try to make contact with it?
You most likely go along with your day.
To other life-forms out there,
we may just be a simple group of ants.
Ants they don't want to hurt or bother,
just observe.
Another thing we have to keep in mind
is how we communicate with the aliens.
Ants on our world might be trying to communicate with us,
but unless they send the right signals, we'll never know.
The same goes for the aliens and us.
We may not be communicating with aliens the right way.
They may not even know that we want to make contact with them, so they just leave us alone.
What is the best way to communicate with aliens?
We'll leave that story for another WHAT IF.