Alien Police Scenario of the Fermi Paradox
As C .Clarke said “ We are either alone in this universe or we are not. And both these ideas
are equally scary. The universe is very vast and has billions of galaxies. These billions
of galaxies have trillions and trillions of planets and many among them are habitable too.
So if there are millions of other habitable planets who have had more time than us to advance,
where are all the aliens? This is the classic Fermi Paradox and we have talked
about in a lot more details on this channel. But today we are going to
take a look at a very speculative scenario of the Fermi Paradox- The Alien Police Scenario.
Predicting what technology will be like in a century or even thousands of years
is a game of educated guesswork. For example, during the American Civil War, no one could have
foreseen that a century later, the atom would be tamed and nuclear weapons with the ability
to end civilization would exist. They just had no foundation for making such a prediction.
On the other side, the notion of travelling to the moon was on the table, thanks to the efforts of
Jules Verne, who published From the Earth to the Moon in 1865. He anticipated humanity would travel
to the moon someday, but he couldn't have imagined that it would happen barely over a century later.
Because we have evolved so much in such a short amount of time, it is possible that we still
have a long way to go in terms of technical growth, both with things we can predict,
such as Dyson swarms, and those we cannot predict. The latter is the eerie aspect of technology.
Entire hypothetical technologies, such as the entire consequences of nanotechnology,
remain mostly unexplored by humans. We've started the adventure, but we have no idea
where we're going. And then there are completely unknown future technologies that we don’t even
know the science for yet. We still don’t know a lot of the science that is hidden from us.
Huge gaps exist in our understanding of the universe. The best example for this would be
that general relativity and quantum mechanics do not line up, even though they both are correct.
This tells us that there are missing pieces of physics that we still need to discover.
We have some puzzle pieces, but we don't know how many more are missing.
This might imply that there are really harmful technologies in our future that
we have not yet imagined. While travelling to the moon was predicted in the 1860s,
the nuclear bomb was not. That requires a trip back in time to 1914 and H.G. Wells' classic
The World Set Free. So the concept of nuclear war, humanity's greatest technical existential danger,
emerged seemingly out of nowhere and very quickly. This might occur again.
But, thus far, we've only done things that have an impact on the earth. Is it possible
that there are technologies out there that are so hazardous that they may destroy entire galaxies,
if not the entire universe? The answer is that it may be. A lot of theories have been made in
regards to galaxy-threatening devices. The most famous example is the paper clip maker,
in which someone constructs a machine with a specific purpose,
to produce paper clips, and it escapes and begins converting the entire galaxy
into paperclips. Another example would be self-replicating probes with no limit on
reproduction that actually consume the galaxy, transforming it into copies of themselves.
Another type of cosmic danger would be generalized very powerful artificial intelligence, which may
choose to eliminate all biology, enslave it, or change it wherever it finds it. Then there are
the mysteries of the cosmos itself. As I said in a previous video, the universe may not exist in its
lowest potential energy state, and if it ever did, it would send out a shockwave at the speed
of light, destroying all matter in the universe in its current form. Is it feasible, given a
comprehensive enough understanding of physics, for someone to do the incorrect experiment and set it
off? The answer is probably no, but it's in such a confusing region of physics that it can't be ruled
out just yet. This creates a dilemma. How do you prevent a civilisation from posing a cosmic danger
if it is capable of doing so? This brings us to what I refer to as the Alien Police Scenario.
This is sort of a variant of the zoo hypothesis, but it's more specific and speculative.
We have already talked about the zoo hypothesis and other possibilities about the Fermi paradox
in our previous videos, so make sure to check them out, the link is in the description.
Once you realize such far-reaching hazards are feasible, it makes logical sense to police the
galaxy, and anybody coming into contact with these technologies must either be warned not to do so,
or be forcibly stopped. Consider it this way: You're sitting on your porch, taking in the
scenery. You'll see police cars patrolling the area on a regular basis, but unless you're clearly
breaking the law, they won't pay any attention to you. They simply pass by on their patrol.
However, if you were taking your neighbor's BBQ and dragging it back to your property while your
neighbor yelled for the cops, the cops would stop and you would stop stealing it.
This might be how different galaxies might work. There are police investigations taking on the
inhabited advancement of growing civilizations. They stay concealed, much like a traffic cop,
until they notice you doing something or reaching a level of technology that necessitates their
involvement for the sake of the whole galaxy's safety. Your personal safety, on the other hand,
may be of secondary importance. If you choose to do something that will cause your own extinction,
that is not the galaxy's concern, and you are free to do anything you want. If you go beyond that,
you will be stopped. It's fun to imagine what this monitoring and intervention situation may
look like. To inspire the phrase "good policeman, bad cop," there may be a combination of police
investigations from various civilizations, some forgiving, some not, and it all depends on
who gets to you first. Alternatively, if the first probe establishes peaceful contact and issues a
stop and desist order is disregarded, the second probe becomes more aggressive. If you don't stop,
you'll be exterminated by a hostile alien civilization police probe. Or it may be a single
all-powerful probe launched by all civilizations working together to enforce galactic safety
standards. It might easily destroy or downshift any dangerous civilization. These are some
possibilities that can be possible. Does it seem like nations and politicians on earth already??
Another possibility is that, If the offending technological development
is the result of a conflict on a planet, the probe may act as a mediator in the dispute to avoid the
development entirely, and then adopt a trust but verify stance with the civilization, knowing that
there is always a death probe sitting in their star system. Another scenario here approaches
it from a different angle. Aside from technical surveillance, a police investigation may have
another purpose. It might also serve as a kind of defense. Why, if such a probe was discovered
to be considerably more powerful than anything required to destroy or reset your civilization? It
can prevent you from creating weapons to match it fairly early on, so there must be another reason.
The question then becomes, are those weapons present for your own protection? Then you must
consider what it is protecting you against. These are always the creepiest Fermi Paradox situations
since they imply the existence of something malicious out there, and you need to be protected
from it. The probe becomes a sentinel, waiting for anything from the depths of space to assault,
at which point it will spring to life to protect you. Perhaps the Galaxy has vanquished that danger
throughout the period the probe has been around, which might be millions of years. Or vice versa,
and the armed probe’s creators are long gone, and the probe is no match for this enemy.
Or the probe may be more than a match for the enemy. Consider the first civilisation in the
galaxy making errors and understanding the perils and rewards of millions of years of technological
advancement. Imagine they've seen it all, battled other civilizations in technological progress
wars, and eventually become the galaxy's police force. Perhaps this occurs in all galaxies with
sentient life, with one overlord civilisation developing and managing the rest, not in their
own internal matters, but in interplanetary affairs. To remove the risk of violence, maybe all
communication between planets is handled by this safety police. The truly terrifying aspect about
this scenario is that we may be in it without even realizing it. It’s highly unlikely, but not zero.
Another possibility is an idea about von Neumann, Benford and Bracewell probes. Any of those ideas
can be applied here for a police probe. A probe may essentially perform two things to watch Us.
It could do it passively, say, from anywhere within the solar system, or perhaps more ideally,
from the moon's surface. If it was suitably disguised and displayed only monitoring
equipment smaller than the greatest resolution of our cameras, it might remain concealed eternally,
merely waiting for us to violate galactic law. The second possibility is that it is deliberately
monitoring us far more closely, and we have mostly dropped the ball and missed it. Such a probe
may create atmospheric probes to see into the atmosphere and observe our actions more closely,
or it could conduct thorough scientific investigations of all life on Earth. People have
frequently stated that humans would be like ants to an alien civilization, and that they would not
be interested in us. But the truth is that we're fascinated by ants in two ways. For starters,
there are scientists on Earth that specialize on ants, and we've amassed a vast amount of knowledge
about them. Ants are fascinating, to the extent that humans keep ant farms for educational and
recreational purposes. However, we also interfere when we discover ants in places where they are
not wanted, such as the kitchen. If the ants go too far, whether consciously or not, the ants
must leave. As a result, even if we aren't at an extraterrestrial civilization's technical level,
they may be quite interested in us. And this where the Unidentified aerial phenomenon or
UAP comes into play. The most likely avenue to an extraterrestrial explanation for the UAP phenomena
is the concept of a probe sitting in the solar system watching us and creating smaller
atmospheric probes. Now a point to note here, that these are matter of phenomena, plural, and there
might be multiple explanations to their origins. Some may stay unknown for the rest of time,
but at least there are attempts like the Galileo Project to try to figure out what's going on.
However, there is a reasonable explanation for an extraterrestrial presence here. The question
of whether or not there is one is quite different. But, if that's the case, what if their motive for
being here is a police operation? Are we being watched? Are these aliens god-like to us? Let us
know what you think in the comments section below. Also make sure to like our video and subscribe to
our channel,a s it encourages us to keep making amazing videos like this for you. Thank you.