There Are Thousands of Alien Empires in The Milky Way

What if there are thousands of  alien empires in the Milky Way, each spanning a few to maybe tens  of star systems, chatting, trading, sometimes shooting or ignoring each other  politely? And if so, why is nobody visiting us? While the Milky Way is ancient and gigantic,  even travelling at 10% the speed of light, any civilization could take over the  whole galaxy within a million years.

But we haven’t seen anybody yet. So it  seems we are alone in the Milky Way. But this idea is built on a lot of  assumptions.

Usually when scientists speculate where all the alien civilizations  are, they assume technology will progress to a point where colonising all  of space becomes kind of easy. But what if we are thinking about  this the wrong way? What if the universe is full of life, but no matter  how technologically advanced you are, space is never easy?

What if  aliens slowly crawl through space, expanding like humans did over the ocean? Let's  look at the only data point we have: ourselves. The Available Real Estate in the Galaxy Oceania is a region with tens of thousands of  islands scattered across millions of square kilometers, separated by an unforgiving,  deadly sea.

Kind of like a galaxy. Some 5000 years ago the first people set  out to colonise Oceania. Especially the Polynesians achieved mind blowing feats. 

Without any modern technology they set out into the vast nothingness hoping to find a  new island to claim or like die far from home. But most of the pacific islands are merely a  few wet rocks or corrals, maybe some palm trees and if you are lucky, birds making a pit stop.  Others with more vegetation are often hostile, lacking the resources to really sustain a lot  of people and remain uninhabited even today.

And then there are the good islands. The Polyneisians colonised them, spreading  their culture and society to dozens of remote islands of all sizes. Some united in kingdoms  spanning many islands, others were independent, many home to competing and belligerent tribes.

And  although thousands of kilometers apart, even the most remote islands were connected with at least  some trade and exchange. A microcosm of humanity. But it didn’t always work out.

The  extremely isolated Pitcairn islands were settled for hundreds of years and relied  on trade with each other and bigger islands hundreds of kilometers away. And then  the local population vanished. We don’t know why – maybe because the islanders did the  human thing and ravaged the natural resources until they became unsustainable.

Maybe the  decline on distant bigger islands severed important connections. We only know their  culture declined and they left or died out. What if space is an ocean to us?

A  hostile place that’s hard to conquer? Would alien civilizations  spread like the Polynesians? The Universe is kind of a horrible place The Milky Way has around 200 billion star systems  and it seems that almost all of them have planets.

Estimates vary, but there may be some 300 million  to tens of billions of rocky, earth-like planets, in the habitable zone around a star, where water  can be liquid. Amazing! Except that most of them are terrible.

Hells of lava, dead frozen  worlds, bare rocks sterile from radiation, blanked by toxic atmospheres. It's easy to  forget, but Venus and Mars are “earth-like”, too. Mars is the next human frontier and fairly  exciting – but Mars dust is poison and deadly radiation and low gravity will make you sick. 

Mars is the worst. Except Venus is even worse, crushing you to death, burning  and dissolving you in acid. If humanity was really motivated and had the  resources and energy, both could be terraformed within maybe a thousand years – we showed how in  other videos.

But the thing is, we already have a planet that's pretty great, 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 are planets like Mars and Venus.

, Barren 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 you get a… Mars. Or worse, a Venus. 

What a let down. Terraforming them is such an intense investment in terms of resources to  make it worth spending the time to travel to the stars for bad planets. Maybe the simple reason  we don’t see galaxy spanning civilizations is that the economics just don’t add up for  almost all of the star systems 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 that report back every few thousand years with new planets ready for fresh settlers,  or automated ships with embryos. But if it were that easy someone would have done it by now.

So  either we are really alone – or it's not easy. Thinking about alien civilizations you  need to make loads of assumptions – and for this video we are assuming that space is hard, 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 pick the very best? Stringing together  island empires like the Polynesians? Thousands of Galactic Empires Every star moves in its own orbit through  the galaxy and most stellar neighbourhoods are only temporary.

At any given time, in  some regions there will be more good islands than in others. While simply because of bad  luck, other regions will be pretty isolated. Earth might currently be in one of these  backwaters, surrounded by really bad islands for dozens of light years in all  directions.

We may be Pitcairn island, so isolated that nobody knows we are here,  or cares to establish a colony so remote. But elsewhere in 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 the next, creating connected empires.

Strings of worlds, with all the adventure  and challenges of expansion even to really good planets. Do they need to animate dead worlds with  oceans? How do they cope with alien microorganisms or strange ecosystems?

Do they need to burn it  all down and create a mirror of their home world, or do they adapt? How many centuries do  they need to make a planet truly their home? Empires expanding in regions full of good islands  would probably meet each other.

Maybe they trade, maybe they fight. Maybe they have coffee  and chat about the meaning of it all. And just like some of the Polynesian islands,  it is likely that many of these planets would be abandoned or for the empires to  break apart for a number of reasons: First of all, most great neighbourhoods  would dissolve over time and connected islands would become remote.

Then it just  may be the nature of civilization to become unsustainable or self destructive – humanity  is extremely young and we’ve already flirted with extinction. There are numerous existential  risks, cultural, technological and environmental that any civilization has to deal with. And  smaller colonies on new planets would likely be less resilient than their homeworlds and  in bigger danger of dying out.

Whenever this happens this would leave a good island free  again for others to rediscover and colonise. Also space is just a different ballpark.  The enormous distances between stars make it hard 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 colonies care what the home world wants  from them, if it can neither help nor really enforce its will on them? This also would make  interstellar war, except the genocidal kind, completely uneconomic.

Would you go to war with  someone because their great grandfather killed yours? At these distances, it's not like anyone  could easily sneak up on each other anyway. And on a much more fundamental level, if  island empires don’t exchange relevant amounts of genetic information – if there  are no hook ups between worlds –, sooner or later these populations will develop in  different directions and eventually become different species.

Making it less likely  that they’ll want to be under common rule. So the idea of enormously big, connected  empires may just not be feasible if the galaxy is an ocean where good islands are few  and far between. But this also means that new civilizations may pop up constantly, spread and  partially or completely die out, even if just by splitting into different factions.

Islands  may be recolonized and abandoned over and over. What would this mean for us? We might think we are alone only because  we are on an isolated island right now.

But there could be thousands of worlds full of  diverse civilizations elsewhere, that we would eventually drift closer to - does this make  the milky way more scary or less scary? Is it a good thing that we'd have time to get our act  together before we face anyone else? Or is it a great tragedy that we might not have the chance to  meet our neighbours beyond for a long, long time?

Well we don’t know, but it is something for you to  ponder tonight when you look up at the sky again. Hopefully humanity is still at the beginning  and we’re learning a tiny bit more about the universe every day – one day, we might spot a good  island. And if we are lucky, many more close by.

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Let’s  conduct a few stellar experiments! We’ll first add some more mass to this protostar.  More.

. a bit more. .

Wow! We’ve just created a blue giant, a star with 10 times the mass of our sun.  Let’s now add a couple of million years and see what happens.

A supernova! Breathtaking. And look!

It  leaves behind a black hole. Fascinating stuff. Now we record our findings.

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