Scientists think we are in an ALIEN CAGE!

there are probably 36 other civilizations hanging out in the Milky Way and over 170 billion galaxies give or take in the observable universe conditions for life are all over space so where is everybody nuclear physicist enrio fery came up with this exact same question during a lunch break with his colleagues in 1950 leading to one of the most unsettling paradoxes in the universe even though there's a huge probability of extraterrestrial civilizations existing we still haven't found any clear evidence of them when possible explanation comes from the zoo hypothesis it suggests that advanced extraterrestrial societies exist

and know exactly who we are and where we are but intentionally choose to stay hidden they're just observing human quirky behaviors as if we're in some kind of a cosmic Wildlife Park but their intentions could be much darker If You're a Star Trek fan you probably remember the main rule for Federation members Starfleet officers shouldn't contact species that are not Advanced to avoid messing with their development even if it means risking their own lives now even though it's fiction this rule perfectly captures what the zoo hypothesis is all about beings from other corners of the

universe see our planet as a cosmic zoo with one-way bars they can watch us brushing our teeth in the morning or walking our dog but we can't catch a glimpse of them in this Theory non-terrestrial life forms deliberately keep their distance from us sticking to a hands-off policy agreement in the vast Cosmic neighborhood it's like those super smart beings agreed that we needed to have the freedom to shape our own future and Destiny following our own path of development without external contamination the idea is that these super Advanced civilizations could be like oh I don't

know 500 million years ahead of us which would explain why we haven't seen any signs of them and maybe it's better this way as humans could eventually be destroyed or even assimilated by this new cosmic power Independence Day style as much as things like going to an art museum might be interesting to us extraterrestrials probably wouldn't be too thrilled watching us stare at the Mona Lisa painting for hours interplanetary cultures might be more into buying tickets to quietly observe how we're developing new technologies such as ultramodern satellites according to the zoo Theory they can't reach

out to us until we hit a certain level of development so improving our technology and wisdom could be the only way to show them that we're mature enough and don't need their spaceship parenting anymore there are a couple of reasons why it's hard to buy into the zoo hypothesis I mean okay extraterrestrials might not visit or reach out because we're not all that advanced but it is tough to explain why they keep ignoring all our attempts to communicate even if the zookeepers try their best not to interfere with animals lives and behaviors I bet they

couldn't just ignore a bear speaking in loud and C English about its desire to communicate so that's pretty much why humans keep trying and trying to provoke some reaction from inhabitants of other planets using radio signals in 2017 in a Valley 8 m southeast of the Norwegian city of truma a radar antenna transmitted some specially composed electronic music to potential Intergalactic listeners the target audience was in GJ 273 also known as light and star it's a runty red dwarf located 12 Lighty years from our Solar System since radio waves travel at the speed of light

we'll have to wait more than two decades before looking for a reply but the main problem with radio waves is that we're kind of in the dark about where to look and civilizations might be as far as 177,000 light years away plus we don't know which radio frequency extra terrestrials used to chat now here on Earth we use the radio spectrum to send signals into the universe assuming that what works for us might be a common method for other civilizations but in fact it could be considered a somewhat old school technique for other beings that's

why current projects are now looking for techno signatures which are signs of technological activity from extraterrestrials like City Lights solar panels structures or artificial satellites another potential clue is to study the atmospheres of planets orbiting nearby stars as an advanced civilization might be altering its atmosphere with different gases making it detectable despite Decades of observations there is still no definitive evidence that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are out there but that doesn't mean they don't exist even by expanding search Fields we're talking about odds much Slimmer than hitting the jackpot with a roughly 1 in three billion

chance of finding an advanced civilization within a given distance from Earth maybe space creatures are responding to our communication attempts but in a way that we can't understand the universe has been around for more than 13 billion years while humans showed up just 200,000 years ago and this is about 0.01% of the universe's age it's like we're still learning to taught while other super smart beings might be sending us messages that are all Lost in Translation we keep waiting for a giant UFO to land on Earth and for green ETS with huge eyes to come

out of it but we forget that our Intergalactic neighbors could be more interesting in building nanot Technologies to watch over us they could also be trying to communicate using neutrinos which are subatomic particles with an extremely small mass that could effortlessly pass through our Planet without being detected by our current technological devices now the zoo hypothesis has another issue it is pretty tough to believe that with all these civilizations supposedly hanging out in the universe they would all decide not to reach out to humans for this to happen there would have to be a great

sense of structure with a higher intelligence working as the head of the universe giving them direct orders and clear rules to keep us isolated but we're talking about billions of possibilities for life right more civilizations mean that there are more chances of a violation of this no contact rule so most likely at least one independent Planet would be just as desperate to find life in the universe as we are some scientists also believe that if such Advanced life had substantially colonized Earth and many other planets we would know it by now the Zoo hypothesis has

two other variations that are even more frightening in the laboratory hypothesis nobody contacts us because humankind is actually being subjected to experiments and Earth is essentially a giant science lab other worldly creatures could be analyzing human responses to various survival challenges such as tsunamis or massive earthquakes in this case the no contact agreement between all other space groups would make a bit more sense since it's in the name of scientific research for the greater good at least for them the planetarium hypothesis proposed in 2001 suggests that we are living in an artificial Universe in some

kind of virtual reality designed to give us the illusion that the universe is empty when it's not but no possible generator could test this hypothesis besides the zoo the laboratory and the planetarium theories there is another possible answer to the fairy Paradox nobody contacts us because humans are completely alone in the universe this is known as the rare earth hypothesis and it emphasizes how Earth occupies an incredibly unique position no other planet could bring life to the universe that could be more than just bacteria we may consider ourselves pretty lucky as even a small change

in any of Earth's orbital parameters like the distance from the Earth to the Sun or the rate of rotation could make conditions too extreme for people or life in general but again it's hard to think that we are alone in this vast universe so we're back to the Paradox where is [Music] everybody according to the theory of panspermia life could have been brought to Earth by a meteorite Comet or asteroid from a different region of space at the moment this idea remains purely theoretical but let's figure out if it could actually turn out to be

true traditionally exobiologists those who are focused on searching for life outside Earth have been trying to explore the possibility of Life on Mars or in the subsurface oceans of Saturn's and Jupiter's icy moons but simple life could be much more widespread it could be drifting through interplanetary space right now in the form of dormant bacteria and spores several scientists have noted that the ultra harsh environment of space is likely to severely damage the DNA and RNA of such spores and microorganisms others believe that since enough microbes could be traveling in a dust cloud some of

them could survive in their original form there are several types of panspermia for example lithopanspermia proposes that some kind of microbic Life Could exist in debris blasted into to the cosmos after planetary collisions with comets and asteroids radioanal claims that organisms might be able to travel through space with the help of radiation coming from stars but in this case it's unclear how the effect of dangerous ultraviolet and x-ray radiation combined with the vacuum of space doesn't totally destroy microorganisms there's also pseudo panspermia according to it organic building blocks of life appear in interstellar clouds of

dust they get transported to the surfaces of planets and Life Starts developing there it sounds really fascinating but is there any evidence for the pans spermia Theory well there have been a few orbital experiments for example from 208 to 2016 the samples gathered by Expose special equipment mounted outside the International Space Station and dedicated to astrobiology were exposed to the conditions of space after that they were returned to Earth from the ISS it turned out that some of them had survived those severe conditions there was even a case when 100% of bacterial spores placed in

mars-like conditions were still capable of life also some seeds survived and were later grown as plants on Earth there have also been exost experiments on the US long duration exposure facility satellite and biopan experiments on Russian Photon capsules they have shown that with minimal protection spores lyans and even minuscule animals such as tardigrades might be able to survive in space for as long as several years a piece of surveyor 3 lunar lander was brought back to Earth in 1969 by the Apollo 12 mission shockingly it contained an earth bacterium that had survived unprotected for more

than 2 years on the airless surface at the same time this bacterium could have come from laboratory contamination on arrival back on on Earth the Indian space research organization carried out a search for space microorganisms too it was done at stratospheric altitudes via balloon flights the results showed that living interplanetary cells existed in air samples taken from Heights of above 25 Mi normally air from lower levels of the atmosphere can't be transported there so this discovery seemed to prove the theory of panspermia but in 2010 NASA atmospheric sampling before and after hurricanes proved that under

certain circumstances Earth bacteria could actually be transported very high into the upper levels of the atmosphere one of the main arguments against panspermia is that if this theory was correct all life found throughout the solar system would have a common origin and share main biochemical characteristics like genetic code it doesn't sound plausible many specialists believe that only the presence of astronautics explorers on the surfaces of let's say Mars Europa or Enceladus can properly solve the question of life in the solar system they can compare any life forms found with earth type life which can turn

out to be a real test of panspermia in any case until probes finally find Direct Proof of spaceborn Life the pans spermia Theory will remain unproven if the Multiverse theory is correct ours is not the only one out there which is as interesting as it is scary right now not every scientist is on board with this mind-bending concept and let's be honest the idea of actually making contact with these parallel universes sounds about as probable as winning the lottery while riding a unicycle but hold on tight because this strange concept isn't just limited to the

Realms of fiction anymore believe it or not a bunch of scientific theories actually support the existence of parallel universes and let me tell you it's a topic that stirs up quite the debate in scientific groups now picture this the universe we live in is mind-numbingly vast we're talking billions some say even trillions of galaxies swirling around each packed with an almost uncountable number of stars some brainiacs studying the universe's shape suggest that its diameter could span a staggering 7 billion light years others even argue that it might be infinite could there be more out there

than meets the eye well real scientific theories are exploring the possibility of universes existing alongside Beyond or even mirroring our own these intriguing concepts of multiverses and parallel worlds often intertwine with other more familiar scientific ideas like the big bang string theory and quantum mechanics in order for us to figure out what's out there we have to rely on the information we're a bit more conf confident in right let's Rewind The Cosmic clock about 13.7 billion years ago everything we're able to see today was squished into a minuscule Singularity then if the Big Bang Theory

is to be trusted it all went boom the universe inflated with a speed faster than that of light everywhere within less than a second the way the universe went pop has led some clever researchers to ponder the existence of more than one universe they question whether that sudden growth ended everywhere at the same time while the expansion ceased for everything we're able to see from Earth 13.8 billion years ago Cosmic inflation might still be ongoing in some other mysterious Corners some theoretical physicists say that as inflation ends in one place a new balloon Universe forms

but here's the catch you can't just hop from one bubble to another like Intergalactic tourists these bubble universes are expanding indefinitely and their edges are zooming away from us faster than light can travel and here's where things get even more confusing let's say we somehow managed to reach the edge of our local balloon and encounter the next Universe well those same theoretical physicists mentioned that the neighboring Universe could be a whole different ball game it might have completely different laws of physics making it a bizarre Place For Us following the same idea some say that

in this vast Multiverse of bubble universes there might be other life forms just like us the problem is we're getting farther away from them with each passing moment and our paths will never cross other super smart researchers out there are trying to connect parallel universes with quantum mechanics now quantum mechanics is basically the fancy math behind teeny tiny particles according to it these particles can exist in multiple States all at once they call it a wave function that holds all the crazy options but here's the catch when we observe these particles we only see one

outcome it's like the universe keeps playing hide and seek with us now there's this Theory called the many worlds theory that says whenever we observe one outcome Another Universe pops up where a different outcome becomes real it's like our universe acts as a giant tree constantly branching into countless versions of itself these alternate universes can't mingle though so you wouldn't even know if there there are a bunch of other 's living slightly or totally different lives this many worlds theory is pretty bold and a bit hard to prove or disprove and that's not great for

science because scientists love to test and experiment with their ideas but if there's Infinite Space out there why wouldn't there be infinite universes too try to imagine the universe as this giant Cosmic playground some Specialists believe that if it's indeed never ending then there's only a limited number of ways that it's building block can arrange themselves eventually they have to repeat certain patterns if this is true then it may be possible that somewhere out there there might be another version of you living the exact same life even down to what you had for brunch yesterday

did we ever have any proof of these supposed parallel universes well some say we did have you heard the tale of the mysterious man from tared it's the story of a man that ended up at a Japanese airport saying he was from a totally unknown country called tored now some folks think it's proof of time travel While others believe it's evidence he came from a different Universe altogether as much as you'd like to believe the story to be factual the tricky part is this torid place there's a reason you haven't heard of it there's no

torid to be found whether in the present day or back in the 1950s when this supposed incident happened after the airport incident the man just vanished Into Thin Air a day after arriv diving in Japan poof gone forever let's rewind to that fateful day in July 1954 when the man from tored supposedly landed in Tokyo descriptions paint him as a bearded french-speaking man nothing too outlandish so far right depending on who's telling the story things start to diverge a bit in one version when the man hands over his passport to get stamped the Japanese officer's

eyes bulge out while the passport looked legit the the country listed as torid isn't recognized by anyone including the officer and other officials naturally they take our torid visitor away for a little Q Anda session in another version the man straight up tells the officer he's from tored and shows him the passport when he doesn't buy it our man from Ted then started trying to convince the officers that his homeland is the real deal according to him torid Sat snugly between France and Spain and would have been around for about 1,000 years to prove his

point he even points to the area on a map that matches the principality of Andor obviously things took a mysterious turn the officers decided to hold the man in custody suspecting he might be up to no good they put him up in a nearby hotel for the night but not without stationing two people outside his room to keep an eye on things can you guess what happens next drum roll please when the officer showed up the next morning ready to continue their their investigation the man had vanished Without a Trace no sign of escape and

to make matters even more puzzling all his personal documents have magically vanished too what if the man from torid was a time traveler or an Intergalactic Adventurer some have even delved into the Realms of Science Fiction to explain this bizarre event and you won't believe the number of people on the internet who've latched onto it as evidence for alternate realities one of the weirdest ideas suggests that the man AC accidentally stumbled into a parallel Dimension and ended up at the Japanese airport in that parallel universe there's an earth just like ours but instead of Andor

they call it torid over there another idea floating around was that the man was a time traveler from the future sorry to break it to you but the most reasonable explanation for the whole story of the man from Tor is that someone's imagination went wild since there are many versions of the same story it's probable people just kept adding outrageous details to the case to make it more Sensational the whole story simply snowballed into an urban legend and there's little to no reason to believe we've once seen a time traveler or Intergalactic hitchhiker right here

on Earth a Dyson Sphere is a theoretical Mega project a ginormous sphere encircling a star with platforms orbiting and tight formation it's supposed to be an ultimate solution both for energy production and living space the creators of a Dyson Sphere get a lot of surface area for habitation and the ability to catch every tiny bit of solar radiation and heat produced by their Central Star the first person to theorize about such a bizarre construction was British American theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson according to him an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization could consider building this sphere after colonizing some

moons and planets in their local Stellar neighborhood with the growth of their population these aliens would need more and more energy to sustain their lives Dyson calculated that assuming that this alien Society grew at 1% per year their area and energy needs would become a trillion times larger in a mere 3,000 years and if their solar system contained a space body similar in size to Jupiter they could take it apart and spread its mass in a sphere spical Shell by building a structure at twice the distance between our planet and the sun this amount of

material would be sufficient to build a huge number of orbiting platforms each of them could be 6 to 10 ft thick which would basically allow this civilization to live on their starf facing surfaces a shell this thick could be comfortably habitable and capable of holding all the equipment needed for using solar radiation without falling onto the star from the inside but after absorbing all this solar energy the sphere would have to riate it otherwise the energy would build up eventually causing the construction to melt it means that the light of a star wrapped in a

Dyson Sphere would look dimmed or even completely darkened depending on how dense the platforms orbiting it were at the same time it would glow unusually bright in infrared wavelengths invisible to the uned eye because of this infrared radiation Dyson spheres are classified as a type of techn signature it's a sign of activity that astronomers can use to discover intelligent life forms in the universe some earth-based researchers have infrared maps of the night sky they examine in hopes of spotting Dyson spheres so far no one has ever found one however one study has selected several Dyson

Sphere candidates its authors have processed large amounts of information using a special data pipeline for combining and analyzing information one of the main search criteria is the detection of excessive infrared radiation at the same time it's important to distinguish this radiation from that emitted by natural objects after a complicated filtering of millions of objects the researchers ident identified seven potential Dyson spheres sure further analysis is needed to determine their nature to do this scientists want to use Optical spectroscopy which may reveal more details about these objects and their Origins at the same time the researchers

admit that these candidate Dyson spheres might have other explanations for example they could be debris discs or protoplanetary discs of young Stars only more research can show whether we can find traces of other civilizations among star systems for now it's still an open question interestingly Dyson spheres have been spoken about a lot in science fiction as far back as 1937 a novel called star maker by Olaf stapledon described systems in one particular Galaxy that were surrounded by a gauze of light traps which focused solar energy for intelligent use that was the reason why the entire

galaxy was dimmed in another novel Ring World the writer spoke about a ring-shaped artificial structure surrounding a star we still can't find the source of the mysterious signal we've been receiving since 2018 we receive it every 22 minutes and nothing can explain this some scientists even believe it could be coming from another civilization we haven't met yet [Music] this strange radio signal wasn't found by a scientist on a serious mission it was actually discovered by a college student just doing a regular project for school Tyrone oori an undergrad student at curtain University in Australia was

sifting through old data of the Southern Sky he was looking for any weird blinking radio signals he finally stumbled upon one from 2018 that seemed to shoot radio waves towards Earth like a lighthouse beam excited about his find Tyrone shared it with his mentor radio astronomer Natasha Hurley Walker she dove into researching this signal hoping for a break through but despite checking different frequency data they hit a dead end but then Natasha spotted a pattern the signal repeated every 18 minutes this was huge but just as they were geared ing up to study it further

poof the signal vanished after only 3 months leaving them with nothing not giving up Natasha and her team scann the skies again desperate for a clue months passed but nothing turned up they were ready to give up and then suddenly a new signal popped up this one kept blinking for 5 minutes then it disappeared and then it came back exactly 22 minutes later the main question was if that signal was related to an 18-minute one to figure it out Natasha went back to the old Radio Data from that area as they dug deeper they realized

that yes and these signals aren't anything new they've been beaming towards Earth for 35 years back in 1988 Indian and American telescopes had caught them but they got buried under tons of other data this was great news for Space Explorers because it meant they could now calculate how far away this mysterious object was after doing the math they figured out it was incredibly far even on a space scale 15,000 light years from Earth now the only thing left to uncover was what exactly this object was Walker and his team started comparing it to All the

known radio emitting objects out there yet its source remains a mystery the signals still pop up every 22 minutes on NASA screens always ending with a frustrating match not found message the scientist called it j18 3910 some think that the signal might come from some extraterrestrial beings maybe it's the signal that seti the search for her extraterrestrial intelligence has been waiting for this project has been working for over 50 years trying to find any evidence of life beyond Earth they also scan the skies for radio waves laser pulses and other mysterious signals so maybe it's

a way for extraterrestrial folk to communicate their location while that idea may sound exciting we need to be careful about jumping to conclusions first we don't have solid proof for that before any concrete evidence it's just speculation and also there are other more plausible explanations most likely it comes from a natural phenomenon and there are a couple of theories for that the first one is the Pulsar Theory imagine a huge star in space much bigger than our side sometimes these big stars finish their life Journeys in a spectacular event called a supernova when this happens

the star's core collapses becoming super compact as if you're squeezing all the stuff from that star into a tiny space that tiny superdense core is called a neutron star some of these neutron stars are extra special we call them pulsars they get their name because they seem to pulse with energy like a space Lighthouse these pulsars have incredibly strong magnetic fields much stronger than what you'd find on Earth they're like enormous magnets in space because of this they shoot out beams of energy they're also spinning super fast so these beams of energy seem to pulse

on and off as they spin around now the strange signal we detected seems to have similarities with pulsars but not quite pulsars usually have a predictable lifespan and slow down over time eventually stopping their radio signals in contrast Our Mysterious signal is quite persistent and is blinking Beyond what's expected for pulsars so maybe it's not a typical Pulsar or not a pulsar at all there's also a magnetar theory now a magnetar is another type of neutron star they're like supercharged versions of pulsars with even stronger magnetic fields and slightly longer pulsating periods maybe this is

what causes our signals intense persistence however when we plotted the data we also realized the signal didn't match The magnetar Vibes either magnetars not only send out radio waves but also powerful x-rays because they're so energetic but the signal we received was only sending out radio waves so we figured it's not a pulsar and not a magnetar the Signal's behavior is very strange and suggests an unnatural Source this means there might be something in the universe that scientists haven't fully explored yet and there is a space object that we don't know much about the final

theory is the so-called dwarf Pulsar sounds a little Dopey to me couldn't help myself now a dwarf Pulsar is like a star that blinks with light flashes similar to pulsars but it takes longer for each blink usually white dwarfs are the leftovers from smaller Stars they don't blink because their magnetic field isn't as strong as pulsars but when a white dwarf becomes pretty hefty almost the mass of our sun it gets super dense and starts pulsating with a strong magnetic field just like pulsars they have a cool Quirk white dwarfs made of electrons not neutrons

like pulsars when these charged electrons start dancing with a magnetic field they shoot out periodic light flashes which happen every 100 to 1,000 seconds as you remember our signal has a period of 22 minutes 1,320 seconds a bit longer than the usual white dwarf Pulsar but it's much closer to the truth so far this sounds like the most plausible explanation but even this Theory isn't fully confirmed yet this just shows how much there is in the universe that we're still figuring out for example fast radio bursts another mysterious type of signal we've been detecting they're

like quick intense bursts of energy in the form of radio waves they have a ton of energy FBS are so powerful that sometimes they can be brighter than entire galaxies now imagine this they release as much energy in a few milliseconds as our sun does in three whole days wow these bursts happen all over the sky with huge frequencies although some have been detected with lower frequencies every day we catch around 10,000 random FBS in the sky some of them repeat but most happen once and disappear forever unfortunately most of them only last for a

fraction of a second and by the time their energy reach tees us it's a thousand times weaker than a mobile phone signal from the Moon this is why despite their brightness there's still a lot we don't understand about them we're still trying to figure out what causes these FBS they could be coming from different sources like already mentioned magnetars colliding stars or even merging galaxies or white dwarfs as these bursts travel through space they pick up information about the cosmic environments they pass through like Interstellar gas clouds it's very unlikely that frbs are some messages

from extraterrestrial beings though not only because there are thousands of them every day all across the sky but also because we know that the sources of these bursts must be incredibly energetic themselves our neighbors would have to have equipment stronger than entire Galaxies for that but the bottom line is while all these signals are fascinating there's still a ton to learn about them imagine living in a world where technology has reached its highest point your daily routines are orchestrated by an AI which anticipates your every need from brewing your morning coffee to selecting a perfect

evening outfit the cityscape outside the window of your floating home is a Marvel of efficiency flying pods whisk people to their Destin ations renewable energy sources power the giant mega City creating an environment of pristine streets and clean air at work you have online meetings with colleagues living across galaxies collaborating on projects that go beyond our current understanding it sounds like a Sci-Fi story but some extraterrestrial civilization might have already reached this level of development scientists started pondering the possibility of life beyond Earth long ago they been wondering what such life could look like and

how humans could identify it from afar this train of thought led to the development of several classification systems including one called the kardashev scale it was proposed in 1964 this classification evaluates hypothetical alien civilizations based on how much energy they are able to harness according to the scale there are three types of civilizations the first type is a technological level close to the current level of earth type two is a civilization capable of harnessing the energy emitted by its own star and the third type is a civilization that has learned to use the energy of

an entire galaxy this scale sure caught people's imagination it was included in a five-page paper called transmission of information by extraterrestrial civilizations this work focuses on calculating how powerful a light signal from any point of the universe should be for us to detect it now within the basic categories humans are a type one civilization on the kardashev scale but some experts claim we aren't even a one since we haven't managed to harness the equivalent of the entire energy of Earth this makes us more like 0.7 and of course we're far from being a two a

civilization with a working Dyson Sphere a Dyson Sphere is a theoretical Mega engineering project encircling a star with platforms that are orbiting it in a tight formation it might be the ultimate solution for living space and energy production with its help the creators of this ginormous construction could have loads of surface area for living and the ability to capture every tiny bit of solar radiation produced by their main star as for a Type 3 civilization it extracts fusion and exotic Energy Information and raw materials directly from their Galaxy this civilization is capable of space travel

via wormholes Intergalactic communication via Subspace and Galaxy scale influence they have Supreme access to energy and are spread all over the universe after millions of years of evolution a type three civilization may actually be AI super intelligences Androids cyborgs and humans may be considered subspecies in such a highly Advanced Galactic Society in the most hopeful scenario humans would have found a way to coexist with their AI Masters or there might be no humans in that world whatsoever this civilization might have already ascended into beings of pure energy capable of controlling and directing machines to carry

out all kinds of work now back to the kardashev scale even though it focuses only on techn signatures it acknowledges bio signatures too suggesting that each search should inform the other the discovery of the simplest organism for example on one of Saturn's moons could increase the probability that many type 2 civilizations exist in our galaxy at the moment seti is the main player in the field of looking for extraterrestrial civilizations it's a combined effort of Enthusiast scientists who focus on receiving and analyzing signals from space in the radio and visible light regions of the electromagnetic

spectrum it's looking for nonrandom patterns that have been likely sent deliberately by technologically advanced beings the first modern seti search was project in 1960 it used a radio telescope in Green Bank Virginia SEI uses targeted searches concentrating on groups of nearby sunlike Stars this is the James web Space Telescope and this is how far we can see through its eyes impressive but let's Zoom further further further the image is getting blurrier and blurrier wait what is this Shadow it's a giant telescope capable of seeing those seemingly blurry images in perfect detail NASA's Roman telescope is

to be launched in 2027 and it might help us unravel the mysteries of the universe including the essence of dark matter no worries James web will continue to show us the beauty of the cosmos and solve Mysteries one by one but astronomers have a new Mission these days they want to deploy the next even bigger Space Telescope and this mission is already well underway the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is likely to start a new age for astronomy scientists hope that the telescope will gather more data than any other NASA Mission has ever done Hubble

and web are incredibly good at zooming in to get a clear detailed view of small parts of the sky meanwhile Roman is going to provide us with a much wider field of view it will be capable of creating infrared images 200 times larger than Hubble at the same time it will have a similarly high level of detail but even though the new telescope will be able to produce perfect images it's going to be used mainly for surveys let's say we need to look for the star population in a nearby Galaxy but it's a too large

field of view for Hubble if we use it we'll have to stitch lots of different shots and create mosaics out of them but with Roman a picture of the entire galaxy can be taken in one single shot look at this recent Mosaic of our neighbor the Andromeda galaxy this image was put together together using 400 individual images taken by Hubble and Roman will paint the same ultrav vast picture with the same level of detail with just two images it not only sounds cool it also means an unprecedented amount of data collected once we have such

a panoramic view of the universe NASA and other space agencies will probably be able to answer some of the greatest questions that have been intriguing Humanity for ages one of the main goals is to test the theory of relativity suggested by Albert Einstein it's been well tested on the scale of our solar system but not so much on larger cosmological scales according to this Theory visible matter is supposed to slow down the expansion of the universe but the universe is expanding Non-Stop and doing it faster and faster so astronomers attribute this ever growing expansion speed

to a mysterious component dark energy they believe that it makes up around 68% of the universe hopefully Roman will provide us with data that will help us accurately measure the position and distance between us and millions of galaxies eventually it might let us figure out the expansion rate of the universe in different areas in the end the results might tell us whether Einstein's theory of gravity needs modification one more of Roman's main goals is to detect hundreds and thousands of new exoplanets within our home Milky Way galaxy the telescope will be able to do it

using the technique known as gravitational micr lensing you see when two stars align with each other the one positioned in front distorts and magnifies the light of the other Star located behind and if the star in the foreground has a planet we can see how this planet affects the light of the star behind it Roman will hopefully count billions of stars providing us with a very good sense of how many of these stars have exoplanets The Cutting Edge telescope will not only spot new exoplanets it will also carry another crucial instrument called a Corona graph

it can image exoplanets that are close to their parent star this is actually an extremely tricky technique since the star light has to be suppressed after all it's much brighter than the objects you want to study by those objects I mean nearby planets the chronograph on the Roman telescope will try to capture large jupiter-like planets directly by conducting live corrections to improve the quality of images if it proves to work properly the telescope will make a great demonstration instrument forming the Baseline for the technology that will be used on future space observatories such observatories will

be capable of directly capturing earthlike planets in the habitable zone of their parent stars but the Roman Space Telescope isn't the only project that can change the way we explore space there are other Concepts like Nautilus it's an idea of a revolutionary Space Telescope based on a novel technology special Optical elements such elements can potentially allow us to overcome the main limitations of space telescopes non-scalable primary mirrors the Nautilus technology can provide large but ultra light telescope apertures enabling the launch of a massive Fleet of identical telescopes they will have an impressive light collecting power

which will help Nautilus survey thousands of earth-sized planets located in the habitable zone of their stars as a result we might find atmospheric signatures of Life on those planets over the past 2 billion years the atmosphere of our planet has changed dramatically the abundance of free molecular oxygen and ozone which are highly reactive gases together with water vapor and methane represent a unique atmospheric composition the presence of these gases bios signatures in the atmosphere of our planet is a sign of life that can be detected from afar we're speaking about Galactic distances here but to

identify such Fingerprints of atmospheric components in the light reflected by or transmitted through the atmospheres of earthlike planets we need very large telescopes NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered more than 4,000 planets and still no existing or even planned Space Telescope has a diameter that is large enough to search for life in exoplanets atmospheres finding and interpreting observations of extraterrestrial life correctly is very difficult but the Nautilus team hopes to build a telescope capable of studying thousands of earthlike planets then there's the European space agency's uclid mission it's designed to explore the composition and evolution of

the Dark Universe the mission was named after Greek mathematician uid who lived in Alexandria around 300 years bcee he founded the subject of geometry and since the density of energy and matter is tightly linked to the geometry of the universe the mission was named in his honor this Space Telescope will create a great 3D map of the large scale structure of the universe across space and time it'll do it by observing billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky uclid will try to figure out how the universe has expanded and how its

structure is formed over the course of cosmic history hopefully it will reveal more about the role of gravity and the Very nature of dark matter and dark energy as we already know Dark Energy likely accelerates the expansion of the universe as for Dark Matter it controls the growth of cosmic structures but experts remain unsure about what dark dark energy and dark matter are by observing the evolution of the universe over the past 10 billion years we might finally figure out how it has been expanding and changing from this astronomers might infer the properties of dark

energy dark matter and gravity it could help find out more about their precise nature the uclid spacecraft is around 15 ft tall and 12 ft wide it consists of two main components the payload module and the the service module the payload module includes a 4T diameter telescope and two scientific instruments a visible wavelength camera and a near infrared camera all spectrometer as for the service module it contains satellite systems such as electric power generation and distribution data processing Electronics thermal control equipment and so on if alien life exists it may be way stranger than we

can imagine for some inexplicable reason we've long assumed that aliens might be like us humans but in reality they're more likely to be some form of unfathomable AI with dozens of billions of years of evolution intelligence can develop in entirely new unexpected directions humans might be near the end of darwinian evolution we no longer need to remain the fittest to survive but the technological evolution of AI Minds is just starting who knows maybe in another Century or two will be overtaken by inorganic intelligence so the question is are aliens more likely to be Flesh and

Blood like us or are they something more artificial even though many believe that people are at the peak of intelligence it's possible that our species may just represent a stage on the way toward more artificial and advanced minds and it can actually explain why space seems to be empty of similar forms of life perhaps an evolutionary transition to non-organic intelligence is inevitable all over the universe then aliens could be electronic descendants of once organic creatures that existed long long ago such an idea gives us some exciting possibilities if AI aliens were out there they would

act and think totally differently from us plus they might not want to be detected non-organic intelligence may not need an atmosphere so they might have already left their home planet if they didn't need any special conditions they would be able to make Intergalactic voyages without having to fear for their lives they could prefer to live in zero gravity because in such conditions you can build very large and very lightweight structures for example if you wanted to construct a giant gossamer thin structure to harvest energy it would be easier to do so in space than on

a planet they might not even need to live in orbit around a star they could have innovative ways of getting energy we can't imagine yet if their brains were silicon-based they could realize that they needed less energy to process information at lower temperatures so they would move away from planetary systems to colder regions of the cosmos they could even have periods of hibernation for billions of years what if they had such a period waiting until the cosmic microwave background the leftover radiation after the big bang cooled down enough for them to function properly we can't

assume that these aliens would be a civilization either on Earth this term means a society of individuals but aliens might be a single integrated intelligence or they might be zombies super intelligent but lacking self-awareness and inner life in this case they would be alive but unable to perceive themselves or the world around them alternatively their advanced intelligence might allow them to understand aspects of reality we can't figure out yet there are likely to be things in the universe that neither our mind nor our senses can grasp but electronic brains might have a very different perception

interestingly these days humans themselves are starting to use AI to detect alien life out there after all there are between 10 and 50 billion potentially habitable worlds in our galaxy alone and looking for intelligent life is a hard task without some assistance that's when the us-based research organization seti search for extraterrestrial intelligence comes into play this institute is looking for Science and Technology beyond the solar system it could be evidence of intelligence out there but it's a needle in a haystack kind of situation luckily new instruments are helping the search artificial intelligence can both handle

massive data sets and spot anomalies which is transforming the hunt for alien intelligence seti together with other research organizations built an AI powered Software System called the very large array it consists of 28 large dish antennas spread across a desert plane when it starts working the AI will be able to process 2 terab of data every second for comparison modern laptops typically have around 1 tbte of total storage so hopefully these new tools will provide us with new groundbreaking discover discoveries at the edge of our solar system there's a cold and mysterious region known as

the ort Cloud it's a hypothetical vast area of icy space objects surrounding the sun it's believed to lie far far away from our Star from 2,000 to 5,000 astronomical units for comparison Pluto's orbit carries the planet between 30 and 50 astronomical units from from the Sun and there in this freezing emptiness a rogue Planet may be hiding right at the moment at least that's what new research has recently suggested rogue planets are called this way because they don't orbit around any Star they wander the Galaxy alone totally untethered without Stars they don't have days or

nights only Eternal Darkness Roga planets are usually kick it out of their planetary systems doomed to a solitary existence of circling the center of the Galaxy on their own of the thousands of planets scientists have detected outside of our solar system only a dozen or so are starless and cruising on their own at the same time there might be billions or even trillions of rogue planets wandering around our galaxy if these estimations are true it might mean that the Milky Way contains more free floating plants planets than Stars anyway in 1907 one astronomer started a

search for Planet X it's a hypothetical giant planet moving around the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune the scientist was convinced that this planet existed because he had observed some irregularities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune his idea led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930 but the dwarf planet was too small to have any serious gravitational impact on the orbit of neptuni let alone Uranus these days the Planet X theory is largely considered to be discredited but it hasn't stopped astronomers from searching for planets in the far reaches of our solar system and

shockingly a new study claims there might be one or even more out there but much much further away than predicted an international team of scientists has recently simulated the unstable Celestial mechanisms of the early solar system they've discovered that there's a possibility that a few planet-sized bodies might have come to rest in the ort Cloud you see about 4.5 billion years ago when the solar system was just forming it was a hectic and unsettled Place gravity sent debris from the cooling protoplanetary dust cloud hurtling around like Cosmic tennis balls from time to time large chunks

of this debris even Planet siiz ones were sent flying far enough to escape the Sun's gravity altogether such pieces of debris turned into rogue planets researchers have seen such space Wanderers in distant exoplanetary systems but according to them there's a 0.5% chance that one or more of those Wayward planets formed in the solar system and ended up in the OR Cloud after drifting away from the Sun at the same time it's slightly more likely that a rogue Neptune like planet was snagged by the Sun's gravity from another planetary system and then this planet came to

rest somewhere in the ort Cloud the chances that this scenario is true reach 7% if this turns out to be the case then a space body similar to Planet X might indeed be hiding out there on the outskirts of our solar system the only problem is that it would still be too far away to have any impact on Neptune's orbit in any case most researchers are convinced that the or cloud is made up of a collection of way smaller icy objects but given the distance to the ort cloud and its enormous size we may never

really figure out what is lurking out there can a planet be bigger than its parent star well if you mean a star like our son it's highly unlikely but what if it was a white dwarf the remnant of a star similar to ours that went out after shedding its outer layers and leaving behind nothing but the core this core is what we call a white dwarf usually it's around the size of our home planet if a star had a planet bigger than Earth before it extinguished it's possible that such a planet could survive all the

chaos in this case a planet that is bigger than its star might actually exist and we've even found planetary systems like this but there's one problem a white dwarf isn't a real star like our sun anymore doesn't produce energy just sits out there getting cooler and cooler so probably such systems don't count for comparison the sun is working non-stop it is fusing hydrogen into helium in its core it has been doing it for more than 4 billion years and is going to keep doing it for the next 7 or 8 billion years the sun is

10 times as wide as the largest planet in our solar system gas giant Jupiter and sadly you can't get a planet much larger than that if you start adding Mass to such a world it will get smaller not bigger so it seems you can find a Planet larger than the Sun but there are also dim red dwarf stars they're the smallest out there barely massive enough to maintain conin Fusion in their cores the tiniest stars that we know about have been discovered recently if astronomers conclusions are correct then both of them can hardly fuse hydrogen

into helium and it takes about 0.077 times the Sun's mass or 75 masses of Jupiter to be able to do that and still they're real stars just very tiny smaller than Jupiter one of them is only about the size of Saturn which must mean that stars can have planets bigger than they are right well theoretically when it comes to practice you can hardly find such planetary systems we found and observed quite a lot of exoplanets which are worlds orbiting other stars it seems that there are indeed loads of Trends out there in space different masses

sizes brightness and so on but the main Trend red dwarfs don't usually have gas giants orbiting them if they do have planets those are typically small rocky worlds more like Earth those are also called terrestrial planets for example a red dwarf called trapist 1 has seven earth-sized planets orbiting it but gas giants circling around red dwarfs are extremely rare hardly one in a 100 tiny stars can boast such a planet this number can be even smaller since the research has been done using candidate planets which haven't been confirmed yet plus the smallest stars are also

the dimmest it means they are extremely hard to detect and it's incredibly hard to figure out whether they have planets orbiting them and if they do whether these planets are gas giants or terrestrial worlds still it's possible that a system where the planet is larger than its parent star exists but the probability is statistically very low at the same time red dwarf stars are very numerous they're actually the most common kind of star in the galaxy making up around 70% of all stars and even though really tiny red dwarfs are relatively rare there still must

be millions or probably even billions of them in the galaxy and if there's even a small fraction of red Dwarfs with gas giants orbiting them it might still mean that a lot of such systems exist in total and some of them can have planets bigger than their host star what makes space so terrifying is its unpredictability even though 99.9 99% of the cosmos is a vacuum if you encounter something of substance the chances are high that it might easily end your life and still some things are scarier than others for example gamma ray bursts when

a Galaxy explodes it releases a powerful burst of gamma rays and those can completely annihilate any asteroid or planet in their path a gamma ray burst occurs in our home Milky Way galaxy once every 5 million years or so then there are vampire Stars scientifically they're known as ootype stars those are enormous blue giants attached to we smaller Stars which gradually get consumed by the gravitational pull of their huge neighbors but vampire Stars don't live long happy lives once a space vampire has consumed a smaller star it explodes into a supernova torn by its own

gravity black holes are both endlessly intriguing and terrifying they consume everything that comes too close and bend SpaceTime around them can they get any scarier definitely once we look at Rogue black holes one of them was discovered in 2016 this Rogue black hole is heavier than the Sun and is moving at a speed of more than 1,240 m/s this black hole could have broken away after the collisions of its home Galaxy with another one at the moment it's around 2 billion light years away from us now how about a mysterious space anomaly called the Great

attractor this area lies around 150 to 250 million light years away from our galaxy The Great attractor gravitational pull is so powerful that it can move entire galaxies toward itself making them collapse with one another but the scariest thing we still don't know what it is and whether our galaxy will end up in its clutches one day meteors might not sound particularly exciting or scary but they are some of the most realistic threats to our planet thousands of meteorites hit Earth every year luckily most of them are too small to cause any serious harm they

either burn in the planet's atmosphere or crash into the ocean our own Sun can be pretty scary too especially when it produces powerful bursts of energy solar flares they often go hand inand with Al Mass ejections those are giant bubbles of ionized gas that can accelerate to incredible speeds the most powerful volcanic eruptions pale in comparison to solar flares that release 10 million times more energy within a few minutes one solar flare can give out billions of tons of charged particles solar flares are also insanely hot with the temperatures reaching several million degrees F astronomers

believe that such bursts of solar radiation happen when the sun's magnetic field gets twisted in some regions at one moment all the pent up energy is released the star sends out light and particles mostly electrons and protons most solar flares last for minutes but some continue for hours a powerful solar storm can potentially cause a devastating Global blackout on Earth the next scary space phenomenon is the dark flow all Galaxy are supposed to be moving uniformly away from one another but there's one large group of clusters that seems to be moving at a speed of

600 m/s toward a small region of space between the constellation Centaurus and V there seems to be no apparent cause for this which is why this inexplicable phenomenon got its name the cosmos also presents many dangers for astronauts for example Extended space travel can apparently change human DNA according to scientists the stress from staying in space for too long might cause astronauts cells to rewrite their genetic code the worst thing is that such DNA changes are permanent