The Future of Humanity, Maybe
You know monkey has been able to control a computer with its brain. Just yeah, so your brain is composed of neurons. Neurons connect together and form a network that can talk to each other through synapses. They're the connection points between neurons and they communicate using chemical signals known as neurotransmitters. All of your senses, everything you experience in life, it's all just neurons firing electrical signals or otherwise known as action potentials.
When neuron spikes occur, these neurotransmitters are released. Information is then relayed across its synapses and eventually reaches another neuron. Now multiply this process by 100 billion and that's your brain in a nutshell. Electrodes are the way that Neuralink and other medical practices study your brain activity by placing these electrodes close to neurons. The action potentials that create electric fields inside your brain can be detected and transferred to a machine that records and measures the data. Neuralink plans to use this to its advantage.
Your brain has two main systems: your limbic system and your cortex. These two are in a relationship with each other. Your limbic system is responsible for your basic emotions, your survival instinct. Your cortex is responsible for your problem-solving skills, your critical thinking. It's where your consciousness exists. Neuralink is aiming to create a third layer to this. The implants will be a third wheel in this relationship but would increase our capabilities by multiple orders of magnitude.
They plan to increase the number of neurons that you can access regularly, that you can use to remember things or regain access to certain parts of your brain that may no longer be active. This is extremely useful for medical patients, some of which who had absolutely zero options up until Neuralink became a reality. The goal is to make this one of the most simple procedures there is, similar to people getting LASIK to improve their vision.
But why do we even need this in the first place? Well, in most cases it's a bandwidth issue. Now, many people hear this but don't exactly understand what that means. It's a speed problem. It's an energy problem. It's how fast you can get information into or out of your brain. If you have something that you want to write down on a computer, you have to type it with your hands or speak it into a microphone. That's probably going to mess it up.
If you want to learn something, it could take days, weeks, months, or even years to fully grasp. If we were able to solve this bandwidth issue, we could accomplish exponentially more in less time with much less physical effort. Neuralink cuts out the middleman and allows input and output directly from your brain to whatever you're doing on a machine or vice versa.
It's like going from writing using a quill to having a pencil to having a keyboard to having Siri to now potentially having nothing but the power of your own brain. This is where brain-machine interfaces come in and they change everything. A brain-machine interface, or BMI, is composed of two things: a brain and a machine. The machine could be anything—a phone, a computer, a bionic arm—anything that provides you with sensor inputs from the outside world or an external source.
These inputs are then returned back into your brain where you can process them. But you need something artificial in your head to return this data to. Now, don't worry. It's not like putting a CPU inside your head; it's actually quite tiny. Each Neuralink N1 chip is roughly 4x4 mm with 1,000 electrodes each. It's feasible to fit up to 10 of these inside your head in different areas, all to measure and affect different parts of your brain.
But companies and neurosurgeons alike can't just go around throwing anything they want into someone's head. It's usually a lengthy process to getting these things approved by the FDA for medical purposes and later on public use. BMIs contain the potential to help people with a wide range of clinical disorders using just 256 electrodes, or about 2.5% of the number of electrodes Neuralink eventually plans to use.
Human patients have been able to control computer cursors, robotic limbs, and speech synthesizers. The full potential with nearly 40 times that amount of electrodes is hard to imagine. Currently, the best FDA-approved BMI is used for Parkinson's patients and it only has 10 electrodes. For Neuralink, this is just the beginning and it's already a thousand times better than what is currently approved.
In version one, each electrode is inserted into your head via tiny threads that are roughly 5 microm thick. They're around 10 times smaller than a human hair and contain 32 electrodes each. It's roughly the same size as a neuron, which is a good idea. There's a size limit for things that you want to stick in your head; something too large is inevitably going to cause problems. So the smaller, the better.
Neuralink actually made a robot that is used to insert these with extreme precision, which is pretty much mandatory. Humans couldn't do it if they wanted. If we want a better future for humanity, we have to be involved in building it and we can only do that by learning the skills of the future. Things like how algorithms and artificial intelligence work.
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Back to our story, this is a penny. It's pretty small, right? It's roughly the same size as the tip of my thumb. Now, zooming in extremely close, this right here is the needle that will be inserted into your skull. Placing it beside a penny, you actually couldn't see it as the robot inserts each thread one by one. At the end, there could eventually be up to 10,000 of these electrodes inside your head, each responsible for recording separate neurons, which can later on be analyzed.
But not only can they read data from your brain; they can also input data as well. It's a two-way street. It's sort of like being able to upload and download things from your brain. Brain implants aren't exactly new either, though they go as far back as the 1950s. Hearing implants are a good example. Neuralink just plans to take the baton and continue down the path, but in a different way.
Other BMIs approach the situation differently. For deep brain stimulation, the kind of implants that were used to assist Parkinson's patients that I mentioned before, they essentially used larger, stiff needles that were pretty much just shoved into the brain to affect neural activity, just as the electrodes from Neuralink will. It works well, but there's a pretty high probability that complications will occur over time: seizures, strokes, and even more. It may fix one issue, but it's probable that multiple other issues will show up.
See, your brain doesn't sit still inside your head; it moves around with you. Even if you think you're sitting still, your brain moves with each breath, each heartbeat. This is what can cause issues and is why a robot is needed for Neuralink's procedure to be successful. Neuralink is taking a different approach and it really isn't even a huge surgery. Your head isn't going to be completely peeled open for these chips to be inserted.
Each chip will be inserted into your head through a small incision of 8 mm at most, so less than a centimeter. You won't need stitches; you won't need any of that. It's hardly a surgery at all. By the way, those chips that are inserted are completely wireless, as you would probably hope. The craziest thing of all is that you won't need to go to a hospital or random place to hook yourself up to use this interface.
There's no USB port sticking out of your head. You won't need a caretaker or anyone to help you with the use of a single wireless battery-powered computer behind your ear. It will actually be able to connect you to your smartphone, effectively making your phone an official part of you. The options and potentials for this technology are limitless, and it's only going to improve over time.
Now, I don't want to overreach here and throw out ideas that are impossible, so I won't. But I will give some solid uses and some pretty cool ideas for Neuralink that can actually become a reality one day. This is my computer. Ironhide sent it to me a couple months back and it's great for everything I need to do. It has a 280 TI graphics card, an I9 processor, and 64 GB of RAM. I can edit much faster and more efficiently than I was able to before. I can play pretty much any game on ultra settings.
But in order to do these things, I need to use my hands. Well, duh! I need to use a mouse and a keyboard to get things done in the way I want or to move my character in games. But Neuralink may be able to change this. If a patient is able to control an arm with his or her mind, then it's not unfeasible to believe that one day you may be able to control characters in video games with your brain as well. Considering it's all Bluetooth, all wireless, it's not too much of a stretch to ask this.
Coupled with advancements in virtual reality, will cause video games and potentially even films to become almost fully immersive. Let's take an example of where Neuralink technology could be used in a pretty cool yet practical way. Let's say you're about to take a month-long trip to Tokyo. You're an American and, as most Americans, most of us only speak one language. We'll have no clue how to get around any city that doesn't have street signs or directions completely in English.
But luckily, Neuralink can help us out here. Imagine there's a Tokyo local who's lived there his entire life, looking at the action potentials of that particular person, studying their neuron spikes in a region of their brain called the hippocampus and in which order they occur. You can trace out a path throughout the entire city from when these spikes occur. Once this data is input into your brain, you'll be able to traverse the city like you've lived there your entire life.
Telepathy is no longer unrealistic! The electrode implants that detect neuro signals wirelessly transmit their data back to the small computer behind your ear. So the idea of transferring data back and forth between these devices is relatively simple to imagine. And because the electrodes can both read and write data, you could theoretically communicate back and forth between people who also have Neuralink implants.
Now, at the moment, the technology isn't exactly close to making this happen—maybe a word or two. But in theory, and with enough improvements, it is possible for high bandwidth communication between two people using nothing but their minds. It may be an aggressive approach as Elon tends to take, but you can see Neuralink implants in human patients by the end of this year. And once that happens, it's only up from there. Improvements will slowly be added and I can honestly see this becoming a big and common practice within the next couple of decades.
You always hear that there's new technology coming out that will change our lives, but I'm serious when I say this. If this is taken seriously and can work in the ways we're studying and planning on at the moment, I see this as an invention that is on the scale of the internet. It will change the world the way airplanes impacted travel, the way antibiotics impacted medicine. Computers and the internet threw us into a brand new digital age.
Phones and computers have become extensions of human beings. They can answer almost any question you could ask at a moment's notice. They've both been pivotal in connecting the entire planet. BMIs like the one Neuralink are creating are going to have a similar, and honestly even larger, effect than that as time goes on. As we enter a new decade, technology that we've passed off as unrealistic becomes more and more plausible. Things that we've written off as impossible end up being the same things that push society forward.
Airplanes, rockets, medicine—all things that used to be seen as wizardry or some voodoo magic are now things that we use every single day. As Neuralink progresses and gets better and better, its cultural impact will grow larger and larger. Kids being born today will grow up in a world vastly different than the one we're living in today. The same way that we're living through a time vastly different than the previous generations.
We will make mistakes along the way; the past shows that pretty well. However, humans overcome. We adapt and we move forward. If you think we're living in the peak of the digital age, you have no idea what's just around the corner. In 2013, Eric Loomis was pulled over by the police for driving a car that had been used in a shooting—a shooting, mind you, that he wasn't involved in at all.
After getting arrested and taken to court, he pleaded guilty to attempting to flee an officer and no contest to operating a vehicle without the owner's permission. His crimes didn't mandate prison time, yet he was given an 11-year sentence with six of those years to be served behind bars and the remaining five under extended supervision. Not because of the decision of a judge or jury of his peers, but because an algorithm said so.
The judge in charge of Mr. Loomis's case determined that he had a high risk of recidivism through the use of the Correctional Officer Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions Risk Assessment Algorithm, or COMPAS. Without questioning the decision of the algorithm, Loomis was denied probation and incarcerated for a crime that usually wouldn't carry any time at all. What has society become if we can leave the fate of a person's life in the hands of an algorithm? When we take the recommendation of a machine as truth, even when it seems so unreasonable and inhumane?
Even more disturbing is the fact that the general public doesn't know how COMPAS works. The engineers behind it have refused to disclose how it makes recommendations and are not obliged to by any existing law, yet we're all supposed to blindly trust and adhere to everything it says. Reading about this story, a few important questions come to mind: How much do algorithms control our lives? And ultimately, can we trust them?
It's been roughly 10 years since Eric Loomis's sentencing, and algorithms now have a far greater penetration into our daily life. From the time you wake up to the time you go to bed, you're constantly interacting with tens, maybe even hundreds, of algorithms. Let's say you wake up, tap open your screen, and do a quick search for a place near you to eat breakfast. In this one act, you're triggering Google's complex algorithm that matches your keywords to websites and blog posts to show you answers that are most relevant to you.
When you click on a website, an algorithm is used to serve you ads on the side of the page. Those ads might be products you've searched for before, stores near your location, or even something you've only spoken to someone about. You then try to message a friend to join you for your meal. When you open any social media app, today your feed no longer simply displays the most recent posts by people you follow.
Instead, what you see can be best described by TikTok's "For You" page. Complex mathematical equations behind the scenes decide what posts are most relevant to you based on your view history on the platform. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and most notoriously TikTok all use these recommendation systems to get you to interact with the content that their machine thinks is right for you.
And it's not just social media. Netflix emails you recommendations of movies to watch based on what you've already seen. Amazon suggests products based on what you previously bought, and probably the most sinister of all, Tinder recommends you the person you're supposed to spend the rest of your life with, or at least that night. These might seem like trivial matters, but it's more than that.
Algorithms are also used to determine who needs more healthcare and when. You have your day in court and a computer program decides whether you'd spend the next decade of your life behind bars for a crime that usually doesn't carry any time. One of the most dangerous things about algorithms is the data that is used to power them, because the more data you feed into an algorithm, the better its results.
And where do companies get this data? It is from their users, like you and me. Most of the time, giving out this information is harmless, but a lot of times these companies sell your information to data brokers, who then sell that data to other companies that want to sell you stuff. That's why you keep getting targeted ads from random companies you've never heard of before.
And what's worse is that these data brokers are often targeted by nefarious actors who steal all the information they have in data breaches. I'm not saying that all algorithms are bad and we should get rid of them. An algorithm is probably the reason you're watching this video in the first place. I'm saying we as a society need to make some changes to the way we currently interact and use these systems.
One of the scariest things about algorithms is that they're built and altered in a black box with little oversight. The engineers behind them determine what we see and don't see. They classify, sort, and rank, and we don't get to know how or why. Even the government doesn't get to know how and why, and if they did, would they understand it? The engineers themselves often don't know why an algorithm behaves the way it does.
They use AI and machine learning, which can make the outcomes become hard to predict. They become a mystery to makers as well. When companies like Google or Facebook are challenged about their platforms after something terrible happens, they hide behind the mythos of the algorithm. They're unbiased systems. They suggest they're rational; to err is human, not machine, they claim.
This is the notion of algorithms that is potentially dangerous. We think of them as pillars of objectivity, incapable of the kind of biases that corrupt human society. But are they genuinely unbiased? Are they pure instruments of rationality? As much as big tech companies would like you to believe they are, the sad truth is they are not.
When the engineers choose to classify and sort, they're using pre-existing classifications which are filled with bias already. And their methods of sorting enforce biases that can have real negative consequences. In 2019, an algorithm was used on more than 200 million patients in US hospitals to determine who would need more care. Although race wasn't included in the criteria, Black patients were discriminated against by the machine anyway.
They were determined to require less care than white patients. How did this happen if race wasn't even an input, you might ask? Well, while race directly wasn't in the equation, previous healthcare expenses were a determining factor in deciding whether someone would need more care. And because Black patients have historically spent less on healthcare, the results were that they required less care—an incorrect blanket conclusion for situations that should be case-by-case evaluations. Although the racial bias was unintended, it still occurred as a result of the engineer designs.
It's because of issues like these that we can't hide behind the myth of the infallible machine. Biases like these will exist in machines as long as humans are the ones building them. And there is one bias that exists in almost every algorithm we use today, with far more reaching consequences. Meta, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Tinder—most tech companies and the platforms they offer you and me as services design their algorithms to maximize one thing and one thing alone: profit.
These platforms generate revenue by primarily selling ads, and to generate more ad revenue, they try to keep you on their platforms longer. Because the longer you're there, the more ads you'll see and the more money they make. Take YouTube for example: there are three main things that make any video successful on the platform—click-through rate, watch time, and session time.
So all YouTube cares about is: can you get people to start watching your video, and can you keep them watching for as long as possible so we can serve them more ads? For the most part, this works as it's supposed to and people get served content they enjoy but would have never found on their own. As with everything in life though, there are downsides. People have learned to game the system by using clickbait to lure viewers in and then to push conspiracy theories that keep people glued to their screens, whether the information is factual or not.
YouTube's algorithm has also been accused of having a radicalizing effect on its viewers. Moderate content always leads to recommendations of more extreme content, which leads people down the notorious rabbit hole. You can start by watching videos about jogging, and YouTube would continue to recommend you videos that push you further—slightly—until one day you wake up and you're watching videos about running an ultramarathon.
Facebook's algorithm shows you more content from friends whose posts you've liked or read in the past. This process slowly funnels you into a bubble where you're mostly reading the same opinions you already have, reinforcing them in your mind. The goal of this approach is, of course, to keep you on the platform longer with views you agree with.
The consequence though is that many harmful beliefs are cemented into the heads of users on the platform instead of being challenged. The more you think about the algorithms of social media, the more they start to seem like programs for creating social problems for the sake of profit. So if that's the case, are all algorithms just evil piles of code that are determined to doom us all? Maybe, but maybe not.
They do have extraordinary benefits to offer when used correctly. A data set of 678 nuns from the Nun Study, a research project started in 1986 on the development of dementia and Alzheimer's, showed something very peculiar. Researchers tried to find if they could spot any patterns in the data to suggest a relationship between something in a person's early life and the onset of these diseases later in life, but to no avail.
The team also had success with the letters that the nuns wrote decades prior when they were entering into the sisterhood around ages 19 and 20. An algorithm was able to detect with incredible accuracy, through these letters, which nuns would go on to have dementia in their elderly years. This is what algorithms are great at—comparing data sets and figuring out tiny patterns that humans are more likely to miss. They're sensitive to variations in data and finding patterns that lead to reliable predictions of possible outcomes.
Today, algorithms are used in detecting the likelihood of getting breast cancer and presenting better models for tackling climate change. Except the machine isn't great on its own; every potential positive here only works with a human behind it. Algorithms can act as the first layer for screening breast cancers, but a human has to act as that necessary second layer to verify the results. Using an algorithm for determining an appropriate jail sentence might one day make sense only if there's a human deciding whether or not the generated output is sensible.
One of the main problems with Eric Loomis’s case is that the judge didn't question the algorithm's recommendation; he simply accepted the supposed objectivity of the machine and sent a man to prison for a crime that didn't warrant it. As it stands now, we just seem to be part of this enormous social experiment being run by tech gurus. And every year or so, another social experiment is added to the mix with its own unique set of social consequences.
More recently, we're discovering what a rapid stream of bite-sized videos does to teenagers or what a completely user-generated game does to twins. So far, this video has been pretty hard on the big tech companies, but I think it's also really important to acknowledge that they are trying to address some of these issues with algorithms. YouTube, for example, has changed its algorithm to include quality and authority as measures of determining whether a video is recommended or not. Facebook has limited its targeting options to try and avoid another Cambridge Analytica scandal, where user data was distributed without consent for political purposes.
Are these adjustments to the algorithm helping? Yes, but not as much as necessary. Even more is the fact that these efforts point to two things: one is that human intervention in algorithms is not only necessary but needs a much stronger presence; two is that tinkering with the algorithm is probably not going to resolve the consequences of their most significant bias—profit-seeking. Keeping people on a platform is always going to be easier with content that sparks the most outrage.
That's not always the case, of course. There is great content on YouTube in earnest—viewers like you watching this video right now. But for every creator seeking to share legitimate information, there seems to be several others blatantly exploiting the algorithm for a quick buck. How can we take these platforms back from them?
The sad truth is we can't. The algorithms need to change. They need to put human welfare above profits. We need to stop designing machines that take advantage of our psychological weaknesses. To make that world possible, we need to be more critical of the algorithm. We need to dismantle the notion that the algorithm is all-knowing, objective, and rational. The black boxes need to open up, and our blind trust in these systems needs to be challenged at every turn.
To paraphrase the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris, we're all looking out for the moment when technology would overpower human strength and intelligence. But there's a much earlier moment when technology overwhelms human weaknesses. That point is being crossed right now, and it's reducing our attention spans, ruining our relationships, destroying our communities. It's downgrading humans.
In some of the most popular films, writers will often use a point of no return to force their main character into action. It's a point in the story where the protagonist can't return to their former life without going through trials that bring into question who they are and what they're capable of. It's a great device for driving a narrative to a satisfying conclusion. But is humanity ready for its point of no return?
For an individual, it's a challenge to overcome so that they can return to their daily lives. But for humankind, it's a new, more dangerous world, and there is no going back to the way things were. Once we cross that threshold, our point of no return is a major climate tipping point. If we don't significantly curb our greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, we won't be able to prevent a 2° Celsius rise in global temperatures.
And that might not sound so terrible at first glance, but that increase will create far-reaching disasters that we're not prepared for. We will be entering a more dangerous world that threatens the majority of life on Earth. It's a world with deadly heat waves, massive flooding along coastlines, and extreme storms. Entire ecosystems will be lost; countless species will go extinct. It's the point where our daily life is disrupted so often that government bodies won't be able to keep up and society as we know it may start to collapse.
The question most of us keep shouting into the ether is: why can't we stop catastrophe? With all the technological advances we've made in climate research at our disposal, why are we driving life on Earth to a mass extinction? The answer is complicated, but there are a few obvious culprits. The influence of the oil and gas industry is staggering. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has spread misinformation or intentionally guided us to unrealistic climate solutions.
Governments have been too vulnerable to lobbyists to tackle climate change in any serious way. And, of course, working against us is the basic fact that such a large-scale change requires a level of cooperation among nations that hasn't existed to date. And then there's greenwashing. To boost their corporate image, companies will advertise how environmentally friendly they are while their actual efforts do little to impact our climate goals.
2035 is the point of no return, but why? The specific date is somewhat arbitrary; it's a deadline chosen based on climate data and findings intended to provoke immediate action. The idea is that we need to reduce global emissions by 60% by that date to avoid a 2° rise in temperature and the catastrophic consequences that will unfold as a result. By 2030, we need a 43% reduction while also lowering methane emissions by 1/3. It's all a part of a greater goal to reach net zero by 2050. This would lead us to a 1.5° increase in temperature globally.
These assessments aren't guaranteed. However, climate scientists are dealing with probabilities and it's still very possible that the current plan for reducing emissions could result in a higher-than-expected increase in temperature. Earth is complex; it's composed of many different systems that are beyond our ability to fully predict. All we can do is make informed estimations, which is all the more reason to take action as urgently as possible.
The consequences of doing nothing or not enough will impact you and everyone you know. They will be fatal for many and disastrous for others. The most direct impact to humanity is an increase in temperatures leading to a rapid rise in heat-related deaths. Entire regions will soon become incapable of supporting human life for long stretches. Even the exposure to prolonged heat can have a negative effect on people.
Car crashes rise while test scores lower. We sleep worse and chronic conditions are exacerbated. Pregnant women are more likely to have stillbirths and violence increases in all its manifestations. Coastal areas will increasingly become flooded by storm surge and sea levels will rise as many of the world's largest cities are completely submerged by ocean water. 37% of the world's population lives within 62 miles of a coast. In the United States alone, the lives of 3 million people will be disrupted on a monthly basis by flooding—whether that's their homes or power facilities.
Rising tides will make life increasingly unbearable along the coast. The total cost from climate change in general is estimated to be $38 trillion a year by halfway through the century, if not enough is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The more obvious impacts of climate change will also have cascading effects. We will soon lose entire ecosystems, starting with Arctic and mountain zones.
These systems fall apart when one source of food is disrupted. In the Arctic, melting sea ice will cause a decline in the abundance of algae. Zooplankton feed off of this plant, and their population will drop as a consequence. This impact will continue down the food chain to cod, seals, and polar bears. Our species is also very vulnerable to a rise in global temperatures. Droughts are already causing problems for our global food supply, which will only get worse without intervention.
Food shortages will often lead to frustration and large-scale human migration. As these disruptions continue, political instability rises when billions are displaced and food is scarce. Society begins to crumble. This is where the world starts to become apocalyptic in nature. You're probably familiar with the Gulf Stream; it's a strong ocean current that delivers warm water from the Gulf of Mexico past the eastern regions of North America and spreads all the way to western Europe.
The Gulf Stream keeps much of the southeastern United States warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. It's also what makes England warmer than regions of a similar distance to the equator as colder areas in Canada. As Greenland's ice caps continue to melt, the resulting massive influx of fresh water will weaken the Gulf Stream until it eventually collapses. The consequences of this disruption are hard to fathom. Sea levels would rise quickly in North America; temperatures would drop in Europe; rainfall that billions of people depend on for growing food would be diminished, and storms would increase in frequency.
If climate emissions aren't dramatically cut, a controversial 2023 study published in Nature Communications outlined how the Gulf Stream could collapse by 2095. Perhaps the biggest challenges with climate change aren't the predictable outcomes, but the unforeseen consequences. Earth is composed of complicated and interconnected systems, and as we disrupt any one of them, we cause a change in many others. The Gulf Stream collapse, for example, could intensify El Niño in the southern hemisphere.
This is the world's most powerful weather pattern. Its heat will grow with even greater intensity, and thunderstorms will occur with more frequency. There's an unfathomable amount of potential consequences that could devastate life on Earth. So why exactly are we doing so little to prevent global disaster? There's a lot of money invested in spewing carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Scientists working for ExxonMobil, a $500 billion company synonymous with fossil fuels, eerily predicted global warming in the late 1970s.
The entire fossil fuel industry has taken many approaches to prevent industry intervention by government bodies. Oil and gas companies put a lot of money into discrediting climate change, from buying news coverage to intensely lobbying politicians. Global warming became a partisan issue, with right-leaning parties siding with big oil and center-left parties acknowledging the problem while doing little to help the cause. So far few governments have been willing to upset those who profit from emissions.
But the reality of climate change has become undeniable. As forest fires rage out of control—once a seasonal event, especially in North and South America—last year alone Canada lost over 44 million acres to flames. Fossil fuel companies have adapted to the new reality of the climate catastrophe by changing their strategy. Instead of outright denial, the oil and gas sector is emphasizing carbon capture technology rather than cutting oil and gas production.
Nations around the world simply pull carbon emissions out of the atmosphere. The glaring problem is that even a robust rollout of this technology, working as envisioned, would only scratch the surface of our emissions output. The vast majority of carbon capture projects have failed to get off the ground, despite governments approving $20 billion of public funding and $200 billion earmarked for the future. To power the capture facilities needed to limit climate change to 1.5° to 2° Celsius, we would need 26,000 terawatt hours of electricity generation, which is more than the global electricity demand in 2022.
The investment needed in the required rollout of technology is currently not even remotely feasible. And even worse, three-quarters of the current capture projects insert the carbon back into the ground to improve oil and gas recovery in oil fields. They're essentially just another way of extracting more fossil fuels. These projects also pose a great risk to the people living around them. Leaks not only harm anyone in the area but also release a highly concentrated quantity of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. And so far there are plenty of examples of leaks occurring.
In one case, the Sleipner carbon storage site in Norway leaked captured carbon into a geological layer, raising concerns over how that could impact the region. These carbon capture projects are also used by some governments to justify the expansion of fossil fuel extraction. The emissions that are taken out of the atmosphere just inspire more oil and gas production. Carbon capture is a pipe dream. While this technology might play some role in the fight against climate change, positioning it as a primary strategy will be disastrous.
Programs like carbon offsetting also have similar issues. They justify the use of fossil fuels by asking people to offset their emissions with a donation. These contributions supposedly support climate-friendly projects; however, these initiatives rarely offset the equivalent amount of carbon emissions and often do nothing. Developers who receive incentives from these programs can generate carbon credits without making any changes at all.
If they cut down less trees than expected, they can be awarded more carbon credits. But these developers often just cut down less trees anyway if it suits a particular project. They just have to do better than a very low standard—it's what some would call a racket. This isn't to suggest that all of these projects are unhelpful, but that most of these carbon credit systems don't help prevent climate change in any significant way. The truth is, you can't offset your emissions so easily; they need to be reduced.
But is humanity up to honestly fighting climate change? A lot of data cited in this video has come from climate scientists where it is relevant. In a recent survey, leading climate scientists expressed doubt about our ability to prevent global temperatures from rising to catastrophic levels. Many believed we have a semi-dystopian future ahead filled with mass migration, famine, war, wildfires, and other disasters.
We still have a path forward to mitigate emissions and rising global temperature. The two largest sectors contributing to global emissions are electricity production and transportation. We already have potential solutions for these sources of pollution. Renewable energy is not only readily available, but has been getting cheaper quickly and spreading fast. Wind, solar, and hydro power generation are a reality now.
The transition to renewable energy will also help reduce the emissions from another evolving innovation in transportation: electric cars. While EVs aren't a perfect solution for fighting climate change, they could reduce our overall carbon output substantially. An electric vehicle powered by a clean grid is responsible for 13 tons of CO2 emissions over its lifetime. By comparison, a gas-powered vehicle contributes 80 tons of CO2.
The emissions involved in EV production are bound to decrease over time as battery technology improves. To reach our net zero goal, we are actually ahead of targets when it comes to solar energy and closing in on the battery production required for EVs and stationary battery usage. Wind energy and heat pumps are lagging behind, but overall we are making progress.
If we manage to cut our emissions early, we buy more time to reduce our overall emissions, and that's time we desperately need. So how long before all this becomes a reality? How long before interplanetary travel is an everyday affair? Well, as you can imagine, that's a complicated question. It is rocket science, after all.
On May 30th, 2020, SpaceX launched its first crewed mission to the International Space Station. It was the first crewed mission with American crew from American soil in an American spacecraft in a very, very long time. And while the contents of the mission weren't anything new—carrying cargo and crew to the ISS—what made this launch so special was that it was the first commercial flight to have done so. And all this took place in one of the most trying times humanity has faced in recent history, with protests all across America and a health crisis that has crippled the entire world.
Like never before seen, the launch still went through, and that means something. And the launch, well, it didn't just go on; it was the most widely watched online NASA event in history. While its total viewership still pales in comparison to that of the Apollo 11 launch, where nearly one-sixth of the entire world tuned in, something tells me that we're about to break that record sooner rather than later.
As I just mentioned, SpaceX was the first to commercially do all of this. But what does this mean, and why is that important? Well, it means that NASA is essentially outsourcing the job of innovating and building the rocket to other companies—companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, and so on. They all bid for an opportunity to build and NASA pays whoever has the best ideas through a contract.
In doing so, NASA is taking a lot of the weight off of its underfunded shoulders and is using the powers of the free market to its benefit. Companies competing to see who can innovate better, who can create rockets that are faster, more efficient, and cheaper is a very important first step to create and maintain a significant presence in low Earth orbit.
And that's where the logistics of space travel changed significantly: low Earth orbit. A popular saying goes that getting to Earth's orbit is halfway to anywhere in the universe. You see, gravity can sometimes be benign. After all, we spend our lives getting used to its effects and sometimes just forget it's there. But when you're dealing with potentially millions of pounds of stuff that needs to be propelled upwards, we have a problem.
As soon as we escape gravity, however, things change drastically. There is quite literally nothing—nothing to drag you down or up or anywhere for that matter. Just the slightest of pushes can propel you endlessly through the vastness of space. To give you a sense of the impact gravity has on space travel, during the Apollo 11 mission, reaching Earth's orbit took nearly 27 times the propellant compared to the rest of the journey, including re-entry into Earth.
Earth's gravity is an endearing force, and in this case, a costly one. The simplest way to get around this problem is to have an outpost in low Earth orbit, or somewhere else—an interplanetary pit stop, if you will—where scientists will work, stock up on supplies, and refuel before they embark on their deep space adventures. The International Space Station, humanity's most prominent low Earth orbit presence at the moment, may help us stock up on food and similar supplies, but when it comes to fuel, things get complicated.
We'll have to look a bit further—380,000 km to be exact. It's a journey we've already made. You see, the moon potentially has everything we need to make propellant: oxygen and hydrogen. And I say "potentially" because scientists are still not sure about the availability and accessibility of water on the moon. But they do know that lunar dust contains oxygen, which accounts for most of the weight of the propellant anyway. All this means that the moon can become the perfect fuel depot for humans before they head out to further planets such as Mars.
Given launches from the moon only have to fight one-sixth of Earth's gravity, this crucial step has seen promising progress in the last few years, with numerous companies already looking into technologies that can help astronauts mine the lunar surface. Also on the cards is a lunar space station intended to get scientists more used to deeper space travel before they head off to further planets—now known as the Lunar Gateway. This project is part of NASA's Artemis program.
The missions are said to have a man and woman back on the surface of the moon by 2024. Understandably, it's an optimistic deadline; NASA is used to that. Who knows, maybe with the push of commercialization we may get there sooner than we think. Fuel has also seen a few breakthroughs in recent decades, the most notable of which is ion propulsion. Instead of using chemical propellants, these systems propel ions—charged particles using electromagnets.
Add to that the lack of drag in space, and all you need is Newton's third law to push you into the vastness. There's a catch though; this ion propulsion, while significantly more efficient than traditional propulsion, provides only minute levels of thrust. The force it'll be pushing the spacecraft with is equivalent to the force a piece of paper exerts on your hand. It's an extremely small force. Keep that up for days, weeks, or months and it adds up so much that it can possibly reach speeds of up to 200,000 mph—nearly six times of what is traditionally possible. But the gist of the force means ion propulsion is not suited for reaching low Earth orbits against the forces of gravity. Rather, it's only useful in zero or microgravity situations.
I personally think future propulsion systems will be a hybrid of both liquid propulsion and ion propulsion. But what about time? You see, the Earth is about 200 times further from Mars than it is from the moon. That's two orders of magnitude. Using currently existing technology, and even with some significant advances such as ion propulsion, a journey like this will take a few months at least. It's really hard to internalize just how large the distances we're dealing with are.
For example, in the time that you've watched this video so far, Voyager 1, the furthest man-made object, has traveled over 4,000 miles. It's currently traveling at an incredible speed of nearly 38,000 mph, but even at that speed, it took nearly 35 years to travel through the solar system. The resupply outpost could potentially solve some of the problems, allowing missions to carry larger payloads than before, but even then the duration can have mental implications.
Long periods of isolation—as all of us have probably experienced by now—can lead to a loss of motivation and affect our ability to work, which is a problem when you spend millions of dollars training astronauts. Coupled that with the idea that food is running out and homesickness unlike any man has ever experienced before and you have mental walls crushing you from both sides. One way to solve this issue might be to not have the astronauts be awake for most of the flight in the first place.
Yes, the key to solving this problem might be hibernation. This field has seen increased attention in the past few years, mainly due to space flight. You see, most of the food we eat is used up just to maintain our body temperature. By lowering this temperature, we can potentially cut down on caloric intake by 50%, if not more—essentially doubling the food supplies. It could also be a way to prevent muscle atrophy in space that astronauts have always suffered from. For longer flights such as those being planned to Mars, this becomes an even bigger issue, and hibernation may be the only way to counteract it.
Hibernation research is still in its infancy and the most remarkable results are still in animals like squirrels and bears. But scientists believe there aren't any biological bottlenecks as to why we shouldn't be able to accomplish hibernation in the future. The state of hibernation we're interested in is currently prevented by our bodies through shivering. If we're able to safely turn that reaction off, scientists believe hibernation could be used in short chunks to prolong supplies and preserve the mental well-being of the crew.
In man's greatest adventures, we're still in the dark about a lot of the effects that long-term space travel has on the human body, and missions such as Artemis can help answer them. But we can go a step further. Neuralink could be another part of the space puzzle, albeit one of the less obvious ones. In its primary stages, Neuralink intends to help patients with diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. However, the goal is also to augment us humans using the power of AI. Within a few decades and some exponential growth, we could have the ability to upload our consciousness to a computer. We could then essentially explore other planets with the dynamic intelligence of a human being but without the physical presence of one.
Of course, space flight with AI may not be manned in the traditional sense, but it gives the opportunity to test the waters. There are other reasons why artificial intelligence is important in the next generation of manned space flight as well. There are two factors that are very new to modern space flight: commercialization, which we've already talked about, is one of them. But the other one is AI. We've never had it before.
Apollo 11 famously had a guidance computer with capabilities that would pale even against the oldest iPhone. To have the power of AI in such situations could radically change what we're able to achieve in the future. In addition, beyond a distance of about 300,000 km, even at light speed, information is going to take more than a second to reach. And for larger distances, this is only going to increase. Given that flight functions such as fuel burning have to be precisely timed and flawlessly executed to reach destinations in deeper space, even a momentary lag can be catastrophic.
The presence of AI can really help astronauts when there is no Houston to call on. AI can also play a crucial role in asteroid mining as well, but unlike the planets or the moon, we know very little about specific asteroids. Landing on their uneven surfaces becomes a task no astronaut has any prior experience in. AI can help learn the landing surface in real-time and allow for a safe landing. But it's one thing to do things safely; it's another to convince the public about it.
You are, after all, much more likely to die by choking on your own food while eating rather than in a plane. But I'll let you guess which activity makes people more anxious. That skewed incorrect perception of how unsafe something is could be our greatest defense mechanism. It might as well be the fear of consequence that has made planes the safest mode of transportation. It's also this fear that has allowed nuclear power generation to lead to fewer casualties than solar power. Space flight will likely follow a similar path to safety.
But then again, how safe does it need to be? After all, if the extinction of the human race is what should drive our space endeavors, it only needs to be safer than the likelihood of extinction, right? Spaceflight fatalities currently have a likelihood of around 3%. In 2018, the likelihood of total human obliteration was 1%, which is kind of an incredibly high number. If the number doesn't go down orders of magnitude, is space flight going to become a safer risk than the alternative of complete destruction? Public perception plays a crucial role in this aspect of space flight.
At the end of the day, that is what determines how well-funded the efforts are and how quickly and safely these goals are achieved. Accidents slow down the progress of space flight remarkably and destroy public support. But the fact that the recent launches took place against a backdrop of global anxiety perhaps goes to show that space flight still retains excitement to unite us all. It has a unique ability to captivate anyone and everyone by satisfying the carnal desires of flight and exploration.
Even if it isn't us inside the cockpit, it's quite literally an escape from our worldly problems. During the course of my research for this video, I was just surprised how sporadic the progress of space flight has been, just based on the content of certain articles and their predictions. It's really quite hard to tell whether they were written 10 days ago in response to the SpaceX hype or 10 years ago.
However, if you read an article about wireless charging or bezel-less displays, you can immediately tell which generation of cell phones the article is talking about. Such indistinguishable progress just goes to show how stagnated space exploration has been lately and how the public hasn't really cared enough to stay in the loop. The Saturn V, the rocket that took man to the moon, is at the time of writing still the most powerful operational rocket in the world, and it's been almost 50 years since its final flight.
You could look at this in two ways: one, our space flight has been disappointingly slow, or two, the Saturn V was so good and ahead of its time that nothing else has come close since. I think it's a little bit of both. And I know I always do this—the fact that the Saturn V still sits on that throne is a testament of what humanity can achieve when it's truly inspired. And while that lack of achievement in recent times can be really demoralizing, it also makes for a future worth looking forward to—one to be excited about.
And I think that's what Elon Musk has in mind when he talks about colonizing Mars. The reality is we know very little about Mars, and at the end of the day, it may not be able to sustain life after all. But the drive to get there, the pursuit of such lofty goals, it's technological indulgence of the highest order. The prospect of seeing another rocket tearing through the sky, well, it has the ability to inspire generations once again—to give us a reason to be excited, excited about tomorrow, excited about the future, or excited to simply be alive.
But even if we end up doing none of this, even if we achieve none of the things we set out to achieve, even if we fail launch after launch and make error after error, of course, I still love you. 4.18. This number is the reason that you're alive right now. Under normal conditions, that's how many joules of energy you need to raise the temperature of a gram of water by 1° C, also known as the specific heat capacity of water.
This value, this property of water, it's special. You see, if this value were any different, life as we know it would not exist. If it were higher, more energy would be needed to raise the temperature of water. The amount of water that evaporates into the atmosphere would reduce, and that means so would rainfall. This also means that there would be a greater difference between the temperature of air near land and the air near water. The resulting changes in pressure would lead to changes in wind speed. Temperatures would significantly drop and species would slowly go extinct.
On the other hand, if the heat capacity were lower than it is now, water would evaporate much quicker and it would no longer be able to regulate the temperature of the Earth as it does now. It would rain all the time, crops would die, and again, species would slowly go extinct. 4.18, it seems, is just the right amount of energy. This just-rightness is seen in other aspects of life on Earth too, including where it sits in the solar system.
Too close to the sun and the water would just boil away before it could form. Too far and it would just freeze. But all these properties are in some way, shape, or form related to water, and so it's no wonder then that the search for life anywhere in space is essentially a search for water. And we found it—lots of it, actually. You see, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and oxygen is the third most abundant.
In between them is helium, which doesn't really react with much. So when the conditions are appropriate, water can be formed. Given the scale of it all and how old the universe is, you'd imagine that there must be some planets in an Earth-like distance from their respective stars to allow for the formation of liquid water and by extension, life. Dr. Frank Drake attempted to answer this very question in 1961 using the Drake equation. He used factors like the average rate of star formation, how many of those stars could have planets, how many of those planets might develop intelligent life forms that could possibly communicate, and so on.
Instead of the entire universe, Drake focused only on our galaxy, which is huge, and for practical limitations of speed and time, really the only thing we should worry about anyway. Understandably, these inputs are all assumptions, and as such, the output of this equation is also an assumption. Depending on who and when you ask, the result of the Drake equation could be anything from a small number that is barely greater than zero to a number in the tens of millions.
Our intuition tells us that if that number were somewhere in between that immense range, the Milky Way should be beaming with advanced civilizations making interplanetary journeys with regularity. Just our galaxy, one of the trillions out there, is so incredibly large that even with astronomically low odds, you would expect to find at least some other civilizations. To give you a sense of how large it is, modern humans have been around for nearly 200,000 years and in that time, time late at its incredible speed has traveled the complete width of the Milky Way only twice.
Okay, so let's run through this. The Milky Way has a lot of stars and a lot of those stars have a lot of planets and a lot of those planets should have a lot of water. And a lot of those planets have been around a lot longer than Earth, so therefore they should have a head start compared to Earth. So that must mean that there are civilizations a lot more advanced than ours. We should have all the tools they need to communicate with us. If that's the case, there's just one problem: where is everybody?
That's the question Fermi asked in 1950, using a similar line of reasoning that I just talked about. Fermi was confused as to why we hadn't already come in contact with aliens considering how abundant they should have been. Known more popularly as the Fermi Paradox, this question draws attention to the discrepancy between the supposed high likelihood of civilizations out there and the lack of observational evidence to prove their existence. To this day, 70 years after Fermi’s equation, even with the scientific advancements we've made, we are yet to receive any signals from any civilization other than our own.
So really, where is everybody? Nearly 50 years after Fermi asked his famous question, an economist named Robin Hanson figured that just as humanity had done in the past, we may have just been asking the wrong question all along. He felt that instead of sticking to the assumption that the universe should be filled with life forms like our own, we should accept what the evidence is telling us: that life is exceedingly rare and that Earth is the only planet we know that has it.
And that we should use that information to understand why we're here and how long we might have. Well, if that's the case, Hanson argued, then there must be something wrong with the typical steps of reasoning that lead to the incorrect perception of life's abundance. Either one or more of these steps are wrong or one or more of these steps are so incredibly improbable that life elsewhere is practically impossible. And thus, the idea of the Great Filter was born: a hindrance that is so immense in its complexity and improbability that we are quite literally the only species to ever get past it.
It's perfectly possible that the Great Filter was whatever initiated abiogenesis, the creation of life from non-living simple organic compounds. After all, it's a process that runs counter to the laws of thermodynamics in that it involves molecules to spontaneously arrange themselves in an ordered and life-giving manner. It would be like a cold cup of water just naturally going hot, which, by the way, is physically possible—only unimaginably unlikely. Things like that just don't happen. Hot things cool down and things tend towards disorder.
So life never really should have formed. The Great Filter could also be the formation of complex cell organisms, or it could be the first proper replication of DNA that allowed for just enough mutation that would eventually sow the seeds for evolution. Or it could be the collision of Earth with a protoplanet named Theia that led to the creation of the moon and with it a reliable axis and a stable climate for life to flourish. It could be a lot of things really. I don't know.
Regardless, if we were to assume that the Great Filter was indeed in our past, it would explain why we are the only ones remaining and why the rest of the universe seems so utterly dead. But it would also say that we have done it! We've made it past the Great Filter! Everyone gets a pat on the back and that's really it. But what if the Great Filter is ahead of us? What if the universe was indeed beaming with life just as we expected it to, but something simply kept filtering or killing civilizations one after another, which is why no one has really reached out to us? And more importantly, what if we're next?
Given the general lack of evidence regarding other planets and why they don't have life, a filter in the future could be just as likely as one in the past, if not more likely. So what are some of the possible filters that could wipe out life as we know it? As it turns out, the abundance of galaxies that we point to when we search for other forms of life may just be the very reason why they don't exist. Our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is a mere 2.5 million light-years away from us, but scientists predict that it's getting closer. In about 4 billion years, it might collide with the Milky Way.
These collisions are common enough in the cosmic timescale that they're important. And although the likelihood of planets colliding with each other is exceedingly rare, given the distances between stars and planets, other massive objects might interfere with the effect of gravity of Earth or whatever planet humanity is on. When Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxy collide, this might pluck them out of the orbit they were in and jettison them out into the emptiness of space, or life simply ceases to exist. Extrapolate this possibility far enough, and you have a possible explanation as to why life is so rare.
The cosmic commonality of galactic collisions keeps destroying life before it can take an intergalactic form. We've just been lucky so far. But you might think that galactic collisions are super rare and still in the distance. So how about we focus on something more closer to home, something more recent instead? In 1989, millions of people in Quebec woke up to heaters that were no longer working in a city that was completely out of power. In one of the rare and extreme cases of coronal mass injections, or simply solar storms, Quebec's entire power grid failed after 90 seconds of this geomagnetic storm from the sun.
Effects were felt in other parts of North America and beyond as radio signals were jammed, satellite measurements went haywire, and elevators stalled. Each of these solar storms can carry well over 100,000 times the energy of today's nuclear arsenal, so they're not to be taken lightly. But typically these storms are distributed over the entire volume of space around the sun, so by the time it reaches Earth, most of it simply dies out. The Quebec-style outage is certainly rare; scientists only predict such storms once every 100 years.
But one only needs to think of a world where we rely on electricity more than we do now. Not just our phones, but our cars, planes, and even the military run on electricity. This is why these solar storms are classified as high-impact, low-frequency risks. They don't happen often, but when they do, they can be catastrophic. On the 15th of February 2013, a dash cam in a car captured what is perhaps one of the most iconic space-related videos of recent times, known as the Chelyabinsk meteor.
It had entered into the Earth's atmosphere undetected and due to its high velocity and shallow angle had turned into a bright brilliant streak of light that was at one point brighter than the sun. Before atmospheric entry, this 20-meter-wide object was believed to have had the energy of a bomb that is roughly 30 times more powerful than the one detonated in Hiroshima. It injured nearly 1,500 people and damaged over 7,000 buildings from shock waves of the initial explosion.
New evidence keeps emerging about the extinction-level threat that asteroids possess. You would think that with such a strong presence in pop culture and wisdom from the leading scientists of the world, the modern world would be much more aware of a threat than ever before. But we're actually pretty underprepared for such an event. Initial plans included nuking the asteroid, but that would only lead to smaller radiation-bathed chunks falling back onto Earth. Genius idea there, boys!
Another strategy could be to fly a ship to the asteroid to create enough of an impact to shift its trajectory, but a 2019 paper from John Hopkins University suggested that asteroids are stronger and harder to destroy than previously thought. And given a large enough asteroid, none of these measures may be enough to save life as we know it. I chose these events specifically because they're all things that have already happened, albeit at a smaller scale, and continue to happen on a regular basis, galactically speaking.
And while extinction-level events are rare and very unlikely in the generations to come, we must remember that if life can sprout from improbabilities, it can end with them too. These are just some of the ways civilization can meet its end: everything from social media to a global pandemic to civilization itself could be hypothesized as the Great Filter that awaits us as humanity's final test.
But as always, there's some fundamental flaws with the idea of a Great Filter and the definitions of life it relies upon. Our sample size is one. This one data point is all we have ever known. How can we say with such confidence that a life form, advanced or otherwise, would even bother to explore beyond the comforts of its own home? Just because we exhibit colonial tendencies does not necessarily mean it has to be a universal phenomenon. And what if life just is different elsewhere?
What if instead of water, life lives off ammonia or methane or another such solvent, and the life that develops in it is fundamentally different from our own? Our current definitions of life are simply too specific to be able to incorporate all the possibilities hidden in the vastness of space. The idea of the Great Filter is shrouded in such deep improbabilities and such extreme extrapolations that it is sometimes hard to pay attention. It is one of the more hypothetical topics out there, with so much simply based on speculation.
There might as well be no Great Filter. After all, the improbability of our existence may not be because of one or two steps in the line of reasoning, but because the entire process is one life-nourishing coincidence after another. The Great Filter seeks to remind us about how lucky we are—lucky to be here at this very moment. Out of the billions of years for which the universe has existed, lucky to have come this far and be so aware of our place in reality, and lucky to realize how fine-tuned the universe seems to be for you and me to live in it.
From the position of our galaxy to the exact values of the natural constants, one after another, from water's abundance to its specific heat capacity, 4.18. On the 15th of August 1977, Ohio State University's radio telescope Big Ear was listening to the apparent emptiness of the cosmos as it did every other day—the great silence, as it is often called, persisted, disturbed only by the noisy residents of Earth or the galactic star shows of bursts and ultimately their inevitable explosive deaths. That day, however, their telescope would receive a rather strange signal as it pointed towards the constellation Sagittarius.
It wasn't similar to any signal they had received in the past. The signal only lasted for 72 seconds and it has never been detected since. Many attempts have been made to explain the origins of the signal, including suggesting that it was man-made. Its non-random nature strongly suggested that the signal could be of artificial origin, which led people to believe that the signal might be from another intelligent civilization. Although we don't have any further evidence about the signal despite numerous attempts to redetect it, the Wow! signal remains unexplained to this day.
It is the closest humanity has ever come to communicating with another potentially intelligent life form, and for all we know that could have been our only chance. Which really makes you wonder, if we came in contact with an extraterrestrial life form, how would we communicate with them? And the better question is, should we even try? Let's start by answering the last question first. Should we even try to contact an extraterrestrial and possibly intelligent life form?
Historically speaking at least, the relationships between discoverers and the discovered haven't gone very well. Those that embark on the risk of exploration are often technologically superior, and the natives they discover stand no chance of being able to defend themselves. An intelligent life form that is able to make the interstellar journey to Earth from a distant galaxy is orders of magnitude more advanced than we are as a species. Given that superiority, we would be essentially at their mercy. Whether they choose to be hostile or friendly is completely up to them.
This was the exact worry of Stephen Hawking, but these warnings are possibly too little too late. You see, with televisions and satellite communications, we've been sending out our signals for over 70 years at this point—knowingly or not, we've been buzzing our planetary sirens for a long, long time. We've been loud and clear about where we are, and so it's not necessarily going to make much of a difference if some other civilization is actually listening.
Perhaps a better course of action would be to try and make sure that the signals we do end up sending are the right ones—one that convey our non-hostility and accurately represent who we are. Besides, it could be argued that a civilization that is so advanced that it can reach other stars is simply beyond the idea of aggression that we tend to show. Our aggression evolved as a trait because it helped us find and protect resources when they're limited. And while an extraterrestrial civilization should have the same problems during its infancy, by the time it can make a journey to a different star, it's likely to have figured out practically an infinite source of energy.
It's pretty unlikely that a civilization that is struggling to make ends meet will have the resources to travel light-years to another planet, but how should we send our messages? Well, the Wow! signal from earlier is a good place to start. The wavelength of this radio signal, roughly 21 cm, has been used to map the universe. It's used as such because hydrogen gas is by far the most abundant element in the universe. This 21 cm wavelength is known as the hydrogen line; it is everywhere in the universe, and so the electromagnetic radiation it emits when its energy state changes is something very useful to astronomers.
The hope is that technologically advanced civilizations will see a similar significance for 21 cm signals and recognize them when they're sent. 21 cm is also used as a unit of measurement in plaques and other interstellar messages that are hurtling through space as we speak. But more on that at a later time. Once the mode of the message has been figured out, we have to decide what that message will contain. Here we need to remind ourselves once again that the civilization we're trying to talk to could be a far superior one than our own.
That would give us a greater freedom in what we want to say in the message since they should be able to crack the code, if you will. You see, some of the messages that have already been sent, including the famous Arecibo message or the plaque that the Voyager spacecrafts are currently carrying, are very complicated. These messages are subjective; they can be interpreted in many ways. You could have people from all around the world each come to different conclusions.
So, if even humans can agree upon what's being said—the very species that made the message—then how can we expect another species to understand it? Additionally, what is to say that the extraterrestrial civilization shares our visual senses or any of our senses for that matter? What is to say that the images of smiling people in the plaques of Voyager 1 and 2 are not hostile signs of aggression in another planet, in another time? Our tendency to be so centered around the human experience can really get in the way.
To eliminate these problems, our messages should be objectively universal and should make no Earth-centric assumptions about the experiences of our galactic neighbors. At least to start, crafting a message for an alien species is a good exercise for humanity to truly understand who we are. So far, only math and maybe some branches of science seem to be truly universal, meaning their content seems to be true everywhere we live. Look, the Pythagorean theorem holds as well on Earth as it does anywhere else in the universe, as far as we know. Things like this are our best bet to initiate communication with a civilization we share nothing else in common with.
The message should also be as non-random as possible, which sounds weird. It should be repetitive so that the chances of detection are increased, and it should also be as time-independent as possible. Space is massive; interstellar distances mean it could take thousands of years for them to reply. A timeline in which the Earth and us humans may change drastically— even light speed is pretty slow in the grand scheme of things. These and other such details need to be part of a protocol that can be used when sending messages to other stars and beyond.
We also need to figure out who and what gets to represent us all in humanity's most important text message at the moment. These protocols have no recognition in national or international law, but what if they show up right on our doorstep? What if they were already listening in on our very first television broadcast and radio signals and have been en route ever since? Is there a post-detection protocol? Who does what and who gets to decide? Theoretically, such a post-detection protocol would fall under the review of SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they do have one.
The movie "Arrival" portrays this very scenario: 12 UFOs land in 12 different parts of the world, and governments are left scrambling to make sense of it all and respond. In such a scenario, the front line would be composed of not soldiers and tanks, but rather cryptologists trying to decode or decipher whatever messages are being exchanged. As the movie depicts, xenolinguistics or alien language would be the focal point in the days after first contact.
Deciphering an alien language would be especially hard, if not impossible, since they might not have the natural sense of grammar and structure that our languages do. Another facet of first contact would be the risk of a viral infection, both to us and to them, whoever they may be. Of course, they would need to be biochemically similar to us for a transmission to occur and cause harm. But as long as there is a possibility, first contact would most likely initiate a lockdown of the region in which it took place. If we can't even be immune to the viruses on Earth—the planet we evolved to live on—we shouldn't try our luck with viruses from another planet.
The political impacts of first contact would be immense. It would usher in a new era for humanity, and to be able to claim such an achievement would be the first thing on every country's political agenda. This could make the first contact a destabilizing force in the world. Religions will be questioned and so will science. The presence of just one extraterrestrial species will significantly change the probability of others being out there too and alter our understanding of life forever. We will remember history differently—time before and after first contact.
The lack of an internationally ratified protocol with the force of law behind it means every country is left on its own on how to react. That's bad. The apparent reward for an individual country or person to be the first is far greater than the reward for a level-headed approach, even though it could likely end in the extinction of the human race. We need a post-detection protocol, but it's not that easy. Countries that worked together in the past may not work together now.
Russia and the United States have worked rather seamlessly, or so it would seem, in their space missions, especially during the long periods in which America couldn't fly to the International Space Station. On the other hand, if you look at global efforts aimed at denuclearization, it's a different story. So if an international protocol is so important, why doesn't one exist? Well, it has to do with how real the problem seems. It just doesn't seem very likely that we will encounter another life form. Earth's to-do list is quite full at the moment.
But I just don't understand how countries that are willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to create the next big telescope can be so oblivious to the possibility of actually finding something. These technological efforts seem less focused at uncovering the truths of the universe and more at winning the next race for global supremacy. There's other scenarios to consider too; for example, what if the other species is less intelligent than us? Well, in that slightly less interesting case, we'll likely be the ones to make the discovery and we'll get to call the shots.
What if they are exactly as intelligent as us? Humans probabilistically speaking, this is the most specific of all the scenarios and is therefore the least likely. Then again, by the time we communicate with each other and receive replies, one or even both species might be extinct. Another creepy possibility is that of past visitations. What if we have been visited before, and what if we've been being observed ever since? The silence at the heart of the Fermi Paradox may reflect stealth, not absence.
These are all possibilities that we have to consider in our search for extraterrestrials. As exceedingly rare as it may seem, the quest for other life forms, the desire to answer the question "are we alone?" is incredibly strong—so strong, in fact, that humanity seems to keep looking for it even if it leads to its own demise.