Alex McColgan

Because if aliens do exist, by the time they find us, it will be too late to consider it.

By then, it might be too late to do anything at all.

This is a question that determines our species' destruction, or maybe our salvation.

I'm Alex McColgan, and you're watching Astrum.

Join with me today as we see what we should do when approaching the search for alien life, because depending on the answer to this question, we have some vitally significant choices ahead of us as a species.

And seeing as this is a question that scientists and political leaders are not yet considering seriously, let's have a go at it on this platform.

For this video, I will draw on some of the ideas and knowledge we've explored so far in the other videos in this series, so if you haven't seen them, then you might want to check them out using the link above.

If our speculations on the behaviour of hypothetical aliens are to be useful to us, they need to be grounded in real observations as much as possible.

For instance, we know that life can arise in the universe, because it did at least once with us.

We know that we can see no signs of any other alien life, an idea we have considered with the Fermi Paradox.

So any behaviour we look at has to line up with this fact.

And we have considered how, when species evolve, form follows function.

The same evolutionary imperatives that drive us likely would drive other species too.

In all probability, everyone needs to eat, or reproduce in one way or another, or they would likely all die out.

So, although we don't know for certain that alien life is even out there, let's bring these ideas together.

In doing so, we gain some revealing insights.

To begin with though, let's hold up the mirror to ourselves.

We are the only instance of life arising in the universe that we know of.

The great human experiment of civilization has been going on for thousands of years and has produced many different types of society, capitalist, socialist, hunter-gatherer, nomadic, and theocratical, to name just a few.

If we want to understand the behavior of alien civilizations, we need to consider societies.