Best of 2024: Where Are All the Aliens?
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If you watched last month's congressional UAP hearing, you're probably asking yourself, where our extraterrestrial friends are hiding? In my first best of 2024 pick, we'll revisit the Fermi paradox and attempt to answer that very question. We'll be back with new episodes of Conspiracy Theories on December 25th.

In the Milky Way alone, there are approximately 200 billion stars, around 20 billion of which are Sun-like stars, complete with an Earth-like planet orbiting them. Scientists estimate there may be 11 billion planets orbiting Sun-like stars just in our home galaxy.

Now, if we apply those numbers to the whole universe, where our current estimates approximate about 200 billion or more galaxies, well, the point should be fairly clear. There is an astounding number of Earth-like planets in the universe. Countless planets, billions of years older than our own, that had the very same preconditions for life as Earth.

Even if we use the most conservative estimate for life forming under these conditions, the conclusion is fairly straightforward. The universe should be teeming with life. And given the incredible amount of star systems much older than our own, many of these life forms would have billions more years to evolve far beyond humanity's wildest dreams.

But if this is the case, if the universe is so incomprehensibly vast and so richly populated with intelligent life, one fundamental question remains: Where is everybody? Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday.

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Today we're traveling back to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which we're all very familiar with from Oppenheimer, the best picture from the 96th Academy Awards. But we aren't talking about the Manhattan Project today. We're eavesdropping on a lunchtime conversation that changed UFO theory forever.

In this episode, we're digging into the Fermi Paradox, the scientific formulaic paradox that asks the question, where is everybody? Stay with us.

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Enrico Fermi made a career studying things we cannot see. His world was the world of particles, the atomic makeup of the universe. In particular, he smashed these tiny particles together just to see what happened.

He was so good at smashing particles together that it earned him the Nobel Prize in 1938 at only 37 years old. And needless to say, Fermi was brilliant. He was one of the 20th century's most influential scientists, and his work continues to have a profound effect on the study of physics.

But on one particular day in 1950, a 49-year-old Fermi was having lunch with his physicist buddies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico when he started pondering the nature of life in the wider universe.

If you're a fan of our show, you'll know that in the 1950s there was a huge spike in reported UFO sightings. With the Cold War in full swing and an abundance of unidentified military spycraft dotting the night sky, many civilians started to wonder if some of these might be extraterrestrial in origin. But an observational scientist like Enrico Fermi needed something more substantial than lights in the sky.

Fermi bemoaned the fact that there had not been any concrete evidence pointing to alien life. And yet, he lamented, given the size of the galaxy, there was a good chance that other planets in the Milky Way could support life.

Fermi was famous for his ability to quickly estimate answers to tough-to-conceptualize questions in his head using speculative data. And so, as he proposed this question of extraterrestrial life to his colleagues, well, that's exactly what he did.

He started by outlining six simple statements that showed this was not merely amusing, a rhetorical question, but rather an incredibly complicated and baffling paradox. Statement number one. The Milky Way is filled with hundreds of billions of stars, and billions of those stars are similar to the sun, which supports life on Earth. Statement number two.

It is highly likely that some of these stars will have planets similar to Earth. That is to say, planets with similar molecular components that are a similar distance from their star as Earth is to the Sun, and that use their star's energy to create life the same way that Earth does.

Number three: We can assume, thanks to the Copernican principle, that Earth is not particularly special. Just a quick aside: The Copernican principle states that the Earth is not the center of the universe and that as inhabitants of Earth, we don't necessarily occupy a special place in the universe.

This was revolutionary when Copernicus first stated it in the 16th century. Up to that point, it had been widely believed that everything in the solar system revolved around the Earth, instead of the Earth and other planets revolving around the Sun. Which brings us back to the third part of Fermi's argument.

He said that since we know, thanks to Copernicus, that the Earth is not particularly special, then intelligent life should exist on at least some of the other Earth-like planets out there. Number four. Some of the intelligent species out there might develop advanced technology, including the technology necessary to travel through space.

After all, if humans on Earth can build space technology, then other intelligent species should be able to as well. Number five. In the current capacity of human technology, interstellar travel would theoretically take millennia to traverse the 100,000 light years across the Milky Way. However, given enough time, this would not be an insurmountable problem.

Since many sun-like stars have been around billions of years longer than our sun has, there have been billions of years for other species to develop and perfect the technology for space travel far beyond our own capabilities. And finally, number six. Given all these factors, why haven't we met any aliens yet or seen evidence of them in our observations of the universe? Where is everybody?

The question and estimations Enrico Fermi formed at that lunch were both impressive and fascinating, but unfortunately for us, the physicists did not explore it any further. Fermi died in 1954, and he would never witness how much of an effect this simple conversation over lunch would have on the world. The other physicists present that day, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York,

eventually spoke about the lunch to the public and Fermi's musings soon came to be known as the Fermi Paradox. So intriguing was this paradox that it continues to baffle scientists and extraterrestrial enthusiasts nearly 70 years later. But in the 1950s, when the paradox was first presented, humanity was relatively limited in its capability to fully analyze this problem.

Space exploration as a science was only just beginning, and our observations of the universe were limited to Earth-bound telescopes. However, we don't need space exploration to consider that there are three basic conclusions that could answer the Fermi Paradox. First, we are the only form of advanced sentient life in the universe. Second, extraterrestrial life does exist,

but has not visited us for some reason. And third, extraterrestrial life has visited us, but we have not yet found definitive proof of this occurring. Okay, in order to take on the conundrum of the Fermi Paradox, we'll look at each of these possibilities in turn.

Throughout the years, many have maintained that we are alone in the universe. Though one man came to this conclusion through more scientific means. In 1975, physicist Michael Hart published a paper on the Fermi Paradox called An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth. Quite a mouthful. In the abstract to his paper, Hart said...

However, he also noted that one couldn't form a definitive answer until further research was completed.

Hart began his argument by taking a more in-depth look at the probability of alien life in the galaxy using a calculation known as the Drake Equation. Back in 1961, astronomer Frank Drake put together an equation to calculate the number of intelligent species in the universe.

The Drake equation is usually written as, hang with me here, N equals R star times F sub P times N sub E times F sub L times F sub I times F sub C times L. I lost myself on that one. But let me break it down for you so you don't have to worry about that.

N, the number we're solving for, is equal to the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy who would be advanced enough to emit electromagnetic emissions. So if we could detect such emissions, this would be a strong indication that they originated from a sentient species fairly far along the evolutionary track.

On the other side of the equation, there are a number of variables, including the numbers of stars like our Sun that are capable of supporting life, the fraction of those stars with planetary systems, the number of planets per star system with an environment suitable for life, and the fraction of planets with intelligent life.

Basically, the Drake equation has a lot of factors, which is further complicated by the fact that astronomers don't have definite numbers for any of those variables. So, even though the Drake equation was built to help us figure out the probability of extraterrestrial life, it still rendered insufficient since many of the data points can only be guessed at.

However, Hart used the estimates at his disposal for this equation and determined that the probability of extraterrestrial life in our galaxy was extremely high. Given this high probability, Hart presented four arguments for how intelligent life outside of Earth could possibly exist without our knowledge.

His first argument is that aliens couldn't reach Earth because of some sort of physical difficulty that, quote, "makes space travel infeasible." His second argument is that aliens simply never chose to come to Earth. His third argument is that advanced civilizations arose too recently for aliens to have reached us.

Life would need to evolve from single-celled organisms to an intelligent species capable of space travel. A human evolution from our ape-like ancestors took approximately 6 million years, and we still share a 98.8% genetic similarity to chimps and a 60% genetic similarity to fruit flies. You're swatting your cousins there.

It doesn't take a specialist in evolutionary genealogy to understand how long it takes for an intelligent life to develop. So, perhaps the aliens who are trying to reach us are still on their way, or just haven't evolved enough yet to build technology to get to us. The fourth argument is that possibly aliens already visited Earth in the distant past, before humans even existed.

Despite these possibilities, Hart himself was still skeptical of the existence of alien life. He thought that the extremely high probability suggested there was no way another form of life would not have advanced enough to colonize the universe. In his 1975 paper, he plainly put it, "They are not here, therefore they do not exist."

For Hart, the matter of extraterrestrial life was settled, all tied up with a nice, neat bow on top. But within the astronomical community, Hart's arguments ignited the search for aliens. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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The Fermi Paradox was a thought experiment first posed by Enrico Fermi in 1950. The paradox questions why we have not yet encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life, even though the incredible scale of the universe suggests that there is a high probability of it existing.

In 1975, physicist Michael Hart published a paper called "An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth," which argued that because we haven't seen alien life, it must not exist. Hart's paper stoked a flame within the scientific community, as fellow scientists also sought to find their own answers to the Fermi Paradox. One of those scientists was physicist Frank Tipler. He asked,

Even if a civilization were advanced enough to travel through space and colonize a galaxy, where would they get enough physical supplies to do it? In his paper, Tipler suggested that a civilization would need some sort of technology that would efficiently replicate the tools necessary for space colonization. He suggested a self-replicating universal constructor with intelligence comparable to the human level.

By this logic, a civilization would send one of these constructors to a neighboring star, have the constructor build copies of itself using materials from that star system, and then send those copies to other stars. That way, the constructor could continue to build civilizations across a galaxy.

Tipler argued that since we don't have such devices on Earth, and we still have yet to see extraterrestrial life, it proved that such universal constructors and the aliens that would build them do not exist. If we are to take Hart and Tipler at their word that humanity is the only advanced life form in the universe, then the question becomes, why? What is it that makes us unique?

One answer to this question is found in the notion of the Great Filter. The Great Filter, named as such by Robin Hanson, a professor and researcher with experience working on DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a theory that argues that at some point during a species evolution, it will hit a wall.

This wall is the point at which it's extremely difficult or impossible for life to continue, such as some sort of inevitable apocalypse. That point is known as the Great Filter. The Great Filter could manifest in many different ways, whether it be resource scarcity, a natural limit to technological advancement, or a catastrophic astronomic event.

If we propose this as a solution to the Fermi Paradox, what follows are two possibilities for humanity's place in the cosmos. The first is that we have already crossed the threshold of the Great Filter. We defy the odds that less evolved species before us were unable to overcome, and we will hopefully continue to evolve into an even more advanced civilization.

Perhaps the universe was more hostile in the past, but over time conditions became more conducive to life. The universe passed the Great Filter and thus humans were able to evolve. We might be one of the few intelligent civilizations, if not the only one in the universe. If we are unique as an intelligent civilization,

It could be attributed to what is known as the rare Earth hypothesis. Even though there may be many Earth-like planets in the universe, the specific conditions of Earth, such as our moon or the molecular composition of the planet, make it specifically suitable for life in a way that very few planets are.

It would be a lonely reality, but it would also provide hope that humanity could evolve enough to become the first civilization to explore the galaxy. Unfortunately, the other possibility for humanity in the context of the Great Filter is bleaker. Much bleaker. This alternative explanation says that the Great Filter is ahead of us.

It suggests that there are certain filters that exist all across the universe and at various points different civilizations are filtered out. That is to say, they go extinct because they can't make it past some sort of obstacle.

The universe is a fundamentally hostile place, and because of this, according to this theory, civilizations are not given enough time to evolve fast enough to avoid this great filter. This could manifest as some kind of naturally occurring cataclysmic event like gamma ray bursts. Or it might be something that the civilization itself creates, like a nuclear apocalypse.

It would be an inevitability that nearly all intelligent civilizations wind up destroying themselves after they reach a certain level of technological advancement. Simulation theory obviously plays well with this idea. If intelligent life was engineered by an unknown entity, these engineers could be testing for a civilization's ability to overcome the Great Filter.

In this case, a naturally occurring great filter could be a cosmic disaster put in place by engineers to end the simulation. So we're not able to make contact with any other civilizations because they're either too unevolved to have the technology to reach us or they've been wiped out by a great filter.

Michael Hart and Frank Tipler's arguments in 1975 and 1980 open the possibility that we are, in fact, alone in the universe. The reason we have yet to find incontrovertible proof about extraterrestrial life is because there is none.

The universe is a vast and complex place, but perhaps for one reason or another, life, and in particular sentient life, is an incredibly rare phenomenon. But there are many scientists who think differently. Yes, there is no physical evidence of aliens, but there is also still no physical evidence that there aren't aliens either.

Which brings us to the second solution to the Fermi Paradox. Extraterrestrial life does, in fact, exist in the universe. But for one reason or another, we have not observed it yet.

Scientists Carl Sagan and William Newman argued against Hart and Tipler in a 1983 paper titled The Solipsist Approach to Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In their paper, Sagan and Newman used mathematical models similar to the ones population biologists used to estimate animal populations.

With those calculations, they concluded that the rates of a civilization's expansion in the universe that Hart had estimated are very unrealistic. Hart didn't take into account that many factors could affect population growth. For example, the possibility that other civilizations might have a finite lifespan, or that a civilization might control population growth rates to maintain their ecology.

This essentially means that a civilization might reach a type of equilibrium with their home planet based on its resources and therefore would not need to venture out into the cosmos. Sagan and Newman asserted that a model of any given civilization would be vastly complicated and dependent on an umpteen amount of variables. Therefore, we cannot make assumptions based solely on the population models of humanity.

Sagan and Newman went on to argue that just because we can't see alien life doesn't mean they don't exist. They just might not behave exactly in a way familiar to us. For example, perhaps another civilization has no interest in life outside their world, the same way humans do.

Or perhaps advanced civilizations have a pact to allow life that emerges in the universe to evolve without influence, much like a real-life prime directive from Star Trek. Whatever the reality, direct contact has yet to be a proven phenomenon. However, the latter half of the 20th century brought a wave of exploration into finding ways to detect extraterrestrial life.

Even so, scientists have yet to find definitive proof of signs of life in the cosmos. Perhaps this is simply because our technology is not advanced enough. The radio and infrared signals we send out from Earth only stretch out to about 100 light years away before dissipating, which constitutes about 0.1% of the galaxy.

Those signals are how alien life might be able to detect and locate us, the same way that we've attempted to detect alien life by looking for signals in outer space. But since we're only reaching 0.1% of the Milky Way, the rest of the universe might be completely blind to our existence.

We're unable to reach much of the galaxy, and perhaps the same can be said for some distant lifeforms all the way at the other end of the Milky Way.

This line of thinking supports something known as the mediocrity principle, which is kind of everything that is the exact opposite of the rare earth hypothesis. The mediocrity principle states that there is nothing unusual about our intelligence, our planets, our solar system, or our galaxy, until evidence proves otherwise.

And so, if we are to believe that there is nothing unusual about us, why wouldn't there be beings similar to us somewhere else in the universe? And if they are out there, what is preventing us from encountering them? Well, there are a few possibilities. Number one, that aliens couldn't and/or can't reach Earth because of some sort of physical barrier. Number two,

that aliens simply chose and actively choose not to visit Earth. And number three, that intelligent alien species just recently invented the technology to reach us and they're still on their way.

To which I might add a fourth possibility. Maybe we'll call it the conspiracy theories destination equation. Which is to say if there is an alien life form on an alien planet, in order to search the universe for life, it would have to send out a ship in one direction all the way to the end of the universe. Which means there would be an infinite number of tangential lines from that alien planet. Every planet they hit, they would have to search for alien life.

Meaning, since they don't know we're here and don't know to look for us, it could take an infinite amount of time to find us. Now, if one of these possibilities is the solution to the Fermi Paradox, then we must turn our search outward. If alien life isn't coming to us, is there a way that we can find alien life? The answer, anticlimactically, is maybe.

In the second half of the 20th century, several efforts to find extraterrestrial life began. In the late 1960s and early 70s, NASA participated in some efforts to search for extraterrestrial life, with programs including Project Orion, the Microwave Observing Project, and the High Resolution Microwave Survey.

These all used different forms of electromagnetic transmissions to try to detect alien life in outer space, but they found nothing conclusive. However, in 1981, Senator William Proxmire used Hart and Tipler's arguments to pull back funding for all of these projects. He said that if physicists argued that there was no extraterrestrial life at all, well then what was the point of looking for it?

It is a fair argument, but only if you take Michael Hart and Frank Tipler's arguments as gospel. Yet, like much of the work surrounding the Fermi Paradox, nothing can be for sure because so much of it is based on conjecture. Despite the government shutting down their search for aliens, interest in extraterrestrial life did not wane and others took up the mantle.

The most prominent example was a private organization called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or the SETI Institute, and was founded in 1984 by Thomas Pearson and Jill Tarter in Mountain View, California.

According to the Institute, "Our mission is to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe and the evolution of intelligence." The researchers at SETI are fundamentally involved with the problem of the Fermi Paradox. They are trying to discover at least a glimpse of extraterrestrial life, thereby altering our understanding of the universe.

The SETI Institute utilizes physical and biological sciences, as well as astrophysics, to make discoveries about life both on Earth and beyond in outer space. Private endeavors like this solidified one simple fact: the public, scientists and non-scientists alike, wanted to find aliens. And they were willing to go to great lengths to do so.

In 1992, the US government's interest in alien life was sparked again. That year, NASA began the more official search for extraterrestrial intelligence, their very own SETI program.

But less than one year later, this program was shuttered after a campaign against it led by Senator Richard Bryan. Even so, the SETI Institute blazes on. They continue to use state-of-the-art technology to scan the night sky looking for any sort of irregularity that might point to some sort of alien life.

In their breadth of exploration, SETI may just have found the first signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. And with that discovery, we may not only have a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox, but a much larger understanding of our place in the cosmos.

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After more than 50 years of examining the Fermi Paradox, it seems we are getting tantalizingly close to finding some small signs that point to the possibility of life somewhere else in the universe. As it seems alien life must exist, but has not yet revealed itself, we must uncover ways to look for alien life.

The SETI Institute used the Allen Telescope Array in the Cascade Mountains in California to conduct a two-year survey of tens of thousands of red dwarf stars. Nearly every single red dwarf star has a planet located in its habitable zone, and this high frequency of planets that might support life make red dwarfs an excellent place to begin the search for extraterrestrial life.

Once SETI finds planets in the habitable zone, they use the array to examine the planets and hopefully discover further details about them. SETI is also developing new methods for optical detection of extraterrestrial intelligence. Previous programs were limited to examining a single pixel of the sky at any given time. But the new optical programs can monitor the entire night sky all at once.

This means it might now be possible to pick up intermittent signals that would have been completely missed. Though these observations haven't found irrefutable evidence of extraterrestrial signals, there has been some intriguing evidence found by simply observing the sky.

In 2015, physicist Roger Griffith led a team at Penn State University to compile a catalog of 93 galaxies where unusually extreme mid-infrared emissions have been seen. Because an advanced civilization would be using advanced technologies, some scientists postulate that using such advanced technologies would leave behind a trail.

They'd be in the form of mid-infrared emissions, and their detection by Roger Griffith's team appeared to be solid evidence of civilization in those galaxies. It was good evidence.

Until it was refuted by another physicist. Later on in 2015, Michael Garrett of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and Leiden Observatory studied radio measurements of some of the strongest intelligent civilization candidate galaxies. But while infrared emissions could be an indicator of advanced forms of life, they can also signal smaller, less significant objects. Mainly,

dust. Garrett found that the vast majority of these galaxies have emissions that are best explained by "natural astrophysical processes related to thermal emissions from dust, not by advanced technology." Garrett said the presence of these emissions "is not heat from alien factories but more likely emission from dust. For example, dust generated and heated by regions of massive star formations."

Well, just when we thought there were some small signs of extraterrestrial life, Garrett shot those ideas down. It's a disappointing revelation for anyone hoping to prove the existence of alien life. However, Garrett also looked at the bright side of his discovery. He said, "...in my view, it means we can all sleep safely in our beds tonight, and an alien invasion doesn't seem at all likely."

Though Garrett himself is a self-described skeptic when it comes to the problems of the Fermi Paradox, in his own words Garrett said, "We're missing an important part of the jigsaw puzzle here. Perhaps advanced civilizations are so energy efficient that they produce very low waste heat emission products. Our current understanding of physics makes that a difficult thing to do."

So by this explanation, there might be intelligent alien life out there in the universe. We just don't have the tools to detect them. It would be as if we're listening for some sounds when really we need to be watching for some sort of visual cue. Thus, the quest to refine the methods in which we attempt to detect extraterrestrial life continues. However, a shocking recent discovery suggests that perhaps aliens will in fact

come to us before we find traces of them in the distant galaxy. In 2017, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope spotted an incredibly strange object moving through our solar system that was soon named Oumuamua.

The name comes from the Hawaiian word for scout, since this object seems like it might be a scout from another sentient species. Oumuamua is the first known object from another star system to visit our own, and its features are somewhat baffling.

While its shape and composition make it seem like a comet at first blush, it is missing a coma, which is one of a comet's most defining characteristics. Because they're made of ice, when it approaches a star like the Sun, a portion of that ice melts leaving a trail or coma. Oumuamua notably does not have such a trail, which makes tracking and studying it particularly difficult.

Immediately, scientists tried to discern the origins of Oumuamua. Because it couldn't be characterized as a comet and its shape and acceleration suggest that it's not an asteroid, classification of the object has been quite complicated. Thus, the natural question became: Was Oumuamua artificial in origin? When Oumuamua was about 170 million miles away from Earth,

Scientists at SETI used the alien telescope array to observe it. If they found artificial radio transmissions coming off of Oumuamua, that would be strong evidence that the object was built by intelligent life.

Jerry Harp is the lead author of a paper on Oumuamua published in 2019. He said, Unfortunately, the search was not successful. If Oumuamua was emitting any sort of transmission, our current technology is incapable of detecting it.

Harp went on to say, Additionally, researchers at Harvard University recently published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in which they suggested that Oumuamua might be a piece of a larger structure, such as a ship.

Their hypothesis is that the object might be a solar sail or a type of craft propelled by solar radiation from a foreign spaceship that was sent our way. They also noted that our solar system is a very small target if you're not aiming at it, so that the chances of something randomly entering the solar system are pretty low. This suggests that it may have been deliberately sent here.

The chairman of Harvard University's Astronomy Department, Professor Abraham Loeb, has vehemently defended his position that Oumuamua is an artificially built object. Professor Loeb said, "If you're not ready to find exceptional things, you won't discover them." Of course, every argument needs to be based on evidence.

But if the evidence points to an anomaly, we need to talk about an anomaly." He continued to say, "Imagine if cavemen had been shown the smartphone. What would they have thought about this special rock? Now imagine that Oumuamua is the iPhone and we are the cavemen.

Imagine scientists who are considered visionaries of reason among the cavemen looking at the device and saying, no, it's just a rock. A special rock, but a rock. Where do you come off claiming it's not a rock? The origins of Oumuamua continue to remain a mystery. But such a momentous event as an extrasolar visit is enough to ignite discussion within the scientific community. Unfortunately, it returns us...

to square one. Despite finds like Oumuamua and the extensive efforts by SETI, there still is no concrete proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life. But perhaps there is a third solution to the Fermi Paradox, one that would be incredibly difficult to prove. Aliens do exist and have come to visit us, but their technology is so advanced that we have not noticed.

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku described this argument like this. He said, let's say we have an anthill in the middle of the forest. And right next to the anthill, they're building a 10-lane superhighway. And the question is, would the ants be able to understand what a 10-lane superhighway is? Would the ants be able to understand the technology and the intentions of the beings building the highway next to them?

We are the ants. One more argument is that the galaxy has already been colonized, but Earth is located so far out in the boondocks of the Milky Way, no one has reached us yet. We're just waiting for the first word of some advanced technology, like a small town before it received its first phone line or cell tower. The hypothetical explanations for the Fermi Paradox get more and more speculative, and

But here's where the lines between science and science fiction blur. When something is as unknown and unknowable as the existence of extraterrestrial life, it inevitably becomes loaded with conjecture. And while that conjecture is supported by some facts, much of it is invented to try to explain the mysteries of the universe. That is why when we look up at the night sky, so many of us see stories waiting to be told...

and worlds waiting to be explored. The vast sky is filled with the possibility of the unknown. Perhaps there are beings with the powers of gods conquering worlds up in outer space. We'd be lucky to remain undiscovered.

Theorists who subscribe to the dark forest hypothesis would certainly follow this line of thinking. The dark forest hypothesis describes a universe full of hostile, technologically advanced civilizations that remain intentionally undetectable out of fear that another hostile civilization might invade. Or we are truly alone in the universe. Our solitude might be a call to action.

to journey out beyond Earth and beyond our solar system. If we are the only living things in the universe, and if Earth were to be destroyed, there would be no life left at all. Answers to the questions may arrive tomorrow, and they may arrive long after humanity has dissolved into dust. As great and infinite as the universe is,

It will continue to reveal surprises about our own little place in the cosmos. But for now, we just don't know.

Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We are here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Or email us at conspiracystories at Spotify.com. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story.

And the official story isn't always the truth. Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Sarah Halle-Corey and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson. And Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.

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