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00:00An advanced Type 3 civilization has the potential to seed younger civilizations all over the
00:06galaxy.
00:07Type 3s may have also developed ways to manipulate time, space, and matter at scales far beyond
00:14anything we can currently imagine.
00:16So could our entire species simply be the product of them?
00:23Do you think it's possible?
00:27For those unaware, a Type 3 civilization is a classification from the Kardashev Scale.
00:33Proposed by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev, the scale organizes theoretical
00:38civilizations into classes based on the energy they can harness.
00:42Originally containing three levels, it was later expanded to five.
00:46Briefly, a Type 1 can harness all planetary energy sources with 100% efficiency.
00:52Type 2 can harness all energy from a nearby star, via megastructures like a Dyson sphere.
00:57Type 3, the original upper limit, and the civilization we're exploring today, would
01:02have the ability to harness all energy in a galaxy.
01:05And beyond that, you have Type 4, which has all the energy in the universe, and Type 5,
01:10which would basically be God-mode, with the ability to manipulate even the fabric of the
01:14universe itself.
01:15So where does that leave us?
01:17Well, we're somewhere between zero and one… a roughly 0.7-level civilization, according
01:23to calculations made by Carl Sagan.
01:25We're no longer Stone Age hunter-gatherers at around 0.2 on Kardashev's scale, but
01:31we also cannot harness the full potential of our planet yet.
01:34The physicist Michio Kaku figures that within 100 to 200 years, humans might advance beyond
01:40Type 1.
01:42But for today's question, if we're still not even beyond the first level, how could
01:46we possibly have descended from a Type 3 time?
01:49Well, while we might suppose an extremely advanced civilization, like a Type 3, would
01:54live in the far reaches of outer space, far away from our world and reality… there's
01:59a chance they could be a lot closer.
02:01Like, right here on Earth, close.
02:03Broadly speaking, if everything we've ever known was to constitute the remnants of another
02:09society, then it would mean that a Type 3 civilization must have either long since died
02:13off on this planet, or at least in this galaxy, or long since moved away, leaving only traces
02:19of themselves behind.
02:21And while that may all sound a lot like science fiction or a conspiracy theory, some legitimate
02:26questions are being raised within the scientific community about what the planet was like long
02:31before we arrived.
02:33One problem is that it's difficult to find direct evidence of extremely old things.
02:39While it stands to reason to expect remnants of an ancient civilization to be buried in
02:43the Earth, that's not likely to be the case.
02:46Artifacts from thousands or tens of thousands of years ago are relatively easy to find.
02:51But when looking for something that's millions or tens of millions of years old, it's almost
02:55impossible.
02:56That's because the geological record is only really preserved back to the beginning
03:01of the Quaternary Period, which is about 2.6 million years ago.
03:05There are fossils from earlier, of course, but they become rarer and rarer.
03:10And we have, on extremely rare occasions, uncovered tools that are more than three million
03:15years old.
03:16But because of how Earth works to refresh its crust over long periods of time, the suggestion
03:21is that some things may have been erased, wiped out by a long game of nature and forgotten
03:27about.
03:28Here's where today's what-if scenario comes in.
03:30And under the ground isn't the only place we can look to, either.
03:34We can also peer into the atmosphere to find, for example, that there are certain similarities
03:39between the climate modelling of today and that of around 55.5 million years ago.
03:45In both periods, there's a spike in the global temperature.
03:48Our spike can be attributed to human activity, but the question is, what about the spike
03:53from 55.5 million years ago?
03:55Might that also be human, or something similar to human, activity?
04:00For two academics in 2018, there were grounds at least to investigate.
04:04The director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, Gavin Schmidt, and the astrophysicist
04:10Adam Frank were intrigued enough to publish a paper exploring the possibility of a pre-human
04:15civilization.
04:16They call the idea the Silurian Hypothesis, with a name inspired by a classic episode
04:22of Doctor Who.
04:23The Silurian Hypothesis has since become a key point of study.
04:27Was the spike in temperature more than 50 million years ago the result of something
04:30natural, or was it something else?
04:33Because blatant physical evidence will have long been wiped out, Schmidt and Frank proposed
04:37that we need other signifiers to look into this incredibly ancient period.
04:42Were we to transport ourselves 55 million years into the future, to look back at our
04:46time, then some evidence of plastics and fertilizers may still be detectable, for example.
04:51So, we need, then, a Type Three version of that.
04:55Perhaps an advanced society would leave behind similar chemical traces, and that would, if
04:59nothing else, tell us something about our own progress.
05:02But more likely, a Type Three civilization will have used technology that's completely
05:06alien to us, so we need to look for something we've never seen before.
05:11But herein lies something of a paradox.
05:14Because there's some argument that an advanced enough society will have also completely and
05:18deliberately removed all evidence of itself from any given planet or star system it had
05:23existed in.
05:25Whether underground, in the air, or embedded in the very fabric of the life it may have
05:29left behind, a Type Three would be knowledgeable enough to know that it could never be revealed
05:34that it was here.
05:35For this reason, many believe that the best probability of us being descendants from an
05:40advanced civilization may involve extraterrestrials.
05:44Given that a Type Three force will have mastered all the energy in the galaxy, the imagined
05:49links between us and it may well exist not on this planet, which has hidden or erased
05:54them, but somewhere else within the Milky Way.
05:57Of course, the big question when it comes to aliens, advanced or not, is where are they?
06:03In the 1950s, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi encapsulated the problem in the now-famous
06:08Fermi Paradox.
06:10And here the issue is that if we are the remnants of a Type Three world, then there should be
06:14other, easily identifiable remnants in the galaxy around us, too.
06:19Megastructures, interstellar ships, signs of terraforming on distant planets, and on
06:23Earth.
06:24But, so far, nothing.
06:26Could our proposed Type Three ancestors possibly have been efficient enough to hide all evidence
06:31of themselves from all the skies above?
06:33Or is something else going on?
06:35In the 1970s, the US scientist Michael Hart proposed four potential reasons why we haven't
06:41encountered aliens on Earth yet.
06:43One, it's physically impossible for them to traverse space.
06:46Two, they're simply choosing not to visit us.
06:49Three, it's too early in their development for interstellar travel.
06:53And four, most significantly for today's video, they have visited us, but in our distant
06:59past, perhaps at a time when humans didn't exist.
07:03In this version of events, for those who suggest that we came from some other advanced group,
07:08this is the key moment.
07:10The key window for when the emergence of life could have been kick-started by the arrival
07:14of an early, advanced civilization.
07:16It's the theory of panspermia, but on a massive scale, where we're not just imagining
07:21stray microbes on a far-off probe, but whole, intelligent creatures specifically leaving
07:26their seed.
07:28In a recent video, we found how it may be possible for life to survive embedded in asteroids…
07:33and how it could also be possible for that life to be picked up by a chunk of space rock
07:38just in passing, without even the need for an impact event.
07:42But now, what we're picturing is neither accidental panspermia nor a biological boom
07:47following an asteroid strike.
07:49It's alien colonization, and we're the results of it.
07:53Finally, consider the headline-making 2020 multi-authored paper that suggested that the
07:58Milky Way may actually be full of long-dead civilizations.
08:02The four researchers behind the claim found that the factors for emerging life may have
08:07peaked about eight billion years after our galaxy formed, and about 13,000 light-years
08:12from its centre.
08:13Humans arose some 13.5 billion years after the galaxy formed, and Earth today is located
08:19about 25,000 light-years from the galactic core.
08:23So, in the context of our question, in many ways we can be considered relative newcomers
08:28to this corner of space, with perhaps many advanced civilizations rising and falling
08:34before we ever came to be.
08:36For now, it should be remembered that scientists are confident that they have a reasonably
08:41solid understanding of how and where life originated.
08:45And yet, there's certainly some mystery remaining.
08:48Could it be, then, that rather than emerging here, we were put here?
08:52Could it be that we're carrying on the torch from a long-dead civilization?
08:56As it stands, these are hypothetical questions and alternate realities only.
09:01But that's what would happen if we were the remnants of a Type Three civilization.
09:06What do you think?
09:07Is there anything we missed?
09:08Let us know in the comments, check out these other clips from Unveiled, and make sure you
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