Benevolent Aliens (Narration Only)
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Isaac Arthur
4.9 • 782 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, SFIA audio listeners. In this month's Nebula exclusive, Big Alien Theory, |
| 0:05.0 | we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge. To hear |
| 0:10.8 | it and every episode early and add free, plus hours of bonus content, check out go.nebola.t. |
| 0:16.4 | TV slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur. This episode is brought to you by Skillshare. |
| 0:23.9 | Science fiction has taught us to be skeptical if aliens claim, we come in peace, |
| 0:28.9 | but what if they actually meant it? |
| 0:32.1 | Quite a few tales in science fiction and theories among UFO watchers involve rather sinister aliens, or those |
| 0:38.4 | that appear nice but are not as benevolent as they seem, but occasionally we do get examples |
| 0:43.3 | where those aliens really are nice and enlightened folks. I suspect their relative rarely |
| 0:48.5 | tends to come from them being a bit boring from a storywriting perspective, no conflict |
| 0:53.4 | or conspiracy, no fun. I thought we |
| 0:56.5 | would ask ourselves what a benevolent group of aliens would be like, what they probably |
| 1:00.5 | would not be like, and what we might be like to other civilizations if we got to be nicer |
| 1:05.3 | people and encountered some fledgling alien civilization ourselves. We must start though by acknowledging the obvious, benevolent is a bit of a subjective term |
| 1:15.8 | to say the least. |
| 1:17.5 | As we discussed in the Fermi paradox zoo hypothesis, an alien race might think they were doing |
| 1:22.5 | us a favor by keeping us tucked away from interference by others and ignorant of their |
| 1:26.7 | own existence. |
| 1:33.7 | Indeed, as we noted there, a post-biological race might flat out kill us for our own good, |
| 1:38.0 | simply because they thought we'd be a lot safer if they came in, scanned our brains, |
| 1:43.0 | turned us off in real life, and rebooted us in some nice, safe, simulated reality somewhere or in time. |
| 1:49.6 | That would be an example of where a civilization with high-minded intent literally committed genocide, from a certain point of view, and it's not the only one. |
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