Uploads from Dr. Becky

Currently Playing: Is TIMING the reason we haven't found aliens? #shorts

One of the big reasons that we haven’t found alien life yet, could just be TIMING. Not quite the same timing that kept Jim and Pam apart for 3 seasons of The Office, but because of the simple fact that humans have existed for only 300,000 years. That might sound like a lot, until you remember the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and the first simple single cell life appeared 3.8 billion years ago. It took evolution another 3 billion years just to make life with multiple cells working together. Fish only crawled onto land 375 million years ago. Dinosaurs ruled for 165 million years before being wiped out. And modern humans? We've been here for only 0.007% of Earth's history. To put that into context, if you compressed those 4.5 billion years of Earth's history into a single year, so that the planet formed on 1st January, dinosaurs show up in mid-December, and humans waltz in at 11:42pm on December 31st. The invention of the wheel, civilisation itself, every historical figure, every person you've ever loved, all of that fits inside the final 60 seconds. So if we want to make contact with an intelligent alien species on another planet, they need to be at the same point in their evolution on their cosmic calendar as us... Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video produced and edited by Dr Becky Smethurst --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com