Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens.
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a short explanation of a non-intuitive anthropic reasoning argument.
What it is
Rational Animations explains Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model, which argues that humanity looks suspiciously early in cosmic history. Expanding civilizations set a deadline that explains our timing and bears on the Fermi paradox.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2021 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Recommends Isinlor · 2021-12 · on “Ask HN: Long-form info-dense videos on YouTube you would recommend to anyone?”
Everything from 3 blue 1 brown: [LINK] Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics): [LINK] history of the entire world, i guess: [LINK] TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K): [LINK] Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens. and Grabby aliens: when we'll meet them, how big they are, and other predictions [this video] [LINK] Everyday Astronaut videos (he has 90 min documentary on Soviet rocket engine): [LINK] Cool Worlds - a lot of 25-35 min very nice astronomy explanations: [LINK] 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss: [LINK]
Recommends BurningFrog · 2022-06 · on “Amino acids found in asteroid samples collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 probe”
Robin Hanson, who coined the term "Great Filter", presented a theory in 2021 to explain the Fermi Paradox. It's known as the "Grabby Aliens Theory". This 12 minute video does a good job of explaining the fairly non intuitive reasoning: [this video] As I understand it (it's not an easy theory to wrap your - or at least my - mind around), the reason we don't see any other civilizations is that we're among the first ones. This seems very unlikely, but is actually not. Because a successful hi tech civilization would likely be inclined to expand ("be grabby") and fill up the galaxy in ~100 million years, as Fermi pointed out. That would mean all habitable planets would then be taken, and no more civil
Cites pas · 2021-11 · on “Aliens might just be too far away”
The the unseen ones are mostly the harmless ones. The grabby (basically the "expansionist Dyson sphere builders") are the ones we should be on the lookout for. [this video] [LINK] [LINK] Robin Hanson's model explains the data, answers the Fermi paradox. We don't see aliens because if there were aliens to be seen they would be in our place. (Because the hard-steps model parametrized by habitable zone time-frames limited by the lifecycle of stars gives a distribution of emergence of intelligent life. And if just a few of those start expanding, they'll soon cover enormous volumes, taking away the possibility for later emergence of intelligent life.)