Hello SFIA audio listeners, in this month's nebulous exclusive, giant space masters will take a look at what sorts of alien behemoths might be possible under known science. To hear it an every episode early in air free, plus hours of bonus content, check out go.nebular.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code Isaac Arthur. The road to eternity is even longer than the roads between stars, and some may choose to sleep
and dream away the yons. Perhaps we might encounter such dreamy empires out among the stars, though such an encounter may awaken nightmares upon the galaxy. The space between galaxies is even emptier than the space between stars, but sometimes you come across stars out there and for those multi-million-year journeys between galaxies as we reached out from the Milky Way to the neighbors beyond, we paused on those journeys
and even zig-zag to set up those systems we did find. This would help form a bridge of stars between galaxies and allow more missions to follow one day and contact to remain
along the bridge. When a splinter of fleet breaks off from the main intergalactic armada, to set up one of these bridge stars, its main goal is to erect the massive energy beam system around that star that will relay communications to neighboring bridge stars and help slow or speed up in your ships that come by joining between stars.
At Midway Station, over a million light years from Earth, the settlers knew no customers would be coming behind for at least a million years, as they were an unplanned system originally bypassed or have a red giant binary system in it. That binary giant exploded as a supernova long after they locked in on a different original path for the armada, but it was a more direct route so their splinter was to settle and build up this more straight line node in
their bridge, far, far ahead in time. In the grand scheme of things this didn't take them very long and with the abundant and currently surplus supply of power, they said about terraforming Midway C, the most promising planet around the remaining star. But the newly formed black hole that remained from the binary was relatively loud, absorbing lots of local matter and emitting radiation blasts that were making it less than ideal to settle
that region of space until it settled down in at least a million years. They contemplated some enhancements or genetic bioforming to better let them settle that planet sooner, but rejected the options as they exceeded what most felt comfortable with. Some experimented with the suggested biological changes and this discouraged most as it seemed to cause
a bit of an uptick in imporcellness and aggression. They decided instead to build vast cryovalt steep inside a mountain on Midway C and to leave the remaining terraforming and space infrastructure maintenance up to the limited AI they employed. They reasoned that even if things began breaking down they could easily awaken and repair it in the time scales they'd have before any other ship could possibly arrive, so they set their crypts to awaken them a million years
later when the route could be established. Some of them though decided to depart using the beaming system to send them back to the Milky Way while they slept, while others decided that rendezvous and again with the intergalactic fleet at the new galaxy would be better. A small group agreed to maintain their original moon base, going on ice and having a few members wake up every few centuries on a staggered rotation to just make sure
all was well. There was a small but non-zero chance of something going wrong every time you froze and thought from the extremely cold temperatures used for multi-millennia freezing. For this reason the maintainers who would all have to wake up over and over again were
kept few in number and they were not a lot of volunteers. The sleepers, the maintainers, the returners and the chaserers all pulched in amicably but in the confusion a small faction called the changers were able to sneak into the maintainers numbers who again were anxious for volunteers. The changers were those who favored a more extreme biophorming approach that would allow much earlier settlement of midway sea and plan to supplant the maintainers
in pursuit of that goal. Some the changers volunteered to be on the first rotation of maintainers to awaken with the intent of fine all the changers out, then altering the system to prevent the other maintainers waking up until the sleepers as a whole did.
The changers reason that after a million years had started they could easily take control the system and grow to huge numbers, then when the sleepers awakened they could be given a chance to join an already thriving society biophormed or not or head on back to the
Milky Way or follow the chasers to their new galaxy. This was an ancient group largely posed human with many of their members already thousands of years old, some even remembering the Milky Way itself and some dreamed of seeing it again and were not afraid of deep time. Of course the maintainers were not composed just of the changers but many others who were committed to their long term success and the types of people who always wanted
another contingency plan and for saw multitude of ways things could go wrong. Indeed several of them had volunteered to become maintainers out of a sense of duty to protect their civilization
from the many dooms it might befall while slumbering. Some of their more senior members were the sorts who didn't just have a plan B or C but a whole alphabet of contingencies so they built in tamper guards for every system including automated defenses on the sleeper vaults, randomizing the selection of who was waking up when and always thying in teams
of three. The changers didn't know of many of these safeguards and when they were all awakened they were shocked to find out that the first two changers had killed the maintainer warden on shift with them allegedly as a last resort. The plan had been for a bloodless and civilized takeover so starting their transformation to the new ward in the wake of a mortar put a strain on the changers that wasn't helped by problems with the initial
bioforming efforts. The changes to themselves were extraordinary and outside the well documented and tested alterations commonly implemented during humanity's expansion through the galaxy. One of the more subtle side effects were made an unfortunate tendency to be a bit more aggressive and impulsive than before though they didn't entirely believe or accept that
at least until it was too late. They planned a hijackly automated awakening system for the other maintainers to delay the next shift awakening or borrowing that to be done with their basic changes by then and simply put the new shift under guard or freeze them but they had delays and problems and realized they were serious tamper guards on the cryo computers. So when the new shift arose since they were outnumbered hundreds to one they
offered them the chance to join or go back on ice. One of them had been a person who previously showed sympathy for the change or perspective and was an expert on the cryo system's security software so they believed them when they offered to join up. But in reality they were horrified
by the plan and set the system to instead start awakening the other maintainers. This resulted in a violent fight inside the lunar facility and its eventual destruction, leaving under a hundred scattered changers down on midway sea, meaning broken in spirit and horrified the outcome. They survived but barely on a planet that would need centuries of improvement
to even qualify as baron. Within a few millennia none of the original changers remained and their numbers were still few and their technology increasingly patched and less understood by those maintainers. Upon a world so harsh it was hard to rebuild civilization and their techno barbarian descendants increasingly grew prone to warring among their tribes and more reckless genetic engineering of themselves and their environment. Many of these changes
were unwise or unstable and hereditary. A particularly bad radiation flare occurred off the black hole when a large asteroid fell into it that would easily have been prevented by their forerunners. The period that followed has no name in their history as their history ended then for hundreds of thousands of years but would have been called a dark age had
those which preceded it or followed it not already been so dark themselves. And they were quite dark as there are no stars in the sky of midway sea a million light years from the nearest galaxy. Time passed on though and their descendants slowly had their genetic stabilize and their new ecosystem too. Their ancient human ancestors would barely have recognized them but the changers were still largely humanoid and intelligent and with
time they once more built civilization and began to thrive on their planet. Then the first sleeper vault opened a small contingent meant to ensure all was ready for others to awaken inside their mountain fortress which was now a large mountainous island in the middle of an Arctic ocean and home to just a small scientific outpost of this young new civilization emerging from its dark age using the location for an observatory to try to see some of these
other stars in those two galaxies they had only recently realized even existed. The sleepers had awakened few in number but with all their technological might intact and with millions of kindred soon to arise an empire awakened to a war stolen from them by treachery and unpleased by what they found. Our known universe is beyond immense dwarfing our galaxy by the same scale that this galaxy dwarfs our lonely solar system.
Our pale blue dot orbits our lonely sun and for all of its immensely is less than the grain of sand compared to this universe and yet it is where all of human history has taken place. It is where all of its many billions of people have lived and all of our recorded history squeezes into just a millionth the time this planet has been around and yet for all of Earth's age it is quite young only around a thought of the time our galaxy has
existed and our universe too. The cosmos themselves the full totality of all that was and ever will be may be even greater and grander and older than that but even just on this tiny planet it isn't too hard to imagine how our great civilizations might have existed that we know nothing of let alone on those other billions and billions of other planets many
billions of years older than Earth. Back when our archaeological and fossil records were a lot scantier and we were just waking up to how old the world was it wasn't too uncommon to imagine civilizations that predated us indeed we found a ton in the later 19th and early 20th century that law human only encouraged us to speculate more on even more ancient and
less human civilizations. The entire cosmic or sub-shot of fiction best known for HP Lovecraft and bordering even on works like Robert Howard's Conan series revolve around these speculations of ancient civilizations here on Earth and our growing awareness of the vastness and age of the wider cosmos whether it was on Earth or out to the universe though the question arises of what happened to these ancient civilizations
and if some remnant of them remained not simply ruins. What caused their re-nation or diminishment and could they simply be hibernating like a predator in its dark cave waiting to
arise again? It is a scary thought since even assuming they are not the monstrous entities we see like Cthulhu they might see us occupying what they regard as their territory and either wipe us out or conquer us or at best maybe just tell us we would be on the equivalent of a small reservation left to ourselves but forbidden to expand.
Fiction is full of dormant alien empires waking up once more usually predatory ones that some human unwise they woke up and it is a topic we've discussed before too but we tend to assume they had no presence of note here on Earth. In recent episodes we looked at what might have happened if dinosaurs had never died out and gotten smart instead
and also at the idea of hollow Earths. While I was writing those I had the amusing notion of someone building hollow concentric layers of planets and populating them with various epochs of the planet's zoological history, human layers, dino layer with a fake sky and starry night on the underside of the human layer or some other layers in between and
so on. At the same time I was recording this month's nebula exclusive on planetary archives and stasis vaults where we discussed the merits of putting such things in deep underground vaults or easily accessed places and whether an archival vault should be secret or not. I would not expect to find any pre-human civilizations existed or remained. We talked about
that in detail in the Salirian hypothesis a few years back. But if I were an ancient technological empire that wanted to hibernate for some reason I could make a good case for cleaning up the more obvious signs of our existence and burying ourselves underground. We also contemplated machine monitors for watching over alien worlds where primitive life had been found and it would make sense to leave a group behind and have them set up a
small civilization for the purpose of monitoring. Our notion of a lone watchman isn't really realistic on geological timelines. You might need the equivalent of a small nation at least. That nation might change their mind down the road about protecting a civilization
too. That inspired our story for the beginning. For channel regulars we'll canonically add that to the adventures of the unity, the ship and crew we followed in the life in a space colony series on their voyage out to Saturn than to other star systems and eventually onto the galaxy's edge in the episode intergalactic colonization where they were getting ready to depart with a huge fleet from the terminus
system. I was also inspired a bit by magrathia, the planet they visited in Douglas Adams hitchhike was guides the galaxy that was rich beyond imagining because they built artificial planets for the people and in doing so drained so much of the wealth of the galaxy that no one could afford their services anymore and so they went on ice until the economy recovered millions of years later.
In this case, their building an unplanned intergalactic relay point, something incredibly valuable but which would take a million years for anyone to even get a message about to advertise its availability for use crossing the intergalactic void. Midway's founders are from the unity fleet which obviously is intended to be a fairly civilized and benevolent group of humanity and I wouldn't assume they are splinter fleet sent on the cyquest to midway was much different
so they're not likely to wake up and genocide their distant mutinies and nephews especially for the crimes of their ancestors so long gone that the only remnants of them would be fossils of their bones and maybe a few rust out components of whatever cybernetic enhancements they had. That said, they are also not too likely to feel like they have no claim on this world
and they are probably several light centuries from any other system. This is the intergalactic void after all and distant travelers have probably been en route to the midway system for over a million years and expecting some sort of greeting and aid. In point of fact given that those travelers are not fools or static they probably will have planned for problems cropping up at midway and maybe very
inhuman in appearance themselves. On the flip side the folks from midway probably will have contemplated arriving armadas being conquest oriented and what advantage of having an enormous pushing beam designed to slow gigatons of ship down from near light speed or give them a push on a new course is they could use those as a weapon to rip that fleet apart too. And this also means one of the first things they're going to do on waking is move to cease control of that system
and make sure it's fully operational or restore it. It is not hard to imagine evil and strange aliens awakening and doing evil or strange things to us. It is after all the entire basis of the cosmic or genre but it's a bit different when contemplating entirely rational and even kind dormant empires waking up and moving ruthlessly to reassort control. We see something like that
occur with the ancients from Stargate Atlantis. The crew originally from modern Earth is traveling back to Atlantis in the Pegasus Scalicy to the Milky Way on a FTL faster than light capable ship when they see another ship moving at something like 99.9999% of light speed. This turns out to be an ancient ship who left long ago and had their own FTL drive fail partway through. They couldn't repair it so decided to resume their travel as close to light speed as they could get.
Relying on relativity to slow time down for them personally so their million year long flight would be survivable. Their civilization was already millions of years old. It went quasi-extinct relatively recently as these things go so they anticipate their kindred would still be they are waiting for them either they didn't come looking for them to give help. Which would be plausible enough and them easier to spot moving that fast from their ultra-relativistic radiation wake.
The heroes of the show siglo them and offer aid half expecting the ship to be dead or similar. They had some prior bad experiences with leftover ancients and their technology. They are then shocked at how fast the ancients responds to the signal and can slam the brake, turn around and politely ask for help. They render it and since they are still closer to Pegasus in the Atlantis station they head back there where they recovered ancients promptly summed up a control terminal no one
knew was there. Identify themselves to the Atlantis computer and take over control of everything. They politely tell the humans to bug off. Nothing personal they are grateful for the help but this was their home and while they are very open to future contact and even visits it's theirs. It is kind of hard to argue the point and kind of futile too since while they are prehuman ancestors they are decidedly posthuman and have access to stupidly powerful technologies that unlike the
Atlantis crew they actually fully understand. They do concede to a reasonable window to vacate things and allow one human ambassador to remain at least temporarily. This is Richard Woolsey instantly played by Robert Picardo not to be confused with his holographic character from
Star Trek Voyager. Until this point the only ancients we see on the station are either holographic personas or from some time travel episodes and same for after this as he is the only survivor after an attack that once more leaves the ancients extinct and has him calling back home to the
Milky Way for help and stating the nature of the medical emergency. The attack was by some of the ancients left over artificial intelligences who hold a grudge against them for building them imperfectly and to use in a war and then deciding to abandon the project as a failure and absolutely glassing the planet they did their experiments on. The ancients and Stargate are usually portrayed as smelt and well intention but occasionally do some intensely stupid and debatably
super evil things. In science fiction discussion where ancient pre-course races such as them are common they often get classified into three categories benevolent neglectful and abusive. Like a lot of fictional ancient and godlike entities they tend to also qualify for the alternative to black and white morality called blue and orange morality for cases where their reasoning is so alien and perpendicular to our normal concept of good evil that it just doesn't
apply. Cthulhu is either the ultimate evil or simply so alien and goal is that it doesn't apply and the same for all the old ones in love cracky and horror. We don't see a lot of benevolent pre-course or science fiction they either got wiped out by something or believe they should leave modern humanity free of interference. From a storytelling perspective this is kind of necessary to keep their
impact on events minimal. Neglectful pre-course are more common and usually it's not that they were evil they just didn't care about us or expect us and they tend to left all sorts of dangerous things lying around the galaxy like weapons for incinerating planets or snuffing out stars. Abusive pre-course races are more common still and often they have been nerfed by something to explain why they awaken in tending to obliterate us but can't quite pull it off.
Frequently they almost all die in hibernation or most of them are still asleep and unable to be awakened yet. It's not time yet or something similar. Often time has driven them mad too causing them to make mistakes or get obsessed with something like collecting antiquities or history. Indeed it often gets argued that only those with such obsessions can survive the long mulch of
yarns. Eternity is not for the mortal mind. As we've often discussed in fiction this is just a plot device to face us with a strange, mysterious and irresistible enemy when against which there is no hope and yet there is because that's the point of the story. Because it is so popular in science fiction it is also a common go-to in discussion of the Fermi paradox that especially has a lot of authors make an understandable effort to make the plot of their stories sound plausible.
A word of advice to authors doing this though. Do not ever give in to the desire overcrest by audiences to fill in the blanks on the mysterious evil bad guys. Or alternatively the mysterious benevolent ancient good guys. It just makes them sound stupid and incompetent and the heroic ones usually less than admirable too. The Stargate ancients for instance
appear to have repeatedly made doomsday devices that were toned on them. And then after achieving ascension to a higher plane of existence individually and being entirely able to help their unassented brethren chose not to. Simply because they agreed it was a bad habit. This included leaving the Pegasus galaxy behind where aliens they helped make the Rath 8 humans as they were cattle except they specifically enjoyed them being terrified too.
And enemy brethren behind in their home galaxy the Ori who literally created an entire galaxy of humans to worship them and who soars they ate. Needless to say the ancients are still better than examples like the Rieperus from Mass Effect, the inhibitors from Revelation Space, or the Vorlons and Shadows from Babylon 5 who all have semi-valid claims at being well-intentioned.
Unlike the Necrons or Elder from Warhammer 40,000 who both regard modern humans as an offensive type of garbage at best be ignored, wiped out where possible, and some cases tortured or mutilated for fun and profit. It is 40k so they are still not the worst thing out there a human-mighting counter and the human empire of the setting is about as tyrannical and terrifying as the worst
civilizations we've ever spawned, at least that history has managed to record. Which includes some nightmare or so bad we tend to assume the accounts were made up by their enemies till archaeologists show they were just about right. Syphy does show us the occasional evil alien empire that was considered so bad that once it was finally resisted and destroyed every trace of
his existence was wiped out and the records of it too. Of course in these cases they inevitably miss something which has been hybridating until the time was right or until some poor full awakening and unleashed it on the peaceful galaxy. It's not really clear why it needed Solon to build things though or needed external help awakening. It is hard to figure out why some empire would
go on ice in its prime. I had to rack my brain to contrive the circumstances for midway C and as we discussed in sleeping giants and hibernating aliens there's not a lot of reasons why you would go on ice for eons. One of those suggested is Estivation Hypothesis, a Fermi paradox theory from 7 years back in 2017 and part of the wider general category that aliens are mostly dormant or hibernating but here it is specifically for the purpose of surviving to an
era where they can better use their resources. Normally it wouldn't seem to make sense for civilization to hibernate for eons while others arrived to claim territory but the notion goes that computation may be easier in an order and quarter universe under the land our computational limit that at half a temperature it takes half the energy to flip a bit or have a thought. And the universe is slowly cooling down. This was the topic of our 2016 episode Black Hole Farming,
one of our most popular early videos which turns 8 years old this week. If you're post-biological entity you can then use the same energy or fuel to run vast the more computation or thought or lifespan so the reason is that you save resources up to run then and you freeze yourself for antostasis until then to get the most living off your resources. The problem is that while this absolutely makes sense it doesn't in the current universe as it appears to be because there's
so many resources lying around unused and untapped. If our galaxy is unused yet because we are the first entities in it then this is fine nothing has been mined and stored yet because no one has been capable but isn't a good reason for explaining the absence of previous civilizations as it
suffers from the issue of leaving a vast supply of available galactic resources untouched whereas a hibernating civilization planning for a post stellar civilization for greater efficiency would be expected to ransack the galaxy to put everything in storage depots of some sort and it would seem hard to argue they would prefer to sleep through this era when they could just send robots
out to do the harvesting. It does not work well under non exclusivity since there is no compelling reason why some civilizations or factions of civilizations might decide not to hibernate or might hibernate but do resource gathering forced automatically. That said it could walk in conjunction with the version of the interdiction hypothesis or the chrono scenarios we looked at earlier this
year which is part of why we are revisiting this topic today. This is where civilization gets worried that its colonies are themselves becoming a threat that they are merely seeding the stars with mutant offspring who are at best of no view of value to them and expensive to create and at worst are openly hostile, ungrateful or murderous children or might create dangerous technologies far
from civilization in the wild and uncontrolled fringe areas of the empire. Under this approach you just mine out the area around you until it is effectively an uninhabitable wasteland as this prevents others from settling it makes it hard for outside alien empires to invade through if any exists and gives you an immense stash of resources to support your eternal empire. It also tends to assume this same problem would apply to alien empires so they have little motive
to invade and expand either. A million empires that exist as well stocked fortresses or racists inside a desert of their own making leaving most of the galaxy or white or cosmos fairly untouched and thus nothing for us to see yet. We also can't assume every alien would dislike hibernation. Hibernation is usually considered a risky strategy that creatures avoid in nature but I've seen some papers debating that recently including those suggesting it may be associated with a long or
lifespan. That resonates with me because I tend to expect we will solve the issue of biological mortality in the next century or so and not really have to worry about aging or disease or crime or injury as causes of death much and I figure aliens would have the same options but there is always that worry of boredom or simply that life might be really hard to keep living sanely if you live
it too long. How human are you even with a human body in mind if you pack tens of thousands of years of life into that memory how about tens of millions would you hibernate between voyages to the stars likely the AI on your ship should be able to handle most things how about at home once
your planet has reached its nominal maximum comfortable population do you put a population cap in place probably official or unofficial you would tend to need one same for your system once it hits Kardashev 2 maximums maybe you get around some of that by having folks spend a lot of time on ice
you take less resources to sustain that way so you spend a lot of time sleepy in shifts this might also shake up the normal power irarchies with rearrangements of who is awake and help circumvent some of the normal upward mobility social issues long live civilizations might have
that's hardly a dormant empire of course but maybe that's what ends up happening you all know that your local stockpile of resources is maxed out and then in the long term it will work more efficiently in a post stellar universe so most hibernate a lot mini like doing it simply to skip
a head a while and see if anything new has happened something interesting or some cheat codes found for a handling entropy or cheating reality this doesn't mean they leave themselves vulnerable given that a much faster and easier way to get more out of your available resources than
waiting half of eternity is to expend some of them locating other stockpiles than attacking and seizing them even if your main plan was to wait out a quadrillion years to run your hyper-efficient computerized existence you might assume that by waiting carefully you could identify a foolish
neighbor who left their defenses down or gave up or broke down and even if that opportunity only popped up once in a billion years that's a million such opportunities for you between now and a quadrillion years from now so i hesitate to say hibernation overall is something evolution
would generally seek to avoid particularly since so many creatures here do it also the main danger of hibernating is the protracted weakness and vulnerable state and a civilization can avoid that by some very common sense methods like leaving some wardens behind albeit that also leaves you
at the mercy of those wardens whose motivations might be dubious and even if not have a lot of paths for failure as i was getting ready to write this episode i noted my cat was doing what he often is napping cat spend around half to two thores of their day sleeping compared to humans who typically
do about a thord humans are a bit of a strange case for brains and sleep but generally speaking predators sleep more than prey your cat sleeps a lot can serve energy in reality they spend a lot of that in 15 to 30 minute naps during which they can react very quickly waiting patiently for the
right moment is something predators tend to get by default we tend to assume that predator species are more likely to be in a position to dominate their environment and evolve technology you can make the reverse case that they don't really need to work as hard for technology because they already
have that top slot with what nature gave them in tooth and claw our only example of high tech is humans and that humans are scammatures by nature and that relates to our ascension through brains and technology and we should assume our lonely status with technology is related in some way to a
trait or traits humans have that other animals do not or have in different intensity or flavor that said we do see tool used by critters besides humans and many all predators time will tell but it would not seem strange for a predator to become the basis for a high tech civilization
indeed we arguably mutated into one as we developed basic technology and it also wouldn't be strange for them to have the idea of hibernating or napping a lot as a good idea a key point today is that we wouldn't expect an entire civilization to go completely on ice for eons but the notion
of short naps is a very different story especially if everyone is doing them and it is staggered when I discuss hibernating civilizations I tend to offer reasons why it doesn't make sense but it is worth noting that we tend to enshrine what we are predisposed to do and then either exempt
it from critical discussion or twist our efforts to justify it logically that's probably not rare in nature so a predatory species might really lock into the idea of hibernating naps being a good idea they also might be more likely to come up winners in a galactic war we fear sleeping predators for
a reason they make terrible enemies and that's why they are the bad guys in so many stories patience being a virtue on galactic scales if you hollow out a chunk of the galaxy for your interdicted fortress oasis since stars do migrate you probably have to wake up occasionally to go
harvest the new ones that ventured into your desolation it probably would not be a good thing to be on a planet that drifted into this interdicted zone though if you were entirely primitive and millions of years from developing technology they might leave you be while your star system
drifted through their empire more likely they disassemble your planet for raw material to add to their dragon horde dormant planet ships colonizing other galaxies are an option for this so are extra galactic sanctuaries and rim migration and the introduction scenario we discussed
indeed when contemplating predators this worth remembering that the biggest threat to humans is other humans and predators are often even more anti social and untrusting and territorial than we are so we'd be rightfully paranoid about our neighbors potentially trying to rob us while
we are on ice i can well imagine they would be too this is a large part of the argument against them developing big interdependent civilizations of course but the argument is hardly ironclad i can make good cases both for and against why they might be more and less likely to favor hibernation than others especially as highly territorial critters might be very prone to interdiction style oasis fortress setups or to run for the hills to set up a trillion separate empires they may even
like the hibernation setups specifically because it allowed them to raid each other for resources and be gleeful for the opportunities to raid arrival or be awakened to the sounds of battle as some young upstart or foolish new alien explorer tried to pillage their stasis pyramid or planets
would a whole empire go on ice though well maybe but never stupidly and while they should leave guardians and alums in place it is worth remembering that they never go on ice if there was an external enemy nearby so they would be building the concept around their biggest fear of being
each other and at this scale even your children and trusted servants are worrisome because you stand between them and their inheritance and you are showing an intention to keep standing there all the way to a ton of these gate so they might want to shove you through it the idea of an
ancient empire waking up is both awesome and terrifying especially if it turned out we were on their torre and they weren't thrilled about it they are unlikely to be much weakened by the hibernation since they wouldn't have done it if they hadn't put a ton of safeguards and research into it
and that means within even a few days of waking up maybe less they would be emerging with uncountable fleets and armies and probably entirely up to date and accurate intel on the current galactic scene since again they'd be insane to have an empire of untold trillions and not
leave at least a few thousands awake at a time monitoring everything summary version if a dormant alien empire wakes up they probably will not that dormant and you probably should not get into a conflict with them if you can possibly avoid it the good news is that the current state of the
universe as best as we can tell from astronomy means you probably can't avoid that conflict either because they don't exist or because they don't for whatever reason go around scouring the galaxy of life and resources to be fair they may decide they don't need all the galaxy's resources
just an awful lot of them and so long as it remains untouched by others it will be enough when the time comes and they find it easier to emerge occasionally and kill off new civilizations rather than just harvest everything who knows though one day as we reach out into the galaxy
and send settlers and explorers to the billions of wars more ancient than our own we might find some of them hold civilizations more ancient than our tiny pale blue dot and who have slumbered in their majestic immensely through the eons before and perhaps one day we may join them in that
hibernation and awaken at the end of time. Today we discussed ancient dormant alien civilizations that might be hiding throughout the galaxy and a critical aspect of making that work has to be some impressive stasis vaults and archives in this month's nebula exclusive will be exploring
those technologies and what their uses are for civilization such as hibernation and how that usage might shape such a civilization including those that might have many citizens regularly going on ice to leapfrog forward in time that's out now on nebula where you can see all our episodes early
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a year of nebula to your friend for just 30 dollars so today we pondered the idea that the apparent absence of aliens might be from them being dormant and next week we're asked instead if maybe the conditions in this universe might be uniquely suited to life arising as we contemplate
the idea of the fine tuned universe and what's implications would be if true especially for the Fermi paradox we mentioned the importance of self-reparering machines today for keeping your empire running while dormant and we'll return to the topic of self-reparering machines on the 25th
after that we'll journey to the moon and explore life as a nomadic minor on the moon if you'd like to get alerts with those and other episodes come out make sure to hit the like, subscribe and notification buttons you can also help support the show by becoming a member here on
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