Name: There Are Thousands of Alien Empires in The Milky Way
Uploaded: 2026-01-18T17:08:28.000Z
Duration: 13 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What if there are thousands of alien empires in the Milky Way.

Each spanning a few to maybe tens of star systems?

Adverbs of manner

Chatting, trading, sometimes shooting or ignoring each other politely.

While the Milky Way is ancient and gigantic, Even traveling at 10% the speed of light, Any civilization could take over the whole galaxy within a million years.

So it seems we're alone in the Milky Way.

But this idea is built on a lot of assumptions.

Usually when scientists speculate where all the alien civilizations are.

They assume technology will progress to a point where colonizing all of space becomes kind of easy.

But what if we're thinking about this the wrong way?

But no matter how technologically advanced you are, Space is never easy.

What if aliens slowly crawl through space.

Expanding like humans did over the ocean?

Let's look at the only data point we ourselves the available real estate in the galaxy.

Oceania is a region with tens of thousands of islands.

Scattered across millions of square kilometers.

Some 5,000 years ago, the first people set out to colonize Oceania.

Achieved mind blowing feats without any modern technology.

They set out into the vast nothingness, Hoping to find a new island to claim or like die far from home.

But most of the Pacific islands are merely a few wet rocks or corals.

And if you're lucky, birds are making a pit stop.

Others, with more vegetation, are often hostile.

Lacking the resources to really sustain a lot of people.

The Polynesians colonized them, Spreading their culture and society.

To dozens of remote islands of all sizes.

Some united in kingdoms spanning many islands.

Others were independent, Many home to competing and belligerent tribes.

And although thousands of kilometers apart, Even the most remote islands were connected with at least some trade and exchange.

The extremely isolated Pitcairn Islands were settled for hundreds of years.

And relied on trade with each other and bigger islands hundreds of kilometers away.

Maybe because the islanders did the human thing.

And ravaged the natural resources until they became unsustainable.

Maybe the decline on distant, bigger islands severed important connections.

We only know their culture declined and they left or died out.

What if space is an ocean to us, A hostile place that's hard to conquer?

Would alien civilizations spread like the Polynesians the universe is kind of a horrible place.

The Milky way has around 200 billion star systems.

And it seems that almost all of them have planets.

there may be some 300 million to tens of billions of rocky Earth like planets in the habitable zone around a star where water can be liquid.

Amazing, except that most of them are terrible hells of lava.

Sterile from radiation blanked by toxic atmospheres.

It's easy to forget, but Venus and Mars are Earth like too.

Mars is the next human frontier and fairly exciting.

Radiation and low gravity will make you sick.

Mars is the worst, except Venus is even worse.

Crushing you to death, burning and dissolving you in acid.

If humanity was really motivated and had the resources and energy, both could be terraformed within maybe a thousand years.

But the thing is, we already have a planet that's pretty great.

So currently humanity's motivation is not very strong.

Now let's think about this in terms of galactic expansion.

If the Milky Way is like a vast ocean full of islands, most are planets like Mars and Venus.

Barren rocks or corals where nothing grows and the elements kill you.

Imagine boarding a generation ship to travel for 100 years or more, only to arrive at a new star.

And then you get a Mars, or worse, a Venus.

Terraforming them is such an intense investment in terms of resources to make it worth spending the time to travel to the stars for bad planets.

Maybe the simple reason we don't see galaxy spanning civilizations is that the economics just don't add up for almost all of the star systems out there.

But wait, you might say it's actually easy.

A high tech race with unlimited resources could automate this process.

Sending thinking machines that report back every few thousand years with new planets ready for fresh settlers or automated ships with embryos.

But if it were that easy, someone would have done it by now.

So either we are really alone or it's not easy.

Thinking about alien civilizations, you need to make loads of assumptions.

And for this video we're assuming that space is hard even for high tech civilizations that have broken free from the limitations we have today.

So what if alien civilizations actually ignore the bad islands and just pick the very best?

Stringing together island empires like the Polynesians.

Every star moves in its own orbit through the galaxy, and most stellar neighborhoods are only temporary.

At any given time, in some regions, there will be more good islands than in Others, while simply because of bad luck.

Earth might currently be in one of these backwaters, surrounded by really bad islands for dozens of light years in all directions.

We may be Pitcairn island, so isolated that nobody knows we're here or cares to establish a colony so remote.

But elsewhere in the Milky Way, good islands may be more common.

There it would be relatively easy for a high tech civilization to jump from one good star system to the next, creating connected empires, strings of worlds with all the adventure and challenges of expansion, even to really good planets.

Do they need to animate dead worlds with oceans?

How do they cope with alien microorganisms or strange ecosystems?

Do they need to burn it all down and create a mirror of their home world?

How many centuries do they need to make a planet truly their home?

Empires expanding in regions full of good islands would probably meet each other.

Maybe they have coffee and chat about the meaning of it all.

And just like some of the Polynesian islands, it's likely that many of these planets would be abandoned or for the empires to break apart for a number of reasons.

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There Are Thousands of Alien Empires in The Milky Way

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