Are Different ET Races Working Together or Not?

There seem to be two broad schools of thought when people talk about different extraterrestrial races. One says they are mostly independent civilizations, each doing their own thing, perhaps with limited contact or alliances. The other says they are part of some larger system: a hierarchy, federation, empire, bureaucracy, or whatever the interstellar equivalent of corporate management looks like, with the oldest and most advanced civilization somewhere near the top.

I’ve wondered about this for a long time because, based on my own experiences and what I’ve read from abductees and researchers, the different beings often seem less like completely unrelated visitors and more like groups operating within some broader structure. But rather than start with the UFO literature, I wanted to approach the question from another, direction: What would astronomy, evolution, probability, and the sheer age of the Milky Way lead us to expect?

First, We Need Some Assumptions

I’m going to make three assumptions.

Firstly, that abiogenesis occurs whenever a planet develops genuinely suitable conditions for life. Science has not established that. We have only one known example: Earth. But life appears to have arisen relatively early in our planet’s habitable history. The strongest evidence shows a microbial biosphere existed at least around 3.4 to 3.5 billion years ago, while some studies argue for even earlier life, possibly approaching 3.8 billion years ago or more. So, for this exercise, I’m assuming that once you get the right chemistry, liquid water, energy sources, and enough environmental stability, life eventually says: Hello world!

My second assumption is that, given billions of years, natural selection will tend to produce increasingly complex and intelligent organisms on many life-bearing worlds. Evolution does not have a predetermined destination, sometimes simplicity is an enormous evolutionary advantage, but Earth does show an extraordinary long-term expansion in biological complexity. Advanced cognition has also evolved independently in very different groups, including primates, cetaceans, elephants, birds and cephalopods. That convergence makes me suspect that intelligence is not simply a one-time evolutionary accident.

Third, I’m going to assume that some form of effective faster-than-light travel, shortcut through spacetime, wormhole travel, warp-like travel, or some equivalent becomes technologically possible. Known physics does not currently give us an engineering recipe for doing this. I personally suspect that whatever advanced beings may be doing, they are manipulating spacetime rather than literally accelerating through space faster than light.

But for this exercise, the mechanism doesn’t matter. What matters is whether an advanced civilization can travel across interstellar distances quickly enough that the Galaxy becomes accessible. I’m assuming yes, especially because I know they are here.

Now things get interesting.

Life Is Probably Much Older Than Earth

The Milky Way is extremely old. Its earliest stars formed more than 13 billion years ago. Those first stars were made mostly from hydrogen and helium, so they initially lacked large quantities of the heavier elements needed to build rocky planets. But stars are basically cosmic recycling plants. They manufacture elements such as carbon, oxygen, silicon, iron, phosphorus and many others, then distribute them back into space when they die.

We are made from recycled stars. We’re literally, star dust. Very reassuring. Nothing says dignity like realizing your calcium was once stellar debris.

Though the important question is how quickly enough of those elements accumulated to form rocky planets. Apparently, pretty quickly. NASA’s Kepler-444 system contains five terrestrial-size planets and formed about 11.2 billion years ago, when the Milky Way was still young. Those planets orbit much too close to their star to be habitable, but their existence proves that rocky planets were already forming extremely early in Galactic history.

Models of the Galactic habitable zone also suggest that many potentially favorable systems can be substantially older than our Solar System. So I think it is reasonable to say that life-capable planets probably existed many billions of years before Earth formed.

For this thought experiment, I’m going to use about 11.5 billion years ago as a rough starting point for the first genuinely promising worlds. That number is not an observation of ancient life. It is simply a working estimate for when the Galaxy was already have been capable of producing planets where life could arise.

Under my first assumption, life then appears. Now we have a very long clock running. Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. Life has existed here for at least roughly 3.5 billion years, probably longer. Complex animals become conspicuous only around the last 600 million years, and Homo sapiens arrive absurdly late, roughly 300,000 years ago. Technological civilization arrives essentially yesterday.

We went from microbes to smartphones in roughly four billion years. I realize that describing smartphones as the glorious endpoint of biological evolution may be overselling us slightly. Still, let’s use Earth as a rough benchmark. If life began somewhere in the Galaxy 11.5 billion years ago, and another biosphere required roughly four billion years to produce technological intelligence, then its first technological civilization may have appeared around 7.5 billion years ago.

That is extraordinary because the Sun itself did not form until about 4.6 billion years ago. So an ancient civilization could theoretically have been building machines, transmitting signals, or exploring space billions of years before Earth even existed. By the time our planet cooled enough to have oceans, somebody elsewhere might already have had a customer-service department. That is when you know a civilization is truly advanced.

How Many Civilizations?

Suppose that during the relevant early period the Milky Way produced somewhere between 10 million and 100 million genuinely suitable planets. Under my abiogenesis assumption, essentially all of them eventually produce life. Then suppose 50% eventually produce technological intelligence. Now, 50% is not a scientific estimate. But I’m choosing 50% because I think that’s actually fairly conservative. I’ve read what amounts to a small library on evolution, and my suspicion is that natural selection, given enough time and enough ecological opportunity, would eventually produce advanced intelligence on most life-bearing worlds. So, using that 50% assumption gives us somewhere between 5 million and 50 million eventual technological civilizations.

Now suppose some significant fraction eventually masters effective interstellar travel. To give ourselves a concrete number, imagine that roughly 12 million technological civilizations eventually arise, and half of those survive or progress far enough to achieve FTL-like travel. That gives us about 6 million FTL-capable civilizations over Galactic history. Again, that is not an astronomical measurement. It is the output of our assumptions. But now we can ask an interesting probability question.

Six million civilizations would not all achieve FTL on Tuesday afternoon. Their evolutionary histories would differ dramatically. One planet might develop complex life quickly. Another might spend an extra billion years dominated by microbes. One gets hit by a giant asteroid. Another avoids it. One develops intelligent land animals. Another produces extremely clever squid who spend the next million years refusing to leave the ocean because, frankly, dry land looks terrible.

Civilizations themselves would also develop at wildly different rates. Agriculture might appear earlier on one world. Industrialization later on another. One civilization might invent artificial intelligence shortly after electricity. Another might devote 5,000 years to perfecting poetry before somebody finally invents the steam engine. Evolutionary clocks are not synchronized.

Still, suppose our 6 million FTL civilizations emerged across a five-billion-year window. The average spacing would be about 833 years. That does not mean Civilization #2 necessarily appears exactly 833 years after Civilization #1. It simply tells us the average spacing across the whole distribution. Actual gaps could be much shorter or much longer, and the earliest civilizations are especially tricky statistically because they come from the extreme leading edge of the distribution.

So I would no longer claim that the first civilization necessarily had millions of years before the second one. That would be too strong. Under this very civilization-rich model, the gap might instead be hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or occasionally much more. But even an 833-year technological head start could be enormous.

Think about humanity 833 years ago. Around the year 1190, Europeans were fighting with swords, riding horses, illuminating manuscripts by hand, and worrying about whether the neighboring lord was going to burn down the village. Today we have nuclear weapons, gene editing, artificial intelligence, satellites, robots on Mars, and tiny glass rectangles that allow us to argue with strangers worldwide while sitting on the toilet.

Now imagine what 833 years of progress after already mastering interstellar travel might look like. I can’t. And that is probably the point.

The First-Mover Advantage

This is where the idea becomes more interesting to me. The first FTL civilization does not necessarily have to wait for the second civilization to develop FTL before encountering it. Suppose Civilization #1 begins expanding immediately. It sends ships, probes, AI systems, automated factories, or whatever an advanced civilization sends. It gradually spreads outward and eventually finds another inhabited planet.

But Civilization #2 might still be 10 million years away from technological intelligence. Or 100 million. Or perhaps it has already developed agriculture but has not discovered electricity. From Civilization #1’s perspective, that younger civilization has already been found. And the race is over before Civilization #2 even realizes there was a race.

Now repeat that process. Civilization #1 finds Civilization #3, then #4, then #5. Some are microbial. Some have animals. Some have intelligent species. Some may already be technological. Whatever. The first civilization now possesses something enormously valuable: information and position. It knows where developing civilizations are. It knows what stage they are in. It may understand their biology and technology before those species even know Civilization #1 exists. That is a massive first-mover advantage.

Imagine Civilization #1 achieved effective FTL around 7.5 billion years ago. Earth forms around 4.6 billion years ago. That gives the first civilization almost three billion years of potential expansion before our planet even exists. So by the time Earth’s earliest life is appearing, Civilization #1 could already be unimaginably ancient.

Civilization #2 may discover FTL and immediately discover that Civilization #1 has already been watching it for 100 million years. Civilization #3 invents radio and somewhere an ancient probe thinks, Oh good. They’re talking now.

Civilization #4 invents nuclear weapons. Someone may decide it is time for closer supervision.

And by the time Civilization #5 develops interstellar travel, it might discover that what looked like an empty Galaxy is actually covered in infrastructure, rules, territories, agreements, alliances, boundaries, and civilizations whose histories go back billions of years. In other words, nobody gets to arrive second and pretend they arrived first.

Would Civilization #1 Take Over the Others?

Would civilization embark on a path to planetary acquisition? Astronomy does not tell us that Civilization #1 would create an empire. Evolution does not tell us that. Probability does not tell us that. That depends entirely on motives. And motives are where this thought experiment becomes much less scientific and much more interesting.

One possibility is security. Suppose Civilization #1 eventually encounters Civilization #2 after it develops comparable interstellar technology. Maybe relations are peaceful. Maybe not. If a major war occurred, the winner might conclude that they will never allow that situation to develop again. So, future civilizations could then be monitored and incorporated before they become strategic competitors. Very human reasoning, admittedly. Perhaps embarrassingly human.

Another possibility is planetary preservation. Suppose Civilization #1 watches younger technological societies repeatedly destroy themselves or severely damage their planets through nuclear war, runaway technologies, ecological collapse, poorly aligned artificial intelligence, or something we have not even invented yet. Some interstellar bureaucrat may eventually decide: All right. Nobody gets the keys until they can prove they won’t drive the planet into a wall.

A living planet could be extraordinarily valuable even if life itself is common. Earth is an oasis surrounded by enormous distances of vacuum, radiation, and lifeless rock. Maybe advanced civilizations care more about preserving biospheres than preserving political independence. That would certainly be awkward for us.

Another possibility is simply dangerous technology. Technological progress may follow something like an S-curve. Once a civilization reaches computers, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, or some other threshold, progress could accelerate rapidly. A civilization millions or billions of years younger might still become dangerous surprisingly quickly. Just consider our own species. We went from the first powered airplane to nuclear weapons in only 42 years. That is not exactly a reassuring résumé.

Maybe a civilization does not need to become technologically equal to its elder to become dangerous. North Korea is far less technologically and economically powerful than the United States, yet nuclear weapons dramatically change how other countries treat it. A younger interstellar civilization might similarly discover some technology capable of causing enormous damage even without matching the older civilization in every other field. That alone could create incentives for regulation.

And there is another possibility. Maybe the reason would make absolutely no sense to us.

Maybe We’re The Monkeys

Suppose the first civilization really is billions of years older than humanity. We might not be capable of understanding its motivations. Trying to infer its strategy could be like teaching international monetary policy to a chimpanzee. The chimp might eventually understand that bananas are somehow involved. That could be about as far as we get.

Imagine a group of monkeys discovered sign language. Maybe by a clever monkey that was taught by humans then escaped. Then they started making tools. Then spears.

Humans probably would not hold a diplomatic summit and say, “Congratulations. You are now our geopolitical equals.” We would observe them. Study them. Restrict them if necessary. Protect nearby human communities from the random spear hurled their way. Perhaps protect the monkeys from themselves. And depending on humanity’s mood that century, probably do several ethically questionable things along the way.

From the monkeys’ perspective, our motives might seem completely mysterious. But now imagine the intelligence difference between humanity and a civilization billions of years older than us. That comparison may actually flatter us.

So Are All the ETs Working Together?

The astronomy supports the idea that habitable worlds could be billions of years older than Earth. The probability argument supports the possibility that one technological civilization could emerge before others and obtain a powerful first-mover advantage. If effective interstellar travel is possible, that first civilization could discover younger civilizations long before those civilizations become spacefaring.

From there, a larger hierarchy, alliance, federation, regulatory system, or empire becomes quite plausible. So, if I had to choose between two possibilities of whether ET is working together or not, I’d go with the former because that makes sense to me. Go back to our monkeys. Suppose they learned sign language, developed tools, and eventually started fasioning spears. We still would not suddenly look at them and say, “Well, congratulations. You’re exactly like us now.”

We would understand their abilities far better than they understood ours. We would know their history. We might have watched them develop from the very beginning. And if they became capable of threatening nearby humans, we would make sure they couldn’t. From the monkeys’ perspective, we might appear impossibly advanced and our motives completely mysterious. Now multiply that technological and intellectual difference by potentially billions of years.

I find it difficult to picture them as dozens of completely independent civilizations randomly flying around the Galaxy, each making its own rules and occasionally bumping into the others over Contact in The Desert for their regularly scheduled abductions. It seems more plausible to me that they are working together within some kind of hierarchy.

Some civilization had to get there first, and whoever got there first would have had an enormous advantage over everyone who came afterward. So for the different beings reported by abductees, my suspicion is that they are not all equals. Some may be ancient. Some may be comparatively young. Some may have enormous authority. Others may simply have jobs to do.

Just as humans would never regard newly technological monkeys as our equals, a civilization billions of years older than us may not regard humanity as remotely equal either. We might be observed, managed, protected, used, controlled, or incorporated eventually. But since we are still here, I’m choosing to take one small bit of comfort from all of this because apparently “wipe out the humans” was not the first item on the agenda.

So that’s nice.

P.S. This article was inspired by an alien allegedly dismissing abductions with, and I paraphrase,“That wasn’t us. Those were the bad aliens.”  That compelled me to look at the science to show whether the different ET groups are working independently or not.