"Don't worry guys, I have been accompanying Isaac around and saw him do tasks. He is not an imposter." *Gets neck snapped five minutes later*

This trope is even older still, dating back to the idea of a fey changeling or older. I've heard somewhere that one theory is that since autism starts to present at a young age, and people didn't understand stuff like it for most of history, that it was a mythological superstitious explanation for severe cases making "normal" babies suddenly start acting "alien."

I think the smartest kind of impersonation, and my favorite kind in fiction, are the ones who the people around them find them more likeable. People don't usually question the doppelganger about the change in a negative or suspicious way since it's seen positively and usually at or near the end of the story those people end up taking the side of the imposter over the original even when they know the truth.

Given the super-impressive appearance altering that some octopodes can do, I think we might be able to make pretty convincing disguises with tech. They can mimic textures and colors _amazingly_ well. Well enough that anything short of close contact will be inadequate to tell the difference. It's not perfect, but they can even blend in with artificial pattern - and they're just acting on instinct.

What an invigorating concept. Thanks Issac, as an Identical twin that used to swap classes, I can definitely relate to this. I used to do extra science, my brother did extra physical education so it’s justified, I’d do anything to learn more science, it’s worth it.

Something not mentioned here with regards to memory is that if someone keeps not remembering things they really, really should, then what is suspected, (for it is what it very sadly turns out to be) is an illness. Even if you are thinking you wouldn't think that about someone young, there are things that can cause memory loss I think (like some brain tumours). In a society where imposter aliens are not an actual thing thought to be real, I think that's where ordinary people's thinking would go if presented with someone apparently super forgetful. This line of thinking made me think up an idea for a dark sci-fi story where humanity finds out that imposter aliens are an actual real thing, and this causes huge panic. Loads of people become super paranoid that anyone they know could be replaced, and there ends up being witch hunt style courts where anyone who gets a bit forgetful for whatever reason gets dragged in front of and loads of innocent people end up being punished in some way, with people claiming it is justified by being sure humanity get the actual aliens, even if there are loads of false positives. Then for extra irony at the end, it turns out that when the aliens realised humanity had become aware of their existence, to protect their agents they had recalled them all, so none of the people accused of being aliens actually were.

The Dutch resistance in WWII reportedly used the name of the town Scheveningen as a password in the war, due to especially that first syllable being really hard to pronounce 'as a native', even for Germans although they are our neighbors and even if they have a thorough understanding of Dutch. If you knew to fool us saying that word, you would have to be a master impostor/spy.

There's a Dresden File story where a shapeshifter, who is very dangerous, extremely hard to hurt, and casually threatening in a way that comes from knowing it, increasingly takes on the form and memories of a crooked accountant who had passwords and permissions he shouldn't have had. As he adopts the memories of his target so that he can access this information, he begins to be frightened and intimidated by the assorted magical gangsters and their wild schemes that he's been sneering at up until that point. (and simultaneously frustrated by this.) It's a fun scene.

When the aliens are SUS.

My first introduction to this category was the Yeerks from the Animorphs book series. They were a sentient species of parasitic slug. They went into the body through the ear (somehow not damaging the eardrum in the process) and sank into the brain, taking control of the person's body. When I was a kid I LOVED the Animorphs. The titular team themselves could transform into animals using technology. Somehow they were able to remove or add mass to their bodies.

Carl Sagan is an alien who lived among us for a while. He helped nudge us along a path. Pretty obvious.

The alien anthropology aspect could certainly be something, if a culture had the tech to make doppelgangers and the like. Could do it Star Trek style, where they're not replacing anyone but instead having researchers show up one day as John Personman. Learn everything there is to know about another species by living as one of them, while also having an engineered body that was indistinguishable from any other individual on the planet.

I had a brainslug a while back, it starved to death after a few days...

Haha I love that this starts off with a tick reference.

On the “digital imposter” point, there are currently criminals who do this to the elderly. My grandma got a call from “her granddaughter”, K. “K” said, “Grandma, I got in trouble and I need some money, please don’t tell my parents.”, to which my grandmother replied “my K wouldn’t call me ‘grandma’” *click*.

What a coincidence, I happened to watch the red dwarf episode "Psirens" today for the first time in years, quite a funny idea, the species use telepathy to convince victims that they're human so they can get close enough to feed on their brains 🤣 but one who makes its self a doppelganger of a ship crew member is foiled by the fact that the crew member really believes himself to be a legendary guitar player, when he actually isn't.. the other crew members give the doppelganger a guitar and it plays it so well that the crew shoot him right on the spot

What about an advanced version of metamorphosis? I read somewhere that caterpillars will dissolve its body in the cocoon and reforming as a butterfly with memories intact. An advanced version of that could be transforming into a completely different species, while only needing the targets genetic material like blood. Still won't get their memories, but might work

Rule #1 of warfare: All is well :)

A better solution for the Fermi paradox regarding your past videos is the fact that most stars are catechismic variable Stars and those Stars will hold back life from developing

I hope you realise just what you have unleashed onto the world with this title...

If brain slugs do arrive in the post I don't think I'd have too much to worry about, like Fry. (Love the Futurama references by the way). Thought-provoking as always Isaac, thanks! ☺

I spend way too much time thinking about how the DS9 changelings work. It's canon that their mass changes when they change shape, which is completely broken. They could turn into an ant, climb up to the ceiling right above your head, and decide to become a boulder instead. They could be a grain of rice on your fork and you wouldn't even know it. Splort. There's the episode in which Laas is fog on the promenade, and people are walking around in him. What if he got bored of being fog, and decided being a giant array of whirling lawnmower blades would be more fun? Or just nerve agent or something. The possibilities are truly horrifying, especially in a city.

No one can Doppelgänger the Ulster Scots, a race which is so Giga Chad even a parallel universe cannot.

I cant emphasize how nice and amazing it is to have decent length quality video content from you for so many years.

Ravenor returned is one of my favorite books in the Warhammer 40k setting, right up there with the rest of the Eisenhorn trilogy of series with Eisenhorn, Ravenor, and Bequin novels

Thanks. As the Tleilaxu learned, too good a copy is no longer a copy. Also, it's possible that, in the future, an extremely sophisticated EEG would be like a fingerprint. Of course, you could also use real fingerprints, voice ID, eye scans, DNA, and presumably a whole suite of other stuff to weed out imposters. Even a digital mind should have some continuity of digital signature. But detecting it would always be an arms race against the perps. tavi.

I could see an alien's ethical framework making infiltration / manipulation preferable to invasion. It's not harmless, but is less disruptive than warfare, and you can get what you want from the locals without upsetting them too much.

Kind of wish you hired a voice actor to imitate your voice for the first 5 minutes. Drive home that, "wait a minute" sensation.

My first thought on hearing that intro was “watch it legitimately be a whole-hearted display of friendship and everyone is actually fine/uncontrolled” 🤣

In startrek shapeshifters AKA changelings AKA fluidic intelligences have a few common traits. The list of common traits is that they don't have a defined shape, they are able mimic other things at least through shape if not shape and pigments. The biggest thing about the three different fluidic creatures that are shown in startrek is that they have the ability to produce a field that tricks scanners or are able to divert scanners around them or even stop them from scanning deeply enough to make the scanners think that the object is harmonious throughout and not a group of individual cells. The next thing is that the more detailed scanners actually are usually harder to find in any abundance.

There is a movie called The Vivarium in which a humanoid mimic species with the ability to move between universes in the multiverse uses ours to kidnap people to raise their young as brood parasites. The human couple is lured into a pocket dimension under the pretense of visiting a new housing development. Once inside, they are unable to leave. All attempts to do so result in them returning to the same house. They are then forced to raise a human mimic that matures in about a year. They are slowly dying of vitamin deficiencies the whole time and experience madness from their inability to escape the pocket universe along with the uncanny valley behavior of their parasite child.

The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, are lifelong recurrent nightmares, since I saw them as a child. Snatchers, as my 7 year old self dubbed, is the most pervasive. I just run and run and run, as everyone turns against me. Its exhilarating.

I was really digging all the Warhammer 40k highlights. Awesome work!!!

Hey, i am glad you mentioned Heinlein. I have almost all of his books, he was really amazing author.

The amount of joy I experience whenever a new SFIA comes out is immense! Keep up the excellence Isaac

Mmm... Guess I have an updated excuse to avoid my picture taken. Out with "it'll steal my soul" and in with "I don't want alien impersonators to have a robust portfolio".

When the imposter is SUS!

Ha! My last play through of a sci-fi game featured an infiltrating mimic that turned traitor after absorbing too much of the the target's personality.

Fermi paradox solved -- Aliens are among us already , and we pretend they don't exist.

I’m not going to say it… I’m not going to say it… I’m not going to say it… AMONGUS!!!

I recall an episode of the anime “Space Dandy” where the doppelgänger alien impersonates Space Dandy, but it so perfect in the mimicry, that neither the imposter nor Space Dandy himself know which is real, and that is identity confusion is a common thing for that species It’s mainly a comedy series, so this is played for laughs

Using this for anthropology: This is the entire premise of "3rd Rock from the Sun". Although half the humor is from the alien imposters being BAD at it.

You're such a gifted and intelligent person. Epic deductional capabilities. You noted correctly that aliens which are smart enough to mimic and do the job of the opposing species would logically not need to mimic as they were smart enough to control by other means. Or contrastingly that if they were the best of their class among their species, they wouldn't be used for clandestine ops. Perhaps the justification is the alien species were in a transitionary phase and they are passing through as refugees. But their intelligence being one of the only things they salvaged from their wreckage. Then it makes sense why their leverage would be so disproportionate and weirdly directed.

Man these shape changer's and doppelgangers, mimmics, & body snatchers , just keep coming! Even the time traveling terminators have trouble finding the right targets with all the SIM variants!

Iain M. Banks had one of his "The Culture" novels centered around a member of a changeling race like this, it was one of his most interesting characters.

There is also the option of taking people who are going to die, reading their memories, then fixing them up and releasing them somewhere close to civilization with a bad case of amnesia in the form of "I have no idea how the past week/month went by, the last thing I remember is nearly dying, which is probably a dream because I'm still alive", with the memories from multiple people then used to make a new person who claims political asylum, buy a citizenship, or otherwise get an identity in a country, then use multiple of those people to create a family or a small secretive community which to serve as a way to introduce multiple brand-new people with vast knowledge, good genetics, and likely top-tier skills (thanks to their knowledge and the knowledge of everyone else they saved), and then use those to infiltrate the highest tiers of society and covertly take over or keep them in check through politics (wars, civil unrest, intentionally bad investment, multi-tiered citizenship (caste system), traitism (i.e. racism, religion, culture, country, settlement (city, town, village, etc.), etc.), and alien-aided "natural" disasters (i.e. gently shoving an asteroid to create a tsunami, using hidden bombs to create earthquakes, use mirrors behind the star to get more sunlight onto the planet or a certain part of the planet, guide asteroids into becoming space dust which to cover the star's light reaching the planet). Once there is a large, powerful, and influential group on that planet or in that civilization, hiding things become easier, and making new identities also becomes easier, especially since you can replace agents if they want to retire, who get different jobs, or who might not want to be part of the cause anymore, especially celebrities or influential people who might start to turn on you. From there, you can do pretty much whatever you want, be it using them as a cheaper workforce for things which are very low tech for you and up to high tech for them (i.e. having them mine and refine ores, up to having them create low-tech machinery for you, in exchange for medicine or for a "super-material" they could use for war or for building (i.e. cement or geopolymer, used to build larger buildings, damns, skyscrapers, or simply sturdier roads), and tweaking the recipe to make them dependent on you for a much longer time, ideally many generations). Not only that, but you could even have them build the most basic infrastructure for your needs, then phasing them out slower (through things like wide-spread infertility, wide-spread slowly-deadly radiation, poisoning of the water and food sources, climate change to introduce a climate more preferable to you, fauna change to introduce a fauna more preferable to you, or simply help overpopulate animals which to prey on them) or quicker (through things like war, viruses, chemical agents, biological agents, or widespread famine). And when you reduced the population enough, you could offer them to turn the existing people or their kids into the higher culture, and slowly have the natives go extinct. Or you could use genetic engineering to downlift them into cattle or uplift them into your own species, the later allowing you to slowly convert civilizations into your civilization and maybe strengthen your genetic pool even more as an intentional or unintentional byproduct, the former being a more ethical way to remove them than outright genocide.

Okay that intro was fucking hilarious, thank you.

Slight protest at your point that shapeshifters impersonating human leaders would have the capacity to impersonate their own civilisation's leaders: Both comedically and literally, an interstellar species would have higher standards for the basic competency of a leader. It's easy to impersonate ours because they don't actually do much other than be physically present.

Opening day football, a new edition here and another on Nebla. It is a good day. I have been very busy so this is the perfect day off for me. Thank you.

A well-timed video title given Disney's announcement of Secret Invasion yesterday. My whole feed is filled with fan discussions talking about doppelgangers.

For another type of impostor/infiltrator/sympathetic spy, consider the 'Hooded Swan' series of books from Brian M. Stableford. The Halcyon Drift is the start of the series, and you get to see the pluses and minuses of the situation early on and how they relate to both entities. Both entities grow and mature throughout the series which is capped in the finale of 'Swan Song'. Also, Stableford uses multiple ideas for translight travel; one I like called Mass Relaxation. Six books in the series, written in the mid-seventies.

IMPOSTERS???????

Oh no, Isaac, beware... There is a doppelganger amidst us :0

No matter the day of the week it’s always great to get a new video from Isaac! Live long and prosper friends 🖖🏻

African mythology has firefly body snatchers called Anze (pronounced aaanz). Basically these firefly monsters fly inside a person, usually the nose, and possess their body. They have some telltale signs, though, such as a taste for drinking entire bowls of palm oil.

In Matrix 3 a copy of Smith burned itself into a human resistance member's mind, and it took a while to get it to take. He wasn't even very good at it, not acting like the guy at all, but it was _good enough_ to do a lot of damage.

The invasion of the body snatchers is such a great movie

Travelers is a great show about this where time travelers go back in time and overwrite the consciousness of someone who was about to die, save their life and then occupy it

Red SFIA stamp is back! Hell yea

2:54 clones that end up sympathising: Westworld series deserves a shout for that particular angle plus some twists !

Warhammer 40 has an assassin clan that excels in infiltration via shape-shifting. Even other species with surgery. One story involved the assassin kidnapping a governors son by swallowing him and keeping him in a secondary stomach. Managed to shut down an uprising without even firing a shot.

I was waiting for the futurama brain slugs, so happy they made an appearance.

Good timing with that Secret Invasion trailer

One of the biggest problems with any "aliens" in real life scenarios seems to be, how likely are they really to have both a physical form and a mental, emotional,. psychological makeup that are so vastly different from humans (maybe from anything on Earth) that blending in or imposters are impossible; even basic understanding and communication could be difficult, though not impossible. All those Star Trek tropes where humans or aliens are disguised or surgically / genetically altered to appear to be another species, for spies or for anthropology, seems like it wouldn't be likely to work. Even if aliens might be similar, there would be proportions, overall sizes, body plans, psych / emotional issues, much that would make that highly unlikely or just not doable. If you genetically modify a being to be another species from another planet, isn't that going to be extreme, requiring a Long time to do it? And if you do it, what is that being now? Truly human or alien? There's a very old Outer Limits or Twilight Zone episode where they transform an astronaut / G.I. into a creature to live on some other planet and they bring him / it back, but how much that creature is still the original man or how much it is now an alien is never quite answered. The show used a puppet of some kind, but supposedly the episode was banned at the time, or nearly so, or they couldn't quite show the alien, because it ws deemed too horrific for TV. Of course, when we see it now, it looks both grotesque and laughable for the special effects f the time. Anyway, the ideas behind that are still very interesting. -- All that said, could there be aliens (or humans) who could mimic each other? Yes, maybe so. Some very good science fiction has been written and filmed abut it. So my objections over realism in what aliens might be like is its own tangent. (Also, Isaac Arthur is more than smart enough to have thought of this.)

Shout out for the Iain Banks novella The State of the Art which features alien Culture agents as undercover anthropologists on Earth, and the novel Inversions which has a pair of--presumably--Culture agents infiltrated inside two warring governments on a medieval era planet.

I'll pass on that vacation. Also, I have these sunglasses you need to try on and look around with. I think you'll find them illuminating.

No, no. I said "All is Welsh" as in "They seem normal but have a weird fondness for sheep".

This reminds me of the Giants series by James P. Hogan. In that series, humanity was actually a transplant from a new destroyed planet in our solar system. A war of 2 major factions was the cause, with one faction settling Earth and forgetting their origins while the other came under the protection of an advanced civilization. Said advanced civilization puts Earth under surveillance in case they get all warlike again, but unbeknownst to them the Faction under their wing has infiltrated Earth and is causing turmoil in order to lead their overlords into drastic action against Earth.

Reminds me of that time Dolly Parton lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest. Could happen to any of us, especially if the doppleganger's good at their job.

I genuinely believe they live was a documentary. Great video

0:28 the biggest red flag more than one world leader agreeing on something

The alien in "Who Goes There" was not animalistic. Near the end of the story, (without going into too many specifics) the one that was isolated had, during its isolation, built an anti-gravity harness and a light that generated light without heat with spare parts it scrounged from the camp. This is hardly primitive or animalistic behavior. Sorry for the comment, but that *is* one of my favorite stories.

I get a kick whenever your Army time pops up. From what I've picked up, we were in or attached to in my case, the same Division in Iraq at the same time.

Ah let’s goo 4 day hunting trip and you post today is a good day gonna listen to this in the shower lmo

"Why infiltrate?" The number one reason I don't like playing as the Darloks in _Master of Orion._ Just about everything they can do you can accomplish in some other way, often without pissing off your neighbors in the process.

Imposters and doppelgängers 😳

You’re a cool guy, Isaac. Wish I could be more like you.

This video is mainly about technology, and it's pretty great. But I've always wondered to what extend the classic "body-snatcher" would be possible in real life biologically. Can a small parasite control the entire brain of a human-level intelligence? Where would the original consciousness go? Would the parasite have issues adjusting? How would they breed? Would they have a "true" form?

They Live was always one of the best lol The Invasion of the body snatchers terrified me when I was younger

Among us?

4:15 Plot twist: the cats are being made to do this by the toxoplasma gondii parasite in order to infect us (see: crazy cat ladies)

A joke a friend of mine and I once used to make was that the best way to determine if somebody wasn't a real human / from earth / etc., was to ask stupidly simple questions and jokes, our go-to being "why did the chicken cross the road?" since we're Americans. You carefully watch and listen to their reaction, because an actual, recognizable person should react in a way one of us would - maybe and eyeroll or groan, a head shake and sarcastic delivery, or in our case, any punchline _except_ the "correct" one. I haven't seen him in years but if he did and I asked him the question and he didn't reply with something off-beat like "because it was duct taped to the horse" I'd know he was an imposter. Same would go for any suspicious person _in their native context._ I wouldn't ask that of somebody from rural India that barely speaks English, for example, because I don't know what kind of answer or behavior to expect from them. That kind of context matters. If you've ever seen _Inglorious Basterds_ then you know the bar infiltration scene where the spy fucks up with something very, very minor and things go to hell with a quickness, but in a context where that difference is huge when you're under intense scrutiny.

This time it was Frank Herberts Dune and often you reference Alastair Reynolds who are both great authors but please consider reading Stephen R. Donaldson's The Gap Cycle (amazing series on brain chemistry alteration) and ofcourse Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence series. Plenty of potential references there

Raised by a navy vet of the vietnam war, i can confirm, if issac does not curse in private like well, a sailor, he wasn't in the military XD. It's like a law in the military.

so for these catoms, would you need to add to mass if their ability to switch forms was the function of excited states, which when lowered again to settle in x number of possible forms? if that makes any sense

Awesome channel my man 💖🌍

There are a few Lovecraft stories that kind of have interesting Impostor Alien storylines like The Shadow Out of Time where ancient aliens mind swap with other species all over space and time to gather information and prolong their species existence beyond extinction events. Some thoughts on those Warhammer Shape Shifters and their bones changing structure. Since they mention it is painful just to use the drug in the first place my guess would be something like nano tech or replicator tech that augments the skeleton in some way to build and destroy the bones to change length/shape. But then this brings up the issue of power sources and raw material acquisition for said tech, but in this case I think to hand wave the answer as "because; future..." is alright lol.

The anime show Summertime Render brings up the idea of, if a doppelganger is a perfect copy of the original, possessing all their memories, and even believing they are the original, are they essentially the same person?

Many of these concepts I first encountered in James Schmitz's _The Other Likeness_, 1962.

The Robin Cook novel "Virus" has the most the interesting twist on this. In the story earth is invaded by intelligent viruses that had pebble size interstellar spaceships. The ships were ignored since they looked like a normal metor shower. When people picked them up they thought it was a cut but it was a invading army going into the blood stream. Toward the end of the novel the controlled people had a hard time knowing who wasn't infected.

March Upcountry - David Weber/ John Ringo Tutorial Implants ("Toots") - An implanted computer processor that interfaces completely with human neural systems without adverse side effects. Used primarily for data processing, storage and training, the toot augments a persons learning capability, including the use of assassination programs (for better marksmanship) or translating alien languages. The device can, in fact, take over for the person and allow him to perform tasks more efficiently. However, it is a security planner's nightmare, as the toot can be hacked and the person forced to do a task against their will (as if they'd been possessed by a demon). People whose toots have been hacked are called "toot zombies" or "toombies".

There was also a predatory alien shapeshifter in the ST:TNG episode "Aquiel," which conceals itself as it's most recently consumed meal. It appears to be inteligent and can override the simulated organism's behavior, but appears to mostly just automatically mimic it until such time as it needs to feed again. It also doesn't attack from an optimal ambush, so perhaps it isn't all that smart, either, since of three humans it attacks in the story, two escape, one not knowing anything about it before hand.

“The deathworlders” involves a cabal of uploaded sapients influencing galactic events using their control over the translator brain implant industry, which are made to their specifications.

💕 I've always loved the Aliens & civilizations series.

Love the Tic example.

Sus

Hi, I love your videos! I have a condition called aphantasia. It means I can't see mental images or pictures in my mind. Have you ever made any videos on the topic of different ways alien or future human brains might be wired, or different ways of thinking/thought processes they might have?

you know you're early to an sfia video when the subtitles aren't there yet

The problem with some of the best stories that hinge on a doppleganger as a key plot point is that you can't recommend them as such without spoiling and ruining the story.

An example of science fantasy imposter would be Phyrexian sleeper agents from Magic: the Gathering.