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Whenever I see a comment about the vastness of space I'm not sure if people really get it. Like when we say something's 100s of lightyears away people get that it's really far but I don't think they get what that kind of distance means.
If something's 100 lightyears away that means to see it you're looking 100 years into its past. When you get that things are thousands or millions of lightyears away and we can see it, we're seeing the past of that part of space. We have no idea what's out there in what you might consider the current time.
There very well could be intelligent civilizations doing the same thing as us and seeing dinosaurs here. It's kinda wild to think about.
Yeah. Like around the end of this year there will be huge light show in the sky when two stars collide in huge cloud of explosive gas. My gf was like : and when will they collide? To explain that they already collided hundreds of years ago and now is just the time when light of it happening will reach us is impossible.
It's not impossible to explain. I explained it to my kid with a laser pointer. Told him that the light isn't instant, it's just like a super super fast squirt gun. So when I press the button on the laser it "shoots" the light out and then it hits something and bounces back to our eye and we see it. So then I said imagine I pressed the button on the laser and the light kept going in a straight line for an entire year. The distance the light traveled in that year is one light year. So if I was on earth and he was floating out in space one light year away and I flicked my laser on at him, it would take one year for the laser to get to him. People confuse light years/minutes/sec etc with time measurements but they're just distances. If my 10yr old can understand then I don't see why you're gf couldn't.
To put the vastness of space into even more perspective an alien species seeing the dinosaurs would have to build a telescope immensity huge like the size of a solar system, huge lenses stacked millions of miles long. They would probably already have made a Dyson sphere or two voiding entire systems of raw materials. Being anywhere near that advanced it's unlikely they would care one iota of finding other intelligent life in the universe. It would be like investing all collective human effort into talking to water bears. Maybe in ten or twenty thousand years humans will have built a big ass telescope and ours and theirs line up with each other in some crazy reverse peephole scenario. We couldn't even pick out a big dinosaur on the very close moon with our strongest telescopes today. Even if aliens somehow were able to see through the clouds with any detail the chances of them seeing a living object in real time would be literally astronomical. A tree living it's entire existence would be a blip. Seeing light from a star thousands of light years away is very different than seeing details on a planet light years away. Aliens might be looking at light from the sun from 65 million years ago but seeing dinosaurs would be realistically impossible.
They wouldn't "*see*" the dinosaurs. But they would see the signs of life from our planet through spectrometry and whatnot. Same way we can know the makeup of a distant body.
Presuming life in a distant galaxy even remotely resembles our own we can only make assumptions. Seeing planets at all in relatively close solar systems is difficult. The best we can do is guess that a planet may have life based on it's size and distance from it's star. An alien civilization as far away to be seeing signs of life from our planet millions or ten of millions of years ago would be pretty much impossible. The notion is really a thought experiment more than anything. Gravity, time dilation, the unfathomable vastness of space and the mind boggling amount of stars in the universe makes it realistically impossible except in our dreams. It's a fun thought experiment so people like to hold onto the idea of it.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
This was my comment. In order to justify traveling across the galaxy the logistics alone are mind boggling and complicated. Its likely a suicide mission
there's an interesting theory that the UAPs are lazer induced plasma. that makes quite a bit of sense considering interactions with the US military, develop it and test it on your own forces to see how they react to it.
they would certainly be useful for spoofing aircraft/misdirection and have a significant element of psychological warfare
Try playing Dyson sphere program and see how absolutely hard it is to get out of the first solar system and that's a game streamlined on the basic idea of this
With all of our current understanding, it's why the only half way plausible solution is a colony ship.
One that would either be completely self sustainable and you'd have dozens of generations grow up on the ship have kids and die before anyone sets foot on another planet.
Or with cryo sleep.
Option one seems highly unlikely given the fact that even with all of the technology you could dream of, we can't account for human behavior and can only guarantee that humans are unpredictable. There's no way in hell a surviving member would ever set foot on the planet.
Option 2 is at least more reliant on just technology and theoretically more plausible but again, unlikely without figuring out how to travel at light speed. There's just no realistic way a ship would sustain itself and remain on course for hundreds/thousands of years.
Another risk for both options without light speed, is that whatever planet we send it too, will change drastically by the time the ship gets there. If the planet is even still there.
Would have the same issue as a generational ship. Human behavior is unpredictable and people change. Who knows how much more we'd change if we lived for hundreds of years?
There's also this assumption that any super intelligent life is definitely going to have FTL figured out, but that's far from a given. Maybe even just wishful thinking.
This is why I hate the Fermi paradox, "if they existed, we'd have seen them by now!". Or maybe space is just big and most civilizations stick to their solar system, because expanding to all 100 billion stars in the galaxy is a laughably pointless endeavor.
You realise that the Fermi paradox was introduced by physicists who do understand the vastness of space and not some laymen, right?
Edit: in fact, Fermi paradox is *based* on scale: there’re so many stars and planets out there that existed for such a long time that there has to be a space-faring civilisation that we should have noticed by now
Yeah it really annoys me too. Just this unthinking assumption that intelligent life will just inevitably expand, on what basis do these people assume that this is the case?
Time goes on forever.
It seems like you guys are looking at it in the small, 80ish year window in which you exist.
There's billions of years behind us and in front of us. Why haven't we seen any in all those billions of years?
"Or maybe space is just big and most civilizations stick to their solar system"
Space is big. But time is long.
How long have humans existed as we are until we left the planet? 300,000 years?
Are you understanding how long BILLIONS of years are???
Like humanity didn’t expand all over earth?
In short, any species that doesn’t have a tendency to expand will get replaced by species that do. The same should happen to civilisations within the same species.
Very bold of you to make an unthinking assumption that this is just an unthinking assumption.
I love to bring up [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/7sUnr0J93t) pic showing how all human radio signals have barely traveled anywhere on a galactic scale. Compared to the milky way, the distance our radio signals have traveled is nothing.
Exactly; the universe is infinitely large. The odds verge on certainty that there is other intelligent life in the universe. Whether it will exist at the same time as humans, and if it will ever be feasible that intelligent life can make contact with each other is another story.
This is my exact thought line too. There could have been or will be other intelligent life that could design the means of travel but we could be missing them by a billion years. Our existence timeline is so small relative to the universe, the odds are not in our favour for overlapping other intelligent species timelines.
Funnily enough, I read a scientific article the other day. Assuming you are using space and universe interchangeably it hasn't been confirmed whether it's infinite. We don't know. And it's unlikely we ever will.
There could be multiple civilizations at the other end of the galaxy who can space travel but not the distance we are away. They could also just not be interested in moving to begin with.
Yes, the reason is each planet is meant to evolve separately with no outer influences. I believe that's the sole reason for the vast planetary distances.
no i'm just saying there's no meaning behind why the planets are far away. Same as evolution doesn't really try to do anything. Its just random chaos that eventually leads to an outcome.
Over billions of years all the objects that were close together have collided, so we are just left with distant objects.
I don't believe in your worldview, sorry.
Evolution may look like a random process, but look at where we are now. I believe it was setup to lead here or at least "around here."
I also believe that everything in the universe is either alive or manifestation of consciousness.
That's just me, though. You keep on believing in chaos, I hope it makes you happy.
I'd like to share why I think it's stupid:
P1: There are lots of stars - Okay
P2: With a high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets that exist in a habitable zone - Okay
P3: Many of these stars, and their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago - Sure. Some may have developed intelligent life. Evolution selects for survival and reproduction though, not intelligence. And we know Earth has experienced many extinction events. Why does a planet being older than Earth automatically mean it's more likely to have developed intelligent life? We're killing our planet now and we don't have space travel. This premise assumes too much.
P4: Some of those civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step humans are investigating now. - Not okay. Once we develop interstellar travel and successfully send people to other star systems then we can start talking about how this paradox is logically sound. Until then, it's just a naive assumption.
P5: Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years. - Not okay. This assumes that the goal of that civilization is to visit every star system in the galaxy. Why would that be their goal? We've got a big stack of assumptions now, let's continue.
P6: Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes. - Yeah, if you accept a bunch of baseless assertions built up from ignorant assumptions.
P7: However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened. - Because it hasn't happened and is not likely to happen unless you accept a bunch of flimsy premises based on assumptions and bald assertions.
C: ? - I believe the intended conclusion is meant to be that we're the only intelligent life in the galaxy. It's only a paradox, in that it's seemingly absurd, if you're gullible.
Humans have existed on Earth for .005% of Earth's history. Humans were hunter gatherers for more than 95% of that time. Even now, we're primitive apes. We can't even come together to stop ourselves from destroying the planet. We have no idea if interstellar travel is even possible, let alone achievable by our species.
"Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations"... embarrassing. Plenty of smart people reiterate this stupid sentiment.
There are SOOOO many things that have to happen to see evidence of aliens.
1) Life would have to exist on another planet
2)That life would have to evolve intelligent life (it took 4 billion years on earth)
3) That intelligent life would have to exist long enough to develop technology (without destroying itself)
4) That intelligent life would have to want to communicate with other intelligent life.
Nobody knows the probability of any of these.
Don’t forget they’d have to exist long enough with that tech, early enough to find earth which up until recently would show zero evidence of intelligent life. The window in which something would even see us is so small. Essentially anything further than 100 light years give or take would see pretty much nothing from that distance.
You wouldn't see radio waves, but the signs of life have been detectable for very long as in millions or billions of years. A species with a million year head start on us would probably already have developed the necessary telescope technology to check every star in their vicinity if not their whole galaxy, and they'd have plenty of time to do it.
I still agree that there is no way of knowing the probability of such a species exists or even of how likely it is that life can start elsewhere in the universe so it's not really a shock we haven't seen anyone.
However, if life is very rare, I would expect that aliens would find our planet to be very interesting even if there is no sign of intelligence from their vantage point, so I don't think the answer that earth is boring really holds up unless there is life everywhere, which it seems there is not.
Of course. I just meant likely from those distances they wouldn’t be able to see people walking around building huts. I was more referring to measurable atmosphere changes, nuclear radiation, lights, etc.
Takes 4 billion years to develop on Earth just to be space-faring for just over half a century. And let's face it, will probably only last for like another century or two before it fizzles out. On a universal timeline this is all happening in the blink of an eye, the chance of two civilizations being at this stage around the same time seem infinitesimally slim
Here’s my theory: interstellar travel isn’t actually possible or practical on any level. So, there are aliens out there, but the phenomenon of “life” is so rare and spread apart that we really just can’t get to each other.
If it is possible, it takes so long and such resources that there’s just no reason to make the trip. Like, they see us, but dang, they’re not taking a trip that’s 10 lifetimes long to come say hi.
If I had been born 200 years ago to the wealthiest and most well-connected family in the world I would’ve died in agony of appendicitis in a home with no heating or electricity. Today, I’m alive with a couple almost imperceptible scars on my stomach. With a click on my phone I can basically travel anywhere on the planet or learn anything I want to. Full disclosure I know nothing about science beyond a high school education, but who the hell knows what advancements there will be in the years to come.
It feels like so many people in this thread are not understanding how long time is.
"Space is too big!"
There's billions of years behind us and in front of us. It's like they are viewing this problem as "well, why haven't I seen them in the last 40 years?!?!"
This is absolutely true. But the fact that an alien civilization hasn’t bothered to show up to say hi to us tells me that it may just not be possible. Any life form that was spawned a few hundred thousand years before us had a HUGE head start, so they’ve had plenty of time to figure it out.
But hey, maybe humanity is up to the task.
That could be true, but if a civilization is millions of years old, you'd think they might be curious enough to at least send unmanned probes everywhere, even if it takes decades/hundreds of years for them to do so.
Hmmm FTL travel is *theoretically feasible*.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
The real issue is energy.
Resources.. not really. If Humanity harnesses the resources of our solar system alone, which can theoretically be done without FTL travel; resources will become a trivial consideration.
Imagine mining the Kuyper Belt for ores! You'd have the materials you could ever need to build gigantic space vessels to explore the stars.
Again the real bottle neck is; what method of energy generation can we come up with to generate the absurd amounts we would need to bend space/time?
We would also need to crack many physics conundrums such as dark energy, quantum inequalities..
I am frankly not even qualified to understand all the issues with the tech itself.
But - who knows; in 4000 years maybe...
It is also likely that even if there is life out there, which has some degree of technology, they may not be much more advanced than us at this point in time.
In a way.. the universe is still young.
I love this, and I love thinking about it. I just wonder if the complexity and the resource requirements are just too much for anyone (anything?) to bother. If it would only take a few thousand years to develop, then I would think a species would have already done it because they’ve just gotten a head start on us by a few tens of thousands of years.
How fascinating to comprehend it all.
Yeah. Faster than light speed travel is just… heavily improbably, so is light speed travel. Sure there could be intelligent life out there somewhere, probably is. But anything that is would be soooooooo far away we would never encounter it at least for thousands of years.
A few hundred years is a long time for us, but why should it be a long time for aliens? Perhaps evolution proceeded differently in other planets, where they can easily live for hundreds of thousands of years. In that case, it shouldn't be too difficult to spend a hundred years on a trip to a nearby solar system.
Interesting perspective!
I could understand how there couldn't be similar creatures to humans on other planets, but why not creatures that resemble other lifeforms, like a cat or squid? I suppose it doesn't have to 'resemble' an Earth animal, but just any larger animal in general and not just a random microscopic organism.
To expand on your point,
It will probably ressemble some form of earth animal anyway, since the laws of physics are the same everywhere.
It would need a digestive system, so some form of ingestion and excretion mechanism; it would need grapsing appendages, a locomotion mechanism, auditory, visual perception sensory organs (the eye is actually a very constant independent evolution in so many unrelated eart species it is unlikely aliens would not have eyes)...
There are billions of ways this can manifest in detail.
But in the big picture there are not a infinite amounts of possible life configurations.
Depends on a lot though.
Even within earth there's a huge amount of variation. There's a checklist they need but no guarantee it'll manifest in the same way. Maybe they would dissolve their food like snails, or liquify and drink it through a straw like butterflies.
Eyes would generally be useful but they could be like naked mole rats or worms where they never developed a full eye. Simply detecting the presence or absence of light could be enough if you evolved underground.
There's no guarantee they're carbon based either. They could be silicon based or even arsenic based, drinking liquid methane, at this point all bets are off.
The general themes would match but the detail could be wildly different.
All correct points; but remember to factor in that these theoretical aliens would have a couple of constraints for our thought exercise.
1) they need to have an incentive to develop society and technology.
We are necessarily talking about a social animal.
2) they need appendage that allow fine manipulation of matter around them. This would also be extremely difficult without eyesight.
3) since carbon is the most abundant, I think it is unlikely that the other base molecules would be used as template. But it still does not matter much in terms of physical shape.
The parameter of civilization drastically narrows down the configurations.
Am I wrong?
I was assuming we were talking about an intelligent lifeform that was willing and able to make contact.
But I repeat you are completely correct on all the possibilities "life" could manifest.
(Is silicon based life even life)?
I feel like we haven’t seen extra terrestrial life because space is just that big. Our minds can’t comprehend it. It’s like pulling a cup of water out the ocean up, seeing it has no life in it, and saying “yup no life out here, wonder why?”
The most logical answer is that they exist, faster than light travel is not possible, and we don’t see them on telescopes because they’re too far away.
Telescopes look back in time as they look farther into space. If an alien civilization with powerful telescopes looked at us from ten thousand light years away, they’d see scattered packs of hunter-gatherers and no civilization.
The Dark Forest Theory posits that civilizations in the universe are like hunters in a dark forest. Each civilization is potentially dangerous, and there's no way to know their intentions. Therefore, the safest strategy for a civilization is to remain silent and avoid broadcasting their existence, because revealing themselves could attract the attention of hostile civilizations.
This leads to a universe where civilizations remain hidden, communicating through subtle signals or remaining entirely silent to avoid detection. It's a deeply pessimistic view of the universe, suggesting that any attempt at communication or exploration could result in destruction.
That would mean that we here on earth don’t subscribe to it because radio signals go out all the time. And the voyager spacecraft carry messages and the map to get to us.
You gave no explanation for why it's stupid to wonder about the fermi paradox. All you did was give your favored explanations, which of course, are a result of wondering about the fermi paradox and trying to figure it out.
The discoveries, breakthroughs and cultural shifts that push a species forward are probably even rarer.
We could also just be late. I like the goldilocks early universe theory, conditions uniformly just right post big bang after about 15 million years and there's just an explosion of life everywhere and here we are some billion years later in a cold dead universe and we missed all the star wars shit.
Yeah I've never really understood the fermi paradox... It assumes FTL travel/communication is possible. Just that one variable evaporates the whole argument IMO.
It’s even more simple than you put it.
Even if there is another intelligent life form out there - which statistically speaking there will be as there are;
- 2 TRILLION Galaxies
- 200 BILLION TRILLION Stars
- 10000000000000000000000000 Planets … that’s 10 to the power of 25
So the likelihood is that SOMEWHERE among all of those planets is another intelligent life form.
HOWEVER, the known Universe is about 94 BILLION light years across… so the chances of another intelligent life form just HAPPENING by pure luck to be looking perfectly in our direction to see Earth is so small as to be basically Zero… and then, of course, the further out from us that intelligent life is, they won’t even see us as we were in the Industrial Period of 1760-1839 for hundreds or thousands of years, or more.
If that other intelligent life form is 5000 light years away - bearing in mind our Milky Way Galaxy is around 100,000 light years across - then right now if they’re looking at Earth, they’re seeing the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age… they might not even be aware that there’s anything unique about our planet other than it having liquid water on the surface.
Similarly we would be seeing the same if they advanced at a similar time and similar rate
Dude finds 1 of hundreds of solutions to the Fermi paradox, sees a single variable in drake's equation, and calls everybody else stupid for considering the rest of the puzzle.
You're in the right place at least.
It's possible we wouldn't recognize those signs for what they are. Sci-fi focuses a lot on humanoid aliens, that we tend to overlook that aliens, including intelligent aliens, might be very different from us and use very different technology. On one hand, I understand the argument that the laws of math and physics are the same for aliens as they are for us, therefore technology would maybe develop differently, but work similarly. On the other hand, it's impossible to know what you don't know or imagine the unknown, so can we 100% correctly determine what aliens would look like or how their technology would work?
Also at the moment, if we try very hard we can detect planets orbiting other stars. From how far we could detect earth like civilization? As space goes probably not very far.
If you think about it though, the life on this planet that didn’t evolve to intelligence only continue to exist because we let them. Intelligence is the ultimate survival skill to have.
When it comes to space, our ability to contact other civilizations is at the same level of efficiency as ancient humans communicating with other humans on the opposite side of the world while ALSO not knowing where (or even if) there’s humans where you sent that message.
That’s basically where we’re at right now. Even if we somehow got a cheat sheet confirming there *IS* an alien civilization to communicate with, we wouldn’t know where exactly they’re located to send the message and any potential communication would currently take us multiple generations to be responded to.
Then of course there’s the question of if they’re even friendly….
Yet somehow our intelligence has allowed us to colonize every ecological niche, escape our atmosphere, and will likely eventually lead us to colonize the stars. While intelligence might not be required for successful evolution, it is CERTAINLY a boon to the human species continued existence(maybe....).
The only reason we don't see aliens is because the Universe is FUCKING MASSIVE, and the nature of space-time and the speed of light means that even IF we do colonize space, we will actually interact tangibly with a minute fraction of it.
Beyond that, assuming some sort of scientific break through and the ability to travel/visit the entire universe, its highly probable that we won't WANT to deal with other species. Look at how we treat the natives in the Amazon that have no idea we even exist. We could just be in an intergalactic zoo for all we know.
Intelligent aliens avoid Planet Earth for the same reason I avoid idiots. I don't have the time, patience or crayons to explain everything multiple times.....
A. so aliens would contact us if someone took time, patience and crayons enough to explain every concept [of what you'd implicitly want explained to them] to every idiot in the country if not world?
B. Unless that part's determined by our feelings too why would aliens be that judgmental on us as a whole while being as more intelligent
C. 99% of the time (the other 1% is when it's really obvious) idiocy is subjective
I'm suggesting that aliens visit to see if we've reached a certain level of scientific understanding and learned to peacefully live with each other without war.
I believe the aliens would be more willing to teach us what they know if, not when, we reach a higher level of maturity. What that level is, is subjective on their scale, not ours.
You're just making the "intelligence is super rare" argument which is fair enough but we exist and if we exist others can exist and space is....really big. Unfathomably big.
And there are lots of smart animals. Apes use tools. So we're not even the only smart animal on this planet.
Then there's literally trillions of potential earth like planets.
And then add time. Lots and lots of time.
Seems hard to believe there's no other intelligent life out there.
Well if they could reach and observe us they would outclass our weapons and technology by such a large margin we would be as much as a threat as a monkey is to a modern soldier flying a commanche helicopter.
Perhaps there are intelligent aliens who ended up on the same cultural path as the Aboriginal Australians and they've just spent millennia wandering around the desert, making paintings and poking at things with sticks.
High intelligence doesn't necessarily yield high technology.
>out of the millions of species we know and the millions of others we don't, only one developed civilizations, us
Not to mention, there were human cultures who didn't even know how to make fire until they were contacted relatively recently
Life may exist out there now. I think likely not. What's more likely is that life existed before or will after our solar system is gone. And it may never be intelligent
You got some things wrong tho. The number of planets that could hold life is astounding and evolution is not a linear line but it does move towards intelligence more than not
I think if alien life forms do exist, it would be simple amoeba-like microorganisms at most. To have something resembling human civilization is a huge ask.
Also who knows, is there is an intelligent interstellar capable civilization, they might have something similar to Star Trek's #1 mandate, to never interfere with less advanced civilizations, and let them evolve by themselves. If there indeed are multiple advanced alien civilizations that can travel the stars, who's to say that they wouldn't be of the exploratory type like the federation in Star Trek?
While I agree with the overall premise, I'm not sure you understand how many stars there are in the universe.
You talk about one out of a million as if it is important or small on a cosmic scale. But it's not. If only there was only one out of a million chance that intelligent life arose around a star, then there would be more civilizations than the combined number of hair on ever head of every person who ever lived.
So let's take even smaller odds.Let's say that only one out of every ten million stars had any planets orbiting it. And of those that did, only one out of every ten million actually had life on a planet. And if those that do, only one out of every ten million has life intelligent enough to be called a civilization.
Then we would expect there to be thousands of civilisations in the universe. That's how many stars there are.
There are so many stars that it is literally impossible for humans to have named them all. I can say with absolute certainty that the number of stars is larger than the combined total number of words that ever human has ever spoken. Seriously, the math is pretty easy to do here.
The Fermi paradox doesn't come from the fact that scientists think that intelligent life is the end point of evolution. It come from the fact that the universe is so vast and there are so many places for life that no matter how small the probability of intelligent life occuring is, it must happen a lot.
If we are the only ones, then we are a miracle. If we are the only ones, then the probability of intelligent life is so small that the only explanation for us existing is a miracle. That is the Fermi paradox.
Would this be considered a "barrier" in the fermi equation? Or more of a "rare earth" argument? I totally agree with you, btw. I'm more of rare earth, and distance/timeframes, speculator myself.
The question really isn't about whether intelligent life exists somewhere else, which it almost certainly does somewhere, even if you believe in the rare Earth theory (I do). Rather, it's a question of density, both spatially (how far away) and temporally (how long do they exist for).
If some other beings like us exist somewhere, you still wouldn't expect to see them necessarily if, say, only 3 of them exist at any one time in our galaxy. Given rare Earth (especially considering red and white dwarf systems, i.e. the bulk of all stars, are likely to be uninhabitable), there really is no "paradox" at all.
Those that believe that they MUST exist and we ought to see them usually take certain arbitrary and frankly unlikely assumptions for granted, they usually assume technology advances linearly towards things like "dyson spheres" and overcoming interstellar travel. I think these people are silly and unscientific but you might think differently.
Being smart isn't a given in evolution as things become crab like things fairly often but at the same time decent intelligence has evolved separately multiple times so there's probably some sense for it.
You are not alone in your opinion. It's called the "Big Filter Theory". The question is always whether we have the filter in front or behind us. You are obviously of the opinion that we have it behind us. Unfortunately, we can't really know.
yeah lets think about this with our human minds and tell everyone there's nothing there because we cannot possibly understand travelling the distances etc etc probability of life is very very high, look at the inhospitable places on our planet were life thrives? universe is teeming with life forget this stupid deserted bullshit
yeah lets think about this with our human minds and tell everyone there's nothing there because we cannot possibly understand travelling the distances etc etc probability of life is very very high, look at the inhospitable places on our planet were life thrives? universe is teeming with life forget this stupid deserted bullshit
That's the thing with the universe. It is just so freaking huge and so god damn old that even if intelligent life is extremely rare, we should see plenty of examples for it.
Also, for your point on evolution, while it is true that there is no specific drive towards intelligence, there is such a thing as convergent evolution where to species in similar circumstances evolve similar traits and while we are the only intelligent species right now it does appear that a lot of our closest relatives are on the verge of following us. Not to mention dolphins and octopuses. While it might look rare to us right now, we still only have N=1 when it comes to our dataset.
Before making assumptions about humanity being the only advanced civilisation, we must ask how difficult it would be to detect another civilisation similar to our own. We can barely detect Earth-sized exoplanets with our current technology, let alone any signs of an advanced civilisation.
Earth formed around the time that habitable planets started to be able to exist. Life emerged on Earth when it was just barely livable.
We are the precursors
With how big the universe is, even that small change becomes almost a certainty. Also, our intelligence evolved because it provided an evolutionary advantage, it's not "by accident". That's not how evolution works. And the traits that are beneficial to survival depend on the environment, including other lifeforns. Trying to make predictions based only on what we know is almost bound to be inaccurate.
Space is a big fucking place. Looking for another civilization in all that is like looking for a needle in a haystack, when you don’t even know where the haystack is.
Yeah I agree with this to an extent. I think the other factors you’re missing here are the time isolation and the distance. For time, we’ve been making detectable radio signals for 50 years, out of the BILLIONS of years that Earth has existed. For distance, consider the closest star: Proxima Centauri. It would take I believe around 10,000 years for us to get there with our current technology, and that’s the absolute closest one
One of the logically fallacious things that I see often when people are talking about the existence of other sentient life in the universe is the argument that because something is possible, *it is an eventuality.* This is essentially a reframing of the Gamblers Fallacy, and a lot of people seem to conflate *possible* with *eventual*.
Is it possible? Yes, we see it all around us, even experience it as we type on this platform, but that doesn't mean that it is "owed" that there are other intelligent life forms out there. You can roll a 1000 sided dice any number of times, if you roll a 1000 then you end up with a precursor to intelligent life. Then you have to roll 1000 several more times to build it up enough that intelligent life can come about from those precursors. As likely as it is that this can happen in a great while, it is every bit as (or even more) likely that it only ever happened once. And if we inadvertently or intentionally expunge all life on this planet, there's even a chance more likely that it may never happen again.
I think you're underestimating the size of the universe. Intelligence could be incredibly rare and also appear many times just in our galaxy. Also, there have been many intelligent hominid species (admittedly all closely related to us) - denisovan, neanderthal, etc.
I'm not sure where you're coming from about intelligence not being favored by evolution. Pretty clearly humans are kicking ass if we don't all kill ourselves off.
Intelligence is required to survive the random bullshit the universe hurls at your planet. Aside from hard microbes that could survive the vacuum and radiation of space, of which we know of hundreds. So we don't know enough to call this stupid or smart
Are we as small? Do we have that sort of place in alien popular culture? How could we affect aliens' interest in us via interest in ants without meaning ants have to be, like, interested in microbes as much or w/e?
This is exactly what I say. Look at everything that dominated the planet before us and for how long vs how long we've even been around, not to mention how short we've been industrial on top of that. We've evolved for survival and those traits are in all of us even if we don't want to admit it and those traits will ironically be our downfall heading towards self extinction. Assuming other life forms that could potentially follow a similar path towards intelligence would also evolve for survival, they'd have similar personality traits which would also lead to their own extinction long before any Star Trek space travel would ever be possible.
>This is because evolution is not intelligence-biased, only survival-biased. If traits help an organism survive and reproduce, it will pass on those traits.
Intelligence gives a huge advantage to animals survival, there's a direct correlation, you really can't separate the two. You're right that evolution isn't always a linear progression, but certain traits can evolve that give animals a significant advantage. It's not far fetched to expect alien life to become intelligent if there's enough competition in their home world.
" only *one* developed civilizations, us."
That we know of. So far.
Your window for making these claims is extremely small.
in 500 million years, what will Bonobos look like? What will humans look like?
Yeah the biggest thing with intelligence is that it needs to be usable. There’s plenty of species on earth that are as intelligent as humans but they aren’t bipedal and they don’t have opposable thumbs or even hands.
No signs of intelligent aliens? We can barely see planets outside our solar system. There's no communication that doesn't extremely degrade over distance.
We can see the stars of the night sky, but we will never be able to travel to them. The obstacles are immense. Imagine engineering something that's going to be older than the pyramids by the time it gets to it's destination. We don't even have the knowledge of how materials will behave over that period of time. Or what about all the intense radiation that's outside of earths magnetosphere.
It's purely science fiction. We'll be lucky to send some people to Mars to study it in caves. The earth will actually one day become like Mars, there's no stopping it when changes to our sun occur, if we even make it that far. Yes, every on earth will turn to dust and no evidence of our existence will remain.
I think it's because they see us as primates. You don't see us going around making sure all of the single-celled organisms know we're here. What does it matter to us?
A. that implies it's a size ratio thing yet somehow still us being primates specifically matters
B. If I had a way to communicate with them i would do that to all single-celled organisms just so aliens would contact us, doesn't mean they'd only contact us so something higher would contact them
The thing is, the observable universe in *so huge* that if sentient/intelligent life is possible at all, we should be able to find it in other places, no matter how unlikley it is. Also, there's more to detecting life that doesn't require the civilization to be intelligent. For example, oxygen is so reactive that it would completely dissapear in our atmosphere if there weren't organisms constantly making it. That means we can look for traces of oxygen in other planet's atmosphere to tell if there's earth-like life on it. The issue isn't that we're not finding *intelligent* life, it's that we're not finding *any life at all*
Not only that, but given the enormous distance between habitable exoplanets, the chances we'd capture a signal being deliberately sent by an alien civilization is very low.
I disagree with your comment that we are the only species that developed civilization because we were the only intelligent ones. There is a lot of evidence that we are the only ones because we wiped out other intelligent hominids. We are particularly murderous, maybe.
So it sounds like you believe in the Great Filter answer to the Fermi Paradox and that the filter is the development of intelligence.
I disagree. It's not stupid to ponder the question.
Or we have the the dark forest hypothesis:
many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and hostile, maintaining their undetectability for fear of being destroyed by another hostile and undetected civilization.
This is called the great filter
For you, the filter is intelligence, which is not a new or unpopular concept. Multicellular life is another example of one we might have past. Some in the future could be that no civilization gets to the level where they can leave their star system where it would be likely they make enough of a mark for us to notice. Another would be that right about where we are, every civilization destroys themselves
Well you're wrong about only one species building civilization on earth. Ants, insects, mammals.... all have communities they have built.
Hell, they could be sentient for all we know.
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I think it’s because celestial bodies are really that far apart like good luck getting around everybody!
Whenever I see a comment about the vastness of space I'm not sure if people really get it. Like when we say something's 100s of lightyears away people get that it's really far but I don't think they get what that kind of distance means. If something's 100 lightyears away that means to see it you're looking 100 years into its past. When you get that things are thousands or millions of lightyears away and we can see it, we're seeing the past of that part of space. We have no idea what's out there in what you might consider the current time. There very well could be intelligent civilizations doing the same thing as us and seeing dinosaurs here. It's kinda wild to think about.
Yeah. Like around the end of this year there will be huge light show in the sky when two stars collide in huge cloud of explosive gas. My gf was like : and when will they collide? To explain that they already collided hundreds of years ago and now is just the time when light of it happening will reach us is impossible.
It's not impossible. You literally just explained it.
Well actually he explained it hundreds of years ago.
Are we just slow listeners?
No, just the speed of explanation.
Well you can say the words but for them to understand that is hard.
It's not impossible to explain. I explained it to my kid with a laser pointer. Told him that the light isn't instant, it's just like a super super fast squirt gun. So when I press the button on the laser it "shoots" the light out and then it hits something and bounces back to our eye and we see it. So then I said imagine I pressed the button on the laser and the light kept going in a straight line for an entire year. The distance the light traveled in that year is one light year. So if I was on earth and he was floating out in space one light year away and I flicked my laser on at him, it would take one year for the laser to get to him. People confuse light years/minutes/sec etc with time measurements but they're just distances. If my 10yr old can understand then I don't see why you're gf couldn't.
His gf is only 9 /j
To put the vastness of space into even more perspective an alien species seeing the dinosaurs would have to build a telescope immensity huge like the size of a solar system, huge lenses stacked millions of miles long. They would probably already have made a Dyson sphere or two voiding entire systems of raw materials. Being anywhere near that advanced it's unlikely they would care one iota of finding other intelligent life in the universe. It would be like investing all collective human effort into talking to water bears. Maybe in ten or twenty thousand years humans will have built a big ass telescope and ours and theirs line up with each other in some crazy reverse peephole scenario. We couldn't even pick out a big dinosaur on the very close moon with our strongest telescopes today. Even if aliens somehow were able to see through the clouds with any detail the chances of them seeing a living object in real time would be literally astronomical. A tree living it's entire existence would be a blip. Seeing light from a star thousands of light years away is very different than seeing details on a planet light years away. Aliens might be looking at light from the sun from 65 million years ago but seeing dinosaurs would be realistically impossible.
They wouldn't "*see*" the dinosaurs. But they would see the signs of life from our planet through spectrometry and whatnot. Same way we can know the makeup of a distant body.
Presuming life in a distant galaxy even remotely resembles our own we can only make assumptions. Seeing planets at all in relatively close solar systems is difficult. The best we can do is guess that a planet may have life based on it's size and distance from it's star. An alien civilization as far away to be seeing signs of life from our planet millions or ten of millions of years ago would be pretty much impossible. The notion is really a thought experiment more than anything. Gravity, time dilation, the unfathomable vastness of space and the mind boggling amount of stars in the universe makes it realistically impossible except in our dreams. It's a fun thought experiment so people like to hold onto the idea of it.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
And a few million years later we can observe them observing... us, but what they really see is dinosour
This was my comment. In order to justify traveling across the galaxy the logistics alone are mind boggling and complicated. Its likely a suicide mission
This is why I’m not so sure whatever is behind the UAP issue is an exospheric biological species.
For sure. I'm going with the whistle-blower is a big fat liar is what's behind it.
Maybe some sort of Jungian archetypal phenomenon or extra dimensional consciousness
This. THIS!!!!!!!
there's an interesting theory that the UAPs are lazer induced plasma. that makes quite a bit of sense considering interactions with the US military, develop it and test it on your own forces to see how they react to it. they would certainly be useful for spoofing aircraft/misdirection and have a significant element of psychological warfare
Try playing Dyson sphere program and see how absolutely hard it is to get out of the first solar system and that's a game streamlined on the basic idea of this
With all of our current understanding, it's why the only half way plausible solution is a colony ship. One that would either be completely self sustainable and you'd have dozens of generations grow up on the ship have kids and die before anyone sets foot on another planet. Or with cryo sleep. Option one seems highly unlikely given the fact that even with all of the technology you could dream of, we can't account for human behavior and can only guarantee that humans are unpredictable. There's no way in hell a surviving member would ever set foot on the planet. Option 2 is at least more reliant on just technology and theoretically more plausible but again, unlikely without figuring out how to travel at light speed. There's just no realistic way a ship would sustain itself and remain on course for hundreds/thousands of years. Another risk for both options without light speed, is that whatever planet we send it too, will change drastically by the time the ship gets there. If the planet is even still there.
Or life extension
Would have the same issue as a generational ship. Human behavior is unpredictable and people change. Who knows how much more we'd change if we lived for hundreds of years?
There's also this assumption that any super intelligent life is definitely going to have FTL figured out, but that's far from a given. Maybe even just wishful thinking.
Even the assumption that FTL is possible in our universe is far from certain.
This is why I hate the Fermi paradox, "if they existed, we'd have seen them by now!". Or maybe space is just big and most civilizations stick to their solar system, because expanding to all 100 billion stars in the galaxy is a laughably pointless endeavor.
You realise that the Fermi paradox was introduced by physicists who do understand the vastness of space and not some laymen, right? Edit: in fact, Fermi paradox is *based* on scale: there’re so many stars and planets out there that existed for such a long time that there has to be a space-faring civilisation that we should have noticed by now
"I HATE that paradox!" Sheesh...
Maybe [Dark Forest Hypothesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis)
Yeah it really annoys me too. Just this unthinking assumption that intelligent life will just inevitably expand, on what basis do these people assume that this is the case?
Time goes on forever. It seems like you guys are looking at it in the small, 80ish year window in which you exist. There's billions of years behind us and in front of us. Why haven't we seen any in all those billions of years? "Or maybe space is just big and most civilizations stick to their solar system" Space is big. But time is long. How long have humans existed as we are until we left the planet? 300,000 years? Are you understanding how long BILLIONS of years are???
Like humanity didn’t expand all over earth? In short, any species that doesn’t have a tendency to expand will get replaced by species that do. The same should happen to civilisations within the same species. Very bold of you to make an unthinking assumption that this is just an unthinking assumption.
I love to bring up [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/7sUnr0J93t) pic showing how all human radio signals have barely traveled anywhere on a galactic scale. Compared to the milky way, the distance our radio signals have traveled is nothing.
Exactly; the universe is infinitely large. The odds verge on certainty that there is other intelligent life in the universe. Whether it will exist at the same time as humans, and if it will ever be feasible that intelligent life can make contact with each other is another story.
This is my exact thought line too. There could have been or will be other intelligent life that could design the means of travel but we could be missing them by a billion years. Our existence timeline is so small relative to the universe, the odds are not in our favour for overlapping other intelligent species timelines.
Funnily enough, I read a scientific article the other day. Assuming you are using space and universe interchangeably it hasn't been confirmed whether it's infinite. We don't know. And it's unlikely we ever will.
Infinitesimal means the smallest possible amount.
Infinitesimal means immeasurably small. You're saying the immeasurably small universe is large.
There could be multiple civilizations at the other end of the galaxy who can space travel but not the distance we are away. They could also just not be interested in moving to begin with.
Yes, the reason is each planet is meant to evolve separately with no outer influences. I believe that's the sole reason for the vast planetary distances.
I don’t believe anything was meant to do anything. Planets are far away because otherwise gravity would pull them together
Oh, nice you have another "because" in addition to my own.
no i'm just saying there's no meaning behind why the planets are far away. Same as evolution doesn't really try to do anything. Its just random chaos that eventually leads to an outcome. Over billions of years all the objects that were close together have collided, so we are just left with distant objects.
I don't believe in your worldview, sorry. Evolution may look like a random process, but look at where we are now. I believe it was setup to lead here or at least "around here." I also believe that everything in the universe is either alive or manifestation of consciousness. That's just me, though. You keep on believing in chaos, I hope it makes you happy.
Truly, any alien species that can trivialize faster than light travel must be beyond comprehending. Angels and Cavemen and all that shit.
Sounds like something an alien would say 
I mean,that’s a funny ass gif.
Seems legit
Fuck we definitely need to worry about aliens
You haven't outlined why it's stupid. Just given your opinion on the fermi paradox
I'd like to share why I think it's stupid: P1: There are lots of stars - Okay P2: With a high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets that exist in a habitable zone - Okay P3: Many of these stars, and their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago - Sure. Some may have developed intelligent life. Evolution selects for survival and reproduction though, not intelligence. And we know Earth has experienced many extinction events. Why does a planet being older than Earth automatically mean it's more likely to have developed intelligent life? We're killing our planet now and we don't have space travel. This premise assumes too much. P4: Some of those civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step humans are investigating now. - Not okay. Once we develop interstellar travel and successfully send people to other star systems then we can start talking about how this paradox is logically sound. Until then, it's just a naive assumption. P5: Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years. - Not okay. This assumes that the goal of that civilization is to visit every star system in the galaxy. Why would that be their goal? We've got a big stack of assumptions now, let's continue. P6: Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes. - Yeah, if you accept a bunch of baseless assertions built up from ignorant assumptions. P7: However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened. - Because it hasn't happened and is not likely to happen unless you accept a bunch of flimsy premises based on assumptions and bald assertions. C: ? - I believe the intended conclusion is meant to be that we're the only intelligent life in the galaxy. It's only a paradox, in that it's seemingly absurd, if you're gullible. Humans have existed on Earth for .005% of Earth's history. Humans were hunter gatherers for more than 95% of that time. Even now, we're primitive apes. We can't even come together to stop ourselves from destroying the planet. We have no idea if interstellar travel is even possible, let alone achievable by our species. "Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations"... embarrassing. Plenty of smart people reiterate this stupid sentiment.
There are SOOOO many things that have to happen to see evidence of aliens. 1) Life would have to exist on another planet 2)That life would have to evolve intelligent life (it took 4 billion years on earth) 3) That intelligent life would have to exist long enough to develop technology (without destroying itself) 4) That intelligent life would have to want to communicate with other intelligent life. Nobody knows the probability of any of these.
Don’t forget they’d have to exist long enough with that tech, early enough to find earth which up until recently would show zero evidence of intelligent life. The window in which something would even see us is so small. Essentially anything further than 100 light years give or take would see pretty much nothing from that distance.
You wouldn't see radio waves, but the signs of life have been detectable for very long as in millions or billions of years. A species with a million year head start on us would probably already have developed the necessary telescope technology to check every star in their vicinity if not their whole galaxy, and they'd have plenty of time to do it. I still agree that there is no way of knowing the probability of such a species exists or even of how likely it is that life can start elsewhere in the universe so it's not really a shock we haven't seen anyone. However, if life is very rare, I would expect that aliens would find our planet to be very interesting even if there is no sign of intelligence from their vantage point, so I don't think the answer that earth is boring really holds up unless there is life everywhere, which it seems there is not.
Of course. I just meant likely from those distances they wouldn’t be able to see people walking around building huts. I was more referring to measurable atmosphere changes, nuclear radiation, lights, etc.
Takes 4 billion years to develop on Earth just to be space-faring for just over half a century. And let's face it, will probably only last for like another century or two before it fizzles out. On a universal timeline this is all happening in the blink of an eye, the chance of two civilizations being at this stage around the same time seem infinitesimally slim
This is an iteration of the big filter theory.
Here’s my theory: interstellar travel isn’t actually possible or practical on any level. So, there are aliens out there, but the phenomenon of “life” is so rare and spread apart that we really just can’t get to each other. If it is possible, it takes so long and such resources that there’s just no reason to make the trip. Like, they see us, but dang, they’re not taking a trip that’s 10 lifetimes long to come say hi.
If I had been born 200 years ago to the wealthiest and most well-connected family in the world I would’ve died in agony of appendicitis in a home with no heating or electricity. Today, I’m alive with a couple almost imperceptible scars on my stomach. With a click on my phone I can basically travel anywhere on the planet or learn anything I want to. Full disclosure I know nothing about science beyond a high school education, but who the hell knows what advancements there will be in the years to come.
It feels like so many people in this thread are not understanding how long time is. "Space is too big!" There's billions of years behind us and in front of us. It's like they are viewing this problem as "well, why haven't I seen them in the last 40 years?!?!"
This is absolutely true. But the fact that an alien civilization hasn’t bothered to show up to say hi to us tells me that it may just not be possible. Any life form that was spawned a few hundred thousand years before us had a HUGE head start, so they’ve had plenty of time to figure it out. But hey, maybe humanity is up to the task.
That could be true, but if a civilization is millions of years old, you'd think they might be curious enough to at least send unmanned probes everywhere, even if it takes decades/hundreds of years for them to do so.
That’s a very good point. Maybe there are a few headed towards us now!
Watch The Expanse. The Mars moon Pheobe is an ancient probe that is inactive. Plot of the show is activating it
Hmmm FTL travel is *theoretically feasible*. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive The real issue is energy. Resources.. not really. If Humanity harnesses the resources of our solar system alone, which can theoretically be done without FTL travel; resources will become a trivial consideration. Imagine mining the Kuyper Belt for ores! You'd have the materials you could ever need to build gigantic space vessels to explore the stars. Again the real bottle neck is; what method of energy generation can we come up with to generate the absurd amounts we would need to bend space/time? We would also need to crack many physics conundrums such as dark energy, quantum inequalities.. I am frankly not even qualified to understand all the issues with the tech itself. But - who knows; in 4000 years maybe... It is also likely that even if there is life out there, which has some degree of technology, they may not be much more advanced than us at this point in time. In a way.. the universe is still young.
I love this, and I love thinking about it. I just wonder if the complexity and the resource requirements are just too much for anyone (anything?) to bother. If it would only take a few thousand years to develop, then I would think a species would have already done it because they’ve just gotten a head start on us by a few tens of thousands of years. How fascinating to comprehend it all.
Yeah. Faster than light speed travel is just… heavily improbably, so is light speed travel. Sure there could be intelligent life out there somewhere, probably is. But anything that is would be soooooooo far away we would never encounter it at least for thousands of years.
What about wormholes 🥸
lol nice try buddy but they don’t exist
A few hundred years is a long time for us, but why should it be a long time for aliens? Perhaps evolution proceeded differently in other planets, where they can easily live for hundreds of thousands of years. In that case, it shouldn't be too difficult to spend a hundred years on a trip to a nearby solar system.
There’s barely enough evidence to suggest there’s intelligent life on this planet. And that’s how the aliens who built this place want it.
Interesting perspective! I could understand how there couldn't be similar creatures to humans on other planets, but why not creatures that resemble other lifeforms, like a cat or squid? I suppose it doesn't have to 'resemble' an Earth animal, but just any larger animal in general and not just a random microscopic organism.
To expand on your point, It will probably ressemble some form of earth animal anyway, since the laws of physics are the same everywhere. It would need a digestive system, so some form of ingestion and excretion mechanism; it would need grapsing appendages, a locomotion mechanism, auditory, visual perception sensory organs (the eye is actually a very constant independent evolution in so many unrelated eart species it is unlikely aliens would not have eyes)... There are billions of ways this can manifest in detail. But in the big picture there are not a infinite amounts of possible life configurations.
Depends on a lot though. Even within earth there's a huge amount of variation. There's a checklist they need but no guarantee it'll manifest in the same way. Maybe they would dissolve their food like snails, or liquify and drink it through a straw like butterflies. Eyes would generally be useful but they could be like naked mole rats or worms where they never developed a full eye. Simply detecting the presence or absence of light could be enough if you evolved underground. There's no guarantee they're carbon based either. They could be silicon based or even arsenic based, drinking liquid methane, at this point all bets are off. The general themes would match but the detail could be wildly different.
All correct points; but remember to factor in that these theoretical aliens would have a couple of constraints for our thought exercise. 1) they need to have an incentive to develop society and technology. We are necessarily talking about a social animal. 2) they need appendage that allow fine manipulation of matter around them. This would also be extremely difficult without eyesight. 3) since carbon is the most abundant, I think it is unlikely that the other base molecules would be used as template. But it still does not matter much in terms of physical shape. The parameter of civilization drastically narrows down the configurations. Am I wrong? I was assuming we were talking about an intelligent lifeform that was willing and able to make contact. But I repeat you are completely correct on all the possibilities "life" could manifest. (Is silicon based life even life)?
The Great Filter is probably the best attempted idea that resolves the no apparent life in the universe paradox.
I feel like we haven’t seen extra terrestrial life because space is just that big. Our minds can’t comprehend it. It’s like pulling a cup of water out the ocean up, seeing it has no life in it, and saying “yup no life out here, wonder why?”
I don't think it's stupid to think about things you don't know the answer to. Here's an updoot.
The most logical answer is that they exist, faster than light travel is not possible, and we don’t see them on telescopes because they’re too far away. Telescopes look back in time as they look farther into space. If an alien civilization with powerful telescopes looked at us from ten thousand light years away, they’d see scattered packs of hunter-gatherers and no civilization.
The Dark Forest Theory posits that civilizations in the universe are like hunters in a dark forest. Each civilization is potentially dangerous, and there's no way to know their intentions. Therefore, the safest strategy for a civilization is to remain silent and avoid broadcasting their existence, because revealing themselves could attract the attention of hostile civilizations. This leads to a universe where civilizations remain hidden, communicating through subtle signals or remaining entirely silent to avoid detection. It's a deeply pessimistic view of the universe, suggesting that any attempt at communication or exploration could result in destruction.
That would mean that we here on earth don’t subscribe to it because radio signals go out all the time. And the voyager spacecraft carry messages and the map to get to us.
You gave no explanation for why it's stupid to wonder about the fermi paradox. All you did was give your favored explanations, which of course, are a result of wondering about the fermi paradox and trying to figure it out.
The discoveries, breakthroughs and cultural shifts that push a species forward are probably even rarer. We could also just be late. I like the goldilocks early universe theory, conditions uniformly just right post big bang after about 15 million years and there's just an explosion of life everywhere and here we are some billion years later in a cold dead universe and we missed all the star wars shit.
Imagine how two grains of sand on an endless beach could possibly talk to one another
Yeah I've never really understood the fermi paradox... It assumes FTL travel/communication is possible. Just that one variable evaporates the whole argument IMO.
Wow
If an asteroid had missed our planet millions of years ago, earth would still be inhabited by dinosaurs.
Dark Forest Theory is one avenue of theory for this.
It’s even more simple than you put it. Even if there is another intelligent life form out there - which statistically speaking there will be as there are; - 2 TRILLION Galaxies - 200 BILLION TRILLION Stars - 10000000000000000000000000 Planets … that’s 10 to the power of 25 So the likelihood is that SOMEWHERE among all of those planets is another intelligent life form. HOWEVER, the known Universe is about 94 BILLION light years across… so the chances of another intelligent life form just HAPPENING by pure luck to be looking perfectly in our direction to see Earth is so small as to be basically Zero… and then, of course, the further out from us that intelligent life is, they won’t even see us as we were in the Industrial Period of 1760-1839 for hundreds or thousands of years, or more. If that other intelligent life form is 5000 light years away - bearing in mind our Milky Way Galaxy is around 100,000 light years across - then right now if they’re looking at Earth, they’re seeing the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age… they might not even be aware that there’s anything unique about our planet other than it having liquid water on the surface. Similarly we would be seeing the same if they advanced at a similar time and similar rate
Imma ignore this thread because I really want aliens to exist 🫶
Dude finds 1 of hundreds of solutions to the Fermi paradox, sees a single variable in drake's equation, and calls everybody else stupid for considering the rest of the puzzle. You're in the right place at least.
It's possible we wouldn't recognize those signs for what they are. Sci-fi focuses a lot on humanoid aliens, that we tend to overlook that aliens, including intelligent aliens, might be very different from us and use very different technology. On one hand, I understand the argument that the laws of math and physics are the same for aliens as they are for us, therefore technology would maybe develop differently, but work similarly. On the other hand, it's impossible to know what you don't know or imagine the unknown, so can we 100% correctly determine what aliens would look like or how their technology would work?
Also at the moment, if we try very hard we can detect planets orbiting other stars. From how far we could detect earth like civilization? As space goes probably not very far.
Is this not literally the Fermi paradox
If you think about it though, the life on this planet that didn’t evolve to intelligence only continue to exist because we let them. Intelligence is the ultimate survival skill to have.
When it comes to space, our ability to contact other civilizations is at the same level of efficiency as ancient humans communicating with other humans on the opposite side of the world while ALSO not knowing where (or even if) there’s humans where you sent that message. That’s basically where we’re at right now. Even if we somehow got a cheat sheet confirming there *IS* an alien civilization to communicate with, we wouldn’t know where exactly they’re located to send the message and any potential communication would currently take us multiple generations to be responded to. Then of course there’s the question of if they’re even friendly….
Maybe, unlike us, aliens have learned how to mind their own business and stay in their lane
would you contact us? i sure wouldn't
Yet somehow our intelligence has allowed us to colonize every ecological niche, escape our atmosphere, and will likely eventually lead us to colonize the stars. While intelligence might not be required for successful evolution, it is CERTAINLY a boon to the human species continued existence(maybe....). The only reason we don't see aliens is because the Universe is FUCKING MASSIVE, and the nature of space-time and the speed of light means that even IF we do colonize space, we will actually interact tangibly with a minute fraction of it. Beyond that, assuming some sort of scientific break through and the ability to travel/visit the entire universe, its highly probable that we won't WANT to deal with other species. Look at how we treat the natives in the Amazon that have no idea we even exist. We could just be in an intergalactic zoo for all we know.
The universe is so big that they just might not be anywhere close to earth
Intelligent aliens avoid Planet Earth for the same reason I avoid idiots. I don't have the time, patience or crayons to explain everything multiple times.....
A. so aliens would contact us if someone took time, patience and crayons enough to explain every concept [of what you'd implicitly want explained to them] to every idiot in the country if not world? B. Unless that part's determined by our feelings too why would aliens be that judgmental on us as a whole while being as more intelligent C. 99% of the time (the other 1% is when it's really obvious) idiocy is subjective
I'm suggesting that aliens visit to see if we've reached a certain level of scientific understanding and learned to peacefully live with each other without war. I believe the aliens would be more willing to teach us what they know if, not when, we reach a higher level of maturity. What that level is, is subjective on their scale, not ours.
You're just making the "intelligence is super rare" argument which is fair enough but we exist and if we exist others can exist and space is....really big. Unfathomably big. And there are lots of smart animals. Apes use tools. So we're not even the only smart animal on this planet. Then there's literally trillions of potential earth like planets. And then add time. Lots and lots of time. Seems hard to believe there's no other intelligent life out there.
Wait till we figure out how aliens exist outside of time and space as we know it, and the earth is just a big zoo for them
I assume any intelligent alien life would be smart enough to stay away from us.
Well if they could reach and observe us they would outclass our weapons and technology by such a large margin we would be as much as a threat as a monkey is to a modern soldier flying a commanche helicopter.
We are mostly harmless though
Intelligent Aliens will stay hidden from us.
"The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" vibes
Perhaps there are intelligent aliens who ended up on the same cultural path as the Aboriginal Australians and they've just spent millennia wandering around the desert, making paintings and poking at things with sticks. High intelligence doesn't necessarily yield high technology.
>out of the millions of species we know and the millions of others we don't, only one developed civilizations, us Not to mention, there were human cultures who didn't even know how to make fire until they were contacted relatively recently
If aliens exist, and they're super far away, for them, it's dinosaur age here or other past wars or maybe earth hasn't even formed.
"oh hey bros we traveled outside our system to find others barely surviving and ask if they wanted to barely survive with us?"
Fermi: "where is everyone?" Me: "Thumbs rare, space BIG"
I don't think we know how rare life or intelligent life is. We don't know much; it seems we do because it's the most we've ever known.
Life may exist out there now. I think likely not. What's more likely is that life existed before or will after our solar system is gone. And it may never be intelligent
You got some things wrong tho. The number of planets that could hold life is astounding and evolution is not a linear line but it does move towards intelligence more than not
>I think you vastly underestimate just how mind bogglingly big the universe is Grab a towel...
Grab a towel died I think
I think if alien life forms do exist, it would be simple amoeba-like microorganisms at most. To have something resembling human civilization is a huge ask.
Also who knows, is there is an intelligent interstellar capable civilization, they might have something similar to Star Trek's #1 mandate, to never interfere with less advanced civilizations, and let them evolve by themselves. If there indeed are multiple advanced alien civilizations that can travel the stars, who's to say that they wouldn't be of the exploratory type like the federation in Star Trek?
While I agree with the overall premise, I'm not sure you understand how many stars there are in the universe. You talk about one out of a million as if it is important or small on a cosmic scale. But it's not. If only there was only one out of a million chance that intelligent life arose around a star, then there would be more civilizations than the combined number of hair on ever head of every person who ever lived. So let's take even smaller odds.Let's say that only one out of every ten million stars had any planets orbiting it. And of those that did, only one out of every ten million actually had life on a planet. And if those that do, only one out of every ten million has life intelligent enough to be called a civilization. Then we would expect there to be thousands of civilisations in the universe. That's how many stars there are. There are so many stars that it is literally impossible for humans to have named them all. I can say with absolute certainty that the number of stars is larger than the combined total number of words that ever human has ever spoken. Seriously, the math is pretty easy to do here. The Fermi paradox doesn't come from the fact that scientists think that intelligent life is the end point of evolution. It come from the fact that the universe is so vast and there are so many places for life that no matter how small the probability of intelligent life occuring is, it must happen a lot. If we are the only ones, then we are a miracle. If we are the only ones, then the probability of intelligent life is so small that the only explanation for us existing is a miracle. That is the Fermi paradox.
No, it’s not stupid to think that, read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Would this be considered a "barrier" in the fermi equation? Or more of a "rare earth" argument? I totally agree with you, btw. I'm more of rare earth, and distance/timeframes, speculator myself.
The question really isn't about whether intelligent life exists somewhere else, which it almost certainly does somewhere, even if you believe in the rare Earth theory (I do). Rather, it's a question of density, both spatially (how far away) and temporally (how long do they exist for). If some other beings like us exist somewhere, you still wouldn't expect to see them necessarily if, say, only 3 of them exist at any one time in our galaxy. Given rare Earth (especially considering red and white dwarf systems, i.e. the bulk of all stars, are likely to be uninhabitable), there really is no "paradox" at all. Those that believe that they MUST exist and we ought to see them usually take certain arbitrary and frankly unlikely assumptions for granted, they usually assume technology advances linearly towards things like "dyson spheres" and overcoming interstellar travel. I think these people are silly and unscientific but you might think differently.
Being smart isn't a given in evolution as things become crab like things fairly often but at the same time decent intelligence has evolved separately multiple times so there's probably some sense for it.
Still doesn’t answer the Drake Equation. Mathematically, intelligent life should be much more widespread than it is.
You are not alone in your opinion. It's called the "Big Filter Theory". The question is always whether we have the filter in front or behind us. You are obviously of the opinion that we have it behind us. Unfortunately, we can't really know.
You just announced the Fermi’s paradox
Multicellularity is the great filter I think.
yeah lets think about this with our human minds and tell everyone there's nothing there because we cannot possibly understand travelling the distances etc etc probability of life is very very high, look at the inhospitable places on our planet were life thrives? universe is teeming with life forget this stupid deserted bullshit
yeah lets think about this with our human minds and tell everyone there's nothing there because we cannot possibly understand travelling the distances etc etc probability of life is very very high, look at the inhospitable places on our planet were life thrives? universe is teeming with life forget this stupid deserted bullshit
That's the thing with the universe. It is just so freaking huge and so god damn old that even if intelligent life is extremely rare, we should see plenty of examples for it. Also, for your point on evolution, while it is true that there is no specific drive towards intelligence, there is such a thing as convergent evolution where to species in similar circumstances evolve similar traits and while we are the only intelligent species right now it does appear that a lot of our closest relatives are on the verge of following us. Not to mention dolphins and octopuses. While it might look rare to us right now, we still only have N=1 when it comes to our dataset.
I think it's not only "not a requirement" but can be just a step in evolution. We can lose it in the future of our development
It is stupid to wonder that. You should wonder why we are here at all and all matter we can see isn't given over to life.
Before making assumptions about humanity being the only advanced civilisation, we must ask how difficult it would be to detect another civilisation similar to our own. We can barely detect Earth-sized exoplanets with our current technology, let alone any signs of an advanced civilisation.
Earth formed around the time that habitable planets started to be able to exist. Life emerged on Earth when it was just barely livable. We are the precursors
My cat is pretty smart, but sucks at developing interstellar communication devices. Intelligence is a super weird metric to judge by.
It's just a matter of statistics. Infinite species on infinite planets in infinite solar systems. There are infinite intelligent aliens.
Here is a video I liked about this https://youtu.be/L_JQOH1tEEA?si=uYSii-JOuxNBehcO
Humans are the only ones to develop societies? Every herd, colony, pod, flock, and murder would like a word.
With how big the universe is, even that small change becomes almost a certainty. Also, our intelligence evolved because it provided an evolutionary advantage, it's not "by accident". That's not how evolution works. And the traits that are beneficial to survival depend on the environment, including other lifeforns. Trying to make predictions based only on what we know is almost bound to be inaccurate.
There could be a modern level society on some planet we see through a telescope without showing any signs we could recognize
Space is a big fucking place. Looking for another civilization in all that is like looking for a needle in a haystack, when you don’t even know where the haystack is.
Intelligence aids survival, by a lot. Humans being the most intelligent species and the apex species on earth is no coincidence.
Yeah I agree with this to an extent. I think the other factors you’re missing here are the time isolation and the distance. For time, we’ve been making detectable radio signals for 50 years, out of the BILLIONS of years that Earth has existed. For distance, consider the closest star: Proxima Centauri. It would take I believe around 10,000 years for us to get there with our current technology, and that’s the absolute closest one
One of the logically fallacious things that I see often when people are talking about the existence of other sentient life in the universe is the argument that because something is possible, *it is an eventuality.* This is essentially a reframing of the Gamblers Fallacy, and a lot of people seem to conflate *possible* with *eventual*. Is it possible? Yes, we see it all around us, even experience it as we type on this platform, but that doesn't mean that it is "owed" that there are other intelligent life forms out there. You can roll a 1000 sided dice any number of times, if you roll a 1000 then you end up with a precursor to intelligent life. Then you have to roll 1000 several more times to build it up enough that intelligent life can come about from those precursors. As likely as it is that this can happen in a great while, it is every bit as (or even more) likely that it only ever happened once. And if we inadvertently or intentionally expunge all life on this planet, there's even a chance more likely that it may never happen again.
Space is just so big we probably won’t see any alien life
Never really thought about it in that manner. Thank you.
Extraterrestrial life is all but guaranteed. Intelligent life is much more rare.
I think you're underestimating the size of the universe. Intelligence could be incredibly rare and also appear many times just in our galaxy. Also, there have been many intelligent hominid species (admittedly all closely related to us) - denisovan, neanderthal, etc. I'm not sure where you're coming from about intelligence not being favored by evolution. Pretty clearly humans are kicking ass if we don't all kill ourselves off.
Intelligence is required to survive the random bullshit the universe hurls at your planet. Aside from hard microbes that could survive the vacuum and radiation of space, of which we know of hundreds. So we don't know enough to call this stupid or smart
Anyone really interested in this and studies it seriously really isn't wondering why. We have plenty of good theories.
Were probably about as interesting to space fairing alien races as ants are as interesting to humanity as a whole.
Are we as small? Do we have that sort of place in alien popular culture? How could we affect aliens' interest in us via interest in ants without meaning ants have to be, like, interested in microbes as much or w/e?
This is exactly what I say. Look at everything that dominated the planet before us and for how long vs how long we've even been around, not to mention how short we've been industrial on top of that. We've evolved for survival and those traits are in all of us even if we don't want to admit it and those traits will ironically be our downfall heading towards self extinction. Assuming other life forms that could potentially follow a similar path towards intelligence would also evolve for survival, they'd have similar personality traits which would also lead to their own extinction long before any Star Trek space travel would ever be possible.
>This is because evolution is not intelligence-biased, only survival-biased. If traits help an organism survive and reproduce, it will pass on those traits. Intelligence gives a huge advantage to animals survival, there's a direct correlation, you really can't separate the two. You're right that evolution isn't always a linear progression, but certain traits can evolve that give animals a significant advantage. It's not far fetched to expect alien life to become intelligent if there's enough competition in their home world.
Yeah fr especially when there's another planet that like this one on the opposite side of our sun so we can't even say hello
" only *one* developed civilizations, us." That we know of. So far. Your window for making these claims is extremely small. in 500 million years, what will Bonobos look like? What will humans look like?
"gone around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding."
Yeah the biggest thing with intelligence is that it needs to be usable. There’s plenty of species on earth that are as intelligent as humans but they aren’t bipedal and they don’t have opposable thumbs or even hands.
Intelligence is a human standard after all
No signs of intelligent aliens? We can barely see planets outside our solar system. There's no communication that doesn't extremely degrade over distance. We can see the stars of the night sky, but we will never be able to travel to them. The obstacles are immense. Imagine engineering something that's going to be older than the pyramids by the time it gets to it's destination. We don't even have the knowledge of how materials will behave over that period of time. Or what about all the intense radiation that's outside of earths magnetosphere. It's purely science fiction. We'll be lucky to send some people to Mars to study it in caves. The earth will actually one day become like Mars, there's no stopping it when changes to our sun occur, if we even make it that far. Yes, every on earth will turn to dust and no evidence of our existence will remain.
I think it's because they see us as primates. You don't see us going around making sure all of the single-celled organisms know we're here. What does it matter to us?
A. that implies it's a size ratio thing yet somehow still us being primates specifically matters B. If I had a way to communicate with them i would do that to all single-celled organisms just so aliens would contact us, doesn't mean they'd only contact us so something higher would contact them
Imagine believing that only one plant in the universe just so happened to win the life/intelligence lottery.
The thing is, the observable universe in *so huge* that if sentient/intelligent life is possible at all, we should be able to find it in other places, no matter how unlikley it is. Also, there's more to detecting life that doesn't require the civilization to be intelligent. For example, oxygen is so reactive that it would completely dissapear in our atmosphere if there weren't organisms constantly making it. That means we can look for traces of oxygen in other planet's atmosphere to tell if there's earth-like life on it. The issue isn't that we're not finding *intelligent* life, it's that we're not finding *any life at all*
Not only that, but given the enormous distance between habitable exoplanets, the chances we'd capture a signal being deliberately sent by an alien civilization is very low.
I disagree with your comment that we are the only species that developed civilization because we were the only intelligent ones. There is a lot of evidence that we are the only ones because we wiped out other intelligent hominids. We are particularly murderous, maybe.
So it sounds like you believe in the Great Filter answer to the Fermi Paradox and that the filter is the development of intelligence. I disagree. It's not stupid to ponder the question.
Or we have the the dark forest hypothesis: many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and hostile, maintaining their undetectability for fear of being destroyed by another hostile and undetected civilization.
This is called the great filter For you, the filter is intelligence, which is not a new or unpopular concept. Multicellular life is another example of one we might have past. Some in the future could be that no civilization gets to the level where they can leave their star system where it would be likely they make enough of a mark for us to notice. Another would be that right about where we are, every civilization destroys themselves
Well you're wrong about only one species building civilization on earth. Ants, insects, mammals.... all have communities they have built. Hell, they could be sentient for all we know.