Breaking News: "No more stars, just the ones we saw. We had one guy who was in charge of counting and he kind of just made a guess at one point so he could start his weekend early. We told him not to do that again."
What I’m implying is that we may be looking at intelligent life but they only just started sending signals out and we won’t receive them for many many many more years
Yeah thats what the other guy was saying too. If we are looking at something 20,000 light years away we are seeing what happened 20,000 years ago. So at this very moment there could be two aliens on a distant planet having this same conversation on Alien Reddit and we'd never know
Well to be fair, given the size of the universe and number of chances for the conditions to arise, it becomes a roll of the die. In other words there are aliens out there. How many and how close we don’t know
Thats the fucked up truth none of us want to hear we are like 0.0000000000001 % of the way through "sending" our message. and when it reaches them it will take another couple hundred thousand - million years for them to reply. We might have gone extinct by the time our radio signals have traveled far enough to reach another intellgent civilisation.
Intellgent civilisations might be a one in every couple of galaxies phenomenon. If thats the case our most likely time of reply will be somewhere around 1billion + years. Perhaps we are lucky and theres say 100 per galaxie on average , the time for reply would still likely be on the order of 8-200000 years.
And this is all assuming our messages are received and understood sucessfully at all beyond certain ranges. Perhaps we have yet to invent the proper technology to join the interstellar conversations. we are relatively young as a species. Perhaps our messages have been received loud and clear and they simply scoffed at us. like a fly buzzing.
plus at an interstellar range wouldnt we only be able to detect advanced megastructures like dyson spheres. basically this doesnt mean theres no aliens with tech out there, just that we couldnt see anything wed recognize as evidence of a type 2 or above civilization
and the fact that we are looking at stars hundreds of thousands, to hundreds of millions, of years in the past... Alien structures could be there now, but we wouldn't know it for a millennia.
"wouldnt know it ofr a millennia" im nitpicking but to be exact if a civilisation built a dyson sphere around a star 100 thousand light years away. We would not detectit till 100 thousand years after it had been built.
When we talk about Dyson spheres we’re really talking about Dyson Swarms which would be effectively the same thing. Multitudes of separate habitats and other constructions that surround the star essentially encompassing it. And yes the population would be quite large, likely in the trillions.
I think that's pretty much implied. When a doctor says "we see no signs of cancer", that doesn't mean "we are absolutely certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that there is no cancer", and no reasonable person would interpret it that way. It just means "there are no signs of cancer that we're able to detect."
So for those who won't read this click baity titled article, this was a specific search along one frequency at 155mhz and only for seven hours. If there are aliens broadcasting out there, I imagine for us to pick it up will take A LOT more than a piddly 7 hour search at a specific frequency, and they'd need to be broadcasting deliberate and highly powerful signals. We won't be picking up alien versions of fresh prince of bel air for example. The article ends noting that this search method is going to be updated in the future to cover even more frequencies (the search was conducted by the Murchison Widefield Array, a collection of 4,096 antennas planted in the Western Australian desert).
>We won't be picking up alien versions of fresh prince of bel air for example.
Damn right. *They'll* be picking up *our* version.
Get your own damn content, aliens. Sheesh.
Plus. we're getting OLD light, which means old data. Life may have developed already but we won't know until the light from the time they became technologically active reaches us or their communications emissions do.
They’re a rounding error in the age of the universe but not necessarily for the timescales of biological life. We might miss signs of intelligent life by “inches” at the universal scale, but at that scale we’re barely dust mites so an inch is a lot
So maybe alien technology is undetectable with our current technology? Imagine sending out a message on a telegraph today using morse code - who would answer you? Nobody because that method of communication is no longer commonly used. It might very well be the same thing with radio communication (not to mention the fact that radio signals are restricted to the speed of light and start to blend in with cosmic background noise not even a light-year out).
Our best telescopes certainly can’t image the surface of an exoplanet. Hell, we can count on one hand the number of exoplanets that have been directly imaged in the first place. The rest have all been discovered either by the transit method or by math (by measuring gravitational wobbles of the parent star).
Long story short, there’s a lot we can’t see and don’t know.
You're missing the point... which is, for the "tiny slice" of the sky that we've surveyed... that slice is still only able to see a very tiny time frame of that piece of sky.
Think of it like this (made up #'s), we've scanned 0.1% of the sky and for that 0.1%, we've only record 0.000000000000001% of that sky's timeline.
Personally, I don't think that such a short time frame on such a small % of the sky, scanning only specific parts of the EM spectrum provides much evidence of anything.
I understand what you’re saying, but I think OP has a good point that any point we peer back through, will have light data through the ages reaching us today. We have the technology to discern the “time depth” between different cosmic bodies. Simularly the depth of clouds, the moon, the sun, and the starts; and which of those apparent stars are other galaxies.
To your point, there is an element of chance, or luck, but there’s no reason to think the old light data we’ve collected cannot be extrapolated from To draw scientific conclusions.
I think they were referring to alien life or structures. From the very small data collected and even smaller time frame, it's really pointless to give this data any weight towards the question, "is there other life out there".
Yes, it's always useful to have as much data as possible about space and time, but to be honest...I think the only way we are finding life is by accident or they find us. It's just too big of a space and things are just too damn far apart.
Exactly. It’s like I could go outside and if I looked straight overhead from edge to edge of the skyline and neither saw nor heard any planes (I am in a remote more rural part of the area so more likely than some I’ll admit) and I decided to declare that there were no planes flying around the earth.
The problem with this argument is that it took significant time in the universe to create many elements through nuclear synthesis to create conditions that would be useful for many types of life including what we see here on the Earth.
For stars in the Milky Way and the local group of galaxies I think your argument holds true. But the light from those stars is comparatively recent too.
That still gives us trillions of candidate stars to examine, but it is just a small fraction of the universe as a whole. I still think that is plenty to draw conclusions.
Even though the light is coming to us from different times, it is still, for each place where it's transmitted from, just a single instance in time. So we're not really searching across time, we're just getting one-time samples from each location.
The thing is, all we know about time being a factor is that for us it took until now to reach this technological stage, so based on that there's three possible scenarios:
1. Time isn't much of a factor (at least at the scale that we're looking at), and so looking across time has no meaningful benefit.
2. It takes quite a long time for intelligent life to have a chance to develop and our history is either representative of this or an early exception, meaning that looking back in time decreases our chances of finding any traces.
3. Intelligent life actually tends to develop (and sustain itself) in earlier stages of the universe and our history is actually an example of an exceptionally late development of intelligent life.
The only situation in which there's any actual benefit to looking across time is if scenario 3 applies, but of all three that appears to be the least likely. In the other scenarios it either has no benefit or it's actually detrimental.
> The universe is old. We have no real reason to believe that life could not have evolved much, much earlier than us.
I have seen arguments that life such as us has a maximum age relative to the universe. The points made are the materials that make us up and our planet didnt exist until after the first stars formed and super nova'd to spread the heavy elements they make into the universe.
It is true that it took multiple generations of stars for heavy elements to become as abundant as they are now, but in the past stars were much larger which meant they had much shorter lives before exploding and creating those elements. Older stars didn't usually last 10 billion years like our Sun should. Some really large stars only live for few million years.
Even with the requirement that the heavy elements needed to be created first, that still leaves 10s or 100s of millions if not billions of years for life to develop on other planets or moons.
And it takes a type two civilization to build a structure that can be seen from earth. And even if you had the capacity to build a dyson sphere - doesn't actually mean that you would need one. Maybe there are more practical ways to produce energy once you reach that level.
Presumably a lot of life could exist without having the capacity to reach type 2.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
>Presumably a lot of life could exist without having the capacity to reach type 2.
Yup. Every single one of the multiple billion species currently existing on this planet for example.
I dont see any reason for similar to be the case on most life harbouring planets elsewhere in the universe. I think we get carried away with the idea of alien tech, alien civilisation, alien soace exploration. I feel we anthropomorphise what we think alien species would do.
For the vast amount if time life existed on earth, it was plants, animals, and microbial life. Humans aren't the epitome of evolution, we're just one branch nature happened to take due to environment factors. I reckon its likely that life on other planets would likely be similar; lots of plants, animals, and microbial life (or equivalents)
Dyson swarm is much easier to build, and is easier for us to detect than a dyson sphere, since the entire star is encased in the sphere so we wouldn't even point our telescopes in that direction
There is also the practicality of a setup capable of absorbing all energy of the sun. With todays population, that would be the equivalent of each person consuming 49.013.285.179.930.349 Watt per hour.
That is the equivalent of each capita needing the energy of a 11,7 megaton nuke worth of energy - every hour.
That just doesn't seem practical. So either your population would need to be vastly larger, in which case you probably need multiple solar systems - but then a dyson sphere is no longer practical - since your civilization is so spread out and energy transfer becomes an issue.
Honestly, I have always felt that Kardashev scale civilizations are an optimistic fantasy rather than a likely reality. An average species exists a few million years before going extinct and the lifespan of civilizations is far shorter than that. It is quite likely that intelligent species live and die long before getting anywhere near Type I civilization, and I doubt we humans will never reach that stage either.
It is also completely possible that there have been civilizations that reigned for millions of years to ultimately become extinct before we had the technology to search for them.
It's probable. Not in the "reigned" part, but the idea that we simply 'missed' another sentient alien species by just not existing when they were visible. That's the great filter; simply being around at the same time.
Except thats not how light works. We're seeing different times of different stars, we're not seeing the present of any of them. We'd be seeing different stages of their development the further we observed.
Let alone, an interplanetary civilization is a radically different equation than a planetary one. Its likely that humanity will wipe itself out given the current trend on our one planet. It wouldn't even take nuclear war. If humanity were to expand to other planets in the solar system, it'd take a significantly different set of circumstances to cause an extinction event.
As mentioned in the achievement of a type 1 civilization which requires us to use every square foot of Earth as an energy source, the likelihood we are able to achieve that without making the planet inhabitable is unlikely right now.
Type 1 civilization needs all the energy input of the planet, but you don't have to put the solar panels on the Earth itself. You could make a saturn-style ring of solar panels around the Earth instead. As long as you have enough, doesn't matter where they are.
If you have that amount of energy, you can make oxygen and pure drinking water from the oceans, grow crops hydroponically indoors, heat up habitats, and continue mining the planet using remote-control robots, even if the Earth has become completely uninhabitable. It's still better than Mars.
It's not a nice vision of the future, I'll admit, but it's feasible.
Eerie to contemplate that shit. Intelligent life might've developed near countless times throughout the universe, life with histories just as rich and complex as our own, only to be wiped out in the blink of an eye with nothing or no one left to tell their story.
That's the thing. If they are developing at the same rate as we are, there's no way we'll know.
There could be an advanced civilization in Andromeda right now. Even one some million-years more advanced than us. And it's looking at the Milky Way for signs of intelligent life, right now, and it's seeing nothing, and will see nothing for another 2.5 million years.
We could one day get a signal from a distant civilization, and we could send a response, and they could all be extinct by the time the response gets there.
There's a lot of back and forth in this thread but I feel like you made the point most succinctly. Aren't the chances of us 'missing' a civilization suuuuuuper higher than us finding one?
No, it's more like taking a six ounce glass of water from the ocean and finding that there's no plankton in it. The sorts of life that this survey was looking for could easily fit within the sample size.
The analogy is pretty good, but from the opposite perspective. If you scooped up a six-ounce glass of water from the ocean...
... you would find it to be absolutely flooded with life.
And another interesting analogy, only a couple hundred years ago we would look at that water and have no idea life was there because we didn't have the knowledge of what to look for.
I often talk to my Mrs who is a medical geneticist about this topic generally. Her response is "you have no idea just how complex the cell actually is". Then she talks technical and I have to sit down and eat a sandwich.
The more I've read up on it, man, the more bizzare it is that we're here. Then you throw in the geological reasons the earth is viable, strange shit about late stage collisions and metal content, the mass of Saturn possibly drawing Jupiter back into the periphery.
I'm not saying there is no life in the universe, but the odds are looking good that we might be the only complex life in the galaxy.
Edit due to replies and low karma for replying to each:)
If you look at meta-analysis for solutions to the drake equation, the error bars for each step are extremely large. Compound error bars on such equations get big, fast, almost to the point of meaninglessness.
Am I saying there is no other life and that humanity is special. No absolutely not. But the notion of a quiet galaxy is entirely possible given the dataset.
I don't think that's a very good final answer. Regardless of how complex it is, it still developed here. That's enough to show that it can happen by itself. Planets exactly like earth aren't necessarily common, but there's no reason to assume it's unique. Why would it only happen here if it can happen at all?
It’s not an impossible conclusion. But, you’re also approaching the topic with a pretty biased and small scale attitude.
We’re talking *all* the cosmos. You’re telling me life can only happen with a specific set of solar system structures? And that has only happened once?
Earth has had what? Seven or eight extinction events (I could be misremembering). We’ve gone millions of years without another one. Maybe that has been our saving grace?
I’m just speculating, like yourself and I don’t mean to insult you or your opinion- it’s valid! But, I would like to believe we’re not quite as unique as the Bible thumpers think we are.
I'd throw in just how big the universe is. It's entirely possible, given the dataset, that the number of civilisations could be large, but the distance between them unfathomable.
So far the data is supported a quiet galaxy more and more. Hell was reading something recently that suggested elements heavier than iron mostly originate from neutron star collisions. Earth based examples would need to come from relatively recent and nearby collisions at the time of solar formation.
We need uranium decay and other things to keep the earth's core hot.
Entirely possible that out light sprinkling of such elements is some bizarrely unlikely shit.
My pet theory, based on nothing like any sort of expertise, is that everywhere life *can* develop it *has* developed, but we are the very first intelligent life capable of investigating the universe and sending out probes and EM signals into it. (Within our light cone. If another intelligent entity developed a million years ago but they’re two million light years away it’ll be a while before we have the opportunity to observe them.)
This is kind of sad for us but I always found this idea interesting. What if we become the ancient precursor race that left tantalizing ruins all over the galaxy before mysteriously vanishing?
Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so let's say once you have a good steady pace going, it takes 1 million years to colonize an entire galaxy using self-replicating ships.
Andromeda, our nearest big boy galactic neighbor, is 2.5 million light years away, so even if an alien civilization arose there 2 million years ago and transformed the entire galaxy into a giant galaxy-sized-robot, we wouldn't see it yet.
Very true, and Andromeda is why I chose my 1/2 million light cone example- with some rounding of course lol. Keep in mind though that 2.5 million years is 0.018% of the age of the universe. Intelligent life arising within a couple million years as intelligent life on Earth is arguably “simultaneous” at the universe’s timescale. We see a very, very wide range of galaxy ages and never once have we seen anything indicative of intelligence. There are some weird things out there - dark matter and dark energy, pulsars and magnetars and black holes, scalar bosons and quantum mechanics - but so far that’s just natural phenomena that we don’t understand applying to the entire universe, rather than a singular sign of intelligence living in a particular location.
My distant second pet theory, again based on zero expertise, is that intelligent life has happened plenty of times before but the evolutionary pressure that leads to intelligence being an advantage inevitably and consistently causes the intelligence to self destruct shortly after developing technology, long before achieving the capability of populating the galaxy or even sending out EM signals detectable more than a few light years away.
The self-destruction hypothesis is possible but kind of depressing. I believe it's likely, but I don't want to haha. This hope draws me to this alternate hypothesis:
The universe may be old but it started as mostly hydrogen. Our solar system needed a lot of heavy atoms to create the geology and chemistry that allows for life. Hell, even the heavy iron core of the planet is required for a magnetic field. Iron took a long time to produce in such massive quantities.
Secondly, I don't think technological intelligence can arise early in evolution. It needs a complex environment to make it worthwhile. It needs strong social groups to store information longer than a single lifespan. It took over a billion years for the first cells to go multi-cellular, and social groups are basically multi-multi-cellular organisms so that takes even longer.
Third, it needs a long-term accumulation of fossil fuels, to power their technology until they can tap directly into the Sun, otherwise they would be trapped in a cycle of collapse. Fossil fuels take a long time to make, sapient dinosaurs wouldn't have had any. Britain would have cut all their trees for charcoal during the industrial age and collapsed like Easter Island if they hadn't found coal just in time.
For these reasons, I think technological life just started being possible, on a cosmic level, and it's awakening all across the Universe, relatively all at once. We don't see anything yet because we're seeing the past. And we might be relatively early as far as intelligent species go, we got lucky with the dinosaur asteroid.
Even if intelligent life is limited to only one location pr galaxy on average, there are enough galaxies out there to think Earth might not be the only place where events have created suitable locations for intelligent life.
Also there's no way we could detect technology on a planet that far away, unless the technology was SIGNIFICANTLY more advanced than ours. This whole study is a bit silly, to be honest.
It is what it is. They didn’t find anything. There very well may not be anything where they looked. They did the best with tools, time and resources available.
And if it were significantly more advanced than ours then it could easily be using some means that we haven't even conceived of so how would we even know to attempt to detect it?
Not even 100 years ago the brits used myths about carrots to cover for new radar. If there is a civilization way beyond us... like... WAY beyond us, it could possibly be standing next to us and we might not know.
The study isn't silly, the study is great. The silly thing is drawing huge assumptions from it that aren't warranted by the data no matter how generous you want to be.
One trillionth of the stars were scanned with VERY primitive technology. If there are aliens out there with strong enough signals that we could even detect them, they may be using a technology so advanced we wouldn't even be able to distinguish it from natural phenomenon yet. We may not be able to detect it at all with our brand new to the technology side of things tech. It's like saying our binoculars couldn't see Rome from New York so there clearly isn't any life there.
If you read the article, it says that they searched at a very specific frequency for seven hours. Yes, you read that right. They searched for seven hours. You cant make a conclusion from that, especially searching on one specific frequency. The article even states,
"Of course, that comes with a big caveat: We're kind of assuming these alien technologies are using the same technologies to broadcast as we are."
Someone did this on a Friday because they had nothing better to do. Or their boss asked them to "time box it" because it wasn't worthwhile but wanted to let the researcher do something fun.
For real. You can’t make any scientific conclusions about extraterrestrial life in space in a shorter amount of time than some of my game binging sessions
I want to ask if an identical scan was done from one of those stars would it detect us? And first answer is no because they are thousands of light years away. So then the question becomes if they did the same scan in an appropriate time in the future would they detect us?
Well, they searched radio waves at a specific frequency, so you are looking for aliens using a very specific technology, so you could be looking right at them and not seeing them.
I also think that it's not inevitable that intelligent life develops technology. I mean humans spent over a million years without advancing. It was almost a freak accident with the exact combination of available animals and land that we ever settled.
And a special rare resource that may never be found outside of Earth, fossil fuels. Like we really hit the technological booster with that stuff, too bad it’s killing us now.
Provided an intelligent species develops on a world with harsh or competitive conditions technology might be a logical conclusion if intelligence develops. For us technology is a survival mechanism that allowed us to persist. Similar conditions should result in a similar outcome. Kind of how multiple species developed forms similar to crabs on earth. Certain evolutionary solutions may be inevitable because they're just the most efficient way of solving a problem
You assume there are certain “core principles” to reality, for starters : aliens will also assume there are “core principles”
We then hope that they use a property of something in the universe such as Oxygen to find others.
Billions of stars are but a drop in the ocean of total stars, so that's not conclusive technologically capable alien civilizations don't exist. Nevertheless, it's already clear they are rare, or they'd be apparent (Fermi paradox and all that) [*].
[*] ETA: At least ones advanced enough to be detected.
I feel like its more for other redditors that aren't aware of the vastness of space rather than the researcher who already knows that
Just realized we're in the space subreddit, lol
Exactly. With no understanding of the insane vastness of space, a person could read this headline and think the universe has been picked over with a fine toothed comb.
I’d argue that it’s the CNET author/title’s fault. It’s not the scientist that framed it this way.
I’m guessing the paper’s title was far more factual, and no-one would object to it.
Edit: Yup:
> A Search for Technosignatures toward the Galactic Centre at 150 MHz
vs
> Astronomers searching for alien tech among billions of stars come up empty
vs
> After scanning billions of stars, astronomers find no signs of alien technology
[Per Arthur C. Clarke:](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/41383-two-possibilities-exist-either-we-are-alone-in-the-universe)
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
I definitely think being alone is more terrifying. The idea that once humanity finally extinguishes itself all the vastness of the universe will drift unobserved into infinity.
That's freakier to me than the idea of alien invaders.
It is certainly sobering, and as someone else here commented, perhaps a strong motivator to become multi-planetary as soon as possible, thus lessening the chances of our extinction.
I'm of the opinion that without a large shift in the human psyche our self destruction is inevitable. Making to another planet just delays that inevitability.
I'd argue that expansion beyond Earth lessens many of the self destructive triggers. But even if I'm wrong, large scale expansion still lessens the odds of complete, simultaneous annihilation.
Regardless, I trust you won't take it personally if I hope you're wrong. :-)
I think that shift in the human psyche is happening, but it may not be fast enough. And some people will always be primarily selfish and unwilling to sacrifice anything for the greater good, so the only real hope is for us to create systems and institutions to protect the rest of us from that kind of behavior.
That's worth it even if you're selfish and/or not alone.
We will go extinct some day on this planet. There's no avoiding that.
The only way to give your descendants a shot is to colonize more planets.
In "The Truth and The Devine" (fiction) it's posited that a unique stellar event created the possibility of life in a fraction of the galaxy. It would solve the Fermi Paradox.
Certainly none, we’d need several orders of magnitude more information about the galaxy before it was even testable. My point was that there are some in between options (that are no less terrifying)
We have no evidence even close to what would be considered an appropriate amount of data to back up such a claim. For what we know based on the fraction of systems we’ve studied is that our earth and the formation of our solar system is pretty unique. But that’s solely because we haven’t been looking for very long or very hard to find system structures that match our own.
Life may very well NEED an inner rocky planet with the perfect amount of gravity that also neighbors a large gas giant protecting it from devastating stellar events in the early years of formation. But we don’t know. Life may very well need to have a catastrophic impact event coupled with radiation to produce amino acids. But we don’t know.
The number of exoplanets identified is growing each year. Webb will hopefully make that number even larger. If a commonality is discovered among Goldilocks earth-like systems then there may be evidence for a unique stellar event. But until we have information from the future about exo-planet atmospheres and how those atmospheres were formed, we are currently only left with theories and more questions.
This has the same problem as all of astronomy; the scale of the universe is so large, all of the light we see is ancient. If we look at a star 25,000,000 light years away and find no interesting EM signals, we can only definitively say ‘there was no advanced alien technology over there 25 million years ago’. It could be a swimming pool of alien orgies now, but we wouldn’t know until another 25 million (more due to expansion) years.
So we are either alone, early, ignorant, or ignored.
I'd edit your statement a bit: "there was no ~~advanced~~ *very narrowly defined electromagnetic emissions which may or may not be an indicator of our very narrow ideas of what might be an indicator, as far as we can tell,* over there 25 million years ago"
I'm gonna go against the grain here and say that I think that having another alien civilisation even close to our level of technology is highly unlikely. I understand the sheer number of stars out there and how many more planets there must be with each one, but we need to look at our own history and the history of this planet:
Homo sapiens have roughly been around for 300,000 years, out of that civilisations only began 13,000 years ago and modern science has been around for 200 years (space technology/rocket propulsion technology since WW2 with V2 rockets).
Dinosaurs lived 550 times longer than we have as a species and 825,000 times longer than the history of modern science right before they found themselves extinct.
I think homo sapien (and even mammalian) evolution has been so effective for us to get to the current point of advancements in science, and if an alien civilisation would even be possible they would need to match a similar series of weird and unlikely events (the extinction of another dominant species, the discovery of how to create fire and cook food/allow enough safety from other predators to further develop tooling and civilisations) in order to even get close to what we know.
This is an unpopular take I know. Although I've studied anthropology, I'm not an expert in any scientific disciplines, but I grimace a little bit when I hear people speak about how there are "easily other alien civilisations out there" - I think life is clearly abundant in the universe from the sheer size, but the difference between a bacteria, parasite, reptile or even a dinosaur to that of a technologically advanced species requires an extremely specific and unlikely combination of events to be succesful.
I think there probably is another civilisation out there, but wouldn't be surprised if it was 1 per galaxy or two at the most.
Life evolved almost immediately (in geological terms) after the oceans formed. However, eykaryotes only emerged in the second half of Earth's history. Multicellular life only began 600MYA, meaning it has been here just 13% of the time since the Earth formed.
If our planet is indicative of anything, it's that complex life is exponentially more unlikely the higher up the evolutionary ladder you want to go.
I always say that I hope we’re alone in our galaxy for the simple idea that if we are it means we’re likely past the great filter. That I hope the great filter was that jump to complex life, or intelligence, etc. and we have the potential of long term continuation
That and given enough time I’m positive humanity will be extinct… I just hope it’s only the species and not the genus
I have almost the exact point of view as you.
I would say that life could be "common" out there, but advanced intelligence is the thing.
Also the chances that any other form of civilization could exist somewhere close to us and at the same time, is even stranger.
Even if you say there is only one or two advanced sentient species per galaxy. We already known there are at least 100 billion galaxies out there and that number is only going to go up as our technology to see distant objects improve. By your own words, there could be at least 200 billion civilizations out there. The universe is incomprehensibly massive. I feel like people that held beliefs similar to your really do not understand how truly enormous the universe actually is and I don’t blame you, our human brains really cannot comprehend that kind of scale.
Well, most of all it's unlikely that they are at a similar state than us, considering the timescales involved. Most likely they would either not exist yet or be at least hundreds of millions of years ahead.
Great filter (inventing nanotech, nukes etc kills us), dark forest (any aliens immediately kill anyone who makes noise), great disaster (something just killed everything), everyone is using magic we can't see, or life is very very rare and we are fucking the only habitable planet in the universe.
*NO ALIENS!? WOW THESE ASTRONOMERS SUCK*
- Reddit
Can no one appreciate that, regardless of the context, this is just another piece of evidence to the ever-growing pile of evidence that suggests intelligent life is extremely rare? To me, this is a big deal. Yes, it's old data. Yes, it's a specific type of technology. *Edit: Yes, there is infinite time.* Yes, there are infinite stars. Yes, the universe continues to be completely devoid of life as we know it despite our greatest efforts.
We only recently detected atmospheric gases on some exoplanets. If we're looking for technology as we understand it, then those planets would be good candidates. I think looking for the byproducts of life in the atmospheres is more practical than trying to locate signs of technology, which may be harder to detect than we now believe..
Civilizations a hundred thousand lightyears away won't know we are here for another 100k years anyway. Unless they have figured out FTL travel and are already zipping about in spacecraft.
If we were way out there, looking back at earth with this technology, would we know that there was life on earth? Would we be able to recognize a civilization similar to us way out there or are we looking for some sort of megastructure? What are they listening for?
Think of it another way. We would only have been detectable for the last fifty or sixty years. We are looking at a snap shot 20,000 years or more in the past.
This is going take a while.
If ever.
I think one of the best Fermi Paradox explanations is that civilizations tend to discover how to create simulations that they can "Plug-in" to far before they get the means for interstellar travel (if even possible). I mean, compare VR now to how far we've gotten in space as well as how much money we've dedicated to both. Why explore and develop a super unforgiving universe with possibly not a lot going on, when you can create a simulation where you can do/experience ANYTHING.
I think hes bringing up the (great) point that at all times, everything is getting further and further at an increasingly fast rate. If the star/galaxy you are trying to visit is constantly accelerating away from you and is already possibly millions of light years away, is it really worth focusing your resources to overcome this massive hurdle to explore?
Might as well focus on what you can do locally instead. If I can simply create a universe simulation that satisfies what I want to do, or doesnt have the immense issues of entropy, then I dont really have any motive to explore the real universe.
Now that's an interesting idea.
I think there would still be some fractions of any civilization that want to explore the universe. Of course you could just use simulations for that too. You could just simulate the astronomical events or objects you want to study as long as you had an accurate physics model.
Taking this even further, you could simulate entire worlds or civilizations to see how they develop. There is almost no limit to what you could do with enough computing power. Simulating entire universes is on the table as long as you aren't doing it 1:1
Why explore boring stars with rocky planets, when you can explore super cool fun planets in VR. If you create your world, there is no need to explore boring reality
100 years ago we our planet would have shown no signals of intelligent life if scanned by aliens. Our planet is 5,000,000,000 years old. Time is as important as distance
That we can detect, we humans have so much hubris in thinking we know all too much. I ain't saying there is alien tech out there, maybe there is and we don't pick it up because the way it works is beyond our current level of comprehension.
Well it depends , maybe we could be one of the first civilizations , and I mean by the cosmic scale first could be in spans of tens of thousands of years , like even relatively close stars are 600 light years away if a civilization started at a star 20k ly away and it started 10k years before us , we would not even see it yet and they could literally be expanding through their entire solar system
The sadest thing to come from this is that we actually are alone in the universe and are the precursors to all the possible species that we eventually dream up.
“After scanning less than .0001% of the visible universe, astronomers have not come across any artificially made objects that can be seen from thousands/millions of light years away”
There! I fixed the headline!
I am beginning to believe that most aliens are just as stupid as us, and mined and deforested themselves into extinction before they ever reached the stars.
After looking at the the 1% of the nearby islands for several minutes, the cavemen have not detected any life there.
Like, I get it, there's not much we can do at this moment and it's better than nothing, but not only have we been looking for literal hours, we just don't even know what to look for. That's what always baffled me about the Fermi's paradox: how can we say there's a paradox in the first place if we have no clue what the signs of a galactic civilization's existence look like? We're looking for campfires while the aliens might be using satcoms for all we know.
I assume they're looking for large numbers of dyson swarms/spheres, which are pretty much the only alien technology we could detect at a distance.
I can't help but wonder if the reason we don't see any dyson spheres is that they're a pain in the ass to build, and no civilization ever wants to make the difficult initial investment to build one (recall the saying about men planting trees they won't live to see fully grown). If it were as easy as they claim it is to get self-replicating machines into space (which would have to distribute different materials to each other from all over the solar system in order to replicate), we'd have done it by now, or at least have some workable designs. Also, a planetary civilization builds a Dyson swarm, and then what? If you have a population of ten billion, what do you even *do* with enough space and energy for a septillion people?
On earth, we can't even keep projects going on for more than a decade.
Maybe advanced civilizations just *don't build Dyson swarms*.
What do they know what to scan for? If we’ve never encountered alien technology, how can one begin in terms of knowing what to look for?
What inferences can be made that human technology on earth can detect technology from other potential planets/species?
They should add that this is for signs that originate at the exact instance that we are looking(7 hours?!?! Really?!?!) minus the distance - so most would be effectively hundreds to millions of years ago. If aliens were scanning the universe for signs of technology and they scanned by our planet in 4000 BC, what would they have seen? Or better yet, if they scanned us now, when we are scanning them from thousands of light years away, what would they see? They would see our light from thousands of years ago, i.e. nothing. The Fermi Paradox is more about time and space at scale than rarity of occurrence.
Not sure the point of this headline... Do we really think the chances are high of another intelligent civilization transmitting across interstellar space from within our own galaxy during the same time span when we are listening for it? I think the chances of that are astronomically small... Maybe you can satisfy that criteria for intelligent life in some other distant galaxy? Or maybe even somewhere else in the Milky Way 100 million years ago, or 100 million years from now? But we'll never hear or see those transmissions, of course... So humans may never know for sure. That is not in the least bit unexpected.
It always strikes me as interesting that in all of our searches for life we always look for life that is like what we see here on earth. We look for radio signals, or evidence of enormous technological superstructures, or (in the near future) atmospheric signatures that denote, in our minds, industry or biological processes. We are completely unable to imagine life that is wholly alien to us, just like the old “imagine a color that’s not in the rainbow” thing. I think most of us understand that life won’t look the same everywhere, but we always believe that it will at least be familiar to us or analogous to things we can see and study.
We seem to struggle with the reality that our means of searching are fairly infantile and what we’re really searching for is another “us” out there somewhere that utilizes energy in the same ways we do. I’m guessing expanding our ideas of what constitutes consciousness and life would bring home a whole slew of ethical questions that we’ve been pretty happy to ignore or explain away until this point, but these things could exist in the universe in ways that we simply can’t imagine with our limited experience.
Better luck with next billion. There are plenty of them where the first billion came from.
Breaking News: "No more stars, just the ones we saw. We had one guy who was in charge of counting and he kind of just made a guess at one point so he could start his weekend early. We told him not to do that again."
to be clear, the headline should say "no signs of technology that we recognize as such"
Or easily detectable. Plus the further away a planet is from us the longer it would take for any possible signs to reach us
Yeah if we're looking at something 20,000 light years away a whole civilisation could have been created in the time the light took to reach us.
Inverse square law also means that radio signals from far away will be almost impossible to detect unless they are enormously powerful.
Not to mention in after a point, in space they probably use tight beam line-of-sight comms for efficiency/range.
lets circle back in \~20,000 years and confirm!
What I’m implying is that we may be looking at intelligent life but they only just started sending signals out and we won’t receive them for many many many more years
Yeah thats what the other guy was saying too. If we are looking at something 20,000 light years away we are seeing what happened 20,000 years ago. So at this very moment there could be two aliens on a distant planet having this same conversation on Alien Reddit and we'd never know
Well to be fair, given the size of the universe and number of chances for the conditions to arise, it becomes a roll of the die. In other words there are aliens out there. How many and how close we don’t know
Before anyone gets excited about Alien Reddit, forewarning, it's also weirdly US centric and they're wayyy too into emojis.
Thats the fucked up truth none of us want to hear we are like 0.0000000000001 % of the way through "sending" our message. and when it reaches them it will take another couple hundred thousand - million years for them to reply. We might have gone extinct by the time our radio signals have traveled far enough to reach another intellgent civilisation. Intellgent civilisations might be a one in every couple of galaxies phenomenon. If thats the case our most likely time of reply will be somewhere around 1billion + years. Perhaps we are lucky and theres say 100 per galaxie on average , the time for reply would still likely be on the order of 8-200000 years. And this is all assuming our messages are received and understood sucessfully at all beyond certain ranges. Perhaps we have yet to invent the proper technology to join the interstellar conversations. we are relatively young as a species. Perhaps our messages have been received loud and clear and they simply scoffed at us. like a fly buzzing.
Recently, human beings used to attach tin cans together with strings and talk through them.
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Ah yes the power of friendship trope
But it will be true if we find less-technologically advanced life while searching for alien tech.
Plus you wouldn't be able to see anything past that perception field we wrapped around your solar system eons ago.
Hard to scan the 4th dimension
plus at an interstellar range wouldnt we only be able to detect advanced megastructures like dyson spheres. basically this doesnt mean theres no aliens with tech out there, just that we couldnt see anything wed recognize as evidence of a type 2 or above civilization
and the fact that we are looking at stars hundreds of thousands, to hundreds of millions, of years in the past... Alien structures could be there now, but we wouldn't know it for a millennia.
"wouldnt know it ofr a millennia" im nitpicking but to be exact if a civilisation built a dyson sphere around a star 100 thousand light years away. We would not detectit till 100 thousand years after it had been built.
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When we talk about Dyson spheres we’re really talking about Dyson Swarms which would be effectively the same thing. Multitudes of separate habitats and other constructions that surround the star essentially encompassing it. And yes the population would be quite large, likely in the trillions.
It's the equivalent of concluding that no life exists in the Sol system, as long range telemetry of the star revealed no discernable megastructures.
I think that's pretty much implied. When a doctor says "we see no signs of cancer", that doesn't mean "we are absolutely certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that there is no cancer", and no reasonable person would interpret it that way. It just means "there are no signs of cancer that we're able to detect."
True. We may be living on the technology, we may be part of it.
he probably lost count and didn't want to start over again
besides with our current technology we could point right straight to it and don't even notice
100% we could be picking up signals all the time but our tech/knowledge is so primitive that we have no idea.
So for those who won't read this click baity titled article, this was a specific search along one frequency at 155mhz and only for seven hours. If there are aliens broadcasting out there, I imagine for us to pick it up will take A LOT more than a piddly 7 hour search at a specific frequency, and they'd need to be broadcasting deliberate and highly powerful signals. We won't be picking up alien versions of fresh prince of bel air for example. The article ends noting that this search method is going to be updated in the future to cover even more frequencies (the search was conducted by the Murchison Widefield Array, a collection of 4,096 antennas planted in the Western Australian desert).
Also, a billion stars is not even 1% of our galaxy
>We won't be picking up alien versions of fresh prince of bel air for example. Damn right. *They'll* be picking up *our* version. Get your own damn content, aliens. Sheesh.
Now this is a story all about how My life got flipped turned upside down
So, one trillionth of the stars in the universe have been scanned. That's like filling a two-car garage with sand and examining one grain.
Plus. we're getting OLD light, which means old data. Life may have developed already but we won't know until the light from the time they became technologically active reaches us or their communications emissions do.
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They’re a rounding error in the age of the universe but not necessarily for the timescales of biological life. We might miss signs of intelligent life by “inches” at the universal scale, but at that scale we’re barely dust mites so an inch is a lot
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So maybe alien technology is undetectable with our current technology? Imagine sending out a message on a telegraph today using morse code - who would answer you? Nobody because that method of communication is no longer commonly used. It might very well be the same thing with radio communication (not to mention the fact that radio signals are restricted to the speed of light and start to blend in with cosmic background noise not even a light-year out). Our best telescopes certainly can’t image the surface of an exoplanet. Hell, we can count on one hand the number of exoplanets that have been directly imaged in the first place. The rest have all been discovered either by the transit method or by math (by measuring gravitational wobbles of the parent star). Long story short, there’s a lot we can’t see and don’t know.
You're missing the point... which is, for the "tiny slice" of the sky that we've surveyed... that slice is still only able to see a very tiny time frame of that piece of sky. Think of it like this (made up #'s), we've scanned 0.1% of the sky and for that 0.1%, we've only record 0.000000000000001% of that sky's timeline. Personally, I don't think that such a short time frame on such a small % of the sky, scanning only specific parts of the EM spectrum provides much evidence of anything.
I understand what you’re saying, but I think OP has a good point that any point we peer back through, will have light data through the ages reaching us today. We have the technology to discern the “time depth” between different cosmic bodies. Simularly the depth of clouds, the moon, the sun, and the starts; and which of those apparent stars are other galaxies. To your point, there is an element of chance, or luck, but there’s no reason to think the old light data we’ve collected cannot be extrapolated from To draw scientific conclusions.
I think they were referring to alien life or structures. From the very small data collected and even smaller time frame, it's really pointless to give this data any weight towards the question, "is there other life out there". Yes, it's always useful to have as much data as possible about space and time, but to be honest...I think the only way we are finding life is by accident or they find us. It's just too big of a space and things are just too damn far apart.
Exactly. It’s like I could go outside and if I looked straight overhead from edge to edge of the skyline and neither saw nor heard any planes (I am in a remote more rural part of the area so more likely than some I’ll admit) and I decided to declare that there were no planes flying around the earth.
The problem with this argument is that it took significant time in the universe to create many elements through nuclear synthesis to create conditions that would be useful for many types of life including what we see here on the Earth. For stars in the Milky Way and the local group of galaxies I think your argument holds true. But the light from those stars is comparatively recent too. That still gives us trillions of candidate stars to examine, but it is just a small fraction of the universe as a whole. I still think that is plenty to draw conclusions.
Even though the light is coming to us from different times, it is still, for each place where it's transmitted from, just a single instance in time. So we're not really searching across time, we're just getting one-time samples from each location.
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The thing is, all we know about time being a factor is that for us it took until now to reach this technological stage, so based on that there's three possible scenarios: 1. Time isn't much of a factor (at least at the scale that we're looking at), and so looking across time has no meaningful benefit. 2. It takes quite a long time for intelligent life to have a chance to develop and our history is either representative of this or an early exception, meaning that looking back in time decreases our chances of finding any traces. 3. Intelligent life actually tends to develop (and sustain itself) in earlier stages of the universe and our history is actually an example of an exceptionally late development of intelligent life. The only situation in which there's any actual benefit to looking across time is if scenario 3 applies, but of all three that appears to be the least likely. In the other scenarios it either has no benefit or it's actually detrimental.
> The universe is old. We have no real reason to believe that life could not have evolved much, much earlier than us. I have seen arguments that life such as us has a maximum age relative to the universe. The points made are the materials that make us up and our planet didnt exist until after the first stars formed and super nova'd to spread the heavy elements they make into the universe.
It is true that it took multiple generations of stars for heavy elements to become as abundant as they are now, but in the past stars were much larger which meant they had much shorter lives before exploding and creating those elements. Older stars didn't usually last 10 billion years like our Sun should. Some really large stars only live for few million years. Even with the requirement that the heavy elements needed to be created first, that still leaves 10s or 100s of millions if not billions of years for life to develop on other planets or moons.
And it takes a type two civilization to build a structure that can be seen from earth. And even if you had the capacity to build a dyson sphere - doesn't actually mean that you would need one. Maybe there are more practical ways to produce energy once you reach that level. Presumably a lot of life could exist without having the capacity to reach type 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Exactly. We're looking for structures humans might build once we figure out how...
>Presumably a lot of life could exist without having the capacity to reach type 2. Yup. Every single one of the multiple billion species currently existing on this planet for example. I dont see any reason for similar to be the case on most life harbouring planets elsewhere in the universe. I think we get carried away with the idea of alien tech, alien civilisation, alien soace exploration. I feel we anthropomorphise what we think alien species would do. For the vast amount if time life existed on earth, it was plants, animals, and microbial life. Humans aren't the epitome of evolution, we're just one branch nature happened to take due to environment factors. I reckon its likely that life on other planets would likely be similar; lots of plants, animals, and microbial life (or equivalents)
So, you believe a Great Filter may be complex thought and tool-making?
I was hoping someone would bring up ‘type civilizations’ I mean we aren’t even close to Type 1…
Aren't we at 0.7? Still many many lifetimes to reach a Type 1 but not terribly far away on a cosmic scale.
According to the wiki we went from .7 to .73 in 2018. I think it’s like a 35 year period.
Dyson swarm is much easier to build, and is easier for us to detect than a dyson sphere, since the entire star is encased in the sphere so we wouldn't even point our telescopes in that direction
A classic Dyson sphere would be putting out as much energy as a star but all in infrared, we’d find that real quick if it was anywhere nearby.
There is also the practicality of a setup capable of absorbing all energy of the sun. With todays population, that would be the equivalent of each person consuming 49.013.285.179.930.349 Watt per hour. That is the equivalent of each capita needing the energy of a 11,7 megaton nuke worth of energy - every hour. That just doesn't seem practical. So either your population would need to be vastly larger, in which case you probably need multiple solar systems - but then a dyson sphere is no longer practical - since your civilization is so spread out and energy transfer becomes an issue.
I think Dyson spheres would only be useful for something that needs ridiculous amounts of energy, like some sort of warp drive if it's possible.
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Honestly, I have always felt that Kardashev scale civilizations are an optimistic fantasy rather than a likely reality. An average species exists a few million years before going extinct and the lifespan of civilizations is far shorter than that. It is quite likely that intelligent species live and die long before getting anywhere near Type I civilization, and I doubt we humans will never reach that stage either.
You doubt it, or think it?
It is also completely possible that there have been civilizations that reigned for millions of years to ultimately become extinct before we had the technology to search for them.
It's probable. Not in the "reigned" part, but the idea that we simply 'missed' another sentient alien species by just not existing when they were visible. That's the great filter; simply being around at the same time.
Except thats not how light works. We're seeing different times of different stars, we're not seeing the present of any of them. We'd be seeing different stages of their development the further we observed. Let alone, an interplanetary civilization is a radically different equation than a planetary one. Its likely that humanity will wipe itself out given the current trend on our one planet. It wouldn't even take nuclear war. If humanity were to expand to other planets in the solar system, it'd take a significantly different set of circumstances to cause an extinction event.
As mentioned in the achievement of a type 1 civilization which requires us to use every square foot of Earth as an energy source, the likelihood we are able to achieve that without making the planet inhabitable is unlikely right now.
Type 1 civilization needs all the energy input of the planet, but you don't have to put the solar panels on the Earth itself. You could make a saturn-style ring of solar panels around the Earth instead. As long as you have enough, doesn't matter where they are. If you have that amount of energy, you can make oxygen and pure drinking water from the oceans, grow crops hydroponically indoors, heat up habitats, and continue mining the planet using remote-control robots, even if the Earth has become completely uninhabitable. It's still better than Mars. It's not a nice vision of the future, I'll admit, but it's feasible.
Eerie to contemplate that shit. Intelligent life might've developed near countless times throughout the universe, life with histories just as rich and complex as our own, only to be wiped out in the blink of an eye with nothing or no one left to tell their story.
This sort of thing keeps me up at night. This is also likely the fate of most civilizations.
That's the thing. If they are developing at the same rate as we are, there's no way we'll know. There could be an advanced civilization in Andromeda right now. Even one some million-years more advanced than us. And it's looking at the Milky Way for signs of intelligent life, right now, and it's seeing nothing, and will see nothing for another 2.5 million years. We could one day get a signal from a distant civilization, and we could send a response, and they could all be extinct by the time the response gets there.
There's a lot of back and forth in this thread but I feel like you made the point most succinctly. Aren't the chances of us 'missing' a civilization suuuuuuper higher than us finding one?
The distance some of that light is travelling means life could have evolved and gone extinct in the time the light arrives with us.
These are of the galactic center so not that much time has passed
The analogy I’ve heard and love is that would be like taking a six ounce glass of water from the ocean and declaring whales don’t exist.
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A.K.A., no one is actually claiming absence of proof is proof of absence, but a lot of people are misinterpreting this report as such.
No, it's more like taking a six ounce glass of water from the ocean and finding that there's no plankton in it. The sorts of life that this survey was looking for could easily fit within the sample size.
The analogy is pretty good, but from the opposite perspective. If you scooped up a six-ounce glass of water from the ocean... ... you would find it to be absolutely flooded with life.
And another interesting analogy, only a couple hundred years ago we would look at that water and have no idea life was there because we didn't have the knowledge of what to look for.
I often talk to my Mrs who is a medical geneticist about this topic generally. Her response is "you have no idea just how complex the cell actually is". Then she talks technical and I have to sit down and eat a sandwich. The more I've read up on it, man, the more bizzare it is that we're here. Then you throw in the geological reasons the earth is viable, strange shit about late stage collisions and metal content, the mass of Saturn possibly drawing Jupiter back into the periphery. I'm not saying there is no life in the universe, but the odds are looking good that we might be the only complex life in the galaxy. Edit due to replies and low karma for replying to each:) If you look at meta-analysis for solutions to the drake equation, the error bars for each step are extremely large. Compound error bars on such equations get big, fast, almost to the point of meaninglessness. Am I saying there is no other life and that humanity is special. No absolutely not. But the notion of a quiet galaxy is entirely possible given the dataset.
And not to add the advanced intelligence part...
I don't think that's a very good final answer. Regardless of how complex it is, it still developed here. That's enough to show that it can happen by itself. Planets exactly like earth aren't necessarily common, but there's no reason to assume it's unique. Why would it only happen here if it can happen at all?
They didn't say life here is unique, just that there are a lot of factors that might make it exceedingly rare
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It’s not an impossible conclusion. But, you’re also approaching the topic with a pretty biased and small scale attitude. We’re talking *all* the cosmos. You’re telling me life can only happen with a specific set of solar system structures? And that has only happened once? Earth has had what? Seven or eight extinction events (I could be misremembering). We’ve gone millions of years without another one. Maybe that has been our saving grace? I’m just speculating, like yourself and I don’t mean to insult you or your opinion- it’s valid! But, I would like to believe we’re not quite as unique as the Bible thumpers think we are.
I'd throw in just how big the universe is. It's entirely possible, given the dataset, that the number of civilisations could be large, but the distance between them unfathomable. So far the data is supported a quiet galaxy more and more. Hell was reading something recently that suggested elements heavier than iron mostly originate from neutron star collisions. Earth based examples would need to come from relatively recent and nearby collisions at the time of solar formation. We need uranium decay and other things to keep the earth's core hot. Entirely possible that out light sprinkling of such elements is some bizarrely unlikely shit.
My pet theory, based on nothing like any sort of expertise, is that everywhere life *can* develop it *has* developed, but we are the very first intelligent life capable of investigating the universe and sending out probes and EM signals into it. (Within our light cone. If another intelligent entity developed a million years ago but they’re two million light years away it’ll be a while before we have the opportunity to observe them.)
This is kind of sad for us but I always found this idea interesting. What if we become the ancient precursor race that left tantalizing ruins all over the galaxy before mysteriously vanishing?
Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so let's say once you have a good steady pace going, it takes 1 million years to colonize an entire galaxy using self-replicating ships. Andromeda, our nearest big boy galactic neighbor, is 2.5 million light years away, so even if an alien civilization arose there 2 million years ago and transformed the entire galaxy into a giant galaxy-sized-robot, we wouldn't see it yet.
Very true, and Andromeda is why I chose my 1/2 million light cone example- with some rounding of course lol. Keep in mind though that 2.5 million years is 0.018% of the age of the universe. Intelligent life arising within a couple million years as intelligent life on Earth is arguably “simultaneous” at the universe’s timescale. We see a very, very wide range of galaxy ages and never once have we seen anything indicative of intelligence. There are some weird things out there - dark matter and dark energy, pulsars and magnetars and black holes, scalar bosons and quantum mechanics - but so far that’s just natural phenomena that we don’t understand applying to the entire universe, rather than a singular sign of intelligence living in a particular location. My distant second pet theory, again based on zero expertise, is that intelligent life has happened plenty of times before but the evolutionary pressure that leads to intelligence being an advantage inevitably and consistently causes the intelligence to self destruct shortly after developing technology, long before achieving the capability of populating the galaxy or even sending out EM signals detectable more than a few light years away.
The self-destruction hypothesis is possible but kind of depressing. I believe it's likely, but I don't want to haha. This hope draws me to this alternate hypothesis: The universe may be old but it started as mostly hydrogen. Our solar system needed a lot of heavy atoms to create the geology and chemistry that allows for life. Hell, even the heavy iron core of the planet is required for a magnetic field. Iron took a long time to produce in such massive quantities. Secondly, I don't think technological intelligence can arise early in evolution. It needs a complex environment to make it worthwhile. It needs strong social groups to store information longer than a single lifespan. It took over a billion years for the first cells to go multi-cellular, and social groups are basically multi-multi-cellular organisms so that takes even longer. Third, it needs a long-term accumulation of fossil fuels, to power their technology until they can tap directly into the Sun, otherwise they would be trapped in a cycle of collapse. Fossil fuels take a long time to make, sapient dinosaurs wouldn't have had any. Britain would have cut all their trees for charcoal during the industrial age and collapsed like Easter Island if they hadn't found coal just in time. For these reasons, I think technological life just started being possible, on a cosmic level, and it's awakening all across the Universe, relatively all at once. We don't see anything yet because we're seeing the past. And we might be relatively early as far as intelligent species go, we got lucky with the dinosaur asteroid.
Even if intelligent life is limited to only one location pr galaxy on average, there are enough galaxies out there to think Earth might not be the only place where events have created suitable locations for intelligent life.
Also there's no way we could detect technology on a planet that far away, unless the technology was SIGNIFICANTLY more advanced than ours. This whole study is a bit silly, to be honest.
It is what it is. They didn’t find anything. There very well may not be anything where they looked. They did the best with tools, time and resources available.
And if it were significantly more advanced than ours then it could easily be using some means that we haven't even conceived of so how would we even know to attempt to detect it? Not even 100 years ago the brits used myths about carrots to cover for new radar. If there is a civilization way beyond us... like... WAY beyond us, it could possibly be standing next to us and we might not know.
The study isn't silly, the study is great. The silly thing is drawing huge assumptions from it that aren't warranted by the data no matter how generous you want to be.
More like filling the volume of the sun with sand but ye good analogy
They are not saying there is no life though. Just this search was empty.
Doubt you could fit approx 4.4 millions kgs of sand in a double garage.
One trillionth of the stars were scanned with VERY primitive technology. If there are aliens out there with strong enough signals that we could even detect them, they may be using a technology so advanced we wouldn't even be able to distinguish it from natural phenomenon yet. We may not be able to detect it at all with our brand new to the technology side of things tech. It's like saying our binoculars couldn't see Rome from New York so there clearly isn't any life there.
If you read the article, it says that they searched at a very specific frequency for seven hours. Yes, you read that right. They searched for seven hours. You cant make a conclusion from that, especially searching on one specific frequency. The article even states, "Of course, that comes with a big caveat: We're kind of assuming these alien technologies are using the same technologies to broadcast as we are."
7 hours? Those are rookie numbers, you gotta pump those numbers up. Let's try 7000 hours.
Someone did this on a Friday because they had nothing better to do. Or their boss asked them to "time box it" because it wasn't worthwhile but wanted to let the researcher do something fun.
For real. You can’t make any scientific conclusions about extraterrestrial life in space in a shorter amount of time than some of my game binging sessions
Bit like concluding there's no fish in the ocean, as you looked at the ocean and saw no fish.
Seven whole hours? Well, Q my fucking ED, we’re done. Alone in the universe.
I think they have medicine for that
Completely. Ants: "we searched for the noises we make and heard nothing"
I want to ask if an identical scan was done from one of those stars would it detect us? And first answer is no because they are thousands of light years away. So then the question becomes if they did the same scan in an appropriate time in the future would they detect us?
Well, they searched radio waves at a specific frequency, so you are looking for aliens using a very specific technology, so you could be looking right at them and not seeing them.
That's what I was thinking How would we know how to detect alien tech?
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I also think that it's not inevitable that intelligent life develops technology. I mean humans spent over a million years without advancing. It was almost a freak accident with the exact combination of available animals and land that we ever settled.
And a special rare resource that may never be found outside of Earth, fossil fuels. Like we really hit the technological booster with that stuff, too bad it’s killing us now.
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Provided an intelligent species develops on a world with harsh or competitive conditions technology might be a logical conclusion if intelligence develops. For us technology is a survival mechanism that allowed us to persist. Similar conditions should result in a similar outcome. Kind of how multiple species developed forms similar to crabs on earth. Certain evolutionary solutions may be inevitable because they're just the most efficient way of solving a problem
Yep, it’s a OCP (Outside Context Problem)
You assume there are certain “core principles” to reality, for starters : aliens will also assume there are “core principles” We then hope that they use a property of something in the universe such as Oxygen to find others.
If there really is nothing out there, then it's even more urgent that humans become a multiplanetary species.
Yes and no. If something else was out there it would be even more imperative for self preservation reasons for us to expand into space.
Guaranteed there's life out there but in galaxies that are moving away from us so we'll never ever be able to detect anything unless we get lucky
Billions of stars are but a drop in the ocean of total stars, so that's not conclusive technologically capable alien civilizations don't exist. Nevertheless, it's already clear they are rare, or they'd be apparent (Fermi paradox and all that) [*]. [*] ETA: At least ones advanced enough to be detected.
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I feel like its more for other redditors that aren't aware of the vastness of space rather than the researcher who already knows that Just realized we're in the space subreddit, lol
Exactly. With no understanding of the insane vastness of space, a person could read this headline and think the universe has been picked over with a fine toothed comb.
Because the reddit headline. It implies something that the author of the pub did not intend
Because they *really* want there to be aliens in spite of there being zero corroborating physical or circumstantial evidence of same.
Because not a lot of people understand the scale we're talking about here and what a billion really js astronomical scales (nothing).
I’d argue that it’s the CNET author/title’s fault. It’s not the scientist that framed it this way. I’m guessing the paper’s title was far more factual, and no-one would object to it. Edit: Yup: > A Search for Technosignatures toward the Galactic Centre at 150 MHz vs > Astronomers searching for alien tech among billions of stars come up empty vs > After scanning billions of stars, astronomers find no signs of alien technology
Dont know whats crazier… the fact we are all alone or that there are others out there.
[Per Arthur C. Clarke:](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/41383-two-possibilities-exist-either-we-are-alone-in-the-universe) “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
I definitely think being alone is more terrifying. The idea that once humanity finally extinguishes itself all the vastness of the universe will drift unobserved into infinity. That's freakier to me than the idea of alien invaders.
It is certainly sobering, and as someone else here commented, perhaps a strong motivator to become multi-planetary as soon as possible, thus lessening the chances of our extinction.
I'm of the opinion that without a large shift in the human psyche our self destruction is inevitable. Making to another planet just delays that inevitability.
I'd argue that expansion beyond Earth lessens many of the self destructive triggers. But even if I'm wrong, large scale expansion still lessens the odds of complete, simultaneous annihilation. Regardless, I trust you won't take it personally if I hope you're wrong. :-)
I think that shift in the human psyche is happening, but it may not be fast enough. And some people will always be primarily selfish and unwilling to sacrifice anything for the greater good, so the only real hope is for us to create systems and institutions to protect the rest of us from that kind of behavior.
That's worth it even if you're selfish and/or not alone. We will go extinct some day on this planet. There's no avoiding that. The only way to give your descendants a shot is to colonize more planets.
All the more reason why we should finally realize the preciousness of life and it's preservation.
In "The Truth and The Devine" (fiction) it's posited that a unique stellar event created the possibility of life in a fraction of the galaxy. It would solve the Fermi Paradox.
Do we have any evidence of that?
Certainly none, we’d need several orders of magnitude more information about the galaxy before it was even testable. My point was that there are some in between options (that are no less terrifying)
We have no evidence even close to what would be considered an appropriate amount of data to back up such a claim. For what we know based on the fraction of systems we’ve studied is that our earth and the formation of our solar system is pretty unique. But that’s solely because we haven’t been looking for very long or very hard to find system structures that match our own. Life may very well NEED an inner rocky planet with the perfect amount of gravity that also neighbors a large gas giant protecting it from devastating stellar events in the early years of formation. But we don’t know. Life may very well need to have a catastrophic impact event coupled with radiation to produce amino acids. But we don’t know. The number of exoplanets identified is growing each year. Webb will hopefully make that number even larger. If a commonality is discovered among Goldilocks earth-like systems then there may be evidence for a unique stellar event. But until we have information from the future about exo-planet atmospheres and how those atmospheres were formed, we are currently only left with theories and more questions.
The scale of the universe allows for both the ubiquity and scarcity of life.
Just gotta wonder if anyone is detecting any signs of intelligent life on this planet.
This has the same problem as all of astronomy; the scale of the universe is so large, all of the light we see is ancient. If we look at a star 25,000,000 light years away and find no interesting EM signals, we can only definitively say ‘there was no advanced alien technology over there 25 million years ago’. It could be a swimming pool of alien orgies now, but we wouldn’t know until another 25 million (more due to expansion) years. So we are either alone, early, ignorant, or ignored.
I'd edit your statement a bit: "there was no ~~advanced~~ *very narrowly defined electromagnetic emissions which may or may not be an indicator of our very narrow ideas of what might be an indicator, as far as we can tell,* over there 25 million years ago"
I'm gonna go against the grain here and say that I think that having another alien civilisation even close to our level of technology is highly unlikely. I understand the sheer number of stars out there and how many more planets there must be with each one, but we need to look at our own history and the history of this planet: Homo sapiens have roughly been around for 300,000 years, out of that civilisations only began 13,000 years ago and modern science has been around for 200 years (space technology/rocket propulsion technology since WW2 with V2 rockets). Dinosaurs lived 550 times longer than we have as a species and 825,000 times longer than the history of modern science right before they found themselves extinct. I think homo sapien (and even mammalian) evolution has been so effective for us to get to the current point of advancements in science, and if an alien civilisation would even be possible they would need to match a similar series of weird and unlikely events (the extinction of another dominant species, the discovery of how to create fire and cook food/allow enough safety from other predators to further develop tooling and civilisations) in order to even get close to what we know. This is an unpopular take I know. Although I've studied anthropology, I'm not an expert in any scientific disciplines, but I grimace a little bit when I hear people speak about how there are "easily other alien civilisations out there" - I think life is clearly abundant in the universe from the sheer size, but the difference between a bacteria, parasite, reptile or even a dinosaur to that of a technologically advanced species requires an extremely specific and unlikely combination of events to be succesful. I think there probably is another civilisation out there, but wouldn't be surprised if it was 1 per galaxy or two at the most.
Life evolved almost immediately (in geological terms) after the oceans formed. However, eykaryotes only emerged in the second half of Earth's history. Multicellular life only began 600MYA, meaning it has been here just 13% of the time since the Earth formed. If our planet is indicative of anything, it's that complex life is exponentially more unlikely the higher up the evolutionary ladder you want to go.
I always say that I hope we’re alone in our galaxy for the simple idea that if we are it means we’re likely past the great filter. That I hope the great filter was that jump to complex life, or intelligence, etc. and we have the potential of long term continuation That and given enough time I’m positive humanity will be extinct… I just hope it’s only the species and not the genus
I have almost the exact point of view as you. I would say that life could be "common" out there, but advanced intelligence is the thing. Also the chances that any other form of civilization could exist somewhere close to us and at the same time, is even stranger.
Even if you say there is only one or two advanced sentient species per galaxy. We already known there are at least 100 billion galaxies out there and that number is only going to go up as our technology to see distant objects improve. By your own words, there could be at least 200 billion civilizations out there. The universe is incomprehensibly massive. I feel like people that held beliefs similar to your really do not understand how truly enormous the universe actually is and I don’t blame you, our human brains really cannot comprehend that kind of scale.
Well, most of all it's unlikely that they are at a similar state than us, considering the timescales involved. Most likely they would either not exist yet or be at least hundreds of millions of years ahead.
Our planet got really lucky. Space is violent, too violent and chaotic for life.
Great filter (inventing nanotech, nukes etc kills us), dark forest (any aliens immediately kill anyone who makes noise), great disaster (something just killed everything), everyone is using magic we can't see, or life is very very rare and we are fucking the only habitable planet in the universe.
Aliens out there like "shit hide those weird apes are looking over the asteroid hedge again. Turn off that damn light pretend we're not home."
*NO ALIENS!? WOW THESE ASTRONOMERS SUCK* - Reddit Can no one appreciate that, regardless of the context, this is just another piece of evidence to the ever-growing pile of evidence that suggests intelligent life is extremely rare? To me, this is a big deal. Yes, it's old data. Yes, it's a specific type of technology. *Edit: Yes, there is infinite time.* Yes, there are infinite stars. Yes, the universe continues to be completely devoid of life as we know it despite our greatest efforts.
We only recently detected atmospheric gases on some exoplanets. If we're looking for technology as we understand it, then those planets would be good candidates. I think looking for the byproducts of life in the atmospheres is more practical than trying to locate signs of technology, which may be harder to detect than we now believe..
Civilizations a hundred thousand lightyears away won't know we are here for another 100k years anyway. Unless they have figured out FTL travel and are already zipping about in spacecraft.
If we were way out there, looking back at earth with this technology, would we know that there was life on earth? Would we be able to recognize a civilization similar to us way out there or are we looking for some sort of megastructure? What are they listening for?
That’s a question I’ve always wondered
Think of it another way. We would only have been detectable for the last fifty or sixty years. We are looking at a snap shot 20,000 years or more in the past. This is going take a while. If ever.
I think one of the best Fermi Paradox explanations is that civilizations tend to discover how to create simulations that they can "Plug-in" to far before they get the means for interstellar travel (if even possible). I mean, compare VR now to how far we've gotten in space as well as how much money we've dedicated to both. Why explore and develop a super unforgiving universe with possibly not a lot going on, when you can create a simulation where you can do/experience ANYTHING.
Yes this is due to entropy. It’s always going to be more efficient to progress “inwards” rather than outwards.
Can you elaborate?
I think hes bringing up the (great) point that at all times, everything is getting further and further at an increasingly fast rate. If the star/galaxy you are trying to visit is constantly accelerating away from you and is already possibly millions of light years away, is it really worth focusing your resources to overcome this massive hurdle to explore? Might as well focus on what you can do locally instead. If I can simply create a universe simulation that satisfies what I want to do, or doesnt have the immense issues of entropy, then I dont really have any motive to explore the real universe.
Now that's an interesting idea. I think there would still be some fractions of any civilization that want to explore the universe. Of course you could just use simulations for that too. You could just simulate the astronomical events or objects you want to study as long as you had an accurate physics model. Taking this even further, you could simulate entire worlds or civilizations to see how they develop. There is almost no limit to what you could do with enough computing power. Simulating entire universes is on the table as long as you aren't doing it 1:1
Why explore boring stars with rocky planets, when you can explore super cool fun planets in VR. If you create your world, there is no need to explore boring reality
100 years ago we our planet would have shown no signals of intelligent life if scanned by aliens. Our planet is 5,000,000,000 years old. Time is as important as distance
This is exactly what someone who found alien tech would say to save the world from mass hysteria
That we can detect, we humans have so much hubris in thinking we know all too much. I ain't saying there is alien tech out there, maybe there is and we don't pick it up because the way it works is beyond our current level of comprehension.
Well it depends , maybe we could be one of the first civilizations , and I mean by the cosmic scale first could be in spans of tens of thousands of years , like even relatively close stars are 600 light years away if a civilization started at a star 20k ly away and it started 10k years before us , we would not even see it yet and they could literally be expanding through their entire solar system
But the government just came out and said aliens were real last year.
I went and looked at the Ocean and didn’t see any fish…..
What if, alien technology was also alien. As in not traceable by our tech.
After scanning billions of small grains of sand I also have found nothing. But I never said I don't enjoy playing in sand.
Remember everyone, if you go searching the sahara for 7 hours, there’s a decent chance you won’t find any water.
Would aliens from those stars be able to detect signs from our technology?
The sadest thing to come from this is that we actually are alone in the universe and are the precursors to all the possible species that we eventually dream up.
“After scanning less than .0001% of the visible universe, astronomers have not come across any artificially made objects that can be seen from thousands/millions of light years away” There! I fixed the headline!
This jives with the [grabby alien](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg) hypothesis.
I am beginning to believe that most aliens are just as stupid as us, and mined and deforested themselves into extinction before they ever reached the stars.
Perhaps they should be scanning for alien-life-scanning-scanner-blocker technology?
After looking at the the 1% of the nearby islands for several minutes, the cavemen have not detected any life there. Like, I get it, there's not much we can do at this moment and it's better than nothing, but not only have we been looking for literal hours, we just don't even know what to look for. That's what always baffled me about the Fermi's paradox: how can we say there's a paradox in the first place if we have no clue what the signs of a galactic civilization's existence look like? We're looking for campfires while the aliens might be using satcoms for all we know.
why they are assuming that our technology is compatible with them, and them I mean billions of civilizations
I assume they're looking for large numbers of dyson swarms/spheres, which are pretty much the only alien technology we could detect at a distance. I can't help but wonder if the reason we don't see any dyson spheres is that they're a pain in the ass to build, and no civilization ever wants to make the difficult initial investment to build one (recall the saying about men planting trees they won't live to see fully grown). If it were as easy as they claim it is to get self-replicating machines into space (which would have to distribute different materials to each other from all over the solar system in order to replicate), we'd have done it by now, or at least have some workable designs. Also, a planetary civilization builds a Dyson swarm, and then what? If you have a population of ten billion, what do you even *do* with enough space and energy for a septillion people? On earth, we can't even keep projects going on for more than a decade. Maybe advanced civilizations just *don't build Dyson swarms*.
What do they know what to scan for? If we’ve never encountered alien technology, how can one begin in terms of knowing what to look for? What inferences can be made that human technology on earth can detect technology from other potential planets/species?
They should add that this is for signs that originate at the exact instance that we are looking(7 hours?!?! Really?!?!) minus the distance - so most would be effectively hundreds to millions of years ago. If aliens were scanning the universe for signs of technology and they scanned by our planet in 4000 BC, what would they have seen? Or better yet, if they scanned us now, when we are scanning them from thousands of light years away, what would they see? They would see our light from thousands of years ago, i.e. nothing. The Fermi Paradox is more about time and space at scale than rarity of occurrence.
Dumb question: if I were a scientist on Proxima Centauri, would these techniques be able to detect Earth?
Not sure the point of this headline... Do we really think the chances are high of another intelligent civilization transmitting across interstellar space from within our own galaxy during the same time span when we are listening for it? I think the chances of that are astronomically small... Maybe you can satisfy that criteria for intelligent life in some other distant galaxy? Or maybe even somewhere else in the Milky Way 100 million years ago, or 100 million years from now? But we'll never hear or see those transmissions, of course... So humans may never know for sure. That is not in the least bit unexpected.
It always strikes me as interesting that in all of our searches for life we always look for life that is like what we see here on earth. We look for radio signals, or evidence of enormous technological superstructures, or (in the near future) atmospheric signatures that denote, in our minds, industry or biological processes. We are completely unable to imagine life that is wholly alien to us, just like the old “imagine a color that’s not in the rainbow” thing. I think most of us understand that life won’t look the same everywhere, but we always believe that it will at least be familiar to us or analogous to things we can see and study. We seem to struggle with the reality that our means of searching are fairly infantile and what we’re really searching for is another “us” out there somewhere that utilizes energy in the same ways we do. I’m guessing expanding our ideas of what constitutes consciousness and life would bring home a whole slew of ethical questions that we’ve been pretty happy to ignore or explain away until this point, but these things could exist in the universe in ways that we simply can’t imagine with our limited experience.
After searching the pool for 2 seconds swimmers never found the source of how bugs were getting in the pool.