Posting here, since I know what kind of responses it’s likely to generate.
But can you look at that, and truly believe they are all empty? How?
It’s certainly possible, even probable, that there’s other life out there. It’s happened once, there’s some probability associated with it, and the universe is a big place.
It’s just whether they’re currently orbiting our planet in ships like pie tins, abducting hillbillies, and obsessing over our anal regions that’s somewhat more questionable…
Agree with this. For me the issue is whether there’s any significant chance of us ever encountering it.
For me the issue is whether there’s any significant chance of us ever encountering it.
Yes, exactly. The odds of other life out there? Definitely. Odds of them finding us within our lifetimes? Very, very tiny.
That’s where Fermi’s Paradox comes in. If there are any other advanced civilizations, it’s reasonable to expect that some of them would have appeared millions of years before ours, so why haven’t they spread throughout the entire galaxy by now? (Assuming at least one such civilization per galaxy.)
One interpretation is that it means there aren’t any other advanced civilizations, but the other possibility is that it just means that such long-range space travel truly is Really Damn Hard and there aren’t any SF-ish shortcuts.
It’s even tiny given the most likely lifespan of our civilization. The only way it ceases to be near infinitesimal is if Einstein was wrong, and it’s possible to exceed the speed of light.
We’ve gone through this before.
Life? Yes.
Life right now? Probably.
Intelligent life, ever? Maybe
Intelligent life, right now? Maaaybe
Intelligent life that has beaten our understanding of physics, right now, and has visited this planet in the last hundred years? No fucking way.
H.
But, but, what shall I do with my tinfoil hat if there’s no aliens to worry about?
How can anybody look at those billions of galaxies with billions of stars and conclude that they weren’t created by God?
How can anybody look at those billions of galaxies with billions of stars and conclude that we are the only people made by God?
Although it borders on anthromophism and mythology, there is information conveyed by the absense of aliens in our nearby environment as much as the presence of them would reveal. That, for one, aliens have had 2 billion years to get over to us, and have not. Why?
It’s akin to how the fact that we’re not seeing time machines popping in and out all around us today tells us something of the possibility of and/or use of time machines in the future.
[edit: Fugative gets it first!]
I sometimes wonder if the answers to the fact that we haven’t met them is simply a matter of resources. The amount of resources required to actually create an interstellar ship, coupled with the requirements to do so, built on top of simple assumptions such as not being to accelerate/decelerate past a certain amount (due to crushing passengers), and not being able to exceed the speed of light, makes it logistically impossible.
On that same note, not encountering probes of other civilizations seems to come down simply to a matter of numbers. There are so many destinations, you couldn’t possibly create enough probes to ever contact more than the most miniscule amount.
The universe is filled with intelligent life. We haven’t seen them, because the one universal law of all civilizations is that all productivity and technological progress stops as soon as a compelling enough MMO is devised.
We’re getting pretty damned close - give it another 50 years, and people will spend all their time working on levelling their alts and cybering instead of developing new forms of interstellar transportation.
That’s where Fermi’s Paradox comes in. If there are any other advanced civilizations, it’s reasonable to expect that some of them would have appeared millions of years before ours, so why haven’t they spread throughout the entire galaxy by now? (Assuming at least one such civilization per galaxy.)
It still works though. Space, as I’m sure you’re aware, is big. Like, fantastically so. The distance between individual stars is mind boggling let alone the distance between galaxies. It’s insanely large.
So the whole needle in a haystack problem presents itself.
Even beyond that, maybe someone else DID exist before us and populated the universe and then died out before we came to be. Billions of years is a hell of a long time.
That’s sort of like the bubble universe theory; it doesn’t do us much good if we can’t get there.
It may be every civilization is practically stranded unless they adopt a long term seeding culture - with lifespans and inclinations like humans, the possibility that we would remain loyal to colonists 30 generations away from us travelling slowly in an expensive ship, and they to us, is unlikely, and even if they managed by luck to find and colonize a planet, equally unlikely they’d spend their “hard earned dollars” sending a ship back to earth.
It’s just whether they’re currently orbiting our planet in ships like pie tins, abducting hillbillies, and obsessing over our anal regions that’s somewhat more questionable…
I think transferring consciousness to the net is a popular theory for advanced civilizations and a way of achieving immortality. Not much to see if an alien race is all bits and bytes.
I guess if you could do something like that, it would be easy enough to load up a copy of yourself onto a mothership and just float around the universe at sub-light speeds, waking up to see the next star system. Something to do for the super-bored.
Here’s one of my Fermi explanations: Any civilization that is capable of colonizing the galaxy (shortcuts or no) would necessarily have an almost unimaginable quantity of resources available to them (energy, materials, real estate). What would such a civilization consider rare and valuable? Novelty. The reason they haven’t contacted us is because we are a Nature Preserve. Our value to them is that we are not part of their galactic monoculture. Opening diplomatic relations with us would negate most of the value they get from observed our “uncontaminated” culture/biosphere, with no obvious upside for them.
One of the things I like about this take is that it allows the possibility that some of the UFO nuts are telling the truth. :-)
We’d make great pets!
I don’t understand how the fact that the universe is large has much to do with the probability that other intelligent life exists.
Here’s the relevant equation (roughly):
(1 - probability of intelligent life, per star) ^ (# of stars)
I think we have some kind of plausible estimate of the number of stars in the universe. (Don’t we? I’m not an astronomy guy…) But the probability of intelligent life, per star, is not known. We have one instance (our own), but little basis to extend this to any kind of reliable probability estimate. Were we a 10 to 1 shot or a 10^50 to 1 shot? Who knows?
Furthermore, others have indicated that the lack of evidence of other intelligent life is, itself a kind of evidence, albeit far from conclusive.
Finally, one could take this whole discussion into a spiritual realm as well, but I’ll skip that for the time being, as it’s a different kind of discussion.