Aliens haven't contacted us. Scientists found a compelling reason why.
Aliens haven't contacted us. Scientists found a compelling reason why.
tectonic planet are rare
Perhaps we're just not as interesting as we think. Maybe aliens don't want to contact us for the same reason I don't want to contact kids playing in the park: I'm simply uninterested in whatever they're doing.
Lol makes me imagine that the alien species have a law against approaching humans or be charged with pedophilia.
Nah, they just have a bunch of myths about the evil homo sapiens abducting their alien babies.
It is homo phobia.
Oh no! Makes all that probing worse.
"They're made out of meat."
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
It's also likely that an alien species capable of interstellar travel doesn't want anything we have. Our resources aren't anything special, they have no need for slave labor and we don't produce anything of interest to them. It's a long drive. Why burn the gas and waste the time?
Knowledge.
Why are there scientists here on Earth studying the most boring subjects imaginable to anyone but them? Why does every tiny organism have a small, but dedicated group of scientists studying it at some point?
We must know - we will know! is a quote which represents humanity well. A factually wrong quote since we will not know everything but, an objective nonetheless. Why should other species believe different?
My point exactly.
But ... but ... I'm so interesting...
I remember a comedian making a joke about this. It's like getting a signal from your dog to come out to the back yard.
Have you read the one about the talking meat?
I'd seen this before, but was happy to reread it for gems like this:
"You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
Such a beautiful description of the human voice.
They are also loud and annoying!
And the smell….
Why the clickbait? Just put why in the title
It's the title of the article. Should the OP just put whatever they want for a title?
Yes, appended in square brackets, to indicate that it is not part of the original text.
This is a service I would appreciate. Or at least put it in the description.
Yes, modern article titles are designed to get you to click it so they make money off advertising to you
The whole article is the why. Not just a single headline-appropriate bullet point.
So if they are right, the Earth is incredibly rare and would be a great find for space faring civilizations. They also had plenty of time to pass by and find this incredibly rare life bearing sphere. But they didn't. You can flip things how ever you want, the question remains - why haven't we seen anyone?
It's simple. We're the first intelligent life in the galaxy. There is nobody else yet in our galaxy.
Also, probably nobody capable of traveling the stars wants to settle a planet. Once you figure out how to make huge spaceships (which you'll need to travel interstellar space) you've essentially learned how to make cities in space. Our solar system would support a lot of people if we just used the resources available for space habitats, and by "lot" I mean in the quadrillions. And it turns out that all you need to support that population is a star to provide energy, and some planets to source materials from.
So with that in mind, why bother finding another habitable planet?
The thing is, out of a population of trillions (or even quadrillions as you say), you only need a few thousand to travel to the stars to colonize another planet. With how large the population is, that is bound to happen. Just like there were bound to be pioneers travelling to the new world to settle it, despite how dangerous the journey was. And how there will be pioneers to settle the moon or mars or further out.
And a civilization like that would absolutely send stuff to other star systems, if only for science, so most of the research for the journey would already be done. And this is assuming that a civilization wouldn't want ever greater quantities of resources for ever greater projects, or access to other star systems for reasons we cannot fathom today (maybe neutron stars or black holes have some incredibly tempting uses? Or maybe there's some useful resources out in the galaxy that we have yet to discover?)
Basically, a successful civilization like that is bound to spread out, it's difficult to see scenarios where a successful civilization would be so homogenous in thought as for that to not happen. Amd then it's before we even get to sending AI probes to "colonize" space and gather data.
Also, probably nobody capable of traveling the stars wants to settle a planet. Once you figure out how to make huge spaceships (which you’ll need to travel interstellar space) you’ve essentially learned how to make cities in space.
I don't think it is a valid point. Yeah, if we can build a ship that take us to Alpha Centauri it would lool like a small city, but that does not mean that it can last forever and the traveller would never need to settle on a planet. And looking what the humans did in the past, it seems logic that while a part would want to continue to explore, another part would want to settle on a planet.
Our solar system would support a lot of people if we just used the resources available for space habitats, and by “lot” I mean in the quadrillions. And it turns out that all you need to support that population is a star to provide energy, and some planets to source materials from.
So with that in mind, why bother finding another habitable planet?
Because it is habitable and can be used as a transit point, advanced outpost, refuelling base or any other use you can do of an habitable planet where to do things you have not to fight even with the environment (tourism for example).
Suhweeet! We can be the Old Ones, Chutulu flatghn la!
Or there are plenty of societies at least as advanced as we are, but we can't find each other because space is big and our stars tend to drown out our own puny EM emissions.
They actually haven't had much time to pass by. Earths only been around for 4.6 billion years, a couple hundred million of that was spent being a cooling ball of magma. Space is fucking huge and the universe is still very young. It's very likely we are on the early end of the development of life in the universe. A lot of things had to happen before our complex life could evolve.
As you said, after the formation of Earth, it took only a few hundred milion years for life to develop. That is incredibly short, almost instanteneously as soon as conditions for life were met, life formed. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, formed almost as soon as galaxies could form. So here we have a situation where a inteligent civilization could have formed anywhere in our galaxy 13 bil years ago or at any point in time after that. Chance is, if they had, by now they would have conquered the whole galaxy. Absence of any sign of inteligent life can be wxplained by the Great Filter. It could be any of the following: 1) interstellar travel is never feasible for any civ, no matter how advanced, 2) Earth-like planets are so rare, that we are probably the only inteligent civ in our galaxy, 3) Earth-like planets are not that rare, but inteligent civs tend to destroy themselves before they manage to spread out to other planets... We don't know what the Great Filter is, but it must be pretty destructive for a civ. I just want to point out the fact that the Great Filter is probably still ahead of us and that we shouldn't take our existence for granted. We need to meticulously examine and neutralize any possible threats to human civilization. This is not fearmongering. It's just common sense, after you take all the facts into account that I laid out.
Maybe it's impossible to travel faster than the speed of light? So it may not be a thing where aliens can just swing by our solar system to snap a few photos before heading off to the next one.
I'm sure that's the case. You can travel to other stars without ftl, it's just a lot slower and probably one way. It's really pretty limiting for society, for instance, without ftl an interstellar "civilization" is basically out of the question, you can't govern another star system without at the very least faster communication.
Maybe it's because we're not as evolved as we think. If aliens did appear, how many kooks would want to attack them because they are different?
If they land in one country, would other countries get jealous or scared, thinking that country now has an advantage? Shit, what happens if the neighbouring country had nukes; would they launch?
More likely is that if aliens had detected life here, Earth would be marked as a red, no-go zone, because of how unstable, tribal and violent we are.
Every conservative on earth would demand we attack the flying illegal aliens. Our planet's dumbest of dipshit right-wingers would be outside shooting at clouds all night long.
There are many ideas and no definite proof. I like the idea that species either try to reach the stars and fail because it costs too much energy, or they find a sustainable lifestyle and not leave their home planet as Dr. Fatima pointed out in a good video
Dr. Fatima is incredible, absolutely love her.
Nice, thanks. I’m of the opinion that any form of civilisation is doomed in about 200 Earth years’ equivalent past their industrial revolution. It is a bit crude, but I will say: so far 100% of the cases I’m analysing have collapse as an expected outcome.
What, it wasn't enough to just gesture meaningfully at the state of the entire godamn planet when looking for reasons why aliens might want to avoid us?
I was going to say this. To those species who are capable of interplanetary colonization, we look like savage war goblins who can only negotiate transaction-based societies and are compelled by number-go-uo at the expense of letting children starve.
Couldn't the aliens be the same way?
The space is huge and FTL travel is impossible. The only reason someone will visit us is if they built a generational space ship. And the only reason to do that is if you have destroyed your own planet and have to colonise another one. We will only see those, who came for our planet and don't care about us.
It's because we have chins. They think we're weird.
It can be as low as only four out of 10,000 galaxies having one civilization
Well that's a new depth of loneliness I didn't know existed before. Great.
I like to think about it differently: That this planet is an incredibly unique and rare thing and humans are even more incredibly unique in the universe. And from that one thing makes us and our planet very very special.
gestures around broadly
Rare Earth by Peter Ward is what you're after here. I took an elective in college that effectively was reading a bunch of space science (and history, it was odd) and discussing. This one caught me off guard but was a decent breakdown of a possible answer to Fermi.
I don't necessarily agree with the supposition, mainly because it still comes from a place of specifically carbon-based life as the end goal. But they do lay out reasoning in an easy to understand way that was super neat to learn.
"It's like winning the lottery," Taras Gerya, a geophysicist at the research university ETH Zurich in Switzerland and an author of the study, told Mashable. "It can be so rare that we don't have much of a chance to be contacted," added Gerya, who coauthored the study with Robert Stern, a geoscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas. -article
I liked the Jupiter rising explanation. Just a planet free range farming for organic matter. Would make alot of sense.
Why would they contact us? Kopernik got a lot wrong, but he was right in that we are nothing special. A species advanced enough to contact other lifeforms must run across planets in various states of ruin 12 a day.
I think it's fundamentally interesting to see other biology. Just look at us trying to catalogue every possible life on earth, no matter how mundane.
What if we are the only ones obsessed with alien and space travels? What if there are quite a few aliens, but they are busy eating fruit and sleeping in the sun.
Even on the remoteest of chances that there is it a sapient life form capable and technologically advanced enough to contact us in this galaxy cluster, much less nearby?
Why the hell would they? We are obviously fucking crazy.
Science. Threat analysis. Entertainment at our silly ways.
If they have abundant resources and energy, sending probes wouldn't be a challenge.
Xenoanthroplology. We're obviously not crazy and our many cultures are presumably much different from theirs. There would be enormous amounts to learn from studying our differences and our similarities.
Unless they've already simulated alien life in computer models... Then there's not a lot left to learn.
So their whole argument is that tectonic plates are needed for complex life to emerge. There isn't much proof for it either way obviously but I find the argument flawed.
In any case, here is why I think aliens are here, either waiting for us to divest ourselves of our economic system and destructive ways (capitalism breaks when you mix in easy space exploration and heavy automation) or observing us and how changes emerge in our society like we do with secluded tribes.
I think the fernie paradox is more of a test than a rule. Any civ that can't pull itself out of the muck is probably bad news for galactic society, so they wait and see.
I find the idea that all intelligent species have the same dominator instinct driving them to explore, exploit, and colonize to be flawed. Not even all humans have this instinct, it's just that our western societies are all about domination so we grow up thinking it's the norm.
I agree, that is why I didn't bring up the possibility of enslavement or colonization. I'd even say the chances are higher of a civ being benign than not when reaching a space faring stage. I base this on mostly nothing.
I do believe an intelligent creature is probably at least mildly curious. Couple that with the likely hood of an advance civ having enough resources to build whatever projects they want, only a small subset of their population would need to be curious enough to make it a reality.
Because they're jerks.
Because we're jerks.
FTFY
The argument David Kipling made seems reasonable. Statistically the chance if there being almost no civilisations or the universe just teeming with life are the biggest. The parameters have to be tweaked just right for there being just a few civilizations in a galaxy. It's not teeming with signals and chances of parameters being just right is low, so most probable is we being alone.
Time.
Timeline wise, we could be at the beginning of when other species are becoming sentient. Or we could have missed them by a billion years. The gap to get in contact is so massive that the odds are stacked against it ever happening.
Distance and time. No one seems to have a clue how far a light year is ... I mean maybe ur finding someone in ur own galaxy over a big enough timeline but sorry 2000 light years to the nearest galaxy? Not a chance.
Yep, relativity is a bitch. Even if we could do the speed of light, our time here would pass so quickly that by the time we reached some place that had life, ours might have stopped existing.
And yes, I know a light year is not a measure of time, but distance, but it still takes time.
I think this is part of it. If the speed of light is the speed limit of matter, it would be very difficult to travel anywhere within reasonable amount of time considering norminal life spans of even the longest living things on Earth.
This is the answer,
100 different civilizations could have happened in our galaxy in the last 1 million years with only a few centuries of them emitting detectable signals.
And it could be worse, it could be 10 civilizations in the last 1 billion years.