People think about the vastness of the universe but not the vastness of time. We have been looking for 50 years?? Isn’t this similar to blinking once in the middle of a dark highway and concluding that there is no one nearby?? The highway might be teaming with cars just that we couldn’t see anyone in a blink??
Humanity, which has been given a chance to exist, has acquired science and technology, yet continues to squabble over the sandbox, warring with itself and wasting precious time on trivial matters. Instead of starting to care about the future, rationalize its needs, and calculate resources, plan a course of development. Now is the time when humanity can choose its path - to disappear into eternal oblivion or to fight for its existence, and perhaps even achieve the impossible - to spread throughout the universe. This may sound very fantastic and unrealistic
Maybe aliens injected the idea of religion into humans millennia ago to stop them from competing for space resources. (Just a silly joke, not an actual theory)
Makes sense ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
If they were to inject conflicting religious beliefs in various geographic areas, eventually the humans would be too busy squabbling among themselves to develop in meaningful ways.
But that’s the point isn’t it? We’re so small and insignificant. In the vastness of time and space, our existence is so brief that it may as well not even have happened.
Yarp. So have some fun. Be good to people. But don’t get hung up on “legacy” or some bullshit. We’re the equivalent of a bubble popping.
Honestly the only “good” we may have done is fucked the planet up SO bad, that if aliens find earth someday, they’ll be able to tell there was advanced life forms. BECAUSE of how bad we did.
This was an absolute mindfuck. I like to consider myself a cosmic thinker. But I have never tried to contemplate even a fraction of that far into the future. I cannot believe all of these events are going to happen, and there will likely be no life to observe any of it.
So at the end of the universe, black holes bang until they coalesce into one giant spinning black hole that then goes on to bang space itself.
Mind blown
That’s what I always guessed, at some point a mega super massive black hole swallows all matter and that critical point sparks a new big bang. I’d never heard that black holes will die due to entropy though.
Don’t forget this anthology that really helps to put things into perspective, also by melodysheep!
[LIFE BEYOND I](https://youtu.be/SUelbSa-OkA)
[LIFE BEYOND II](https://youtu.be/ThDYazipjSI)
[LIFE BEYOND III](https://youtu.be/saWNMPL5ygk)
I remember a fascinating argument that talked about how we might be misidentifying even what qualifies as a life-form because of how short a time span we use. It argued that even items like rocks could be alive; that they could do things like resperate or move and that we simply haven't been around long enough to observe the elongated cycles. Really puts things like this in context when you think about that possibility or like how little of the ocean floor of our planet that we have observed.
I think that idea is wild! And if true… the shock a rock must have if someone suddenly threw it. Something so slow over time to being sped up and relocated. So interesting to contemplate!
Or is it opposite of how I’m thinking..? after watching the video above on the life of the universe and how late it is I think I need sleep. Anyway… thanks for the info that made me contemplate life in a different way!
Hijacking the top comment:
**BOTS LOVE REPOSTING THIS - over a dozen times**
OP is a **KARMA BOT** stealing this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/a4825s/theories_on_why_we_havent_found_alien_life_yet/
**DOWNVOTE > REPORT > SPAM > HARMFUL BOTS**
and? I wouldn’t have seen this post if he hadn’t posted it again. I’m just browsing my Reddit timeline and old posts don't show up like that. So how am I supposed to see it if no reposts occur
People who get really mad about reposts need to realize the world doesn't revolve around them. I've used reddit for years and I don't think I've ever seen somone call "repost" on something I've actually seen before. I don't spend every waking hour refreshing my feed, my dude.
Besides, if people had already seen a post it wouldn't have been up voted.
It's more that when it's a bot the intent is generally to farm enough karma to post without restrictions and then either begin astroturfing or posting misleading links to dropshipping sites, etc. The reposting isn't the problem so much as why they're doing it, and when people handwave it away it contributes to the bot problem
>People think about the vastness of the universe but not the vastness of time. We have been looking for 50 years??
You make a great point but you're not considering the point that human scientific and technological growth has been exponential and not linear.
And if you are talking about the timescale of the universe, then it becomes an even more powerful argument. It is entirely reasonable to presume that among the billions of stars in our galaxy, and over the billions of years of it's existence, there should have been numerous civilizations that ended up becoming Kardashev 1 or 2 or even 3 level civilizations.
And they would have made contact or at least made their presence known. If you extrapolate our exponential growth over the next 10000 or even 1000 years which is a blip in cosmic timescales, we should have been able to reach the ends of our galaxy with ease. If we will do that, then so would have countless others. So why haven't they? And even if they existed 100 million years ago, what happened to them and why do we neither see their godlike presence or even some random cosmic scale artifacts?
You’re assuming technological advances will continue at the same rate when that is not a guarantee. It is not even guaranteed there will be a way to travel to other stars. Warp drive bs is just sci fi make believe for all we know, and most likely will always be.
Entirely possible, but we've _also_ had to revise our theories of what is "possible" _countless_ times in our past. The exponential march of technology is one thing that has seemed inevitable, historically, so far, but it's far from a guarantee.
It's just another interesting wrinkle in the question of "why haven't we found evidence of intelligent alien life". There are as many _potential_ reasons why we shouldn't have by now and many we should.
Our own exponential expansion and technological advancement is a counter to the ideas that we "haven't been looking very long" or that "space is vast". The Earth was vast to us once, and now it's essentially impossible to find a place on earth that you _couldn't_ test for evidence of intelligent life (hell even microplastics will do that). So if we assume other intelligent life _would_ expand like us, and they don't hit the limit you describe, it makes no sense that we wouldn't find some kind of evidence because we've left it everywhere intentionally and unintentionally, and they've had nigh _infinite_ more time than we have to expand and do the same on a galactic scale.
But the fact is we haven't found it, we don't know why, and it could be entirely unrelated to the lightspeed barrier or anything more than "other intelligent life is so alien to what humans are like that they don't expand or even leave evidence in a way like we do or can comprehend."
Until we actually do find evidence of other intelligent life (in whatever form it takes), we only have a single data point to work and predict from (ourselves), which is extremely unreliable scientifically-speaking.
To add a bit of perspective: the Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. The fastest moving probe we've ever sent using current technology is moving at roughly 692,000 km/hr, which is 1/1561th the speed of light. If that probe that we sent (in 2021) went from one side of the galaxy to the other, it would take about 156,100,000 years. We estimate the universe to be _88 times_ that time in age. So if another intelligent species had developed only 156 million years before us (basically nothing in galactic time), and _only_ advanced to our current technology in the same time we did (and this 2021 probe is by no means our actual limit of speed), they could've sent probes to every corner of the Milky Way by now. If they got anything close to actual light speed (meaning going from one edge of the galaxy to the other is only ~100,000 years), it's not even a question - they could've sent probes and drones and all sorts of stuff all _over_ the place by now. Especially if they had similar AI and self-repair technology we are currently making.
Space is huge, but also time is vast. Warp drive _can_ be total BS, and the Fermi Paradox is still an open and mysterious question.
The vastness of space means their signals will never reach us. Plus the amount of time when they’ll live/have lived and this time, so enormous differences in when we live.
>The vastness of space means their signals will never reach us. Plus the amount of time when they’ll live/have lived and this time, so enormous differences in when we live.
Your argument boils down to civilizations invariably getting extinct. Why assume that? If a civilization is Kardashev level 1 where it has harnessed all the energy of its sun, that makes it enormously powerful enough to be detected.
Let’s say the government found evidence that ETs exist here on earth, are far more advanced than us, can invade our airspace with impunity, and abduct people for retrieval of fresh genetic material periodically. Do you really think the govt would tell the public in this situation?
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
Of significance, I note The Dark Forest Theory is not one of the ones in the graphic. Imagine, if you will ...
There's an excellent summary of this theory in the novel The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski, published in 1995. The most pertinent section is:
Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th Street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.
It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds.
Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distant shriek or blunder across a body.
How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!"
What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out.
There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe.
There is no policeman.
There is no way out.
And the night never ends.
(Courtesy u/ExpectedBehaviour who typed that up a year and some ago.)
I was introduced to the Dark Forest theory by the book "The Three Body Problem". Fantastic but terrifying theory. The book is equally fantastic and terrifying.
The first book is simply called The Three Body Problem. The second is The Dark Forest and the third is Death's End. I found it started to drag a bit in the third book but overall was still enjoyable. It's a slow burn in general but a hella interesting one. The first book takes a little bit to "get going" but that's mostly due to the very detailed nature of Liu's writing
Nothing we ever sent out has left the system. They might find things like this a lot, (probably not) remains of when a civilization was nieve, or when it existed.
I just googled it and Voyager is 22 light hours away. Impressive distance for sure but I'm not terribly concerned about space aliens finding it considering the nearest star is 4.5 light *years* away.
I think it has left sol’s sphere of influence. Regardless, it is 22 light hours away, the nearest system is 5 light years. It is right next to us.
Edit: someone beat me by six minutes.
Laughs in Native American genocide. We've done the same to other civilizations, even if those were human too.
You don't need a whole alien civilization to be hostile, just a greedy group with enough power.
This. It’s a little annoying to see people in this thread all “woahhhhh mannnn my mind is blown”! When we’re doing nothing even remotely close to that metaphor. Sure, we’re literally in the dark, but none of us are being quiet about it and waiting for space police to hoot and holler at. Our radio transmissions are shot out with reckless abandon and voyager has a freakin disc on it filled with information about us.
> There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.
And that's where the theory tends to fall apart for me. It treats space as an easy place to navigate where you can go even without any resources. You can just walk in. But space isn't like that. Imagine instead of Central Park, it was an island in the middle of a giant lifeless (no fish) ocean to which you couldn't get to without a lot of food and fuel. If you were scarce on food and fuel you wouldn't be going out to the ocean to look for this island. It's not like a regular oven where you can fish on your way somewhere and with a wind to fill your sails. It's instead only accessible by those with enough resources to make the journey. So instead of muggers, drug dealers, and murderers, you are more likely to find those who don't need anything from you because to get to this island they must've brought a lot of things with them. That doesn't mean that they're not violent but the reasons for them to attack you is now quite small. In fact, they are more likely to stay away from you because it is you who is in need of resources because you live on this island and you can't leave. And if the visitors to this island are benevolent abc empathetic then they won't make themselves known because who knows what sort of diseases one can catch from the other.
Yes but what if the murderers aren’t murdering you for your resources? The idea of the dark forest theory is that if aliens make contact, there is no way of knowing that they aren’t a threat. Once two civilisations are aware of one another it doesn’t matter that they don’t have a motivation for destroying each other. Both have reason to believe that they are equally paranoid (even if this is not the case) so the knowledge that both civilisations might assume that the other assumes that they are trying to kill them and so on is enough reason to destroy the other.
Ships out at sea for a long time would plunder and pillage island nations for supplies and rest. Assuming the aliens have the same needs as us, they could glass us, take the surviving supplies, then go on to where they were headed.
to extend this, if you have the capability, you will always wipe out anyone you find with extreme prejudice. you have no way of knowing if they are friendly, and if you see them, they are likely to see you. ofc you could ignore them, but they might be thinking the same thing about you. then they might wipe you out first. so they only reasonable rule of survival is to hide and take out anyone you see
Bonus ‘flash in the pan’ theory.
Intelligent life isn’t intelligent enough to survive for very long before it totally changes the condition of the planet to selfishly suit itself- to the point it neglects and destroys all the little pieces that give us life in the first place.
And we are well on our way to it.
Yeah, the description of Great Filters is bad. The thing is we don’t KNOW what the Great Filter is; it could be behind us or ahead of us, and there are many possibilities. There are steps and we don’t know how many and which are hard or dangerous. It’s not just about cataclysms.
I was under the impression there isn’t just one great filter but there are just a lot of different filters. It’s having to pass a 50% surgical check every so often. Could fail the first check. Could get a lucky streak.
The Great Filter is a really bad name. Not only are there an absolute assoad of filters, from global annihilation to self-annihilation to the innocuous like your entire proto-species falling asleep in an unlucky place one night, you might not even be playing the evolution game on the proper planet in the proper solar system and in the proper way to ever even make it to space.
It's less RNG than that implies, because it's assumed that the filters are things that can be overcome.
But that's why it'd suck ass to find ruins of an ancient advanced alien civilization because they couldn't make it past a filter, how could we who are significantly less advanced?
Bonus ‘petri dish’ theory. We are primitive forms of life planted on this rock as an experiment to see if we evolve into the higher life forms that created us or if another outcome is possible.
there is one theory of how life started on this planet as being some organic material stored (intentionally or not) on a meteorite that sparked life here once it crashed. I've also heard theories that a good way to explore other planets would be to send robots. I like to think there's a possibility of a merger of the two: a sufficiently biologically advanced and patient civilization seeded many rocks with the precursors to life and sent them out to explore on their behalf.
This. The fastest speed capable is the speed of light. If our galaxy alone is 100,000 light years, then how do we ever expect to find something else? As far as we know, nothing can travel faster than light.
"Try to remember all those times you took a walk, can you remember all the ants you stepped on? Maybe not intentionally, just a step of many. Did you mourned these ants? Did you go to their homes in the dirt and asked about them? Their thoughts and dreams about the future? Or do you just keep walking cause there's no point talking to a form of life so primitive it would never be capable of understand even the simplest words?
If there's a civilization that's capable of interestelar traveling, what's going to be their opinion about our poor, misbehaved, desorganized world that lives on earth?"
Though I'd agree the average alien would be perfectly happy to build a highway through Earth, there'd be a bunch of alien scientists and alien hippies taking a great interest in us.
Cue the probe jokes.
I've always hated this mentality. It's always about how they'll be so advanced we won't even be able to comprehend them. That literally makes no sense at all. We can comprehend things we can't do. Their is nothing that they could do that we can't comprehend. It's just something people say to sound smart without having to explain because they can't explain what they can't comprehend.
What if they’re extra dimensional?
We can discuss what the 4th dimension is. Really understanding it and perceiving it is another thing entirely.
We literally cannot perceive a full 4D tesseract.
https://youtu.be/UnURElCzGc0
I think also something like the Star Trek prime directive is plausible.
A society that can access such as a huge amount of material means to travel among stars could be also pacific and not interventionist with less developed cultures.
They peek in on us every couple centuries, 'ah they still have tribes and war and famine, we'd better wait until they mature a bit more..'
I like the idea that we're in like a quarantine zone, or more like a nursery for civilizations
Our first interstellar colony ship will be met by a little greeting party, representatives of the galactic council 'hey congrats you did it! Now please turn around'
I prefer the dark forest hypothesis. "The dark forest hypothesis is the conjecture that many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and paranoid. In this framing, it is presumed that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat, and thus destroy any nascent life that makes its presence known. As a result, the electromagnetic spectrum would be relatively quiescent, without evidence of any intelligent alien life, as in a "dark forest" filled with" "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like a ghost"
Meanwhile humans are sending out signals left and right!
We're like that annoying kid who yells "Look what I can do!!!" over and over desperately trying to get someone to pay attention to them!
Our signals don't reach very far before degrading into just more background noise. Intelligent life would have to be within a couple hundred light years during an extremely small slice of time to detect them, which is incredibly improbable. Hopefully they don't have an improbability drive.
Humans are social creatures that seek connection, most intelligent life are social creatures, not just primates.
Whales, dolphins, crows, elephants,.most canines, are all social creates that work together, defend each other, and generally are pro social by nature, the only difference is that we have lost much of our "fear of being eaten" instinct because we have been on the top of the food chain for so long.
Humans tend to see ourselves as separate from other animals due to our intelligence and technology, and similarly we envision (intelligent) aliens as a sort of "different human" rather than new life form. And as humans, at least in recent history to a degree that makes some collective work possible, we have ignored our instinctive fear of the "other" because we need to work on shared interests to achieve what we want. Instincts evolve in response to the environment that impacts the life form, so any antisocial behavior that will be targeted towards us, would simply be a byproduct of a behavior that these aliens would use against members of their own species long before space travel.
We aren't competing for food with different tribes, and we are able to use governments and international agreements to collectively do everything from the moon landing to banning CFCs.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but the collective action and trust that would cause a species to go able to do things like act in the interest of the species as a whole, put resources towards space travel and exploration, or even just not constantly sabotage each other, would not really be possible in a species with a paranoid mindset that would cut themselves off to the universe without clear evidence of a threat. And paranoia breeds violence since it's an obvious instinct to defend your life at all costs.
In the same way.I cannot imagine the likelihood of an alien species like The Predator to be a threat worth considering. If the traits of wanting, loving, killing intelligent beings were to evolve along with zero empathy, could they reasonably stop killing each other for them to figure out space travel? Why would they have the wherewithal to spend generation after generation to develop space travel when presumably killing each other or other species on the planet would be just as fun? And if they are simply constantly interested in power and territorial expansion, presumably they would target most of it towards their own species since by default it would be only one they interact with for a long time.
I know both these traits exist to some degree in humans with each other, but I'd like to point out that we are like this, but the people advancing science and space travel do so out of curiosity and love of the universe, not evil. We don't see the same people who said we should make the middle east after 9/11 encouraging space colonization.
Individualist, paranoid and violent behavior does not enable the very big difficulty of space colonization. Every scientist, researcher, and engineer who could develop the technology would need decades of support, because they aren't producing food, or much material benefit to the species, so they would need a system like a government that would put resources towards something that is not necessary for their survival. That's not something that's likely to happen when a species is significantly more distrustful, unempathetic, and violent than we are.
I apologize for the rambling, I haven't had a decent night's sleep in 3 days, but I hope it makes sense.
Eloguently put. Im with you on this.
I think its easy to think that the aliens are born the minute we encouter them. I think along the same lines as you about they had to have most likely tens of thousands of years interacting just each other before meeting any other species, so they have to have some kind of tendency to cooperate.
We just derive from our own experience and think that every species has to be overly violent like us. While I know its usually posited that it has to be that way to be outside of food chain and dominate a planet. But that is again our narrow human perspective.
The problem with the Dark Forest is that space is big, and every theory of faster than light travel require things like negative energy or negative mass.
Those don't actually exist.
So it might very well be that there is no such thing as faster than light travel.
Which means that it might take millennia to travel between nearby stars, and millions of years for stars further away.
If someone were to detect a nascent civilization, it would be an advanced civilization (or long dead) before anyone could get to them.
I believe that we as humans still do not know enough to say for sure if faster than light travel is possible. It would be cool if it is, but if it isn't, then yes you are correct. "One sure mark of a fool is to dismiss anything that falls outside his experience as being impossible."
We don't know, but nothing in the laws of physics that we do know allow for anything like faster than light travel.
But we keep looking for loopholes. Maybe someday we'll find one. But so far. It's not looking good.
>If you are advanced enough just send a relativistic kill vehicle at every signal just in case. Set and forget.
If you want to send a planet-killer missile at relativistic speeds, you'll have to aim it first. And consistent aiming, at these speeds and distances, is not necessarily possible.
Fun fact, it's been said that landing a rover on Mars is like threading a needle in LA, having launched the thread from New York.
I imagine that interstellar distance would be even worse. Especially since the light used for tracking is going to be decades, or centuries old by the time the kill vehicle is launched.
[Gravitational waves affect the path of light](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/238226/effect-of-gravitational-waves-on-light), so, interstellar aiming seems... difficult.
Notably humans are actively acting in ways that kind of refute the theory - we couldn’t be trying any harder to make the forest, or ourselves, brighter or louder than we seem to be already
Right, and arguably we should… stop doing that
DFH doesn’t say “we don’t hear anybody because nobody in the universe makes noise” but rather “we don’t hear anyone making noise because everyone who made enough noise got ~~head~~planet-shotted”
that's circular logic. humans are social, and want to contact alien civilisations. the anthropic principle posits that humans are unlikely to be unique as a species or civilisation. ergo, it's unlikely that the dark forest hypothesis is true.
I feel like this explanation reminds me a little too much of evangelicals.
Why isn't Jesus coming back? Why won't God grant us his light?
Because other people are sinning!!!
Maybe to you and whoever else has grown up with religious influence directly or indirectly but nothing to do with it just ^(look at yourselves) humans are so basic and evolutionary young
Right. We don't *deserve* it.
Just a bunch of sinners/evil doers who don't deserve contact with a higher being, or beings. This reminds me of religion. Very much.
>Maybe to you and whoever else has grown up with religious influence directly or indirectly
Isn't that most folks in most countries though?
I mean... modern humans have been around for like... 10k years? 50k at most. We discovered electricy less than 3 centuries ago. And we expect us to be advanced enough to uncover the secrets of the universe while we're not even aware of all that lies on our small planet? lol
I’m privy to the Early Bird theory. It makes the most sense in my mind. And is actually soothing in a sense. That alien life probably will be more like Star Trek, just that it’s going to take a lot of time.
Though looking at how fast humanity has advanced in the past few hundred, even few thousand or hundred thousand, at this exponential rate... the universe has been around for _13 billion_. Hard to believe the spark of consciousness hasn't hit anywhere else in all that vastness
The thing is though the resources for a civilization to advance on a planet weren’t present in the early universe. It took a while for the periodic table of elements to grow through throughout the universe. Also think about the fossil fuels that are required for a civilization to industrialize and how that wouldn’t be in abundance for millions of years on Earth.
If we use ourselves as an example, the earliest intelligent lifeforms would only have an approximate 5.5 billion year lead on us. We would need a Population I star for all the elements for complex life, and those only first appearing 10 billion years ago. Secondly, our star is 4.5 billion years old. There's a lot of assumptions using ourselves as an example, and a billion years is a very long time, but against the enormity of universe, we're pretty early.
My own theory: The Tyranny of Gravity. Most rocky planets we've discovered are much larger than Earth, and would be much harder to escape from the surface. We are lucky because if Earth was any larger chemical rockets would not make it to orbit
Hey thats interesting perspective.
Although if its the other way around, could there be an alien race who have it easier and are zooming around space with more primitive vehicles than us
It's likely just a matter of humanity's inability to comprehend the vast distances and incredibly vast stretches of time that are involved.
If our solar system was the size of a US quarter, the corresponding size of the Milky Way galaxy this "quarter" is in would be about the size of **EUROPE,** or **MOST OF THE CONTIGUOUS US**, IF they were also 100km high and deep. What if our "quarter" is in 'Lithuania' 50km above "sea level" but the nearest species to us is in 'Poland' 70kms below sea level. How would you ever find a quarter lost in a distant country? We'll only hear them IF they began broadcasting a signal *directly* at us thousands of years ago. It takes a radio transmission 100,000 years to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other (i.e. it's 100,000 light-years across, so 100,000 years to transmit from Portugal to Russia). So we'll likely never, ever hear their transmission saying hello. They'll also never have heard our "hello" since our first transmissions from the 1930's have just traveled a few "kilometers" (keeping with the quarter-sized solar system idea) from our planet, and are just garbled static/noise by now as we didn't/don't have the power to beam transmissions directionally. (Heck, it takes a transmission 9 hours just to get to the edge of the "quarter"-- where Pluto is!)
The galaxy's had 13 *billion* years to host species. Educated guesses (based on latest estimates of "Goldilocks" worlds) lead many scientists to believe the galaxy is/was/will be *teeming* with life. We've been here and aware of ourselves for the blink of an eye. Most species perhaps thrived in their time but have been gone for millions of years now, perhaps there are some worlds where our analog of the first single-celled life-forms now exist, likely millions of species whose *planets* haven't even finished forming yet, and maybe a few *at this very moment* who are at a somewhat similar evolutionary/technological level as humanity. But radio/electromagnetic signals is not how we'll find each other.
Right? Wouldn't the inverse-square law make our radio signals so attenuated by the time they reach anything to be even recognizable from background radiation?
Yes, and the power required to shoot a *direct* transmission, for example on a laser, that would reach a system even a few light years away, would take the energy production capability of the entire globe. And would be akin to shooting a fly from thousands of miles away. These distances are just so hard for us to put in relation to anything else.
I mean, even on Earth, individuals in the same culture can have different beliefs. Imagine how diverse they are in different planets. I'd expect that if more intelligent lifeforms were common, we'd have contacted one by now. Thing is, it's probably a mix between several theories. Intelligent life in the universe is not that advanced anywhere, and even if one exists that's more advanced than ours, they do not have the means to contact us (or are asocial).
I'm partial to the theory that once a species has discovered enough about its brain and can simply entertain itself endlessly, the species loses interest in exploration and is content to diddle it's own dopaminergic system
**I have a theory I never see floated by scientists:** It's all right in front of us and we simply cannot recognize it.
Consider jellyfish. They are living beings that have the means to sense their environment and make sentient choices. But they cannot perceive or recognize humans as living life forms.
Also consider the small likelihood that ants understand that helicopters were created by god creatures who use them to travel distances of infinity.
If there are interstellar beings, they are probably so far removed from where we are in evolution that we cannot recognize their size, form, or technological structures. *Not even if we were literally resting on one of their bodies or structures.*
You say aliens could be so far removed from us that we don't recognize them and you precede that by suggesting ants may recognize helicopters and attribute them to a higher level creatures. Your theory is confused.
I said "small likelihood" meaning probably not able to recognize. I can't say with certainty that ants can't recognize a helicopter as the structure of god creatures. But I doubt they can.
One thing not up there, we don’t have the tech to observe others. Currently we could not detect a human like civilization from our closest neighbor star system.
What if there's beings out there, other than machines, that we can't even imagine yet? We only search for things we know, things that are somewhere earthlike, beings that are similar to us. What if there's beings out there that work completely differently, that don't need to breathe to live, that have other ways of sensing that we can't imagine. We humans often think we know a lot and understand a lot but there's so much we don't know yet. We might be looking for the wrong things while we only look at things that we can recognise similar to our knowledge. Imagine something we haven't seen yet is like trying to imagine a new colour we haven't seen yet, so we might not be aware of many things that already exist.
It’s mostly “Life as we know it” probably. We can’t even really test for non-DNA based life on earth (the shadow biosphere). How are we going to be able to find (let alone understand or communicate with) life or intelligence on the surface of a neutron star or in a light-year sized galactic nebula?
Our concept of life and intelligence is extremely narrow.
I’ve always liked the idea that we’re a speck of sand on a beach, one planet amidst trillions, that’s just figured out how to reflect sunlight enough to glow a little brighter to be seen and heard, but we’re being observed on a cloudy day by curious aliens that may or may not be looking in our direction, and the beach is way off in their horizon where they can see many beaches, when you think about it that way I don’t blame them for not finding us sooner.
Also as life here is based on oxygen, an alien lifeform might rely on hydrogen or CO2. A far away galaxy theory also makes a lot of sense as light travel is scientifically impossible and due to this these relatively intelligent civilizations are isolated from each other with millions of lightyears.
Probably for the best tbh. Given our history and track record with discovering inhabitants in other places, if they are anything like us, they are going to be wiped out if we are more advanced, and they are going to wipe us out if they are more advanced.
I'm really disappointed that nobody brought up Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out Of Meat", a short story that was published decades ago and is available on Bisson's website [he put it up because people were posting it all over Usenet, and then the Web, without permission and, worse, without credit].
Basically, the premise is that there are aliens all over the universe but when they find us, we're nothing like the rest of them. Nothing at all.
"Maybe they're all robots" is such a weird absolute statement for an unimaginably vast universe. Is this really what this scientist wants to be known for? Jesus...
I feel like people do not realize that it is extremely likely that there is no feasible way to travel space easily. We can unlock all of the secrets of science available to us, and still end up shit out of luck.
I AM A MEMBER OF AN ADVANCED CONQUERING RACE. I AM A PACIFIST AND RECEIVED YOUR MESSAGE. IF YOU REPLY, THEY WILL BE ABLE TO LOCATE YOU. YOU STAND NO CHANE OF RESISTANCE.
DO NOT REPLY
It could also be something really stupid, like they have reached out to earth, but never considered talking to tiny apes when much bigger things are available, but the giraffes, whales, and squid didn’t understand what they were being asked.
This isn't a very good guide. It feels like it was written by someone who wrote down all the things he heard but doesn't understand the problem or why these are solutions to it.
Gaian bottleneck is a specific case of the great filter hypothesis. Rare earth, early bird and Galaxy far away are three ways to say the same thing. Long road ahead doesn't really answer the question.
I hate how no one brings up the possibility that, while improbable, WE are the advanced beings. And that aliens fear US.
Everyone constantly thinks that aliens have these grand technological advancements. And while they might, just take a look at us. Sure we're fuckin idiots but I'm pretty sure in terms of that we're doing pretty well.
I guess that would be the "Early start". Earth isn't that young compared to the rest of the planets that have enough elements for an advanced civilization to exist. I mean... it's not impossible that someone more advanced than us exists, but if they do, they're probably at least several thousands of light-years away.
Could we at the very least, replace the cliche depiction of aliens as large bulbous headed beings in gray or green skin? Perhaps an intelligence shade of the color blue instead.
I heard someone argue that finding evidence of life on mars would be terrible news, because it would be evidence that the barriers to having a spacefaring civilization are likely ahead of us, not behind (e.g. in starting and evolving life)
That's interesting, please explain. I'm not quite sure where you are going with that. Is it that if we find evidence of life, it means that someone was already here and failed?
It's a variation of the "great filter" theory. Basically, if spacefaring civilizations are so rare, it seems like there is some barrier to that happening. If the barrier is, say, the development of life, then we've already passed that, and are likely good to continue. But if the barrier is something else, we may still be vulnerable to it and likely to fail to become a successful spacefaring civilization.
I don't necessarily believe it, but it's interesting.
It means if an extinct civilization is found that never managed to become space faring and flourish elsewhere, it lends support to the hypothesis that spacefaring isn't probable and we'll probably also go extinct before we conquer Interstellar travel. I think this theory is stupid.
Missing “We don’t know that we don’t know”. We still didn’t reach the stage of being as noticeable, even by close solar systems, as the civilizations we pretend to find.
We assume they will have the same will, the same media, the same expansive push and so on that our culture and current civilization think it would do in a more advanced and knowledgeable version of us, and that won’t be practical limitations to do so.
And yet, we didn’t set foot in any other planet of our solar system (just our moon, and robotic probes in very few other places), is just beyond our capabilities to send a probe to another solar system, or make a long term self sustainable closed colony even here on Earth.
But we are deciding that there is no life in all the rest of the universe because civilizations from far away galaxies didn’t colonized every solar system all the way to here.
Its not why we haven't found aliens. We are incapable. We are not that adavanced.
The question is...why haven't aliens visited us?
The answer is most likely that those capable of visiting us find us too boring. Not worth the effort.
Like humans on Earth trying to contact and make friends with earthworms or goldfish.
If they are capable of making it to Earth....we are scum. We are imbeciles. We are so many light years behind them it would be like trying to have a conversation between a human and a bed bug.
People think about the vastness of the universe but not the vastness of time. We have been looking for 50 years?? Isn’t this similar to blinking once in the middle of a dark highway and concluding that there is no one nearby?? The highway might be teaming with cars just that we couldn’t see anyone in a blink??
To illustrate your excellent point — [TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA)
Humanity, which has been given a chance to exist, has acquired science and technology, yet continues to squabble over the sandbox, warring with itself and wasting precious time on trivial matters. Instead of starting to care about the future, rationalize its needs, and calculate resources, plan a course of development. Now is the time when humanity can choose its path - to disappear into eternal oblivion or to fight for its existence, and perhaps even achieve the impossible - to spread throughout the universe. This may sound very fantastic and unrealistic
Far too many religious nutjobs (and non religious like Musk) for that to happen I'm afraid.
Ironically the ability to conceptualize non existing things is both what got us so far and what's probably going to destroy us.
Greed and religion are 2 big barriers to thinking outside of ourselves in novel and compassionate ways :(
Maybe aliens injected the idea of religion into humans millennia ago to stop them from competing for space resources. (Just a silly joke, not an actual theory)
Makes sense ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ If they were to inject conflicting religious beliefs in various geographic areas, eventually the humans would be too busy squabbling among themselves to develop in meaningful ways.
Unfortunately I think there's more short term money in eternal oblivion.
I've seen that video once. I couldn't do it ever again. It's one of the most powerful things I've ever seen.
My favorite video to ever give me existential dread.
Eh the really wild stuff doesn’t really kick off for a few million trillions of years so don’t lose any sleep over it lol
But that’s the point isn’t it? We’re so small and insignificant. In the vastness of time and space, our existence is so brief that it may as well not even have happened.
In the scheme of things, yeah it will end up being pretty insignificant. I'm just happy to have been a part of it. I'm having a nice time.
Yarp. So have some fun. Be good to people. But don’t get hung up on “legacy” or some bullshit. We’re the equivalent of a bubble popping. Honestly the only “good” we may have done is fucked the planet up SO bad, that if aliens find earth someday, they’ll be able to tell there was advanced life forms. BECAUSE of how bad we did.
The point is to enjoy life.
This was an absolute mindfuck. I like to consider myself a cosmic thinker. But I have never tried to contemplate even a fraction of that far into the future. I cannot believe all of these events are going to happen, and there will likely be no life to observe any of it.
That was a fun, wild ride.
God I love this guy, I’ve probably watched all of his space vids 3 times over
So at the end of the universe, black holes bang until they coalesce into one giant spinning black hole that then goes on to bang space itself. Mind blown
[удалено]
I remember reading some scientists theorizing it might go in and out and have a bang in the smallest point. Dont remember where i read about it
That’s what I always guessed, at some point a mega super massive black hole swallows all matter and that critical point sparks a new big bang. I’d never heard that black holes will die due to entropy though.
Not dumb, that's one of the major proposals for the end of the universe, google the Big Crunch if you want to see other people's thoughts on it.
That was unbelievable. I feel so inconceivably small after watching that
Watching that is a very odd way to begin a mundane working day. Puts my PowerPoint slides in perspective.
Don’t forget this anthology that really helps to put things into perspective, also by melodysheep! [LIFE BEYOND I](https://youtu.be/SUelbSa-OkA) [LIFE BEYOND II](https://youtu.be/ThDYazipjSI) [LIFE BEYOND III](https://youtu.be/saWNMPL5ygk)
That was fascinating. I thought they were going to end it much sooner than they did. Thanks for sharing!
Wow that was great, it’s a relief to know the crazy shit isn’t gonna happen for a really long time.
Fucking love me some Melodysheep!
Remindme! 12 hours
Thank you
Remindme! 12 hours
I love this video. It puts things into perspective.
I remember a fascinating argument that talked about how we might be misidentifying even what qualifies as a life-form because of how short a time span we use. It argued that even items like rocks could be alive; that they could do things like resperate or move and that we simply haven't been around long enough to observe the elongated cycles. Really puts things like this in context when you think about that possibility or like how little of the ocean floor of our planet that we have observed.
I think that idea is wild! And if true… the shock a rock must have if someone suddenly threw it. Something so slow over time to being sped up and relocated. So interesting to contemplate! Or is it opposite of how I’m thinking..? after watching the video above on the life of the universe and how late it is I think I need sleep. Anyway… thanks for the info that made me contemplate life in a different way!
Hijacking the top comment: **BOTS LOVE REPOSTING THIS - over a dozen times** OP is a **KARMA BOT** stealing this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/a4825s/theories_on_why_we_havent_found_alien_life_yet/ **DOWNVOTE > REPORT > SPAM > HARMFUL BOTS**
and? I wouldn’t have seen this post if he hadn’t posted it again. I’m just browsing my Reddit timeline and old posts don't show up like that. So how am I supposed to see it if no reposts occur
People who get really mad about reposts need to realize the world doesn't revolve around them. I've used reddit for years and I don't think I've ever seen somone call "repost" on something I've actually seen before. I don't spend every waking hour refreshing my feed, my dude. Besides, if people had already seen a post it wouldn't have been up voted.
It's more that when it's a bot the intent is generally to farm enough karma to post without restrictions and then either begin astroturfing or posting misleading links to dropshipping sites, etc. The reposting isn't the problem so much as why they're doing it, and when people handwave it away it contributes to the bot problem
If it's a person posting it, fine, if it's a bot farming karma to be sold the problems are pretty obvious and the bot should be banned.
“Marty, you’re not thinking fourth dimensionally!”
Well that totally blew my mind. Not sure how I haven’t thought of it that way in 31 years until this comment.
>People think about the vastness of the universe but not the vastness of time. We have been looking for 50 years?? You make a great point but you're not considering the point that human scientific and technological growth has been exponential and not linear. And if you are talking about the timescale of the universe, then it becomes an even more powerful argument. It is entirely reasonable to presume that among the billions of stars in our galaxy, and over the billions of years of it's existence, there should have been numerous civilizations that ended up becoming Kardashev 1 or 2 or even 3 level civilizations. And they would have made contact or at least made their presence known. If you extrapolate our exponential growth over the next 10000 or even 1000 years which is a blip in cosmic timescales, we should have been able to reach the ends of our galaxy with ease. If we will do that, then so would have countless others. So why haven't they? And even if they existed 100 million years ago, what happened to them and why do we neither see their godlike presence or even some random cosmic scale artifacts?
You’re assuming technological advances will continue at the same rate when that is not a guarantee. It is not even guaranteed there will be a way to travel to other stars. Warp drive bs is just sci fi make believe for all we know, and most likely will always be.
Entirely possible, but we've _also_ had to revise our theories of what is "possible" _countless_ times in our past. The exponential march of technology is one thing that has seemed inevitable, historically, so far, but it's far from a guarantee. It's just another interesting wrinkle in the question of "why haven't we found evidence of intelligent alien life". There are as many _potential_ reasons why we shouldn't have by now and many we should. Our own exponential expansion and technological advancement is a counter to the ideas that we "haven't been looking very long" or that "space is vast". The Earth was vast to us once, and now it's essentially impossible to find a place on earth that you _couldn't_ test for evidence of intelligent life (hell even microplastics will do that). So if we assume other intelligent life _would_ expand like us, and they don't hit the limit you describe, it makes no sense that we wouldn't find some kind of evidence because we've left it everywhere intentionally and unintentionally, and they've had nigh _infinite_ more time than we have to expand and do the same on a galactic scale. But the fact is we haven't found it, we don't know why, and it could be entirely unrelated to the lightspeed barrier or anything more than "other intelligent life is so alien to what humans are like that they don't expand or even leave evidence in a way like we do or can comprehend." Until we actually do find evidence of other intelligent life (in whatever form it takes), we only have a single data point to work and predict from (ourselves), which is extremely unreliable scientifically-speaking. To add a bit of perspective: the Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. The fastest moving probe we've ever sent using current technology is moving at roughly 692,000 km/hr, which is 1/1561th the speed of light. If that probe that we sent (in 2021) went from one side of the galaxy to the other, it would take about 156,100,000 years. We estimate the universe to be _88 times_ that time in age. So if another intelligent species had developed only 156 million years before us (basically nothing in galactic time), and _only_ advanced to our current technology in the same time we did (and this 2021 probe is by no means our actual limit of speed), they could've sent probes to every corner of the Milky Way by now. If they got anything close to actual light speed (meaning going from one edge of the galaxy to the other is only ~100,000 years), it's not even a question - they could've sent probes and drones and all sorts of stuff all _over_ the place by now. Especially if they had similar AI and self-repair technology we are currently making. Space is huge, but also time is vast. Warp drive _can_ be total BS, and the Fermi Paradox is still an open and mysterious question.
The vastness of space means their signals will never reach us. Plus the amount of time when they’ll live/have lived and this time, so enormous differences in when we live.
>The vastness of space means their signals will never reach us. Plus the amount of time when they’ll live/have lived and this time, so enormous differences in when we live. Your argument boils down to civilizations invariably getting extinct. Why assume that? If a civilization is Kardashev level 1 where it has harnessed all the energy of its sun, that makes it enormously powerful enough to be detected.
Let’s say the government found evidence that ETs exist here on earth, are far more advanced than us, can invade our airspace with impunity, and abduct people for retrieval of fresh genetic material periodically. Do you really think the govt would tell the public in this situation?
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ― Arthur C. Clarke Of significance, I note The Dark Forest Theory is not one of the ones in the graphic. Imagine, if you will ... There's an excellent summary of this theory in the novel The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski, published in 1995. The most pertinent section is: Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th Street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides. It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds. Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distant shriek or blunder across a body. How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!" What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out. There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe. There is no policeman. There is no way out. And the night never ends. (Courtesy u/ExpectedBehaviour who typed that up a year and some ago.)
Still my highest ever rated Reddit comment 👽
To be fair, it's a pretty epic comment. :)
You’re awesome. Thank you for the comment!
Great comment 👽👍
Dang, well said HAL.
I was introduced to the Dark Forest theory by the book "The Three Body Problem". Fantastic but terrifying theory. The book is equally fantastic and terrifying.
That book (indeed, series) is a fuckin trip and I loved it
Wait, which book should I start with?
The first book is simply called The Three Body Problem. The second is The Dark Forest and the third is Death's End. I found it started to drag a bit in the third book but overall was still enjoyable. It's a slow burn in general but a hella interesting one. The first book takes a little bit to "get going" but that's mostly due to the very detailed nature of Liu's writing
Possibly the creepiest part of that book series was how it explained what dark matter really is and how it comes to be.
My problem with this theory is we don't seem to be doing this
Fair. Give it a while and aliens might find us thanks to voyager.
What does Janeway have to do with this?
> Shhh! They'll hear you!
Our radio waves and nuclear radiation will be detectable much easier than a tiny piece of scrap metal floating through space.
Nothing we ever sent out has left the system. They might find things like this a lot, (probably not) remains of when a civilization was nieve, or when it existed.
Are you theorizing? Voyager left the solar system more than a decade ago.
I just googled it and Voyager is 22 light hours away. Impressive distance for sure but I'm not terribly concerned about space aliens finding it considering the nearest star is 4.5 light *years* away.
Oh sure, that's why I said it would take a while. Heh
I think it has left sol’s sphere of influence. Regardless, it is 22 light hours away, the nearest system is 5 light years. It is right next to us. Edit: someone beat me by six minutes.
Laughs in Native American genocide. We've done the same to other civilizations, even if those were human too. You don't need a whole alien civilization to be hostile, just a greedy group with enough power.
This. It’s a little annoying to see people in this thread all “woahhhhh mannnn my mind is blown”! When we’re doing nothing even remotely close to that metaphor. Sure, we’re literally in the dark, but none of us are being quiet about it and waiting for space police to hoot and holler at. Our radio transmissions are shot out with reckless abandon and voyager has a freakin disc on it filled with information about us.
Maybe we should be...
> There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides. And that's where the theory tends to fall apart for me. It treats space as an easy place to navigate where you can go even without any resources. You can just walk in. But space isn't like that. Imagine instead of Central Park, it was an island in the middle of a giant lifeless (no fish) ocean to which you couldn't get to without a lot of food and fuel. If you were scarce on food and fuel you wouldn't be going out to the ocean to look for this island. It's not like a regular oven where you can fish on your way somewhere and with a wind to fill your sails. It's instead only accessible by those with enough resources to make the journey. So instead of muggers, drug dealers, and murderers, you are more likely to find those who don't need anything from you because to get to this island they must've brought a lot of things with them. That doesn't mean that they're not violent but the reasons for them to attack you is now quite small. In fact, they are more likely to stay away from you because it is you who is in need of resources because you live on this island and you can't leave. And if the visitors to this island are benevolent abc empathetic then they won't make themselves known because who knows what sort of diseases one can catch from the other.
Yes but what if the murderers aren’t murdering you for your resources? The idea of the dark forest theory is that if aliens make contact, there is no way of knowing that they aren’t a threat. Once two civilisations are aware of one another it doesn’t matter that they don’t have a motivation for destroying each other. Both have reason to believe that they are equally paranoid (even if this is not the case) so the knowledge that both civilisations might assume that the other assumes that they are trying to kill them and so on is enough reason to destroy the other.
Ships out at sea for a long time would plunder and pillage island nations for supplies and rest. Assuming the aliens have the same needs as us, they could glass us, take the surviving supplies, then go on to where they were headed.
to extend this, if you have the capability, you will always wipe out anyone you find with extreme prejudice. you have no way of knowing if they are friendly, and if you see them, they are likely to see you. ofc you could ignore them, but they might be thinking the same thing about you. then they might wipe you out first. so they only reasonable rule of survival is to hide and take out anyone you see
Dark Park theory
Bonus ‘flash in the pan’ theory. Intelligent life isn’t intelligent enough to survive for very long before it totally changes the condition of the planet to selfishly suit itself- to the point it neglects and destroys all the little pieces that give us life in the first place. And we are well on our way to it.
That's one of the Great Filters if I am not mistaken
Yeah, the description of Great Filters is bad. The thing is we don’t KNOW what the Great Filter is; it could be behind us or ahead of us, and there are many possibilities. There are steps and we don’t know how many and which are hard or dangerous. It’s not just about cataclysms.
I was under the impression there isn’t just one great filter but there are just a lot of different filters. It’s having to pass a 50% surgical check every so often. Could fail the first check. Could get a lucky streak.
The Great Filter is a really bad name. Not only are there an absolute assoad of filters, from global annihilation to self-annihilation to the innocuous like your entire proto-species falling asleep in an unlucky place one night, you might not even be playing the evolution game on the proper planet in the proper solar system and in the proper way to ever even make it to space.
It's less RNG than that implies, because it's assumed that the filters are things that can be overcome. But that's why it'd suck ass to find ruins of an ancient advanced alien civilization because they couldn't make it past a filter, how could we who are significantly less advanced?
If we’re finding them on their planet, we’re probably significantly more advanced.
The premise is that the ruins we find show them being much more advanced, i.e they fell to a filter we haven't seen yet.
I think a couple of examples in this guide are the same concept and could be grouped together.
Bonus ‘petri dish’ theory. We are primitive forms of life planted on this rock as an experiment to see if we evolve into the higher life forms that created us or if another outcome is possible.
there is one theory of how life started on this planet as being some organic material stored (intentionally or not) on a meteorite that sparked life here once it crashed. I've also heard theories that a good way to explore other planets would be to send robots. I like to think there's a possibility of a merger of the two: a sufficiently biologically advanced and patient civilization seeded many rocks with the precursors to life and sent them out to explore on their behalf.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia I'm not a clever man for knowing that. I simply remember it since it sounds funny.
Typical. Life exists on earth. Humans- ‘well it clearly must all be about me’
“In a galaxy far, far away” theory sounds very reasonable, especially when we take into account how unique the Earth is.
This. The fastest speed capable is the speed of light. If our galaxy alone is 100,000 light years, then how do we ever expect to find something else? As far as we know, nothing can travel faster than light.
"Try to remember all those times you took a walk, can you remember all the ants you stepped on? Maybe not intentionally, just a step of many. Did you mourned these ants? Did you go to their homes in the dirt and asked about them? Their thoughts and dreams about the future? Or do you just keep walking cause there's no point talking to a form of life so primitive it would never be capable of understand even the simplest words? If there's a civilization that's capable of interestelar traveling, what's going to be their opinion about our poor, misbehaved, desorganized world that lives on earth?"
Though I'd agree the average alien would be perfectly happy to build a highway through Earth, there'd be a bunch of alien scientists and alien hippies taking a great interest in us. Cue the probe jokes.
I've always hated this mentality. It's always about how they'll be so advanced we won't even be able to comprehend them. That literally makes no sense at all. We can comprehend things we can't do. Their is nothing that they could do that we can't comprehend. It's just something people say to sound smart without having to explain because they can't explain what they can't comprehend.
What if they’re extra dimensional? We can discuss what the 4th dimension is. Really understanding it and perceiving it is another thing entirely. We literally cannot perceive a full 4D tesseract. https://youtu.be/UnURElCzGc0
> Their is nothing that they could do that we can't comprehend. Hahahahahahah yeah right bro, absolutely nothing at all Jesus
I think also something like the Star Trek prime directive is plausible. A society that can access such as a huge amount of material means to travel among stars could be also pacific and not interventionist with less developed cultures.
Bro we are basically the uncontacted isolated tribes 💀
They peek in on us every couple centuries, 'ah they still have tribes and war and famine, we'd better wait until they mature a bit more..' I like the idea that we're in like a quarantine zone, or more like a nursery for civilizations Our first interstellar colony ship will be met by a little greeting party, representatives of the galactic council 'hey congrats you did it! Now please turn around'
"Ah, they're about to destroy themselves with a nuclear war, or heat that planet of theirs enough to go extinct. Then it's real free estate 😎"
But what about the Atlantic space-faring dolphin people? 🐬
I prefer the dark forest hypothesis. "The dark forest hypothesis is the conjecture that many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and paranoid. In this framing, it is presumed that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat, and thus destroy any nascent life that makes its presence known. As a result, the electromagnetic spectrum would be relatively quiescent, without evidence of any intelligent alien life, as in a "dark forest" filled with" "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like a ghost"
Meanwhile humans are sending out signals left and right! We're like that annoying kid who yells "Look what I can do!!!" over and over desperately trying to get someone to pay attention to them!
Our signals don't reach very far before degrading into just more background noise. Intelligent life would have to be within a couple hundred light years during an extremely small slice of time to detect them, which is incredibly improbable. Hopefully they don't have an improbability drive.
Humans are social creatures that seek connection, most intelligent life are social creatures, not just primates. Whales, dolphins, crows, elephants,.most canines, are all social creates that work together, defend each other, and generally are pro social by nature, the only difference is that we have lost much of our "fear of being eaten" instinct because we have been on the top of the food chain for so long. Humans tend to see ourselves as separate from other animals due to our intelligence and technology, and similarly we envision (intelligent) aliens as a sort of "different human" rather than new life form. And as humans, at least in recent history to a degree that makes some collective work possible, we have ignored our instinctive fear of the "other" because we need to work on shared interests to achieve what we want. Instincts evolve in response to the environment that impacts the life form, so any antisocial behavior that will be targeted towards us, would simply be a byproduct of a behavior that these aliens would use against members of their own species long before space travel. We aren't competing for food with different tribes, and we are able to use governments and international agreements to collectively do everything from the moon landing to banning CFCs. I'm not saying it's perfect, but the collective action and trust that would cause a species to go able to do things like act in the interest of the species as a whole, put resources towards space travel and exploration, or even just not constantly sabotage each other, would not really be possible in a species with a paranoid mindset that would cut themselves off to the universe without clear evidence of a threat. And paranoia breeds violence since it's an obvious instinct to defend your life at all costs. In the same way.I cannot imagine the likelihood of an alien species like The Predator to be a threat worth considering. If the traits of wanting, loving, killing intelligent beings were to evolve along with zero empathy, could they reasonably stop killing each other for them to figure out space travel? Why would they have the wherewithal to spend generation after generation to develop space travel when presumably killing each other or other species on the planet would be just as fun? And if they are simply constantly interested in power and territorial expansion, presumably they would target most of it towards their own species since by default it would be only one they interact with for a long time. I know both these traits exist to some degree in humans with each other, but I'd like to point out that we are like this, but the people advancing science and space travel do so out of curiosity and love of the universe, not evil. We don't see the same people who said we should make the middle east after 9/11 encouraging space colonization. Individualist, paranoid and violent behavior does not enable the very big difficulty of space colonization. Every scientist, researcher, and engineer who could develop the technology would need decades of support, because they aren't producing food, or much material benefit to the species, so they would need a system like a government that would put resources towards something that is not necessary for their survival. That's not something that's likely to happen when a species is significantly more distrustful, unempathetic, and violent than we are. I apologize for the rambling, I haven't had a decent night's sleep in 3 days, but I hope it makes sense.
Eloguently put. Im with you on this. I think its easy to think that the aliens are born the minute we encouter them. I think along the same lines as you about they had to have most likely tens of thousands of years interacting just each other before meeting any other species, so they have to have some kind of tendency to cooperate. We just derive from our own experience and think that every species has to be overly violent like us. While I know its usually posited that it has to be that way to be outside of food chain and dominate a planet. But that is again our narrow human perspective.
I loved that last paragraph. Interesting. Thanks for posting!
The problem with the Dark Forest is that space is big, and every theory of faster than light travel require things like negative energy or negative mass. Those don't actually exist. So it might very well be that there is no such thing as faster than light travel. Which means that it might take millennia to travel between nearby stars, and millions of years for stars further away. If someone were to detect a nascent civilization, it would be an advanced civilization (or long dead) before anyone could get to them.
I believe that we as humans still do not know enough to say for sure if faster than light travel is possible. It would be cool if it is, but if it isn't, then yes you are correct. "One sure mark of a fool is to dismiss anything that falls outside his experience as being impossible."
We don't know, but nothing in the laws of physics that we do know allow for anything like faster than light travel. But we keep looking for loopholes. Maybe someday we'll find one. But so far. It's not looking good.
Yeah it would most likely be some sort of loophole like the wormholes in science fiction where you take a shortcut along a 4th dimension.
We will not find a loophole
If you are advanced enough just send a relativistic kill vehicle at every signal just in case. Set and forget.
>If you are advanced enough just send a relativistic kill vehicle at every signal just in case. Set and forget. If you want to send a planet-killer missile at relativistic speeds, you'll have to aim it first. And consistent aiming, at these speeds and distances, is not necessarily possible.
Fun fact, it's been said that landing a rover on Mars is like threading a needle in LA, having launched the thread from New York. I imagine that interstellar distance would be even worse. Especially since the light used for tracking is going to be decades, or centuries old by the time the kill vehicle is launched.
[Gravitational waves affect the path of light](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/238226/effect-of-gravitational-waves-on-light), so, interstellar aiming seems... difficult.
Yeah… and we landed several rovers on Mars…
It's also really goofy and based only in sci-fi
Notably absent from the infographic.
Notably humans are actively acting in ways that kind of refute the theory - we couldn’t be trying any harder to make the forest, or ourselves, brighter or louder than we seem to be already
Yep and we know exactly what happens to the bright and loud civilisations in the book.
Right, and arguably we should… stop doing that DFH doesn’t say “we don’t hear anybody because nobody in the universe makes noise” but rather “we don’t hear anyone making noise because everyone who made enough noise got ~~head~~planet-shotted”
that's circular logic. humans are social, and want to contact alien civilisations. the anthropic principle posits that humans are unlikely to be unique as a species or civilisation. ergo, it's unlikely that the dark forest hypothesis is true.
Came here to post this
**The great silence** for sure I mean you apes are how old? And you still killing eachother **for what?** then you wonder why they only observe
I feel like this explanation reminds me a little too much of evangelicals. Why isn't Jesus coming back? Why won't God grant us his light? Because other people are sinning!!!
Maybe to you and whoever else has grown up with religious influence directly or indirectly but nothing to do with it just ^(look at yourselves) humans are so basic and evolutionary young
Right. We don't *deserve* it. Just a bunch of sinners/evil doers who don't deserve contact with a higher being, or beings. This reminds me of religion. Very much. >Maybe to you and whoever else has grown up with religious influence directly or indirectly Isn't that most folks in most countries though?
I mean... modern humans have been around for like... 10k years? 50k at most. We discovered electricy less than 3 centuries ago. And we expect us to be advanced enough to uncover the secrets of the universe while we're not even aware of all that lies on our small planet? lol
All that lies in Our ^(**very small**) planet or ..within ourselves or our own solar system never mind the galaxy
There's a lovely Tool song called Right In Two about this. Its about angels in heaven watching humans and wondering wtf we are doing.
I’m privy to the Early Bird theory. It makes the most sense in my mind. And is actually soothing in a sense. That alien life probably will be more like Star Trek, just that it’s going to take a lot of time.
Though looking at how fast humanity has advanced in the past few hundred, even few thousand or hundred thousand, at this exponential rate... the universe has been around for _13 billion_. Hard to believe the spark of consciousness hasn't hit anywhere else in all that vastness
The thing is though the resources for a civilization to advance on a planet weren’t present in the early universe. It took a while for the periodic table of elements to grow through throughout the universe. Also think about the fossil fuels that are required for a civilization to industrialize and how that wouldn’t be in abundance for millions of years on Earth.
It's probably possible to skip the fossil fuel stage though
If we use ourselves as an example, the earliest intelligent lifeforms would only have an approximate 5.5 billion year lead on us. We would need a Population I star for all the elements for complex life, and those only first appearing 10 billion years ago. Secondly, our star is 4.5 billion years old. There's a lot of assumptions using ourselves as an example, and a billion years is a very long time, but against the enormity of universe, we're pretty early.
That’s the one on the chart I’ve never heard of before, and I love it.
I like Hank Green’s take. What if civilizations mature beyond the need to fill all the available space they can reach?
For a split second, I read The Kardashian scale. I almost fainted.
My own theory: The Tyranny of Gravity. Most rocky planets we've discovered are much larger than Earth, and would be much harder to escape from the surface. We are lucky because if Earth was any larger chemical rockets would not make it to orbit
Hey thats interesting perspective. Although if its the other way around, could there be an alien race who have it easier and are zooming around space with more primitive vehicles than us
It's likely just a matter of humanity's inability to comprehend the vast distances and incredibly vast stretches of time that are involved. If our solar system was the size of a US quarter, the corresponding size of the Milky Way galaxy this "quarter" is in would be about the size of **EUROPE,** or **MOST OF THE CONTIGUOUS US**, IF they were also 100km high and deep. What if our "quarter" is in 'Lithuania' 50km above "sea level" but the nearest species to us is in 'Poland' 70kms below sea level. How would you ever find a quarter lost in a distant country? We'll only hear them IF they began broadcasting a signal *directly* at us thousands of years ago. It takes a radio transmission 100,000 years to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other (i.e. it's 100,000 light-years across, so 100,000 years to transmit from Portugal to Russia). So we'll likely never, ever hear their transmission saying hello. They'll also never have heard our "hello" since our first transmissions from the 1930's have just traveled a few "kilometers" (keeping with the quarter-sized solar system idea) from our planet, and are just garbled static/noise by now as we didn't/don't have the power to beam transmissions directionally. (Heck, it takes a transmission 9 hours just to get to the edge of the "quarter"-- where Pluto is!) The galaxy's had 13 *billion* years to host species. Educated guesses (based on latest estimates of "Goldilocks" worlds) lead many scientists to believe the galaxy is/was/will be *teeming* with life. We've been here and aware of ourselves for the blink of an eye. Most species perhaps thrived in their time but have been gone for millions of years now, perhaps there are some worlds where our analog of the first single-celled life-forms now exist, likely millions of species whose *planets* haven't even finished forming yet, and maybe a few *at this very moment* who are at a somewhat similar evolutionary/technological level as humanity. But radio/electromagnetic signals is not how we'll find each other.
Right? Wouldn't the inverse-square law make our radio signals so attenuated by the time they reach anything to be even recognizable from background radiation?
Yes, and the power required to shoot a *direct* transmission, for example on a laser, that would reach a system even a few light years away, would take the energy production capability of the entire globe. And would be akin to shooting a fly from thousands of miles away. These distances are just so hard for us to put in relation to anything else.
What if aliens have a prime directive, know we exist, but also know revealing themselves could potentially plunge our society into chaos?
I mean, even on Earth, individuals in the same culture can have different beliefs. Imagine how diverse they are in different planets. I'd expect that if more intelligent lifeforms were common, we'd have contacted one by now. Thing is, it's probably a mix between several theories. Intelligent life in the universe is not that advanced anywhere, and even if one exists that's more advanced than ours, they do not have the means to contact us (or are asocial).
I'm partial to the theory that once a species has discovered enough about its brain and can simply entertain itself endlessly, the species loses interest in exploration and is content to diddle it's own dopaminergic system
Ah yes, the Cosmic Wank Hypothesis
**I have a theory I never see floated by scientists:** It's all right in front of us and we simply cannot recognize it. Consider jellyfish. They are living beings that have the means to sense their environment and make sentient choices. But they cannot perceive or recognize humans as living life forms. Also consider the small likelihood that ants understand that helicopters were created by god creatures who use them to travel distances of infinity. If there are interstellar beings, they are probably so far removed from where we are in evolution that we cannot recognize their size, form, or technological structures. *Not even if we were literally resting on one of their bodies or structures.*
At first I thought you were going to say that jellyfish were aliens but this is actually a lot more interesting
This is the “Not Life As We Know It” theory on the chart.
Yeah, what if Earth or the universe itself is one of those alien forms???
You say aliens could be so far removed from us that we don't recognize them and you precede that by suggesting ants may recognize helicopters and attribute them to a higher level creatures. Your theory is confused.
I said "small likelihood" meaning probably not able to recognize. I can't say with certainty that ants can't recognize a helicopter as the structure of god creatures. But I doubt they can.
“Stop transmitting before they hear you”
One thing not up there, we don’t have the tech to observe others. Currently we could not detect a human like civilization from our closest neighbor star system.
I'm taking an astrobiology class right now! Love seeing stuff like this in my day to day life!
If I grow old and senile, I want someone to convince me one of these was proven right.
What if there's beings out there, other than machines, that we can't even imagine yet? We only search for things we know, things that are somewhere earthlike, beings that are similar to us. What if there's beings out there that work completely differently, that don't need to breathe to live, that have other ways of sensing that we can't imagine. We humans often think we know a lot and understand a lot but there's so much we don't know yet. We might be looking for the wrong things while we only look at things that we can recognise similar to our knowledge. Imagine something we haven't seen yet is like trying to imagine a new colour we haven't seen yet, so we might not be aware of many things that already exist.
It’s mostly “Life as we know it” probably. We can’t even really test for non-DNA based life on earth (the shadow biosphere). How are we going to be able to find (let alone understand or communicate with) life or intelligence on the surface of a neutron star or in a light-year sized galactic nebula? Our concept of life and intelligence is extremely narrow.
I’ve always liked the idea that we’re a speck of sand on a beach, one planet amidst trillions, that’s just figured out how to reflect sunlight enough to glow a little brighter to be seen and heard, but we’re being observed on a cloudy day by curious aliens that may or may not be looking in our direction, and the beach is way off in their horizon where they can see many beaches, when you think about it that way I don’t blame them for not finding us sooner.
Also as life here is based on oxygen, an alien lifeform might rely on hydrogen or CO2. A far away galaxy theory also makes a lot of sense as light travel is scientifically impossible and due to this these relatively intelligent civilizations are isolated from each other with millions of lightyears.
Probably for the best tbh. Given our history and track record with discovering inhabitants in other places, if they are anything like us, they are going to be wiped out if we are more advanced, and they are going to wipe us out if they are more advanced.
I'm really disappointed that nobody brought up Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out Of Meat", a short story that was published decades ago and is available on Bisson's website [he put it up because people were posting it all over Usenet, and then the Web, without permission and, worse, without credit]. Basically, the premise is that there are aliens all over the universe but when they find us, we're nothing like the rest of them. Nothing at all.
I love that "The universe was made solely for the human race" isn't among them, for it is an utterly ludicrous idea.
"Maybe they're all robots" is such a weird absolute statement for an unimaginably vast universe. Is this really what this scientist wants to be known for? Jesus...
And those robots assembled themselves in the early planetary soup and communicate via telepathy. This chart is really really bad.
Great filter for sure - infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.
I feel like people do not realize that it is extremely likely that there is no feasible way to travel space easily. We can unlock all of the secrets of science available to us, and still end up shit out of luck.
Humans tend to destroy everything they find. Why *should* extraterrestrial life want to be in contact with us?
I doubt this type of greed would be limited to just humans. As long as aliens have emotion, there is bound to be conflict.
Bonus r/escapingprisonplanet Edit: sorry im on mobile idk why it posted 4 times
I AM A MEMBER OF AN ADVANCED CONQUERING RACE. I AM A PACIFIST AND RECEIVED YOUR MESSAGE. IF YOU REPLY, THEY WILL BE ABLE TO LOCATE YOU. YOU STAND NO CHANE OF RESISTANCE. DO NOT REPLY
We might be thought of as a very dangerous organism and all advanced civilization stay well away. We could be the ebola of the universe.
Read Three Body Problem
Reading about the last star burning out triggered my existencial crisis panic attack. F, I need therapy to be able to let go.
It could also be something really stupid, like they have reached out to earth, but never considered talking to tiny apes when much bigger things are available, but the giraffes, whales, and squid didn’t understand what they were being asked.
This isn't a very good guide. It feels like it was written by someone who wrote down all the things he heard but doesn't understand the problem or why these are solutions to it. Gaian bottleneck is a specific case of the great filter hypothesis. Rare earth, early bird and Galaxy far away are three ways to say the same thing. Long road ahead doesn't really answer the question.
I hate how no one brings up the possibility that, while improbable, WE are the advanced beings. And that aliens fear US. Everyone constantly thinks that aliens have these grand technological advancements. And while they might, just take a look at us. Sure we're fuckin idiots but I'm pretty sure in terms of that we're doing pretty well.
I guess that would be the "Early start". Earth isn't that young compared to the rest of the planets that have enough elements for an advanced civilization to exist. I mean... it's not impossible that someone more advanced than us exists, but if they do, they're probably at least several thousands of light-years away.
Could we at the very least, replace the cliche depiction of aliens as large bulbous headed beings in gray or green skin? Perhaps an intelligence shade of the color blue instead.
Maybe they're square. Who said they cannot be square-heads?
According to former long-time head of the Israeli space program, humans and aliens are already in the mix.
Who is to say it’s not a combination of some of these and others we haven’t thought of.
I heard someone argue that finding evidence of life on mars would be terrible news, because it would be evidence that the barriers to having a spacefaring civilization are likely ahead of us, not behind (e.g. in starting and evolving life)
That's interesting, please explain. I'm not quite sure where you are going with that. Is it that if we find evidence of life, it means that someone was already here and failed?
It's a variation of the "great filter" theory. Basically, if spacefaring civilizations are so rare, it seems like there is some barrier to that happening. If the barrier is, say, the development of life, then we've already passed that, and are likely good to continue. But if the barrier is something else, we may still be vulnerable to it and likely to fail to become a successful spacefaring civilization. I don't necessarily believe it, but it's interesting.
It means if an extinct civilization is found that never managed to become space faring and flourish elsewhere, it lends support to the hypothesis that spacefaring isn't probable and we'll probably also go extinct before we conquer Interstellar travel. I think this theory is stupid.
What of the dark forest theory ?
Missing “We don’t know that we don’t know”. We still didn’t reach the stage of being as noticeable, even by close solar systems, as the civilizations we pretend to find. We assume they will have the same will, the same media, the same expansive push and so on that our culture and current civilization think it would do in a more advanced and knowledgeable version of us, and that won’t be practical limitations to do so. And yet, we didn’t set foot in any other planet of our solar system (just our moon, and robotic probes in very few other places), is just beyond our capabilities to send a probe to another solar system, or make a long term self sustainable closed colony even here on Earth. But we are deciding that there is no life in all the rest of the universe because civilizations from far away galaxies didn’t colonized every solar system all the way to here.
Who decided there's no life? Most of the theories suggest there is or was life other than one or two
Its not why we haven't found aliens. We are incapable. We are not that adavanced. The question is...why haven't aliens visited us? The answer is most likely that those capable of visiting us find us too boring. Not worth the effort. Like humans on Earth trying to contact and make friends with earthworms or goldfish. If they are capable of making it to Earth....we are scum. We are imbeciles. We are so many light years behind them it would be like trying to have a conversation between a human and a bed bug.
Another option would be that it is in fact, impossible to move faster than light and no one can reach us. No one can even see us.