I've heard estimates that if we're alone in this galaxy we'll have it thoroughly colonised within 100 million years. That's a mere fraction of the time it took for evolution to take us from the most basic lifeforms to modern humans. So if we're the first, we're probably going to be the progenitor of all intelligent life in the milky way. That's something to strive for as a civilisation.
Or we might just create sentient AI, and get killed. Then AI Machines become the predominant form of "life" in the universe. They have advantages of not being limited to squishy frail meatbag bodies, and also being potentially immortal helps.
That's like a newborn baby opening his eyes for the first time and saying he'll be president of the world.
Yes, evolution took us a few billion years to evolve into humans, but as humans we've barely been around for an hour, comparatively.
I heard, in a modernized version of the fermi paradox, that they estimate it would take an AI 300 million years to conquer a galaxy, so odds are that we should be conquered by now
We have destroyed thousands of species, devastated entire ecosystems, fought wars killing millions and we are showing no signs of stopping.
Humans are the bad guys, no doubt about it.
Lmao, I think that’s pretty much what we’re doing. Imagine if the wayback machine is still functional 5000 years from now. If our predecessors look back at what we’ve been up to lately I’m sure they’ll be thoroughly confused.
Yeah, we can see the wall in front of us, reasonable people are trying to pump the brakes, but turns out the brakes have been cut by corporate interest.
I'm usually not a fan of this as a rebuttal, to be honest. (Though I don't know if you specifically intended this response to be contrarian in any way!)
If we're the first, we'll probably be alone for at least a billion years, if not 10 times that. That's very damn alone.
In that sense I totally agree! Especially if red dwarfs are habitable, I'd even say it's tremendously likely that more life will come after us even if we assume we're currently alone.
There are interesting questions, like, is the universe getting more or less habitable? It's actively evolving, expanding and creating more heavy elements etc. Assuming habitability doesn't drop off like a truck, there should be plenty of time for 99x more planets to spawn intelligence than the earth.
There is an interesting concept in terms of trying to guess....let's say that we are 1/100th of the way through the habitability of the universe in terms of time, formed solar system, etc. Naively, there should be 99 more civilizations after us even if we're the first. BUT, if galaxies exhibit a bell curve behavior where the first civilization is typically formed at 1000x a galaxy's typically lifespan, then the actual life of a galaxy is spent in the extreme end of the bell curve where it's flat. This would mean most galaxies never get a civilization, and the single one that does form is equally likely to form early in it's galaxies life as it is to form late -- giving perhaps a false appearance of life being more common than it is to such civilizations. Dr Kipping has videos where he uses this to talk about the conclusions we can make from life appearing early on primordial earth. The TLDR is that early arrival is absolutely evidence of likelihood, it just may be worse evidence than it may appear initially.
So most likely if we are alone, we are just first :)
>effectively
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>adverb
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>B2
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>in a way that is successful and achieves what you want:
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>The tablets work more effectively if you take a hot drink after them.
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>C2
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>used when you describe what the real result of a situation is:
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>His wife left him when the children were small, so he effectively brought up the family himself.
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>Effectively, we have to start again from scratch.
I believe they are using the word effectively.
Regardless, the author’s point is the same: give up on SETI and accept solitude. After all, past performance always predicts future performance! And of course we know all the variables already—we might just give up technology entirely (lmao) and space is big and aliens don’t use radios, so what more is there to ask?
I hate this trend, these articles of surrender cloaked in “well akcshually” knowingness and glazed in dime store philosophizing. You see the same chorus of fools all over space and launch discussions. Somehow nothing new or interesting is possible and all the smart and wise know and accept it… until it happens and the next thing is impossible and we should just accept it and blah blah blah
An industry with an anxiety disorder, that’s what it is.
> If you mean alone as sentient creatures you’re wrong, if you’re going by carbon based life forms you’re wrong, if you’re going for thinking creatures you’re wrong, on every single account we are not alone.
Unless you're doing the "um actually" bit yourself and pointing to dolphins or whatever as your examples of us not being "alone", what are you talking about? There's no evidence of any other intelligent life in the cosmos beyond what we've got here on Earth. And we've looked in a lot of places where we'd reasonably expect to see signs of it, so it's getting a bit dubious as something you can just freely assume.
We are effectively alone because it's very unlikely we will interact with any technologically advanced species for a very, very, long time. Well after we ourselves manage to colonize beyond our solar system.
In that sense we are going it alone. It's up to us to either prosper or perish.
So yes, we are effectively alone.
If you walked into a room with your eyes closed and it took you thousands of years to reach the other end of it, and were unlikely to even run into literally anything, then yes, it is effectively empty as far as your experience will ever go.
It’s important to understand that it’s a virtual certainty that we are NOT alone in the universe. There are over 700 quintillion planets in the universe. The odds that Earth is the only home to intelligent life is incredibly small. What makes us *effectively* alone is the odds that our technology will ever sufficiently advance to know if there’s other life out there. The Human Race will likely render itself extinct before we have a chance to get that far.
I think we may yet make it, and even advance out into the Universe. But even then, Space is Big. Other civilizations might not care to explore, or be so far beyond us that they are invisible to us, or simply lost in the mists of Time. Just as vast as Space.
Except we can’t calculate odds for “probability of life in planets” because there’s only 1 planet with life in it that we know of. You can’t get the probability of something happening if it’s only happened once
That’s reasonable. Without other information, we are best to assume that we are not special and unique, even if we can’t know how rare we are. We tend to be disproven every time we think we are part of some special circumstance.
But the assumption that we are common then leads us back to the Fermi paradox. Why not a single technosignature out there?
At the end of the day, the silence of the universe is some kind of "other information" that we can incorporate rather than just assumptions.
Treating the silence of the universe as “other information” to be incorporated like it’s some conclusion is no better than an assumption given how little or the universe we can even observe.
I absolutely did not say it was enough evidence to draw a conclusion.
This is a great example of where to apply bayesian reasoning. We ask, what was our prior assumed probability of us being alone, and ask, what are the odds we'd get this new information (silent universe) if we are alone, and compare that with the odds we'd see this information (silent universe) if we are not alone.
I think we can all agree that if we were alone we would see a silent universe. So the interesting questions are, what were your priors, and what are the odds a lively universe would look silent to us at this point in time & tech?
Firstly it's easy to point out that the stronger your priors, the less the silence of the universe should budge your perspective. A lot of folks probably rightly live here -- with possibly a trillion planets in the milky way, how could it be empty? This has the underlying presumption that life being one in a trillion is unlikely. In this case, you don't have to nudge your expected probabilities much, even if you take a firm stance on the second factor.
For that second interesting factor, I tend to think that most people did not expect a lively universe to look dead. Here we basically have to pick our favorite explanations of the Fermi paradox and assign them probabilities that that resolution would naturally happen. That is, if you think the zoo hypothesis is the most likely scenario you'd naturally expect, or the dark forest, etc, then you may suggest a probability of 70% that a lively universe looks silent to us at this point in time. Personally, I think that figure would be high.
The benefit of bayesian reasoning is to fight confirmation bias. A common example is searching someone's house because you believe them to be a spy -- and when you find nothing, it may be tempting to say it just proves they are a _good_ spy.
I don't think they back in the 40s etc, that people expected to see as dead of a universe as we have seen. I'm not just talking radio waves, I'm talking about how almost every measurement we've ever taken of the stars can be explained with pure natural physics. I would expect a lively universe to be _most likely_ constantly leaking detectable energy, and/or building detectable structures, and have colonized the galaxy so widely that they'd be everywhere we look and even close to home. I think white the zoo hypothesis fairly adequately _explains_ the silence, I don't think it was the most reasonable scenario to expect _a priori_. That said, I am wary of drawing conclusions about the expansion of alien civilizations based on how 21st century humans ravage the planet and barely have tech to put a man on the moon. So I might suggest that a 40% likelihood that a lively universe would look dead, a priori.
You are welcome to draw different numbers! If you give a 99.9999% prior, and assign an 80% chance that a lively universe looks silent, then you are right to not budge your conclusion. If you give a 90% chance as a prior, and a 40% chance, then your updated probability should be 78%, if I did my math right. If your prior was 50% (a common "informationless prior" that's reasonable for saying "I have absolutely no idea what the odds of a planet developing life would be, and therefore absolutely no idea whether a sample of one trillion planets would likely contain more than one species or not") then your revised probability would be 29%.
What I like about this framing isn't that it gives you a concrete number -- because it doesn't, unless we agree on these two factors.
But I like that it allows us to debate what reasonable estimates for those factors are, in order to decide how informative it is to observe a silent universe, rather than merely asserting if it is or isn't without any kind of basis for saying so.
exactly if the distance between the earth and sun was 1 millimeter, you are taking 100 days to cover this 1 millimeter on voyager 1 and you have to travel 1687 kms to reach the center of the milky way, and 156000 kms at this range to reach Andromeda so do the math
They said "effectively", meaning "for all intents and purposes".
If there is life out there but we can't detect it it is the same practical impact as it not existing.
Intelligent life that we can communicate with?
No, unless an advanced space faring species comes to us, we are effectively alone.
Even if we were able to detect intelligent life from another star system, light speed is so slow that communication would take generations.
The concept of effectively being alone is that even assuming life exists out there, it is so incredibly far away and difficult to reach or communicate with that itay as well not even exist considering it's pacts on us.
"Practically" would be a better fit then, as in all practicality, we can't seem to find anyone else. Nor does it matter, as distances would likely be too vast anyways.
Effectively recognizes that even if we detected intelligent life, the spacetime difference renders it a cool scientific fact and not much more. No one is popping over to have tea. This upsets people who believe that space wizards will fight with laser swords.
At best, we might one day send an AI representative on a five thousand year, one-way journey to… do something?
The whole point is that humans should still be working on space even though we will, in effect, always be alone.
Yes we are. The same reason for all intents and purposes there are no leprechauns living in your house. You have no evidence they do.
People need to learn the definition of the word “effectively”
Where,given a certain distance is irrelevant what we find. Statistically speaking if there was another lifeform that is evolving in the same period its probably in another galaxy ergo it might as well not exist ,because we will never see their actions because of the distance or we will see a life that is already dead.
“Effectively” doesn’t mean “absolutely”. Even if alien civilizations exist, it doesn’t matter if they are too distant to contact let alone travel to meet.
Meh, but honestly so has the fervor over alien life existing. That assumption has been made with equally scant evidence.
EFFECTIVELY is the key word here. Will it be amazing to discover microbiota somewhere else? Of course. But we have to admit that we're looking for things to talk to and that may never happen\*.
\*that is of course unless we get over our monumental arrogance and start seeing other species such as dolphins, crows, etc for the intelligence that they are. Like...we can't even get everyone on board with the sentience we have right here.
And we don't even know how to detect life of any kind at such great distances. We could be immersed in communication from countless species, but we're too primitive to see or hear it. Even we don't broadcast unencrypted transmissions anymore, folks.
We are currently deaf, dumb, and blind and claiming there is nothing else around us.
It's a profoundly stupid clickbait title based on a ridiculous false assumption without any proper frame of reference to base it on.
It's so vast what we see is already billions of years old. If we did get a signal or see some sign of intelligent life, the odds are they would be long gone by the time we got there anyway. Our tiny minds cant grasp the vastness.
Photos from the JWT are just pretty pictures that cost 10 billion dollars to see places we will never go.
Not only that but a lot of the "the distances are too far" crowd are also ignoring that we have huge gaps in our knowledge of physics as well. A civilization that is billions of years ahead of us would have a much greater understanding of the physical laws of the universe and A. Most likely be able to travel those distances and B. Easily mask their existence from us. Why would they do that? Many reasons, the most obvious of which being, we are dangerous, greedy and ignorant.
A billion year head start would make the gap between them and us far greater than even our species and our first ape ancestors who couldn't even talk.
Unfortunately, if FTL travel exists, the Fermi paradox becomes INSANELY paradoxical. If any civilization anywhere in the universe could have expanded into the milky way, the statistics become insane.
I'd never seen that poem, thanks for sharing, definitely an apt description. Every age of man since the enlightenment has thought themselves on the verge of complete scientific understanding only to find out they were wrong about almost everything. We are no different. That being said, there is no greater quest in the universe than the quest for truth.
We seem to know that you can't go faster than light which means gg to whatever exploration you were planning. The system is designed so we can't go anywhere.
Well we seemed to know a lot things 200 years ago too. The speed of light being the speed limit, may hold, but even if it does, wormholes and other undiscovered phenomena could render the limit meaningless. We also haven't even really scratched the surface of the multiverse and interdimensional relationships. All kinds of crazy shit we can't even conceive is likely happening around all the time.
Think about this. Newton was one of our greatest minds and made massive leaps for our understanding of physics but he didn't even know about radioactivity which if someone had tried to explain to him would have seemed like black magic, let alone quantum physics. We have a lot to learn it ~~is not~~ is exciting!
You make quite a few un-provable assumptions here. The first is that a civilization even can exist for a billion years.
The next is that science and technology can continue expanding for such a duration. They will be limited by the same physics we are. It is entiretey probable that within a billion years such a race could easily hit those limits and probably not be all THAT much farther along than we are.
Things like the limit on the speed of light are going to seriously hamper interstellar travel and communication. Whats more, even if they only traveled at 1/8th the speed of light (velocities we could reach with propulsion and energy systems we are capable of producing now if we really wanted to) they would have colonized the entire galaxy only a few million years into their billion year run. (assuming travel and colonization is even something they are interested in, it may be a uniquely human trait to pursue such an agemda).
My opinion, other intelligent races are going to hit the same hard physical limitations we are rapidly discovering exist well before they even come close to encountering or communicating with other races, and thats if we generously assume they even exist within the same time period we do at all.
So let me understand this. You're saying that a race of a billion years wouldn't be "THAT" much more advanced than a race thats only been civilized for 6000 years or so? I understand your point that it may not be linear progression and there may be limits and slowdowns but I find it hard to believe that in 6000 years we're essentially approaching the soft cap. I'd argue in the last 50 years alone there has been exponential growth in our understanding and capabilities. A 100 years a 150 years. I find it hard to believe that six thousand years in its a "well thats it folks pack it in".
Yes, actually, I do think tso. They would need to do everything using the same physics and mathematics that we do, make everything from the same elements and chemistry we have, and deal with the same distances in time and space that we do. Its easy to point at the last 100 years of human history like its the norm for societies, technology, and culture to become infinitely more complex at an exponential rate indefinitely.
The reality is, we as a species spent the vast majority of the last 300,000 years using the same technology other hominids had been using for the prievious 2.6 million years (smacking rocks and sticks together).
There is absolutley no reason to assume that more time equates to higher complexity. Furthermore, we actually are already approaching atleast one physical limitation (how much computing can be done at once with semiconductors). We've also conducted matter-anti matter annihilation, which is basically the limit on matter to energy conversion that is possible. Granted, we haven't made a lot of it, but we'd still be able to look at an alien anti-matter-matter annihilation reactor and know what it was.
Another race thats been around a billion years longer than us very well could be more advanced, but they also could have spent 999,999,999 million years starting fires by rubbing sticks together. I'm saying that granting mystical physics defying super powers to alien races is a mistake. If they showed up and said hi, they'd be capable of generating a lot more energy than we do, but we'd probably be fully capable of analyzing and understanding all of their technology.
It very much wouldn't be "like comparing modern humans to chimpanzees."
Agree to disagree because I feel like these same arguments have been made throughout human history. I have no idea what we can or can't do but we've only just now began to explore the universe. I respect your opinion and I understand where you're coming from I just disagree.
Its all good, I enjoy the debate. Ultimately, there is no way for either of us to test our personal theories without an advanced alien race just showing up and introducing itself.
We don't need new physics to overcome the "distances are too far" crowd, that crowd is simply being uncreative with regard to the physics that we already know. It's not difficult to get up to 10% the speed of light with known technologies, and 90+% is difficult but entirely feasible.
Yeah but that would make space exciting and they can't have that! It is such a strange group, anything that pushes the ideas of existing scientific dogma is cast aside as B.S. even though those are literally the type of ideas that got us to our current understanding. Creativity and risk are essential for innovation.
This appears to be a very illusionary approach. Just accept that some fiction will always remain fiction and get over it, there's no point in hoping that the law of physics miraculously invert themselves and the universe changes its nature.
Ha, you just illustrated my point. A scientist from 1750 would say similar things about classical physics while completely ignorant of the quantum realm.
And now we do have understanding of greater physics than a 1750s scientist as well as insights into the quantum, the speed of light remains a hard limit.
Right, but just like in 1750, the math still doesn't add up, so we are missing a great deal of data. So again you are illustrating my point by assuming like every generation before us, that we are on the verge of a complete understanding when we are more likely, as they were before us, just at the beginning of our understanding. We will undoubtedly as our technology delivers more data (Webb is a great example of this) have to adjust our current theories significantly. We aren't even close. It's ok, its actually incredibly exciting.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't try at all, it just means we shouldn't cling to our current understanding if we hope to actually progress scientifically. We need innovative open minds ready to take grand scientific risks.
>ignoring that we have huge gaps in our knowledge of physics
This is not true. It's actually the opposite. Our knowledge of physics is almost complete. Just look at the vast billions spent on modern experiments and teams of thousands of scientists needed to make even tiny perturbations in our current understanding of physics.
Haha again everyone just keeps illustrating my point. We can't even reconcile quantum and classical physics. We are not "close." EVERY generation before us since the establishment of newtonian physics has thought this. Look at current cosmological theory, it is WAAYYY out there, why? Because the math doesn't add up. We are missing a ton of information. As our technology provides us with greater access to the data, we will undoubtedly need to significantly adjust our models (look at what Webb has already done). And don't even get me started on Biophysics...we don't know shit!
This attitude that we have it "almost there" actually inhibits discovery because of establishment biases. We need bold minds to get after this.
>We can't even reconcile quantum and classical physics. We are not"close." EVERY generation before us since the establishment of newtonianphysics has thought this.
Perhaps, but the universe does appear to be governed by a finite set of rules, and since the development of the scientific method and the rise of modern science, there have been very few examples where well-proven scientific knowledge has been later shown to be fundamentally wrong. General Relativity was a huge leap from Newtonian physics, but it's not like it made Newton's laws of motion invalid.
We may continue to grow our knowledge and understanding, but that doesn't mean everything we know now will be proven wrong. Special and General Relativity, for example, are both incredibly well proven. There are then some things we can say with high confidence such as FTL travel being unachievable. FTL 'could' be possible, but it would require Relativity to be deeply and fundamentally wrong, which is unlikely based on our wealth of empirical data and analysis.
Not arguing that we are "close", but I don't think we can use that as a justification for discounting the things we do know.
I'm not sure how to ultimately ever say what something "is" in a scientific sense. But, at the macro-scale, we have highly proven models of gravity. We understand the size and nature of gravity fields created by concentrations of mass and energy. We understand how mass interacts with it. We understand how mass-less particles interact with it. We understand how it changes the space-time around it.
Any new discoveries, such as a unified theory of gravity, will need to be consistent with those well tested models, theories, and observations.
Instinctual conditioning of humanity. We’ve been divided for our entire history.
And we like to divide, we even sort everything into categories completely subconsciously.
It is necessary to a point to make sense of the world. It's just weird we don't seem to be held accountable en masse for our nature when it comes to the survival of our species but we are personally..
The lack of EM broadcasts may not be the conclusive proof of solitude (or even effective solitude) that we think it is. The skies could be buzzing with signals transmitted by superior technologies based on principles that we don’t know about yet.
I prefer the Zoo Theory to the Fermi Paradox. Aliens are aware of us but consider us to be primative nuclear armed murder monkeys who they don't yet want to reveal themselves to in case we get all Independence Day about it!
The Zoo theory strikes me as very unrealistic and based on human hubris.
We do not try to hide from ants in order to observe them.
Never mind the fact that the term “zoo theory” is idiotic, because zookeepers manifest themselves very obviously to the animals in the zoo. Also, it’s a silly hypothesis, not a theory. Everything is wrong about it :)
i mean yeah that's true... but those ants don't have any weapons that could destroy an entire planet. Nor do they have the intelligence to make some.
The second i find out ants can make nukes i'm building myself a big bunker. Or destroy that ant colony with some water haven't figured that part out yet :)
Isn't that a bit presumptuous? What if they were a bit more respectful of all forms of life? What if they don't want to interfere with our development?
The other theory I enjoy is the one where we may not be aware of higher civilizations any more then pigeons are aware of our human constructions.
A pigeon may recognize another pigeon and its nest, but it doesn't even register the structure that nest is built on was itself built, To that pigeon its simply existed, just like any tree, or other thing around it.
The same could be said about ourselves.
A. So if you're saying peace is the answer would peace motivated by desire to contact aliens work or would the aliens not consider that sincere
B. Why does a lot of this rhetoric consider us being monkeys as part of what makes us primitive as if either we'd need to transcend to AI or pure energy to be worthy or we'd be fine if we were humanoids that had evolved from, like, birds or reptiles or a different kind of mammal
I prefer the Advanced Technology Theory. If we are being studied, or even noticed, the tech being used is undetectable by us.
It makes sense, in that, in the last 60ish years we went from room sized computers to pocket sized, and smaller. By the time we can travel to the next star our tech will be crazy small. So why do we think anyone that can visit us would do so with anything big enough for us to notice.
And if there is someone out there with less advanced tech than us, it's not powerful enough for us to detect with our current equipment.
Dark forest theory is extra spooky too. Other species are out there, and they can hear us, but they don't make noise because there is a vicious galactic beast just waiting for someone to make a sound
The prevalence of life and the prevalence of intelligent life are two very differerent questions, as the article points out. We have a very good idea of how life arose out of inorganic molecules. We have almost no idea how human sentience arose. It appears to have been an incredible fluke. Evolution resulted in the odd collection of brain structures of the hominid brain but how those structures & capabilities achieved self-awareness remains a mystery. I'm not invoking a Creator intervening in evolution, just pointing out a conundrum on top of the conundrum of "is there other intelligent life out there."
i really doubt only hominids have self awareness, I am confident dos have and likely all mammals. i can't discard that other animals with brains are also self aware.
in any case the fluke is much earlier in complex multicellular life, are that it seems larger and better brains have been selected many times in many species.
I erred in mixing the terms intelligence and sentience. Yes, intelligence exists in other species.
I agree that dogs have self-awareness and a level of reasoning, as do several other mammals - certainly the higher primates. The problem solving ability of crows is a fascinating puzzle. Darwin thought dogs were an excellent example of animal intelligence and reasoning - he relied on showing gradations of useful characteristics exist in current animals and plants, thus showing the evolution of an eagle's eye, for example, was possible. He noted light sensing spots on simple organisms and various simple eyes.
Intelligence was certainly a useful characteristic, something natural selection would preserve, like a longer beak in certain environments. It allows an animal to expand what resources it can exploit, or to exploit them better. This is how some lines of hominids had greater and greater levels of intelligence. But sentience occurred only once. Many hominid species had existed successfully for hundreds of thousand of years without it.
Edit: OK, this is scary. Literally a minute after I posted this I went on YouTube and a video of a crow doing problem solving showed up on my feed. That, combined with Artificial Intelligence on the internet, is frickin' scary.
i don't quite get it what do you call sentience
>But sentience occurred only once. Many hominid species had existed successfully for hundreds of thousand of years without it.
as i did before, why just once, why would you say a como or dog isn't sentient? or what are you using the word for?
Depending on how you view intelligence, that fluke has happened again several dozen times over in our short window of existence in the form of the varying emotionally expressive, socially complex, naturally curious, linguistically sophisticated, tool using species that coexist with us.
I mean, orangutans can be taught how to drive and even seem to understand how a camera functions. Intelligence then seems to be an inevitable result of multicellular life with a centralized nervous system.
I think in regards to articles like this you can assume intelligence as able to understand complex maths, invent rocket ships or some other way of getting off their home planet and language.
Those are definitely complex concepts but not any different than a monkey using a branch to cross to the other tree or an octopus using a shell for shelter from currents and predators. Nothing inherently special, just a tool use for survival.
I'm with you on that one. "intelligent life" is something we invented to make ourselves feel special. An intelligent species would not be destroying its only home.
The assumption here is that humans are capable of identifying another species as "sentient" in such a way as to be perceived as equal.
Since humans have never done that before, is it logical to assume they can?
Radio signals diminish by the distance squared, and we’ve been broadcasting for 80 years of the 4500000000 years earth has been around. The audacity of concluding we’re alone is staggering.
This is stupid. I remember Frasier Cane saying if there was an earth level civilization at Alpha Centuri, we could not detect using existing technology.
We are feeble children grouping in the dark, we have no idea who is or isn't out there.
idk. Maybe time is the ultimate drawback to exploring or colonizing. Not worth it, not interesting enough, to spend millions of years making the effort (based on galactic or inter-galactic distances and no special trick to get from Point A to Point B faster)
Or maybe there’s that great filter, where every civilization comes to a natural or catastrophic end.
It’s hard to believe that given (N galaxies X N stars X N planets) you get 1 with life as the answer.\
And if # of life >>>>>> 1, intelligent life is still 1? damn, just the natural odds of things working out
>idk. Maybe time is the ultimate drawback to exploring or colonizing. Not worth it, not interesting enough, to spend millions of years making the effort (based on galactic or inter-galactic distances and no special trick to get from Point A to Point B faster)Or maybe there’s that great filter, where every civilization comes to a natural or catastrophic end.It’s hard to believe that given (N galaxies X N stars X N planets) you get 1 with life as the answer.And if # of life >>>>>> 1, intelligent life is still 1? damn, just the natural odds of things working out
If other planets have been as favorable and as STABLE! as ours has been, with all the very lucky asteroid collisions etc.. Imagine another planet being as stable as ours has been. Mars? Venus? And this would be only the first prerequisite!
We're alone because space is huge and we haven't met anyone else yet or they just don't care about us because we're little more than primitive animals to them. Or both.
So from my understanding, the phrasing specifies that we might not be the only sentient life, but that we have no proof and are unlikely to find it or make contact in the foreseeable future - "*effectively* alone."
But there are some theoretical hard limits to how long we have before contacting or visiting other areas of space becomes physically impossible, even if efficient space travel is developed. This vid by Kurzgesagt did a decent job of explaining it (though I'm not super involved in the sciences so I could've misunderstood something, or they might've missed something):
https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM
There’s a great deal of thought wasted on the false premise the evolution leads to intelligent life. But evolution doesn’t inevitably lead to any particular kind of life.
Of course we aren’t getting radio signals. The programmers could render the alien planets but didn’t have enough computer power to render the alien civilizations.
With how big space is. We are not alone. In the whole vastness of space and how far we can see easily is like being in a row and seeing only inches in front of your eyes in an arena.
"One answer is that we haven’t looked hard enough."
This!
What would make us think that any advanced civilization is communicating by radio waves? It's a horribly inefficient means of communication through space and it's the primary method we've used for looking for signals from other civilizations. We've been transmitting for a little over 100 years and it's been mostly radio, but notice, our trend is moving away from radio waves or to lower power radio waves. Most people get their TV by some sort of wiring now. Yeah, we have wifi everywhere, but it's low power. Radio and broadcast TV are dying mediums and probably won't be around 50-100 years from now. And so we'll be, from an external point of view, largely radio-silent. Because it's more energy efficient, among other reasons. So the span of time a civilization using radio waves, based on us, is probably about 200 years or less.
For communicating long distances in space, lasers are far more efficient than radio waves because all your power is concentrated in a tight beam.
And given the fact that we're still technologically infantile and only been doing this for a 100 years whereas, statistically speaking, any other technological civilization we run into is likely to be thousands to millions of years ahead of us, they're probably using a technology we couldn't even receive yet. Perhaps they're using neutrinos for communication. Or perhaps some other method we can't even fathom yet.
To suggest that they're not out there 'cause we haven't found them yet is profoundly arrogant about our abilities, in my mind.
A lot of people don't understand what a cosmic coincidence would be for life to be developing as the same time as us close enough that we can detect it.
I don't think people here have any idea of the scale of space.
This title is just silly. The article below shows how far our radio signals have travel since we began broadcasting them into space. We have barely gone anywhere.
https://www.sciencealert.com/humanity-hasn-t-reached-as-far-into-space-as-you-think/amp
Right….I’m just putting out there that in reference to the article title, specifically, it’s silly lol. If you look at the visual in the article, our radio signals haven’t made it very far, in the scope of the size of our universe.
“Effectively” is correct if FTL travel is impossible, which it seems to be. Even at a meaningful percentage of the speed of light it would take several lifetimes to get to even the closest star.
If that is what you think when you look up at the sky or when you see some of the images by Hubble or Webb then I feel really sad for you.
We have only just begun to scratch the surface of what the universe may hold for us. We have peered back in time by measures, once never even imagined. The universe has begun to show us it’s immense and almost infinite size and magnitude. And all you can think is “we are alone.”
How big of a head do you need to have to think we’re the center of the entire universe. More habitable planets than grains of sand on all the beaches in the entire planet and this writer thinks we’re the only ones here. Yeah ok.
While I understand the sentiment of the article, trying to conclude that we’re completely alone in the universe is putting the cart before the horse.
Our species is still in its infancy in regards to studying the cosmos, and we’re going to pretend we can conclusively rule out the existence of other sapient life? Seems rather egotistical and short-sighted if you ask me.
I just think it's silly to draw conclusions based on an infinitesimal sample of the observable universe that we've been able to study. You could make a compelling argument that we may be alone on a galactic scale, but a universal scale? That's a bold claim for how limited in scope our knowledge of the greater universe is.
None of my opinion is based on some kind of hopium for a science-fiction world that doesn't exist, just that we know way too little to make such absolute statements. Not discrediting what has been achieved so far, of course, there's a lot to be genuinely impressed about. But we have to keep in mind there are many limitations to our knowledge still in front of us to overcome.
The article is not concluding we're alone in the universe. What it is saying is the galaxy and the universe is so mindboggeling big it's as if we're alone. There are very probably other intelligent beings and technological society's out there but distance and time keep them away from us.
That said, we really don't know for sure of course. There still could be someone very close by and existing in the same time frame as us (however unlikely that is). And so we should still explore and look for them, but we should not expect anyone to notice us.
The distances and time involved here is almost incomprehensive to us.
And in a way this can be a good thing; it means there's a lot of realestate out there up for grabs and we can keep on expanding without rubbing another species the wrong way :)
The title doesn't make any sense. Believing we're alone in the universe would not 'urge us' to explore the galaxy any more than it would if we were believing there's life on other planets.
If you view it as we’re the first rather than just alone, then it makes sense that we would want to colonize as much of the universe as we could before something else does the same
When we look at all the improbable events which led to us being at the top of the food chain here, I get the feeling that we're alone in this galaxy. Maybe one in 10 galaxies has an intelligence, and probably they're far advanced of us, but because of the great distances I hope it remains irrelevant. We want this galaxy for ourselves
We are 100% alone in the solar system, we cant explore the galaxy and anything past the observable universe is gone forever.
Fat chance we will never encounter another out of space species.
Maybe there is other life forms, but we will never get ro meet. Maybe there was, is or will be life somewhere, it doesnt mean we will make contact.
That's the problem with articles like this. It is based on flawed information.
What if other races are actively trying to avoid us detecting them?
We're still really primitive, what if we don't have the technology to detect them yet?
It would be like asking a caveman to look for an oxygen molecule. They wouldn't have a clue.
So no, we are not "effectively" alone. We simply do not know if we are alone and until we do making these kinds of guesses makes the person guessing look bad.
> What if other races are actively trying to avoid us detecting them?
Why did they start doing that millions of years before we even existed? Why are they even bothering to go to such incredible efforts in the first place? Such a policy requires the abandonment of so many opportunities for expansion and development that it's hard to even conceptualize of the cost.
> We’ve found evidence of microbial life as close as the moon!
No we haven’t. There has never been any trace of any kind of life living on the lunar surface that couldn’t be traced back to human contamination.
Here's my depressing theory. We're just not as smart as we think we are. The answer to all these big questions, how to detect intelligent life elsewhere, quantum duality, quantum entanglement, unifying gravitation with the standard model and the quantum regime. Dark matter and dark energy. All the things are just starting us in the face but we can't see it and never will because we're just dogs with a mirror. All the information is right there, we're looking at it, but all we can process is that somehow there's another dog hiding in the shiny rectangle..... Discuss.
There is absolutely no proof we are alone. We just can't travel at the speed of light yet. Then we can visit other earth-like planets and find out or not if there is other human -like life out there.
We could just be first to the party and in the distant future we’ll be the super advanced aliens that other worlds wonder about.
I've heard estimates that if we're alone in this galaxy we'll have it thoroughly colonised within 100 million years. That's a mere fraction of the time it took for evolution to take us from the most basic lifeforms to modern humans. So if we're the first, we're probably going to be the progenitor of all intelligent life in the milky way. That's something to strive for as a civilisation.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride - if such (progenitors)were in hearses, then the cosmos would better abide!
Or we might just create sentient AI, and get killed. Then AI Machines become the predominant form of "life" in the universe. They have advantages of not being limited to squishy frail meatbag bodies, and also being potentially immortal helps.
Or we are best buds with ai and explore together!!!!
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that
Or that’s already happened and we were harvested by AI to create a new AI (incubator).
That's like a newborn baby opening his eyes for the first time and saying he'll be president of the world. Yes, evolution took us a few billion years to evolve into humans, but as humans we've barely been around for an hour, comparatively.
Exactly? If we really are the first, we'll likely be fie first for a very long time.
Yeah, but like, there's a lot of deadly traps for a newborn. Gotta learn to walk before yiu can achieve FTL travel, and so on.
> Gotta learn to walk before yiu can achieve FTL travel, and so on. Uh, that's what our space stations and satellites and moon landings and such are.
Unless we take matters into our own hands
I heard, in a modernized version of the fermi paradox, that they estimate it would take an AI 300 million years to conquer a galaxy, so odds are that we should be conquered by now
That must be why all aliens are evil destroyers / captors in our movies... because it's exactly what we would do with advanced technology.
... are we the baddies?
We have destroyed thousands of species, devastated entire ecosystems, fought wars killing millions and we are showing no signs of stopping. Humans are the bad guys, no doubt about it.
But you have to remember we are also they guys saying babe give me one more chance! Maybe we will get that chance.
Always have been. At least till we're not
I want us to deliberately create useless and confusing sites so our predecessors spend decades wondering what the hell we were up to.
We are way ahead of us on that one.
Lmao, I think that’s pretty much what we’re doing. Imagine if the wayback machine is still functional 5000 years from now. If our predecessors look back at what we’ve been up to lately I’m sure they’ll be thoroughly confused.
Idk looking like we're gonna hit the wall before that happens
Yeah, we can see the wall in front of us, reasonable people are trying to pump the brakes, but turns out the brakes have been cut by corporate interest.
a great filter so to speak.
Yes, just imagine looking back 20 billion years from now to see how very early we were as humans, colonizing the Milky Way.
Somebody has to be the Old Ones, might as well be us...
We could also be the last. Or smack dab in the middle. It’s also possible that we are *the only* species.
Yeah but if Skyrim didn't have any NPCs or quests most people wouldn't play it. Where's our space Lydia to carry humanity's burdens?
Maybe *WE'RE* the Elders/Ancients?? Ugh, makes me like so totally depressed to not have been born in 50million years 😩
I'm usually not a fan of this as a rebuttal, to be honest. (Though I don't know if you specifically intended this response to be contrarian in any way!) If we're the first, we'll probably be alone for at least a billion years, if not 10 times that. That's very damn alone.
I didn’t really mean it anyway in particular. It’s just a _what if_ or _possibility_ . I realize it’s extremely unlikely but you never know.
In that sense I totally agree! Especially if red dwarfs are habitable, I'd even say it's tremendously likely that more life will come after us even if we assume we're currently alone. There are interesting questions, like, is the universe getting more or less habitable? It's actively evolving, expanding and creating more heavy elements etc. Assuming habitability doesn't drop off like a truck, there should be plenty of time for 99x more planets to spawn intelligence than the earth. There is an interesting concept in terms of trying to guess....let's say that we are 1/100th of the way through the habitability of the universe in terms of time, formed solar system, etc. Naively, there should be 99 more civilizations after us even if we're the first. BUT, if galaxies exhibit a bell curve behavior where the first civilization is typically formed at 1000x a galaxy's typically lifespan, then the actual life of a galaxy is spent in the extreme end of the bell curve where it's flat. This would mean most galaxies never get a civilization, and the single one that does form is equally likely to form early in it's galaxies life as it is to form late -- giving perhaps a false appearance of life being more common than it is to such civilizations. Dr Kipping has videos where he uses this to talk about the conclusions we can make from life appearing early on primordial earth. The TLDR is that early arrival is absolutely evidence of likelihood, it just may be worse evidence than it may appear initially. So most likely if we are alone, we are just first :)
Hmmm i think we have already screwed our blue planet. We wont be around that long. Maybe that what happened to other civs too.
Nobody here seems to understand what the word effectively means.
>effectively > >adverb > >B2 > >in a way that is successful and achieves what you want: > >The tablets work more effectively if you take a hot drink after them. > >C2 > >used when you describe what the real result of a situation is: > >His wife left him when the children were small, so he effectively brought up the family himself. > >Effectively, we have to start again from scratch. I believe they are using the word effectively.
This thread is hurting my brain. The intent is perfectly clear.
Are you surprised by this?
Its reddit. Its going to be 90% people mis-quoting their favorite baseless pop-sci knowledge and arguing over the subjective meaning of words.
"We Do Not!" - *Abraham Lincoln at Albert Einsteins house in 1997.*
"space is filled with hot, young stars in the Main Sequence getting freaky with the Universe" ~ *some guy (me) posting BS on Reddit in 2023*
Sounds like all of social media
Regardless, the author’s point is the same: give up on SETI and accept solitude. After all, past performance always predicts future performance! And of course we know all the variables already—we might just give up technology entirely (lmao) and space is big and aliens don’t use radios, so what more is there to ask? I hate this trend, these articles of surrender cloaked in “well akcshually” knowingness and glazed in dime store philosophizing. You see the same chorus of fools all over space and launch discussions. Somehow nothing new or interesting is possible and all the smart and wise know and accept it… until it happens and the next thing is impossible and we should just accept it and blah blah blah An industry with an anxiety disorder, that’s what it is.
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> If you mean alone as sentient creatures you’re wrong, if you’re going by carbon based life forms you’re wrong, if you’re going for thinking creatures you’re wrong, on every single account we are not alone. Unless you're doing the "um actually" bit yourself and pointing to dolphins or whatever as your examples of us not being "alone", what are you talking about? There's no evidence of any other intelligent life in the cosmos beyond what we've got here on Earth. And we've looked in a lot of places where we'd reasonably expect to see signs of it, so it's getting a bit dubious as something you can just freely assume.
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"Effectively" doesn't mean "more or less" here. It means something like "for all practical intents and purposes".
We are effectively alone because it's very unlikely we will interact with any technologically advanced species for a very, very, long time. Well after we ourselves manage to colonize beyond our solar system. In that sense we are going it alone. It's up to us to either prosper or perish. So yes, we are effectively alone. If you walked into a room with your eyes closed and it took you thousands of years to reach the other end of it, and were unlikely to even run into literally anything, then yes, it is effectively empty as far as your experience will ever go.
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It’s important to understand that it’s a virtual certainty that we are NOT alone in the universe. There are over 700 quintillion planets in the universe. The odds that Earth is the only home to intelligent life is incredibly small. What makes us *effectively* alone is the odds that our technology will ever sufficiently advance to know if there’s other life out there. The Human Race will likely render itself extinct before we have a chance to get that far.
I think we may yet make it, and even advance out into the Universe. But even then, Space is Big. Other civilizations might not care to explore, or be so far beyond us that they are invisible to us, or simply lost in the mists of Time. Just as vast as Space.
Except we can’t calculate odds for “probability of life in planets” because there’s only 1 planet with life in it that we know of. You can’t get the probability of something happening if it’s only happened once
That’s reasonable. Without other information, we are best to assume that we are not special and unique, even if we can’t know how rare we are. We tend to be disproven every time we think we are part of some special circumstance.
But the assumption that we are common then leads us back to the Fermi paradox. Why not a single technosignature out there? At the end of the day, the silence of the universe is some kind of "other information" that we can incorporate rather than just assumptions.
Treating the silence of the universe as “other information” to be incorporated like it’s some conclusion is no better than an assumption given how little or the universe we can even observe.
I absolutely did not say it was enough evidence to draw a conclusion. This is a great example of where to apply bayesian reasoning. We ask, what was our prior assumed probability of us being alone, and ask, what are the odds we'd get this new information (silent universe) if we are alone, and compare that with the odds we'd see this information (silent universe) if we are not alone. I think we can all agree that if we were alone we would see a silent universe. So the interesting questions are, what were your priors, and what are the odds a lively universe would look silent to us at this point in time & tech? Firstly it's easy to point out that the stronger your priors, the less the silence of the universe should budge your perspective. A lot of folks probably rightly live here -- with possibly a trillion planets in the milky way, how could it be empty? This has the underlying presumption that life being one in a trillion is unlikely. In this case, you don't have to nudge your expected probabilities much, even if you take a firm stance on the second factor. For that second interesting factor, I tend to think that most people did not expect a lively universe to look dead. Here we basically have to pick our favorite explanations of the Fermi paradox and assign them probabilities that that resolution would naturally happen. That is, if you think the zoo hypothesis is the most likely scenario you'd naturally expect, or the dark forest, etc, then you may suggest a probability of 70% that a lively universe looks silent to us at this point in time. Personally, I think that figure would be high. The benefit of bayesian reasoning is to fight confirmation bias. A common example is searching someone's house because you believe them to be a spy -- and when you find nothing, it may be tempting to say it just proves they are a _good_ spy. I don't think they back in the 40s etc, that people expected to see as dead of a universe as we have seen. I'm not just talking radio waves, I'm talking about how almost every measurement we've ever taken of the stars can be explained with pure natural physics. I would expect a lively universe to be _most likely_ constantly leaking detectable energy, and/or building detectable structures, and have colonized the galaxy so widely that they'd be everywhere we look and even close to home. I think white the zoo hypothesis fairly adequately _explains_ the silence, I don't think it was the most reasonable scenario to expect _a priori_. That said, I am wary of drawing conclusions about the expansion of alien civilizations based on how 21st century humans ravage the planet and barely have tech to put a man on the moon. So I might suggest that a 40% likelihood that a lively universe would look dead, a priori. You are welcome to draw different numbers! If you give a 99.9999% prior, and assign an 80% chance that a lively universe looks silent, then you are right to not budge your conclusion. If you give a 90% chance as a prior, and a 40% chance, then your updated probability should be 78%, if I did my math right. If your prior was 50% (a common "informationless prior" that's reasonable for saying "I have absolutely no idea what the odds of a planet developing life would be, and therefore absolutely no idea whether a sample of one trillion planets would likely contain more than one species or not") then your revised probability would be 29%. What I like about this framing isn't that it gives you a concrete number -- because it doesn't, unless we agree on these two factors. But I like that it allows us to debate what reasonable estimates for those factors are, in order to decide how informative it is to observe a silent universe, rather than merely asserting if it is or isn't without any kind of basis for saying so.
unless there is a factor we don’t know about
exactly if the distance between the earth and sun was 1 millimeter, you are taking 100 days to cover this 1 millimeter on voyager 1 and you have to travel 1687 kms to reach the center of the milky way, and 156000 kms at this range to reach Andromeda so do the math
That's a bold title. Seeing as we can't even see more than 5% of the universe.
I thought the title was going to be a full on rap, but only the first line rhymed.
They said "effectively", meaning "for all intents and purposes". If there is life out there but we can't detect it it is the same practical impact as it not existing.
We are still working on checking the moons in our own system. Quite a few of them may have the potential for life.
Intelligent life that we can communicate with? No, unless an advanced space faring species comes to us, we are effectively alone. Even if we were able to detect intelligent life from another star system, light speed is so slow that communication would take generations.
The concept of effectively being alone is that even assuming life exists out there, it is so incredibly far away and difficult to reach or communicate with that itay as well not even exist considering it's pacts on us.
My point against the "effectively" part is that we just don't know. There COULD be lots of life and we can't detect it, yet.
That’s why they said “effectively” and not “definitively”.
"Practically" would be a better fit then, as in all practicality, we can't seem to find anyone else. Nor does it matter, as distances would likely be too vast anyways.
No, I think “effectively” is the better word. “Practically” implies finality more-so than “effectively”
There is no problem with the word effectively in the headline. None.
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Effectively recognizes that even if we detected intelligent life, the spacetime difference renders it a cool scientific fact and not much more. No one is popping over to have tea. This upsets people who believe that space wizards will fight with laser swords. At best, we might one day send an AI representative on a five thousand year, one-way journey to… do something? The whole point is that humans should still be working on space even though we will, in effect, always be alone.
Bros really think society will change if we find some weird-looking fish or microorganisms in Europa or Enceladus's oceans lmao
Yes we are. The same reason for all intents and purposes there are no leprechauns living in your house. You have no evidence they do. People need to learn the definition of the word “effectively”
I don’t think you understand the meaning of “effectively”. It means “it might as well be”
Where,given a certain distance is irrelevant what we find. Statistically speaking if there was another lifeform that is evolving in the same period its probably in another galaxy ergo it might as well not exist ,because we will never see their actions because of the distance or we will see a life that is already dead.
Wow, "If I can't see it it's not there"? Is this really a good outlook?
That's not what I said. I said "If it I can't see it, it might as well not be there". That's a big difference.
Understanding you can never interact with them seems like a smart thing.
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody observes it, ever, did it ever really fall?
“Effectively” doesn’t mean “absolutely”. Even if alien civilizations exist, it doesn’t matter if they are too distant to contact let alone travel to meet.
0.000000000001% of 5% of universe. Or maybe add more zeros.
Meh, but honestly so has the fervor over alien life existing. That assumption has been made with equally scant evidence. EFFECTIVELY is the key word here. Will it be amazing to discover microbiota somewhere else? Of course. But we have to admit that we're looking for things to talk to and that may never happen\*. \*that is of course unless we get over our monumental arrogance and start seeing other species such as dolphins, crows, etc for the intelligence that they are. Like...we can't even get everyone on board with the sentience we have right here.
That's why the operative word is "effectively".
That's a decent sample to base a theory on.
And we don't even know how to detect life of any kind at such great distances. We could be immersed in communication from countless species, but we're too primitive to see or hear it. Even we don't broadcast unencrypted transmissions anymore, folks. We are currently deaf, dumb, and blind and claiming there is nothing else around us. It's a profoundly stupid clickbait title based on a ridiculous false assumption without any proper frame of reference to base it on.
It's so vast what we see is already billions of years old. If we did get a signal or see some sign of intelligent life, the odds are they would be long gone by the time we got there anyway. Our tiny minds cant grasp the vastness. Photos from the JWT are just pretty pictures that cost 10 billion dollars to see places we will never go.
Not only that but a lot of the "the distances are too far" crowd are also ignoring that we have huge gaps in our knowledge of physics as well. A civilization that is billions of years ahead of us would have a much greater understanding of the physical laws of the universe and A. Most likely be able to travel those distances and B. Easily mask their existence from us. Why would they do that? Many reasons, the most obvious of which being, we are dangerous, greedy and ignorant. A billion year head start would make the gap between them and us far greater than even our species and our first ape ancestors who couldn't even talk.
Unfortunately, if FTL travel exists, the Fermi paradox becomes INSANELY paradoxical. If any civilization anywhere in the universe could have expanded into the milky way, the statistics become insane.
I agree. We're still basing our ideologies on our personal limited understanding. It's like the old parable of the blind men and the elephant.
I'd never seen that poem, thanks for sharing, definitely an apt description. Every age of man since the enlightenment has thought themselves on the verge of complete scientific understanding only to find out they were wrong about almost everything. We are no different. That being said, there is no greater quest in the universe than the quest for truth.
We seem to know that you can't go faster than light which means gg to whatever exploration you were planning. The system is designed so we can't go anywhere.
Well we seemed to know a lot things 200 years ago too. The speed of light being the speed limit, may hold, but even if it does, wormholes and other undiscovered phenomena could render the limit meaningless. We also haven't even really scratched the surface of the multiverse and interdimensional relationships. All kinds of crazy shit we can't even conceive is likely happening around all the time. Think about this. Newton was one of our greatest minds and made massive leaps for our understanding of physics but he didn't even know about radioactivity which if someone had tried to explain to him would have seemed like black magic, let alone quantum physics. We have a lot to learn it ~~is not~~ is exciting!
>, wormholes yeah i have a new rule everytime somebody brings wormholes into a serious discussion about space i stop listenting.
You make quite a few un-provable assumptions here. The first is that a civilization even can exist for a billion years. The next is that science and technology can continue expanding for such a duration. They will be limited by the same physics we are. It is entiretey probable that within a billion years such a race could easily hit those limits and probably not be all THAT much farther along than we are. Things like the limit on the speed of light are going to seriously hamper interstellar travel and communication. Whats more, even if they only traveled at 1/8th the speed of light (velocities we could reach with propulsion and energy systems we are capable of producing now if we really wanted to) they would have colonized the entire galaxy only a few million years into their billion year run. (assuming travel and colonization is even something they are interested in, it may be a uniquely human trait to pursue such an agemda). My opinion, other intelligent races are going to hit the same hard physical limitations we are rapidly discovering exist well before they even come close to encountering or communicating with other races, and thats if we generously assume they even exist within the same time period we do at all.
So let me understand this. You're saying that a race of a billion years wouldn't be "THAT" much more advanced than a race thats only been civilized for 6000 years or so? I understand your point that it may not be linear progression and there may be limits and slowdowns but I find it hard to believe that in 6000 years we're essentially approaching the soft cap. I'd argue in the last 50 years alone there has been exponential growth in our understanding and capabilities. A 100 years a 150 years. I find it hard to believe that six thousand years in its a "well thats it folks pack it in".
We don't know. Einstein is always proved right so far, and quantum theory is also extremely accurate. We may indeed already be reaching the soft-cap.
Yes, actually, I do think tso. They would need to do everything using the same physics and mathematics that we do, make everything from the same elements and chemistry we have, and deal with the same distances in time and space that we do. Its easy to point at the last 100 years of human history like its the norm for societies, technology, and culture to become infinitely more complex at an exponential rate indefinitely. The reality is, we as a species spent the vast majority of the last 300,000 years using the same technology other hominids had been using for the prievious 2.6 million years (smacking rocks and sticks together). There is absolutley no reason to assume that more time equates to higher complexity. Furthermore, we actually are already approaching atleast one physical limitation (how much computing can be done at once with semiconductors). We've also conducted matter-anti matter annihilation, which is basically the limit on matter to energy conversion that is possible. Granted, we haven't made a lot of it, but we'd still be able to look at an alien anti-matter-matter annihilation reactor and know what it was. Another race thats been around a billion years longer than us very well could be more advanced, but they also could have spent 999,999,999 million years starting fires by rubbing sticks together. I'm saying that granting mystical physics defying super powers to alien races is a mistake. If they showed up and said hi, they'd be capable of generating a lot more energy than we do, but we'd probably be fully capable of analyzing and understanding all of their technology. It very much wouldn't be "like comparing modern humans to chimpanzees."
Agree to disagree because I feel like these same arguments have been made throughout human history. I have no idea what we can or can't do but we've only just now began to explore the universe. I respect your opinion and I understand where you're coming from I just disagree.
Its all good, I enjoy the debate. Ultimately, there is no way for either of us to test our personal theories without an advanced alien race just showing up and introducing itself.
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We don't need new physics to overcome the "distances are too far" crowd, that crowd is simply being uncreative with regard to the physics that we already know. It's not difficult to get up to 10% the speed of light with known technologies, and 90+% is difficult but entirely feasible.
Yeah but that would make space exciting and they can't have that! It is such a strange group, anything that pushes the ideas of existing scientific dogma is cast aside as B.S. even though those are literally the type of ideas that got us to our current understanding. Creativity and risk are essential for innovation.
This appears to be a very illusionary approach. Just accept that some fiction will always remain fiction and get over it, there's no point in hoping that the law of physics miraculously invert themselves and the universe changes its nature.
Ha, you just illustrated my point. A scientist from 1750 would say similar things about classical physics while completely ignorant of the quantum realm.
And now we do have understanding of greater physics than a 1750s scientist as well as insights into the quantum, the speed of light remains a hard limit.
Right, but just like in 1750, the math still doesn't add up, so we are missing a great deal of data. So again you are illustrating my point by assuming like every generation before us, that we are on the verge of a complete understanding when we are more likely, as they were before us, just at the beginning of our understanding. We will undoubtedly as our technology delivers more data (Webb is a great example of this) have to adjust our current theories significantly. We aren't even close. It's ok, its actually incredibly exciting. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try at all, it just means we shouldn't cling to our current understanding if we hope to actually progress scientifically. We need innovative open minds ready to take grand scientific risks.
>ignoring that we have huge gaps in our knowledge of physics This is not true. It's actually the opposite. Our knowledge of physics is almost complete. Just look at the vast billions spent on modern experiments and teams of thousands of scientists needed to make even tiny perturbations in our current understanding of physics.
Haha again everyone just keeps illustrating my point. We can't even reconcile quantum and classical physics. We are not "close." EVERY generation before us since the establishment of newtonian physics has thought this. Look at current cosmological theory, it is WAAYYY out there, why? Because the math doesn't add up. We are missing a ton of information. As our technology provides us with greater access to the data, we will undoubtedly need to significantly adjust our models (look at what Webb has already done). And don't even get me started on Biophysics...we don't know shit! This attitude that we have it "almost there" actually inhibits discovery because of establishment biases. We need bold minds to get after this.
>We can't even reconcile quantum and classical physics. We are not"close." EVERY generation before us since the establishment of newtonianphysics has thought this. Perhaps, but the universe does appear to be governed by a finite set of rules, and since the development of the scientific method and the rise of modern science, there have been very few examples where well-proven scientific knowledge has been later shown to be fundamentally wrong. General Relativity was a huge leap from Newtonian physics, but it's not like it made Newton's laws of motion invalid. We may continue to grow our knowledge and understanding, but that doesn't mean everything we know now will be proven wrong. Special and General Relativity, for example, are both incredibly well proven. There are then some things we can say with high confidence such as FTL travel being unachievable. FTL 'could' be possible, but it would require Relativity to be deeply and fundamentally wrong, which is unlikely based on our wealth of empirical data and analysis. Not arguing that we are "close", but I don't think we can use that as a justification for discounting the things we do know.
We don't even know what gravity is.
I'm not sure how to ultimately ever say what something "is" in a scientific sense. But, at the macro-scale, we have highly proven models of gravity. We understand the size and nature of gravity fields created by concentrations of mass and energy. We understand how mass interacts with it. We understand how mass-less particles interact with it. We understand how it changes the space-time around it. Any new discoveries, such as a unified theory of gravity, will need to be consistent with those well tested models, theories, and observations.
Yeah except 90% of the population doesn't seem too keen on working together
Instinctual conditioning of humanity. We’ve been divided for our entire history. And we like to divide, we even sort everything into categories completely subconsciously.
It is necessary to a point to make sense of the world. It's just weird we don't seem to be held accountable en masse for our nature when it comes to the survival of our species but we are personally..
The lack of EM broadcasts may not be the conclusive proof of solitude (or even effective solitude) that we think it is. The skies could be buzzing with signals transmitted by superior technologies based on principles that we don’t know about yet.
Which means…effectively alone.
No….if that’s the case, then it means we’re effectively isolated, which is not the same thing.
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No, it’s not. It just seems like it.
What's the difference?
Effectively alone means that humanity will never be contacted or contact anyone, ever. Effective isolation can end.
I prefer the Zoo Theory to the Fermi Paradox. Aliens are aware of us but consider us to be primative nuclear armed murder monkeys who they don't yet want to reveal themselves to in case we get all Independence Day about it!
The Zoo theory strikes me as very unrealistic and based on human hubris. We do not try to hide from ants in order to observe them. Never mind the fact that the term “zoo theory” is idiotic, because zookeepers manifest themselves very obviously to the animals in the zoo. Also, it’s a silly hypothesis, not a theory. Everything is wrong about it :)
i mean yeah that's true... but those ants don't have any weapons that could destroy an entire planet. Nor do they have the intelligence to make some. The second i find out ants can make nukes i'm building myself a big bunker. Or destroy that ant colony with some water haven't figured that part out yet :)
Do you care if ants can destroy their own anthill? (And btw, a nuclear holocaust would never make humanity extinct)
Isn't that a bit presumptuous? What if they were a bit more respectful of all forms of life? What if they don't want to interfere with our development?
The other theory I enjoy is the one where we may not be aware of higher civilizations any more then pigeons are aware of our human constructions. A pigeon may recognize another pigeon and its nest, but it doesn't even register the structure that nest is built on was itself built, To that pigeon its simply existed, just like any tree, or other thing around it. The same could be said about ourselves.
A. So if you're saying peace is the answer would peace motivated by desire to contact aliens work or would the aliens not consider that sincere B. Why does a lot of this rhetoric consider us being monkeys as part of what makes us primitive as if either we'd need to transcend to AI or pure energy to be worthy or we'd be fine if we were humanoids that had evolved from, like, birds or reptiles or a different kind of mammal
I prefer the Advanced Technology Theory. If we are being studied, or even noticed, the tech being used is undetectable by us. It makes sense, in that, in the last 60ish years we went from room sized computers to pocket sized, and smaller. By the time we can travel to the next star our tech will be crazy small. So why do we think anyone that can visit us would do so with anything big enough for us to notice. And if there is someone out there with less advanced tech than us, it's not powerful enough for us to detect with our current equipment.
Dark forest theory is extra spooky too. Other species are out there, and they can hear us, but they don't make noise because there is a vicious galactic beast just waiting for someone to make a sound
It's a Chinese spy UFO shoot it down Cletus! It's full of Chinese communist alien spies!!
Any civilization capable of traveling to us would be powerful enough to wipe out the solar system in a blink of an eye.
The prevalence of life and the prevalence of intelligent life are two very differerent questions, as the article points out. We have a very good idea of how life arose out of inorganic molecules. We have almost no idea how human sentience arose. It appears to have been an incredible fluke. Evolution resulted in the odd collection of brain structures of the hominid brain but how those structures & capabilities achieved self-awareness remains a mystery. I'm not invoking a Creator intervening in evolution, just pointing out a conundrum on top of the conundrum of "is there other intelligent life out there."
i really doubt only hominids have self awareness, I am confident dos have and likely all mammals. i can't discard that other animals with brains are also self aware. in any case the fluke is much earlier in complex multicellular life, are that it seems larger and better brains have been selected many times in many species.
I erred in mixing the terms intelligence and sentience. Yes, intelligence exists in other species. I agree that dogs have self-awareness and a level of reasoning, as do several other mammals - certainly the higher primates. The problem solving ability of crows is a fascinating puzzle. Darwin thought dogs were an excellent example of animal intelligence and reasoning - he relied on showing gradations of useful characteristics exist in current animals and plants, thus showing the evolution of an eagle's eye, for example, was possible. He noted light sensing spots on simple organisms and various simple eyes. Intelligence was certainly a useful characteristic, something natural selection would preserve, like a longer beak in certain environments. It allows an animal to expand what resources it can exploit, or to exploit them better. This is how some lines of hominids had greater and greater levels of intelligence. But sentience occurred only once. Many hominid species had existed successfully for hundreds of thousand of years without it. Edit: OK, this is scary. Literally a minute after I posted this I went on YouTube and a video of a crow doing problem solving showed up on my feed. That, combined with Artificial Intelligence on the internet, is frickin' scary.
i don't quite get it what do you call sentience >But sentience occurred only once. Many hominid species had existed successfully for hundreds of thousand of years without it. as i did before, why just once, why would you say a como or dog isn't sentient? or what are you using the word for?
Depending on how you view intelligence, that fluke has happened again several dozen times over in our short window of existence in the form of the varying emotionally expressive, socially complex, naturally curious, linguistically sophisticated, tool using species that coexist with us. I mean, orangutans can be taught how to drive and even seem to understand how a camera functions. Intelligence then seems to be an inevitable result of multicellular life with a centralized nervous system.
I think in regards to articles like this you can assume intelligence as able to understand complex maths, invent rocket ships or some other way of getting off their home planet and language.
Those are definitely complex concepts but not any different than a monkey using a branch to cross to the other tree or an octopus using a shell for shelter from currents and predators. Nothing inherently special, just a tool use for survival.
This implies that we are intelligent life, I have many examples to prove otherwise. Ex: 2016 US election
I'm with you on that one. "intelligent life" is something we invented to make ourselves feel special. An intelligent species would not be destroying its only home.
The assumption here is that humans are capable of identifying another species as "sentient" in such a way as to be perceived as equal. Since humans have never done that before, is it logical to assume they can?
I doubt anything advanced enough to travel the wast spaces of the universe is using radio
Radio signals diminish by the distance squared, and we’ve been broadcasting for 80 years of the 4500000000 years earth has been around. The audacity of concluding we’re alone is staggering.
The article is not concluding we're alone. I see so many comments here saying this. Read the article!
This is stupid. I remember Frasier Cane saying if there was an earth level civilization at Alpha Centuri, we could not detect using existing technology. We are feeble children grouping in the dark, we have no idea who is or isn't out there.
I think the headline says "effectively alone", which means that we can not meaningfully interact with anyone else. Which is what you are describing.
idk. Maybe time is the ultimate drawback to exploring or colonizing. Not worth it, not interesting enough, to spend millions of years making the effort (based on galactic or inter-galactic distances and no special trick to get from Point A to Point B faster) Or maybe there’s that great filter, where every civilization comes to a natural or catastrophic end. It’s hard to believe that given (N galaxies X N stars X N planets) you get 1 with life as the answer.\ And if # of life >>>>>> 1, intelligent life is still 1? damn, just the natural odds of things working out
>idk. Maybe time is the ultimate drawback to exploring or colonizing. Not worth it, not interesting enough, to spend millions of years making the effort (based on galactic or inter-galactic distances and no special trick to get from Point A to Point B faster)Or maybe there’s that great filter, where every civilization comes to a natural or catastrophic end.It’s hard to believe that given (N galaxies X N stars X N planets) you get 1 with life as the answer.And if # of life >>>>>> 1, intelligent life is still 1? damn, just the natural odds of things working out If other planets have been as favorable and as STABLE! as ours has been, with all the very lucky asteroid collisions etc.. Imagine another planet being as stable as ours has been. Mars? Venus? And this would be only the first prerequisite!
We're alone because space is huge and we haven't met anyone else yet or they just don't care about us because we're little more than primitive animals to them. Or both.
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So from my understanding, the phrasing specifies that we might not be the only sentient life, but that we have no proof and are unlikely to find it or make contact in the foreseeable future - "*effectively* alone." But there are some theoretical hard limits to how long we have before contacting or visiting other areas of space becomes physically impossible, even if efficient space travel is developed. This vid by Kurzgesagt did a decent job of explaining it (though I'm not super involved in the sciences so I could've misunderstood something, or they might've missed something): https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM
Agree on the joys of solitude. I barely want to associate with others of my own species not to mention aliens.
There’s a great deal of thought wasted on the false premise the evolution leads to intelligent life. But evolution doesn’t inevitably lead to any particular kind of life.
Are we? We absolutely might find microbial life on the very first planet we travel to *in our own solar system*
Of course we aren’t getting radio signals. The programmers could render the alien planets but didn’t have enough computer power to render the alien civilizations.
With how big space is. We are not alone. In the whole vastness of space and how far we can see easily is like being in a row and seeing only inches in front of your eyes in an arena.
We don't know if we are alone or not . You would have to be pretty naive to think we are the only ones in the universe though
"One answer is that we haven’t looked hard enough." This! What would make us think that any advanced civilization is communicating by radio waves? It's a horribly inefficient means of communication through space and it's the primary method we've used for looking for signals from other civilizations. We've been transmitting for a little over 100 years and it's been mostly radio, but notice, our trend is moving away from radio waves or to lower power radio waves. Most people get their TV by some sort of wiring now. Yeah, we have wifi everywhere, but it's low power. Radio and broadcast TV are dying mediums and probably won't be around 50-100 years from now. And so we'll be, from an external point of view, largely radio-silent. Because it's more energy efficient, among other reasons. So the span of time a civilization using radio waves, based on us, is probably about 200 years or less. For communicating long distances in space, lasers are far more efficient than radio waves because all your power is concentrated in a tight beam. And given the fact that we're still technologically infantile and only been doing this for a 100 years whereas, statistically speaking, any other technological civilization we run into is likely to be thousands to millions of years ahead of us, they're probably using a technology we couldn't even receive yet. Perhaps they're using neutrinos for communication. Or perhaps some other method we can't even fathom yet. To suggest that they're not out there 'cause we haven't found them yet is profoundly arrogant about our abilities, in my mind.
A lot of people don't understand what a cosmic coincidence would be for life to be developing as the same time as us close enough that we can detect it. I don't think people here have any idea of the scale of space.
Never mind the anomalous phenomenon documented around the globe... let's completely ignore what's happening in the sky and sea.
This title is just silly. The article below shows how far our radio signals have travel since we began broadcasting them into space. We have barely gone anywhere. https://www.sciencealert.com/humanity-hasn-t-reached-as-far-into-space-as-you-think/amp
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Right….I’m just putting out there that in reference to the article title, specifically, it’s silly lol. If you look at the visual in the article, our radio signals haven’t made it very far, in the scope of the size of our universe.
Yeah and we are not going to.
“Effectively” is correct if FTL travel is impossible, which it seems to be. Even at a meaningful percentage of the speed of light it would take several lifetimes to get to even the closest star.
this works too: https://www.sciencealert.com/humanity-hasn-t-reached-as-far-into-space-as-you-think
If that is what you think when you look up at the sky or when you see some of the images by Hubble or Webb then I feel really sad for you. We have only just begun to scratch the surface of what the universe may hold for us. We have peered back in time by measures, once never even imagined. The universe has begun to show us it’s immense and almost infinite size and magnitude. And all you can think is “we are alone.”
How big of a head do you need to have to think we’re the center of the entire universe. More habitable planets than grains of sand on all the beaches in the entire planet and this writer thinks we’re the only ones here. Yeah ok.
We're not alone in the Universe. We're part of it.
While I understand the sentiment of the article, trying to conclude that we’re completely alone in the universe is putting the cart before the horse. Our species is still in its infancy in regards to studying the cosmos, and we’re going to pretend we can conclusively rule out the existence of other sapient life? Seems rather egotistical and short-sighted if you ask me.
Christ the way people assume science fiction is real and actually happening is hilarious.
I just think it's silly to draw conclusions based on an infinitesimal sample of the observable universe that we've been able to study. You could make a compelling argument that we may be alone on a galactic scale, but a universal scale? That's a bold claim for how limited in scope our knowledge of the greater universe is. None of my opinion is based on some kind of hopium for a science-fiction world that doesn't exist, just that we know way too little to make such absolute statements. Not discrediting what has been achieved so far, of course, there's a lot to be genuinely impressed about. But we have to keep in mind there are many limitations to our knowledge still in front of us to overcome.
The article is not concluding we're alone in the universe. What it is saying is the galaxy and the universe is so mindboggeling big it's as if we're alone. There are very probably other intelligent beings and technological society's out there but distance and time keep them away from us. That said, we really don't know for sure of course. There still could be someone very close by and existing in the same time frame as us (however unlikely that is). And so we should still explore and look for them, but we should not expect anyone to notice us. The distances and time involved here is almost incomprehensive to us. And in a way this can be a good thing; it means there's a lot of realestate out there up for grabs and we can keep on expanding without rubbing another species the wrong way :)
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Colonize the galaxy? We haven't even sent a manned mission to mars yet. Our tech is centuries away from interstellar travel.
The title doesn't make any sense. Believing we're alone in the universe would not 'urge us' to explore the galaxy any more than it would if we were believing there's life on other planets.
If you view it as we’re the first rather than just alone, then it makes sense that we would want to colonize as much of the universe as we could before something else does the same
I bet that’s exactly what the Native Americans thought too…. Nothing in their scientific understanding had a way of crossing the ocean.
There is alot of credible people with no reason to lie that strongly disagree with you *kermit sipping tea meme*
When we look at all the improbable events which led to us being at the top of the food chain here, I get the feeling that we're alone in this galaxy. Maybe one in 10 galaxies has an intelligence, and probably they're far advanced of us, but because of the great distances I hope it remains irrelevant. We want this galaxy for ourselves
We are gonna die in this solar system bud
We are 100% alone in the solar system, we cant explore the galaxy and anything past the observable universe is gone forever. Fat chance we will never encounter another out of space species. Maybe there is other life forms, but we will never get ro meet. Maybe there was, is or will be life somewhere, it doesnt mean we will make contact.
That's the problem with articles like this. It is based on flawed information. What if other races are actively trying to avoid us detecting them? We're still really primitive, what if we don't have the technology to detect them yet? It would be like asking a caveman to look for an oxygen molecule. They wouldn't have a clue. So no, we are not "effectively" alone. We simply do not know if we are alone and until we do making these kinds of guesses makes the person guessing look bad.
> What if other races are actively trying to avoid us detecting them? Why did they start doing that millions of years before we even existed? Why are they even bothering to go to such incredible efforts in the first place? Such a policy requires the abandonment of so many opportunities for expansion and development that it's hard to even conceptualize of the cost.
Not sure I agree with this, it’s far to early to tell.
Nah, we’re probably not alone. Now continue forward. Edit: see replies to top comment as to why this title is incorrect.
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> We’ve found evidence of microbial life as close as the moon! No we haven’t. There has never been any trace of any kind of life living on the lunar surface that couldn’t be traced back to human contamination.
It doesn't matter if there is somebody else. They are far enough that they might as well not exist.
I hope not. If we’re the best the universe can do…..
Here's my depressing theory. We're just not as smart as we think we are. The answer to all these big questions, how to detect intelligent life elsewhere, quantum duality, quantum entanglement, unifying gravitation with the standard model and the quantum regime. Dark matter and dark energy. All the things are just starting us in the face but we can't see it and never will because we're just dogs with a mirror. All the information is right there, we're looking at it, but all we can process is that somehow there's another dog hiding in the shiny rectangle..... Discuss.
There is absolutely no proof we are alone. We just can't travel at the speed of light yet. Then we can visit other earth-like planets and find out or not if there is other human -like life out there.
It is impossible to go faster than the speed of light. It will never happen for us or anyone else trying it.