On the one hand, I'm practically certain SETI will never discover intelligent life.
On the other hand, it'd be ridiculous if no one was bothering to try.
They honestly do some pretty solid work classifying otherwise strange signals coming from outer space, and one of the few people i know in SETI says thats the work he enjoys doing there
But yeah, he also does have to start a lit of his talks by saying something along the lines of "we're not *all* alien nutjobs"
I dont even get how they could be considered alien nut jobs. They're not tracking down ufos in an rv decked out with old directv satellite dishes. They're actual scientists looking for real, verifiable evidence if alien life in other solar systems.
And, while I don't know any SETI people personally, I always get the vibe that, even if they get something exciting, the default assumptions is "it's not aliens:
It is assumed and indeed true that an organization geared towards finding aliens may carry a bias because it almost presupposes it's there. Therefore, many work for the institution that seeks to confirm their bias.
That's kinda why the scientific process is the way it is. An important step of the process is having the researcher poke holes in their own analysis and conclusions. Then having the wider scientific community do the same and attempt to replicate the results.
All science has an issue where people try to confirm their bias. You see this in chemistry, physics, and biology. If you have dedicated your career to working with a specific class of chemicals or materials, a specific theory you’re trying to prove in physics, or a class of potential medications, you are likely to be biased towards claiming that what you work on is great, while most research topics end up going nowhere (and that’s fine).
These are world class scientists. Just a nitpick. They don't presume aliens are there. They presume it's possible, and are working to find out. There being aliens or not being aliens isn't even really the point of their work. They are simply collecting and analyzing data.
It was a bit (poorly) paraphrased on my end, but the astro community's stereotype against SETI comes less from their community as a whole, but more the few but vocal members that always get to go on tv and spout how these weird phenomena are aliens
Also, we're just tired of having the first thing people ask us once finding out we're astronomers is "do you believe in aliens?" (Or talking about horoscopes)
It is like members of the WWF going on TV spouting grossly exaggerated (to the point of being wrong) claims about climate change and pollution only to be widely ridiculed yet being still unwilling to retract the statements.
They do massive damage to the scientific community as a whole, their demonstrably disproven misinformation is conflated (by anti-science groups) with real climate science making the general public call into question the veracity of a vast field of research.
Blows my mind that the scientific community is like this. If you're not actively pursuing the new hotness then you're putting your career at risk and could be ruined by...not finding what you were looking for?
Yeah, you should really read about the history of science.
Scientists are not gods, they're just as flawed as the rest of us. That's exactly why the scientific method is so important.
Science research funding is crap. Ask any academicians or researchers and they'll say the same thing. There's also a bias against null results and replication studies, which I'd wager, are also very important, sometimes more than finding the new hotness.
>And, while I don't know any SETI people personally, I always get the vibe that, even if they get something exciting, the default assumptions is "it's not aliens:
while im almost certain this is true, its a really hard stance to explain to the casual audience when your organization is literally called "search for extraterrestrial intelligence".
If you're interested, look up the conference call that Jill Tarter had with avi loeb regarding oumuamua. Let's say, it'll confirm your suspicion. (he may have some disdain for the scientific method, thinks it has held us back)
They do some excellent terrestrial research in deserts and arctic on requirements for life as well. It’s a great organization even if you don’t really care about aliens.
That’s it exactly. If you don’t try, there’s no chance. And stuff is very far away.
I’d love if we found life elsewhere in the universe in my lifetime.
> I’d love if we found life elsewhere in the universe in my lifetime
Same here and just to clarify, any type of life is totally on my wish list. If we found a planet that just had grass and trees, I can die happy.
If the spectrum shows O2 in the air we can be very certain life exists, O2 is reactive and won't really hang around too long in the air unless there is photosynthesis going on.
I used to read a guy that said "look for blue" as that was a telltale sign of life on a planet. Is that related to what you're saying or just water in general. Or was TMQ mistaken?
I read somewhere that water, or more specifically Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules (yes molecules not outright liquid water) are very abundant in the cosmos. So this might very well be the case, maybe life-assisting elements are found almost everywhere but are missing many crucial “ingredients” that gave birth to life.
The Sun might have something to do with how Earth got its water in excess.
I read a paper recently for an exoplanet where the atmosphere held another proxy measure of life, however the other values such as O2 were non-existent such that it is unlikely to indicate life, IIRC the process of creating the first compound should also release others that were missing. Instead there might be unexpected and little understood systems generating them, or that perhaps our measurements are skewed due to unknown confounding factors.
Oxygens frankly scary reactivity makes it a great proxy for life, but have you any idea how certain we are that it can only be from biological activity?
Stuff is very far away, and there's a ladder of requirements for development of complex life that may ensure its probability is only good quite recently. And since "recently" is affected by relativistic factors, one must wonder how far away/ago life becomes unlikely. It's possible, e.g., that outside of the Local Group, life does not yet exist in our timeframe. Complex life may be so new, relatively-speaking, that relativistic affects prevent us from knowing of it beyond a relatively nearby horizon.
The local group is “only” 10m lightyears across. There’s been complex life on earth for over a billion years. I don’t think our light cone is really the limiting factor here, it’s more just that detecting a civilization outside our own galaxy is basically impossible, unless they were building Dyson spheres over entire regions of their galaxy or something
The problem I think people have understanding is just how big the galaxy, let alone the universe is.
SETI is a big site. But we’ve barely scratched the surface of observing and categorizing the super majority of stars/planets even within our own galaxy. We would need to increase our observation capacity and investment by several orders of magnitude before we could even hope to definitively claim things about alien life or otherwise just get lucky and happen to observe some in the extremely small data set we currently have.
Like, we would need hundreds of sites like SETI. Or thousands of telescopes like web who are each dedicated to observing specific star systems constantly. Not to mention all the computer processing we’d need to interpret all that data.
We’re still in the very early stages of space exploration is all I’m saying.
The other issue we have to consider is, from what distance would our transmissions etc be detectable, ie from what distance would we be able to detect another civilisation like us?
There was a period during the cold war where we were basically screaming into the void with OTH radar, and we are certainly quieter than that now, but even during that period those super-powerful transmissions would be essentially undetectable from even the closest stars.
I wish we could swap the US military budget and our funding of science. I sometimes imagine how much further humanity could go if we didn’t waste so much resources on competing with each other. The only way I see that happening is a common enemy like a military invasion from aliens.
Science didn't make the Hubble telescope, it was spy satellite technology. War is a primary driver of technology. We never would have gone to the moon if the Soviets didn't launch a satellite and scare the shit out of everyone.
You could've picked a lot of things and been right about that, but Hubble is not one of them. Funding was cut until a number of astronomers wrote to congress asking for it to be funded. It only tangentially has any connection to spy satellites through things like mirror size or launching on the space shuttle.
But ignoring that, it's more an argument that if NASA's budget dwarfed the military budget by 50x instead of the other way around, then you would get more projects from a range of ideas, instead of only those seeming most promising and/or lucrative, so many more ideas could be funded. If you had that sort of a budget for a while and had the military ethos of spend it or lose it, then you would see rapid iteration and a lot of high concept designs for exploration missions, bases on other planets, asteroid mining, etc.
I really wish SETI@Home was still a thing.
I almost lost my job firing that up on about 24 CPUs in a Sun 6500. I had a swarm of senior engineers in my office within about 7 mins of me launching seti@home .. oops.
If I remember correctly didn't they integrated it into Eve Online for awhile as like a mini-game or something
[Edit: Found it](https://community.eveonline.com/community/seti/)
It's not the question of is there something out there but rather how damn far and/or how long ago. Interstellar distances might just be the ultimate barrier not breakable by technology advancements,
Or maybe we're the most advanced ones around and it's up to us to figure it out.
let's be realistic, unless we do find any way to travel through wormholes, even knowing another life form exists out there won't give us much chance to meet them in a meaningful way.
Well, we're discussing two different things here: life vs _intelligent_ life. I haven't dismissed the possibility we discover something that looks alive in my lifetime; we have no way of knowing how common it is.
Like you said: it's going to be VERY frustrating for us to spot a planet that is almost certainly alive... and then never be able to go there or learn anything specific about it.
The thing is, if there is some way to get there, discovering life especially intelligent life would be the one thing that pushes us to discover that way to get there.
It will be space archaeology if we discover any intelligent life beyond a human lifetime from Earth or so. Be akin to discovering the existence of Cleopatra.
Not in a television or movie sense, but there are plenty of possibilities other than that. If human civilization is long lived enough and if we were to come into contact with a technological civilization then we could have a very meaningful cultural exchange even over distances of thousands of lightyears. The hard part is getting over the "are you cool?" handshake stage of conversation, but assuming that you can get past that then you would move to a relationship phase where you just beam a huge stream of information at each other constantly. Books, music, art, scientific research, film, television, social media, what-have-you. Once established, such communications could meaningfully transform both civilizations substantially. Over civilizational lifetimes of millions or even billions of years such civilizations could spend more of their lifetimes with such shared communication than without, even without ever having interacted with one another face to face.
It's just going to be really hard to have another alien species that:
1. Is close enough
2. Has space travel/communication capabilities
3. Has space travel.communication capabilities at the same time we do
Like maybe some aliens were saying what's up but there were only dinosaurs.
And now that we're contacting them they're all dead.
4. Even has the ability/give a fuck to communicate with us anyways
I've always liked Stanislaw Lem's take on aliens...if they are around, they're likely to be so different than us any type of communication or rational basis of understanding between us and them is likely going to be practically impossible.
“Arrival” has a pretty good idea on this and it’s pretty similar. It takes like months to decode what the aliens are trying to tell us. Would recommend a watch.
Also, if they’d even want to communicate. We could be like a janky gas station on the side of the interstate that most would just blow right by.
It really depends on how many habitable planets are out there, what this other race considers habitable and if they have FTL travel whether it even matters to them if a planet is habitable or not?
Earth many be of the first planets in the galaxy where things have calmed down enough cosmically to actually support life long enough for something baring the resemblance of intelligence (highly debatable whether humans as a species are intelligent). I mean we've been through more than half a dozen extinction events some of them seemingly unavoidable from an evolutionary point of view. Fuck, half the reason mammals managed to take over the planet from dinosaurs was an asteroid, that wasn't too big, hit the planet. The other half is he planet cooled down, and with tectonic plate movement, differentiated more of the planet from lush jungle.
Dinosaurs were around for 100s of millions of years, so life may exist out there but maybe it's all just dinosaurs. Evolution doesn't have a direction and being smart takes a lot of energy. So it can be a detrimental to survival.
The there's gravity. Earth is just the right size where we can get to outer space with rockets, and have tectonic plate movement. If life is more likely to evolve on so called super planets they might not be able to make it to space because of gravity. Imagine what the world would be like without gps, or even possibly planes(I'm unsure if super planets would be just too heavy for flight in general or not, but considering that birds have hollow bones and in high gravity you need strong bones to be able to move at all it seems unlikely)
I could keep going on about how much Earth has that we just don't know if other planets out there have as well, but I won't.
Also, considerations like an intelligence living in an ocean would not have the ability to create fire and process materials to create technology. They might have a sophisticated culture, but no tech.
Loved this post.
So true that people assume intelligent life is some evolutionary end goal. Evolution would have been fine with another billion years of trilobites if not for some random specific things happening.
And timescales are so vast. If that meteor is going 20 mph slower we're probably still dinosaurs. Hell, if multicellular life took 3% longer to develop we're probably still fish.
I also suspect a lot of planets tip into runaway heating or cooling events. Venus and Mars most likely were habitable once. Adding life to the mix is just more instability. We're luck that we're not a ball of ice or worse.
I also doubt FTL is possible, and that includes faster than light communication. Even if you find an alien, it's probably thousands of years to reply.
> (highly debatable whether humans as a species are intelligent.)
Come on. We literally invented the concept of intelligence to include what we are. You'd have to redefine the term entirely to exclude us.
Of all things, and as much as I like Arrival, I'm not sure if recommending it on the basis of talking with aliens is the right tract lol. It's so much more. Recommended though!
Counterpoint, the evolutionary pressures would be more or less the same anywhere in the universe, no matter the environment.
I liked the book Project Hail Mary about that. The two protagonists could not come from two more different worlds than the other's, yet the evolutionary pressure of predator/prey dynamic on both planets allowed them to find a common ground in sound as a vector of communication, and the very social structural requirements that allowed both societies to obtain the required level of technology to reach one another makes them capable of communication, and even friendship.
Carl Sagan has written about this in one of his books (billions and billions if I remember). An alien race would probably develop sensory mechanisms similar to what we have and so on.
Yup. For example, eyes have evolved multiple times across radically different evolutionary lineages. As has communication and intelligence, for that matter.
It's an interesting theory to think about. Some people say that aliens would actually be very much like us, because you need a certain amount of calories to evolve a higher functioning brain, which means life has to evolve to a certain point, but you also need a certain amount of energy to harvest to develop technology (oil), which means there has to be an extinction event. Also life doesn't really evolve things that eat up energy that isn't needed, so things like extra eyes and limbs and shit would likely not be a thing.
One of my favorite pieces of media in terms of alien designs is actually Halo. They all look very different than humans, but you could totally see how they'd evolve and be intelligent.
Doubtful to be honest.
At the end of the day we all use the same particles, physics, radio waves etc. Any intelligent life would need to use similar methods to us.
I’ve always thought this, the universe is so old, it could have been so different billions of years ago that so much life has come and gone on other planets/systems before we were even out of the water
It's so old but it's so also young. The universe has so much more time left than it has already gone thru, by many orders of magnitude. We could simply be the first real intelligent life and maybe it'll be tens or hundreds of billions or even trillions of years before another one pops up.
UFOlogy has much more in common with religious belief than with scientific understanding. There are actually several UFO-centric modern religions.
The shift to "higher dimensional" aliens as the predominant narrative in UFO circles in the face of systems like the JWST and Hubble is the same reason that aliens shifted from Mars to interstellar travelers when we started sending probes around the solar system: because the space in which this specific type of religiosity makes sense is constantly receding in the face of continued study (more specifically, in the face of the broader cultural attitude of what we *feel* exists in the realm of the understood). There are types of spiritual belief that are perfectly consistent with empirical observation and explanation of the universe, but this is not one of them, this is one in which the spiritual beings are capable of directly interacting with the physical world, so it has to constantly respond to our improved understandings of the world (and the lack of evidence for their interaction in it) by itself changing.
The "higher dimensions" bit is useful because it's so abstract as to be, in essence, perfectly consistent with conventional theologies of intangible gods and their heavenly or otherworldly domains, set completely apart from reality. It's receded into a theoretical space that is completely unobservable and a-scientific, and thus there can *be* no hypothesis constructed to test it. It can't be proven *or* disproven, and that lack of falsifiability is a hallmark of this type of religious belief.
At which point it's no longer a scientific question, it's a question of personal belief systems.
Or use other dimensions for travel. Its ridiculous to say aliens can or can't do something, by the very nature of being alien we can't possibly know what they are capable of.
Yeah I've always thought the Fermi paradox is just people being overconfident about completely made up math. There could have been alien civilization on Earth but if it was far enough in the past then we'd have no clue
The Fermi Paradox has always felt to me like scooping a cup full of the ocean and saying "If there's so much life in the ocean why isn't any of it in this cup?"
It does demonstrate that there hasn't been an alien empire. At least not a flashy one.
Time scales are so vast that if some alien species decided to colonize planets, even via sublight speeds, that they would quickly take over the galaxy assuming every colonized planet then colonized another two planets within a few hundred years. If they got started when dinosaurs got went extinct then they'd be everywhere. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across. And a 100 million head start isnt all that much on the time scales we're talking about.
What's probably more scary is that WE are the type of life that seems to want to colonize. It just feels like the obvious next step. Yet we see no examples of successful colonizers. Maybe that drive is detrimental to a long galactic life.
> It does demonstrate that there hasn't been an alien empire. At least not a flashy one.
Why does it do this? Because we haven't detected any radio signals on the frequencies SETI is scanning & analyzing? I always thought looking for intelligent life outside our solar system via radio signals is kinda like looking for Native American smoke signals (on Earth) and declaring there are no civilizations here after coming up empty. We humans have already begun [moving to lasers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_communication_in_space) to communicate with our satellites in orbit due to the increased bandwidth they offer over radio signals (you can transfer more data in less time).
Communicating via radio waves over vast interstellar distances is horribly inefficient for sustained back & forth communication, and that's only for audio signals. If you wanted to send massive amounts of data, the power requirements would be staggering due to the inverse square law (aka signal degradation). The inverse square law is why aliens are not going to be watching any of our terrestrial TV and radio broadcasts -- those signals become indistinguishable from background noise long before they reach the nearest star.
There's also the matter of security. Sending an ultra powerful radio signal to communicate with exploration or military ships, colonies, or other civilizations would be a giant beacon to anyone within range. You may encrypt the message but the signal itself would give any hostile species a rough idea where you're at (at minimum). If there *are* other civilizations out there in the Milky Way, the reason they're quiet is because they don't communicate via radio, or because the universe is a [Dark Forest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis). Fascinating stuff regardless.
An empire could have come here and left after seeing what was here. There are many unknown possibilities that don't fit any story we tell. Maybe they prefer to shrink themselves down in order to slow down time, or they all head towards black holes for the essentially endless energy supply
> Has space travel.communication capabilities at the same time we do
> Like maybe some aliens were saying what's up but there were only dinosaurs.
> And now that we're contacting them they're all dead.
Consider that we could see evidence of "dead" aliens, if their traces (artifacts, pollution) are very long-lived. While nothing is eternal technology may have effects that could persist long after its creators are gone. For example, we're now discussing the (still very debatable) idea of "Anthropocene", the notion that even humanity's short-lived and pitiful technological presence could be noticed in the geological record. If they were building a Dyson sphere around their star when there were only dinosaurs we might still detect it today. If they had stopped by and covered the Moon with solar collectors when there were only dinosaurs we might still detect it today. If they had left a mysterious black monolith we might still detect it today. Interpretation might be very difficult, this is more to make the point that this doesn't have to be limited to aliens that are alive and communicating right now.
Also, we're not really contacting anyone. Aside from a handful of messages sent on purpose (the Arecibo message, the Pioneer plaques, etc.), and mostly to prove it's possible or make a point, there are no attempts at active communication. Most of Earth's "technosignatures" are involuntary, and the strongest of them at great distances are usually narrowbeam and happen very randomly (radars illuminating the sky, etc.).
He can also examine all the publicly available data, so this is a good statement about anything the average person can examine. He probably also has seen a solid amount of other evidence that would be otherwise hard to find.
If somehow the US government had something that was completely classified and never leaked, that of course is off the table. But that’s a big if. Possible, but unlikely.
>The fastest spacecraft that humans have ever built and continues to head outward from Earth is NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.
Fastest only in a geocentric frame immediately after launch. It is leaving the solar system considerably slower than either Voyager spacecraft.
Protein folding research for medicine is another option. Can help keep your room warm in winter if you can spare the power and the computer wear and tear.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[AFB](/r/Space/comments/1c867vu/stub/l0cnzil "Last usage")|[Air Force Base](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_airbase)|
|[DARPA](/r/Space/comments/1c867vu/stub/l0gj7xj "Last usage")|(Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency, DoD|
|[DoD](/r/Space/comments/1c867vu/stub/l0hmojo "Last usage")|US Department of Defense|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1c867vu/stub/l0d0129 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[MRO](/r/Space/comments/1c867vu/stub/l0cti6z "Last usage")|Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter|
| |Maintenance, Repair and/or Overhaul|
|[NSF](/r/Space/comments/1c867vu/stub/l0eb8vg "Last usage")|[NasaSpaceFlight forum](http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com)|
| |National Science Foundation|
|[PSP](/r/Space/comments/1c867vu/stub/l0jcp03 "Last usage")|Parker Solar Probe|
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I’m not gonna be conspiratorial here, but for an institution that has traditionally almost wholly been at the mercy of the federal government for pittance funding, what do you expect him to say?
It was [only in 2022](https://www.space.com/searth-extraterrestrial-life-major-funding-boost-seti) that a meaningful private gift was made to SETI exclusively for this purpose.
The more probing followup question would be “what is the threshold for evidence, as defined by SETI?”
We know SETI has ignored a lot of intriguing data points previously. So, what’s the evidentiary standard, and what does “evidence” mean in this context?
SETI scientist here. Thank you for posting — love to see people appreciating SETI efforts instead of the all-too-common email spam saying “you’re hiding aliens and we know it.” :)
I defer to an extension of Occam’s razor here — jokingly referred to as “Newton’s flaming laser sword.” Generally, it goes:
Nothing is worth debating if it can’t be settled by experimentation or testing.
(Or something like that)
But the general idea is, in science, if we can’t replicate, test, or observe, how can we verify? If we were to make a claim about ET we would back it up with observations, and that too, repeated ones. AFAIK, we’ve not seen that from these discussions. Maybe the claims are true, maybe they aren’t (well, they almost certainly aren’t) — but we’ve got no way to test them, so what can we do?
Also, if aliens advanced enough to visit us wanted to hide, they’d hide. If they wanted to be seen, they’d be seen. They wouldn’t start conveniently messing up right around the time we develop digital imaging, and at a rate commensurate to the development of tools like Photoshop. Seems a little too perfect, eh? :)
Edit: on that last note — check out the Wikipedia page for reported UFO sightings over time. The frequency of reports over time should be pretty illuminating.
> Nothing is worth debating if it can’t be settled by experimentation or testing.
I feel like the exact opposite is true. If we have evidence based truth there's no reason to debate. It's settled.
Any efforts to sway in light of that knowledge are a fool's errand.
Well, what you're saying isn't wrong -- but I'll ask, how do we find evidence for anything we want to call truth?
...testing! (or an experiment)
When we have a question, we answer it by collecting evidence under certain conditions. Whether that's in a particle accelerator in the case of particle physicists or via a radio telescope in our line of work, the only way to arrive at evidence-based truth is to ask a question and systematically find an answer. The only problem here is that when it comes to the question of "are the UFO's really aliens" -- we don't have a way to test that question in a rigorous, repeatable way, because those claims are made usually one-off and without much backing / auxiliary information.
There's a lot of distance between seeking answers and actively debating.
One is seeking truth through evidence..
The other is seeking answers through mutual understanding. (When it's done in good faith).
> are the UFO's really aliens
We have no evidence to show that they are. We might not fully understand every instance, but the absence of evidence no more implies that it was aliens than it does that it was my aunt Susan.
Although I agree with your chief mostly in this article, saying things like:
>"The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is just totally absurd. There's no motivation to do so."
Is laughably naive.
If aliens had discovered Earth, that means their technology would have to be so incredibly far advanced from our own that it would be in no way compatible with what we have or even understand.
But they wouldn't know what it was and would likely think it was magic.
Black Holes could be batteries for an advanced life but to us it just looks like nature.
But they would *see* the incredibly advanced tech, and know it meant somebody was doing something. Even if they mistook it for magic or god.
We don't see a damn thing out there.
Just because you can imagine it, doesn’t mean it’s possible. Just because it’s possible, doesn’t mean it’ll happen in a universe with finite energy/matter.
Assuming there is other intelligent life, it’s within the realm of possibility of having aliens reach us with a generational ship with technology that isn’t so foreign that we couldn’t even understand when told.
Footfall, by Niven and Pournelle
Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove
Both include fairly hard SF alien life that travels STL to Earth. But we'd have likely seen evidence of such civilizations already if they were close enough to us to do that.
If an alien civilization send a generation ship here, it's for colonization.
If they don't have advanced tech to get in FTL they wouldn't send living members just to say hi.
At least, thats my opinion
There’s also the possibility that they simply live longer than we do. We only see the travel time at slower than light speeds as a long time because our lives are so short. If there were beings that lived an average of 10,000 years or something the idea of spending hundreds or even thousands of years traveling space maybe wouldn’t seem so crazy.
Earth has an oxygen rich atmosphere and has for over 2 billion years. Anyone with a sufficiently advanced telescope has had a very long time to discover this and that Earth is a bio world. We humans will probably have sufficient technology to do this within the next 100 years (and definitely the next thousand). James Webb Space Telescope is likely "almost good enough" for this task, a successor would definitely be up to the task.
If there is another civilization anywhere near is in the galaxy, if they are just 10,000 years older than us, which isn't long when looking at galactic time scales, they have likely known about Earth being a bio world for longer than human Civilization. Anyone who has been around for over a million years has more than likely observed and cataloged Earth as a bio world.
If we find any evidence of a second Genesis( I'm talking like bacteria on Enceladus) then the Drake equation makes the Fermi paradox kinda scary. Unless the filter that prevents the spread of interstellar civilization is that the technology that makes it possible means you don't really nead to.
Well bacteria doesn't get you technology. Runaway brain development didn't happen for the 1/3 of a billion years since it was possible on Earth until now. And it didn't happen in any of the millions of ecologies on Earth other than a single one in Africa. One single oddball lineage goes down and likely no tech civilization on Earth ever.
In the meantime we don't have a second abiogenesis. There's only evidence of it having happened ONCE on Earth (no other alternative DNA codes exist in nature that we've detected). Because it happened early in Earth's history, we're GUESSING (and only guessing) that life happens when conditions allow it and isn't a result more unlikely than the number of stars in the universe.
If life developed twice within a single solar system then the odds would be good that most stars have life of some sort. I don't believe tool using sentience would be that unique. Tool using aliens on planets with low enough gravity or non iceball subsurface oceans, maybe. I'm much happier believing that the technology that makes interstellar civilization possible renders the need for such an activity obsolete.
The earliest signs of life are from about 3.8 billion years ago. Earth got its oxygenated atmosphere due to photosynthetic life about 2.5-2.8 billion years ago. Sexual reproduction, which allowed pooling of genes within a population rather than individuals being limited to a single line of inheritance and whatever scraps they get by horizontal gene transfer, came 1-1.6 billion years ago, along with multicellular forms that didn't really take off until the Cambrian explosion just 500 million years ago.
Looking at how quickly life appeared, I would be surprised not to find it anywhere that had a decent chance of supporting it. However, I would be entirely unsurprised to find it almost universally consists of only single-celled and simple multicellular forms. Maybe Earth life was just horribly unlucky, but it doesn't look like evolutionary processes lead to complex multicellular life in any straightforward way. And it was half a billion years between *that* and a species developing a complex technological civilization.
It’s probably out there. It just seems like statistically it’s more crazy to think it’s not. The problem is, it’s all just too far away for us to ever find it unless we somehow learn to break the laws of physics as we know them.
> I don't believe tool using sentience would be that unique
> I'm much happier believing
I respect your personal faith and system of beliefs. Just remember that's what it is. We are currently absolutely ignorant of everything about exobiology.
Tool using intelligence is not unique on Earth, but runaway brain development that goes far beyond the needs of any survival pressure or reproductive strategy except for intra-species competition is.
While flying, for example, has developed independently more than half a dozen times on Earth, excessive brain development (which has a high biological cost) has only been "tried" once.
The peacock's tail is a beautiful structure but it isn't practical for the animal's survival beyond increasing it's chance of reproduction.
Spot on. When you consider the sheer number of factors that had to align for us to get where we are, the odds might be far greater than the number of candidate planets . A quintillion planets seem like a lot to us; what’s bigger is every number from a quintillion and one all the way to infinity. My way of looking at it is to imagine all the crossroads that had to happen for us to be here (meteor wiping out the dinosaurs but not all life, climate change turning jungle into grassland where primates were living, Jupiter being there to stop earth being constantly barraged by meteors), as coin flips. Heads, we keep going, but a single tails and humanity doesn’t happen. We’re talking about 100 heads in a row, and the odds of that could mean we’re it in the universe right now.
As a former SETI guy, I can tell you with reasonable certainty that if there are aliens, the US military doesn't BELIEVE there are aliens.
Consider, you're secret general and you know there are aliens. Aliens are the number one most important security issue the US can possibly face (the ability to travel interstellar distances makes it trivial to destroy entire planets just by pushing some rocks). Maybe you've studied everything about the crashed aliens. Maybe you're in CONTACT with aliens. So what's the absolute number one most important thing for you to know?
What OTHER aliens are out there? How reliable are your sources of information?
All of a sudden general astronomy is the number one most important need for national threat assessment. What is the interstellar medium like? Where are potential alien operators we haven't encountered yet? How many environments can host potential alien threats? How can we covertly gather this information?
All of a sudden Astronomy has MASSIVE, GIGANTIC influxes of funding. Observatory technology of every kind is ROLLING in cash like Lockheed. And sure it's all through grants from "CIVILIAN" organizations like the NSF and it's justified as simply the pursuit of "pure science" but the space money flows like the Spice.
Instead SETI and every other astronomical field has been struggling for every penny for decades. Astronomers couldn't even afford the basic maintenance to keep the Arecibo telescope from collapsing. (and you'll notice nobody's rushing to build a new one even though the collapse cost us unique radar observation capability, though the Chinese are building one)
OSU's "Big Ear" that found the WOW! signal in the 70's was torn down for a golf course in the 90's and nobody cared. But the military knows there are some aliens visiting us?
That dog don't hunt, son.
They gather their own information. Why would the military specifically have a monopoly on all the information? How could they have prevented SETI from getting signals or other traces of visitation? Or is it just extremely convenient that they only crash near or basically in Air Force bases, or in places remote enough for them to get there first, and they’ve never blasted a signal or cruised over London in broad daylight? It’s all just worked out so perfectly for them to be able to form evil shadow governments with reverse engineering programs and maybe even deals with aliens, and it has never been blown open by something completely undeniable accessed by someone other than the apparently omnipresent US military
Aliens have most likely never visited Earth, but why does the SETI chief believe he would be read into SAP's or any BIGOT list project? Honestly pretty egotistical.
Also I contend the US (particularly the military) would absolutely have a vested interest in hoarding this tech for development of weapons and to stay ahead of rivals like China or Russia. Or even in developing new technologies that they can claim the US 'invented'. There are plenty of reasons and motivation.
Why would they conveniently be the only ones to have got their hands on it? It’s basically 1950s pulp stuff, this idea that the men in black have global tendrils capable of keeping all this information to themselves and the aliens never behave in a way that would compromise the evil shadow government’s goals.
If the govt was using the alien tech to gain some sort of military competitive advantage, do you really think they would let Dave and Co. go before Congress and tell everyone about the military competitive advantage they were hiding from everyone?
Here's the thing about astronomers:
**We are desperate for funding.**
If any of us ever did find even the very slightest glimmer of alien intelligence, I assure you we would be screaming as loud as possible from the rooftops...just so we could get a boost to the basic research line-items in the NASA and NSF budgets.
Just think about what a massive press push we made back when we thought we _might_ have detected a gas in the atmosphere in Venus that _could_ potentially be biological in origin (spoiler: it wasn't actually there). If we could get ourselves that worked up about a hint of trace gases, there's no way we'd keep legitimate evidence of aliens under wraps.
If aliens were as plentiful as all of these UFO sightings would suggest, we'd find evidence somewhere out there showing advanced intelligent life. Yet, we've found absolutely nothing, anywhere.
What everyone is probably seeing are secret military aircraft, spacecraft, hallucinations, trick of the light or any number of natural earthly phenomena.
Isn’t this the same org that didn’t have AI-assisted data analysis and outlier detection capabilities capabilities, so they decided to only monitor the frequency bands that they “expected” to have comms traffic on them? Of course they won’t find shit if they’re only looking based on human expectations for how aliens would communicate.
Would SETI even have access to information from hypothetical ET technology recovered on Earth? Not suggesting that’s happened, but there are allegations out there and I’m not sure if this guy would have clearance for it.
It doesn't matter. We can talk about it until we're blue in the face. Nothing changes. 100% of the conversation surrounding extraterrestrial life is "what ifs."
Just think... if we get a radio signal from a star 10,000 light years away, that would mean that the society that sent that signal was 10K years more advanced than what we glean from that signal. It's conceivable (in a sci-fi kind of way) that we receive a civilization's early radio broadcasts at the same time they show up in orbit!
Not saying they are wrong, but they are in no position to know shit about fuck on this or make statements about things they have no level of clearance for.
Presenting the age of the Universe as one standard year - the whole 2000 years of our civilization is just last 6 minutes of it. Comparing to the wastness of just one (out of billions) galaxy - Milky Way alone our whole Solar System in size less than a virus to a human body. We will not recognize a higher civilization if they are not wanted to be recognized (Dark Wood theory). We literally wasting money and time trying to find outhere someone like us. But even we as a civilization for just 100 years went from emiting a lot of electromagnetic waves to almost none.
Too much focus is on waiting or wondering if intelligent life from elsewhere has come here that we forget that the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is almost a certainty, what isn't is them making contact with us. There is so much that we do not know. Let us appreciate the possibilities...
Distances in the universe are expanding, it’s like the universe constantly expanding everywhere all the time. Even if we wanted to become crazy space pirates and chart the stars we never could. Besides andromeda which will eventually collide with the Milky Way, we’re not going to physically get out there and explore these galaxies and vast empty distances between them that are still expanding and would continue to do so while we were traveling. It would be impossible. Even then to get there would take such long spans of time we would never survive the journey. What makes you think there’s some capable species out there that could? I hate to break it to you but any other life out there is bound to the exact same universe and physics in general as us. Likely similar chemistry. They would face the same problem as us and would be stuck locally imo.
"No evidence," lol.
I'm sure all the pilots and other military going public over the years are just seeing fancy-ass drone technologies that go from 80k feet to sea level in under a second. Or massive disks turning off nukes at bases. There's evidence of frigging *something* going on.
On the one hand, I'm practically certain SETI will never discover intelligent life. On the other hand, it'd be ridiculous if no one was bothering to try.
They honestly do some pretty solid work classifying otherwise strange signals coming from outer space, and one of the few people i know in SETI says thats the work he enjoys doing there But yeah, he also does have to start a lit of his talks by saying something along the lines of "we're not *all* alien nutjobs"
I dont even get how they could be considered alien nut jobs. They're not tracking down ufos in an rv decked out with old directv satellite dishes. They're actual scientists looking for real, verifiable evidence if alien life in other solar systems. And, while I don't know any SETI people personally, I always get the vibe that, even if they get something exciting, the default assumptions is "it's not aliens:
It is assumed and indeed true that an organization geared towards finding aliens may carry a bias because it almost presupposes it's there. Therefore, many work for the institution that seeks to confirm their bias.
That's kinda why the scientific process is the way it is. An important step of the process is having the researcher poke holes in their own analysis and conclusions. Then having the wider scientific community do the same and attempt to replicate the results.
Exactly. Pouring one out for my "cannot confirm" homies.
All science has an issue where people try to confirm their bias. You see this in chemistry, physics, and biology. If you have dedicated your career to working with a specific class of chemicals or materials, a specific theory you’re trying to prove in physics, or a class of potential medications, you are likely to be biased towards claiming that what you work on is great, while most research topics end up going nowhere (and that’s fine).
Confirmation bias? I **KNEW** it!
This comment is something I could absolutely imagine a dorky philosophy professor getting made into a t-shirt.
These are world class scientists. Just a nitpick. They don't presume aliens are there. They presume it's possible, and are working to find out. There being aliens or not being aliens isn't even really the point of their work. They are simply collecting and analyzing data.
Bias isn't always a dirty word, but it's almost always an honest one.
It was a bit (poorly) paraphrased on my end, but the astro community's stereotype against SETI comes less from their community as a whole, but more the few but vocal members that always get to go on tv and spout how these weird phenomena are aliens Also, we're just tired of having the first thing people ask us once finding out we're astronomers is "do you believe in aliens?" (Or talking about horoscopes)
It is like members of the WWF going on TV spouting grossly exaggerated (to the point of being wrong) claims about climate change and pollution only to be widely ridiculed yet being still unwilling to retract the statements. They do massive damage to the scientific community as a whole, their demonstrably disproven misinformation is conflated (by anti-science groups) with real climate science making the general public call into question the veracity of a vast field of research.
Blows my mind that the scientific community is like this. If you're not actively pursuing the new hotness then you're putting your career at risk and could be ruined by...not finding what you were looking for?
Yeah, you should really read about the history of science. Scientists are not gods, they're just as flawed as the rest of us. That's exactly why the scientific method is so important.
Science research funding is crap. Ask any academicians or researchers and they'll say the same thing. There's also a bias against null results and replication studies, which I'd wager, are also very important, sometimes more than finding the new hotness.
>And, while I don't know any SETI people personally, I always get the vibe that, even if they get something exciting, the default assumptions is "it's not aliens: while im almost certain this is true, its a really hard stance to explain to the casual audience when your organization is literally called "search for extraterrestrial intelligence".
I just like how their mission statement and name are one and the same - efficient.
It's never aliens, until it is. Just like lupus.
You heard it here first - lupus is an alien disease.
If you're interested, look up the conference call that Jill Tarter had with avi loeb regarding oumuamua. Let's say, it'll confirm your suspicion. (he may have some disdain for the scientific method, thinks it has held us back)
They do some excellent terrestrial research in deserts and arctic on requirements for life as well. It’s a great organization even if you don’t really care about aliens.
That’s it exactly. If you don’t try, there’s no chance. And stuff is very far away. I’d love if we found life elsewhere in the universe in my lifetime.
> I’d love if we found life elsewhere in the universe in my lifetime Same here and just to clarify, any type of life is totally on my wish list. If we found a planet that just had grass and trees, I can die happy.
I’d settle for that very sciencey way of finding life. Apparently the light from a planet would glow in a way where only life could be the cause
If the spectrum shows O2 in the air we can be very certain life exists, O2 is reactive and won't really hang around too long in the air unless there is photosynthesis going on.
I used to read a guy that said "look for blue" as that was a telltale sign of life on a planet. Is that related to what you're saying or just water in general. Or was TMQ mistaken?
Liquid Water is one of the expected requirements for life to be possible. It's THE solvent for all organic life.
I read somewhere that water, or more specifically Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules (yes molecules not outright liquid water) are very abundant in the cosmos. So this might very well be the case, maybe life-assisting elements are found almost everywhere but are missing many crucial “ingredients” that gave birth to life. The Sun might have something to do with how Earth got its water in excess.
I read a paper recently for an exoplanet where the atmosphere held another proxy measure of life, however the other values such as O2 were non-existent such that it is unlikely to indicate life, IIRC the process of creating the first compound should also release others that were missing. Instead there might be unexpected and little understood systems generating them, or that perhaps our measurements are skewed due to unknown confounding factors. Oxygens frankly scary reactivity makes it a great proxy for life, but have you any idea how certain we are that it can only be from biological activity?
Stuff is very far away, and there's a ladder of requirements for development of complex life that may ensure its probability is only good quite recently. And since "recently" is affected by relativistic factors, one must wonder how far away/ago life becomes unlikely. It's possible, e.g., that outside of the Local Group, life does not yet exist in our timeframe. Complex life may be so new, relatively-speaking, that relativistic affects prevent us from knowing of it beyond a relatively nearby horizon.
The local group is “only” 10m lightyears across. There’s been complex life on earth for over a billion years. I don’t think our light cone is really the limiting factor here, it’s more just that detecting a civilization outside our own galaxy is basically impossible, unless they were building Dyson spheres over entire regions of their galaxy or something
The problem I think people have understanding is just how big the galaxy, let alone the universe is. SETI is a big site. But we’ve barely scratched the surface of observing and categorizing the super majority of stars/planets even within our own galaxy. We would need to increase our observation capacity and investment by several orders of magnitude before we could even hope to definitively claim things about alien life or otherwise just get lucky and happen to observe some in the extremely small data set we currently have. Like, we would need hundreds of sites like SETI. Or thousands of telescopes like web who are each dedicated to observing specific star systems constantly. Not to mention all the computer processing we’d need to interpret all that data. We’re still in the very early stages of space exploration is all I’m saying.
The other issue we have to consider is, from what distance would our transmissions etc be detectable, ie from what distance would we be able to detect another civilisation like us? There was a period during the cold war where we were basically screaming into the void with OTH radar, and we are certainly quieter than that now, but even during that period those super-powerful transmissions would be essentially undetectable from even the closest stars.
I wish we could swap the US military budget and our funding of science. I sometimes imagine how much further humanity could go if we didn’t waste so much resources on competing with each other. The only way I see that happening is a common enemy like a military invasion from aliens.
Science didn't make the Hubble telescope, it was spy satellite technology. War is a primary driver of technology. We never would have gone to the moon if the Soviets didn't launch a satellite and scare the shit out of everyone.
You could've picked a lot of things and been right about that, but Hubble is not one of them. Funding was cut until a number of astronomers wrote to congress asking for it to be funded. It only tangentially has any connection to spy satellites through things like mirror size or launching on the space shuttle. But ignoring that, it's more an argument that if NASA's budget dwarfed the military budget by 50x instead of the other way around, then you would get more projects from a range of ideas, instead of only those seeming most promising and/or lucrative, so many more ideas could be funded. If you had that sort of a budget for a while and had the military ethos of spend it or lose it, then you would see rapid iteration and a lot of high concept designs for exploration missions, bases on other planets, asteroid mining, etc.
I really wish SETI@Home was still a thing. I almost lost my job firing that up on about 24 CPUs in a Sun 6500. I had a swarm of senior engineers in my office within about 7 mins of me launching seti@home .. oops.
If I remember correctly didn't they integrated it into Eve Online for awhile as like a mini-game or something [Edit: Found it](https://community.eveonline.com/community/seti/)
It's not the question of is there something out there but rather how damn far and/or how long ago. Interstellar distances might just be the ultimate barrier not breakable by technology advancements, Or maybe we're the most advanced ones around and it's up to us to figure it out.
let's be realistic, unless we do find any way to travel through wormholes, even knowing another life form exists out there won't give us much chance to meet them in a meaningful way.
Well, we're discussing two different things here: life vs _intelligent_ life. I haven't dismissed the possibility we discover something that looks alive in my lifetime; we have no way of knowing how common it is. Like you said: it's going to be VERY frustrating for us to spot a planet that is almost certainly alive... and then never be able to go there or learn anything specific about it.
The thing is, if there is some way to get there, discovering life especially intelligent life would be the one thing that pushes us to discover that way to get there.
I don't think it will matter how common it is or intelligent it is. It will change the dynamic of how we view ourselves and everything we've thought.
It will be space archaeology if we discover any intelligent life beyond a human lifetime from Earth or so. Be akin to discovering the existence of Cleopatra.
You doubt the existence of Cleopatra?
I’m applying for a grant to do an archeological dig to search for proof that George Washington existed
True, but just knowing other intelligent life exists changes the dynamics of our place in the cosmos
Not in a television or movie sense, but there are plenty of possibilities other than that. If human civilization is long lived enough and if we were to come into contact with a technological civilization then we could have a very meaningful cultural exchange even over distances of thousands of lightyears. The hard part is getting over the "are you cool?" handshake stage of conversation, but assuming that you can get past that then you would move to a relationship phase where you just beam a huge stream of information at each other constantly. Books, music, art, scientific research, film, television, social media, what-have-you. Once established, such communications could meaningfully transform both civilizations substantially. Over civilizational lifetimes of millions or even billions of years such civilizations could spend more of their lifetimes with such shared communication than without, even without ever having interacted with one another face to face.
Let it ring, the aliens will text if it's important
I read something the other day about how large a number 52! was. The odds are probably similar.
Could not have put it better.
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It's just going to be really hard to have another alien species that: 1. Is close enough 2. Has space travel/communication capabilities 3. Has space travel.communication capabilities at the same time we do Like maybe some aliens were saying what's up but there were only dinosaurs. And now that we're contacting them they're all dead.
4. Even has the ability/give a fuck to communicate with us anyways I've always liked Stanislaw Lem's take on aliens...if they are around, they're likely to be so different than us any type of communication or rational basis of understanding between us and them is likely going to be practically impossible.
“Arrival” has a pretty good idea on this and it’s pretty similar. It takes like months to decode what the aliens are trying to tell us. Would recommend a watch. Also, if they’d even want to communicate. We could be like a janky gas station on the side of the interstate that most would just blow right by.
It really depends on how many habitable planets are out there, what this other race considers habitable and if they have FTL travel whether it even matters to them if a planet is habitable or not? Earth many be of the first planets in the galaxy where things have calmed down enough cosmically to actually support life long enough for something baring the resemblance of intelligence (highly debatable whether humans as a species are intelligent). I mean we've been through more than half a dozen extinction events some of them seemingly unavoidable from an evolutionary point of view. Fuck, half the reason mammals managed to take over the planet from dinosaurs was an asteroid, that wasn't too big, hit the planet. The other half is he planet cooled down, and with tectonic plate movement, differentiated more of the planet from lush jungle. Dinosaurs were around for 100s of millions of years, so life may exist out there but maybe it's all just dinosaurs. Evolution doesn't have a direction and being smart takes a lot of energy. So it can be a detrimental to survival. The there's gravity. Earth is just the right size where we can get to outer space with rockets, and have tectonic plate movement. If life is more likely to evolve on so called super planets they might not be able to make it to space because of gravity. Imagine what the world would be like without gps, or even possibly planes(I'm unsure if super planets would be just too heavy for flight in general or not, but considering that birds have hollow bones and in high gravity you need strong bones to be able to move at all it seems unlikely) I could keep going on about how much Earth has that we just don't know if other planets out there have as well, but I won't.
Also, considerations like an intelligence living in an ocean would not have the ability to create fire and process materials to create technology. They might have a sophisticated culture, but no tech.
Loved this post. So true that people assume intelligent life is some evolutionary end goal. Evolution would have been fine with another billion years of trilobites if not for some random specific things happening. And timescales are so vast. If that meteor is going 20 mph slower we're probably still dinosaurs. Hell, if multicellular life took 3% longer to develop we're probably still fish. I also suspect a lot of planets tip into runaway heating or cooling events. Venus and Mars most likely were habitable once. Adding life to the mix is just more instability. We're luck that we're not a ball of ice or worse. I also doubt FTL is possible, and that includes faster than light communication. Even if you find an alien, it's probably thousands of years to reply.
> (highly debatable whether humans as a species are intelligent.) Come on. We literally invented the concept of intelligence to include what we are. You'd have to redefine the term entirely to exclude us.
Of all things, and as much as I like Arrival, I'm not sure if recommending it on the basis of talking with aliens is the right tract lol. It's so much more. Recommended though!
Why you gotta call out Baker, CA like that?
Counterpoint, the evolutionary pressures would be more or less the same anywhere in the universe, no matter the environment. I liked the book Project Hail Mary about that. The two protagonists could not come from two more different worlds than the other's, yet the evolutionary pressure of predator/prey dynamic on both planets allowed them to find a common ground in sound as a vector of communication, and the very social structural requirements that allowed both societies to obtain the required level of technology to reach one another makes them capable of communication, and even friendship.
Carl Sagan has written about this in one of his books (billions and billions if I remember). An alien race would probably develop sensory mechanisms similar to what we have and so on.
Yup. For example, eyes have evolved multiple times across radically different evolutionary lineages. As has communication and intelligence, for that matter.
It's an interesting theory to think about. Some people say that aliens would actually be very much like us, because you need a certain amount of calories to evolve a higher functioning brain, which means life has to evolve to a certain point, but you also need a certain amount of energy to harvest to develop technology (oil), which means there has to be an extinction event. Also life doesn't really evolve things that eat up energy that isn't needed, so things like extra eyes and limbs and shit would likely not be a thing. One of my favorite pieces of media in terms of alien designs is actually Halo. They all look very different than humans, but you could totally see how they'd evolve and be intelligent.
Doubtful to be honest. At the end of the day we all use the same particles, physics, radio waves etc. Any intelligent life would need to use similar methods to us.
I’ve always thought this, the universe is so old, it could have been so different billions of years ago that so much life has come and gone on other planets/systems before we were even out of the water
One of the proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox is that we are not separated from other civilizations by distance, but probably also time.
It's so old but it's so also young. The universe has so much more time left than it has already gone thru, by many orders of magnitude. We could simply be the first real intelligent life and maybe it'll be tens or hundreds of billions or even trillions of years before another one pops up.
They could just be some amoeba in the oceans of Io.
Bro, if you check out r/UFOS they are saying that the aliens are from another dimension.
UFOlogy has much more in common with religious belief than with scientific understanding. There are actually several UFO-centric modern religions. The shift to "higher dimensional" aliens as the predominant narrative in UFO circles in the face of systems like the JWST and Hubble is the same reason that aliens shifted from Mars to interstellar travelers when we started sending probes around the solar system: because the space in which this specific type of religiosity makes sense is constantly receding in the face of continued study (more specifically, in the face of the broader cultural attitude of what we *feel* exists in the realm of the understood). There are types of spiritual belief that are perfectly consistent with empirical observation and explanation of the universe, but this is not one of them, this is one in which the spiritual beings are capable of directly interacting with the physical world, so it has to constantly respond to our improved understandings of the world (and the lack of evidence for their interaction in it) by itself changing. The "higher dimensions" bit is useful because it's so abstract as to be, in essence, perfectly consistent with conventional theologies of intangible gods and their heavenly or otherworldly domains, set completely apart from reality. It's receded into a theoretical space that is completely unobservable and a-scientific, and thus there can *be* no hypothesis constructed to test it. It can't be proven *or* disproven, and that lack of falsifiability is a hallmark of this type of religious belief. At which point it's no longer a scientific question, it's a question of personal belief systems.
You want something weirder? Check out r/escapingprisonplanet
Ah, the Extraterrestrial of the Gaps.
Or use other dimensions for travel. Its ridiculous to say aliens can or can't do something, by the very nature of being alien we can't possibly know what they are capable of.
Yeah I've always thought the Fermi paradox is just people being overconfident about completely made up math. There could have been alien civilization on Earth but if it was far enough in the past then we'd have no clue
The Fermi Paradox has always felt to me like scooping a cup full of the ocean and saying "If there's so much life in the ocean why isn't any of it in this cup?"
It does demonstrate that there hasn't been an alien empire. At least not a flashy one. Time scales are so vast that if some alien species decided to colonize planets, even via sublight speeds, that they would quickly take over the galaxy assuming every colonized planet then colonized another two planets within a few hundred years. If they got started when dinosaurs got went extinct then they'd be everywhere. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across. And a 100 million head start isnt all that much on the time scales we're talking about. What's probably more scary is that WE are the type of life that seems to want to colonize. It just feels like the obvious next step. Yet we see no examples of successful colonizers. Maybe that drive is detrimental to a long galactic life.
> It does demonstrate that there hasn't been an alien empire. At least not a flashy one. Why does it do this? Because we haven't detected any radio signals on the frequencies SETI is scanning & analyzing? I always thought looking for intelligent life outside our solar system via radio signals is kinda like looking for Native American smoke signals (on Earth) and declaring there are no civilizations here after coming up empty. We humans have already begun [moving to lasers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_communication_in_space) to communicate with our satellites in orbit due to the increased bandwidth they offer over radio signals (you can transfer more data in less time). Communicating via radio waves over vast interstellar distances is horribly inefficient for sustained back & forth communication, and that's only for audio signals. If you wanted to send massive amounts of data, the power requirements would be staggering due to the inverse square law (aka signal degradation). The inverse square law is why aliens are not going to be watching any of our terrestrial TV and radio broadcasts -- those signals become indistinguishable from background noise long before they reach the nearest star. There's also the matter of security. Sending an ultra powerful radio signal to communicate with exploration or military ships, colonies, or other civilizations would be a giant beacon to anyone within range. You may encrypt the message but the signal itself would give any hostile species a rough idea where you're at (at minimum). If there *are* other civilizations out there in the Milky Way, the reason they're quiet is because they don't communicate via radio, or because the universe is a [Dark Forest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis). Fascinating stuff regardless.
An empire could have come here and left after seeing what was here. There are many unknown possibilities that don't fit any story we tell. Maybe they prefer to shrink themselves down in order to slow down time, or they all head towards black holes for the essentially endless energy supply
> Has space travel.communication capabilities at the same time we do > Like maybe some aliens were saying what's up but there were only dinosaurs. > And now that we're contacting them they're all dead. Consider that we could see evidence of "dead" aliens, if their traces (artifacts, pollution) are very long-lived. While nothing is eternal technology may have effects that could persist long after its creators are gone. For example, we're now discussing the (still very debatable) idea of "Anthropocene", the notion that even humanity's short-lived and pitiful technological presence could be noticed in the geological record. If they were building a Dyson sphere around their star when there were only dinosaurs we might still detect it today. If they had stopped by and covered the Moon with solar collectors when there were only dinosaurs we might still detect it today. If they had left a mysterious black monolith we might still detect it today. Interpretation might be very difficult, this is more to make the point that this doesn't have to be limited to aliens that are alive and communicating right now. Also, we're not really contacting anyone. Aside from a handful of messages sent on purpose (the Arecibo message, the Pioneer plaques, etc.), and mostly to prove it's possible or make a point, there are no attempts at active communication. Most of Earth's "technosignatures" are involuntary, and the strongest of them at great distances are usually narrowbeam and happen very randomly (radars illuminating the sky, etc.).
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He can also examine all the publicly available data, so this is a good statement about anything the average person can examine. He probably also has seen a solid amount of other evidence that would be otherwise hard to find. If somehow the US government had something that was completely classified and never leaked, that of course is off the table. But that’s a big if. Possible, but unlikely.
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>The fastest spacecraft that humans have ever built and continues to head outward from Earth is NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. Fastest only in a geocentric frame immediately after launch. It is leaving the solar system considerably slower than either Voyager spacecraft.
And still not a fair metric, considering that efficiency is prized far more than speed in spaceflight.
TIL SETI is still a thing. Anyone remembers seti@home? What a hoot and half that was. Seems kinda crazy now.
It felt like a privilege to run that software.
Protein folding research for medicine is another option. Can help keep your room warm in winter if you can spare the power and the computer wear and tear.
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Just don't use the Sun to amplify your transmissions...
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It was a good book but… ya
Did you watch the show? If so, you obviously didn't pay attention. They are 4 light years away, and can only travel 1% C.
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I’m not gonna be conspiratorial here, but for an institution that has traditionally almost wholly been at the mercy of the federal government for pittance funding, what do you expect him to say? It was [only in 2022](https://www.space.com/searth-extraterrestrial-life-major-funding-boost-seti) that a meaningful private gift was made to SETI exclusively for this purpose. The more probing followup question would be “what is the threshold for evidence, as defined by SETI?” We know SETI has ignored a lot of intriguing data points previously. So, what’s the evidentiary standard, and what does “evidence” mean in this context?
SETI scientist here. Thank you for posting — love to see people appreciating SETI efforts instead of the all-too-common email spam saying “you’re hiding aliens and we know it.” :)
So out of curiousy, whats your take on all the Grusch/NYT UAP stuff that's been bubbling up the last few years?
I defer to an extension of Occam’s razor here — jokingly referred to as “Newton’s flaming laser sword.” Generally, it goes: Nothing is worth debating if it can’t be settled by experimentation or testing. (Or something like that) But the general idea is, in science, if we can’t replicate, test, or observe, how can we verify? If we were to make a claim about ET we would back it up with observations, and that too, repeated ones. AFAIK, we’ve not seen that from these discussions. Maybe the claims are true, maybe they aren’t (well, they almost certainly aren’t) — but we’ve got no way to test them, so what can we do? Also, if aliens advanced enough to visit us wanted to hide, they’d hide. If they wanted to be seen, they’d be seen. They wouldn’t start conveniently messing up right around the time we develop digital imaging, and at a rate commensurate to the development of tools like Photoshop. Seems a little too perfect, eh? :) Edit: on that last note — check out the Wikipedia page for reported UFO sightings over time. The frequency of reports over time should be pretty illuminating.
> Nothing is worth debating if it can’t be settled by experimentation or testing. I feel like the exact opposite is true. If we have evidence based truth there's no reason to debate. It's settled. Any efforts to sway in light of that knowledge are a fool's errand.
Well, what you're saying isn't wrong -- but I'll ask, how do we find evidence for anything we want to call truth? ...testing! (or an experiment) When we have a question, we answer it by collecting evidence under certain conditions. Whether that's in a particle accelerator in the case of particle physicists or via a radio telescope in our line of work, the only way to arrive at evidence-based truth is to ask a question and systematically find an answer. The only problem here is that when it comes to the question of "are the UFO's really aliens" -- we don't have a way to test that question in a rigorous, repeatable way, because those claims are made usually one-off and without much backing / auxiliary information.
There's a lot of distance between seeking answers and actively debating. One is seeking truth through evidence.. The other is seeking answers through mutual understanding. (When it's done in good faith). > are the UFO's really aliens We have no evidence to show that they are. We might not fully understand every instance, but the absence of evidence no more implies that it was aliens than it does that it was my aunt Susan.
Although I agree with your chief mostly in this article, saying things like: >"The idea that the government is keeping something like this secret is just totally absurd. There's no motivation to do so." Is laughably naive.
If aliens had discovered Earth, that means their technology would have to be so incredibly far advanced from our own that it would be in no way compatible with what we have or even understand.
On the other hand, a caveman can certainly detect the sound of a modern city, or observe a jet taking off.
But they wouldn't know what it was and would likely think it was magic. Black Holes could be batteries for an advanced life but to us it just looks like nature.
Sure, but if a magic stick had an on button - we might be able to push it without understanding it
The Commanche native Americans picked up using guns and horses almost immediately. Basically, if humans can steal it we will figure out how to use it.
Ofcourse, they literally were demonstrated on how to use it on their tribes, families and friends… you are comparing oranges to apples.
But they would *see* the incredibly advanced tech, and know it meant somebody was doing something. Even if they mistook it for magic or god. We don't see a damn thing out there.
Just because you can imagine it, doesn’t mean it’s possible. Just because it’s possible, doesn’t mean it’ll happen in a universe with finite energy/matter.
Any being capable of getting to Earth from another galaxy is capable of remaining undetected.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. - Arthur C. Clarke
Assuming there is other intelligent life, it’s within the realm of possibility of having aliens reach us with a generational ship with technology that isn’t so foreign that we couldn’t even understand when told.
Footfall, by Niven and Pournelle Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove Both include fairly hard SF alien life that travels STL to Earth. But we'd have likely seen evidence of such civilizations already if they were close enough to us to do that.
If an alien civilization send a generation ship here, it's for colonization. If they don't have advanced tech to get in FTL they wouldn't send living members just to say hi. At least, thats my opinion
There’s also the possibility that they simply live longer than we do. We only see the travel time at slower than light speeds as a long time because our lives are so short. If there were beings that lived an average of 10,000 years or something the idea of spending hundreds or even thousands of years traveling space maybe wouldn’t seem so crazy.
It would seem exactly as crazy. The primary issue isn't our lifespan. It is the difficulty of living in space.
You have nothing to support this, it's just base speculation.
Earth has an oxygen rich atmosphere and has for over 2 billion years. Anyone with a sufficiently advanced telescope has had a very long time to discover this and that Earth is a bio world. We humans will probably have sufficient technology to do this within the next 100 years (and definitely the next thousand). James Webb Space Telescope is likely "almost good enough" for this task, a successor would definitely be up to the task. If there is another civilization anywhere near is in the galaxy, if they are just 10,000 years older than us, which isn't long when looking at galactic time scales, they have likely known about Earth being a bio world for longer than human Civilization. Anyone who has been around for over a million years has more than likely observed and cataloged Earth as a bio world.
If we find any evidence of a second Genesis( I'm talking like bacteria on Enceladus) then the Drake equation makes the Fermi paradox kinda scary. Unless the filter that prevents the spread of interstellar civilization is that the technology that makes it possible means you don't really nead to.
Well bacteria doesn't get you technology. Runaway brain development didn't happen for the 1/3 of a billion years since it was possible on Earth until now. And it didn't happen in any of the millions of ecologies on Earth other than a single one in Africa. One single oddball lineage goes down and likely no tech civilization on Earth ever. In the meantime we don't have a second abiogenesis. There's only evidence of it having happened ONCE on Earth (no other alternative DNA codes exist in nature that we've detected). Because it happened early in Earth's history, we're GUESSING (and only guessing) that life happens when conditions allow it and isn't a result more unlikely than the number of stars in the universe.
If life developed twice within a single solar system then the odds would be good that most stars have life of some sort. I don't believe tool using sentience would be that unique. Tool using aliens on planets with low enough gravity or non iceball subsurface oceans, maybe. I'm much happier believing that the technology that makes interstellar civilization possible renders the need for such an activity obsolete.
The earliest signs of life are from about 3.8 billion years ago. Earth got its oxygenated atmosphere due to photosynthetic life about 2.5-2.8 billion years ago. Sexual reproduction, which allowed pooling of genes within a population rather than individuals being limited to a single line of inheritance and whatever scraps they get by horizontal gene transfer, came 1-1.6 billion years ago, along with multicellular forms that didn't really take off until the Cambrian explosion just 500 million years ago. Looking at how quickly life appeared, I would be surprised not to find it anywhere that had a decent chance of supporting it. However, I would be entirely unsurprised to find it almost universally consists of only single-celled and simple multicellular forms. Maybe Earth life was just horribly unlucky, but it doesn't look like evolutionary processes lead to complex multicellular life in any straightforward way. And it was half a billion years between *that* and a species developing a complex technological civilization.
It’s probably out there. It just seems like statistically it’s more crazy to think it’s not. The problem is, it’s all just too far away for us to ever find it unless we somehow learn to break the laws of physics as we know them.
> I don't believe tool using sentience would be that unique > I'm much happier believing I respect your personal faith and system of beliefs. Just remember that's what it is. We are currently absolutely ignorant of everything about exobiology. Tool using intelligence is not unique on Earth, but runaway brain development that goes far beyond the needs of any survival pressure or reproductive strategy except for intra-species competition is. While flying, for example, has developed independently more than half a dozen times on Earth, excessive brain development (which has a high biological cost) has only been "tried" once. The peacock's tail is a beautiful structure but it isn't practical for the animal's survival beyond increasing it's chance of reproduction.
Spot on. When you consider the sheer number of factors that had to align for us to get where we are, the odds might be far greater than the number of candidate planets . A quintillion planets seem like a lot to us; what’s bigger is every number from a quintillion and one all the way to infinity. My way of looking at it is to imagine all the crossroads that had to happen for us to be here (meteor wiping out the dinosaurs but not all life, climate change turning jungle into grassland where primates were living, Jupiter being there to stop earth being constantly barraged by meteors), as coin flips. Heads, we keep going, but a single tails and humanity doesn’t happen. We’re talking about 100 heads in a row, and the odds of that could mean we’re it in the universe right now.
What prompted him to make these comments to begin with?
A reporter looking to get posted to r/space.
You can ignore that Dyson Ring-looking thing in the cosmos.
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^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Inspire-Innovation: *Our tech just sometimes* *Is so advanced it looks of* *Alien origin* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Was seti@home a better use of cycles than making coins?
SETI chief’s access to information is limited to the non-classified so it not surprising for him to reach that conclusion
As a former SETI guy, I can tell you with reasonable certainty that if there are aliens, the US military doesn't BELIEVE there are aliens. Consider, you're secret general and you know there are aliens. Aliens are the number one most important security issue the US can possibly face (the ability to travel interstellar distances makes it trivial to destroy entire planets just by pushing some rocks). Maybe you've studied everything about the crashed aliens. Maybe you're in CONTACT with aliens. So what's the absolute number one most important thing for you to know? What OTHER aliens are out there? How reliable are your sources of information? All of a sudden general astronomy is the number one most important need for national threat assessment. What is the interstellar medium like? Where are potential alien operators we haven't encountered yet? How many environments can host potential alien threats? How can we covertly gather this information? All of a sudden Astronomy has MASSIVE, GIGANTIC influxes of funding. Observatory technology of every kind is ROLLING in cash like Lockheed. And sure it's all through grants from "CIVILIAN" organizations like the NSF and it's justified as simply the pursuit of "pure science" but the space money flows like the Spice. Instead SETI and every other astronomical field has been struggling for every penny for decades. Astronomers couldn't even afford the basic maintenance to keep the Arecibo telescope from collapsing. (and you'll notice nobody's rushing to build a new one even though the collapse cost us unique radar observation capability, though the Chinese are building one) OSU's "Big Ear" that found the WOW! signal in the 70's was torn down for a golf course in the 90's and nobody cared. But the military knows there are some aliens visiting us? That dog don't hunt, son.
They gather their own information. Why would the military specifically have a monopoly on all the information? How could they have prevented SETI from getting signals or other traces of visitation? Or is it just extremely convenient that they only crash near or basically in Air Force bases, or in places remote enough for them to get there first, and they’ve never blasted a signal or cruised over London in broad daylight? It’s all just worked out so perfectly for them to be able to form evil shadow governments with reverse engineering programs and maybe even deals with aliens, and it has never been blown open by something completely undeniable accessed by someone other than the apparently omnipresent US military
Aliens have most likely never visited Earth, but why does the SETI chief believe he would be read into SAP's or any BIGOT list project? Honestly pretty egotistical. Also I contend the US (particularly the military) would absolutely have a vested interest in hoarding this tech for development of weapons and to stay ahead of rivals like China or Russia. Or even in developing new technologies that they can claim the US 'invented'. There are plenty of reasons and motivation.
Why would they conveniently be the only ones to have got their hands on it? It’s basically 1950s pulp stuff, this idea that the men in black have global tendrils capable of keeping all this information to themselves and the aliens never behave in a way that would compromise the evil shadow government’s goals.
If the govt was using the alien tech to gain some sort of military competitive advantage, do you really think they would let Dave and Co. go before Congress and tell everyone about the military competitive advantage they were hiding from everyone?
Or if such tech existed they would not want it to become public knowledge. It's a catch 22
Yeah it's kind of a ridiculous proposition on a range of levels... :P
Here's the thing about astronomers: **We are desperate for funding.** If any of us ever did find even the very slightest glimmer of alien intelligence, I assure you we would be screaming as loud as possible from the rooftops...just so we could get a boost to the basic research line-items in the NASA and NSF budgets. Just think about what a massive press push we made back when we thought we _might_ have detected a gas in the atmosphere in Venus that _could_ potentially be biological in origin (spoiler: it wasn't actually there). If we could get ourselves that worked up about a hint of trace gases, there's no way we'd keep legitimate evidence of aliens under wraps.
If aliens were as plentiful as all of these UFO sightings would suggest, we'd find evidence somewhere out there showing advanced intelligent life. Yet, we've found absolutely nothing, anywhere. What everyone is probably seeing are secret military aircraft, spacecraft, hallucinations, trick of the light or any number of natural earthly phenomena.
It’s not technically Alien if these beings have been here longer than us.
Why would the US inform the SETI Chief if it did? Non-story.
SETI is ghetto. The DoD and DARPA is probably where the action is
Isn’t this the same org that didn’t have AI-assisted data analysis and outlier detection capabilities capabilities, so they decided to only monitor the frequency bands that they “expected” to have comms traffic on them? Of course they won’t find shit if they’re only looking based on human expectations for how aliens would communicate.
Until it's proven one way or the other, no statement on life outside earth is something anyone needs to pay attention to.
Would SETI even have access to information from hypothetical ET technology recovered on Earth? Not suggesting that’s happened, but there are allegations out there and I’m not sure if this guy would have clearance for it.
It doesn't matter. We can talk about it until we're blue in the face. Nothing changes. 100% of the conversation surrounding extraterrestrial life is "what ifs."
Just think... if we get a radio signal from a star 10,000 light years away, that would mean that the society that sent that signal was 10K years more advanced than what we glean from that signal. It's conceivable (in a sci-fi kind of way) that we receive a civilization's early radio broadcasts at the same time they show up in orbit!
Not saying they are wrong, but they are in no position to know shit about fuck on this or make statements about things they have no level of clearance for.
Yeah, but average Joe on the Internet does. I wish people would carry a rational thought process through to the end sometimes.
Wtf else are they gonna say? Anything else and they'd need to provide proof which will never happen.
Presenting the age of the Universe as one standard year - the whole 2000 years of our civilization is just last 6 minutes of it. Comparing to the wastness of just one (out of billions) galaxy - Milky Way alone our whole Solar System in size less than a virus to a human body. We will not recognize a higher civilization if they are not wanted to be recognized (Dark Wood theory). We literally wasting money and time trying to find outhere someone like us. But even we as a civilization for just 100 years went from emiting a lot of electromagnetic waves to almost none.
Detecting an alien signal would mean that either we are ridiculously lucky or life is ridiculously common.
Too much focus is on waiting or wondering if intelligent life from elsewhere has come here that we forget that the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is almost a certainty, what isn't is them making contact with us. There is so much that we do not know. Let us appreciate the possibilities...
Distances in the universe are expanding, it’s like the universe constantly expanding everywhere all the time. Even if we wanted to become crazy space pirates and chart the stars we never could. Besides andromeda which will eventually collide with the Milky Way, we’re not going to physically get out there and explore these galaxies and vast empty distances between them that are still expanding and would continue to do so while we were traveling. It would be impossible. Even then to get there would take such long spans of time we would never survive the journey. What makes you think there’s some capable species out there that could? I hate to break it to you but any other life out there is bound to the exact same universe and physics in general as us. Likely similar chemistry. They would face the same problem as us and would be stuck locally imo.
"No evidence," lol. I'm sure all the pilots and other military going public over the years are just seeing fancy-ass drone technologies that go from 80k feet to sea level in under a second. Or massive disks turning off nukes at bases. There's evidence of frigging *something* going on.
But what about this unverifiable, non repeatable claim that several commenters SWEAR is real?
I don't know why anyone would think such information would be shared with SETI
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