A long read introduction to the topic - from We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters
“The search for exoplanets is radically expanding our understanding of the cosmos. “We have learned that the universe is teeming with a fascinating variety of planets, more types than we could have imagined,” writes the astrobiologist Lisa Kaltenegger. But so far, it has found exactly as many extraterrestrials as radio astronomy has: zero. The more we learn about the universe, the more acute the Fermi paradox becomes.”
Probably they know we’re here and want nothing to do with us.
TL;DR:
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space
That and faster than light travel being accidental time travel is my answer. The aliens are here but in our past. They are also wondering which species of dinosaur was broadcasting all that TV, and where are all the funny looking apes.
Bill Bryson? Excellent.
Douglas Adams, but love Bill Bryson too.
It is not a paradox, we are speed running towards human extinction. Thus providing a very simple reason why intelligent life doesn’t last long and defines a simple great filter.
What we consider intelligent is quite subjective
Under different definitions, “a forest” could be an inteligent individual
I knew one. He was not at all intelligent.
We are almost certainly an outlier.
There’s probably life all over the place like on earth but it’s very primitive.
It took 3.5 billion years to get to the point where we evolved enough to be able to ask this question. 3.5 billion years of near misses, mass extinction events, and our star remaining stable enough to not wipe us out. I suspect microbial life is very common, we might even find some in our solar system but sentient life much less so and sentient life existing at the same time that we do is even rarer let alone sentient life creating radio waves over a long enough period to coincide with our very recent attempts to receive it.
Earth has been giving off obvious chemical evidence of life signs for eons. Any Type 1 civilization would have seen it a long time ago and we would stand out like glass on the beach.
Even if they haven’t arrived to check it out, which I doubt, they will be watching carefully in various ways.
So: zoo hypothesis seems more likely than anything to me.
Earth has been giving off obvious chemical evidence of life signs for eons.
True, like I said microbial life is likely found all over the galaxy but we’ve only been transmitting radio waves for a little over a century.
Even if they haven’t arrived to check it out, which I doubt, they will be watching carefully in various ways.
How would they travel, realistically? Also what are these various ways that they will be watching?
It’s impossible to be “realistic” about travel, as it is one of the things where we don’t know how little we know. We theorize about alcubierre warp fields and wormholes or generation ships or machine intelligences but isn’t that like saying you can’t canoe to the moon without a better paddle? Do our paleo ancestors have anything to say about ion drives or plutonium energy sources?
I appreciate all the skeptics on space travel, but so many fall down on turning the same skepticism on our own limits to knowledge, and assume we know enough to make conclusive assumptions about something we have never tried.
True, but we still have to try and understand the universe within the scientific framework we’ve built otherwise we’re just indulging in science fiction. We know things like the distances involved, the time it would take to travel those distances even at a high percentage of the speed of light, the amount of energy needed to move a specific mass, and so on.
Maybe there are ways around this for sufficiently advanced beings but maybe there is intelligent life within 100 light years of us that is listening to the first radio broadcasts with no way of getting here.
Yes. My point is that the theoretical approach is
- already sf inspired: cf. warp drives etc.
- applying our limitations as universal is also a sf ‘plot twist’, as it’s highly unlikely that we understand enough to be conclusive
- slow travel is just the ‘better canoe paddle’ approach… probably near impossible
- relativistic speeds are unlikely effective not so much because of on-board problems but because human society is so volatile, as more than a common sf trope
- and most importantly: separate scientific framework descriptions from dogma, as science is provisional and assumes a better proof is simply waiting for better research; speculation is inspiration and goal-setting
Sent from my tricorder/communicator combo unit
I like the theory that any life advanced enough to explore the galaxy is watching humanity in disgust and avoiding us like the plague while waiting for our self-induced extinction.
We’re aliens and others are present as well
I believe for us the answer is a very depressing one, I think organic intelligence almost always is superseded by more durable and effectively unlimited inorganic intelligence. That the intelligence exploring the universe is all machine we are regarded as a dull precursor wet phase to what they hope will emerge and they have no interest in interactions with slime.
Speed of light, expansion of universe. The end.
The replies to this story are making me lose faith in humanity.
Well the Drake equation is quite speculative but we are gradually filling in blanks. Exoplanets for example. It’s just those last few terms that are tricky. If we found evidence of prehistoric life on Mars that might help as well. But the general response that intelligent life is always doomed and we all deserve to die for making occasionally stupid decisions is unhealthy I agree.
Liu Cixin sold me on the Dark Forest theory
Species who gain intelligence goofily try pushing toward space while letting their home planets environement go. They go nuts on pulling resources from their planet to try and put members of the species on planets that are not at all habitable like their homeplanet or to throw things at the stars when they can’t get past the speed of light. All the while their planet becomes less and less habitable and they don’t try to just live sustainably as a species on their planet.
People who believe in there ever being “contact” do not comprehend the size and nature of the universe.
Rule one, it’s expanding, rule 2, faster than light.
We’ll never achieve relativistic speed, our physiology doesn’t allow “generational ships”, a fetuses brain will never develop to intelligence in freefall. Centrifugal force is not gravity.
The belief in alien intelligence is simply going to be an exercise for theocracy and philosophy, never to manifest in our reality.
Maybe as the universe evolves new physics emerge allowing for new technology, the universe was once in fact so hot physics didn’t work as we identify with it but contact within humanities existence probably won’t happen. Nice to think about though, it’s in our nature for community due to our emotional intelligence, sometimes lack thereof providing contrast.
The answer is obvious, it’s just not anthropocentric, so no one bothers to think of it.
When you look out at the sky, you see the results of a universe engineered by an intelligent species. You can’t tell, for the same reason a hippo looking out at a nature preserve can’t tell they are in a curated environment that has been made to appear to them as natural as possible, set aside for preservation.
We are ants, farting into the cosmos, wondering why no one else farts back. To think that radio waves and visible light are the height of understanding and interacting with the universe, is on its face nonsense.
We can’t even maintain homeostasis on a single tiny planet that started with the most perfect conditions a universe could ever have for us. Why oh why do the “brightest minds” think that we have the tools to communicate with or even observe those who traverse solar systems, much less galaxies or the universe itself?
Pure ego. Look at all the “great filter possibilities” people propose. They’re all “what if monkey forest, but bigger”. Sure Ken, the unfathomable universe is just “big monkey forest”.
But how does this differ from some God preserving humans for their own reasons or fairies doing it magically for that matter. Unknowable superhuman forces isnt a useful starting hypothesis for this question. After all how can it be tested? There doesn’t seem to be anything it proves or disproves.
Which theories for “the great silence” are currently testable? Which ones currently prove or disprove anything?
This theory is at least evidence based. If you’d like to know how it specifically differs from a specific theory, I’m happy to explain just like below.
The way it differs from some god or faeries preserving humans is that;
- it doesn’t require the entity to know or care about us specifically. It does not revolve around our existence
- it fits the observable evidence instead of dismissing it or excusing it or coming up with fantastical, unfounded, “magics”
- it is a logical conclusion for any thinking matter that can consistently improve but is still computationally constrained to our universe, to preserve novelty for the sake of “unknown unknowns” that cannot be computationally discovered
- it follows a proven pattern of increasing information density that can be traced back to the beginning of the existence of any thinking matter. It is the logical conclusion of the physics of that process as we have observed it in the historical record, playing out over several billion years, anywhere in the universe
True, although given how little of the universe we are aware of I think the evidence can only grow. Thanks for the explanation.
Physical existence is only one aspect of it. Roswell itself was proof that some freaky-ass shit was personally witnessed by no less than 30 people, but we can’t count that because . . Um . . Reasons.
Nuts-and-bolts contact on the WH front lawn isn’t likely. And serious scientific questions are very much tied to physical, nuts-and-bolts answers. That doesn’t mean “no” or “never”.
The alien races travel around the galaxy (anti-spinwise), collecting promising species along the way and helping them evolve into space faring races like themselves. Humanity evolved too fast, or wasn’t noticed the last time around, but they’ll be here “soon” - within 10 million years.
