Unless I'm missing something, the chances of intelligent alien life seem pretty good. The next question is: How do we summon them to Earth to bring space communism and/or anal probing?
The Milky Way is huge. There's room for there to be loads of aliens without any of us being within spitting distance of each other.
Or put simply: there are 8 billion people on Earth but you're not anal probing anyone at the moment either.
I did some quick wolfram alpha calculations, assuming an average distribution of stars (false, since there are varying densities inside the arms and more density in the core), there actually should be one about every 0.9 square lightyears. A lot better than I expected. But I've played enough Elite: Dangerous to know that stellar density near the core is significantly higher to the point where it is DEFINITELY throwing these calculations off.
you cant go faster than the speed of light and the speed of light is too slow.
This is the real problem. For any meaningful contact to be established, an alien race would need some kind of wormhole/warp technology, and the fact that no alien race has established contact with us yet is (in my opinion) pretty damning evidence that such a technology is not possible.
They'd have to have a general interest in exploration for exploration's sake, which I think is a reasonable assumption for intelligence. By the time they get to space, there's just so much abundance in the stars just around your home that - what would be the point of exploring for more resources? They'd have to also have some interest in exploring just because.
You are actually describing Capitalism how Land does in thirst for annihilation
There is surely life elsewhere in the universe — even intelligent life on the same level as us. But if there are any alien species out there in the universe, which there surely are, and they’ve been intelligent long enough to even be on the same technological level as us — who’s to say their golden record or voyager II wasn’t shot in a completely different direction? What if their telescopes are just pointing in a direction that’ll never have our solar system come into view? What if their own galaxy orbits the center of the universe at such an angle that we’re like two passing ships in the night?
What if they’re so “deep” into the universe that their radio signals or whatever just never make it to us?
We’ll never know and honestly I think we’re destined as a species to always be “alone” in that sense. The universe is too vast — too impregnable for it to even be feasible for us to make contact with some other species out there. They definitely are out there - and hopefully there is some sort of universal consciousness that we all filter back into after death.
and hopefully there is some sort of universal consciousness that we all filter back into after death.
There is - tryptamine psychedelics told me so.
Also, that love is fundamental; and hate is laughable in comparison, a human invention. It's all gonna be alright :af-heart:
If FTL travel isn't possible, I think one day we'll be in a position where we can "see" life on other planets with powerful telescopes but not be able to reach them or communicate with them (and vice versa).
Then again there may very well be a larger than Earth sized rocky planet just outside Pluto's orbit, and we can't see that yet, so we might be a ways off from seeing aliens.
From what I understand, the Webb telescope is expected to be a pretty big jump in capability, and is supposed to go up October of this year:
The more distant an object is, the younger it appears: its light has taken longer to reach human observers. Because the universe is expanding, as the light travels it becomes red-shifted, and objects at extreme distances are therefore easier to see if viewed in the infrared.[136] JWST's infrared capabilities are expected to let it see back in time to the first galaxies forming just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.[137]
Infrared radiation can pass more freely through regions of cosmic dust that scatter visible light. Observations in infrared allow the study of objects and regions of space which would be obscured by gas and dust in the visible spectrum,[136] such as the molecular clouds where stars are born, the circumstellar disks that give rise to planets, and the cores of active galaxies.[136]
Relatively cool objects (temperatures less than several thousand degrees) emit their radiation primarily in the infrared, as described by Planck's law. As a result, most objects that are cooler than stars are better studied in the infrared.[136] This includes the clouds of the interstellar medium, brown dwarfs, planets both in our own and other solar systems, comets, and Kuiper belt objects that will be observed with the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).[45][137]
Maybe this could lead us to new evidence of life on other planets?
My take: Aliens definitely exist, but the distances between planets are so vast that it simply doesn't make sense for them to travel beyond their own solar system, and even if they are the chances that they've traveled close enough to us for us to detect their presence is infinitesimally small.
Maybe it's something we won't fully understand until we have our own FALGSC and know exactly what it will cost, how long it will take, and how low the chances of success are for our own attempts to go elsewhere in the galaxy.
either the great filter is behind us and we're the first, or it's in front of us and there's a reason we haven't met any FTL aliens
the 2019 global average atmospheric carbon dioxide was 409.8 parts per million; im thinking the great filter is definitely not behind us
There's also the issue of time and scale. How many species might there have already been, how many are yet to come? How many of those are detectable, or able to detect us? Would they make themselves known to us?
There's every chance we're not the only life to exist. There's also every chance we'll never know otherwise.
Aliens probably exist in this galaxy.
They are almost certainly only plants and single celled slime because that's what evolution apparently optimizes for (because that's the absolute vast majority, like 90%, of the biomass on earth). The history of Earth starts about 4.5 billion years ago, life emerges around 3.7 billion years ago, eukaryotes about 2 billion years ago, and animal life that we would recognize as sponges (we actually would have had trouble marking the distinction between fungi and animals here) only emerges about 1 billion years ago. For some reason, multicellular animal life is hard or just sub-optimal in the evolutionary algorithm of natural selection.
For the few multi-celled creatures that are intelligent, technological, and society forming, we are almost certainly in the vast majority of all such creatures by Zipf's law or other such statistical laws. Which implies that they typical technological, society forming intelligent biological life is a human. Any others almost certainly make up small groups that would not have the numbers to establish the distribution of labor required to develop things like radio and space travel. In the history of anatomical humanity, some 3 million years, we have only had technological innovations like agriculture for the last 10 000 years or so - to be honest, for us, agriculture and society was a bad development in terms of labor time, calories, etc. We had to keep at it by Marx's laws of accumulation before we really got to the level of development of capitalism and very early socialism where we could use radio, space travel, etc.
The Drake equations pre-supposes that intelligence and consciousness is optimal for evolution - it isn't. We have it, but if you look around at our fellow species, we're the only ones who were both smart enough to develop technological society while being dumb enough to develop a technological society that can nuke itself and release enough GHG to boil everything else. The Drake equations also pre-supposes that multi-cellular life has a 100% chance of occuring - it doesn't, we didn't see the variety of animal forms until the Cambrian explosion. Not before and not since, something unusual happened in Earth's history that makes us different from a more "typical" life forming planet.
The above means we are almost certainly alone in the entirety of our future light cone. No one else is coming to save us, our galaxy and local group is likely devoid of another intelligent, society forming species like us. The void between galaxies is so large that, likely, we will be alone for more tens of millions of years. We must save ourselves and establish space communism on our own. And on a different note along those lines, I'd rather we would have figured it out on our own anyway - else we'd be some strange pet to a superior species.
They're here, the zoo hypothesis is true, the prime directive is real, the smart ones don't build big they build small, they're literally laughing at us RIGHT NOW
:posad: :posadas: :possadist-ufo: :porky-scared:
We don't. The galaxy is so big that we could probably never have a dialog with another species. Decades of time delay between messages. Unclear how to decode or translate. Do they use binary, phase shifting radio frequency, do they use any similar language steu ture to ours?
We will see if we don't globally warm outsleves back to the stone age. That would mean we had a hundred year window out of the hundred thousand or so we have been a species.
Then visiting would require hundres of years and more resources than we have used for anything ever to do.
I always think of the WOW! signal. We received just a blast of radio but about the only think we could do with it is just remark, "yeah that was a lot of energy at once." Could've been an attempt at communication but we couldn't record anything intelligble with the tech we had and we didn't really have the tech to keep a decent copy of it on hand for future decoding.
