https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
4.1 Rarity of intelligent life
4.1.1 Extraterrestrial life is rare or non-existent 4.1.2 Extraterrestrial intelligence is rare or non-existent 4.1.3 Periodic extinction by natural events
4.2 Evolutionary explanations
4.2.1 Intelligent alien species haven't developed advanced technologies 4.2.2 It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself 4.2.3 It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others 4.2.4 Civilizations only broadcast detectable signals for a brief period of time 4.2.5 Alien life may be too alien
4.3 Sociological explanations
4.3.1 Colonization is not the cosmic norm 4.3.2 Alien species may have only settled part of the galaxy 4.3.3 Alien species may not live on planets 4.3.4 Alien species may isolate themselves from the outside world
4.4 Economic explanations
4.4.1 Lack of resources needed to physically spread throughout the galaxy 4.4.2 It is cheaper to transfer information than explore physically
4.5 Discovery of extraterrestrial life is too difficult
4.5.1 We haven't listened properly 4.5.2 We haven't listened for long enough 4.5.3 Intelligent life may be too far away 4.5.4 Intelligent life may exist hidden from view
4.6 Willingness to communicate
4.6.1 Everyone is listening but no one is transmitting 4.6.2 Communication is dangerous 4.6.3 Earth is deliberately avoided 4.6.4 Earth is deliberately isolated (planetarium hypothesis)
4.7 Alien life is already here unacknowledged
Most likely explanation is that they're out there and know we are mega cringe so they stay away
Edit: Fuckkkkkk dude this formatting got me feeling like something
They were going to contact us, but they started deciphering blue check twitter and turned around
Earth just posted cringe again, no we dont need a golden picture of your genitals.
There's a lot of window dressing around the whole question, but all of the answers boil down to something like -
#1. Everything is far away in distance from everything else
#2. Everything is also far away in time thanks to the first
#3. Far, far more ways to be dead than alive
#4. Far more way to be alive than intelligent
#5. Far more way to be intelligent than human. We may be the only species that thinks flinging itself into the void is a remotely good idea.
Yeah I was there too. Look forward to seeing you in this same thread on Thursday
Why would aliens want to visit us?
If there exists an alien race so technologically advanced to allow interstellar, or perhaps intergalactic travel, wouldn't they be so advanced in comparison to regard us as nothing but ants?
Think about it: Would you stop to talk to ants?
What's the argument that we're like ants to them? Would we be unable to understand their motivations and goals, how they communicate with each other, etc? I don't buy it.
Sure a biological brain is slower than a computer, and humans can't see gamma/xray/microwave/ultraviolet/infrared/radio waves without assistance, but would that really change anything?
Consider that we're pretty damn sure lots of animals around us have language. Dolphins, chimps, elephants, parrots(shit, most communal birds really), meerkats, hell, I'd include eusocial insects. And we're nowhere even close to being able to communicate to them in a meaningful fashion.
Now consider a species that evolved in a completely different environment, from completely unrelated ancestors, with completely different architecture of their minds, possibly running with completely different chemistry.
I have doubts we could talk to aliens even if they wanted to as well.
Dolphins just want fish, friends, sex, no pollution, etc, and they can't meaningfully interact with the world outside the water. They say things along those lines, and not much outside of that. It would be cool to understand exactly what they say, but they're not talking about nuclear fusion behind our backs.
For better or for worse, humans evolved to be able to understand much more. The post above implies there are "things humans can't understand", which is what I disagree with. Anything physically possible/solvable should be understandable to the human brain with enough tools. Humans understand chemistry to an extent that they could figure out an alien's biology given enough resources and time. In this way, the human brain is analogous to a universal Turing machine, and sadly dolphin brains are not yet.
Not trying to be human-centric, but I would love an example of something that is fundamentally outside the range of human understanding that hypothetical aliens could understand that makes us like ants to them in the way that even if they understand our language and motivations, we could never understand theirs. I think it's all handwaving.
Not to be glib, but I'm not capable of giving you an example of thing humans can't think of. Like, that's kind of the point I'm making.
I have strong objections to the idea they human brain being capable of simulating a universal Turing machine is actually helpful for communication like that. The few pounds of wetware we have, even in aggregate, is no guarantee we'd be able to simulate their mind-spaces in any reasonable finite time. And even if we could there's no guarantee we'd have similar enough qualia interpretation to make communication meaningful.
Like, in a Mary's box sort of way, saying 'Dolphin thought consists of Water, Sex, Food' seems dismissive to me. I will never experience Dolphin qualia, I will never experience Dolphin thought. We can understand their motivations in abstract as those things sure, I like to think they tell stories about and have group opinions of humans. but that's a long way from being able to communicate any of the strange thoughts humans operate on.
I'm saying that you can't fathom an idea that the human brain is useless against because such a thing does not exist. Here's an attempt anyway.
The universe is made of matter, it's all that exists, and it's the interaction between the matter that caused the brain to evolve and exist like it does. From the brain there are emergent concepts like love. Assume the brain has reached a point of diminishing returns, so the next step might be an entity created with computing technology, which thinks faster and has better sensors and communicates with almost unlimited bandwidth with at the speed of light, and assume immortality through replaceable parts.
Imagine that from the interaction between these lifeforms comes emergent concepts similar to love that we have no words for because the emergent behavior doesn't emerge on humanity's level, but only on a level for immortal creative compassionate calculating machines. Or imagine such lifeforms harness all the energy in a star system or galaxy or galaxy cluster and use it to make a cool machine or a new universe with different rules than ours somehow. I think a capable science fiction writer could write a story explaining what it's like between these lifeforms, or even describe the new universe and some emergent behaviors unique to that universe, and we could understand, whether or not the lifeforms exist or universe exist. (I'm about to be rambling even more, so I'll stop.)
Dolphin qualia is dope, and while I would love to swim in the ocean as a dolphin, it's for dolphins to do that. It's a fine way to exist and there's nothing meant to be dismissive when I say that. Are dolphins capable of understanding and creating fusion? More power to them! :pog-dolphin:
Alright I get what you're saying. Yeah dolphins are dope, and if we could uplift them to understand fusion and maybe us, that be doing daddy Posadas proud.
I guess what I'm saying is, we don't have a lot of good directions to go in for communication with dolphins right now. Like, I feel like it hubris to say we could ever get to that point, just because it would be so far beyond what we know we can do. And I'm pretty sure we'd have had fusion by now if it got anything more than shoestring budget.
And if I apply that forwards, if we run across some hyper-culture 5th international, I'm not sure they could communicate to us if they wanted to.
Like, our greater scope of intelligence hasn't given us a better command of interspecies communication, hell I'm not sure our command of language is necessarily better than a dolphins, maybe it's just abstract reasoning or lack of mathematics or the lack of grippy appendages holding them back from fusion. We just don't know. It's an unknown unknown. Maybe we too lack something that would let us talk to aliens.
The analogy is just supposed to put in terms how weak and insignificant we are in comparison to space-faring star-jumping aliens. I do not mean that we are literally ants to them, rather just so (relatively) weak and insignificant that they wouldn't even bother with us.
Basically everything about the topic is unknown because we have only one piece of data: us.
We don't know the parameters for life itself, let alone intelligent life. We don't know the types of life that could exist. We imagine they're like us and go from there, which is an anthropomorphic assumption that would likely be wrong.
There is very little to say about it but people still try for some reason.
personally I hope we find aliens and they're genetically identical to humans. As that would be pretty funny
We might simply be too far apart to ever meet them.
There is finite matter on a planet, even less matter that can be converted into the energy one would need to travel that far in any reasonable time. Technology can do a lot, but it can't defy the laws of physics.
But hey, no one really knows for sure. Maybe there is a way we haven't thought of yet. Something like wormholes. We still might get to party with cool aliens one day!
robot people robot people
giving up 4+ years to go to a different solar system of a finite lifespan? no way
chillin playing tetris for a few years of an effectively endless existence? why not
What if the real aliens were the friends we made along the way?
As a fuckin nerd I must point out - Even if you get cutesy and build a Dyson sphere, focus the output into a series of stellasers using the sun's corona as a lensing medium, and fire the fucker as a Nicholl-Dyson beam (death star, it's how you build a deathstar) pushing laser to accelerate a spacecraft to as fast as you can go.
It's still only going to be 20% of C. Max. Which sounds like a lot, but that's still 20 years to the closest star. If you don't stop. Stopping means doing that in reverse so call it a half century to the nearest star. Anything beyond that speed and the interstellar medium turns from void into drag with the bonus of deadly particle radiation.
And this is with the most grandiose bullshit grampa sci-fi space dreams. Space is BIG.
Why can't we reach beyond 0.2c? There are other things in the universe which travel at near light speed right?
Small things, and a few very, very large things. The interstellar medium ain't much, around 10-20 hydrogen atoms per square meter. But it adds up.
Particles zip around at larges fractions of C all the time, but because they're so small there's not much to interact with them out there so the only thing to slow them down is space stretching beneath them.
And black holes, neutron stars, binary dwarf stars, a few of these are in orbits at are at appreciable digits of C, but shit, good luck stopping those with anything.
Like, if you're willing to wait, you can just leave ur deathstar on for a few million years and it'll start pushing the star & everything bound to it with it for the ride. Make Sol a mobile home and go arbitrarily fast. But if you're willing that long, .2 is pretty fast actually.
How would they slow down the vehicle if there wasn't already an identical Dyson sphere at the destination? Sounds completely infeasible.
Yeah, stopping gets a bit ridiculous. Like, you can brake off the interstellar medium/destination star magnetically, or you could shoot a mirror ahead, and the focus the beam on that & bounce it around to brake, but it just gets really comical. Cars don't work without roads and regular interstellar travel doesn't work without municipal doom lasers.
It’s still only going to be 20% of C. Max
Which impressively isn't that far from theoretically buildable spacecrafts such as project Daedalus (12% of lightspeed).
Spicy take: the Fermi paradox is a giant meme and features a bunch of numbers pulled out of thin air.
The reality of it is that Earth has existed for billions of years and has had civilization for ten thousand years, maybe a little longer. We only have Earth to judge, but as best we can tell, intelligent life is super rare. Even if there were smart aliens out there, they could've lasted a million years and we'd probably still miss them.Spicy take: the Fermi paradox is a giant meme and features a bunch of numbers pulled out of thin air.
I think your are conflating the Drake Equation with the Fermi Paradox.
And the Drake Equation essentially is a meme:
The equation was written in 1961 by Frank Drake, not for purposes of quantifying the number of civilizations, but as a way to stimulate scientific dialogue at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).[3][4] The equation summarizes the main concepts which scientists must contemplate when considering the question of other radio-communicative life.[3] It is more properly thought of as an approximation than as a serious attempt to determine a precise number.
Yup, answering the Fermi Paradox relies on the existence of hypothesis like the Drake Equation so in a sense you were right but I wanted to clarify for the unfamiliar.
Would be extremely interesting to watch as languages evolve at a rate that makes them hard to distinguish as the same language without a primer on the changes in meanings of words or addition of new words and removal of old ones from use.
With algorithmic CETI you could at least send some sort of advanced runnable chatbot so they'd get some answers directly. Possibly even actual digitized consciousness if such a thing is possible (which, despite the certainty about this of most techbros, is still to be demonstrated).
Or it's some shit like a global mega organism and has no desire to leave, let alone the capability
The zoo hypothesis speculates on the assumed behavior and existence of technically advanced extraterrestrial life and the reasons they refrain from contacting Earth. It is one of many theoretical explanations for the Fermi paradox. The hypothesis is that alien life intentionally avoids communication with Earth, and one of its main interpretations is that it does so to allow for natural evolution and sociocultural development, avoiding interplanetary contamination, similarly to people observing animals at a zoo. The hypothesis seeks to explain the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life despite its generally accepted plausibility and hence the reasonable expectation of its existence. A variant on the zoo hypothesis suggested by the former MIT Haystack Observatory scientist John Allen Ball is the laboratory hypothesis, where humanity is being subjected to experiments, with the Earth being a giant laboratory.[1]
Aliens might, for example, choose to allow contact once the human species has passed certain technological, political, or ethical standards. They might withhold contact until humans force contact upon them, possibly by sending a spacecraft to planets they inhabit. Alternatively, a reluctance to initiate contact could reflect a sensible desire to minimize risk. An alien society with advanced remote-sensing technologies may conclude that direct contact with neighbors confers added risks to oneself without an added benefit. In the related laboratory hypothesis, the zoo hypothesis is extended such that the 'zoo keepers' are subjecting humanity to experiments, a hypothesis which Ball describes as "morbid" and "grotesque",[1] overlooking the possibility that such experiments may be altruistic, i.e., designed to accelerate the pace of civilization to overcome a tendency for intelligent life to destroy itself, until a species is sufficiently developed to establish contact, as in the zoo hypothesis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis
