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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.
Or it's some shit like a global mega organism and has no desire to leave, let alone the capability
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).
A lot of people here are implying that in order for us to discover a space faring civilization, that they'd have to make some kind of deliberate effort to contact us. But that's probably not true. If we assume that a space faring civilization would generally want to build a dyson swarm (reasonable, where is there a bigger supply of energy than stars) and that they could build a dyson swarm (again reasonable. It would take a long time to finish but it doesn't require any new laws of physics to be possible, and though it would take a long time to finish, you start reaping the benefits immediately), then if there were space faring civilizations as old as they are distant from us (that is, if they've built a dyson swarm n years ago and they are within n light years of us), then we should be able to observe them from here.
idk why you'd do a dyson sphere/swarm tbh
what kind of power demands couldn't be met with much, much easier terrestrial fusion?
Well for one, planets aren't efficient. You have to deal with gravity, which is costly if you want anything to leave the planet. It's not efficient in terms of space. That is, the matter that composes a planet could create more space for humans to live in if it was stripped down and used to make space stations that people live on, which is one form a dyson swarm could take.
But I guess more importantly, there is an assumption here that at least some of these space faring civilizations would always seek to increase their energy output. That there will never be a point where they decide "We've got enough, let's just stop now" when they could probably have a largely automated process that keeps expanding it instead. You could definitely argue that some space faring civilizations would not seek to increase their energy output, but that wouldn't solve the fermi paradox because even if only 1/1000 would choose to do this you'd expect to still see some dyson swarms. You'd have to come up with a reason for why all civilizations don't want to build dyson swarms.
i'd challenge 'planets aren't efficient'. labor is much more efficient where people can actually survive and thrive. assuming as we do that other life'd be planetbound, the same constraint exists.
i might be getting a bit big for my britches here but it kinda seems like this imagining of the fermi paradox has built in assumptions we can't assume are true: the ever-expanding needs of power thing is obv entrenched capitalist realism. the assumption of an innate interstellar wanderlust and thirst for exploration is basically uncritically accepting the mythology of european imperialism. the assumption technology will necessarily make fantasy engineering possible @ dyson sphere/swarm...
I don't see why a planet would allow people to thrive more than a space station necessarily would. And if that's true, I feel like a single planet is going to get pretty crowded.
I definitely see your capitalist realism point. I'd probably counter it with firstly that "exploration" in this context would be pretty low effort for the types of civilizations we're talking about. It'd take millions of years provided no interstellar travel, but sending a probe to every solar system would be trivial, and probably worth doing. And secondly, would a fully automated luxury gay space communist society not want to increase its energy output? I feel like you'd want it to support the "fully automated luxury" part. And with a massive amount of automation, it likely wouldn't require an immense amount of labor to get a dyson swarm started. But overall, yeah I guess it's possible that the idea of a civilization always desiring to grow it's energy output is rooted in capitalist realism.
I strongly disagree with the last part though. FTL travel is fantasy engineering, and a dyson sphere probably is as well, but a dyson swarm really isn't. It's at a scale that's hard for us to imagine, since it'd be probably billions or trillions of small space stations, but building such a space station doesn't require breaking a law of physics or some unimaginable technological breakthrough.
Elon's loop doesn't require breaking a law of physics or unimaginable technological breakthrough either, its just something with fatal premises & problems---for a dyson swarm there's an actually unimaginable amount of factors we're simply brushing aside to say its something we can definitely do. granted, a wee solar panel station floating around the sun isn't crazy, but an operation made entirely or almost entirely of robots harvesting raw resources & doing an entire production line to churn out billions of those? that's an insane organizational, nevermind technological, feat.
it's similar with 'trivially' sending out probes to survey the expanse of space... is it trivial though? one of the proposals is self-replicating probes--just casually making robots that can explore, prospect, mine, refine, smelt, manufacture... while also fueling itself somehow... all this for the only guaranteed return being survey data? we know a staggering amount about distant astronomical objects just with fancy telescopes, wouldn't more & better telescopes & such---possibly in various-but-still-nearby places---be a much simpler investment with similar guaranteed returns?
Elon's Loop's fatal problems are that at best it's shittier than a train. I guess I don't think it's comparable.
It definitely would be a huge technological feat, but put in the context of what we already know what's possible, millions of years to work with, and the size of the universe, it doesn't explain none being currently observable by us unless you are suggesting that these technological challenges may be absolutely insurmountable.
I would say the same about the Von Neumann (self-replicating) probes. Also, from what I understand, telescopes have some limitations, like if a planet's orbit does not pass in between a star and us, we can't detect it, since we can't detect the star's dimming from when it passes by (I could be wrong though).
my point is more the L00p can never function as its supposed to even if 'car go thru tunnel' is something that works. satellite that absorbs solar energy is plausible, but billions-strong network of automatically constructed versions of that incorporates a lot more elements that might not work.
i kinda am asserting that either the technological challenges are insurmountable--which is probably an opinion that'd be shared by artificial intelligence skeptics, or that the technological challenges aren't worth surmounting. If it would take several million years to do a project, even a couple thousand, I wouldn't blame anyone for not doing it.
Is your opinion the same for a project that, though it could take a million years for it to be "finished", you start reaping the rewards immediately? (E.g. A dyson swarm, where each additional station is useful.
idk unless we've got immortal beings overseeing it the timescale is gonna throw a wrench in it, hell, even if they're immortal. cultures are constantly developing, language changes, bad things could happen. there's no examples yet of the kind of institutional & political cohesion we might need. space communism being an infinitely stable and enduring system is probably a bit naive
I don't think I agree that such a high amount of political and institutional cohesion would be necessary. It's less of a singular project that has a start and a finish and more of a thing that would be continuously added on to as power and/or habitats are needed until it's full and we can't add anything else.
