maybe if you want to overthink it. or maybe FTL travel is just impossible (very likely)
the chance of independently developing intelligent life + the extremely low max speed of travel = why would anyone ever find us? pessimistic theories are just overthinking it
I think the thing scientists are puzzled by is the complete lack of evidence of advanced civilizations anywhere. The universe is very old, and very vast. Even conservative estimates assumed we'd be able to find some evidence of radio signals.
radio signals would take millions of years to get any significant distance and for all we know we just evolved in a span of time right after one passed through our solar system. even a 0.1 degree difference in the direction of travel could make a radio signal entirely miss our solar system too. that combined with the low revolution rate of multicellular creatures means that it's probably just that no one knows where to find others and there's very few people to look
The galaxy is huge but even if a civilization could "only" travel at 50% the speed of light ever (and also if a desire to expand is a reasonable thing these civilizations would have) the galaxy would've been colonized within 100K years or so. So if any time between anatomical humans and now there were spacefaring civilizations in the galaxy, we should see evidence for it pretty much anywhere we point our telescopes.
It's not because I want to overthink it; this question has been overthought by many others before us, and of the multitudes of potential reasons they have come up with the amount that aren't the result of something with horrible implications for us is close to 0.
Also notable though is we quickly set aside the concept of alien life being imperceptible (for lack of a better word) by humans so like the least scary way to think of it is we are all lab rats for some 4th dimensional reality TV show or some shit which might not be all that practically different from standard theism
it's not close to zero. wtf are you talking about. the great filter could have just been developing brains. intelligent life might just be a rare result of evolution. maybe nobody found us in the 10000 year life span we were writing down words we understand (real short time in space terms)
there is no reason to torture yourself over something that has a 99% chance of just being the most obvious thing of "nobody developed radio"
:this: :this: :this: it's 100 times easier for single celled organisms to live and reproduce than whatever the fuck we have going on
hell for all we know we came from the rubble of some progenitor species' planet exploding and all of our "siblings" are billions of light years away by now
We haven't even seen single celled life. All we know of exoplanets is the slim information that can be gleaned from the shadows they cast as they pass in front of their star.
It is rather silly, yes. I personally put more stock in the idea that we're probably on the early side. We may even be the first. 12 billion years is not all that long if you let the physics calculations play out.
Very true. I suppose what I like about the "early humans" hypothesis is that it forces one to consider that, as far as we know, this is it. We should treat life as precious because, even if it's common, we don't actually know that.
But isn't that the kind of take only a self important human would have? What makes us special that we are the thing that "interrupts" the otherwise uninterrupted universe?
I’m not only talking of humans, I mean the small speck of multicellular creatures in a seemingly infinite universe. And your second question lends to exactly what I’m saying, I find it borderline narcissistic to think there’s nothing quite like us in the entire universe.
Well what was being discussed above was contact, and single called life isn't going to be able to be doing that.
Regardless, it's still being "self important" to think the universe is essentially empty were it not for this specific configuration of matter that happens to be what we consider "like us." The fact of the matter remains, there is no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere and is probably extremely rare, even if single celled life is common. It's not narcissistic to recognize that super rare even one off events (like a configuration of matter that can be conscious) do actually occur.
yeah but while the universe is huge and has a ton of stuff in it and likely billions intelligent species, all we can ever hope to know is in the milky way and andromeda and honestly we probably wont ever know everything in these two galaxies
the most we 'explored' thousands of planets is seeing their stars wobble back and forth or dip in brightness and saying 'yep probably a planet', its way too early to rule out single celled life on any of these planets before we can even tell what kind of planet it is
What? We have explored like 2 planets, and some moons and asteroids. Telescopes won't really tell you anything about simple life on expolanets. Even our furthest probe is voyager what is .056% of the way to the nearest star and has been traveling for decades.
Some molecules are unstable and unlikely to be in high concentrations but also leave obvious spectra (like O2, O3, CH4). You can tell by atmospheric scattering. I doubt we have any telescopes powerful enough to resolve far enough though, planets are pretty tiny.
Yeah I have some passing familiarity with this from reading a few papers about the Venus phosphine thing from about a year ago that turned out to be a measurement error. If we can mess up measuring the closest planet, think about how hard it is to see planets light years away.
The key part of that sentence was "with horrible implications for us." I'm not specifically referring to "Something giant eating us all and killing us" or something like that. I mean to find out we're alone would be horrible, to find out intelligence is a fluke would be horrible, to find out we exist in a blink between the ticking hands of the cosmic clock would suck, a linear model for the experience of time not being the norm wouldn't be great either tbh.
there is no reason to torture yourself over something that has a 99% chance of just being the most obvious thing of “nobody developed radio”
I assure you I only think about this stuff when someone makes a related post, I don't lay awake at night thinking about this stuff because I have more mundane things to keep me awake all night. :P
i will agree the "benign" theories are much less popular and less frequently made than the wacky ones but that's probably because there isn't much more to say about them. this "single-cell" theory might make up 0.01% of all theories but the chance of it being true is waaaaaay higher than that
A Christian ‘theorist’ probably - “As more people stan creationism, thereby becoming the majority in discourse, then surely there will be an equal increase in the likelihood of creationism being true” :think-about-it:
The usual reply is that the universe is old and the galaxy isn't that big even at sub light speeds in geological time.
The dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. The galaxy is 105,700 light years in diameter. If instead of dying the dinos spent five million years becoming sapient and building a 0.5 light speed engine, by now they could have traveled the galaxy edge to edge like three hundred times over.
my response to that is that 300 times is super tiny and unless alien life decided to travel 300 times (or even 600 times) in a mathematically efficient pattern to the edge of the galaxy (which they have no reason to because there's no reason to assume alien life would want to travel anyways, and it would be a massive waste of energy, resources, and people) we would never have even a hundredth of a percent of a chance of seeing them, even if they travelled 600 times in random directions.
Well, I just used 65 million as an example and Earth is 4.5 billion years old and there are much older planets. My point is that galaxy's size and age make factors other that possibility of FTL travel more important to the whole question. Factors like probability of multicellular, sapient life developing and sustaining itself long enough to colonize space.
maybe if you want to overthink it. or maybe FTL travel is just impossible (very likely)
the chance of independently developing intelligent life + the extremely low max speed of travel = why would anyone ever find us? pessimistic theories are just overthinking it
I think the thing scientists are puzzled by is the complete lack of evidence of advanced civilizations anywhere. The universe is very old, and very vast. Even conservative estimates assumed we'd be able to find some evidence of radio signals.
radio signals would take millions of years to get any significant distance and for all we know we just evolved in a span of time right after one passed through our solar system. even a 0.1 degree difference in the direction of travel could make a radio signal entirely miss our solar system too. that combined with the low revolution rate of multicellular creatures means that it's probably just that no one knows where to find others and there's very few people to look
We should probably do more revolutions to increase it.
fuck yeah
The galaxy is huge but even if a civilization could "only" travel at 50% the speed of light ever (and also if a desire to expand is a reasonable thing these civilizations would have) the galaxy would've been colonized within 100K years or so. So if any time between anatomical humans and now there were spacefaring civilizations in the galaxy, we should see evidence for it pretty much anywhere we point our telescopes.
It's not because I want to overthink it; this question has been overthought by many others before us, and of the multitudes of potential reasons they have come up with the amount that aren't the result of something with horrible implications for us is close to 0.
Also notable though is we quickly set aside the concept of alien life being imperceptible (for lack of a better word) by humans so like the least scary way to think of it is we are all lab rats for some 4th dimensional reality TV show or some shit which might not be all that practically different from standard theism
it's not close to zero. wtf are you talking about. the great filter could have just been developing brains. intelligent life might just be a rare result of evolution. maybe nobody found us in the 10000 year life span we were writing down words we understand (real short time in space terms)
there is no reason to torture yourself over something that has a 99% chance of just being the most obvious thing of "nobody developed radio"
mitochondria symbiosis is a pretty interesting filter. It could be most life in the universe is just short lived and uncomplicated cells.
:this: :this: :this: it's 100 times easier for single celled organisms to live and reproduce than whatever the fuck we have going on
hell for all we know we came from the rubble of some progenitor species' planet exploding and all of our "siblings" are billions of light years away by now
Meat-gundamns are unlikely, treat your cells with respect.
we've explored thousands upon thousands of planets and i'm unsure if we've ever seen anything beyond single cell life, so yeah
We haven't even seen single celled life. All we know of exoplanets is the slim information that can be gleaned from the shadows they cast as they pass in front of their star.
then why would we ever expect to be contacted by aliens? have you ever tried contacting a friend by pointing a laser pointer in random directions?
It is rather silly, yes. I personally put more stock in the idea that we're probably on the early side. We may even be the first. 12 billion years is not all that long if you let the physics calculations play out.
I just find it extremely improbable that in a limitless universe, there is nothing but an endless void interrupted by dogs and selfimportant humans.
Very true. I suppose what I like about the "early humans" hypothesis is that it forces one to consider that, as far as we know, this is it. We should treat life as precious because, even if it's common, we don't actually know that.
But isn't that the kind of take only a self important human would have? What makes us special that we are the thing that "interrupts" the otherwise uninterrupted universe?
I’m not only talking of humans, I mean the small speck of multicellular creatures in a seemingly infinite universe. And your second question lends to exactly what I’m saying, I find it borderline narcissistic to think there’s nothing quite like us in the entire universe.
Well what was being discussed above was contact, and single called life isn't going to be able to be doing that.
Regardless, it's still being "self important" to think the universe is essentially empty were it not for this specific configuration of matter that happens to be what we consider "like us." The fact of the matter remains, there is no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere and is probably extremely rare, even if single celled life is common. It's not narcissistic to recognize that super rare even one off events (like a configuration of matter that can be conscious) do actually occur.
universe isn't limitless. we have a gravity group of only two galaxies.
That’s still absolutely massive, isn’t it? I
yeah but while the universe is huge and has a ton of stuff in it and likely billions intelligent species, all we can ever hope to know is in the milky way and andromeda and honestly we probably wont ever know everything in these two galaxies
the most we 'explored' thousands of planets is seeing their stars wobble back and forth or dip in brightness and saying 'yep probably a planet', its way too early to rule out single celled life on any of these planets before we can even tell what kind of planet it is
well in that case we have no way to prove any hypothesis and this is all navel gazing for the purpose of paranoia and self-sabotage
What? We have explored like 2 planets, and some moons and asteroids. Telescopes won't really tell you anything about simple life on expolanets. Even our furthest probe is voyager what is .056% of the way to the nearest star and has been traveling for decades.
Some molecules are unstable and unlikely to be in high concentrations but also leave obvious spectra (like O2, O3, CH4). You can tell by atmospheric scattering. I doubt we have any telescopes powerful enough to resolve far enough though, planets are pretty tiny.
Yeah I have some passing familiarity with this from reading a few papers about the Venus phosphine thing from about a year ago that turned out to be a measurement error. If we can mess up measuring the closest planet, think about how hard it is to see planets light years away.
The key part of that sentence was "with horrible implications for us." I'm not specifically referring to "Something giant eating us all and killing us" or something like that. I mean to find out we're alone would be horrible, to find out intelligence is a fluke would be horrible, to find out we exist in a blink between the ticking hands of the cosmic clock would suck, a linear model for the experience of time not being the norm wouldn't be great either tbh.
I assure you I only think about this stuff when someone makes a related post, I don't lay awake at night thinking about this stuff because I have more mundane things to keep me awake all night. :P
oh im a dumbass
yeah i sorta became desensitized from crippling existential fear of loneliness thanks to capitalism. not cured just desensitized.
i will agree the "benign" theories are much less popular and less frequently made than the wacky ones but that's probably because there isn't much more to say about them. this "single-cell" theory might make up 0.01% of all theories but the chance of it being true is waaaaaay higher than that
A Christian ‘theorist’ probably - “As more people stan creationism, thereby becoming the majority in discourse, then surely there will be an equal increase in the likelihood of creationism being true” :think-about-it:
The usual reply is that the universe is old and the galaxy isn't that big even at sub light speeds in geological time.
The dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. The galaxy is 105,700 light years in diameter. If instead of dying the dinos spent five million years becoming sapient and building a 0.5 light speed engine, by now they could have traveled the galaxy edge to edge like three hundred times over.
my response to that is that 300 times is super tiny and unless alien life decided to travel 300 times (or even 600 times) in a mathematically efficient pattern to the edge of the galaxy (which they have no reason to because there's no reason to assume alien life would want to travel anyways, and it would be a massive waste of energy, resources, and people) we would never have even a hundredth of a percent of a chance of seeing them, even if they travelled 600 times in random directions.
Well, I just used 65 million as an example and Earth is 4.5 billion years old and there are much older planets. My point is that galaxy's size and age make factors other that possibility of FTL travel more important to the whole question. Factors like probability of multicellular, sapient life developing and sustaining itself long enough to colonize space.
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