Mine is probably the most boring: There are many intelligent species in the universe. Faster-than-light travel, however, really is simply impossible, meaning that there cannot exist a truly interstellar civilization. So while some species have probably settled solar systems other than their own through generation ships, suspended animation, time dilation, or whatever, their range of expansion is limited. This means that encounters between species of different planets are rare. Humans will most likely never contact any intelligent alien species, at most one or two. We might, however, discover evidence of their existence through telescopes or something.
its gonna be so disappointing when we find alien life and its literally just a fucking crab
I think the Great Filter is figuring out how to sustain a planet-dominating species without completely consuming the planet. Alien life is probably super common but the same characteristics that enable a species to become planet-dominating are counter-productive to meeting the goal of planetary harmony. Sidenote, here's a really cool video that details the kinds of alien life we might find throughout the universe, insane production value and ridiculous render quality, highly recommend.
only the most patrician video recommendations for my fellow chapos
I've got a similar opinion, although I think it's more likely that "technological" life is less common. We know that life arose on Earth just about as soon as it was viable for life to arise, but the evolution of eukaryotes took over a billion years, and that event may have only ever happened once. After that, multicellular life took another billion or so years to start evolving. If we imagine that those two evolutionary events are in fact not 'inevitable' consequences but instead infinitesimally unlikely chances, it feels like there's probably a whole lot of prokaryotes in the universe, but significantly less multicellular life.
Adding on to that, there's been a bit over 100 million years of large terrestrial lifeforms before evolution finally rolled a species that had the qualities to do the kinds of things that humans have done. We're already seeing how intelligence does not inevitably lead to development of human-analogue technology (Corvids, Cetaceans, other great apes). Many species through land evolutionary history have likely had human-level intelligence, but due to other circumstances didn't go along a path that led to space exploration. So I think that there are still planets that have complex multicellular and even intelligent life, but no agriculture or other stuff that would lead to industrial-level societies.
I agree that it's depressingly likely that FTL just doesn't exist in a meaningful sense, which would form the biggest difficulty in creating interstellar communities.
This is really interesting, what species are meant to have similar intelligence to humans?
Yeah, that's kind of more like it. We can't really estimate the intelligence of extinct species that well aside from looking at brain size and other physical circumstantial evidence, but I'm extrapolating from our current and growing understanding of intelligence in non-human animals like dolphins and corvids. We're increasingly realizing that these species are much smarter than we had previously thought, and the toolmaking, memory, and self-recognition displayed specifically by magpies (I think) means that these traits can evolve outside of mammals.
I'm of the opinion that 'being human-level smart' is not something that's only popped up in humans, but merely that our hominid ancestors were the first to combine that with other relatively rare features like opposable thumbs to allow for unprecedented tool use, and then things just happened from there.
I reject it outright.
We've barely even begun to search, space is really big, and the technology we use for searching is still really not that very good. Looking at tiny sections of space with radio telescopes and shit and declaring that there's some big mystery about where all the aliens are is like dunking a shot glass into the ocean and wondering where all the fish are, the Fermi Paradox is nonsensical.
The question is not why we haven't found any alien life, it is why hasn't alien life found us? If they exist, then they are hiding themselves from us. Why? If they don't exist, why do we?
Well, the issue with the technology being used to search would apply to hypothetical eight billion year old aliens too, just in the opposite direction. All the signs we're giving off of being a technological intelligent species could simply be so obsolete they fly under the radar entirely, and while Earth would obviously be life-bearing we have no way of knowing if hypothetical aliens would care about that. Given that life might exist on Venus, I wouldn't be surprised if life is actually really common.
Also, I didn't mention this in my initial answer because I know what it does to my perceived credibility, but: UFOs are probably real. The US Navy has said as much, and more importantly a lot of people in the Scientific community are starting to care about the subject again, in recent years there have been more UFO-related scientific studies being set up than in the past few decades. The broad consensus among reputable people on the subject is that sufficient evidence exists to overturn the long-standing belief that UFOs aren't real, which was mostly created by the CIA-funded Condon Report which ignored it's own data and was made with the explicit purpose of 'disproving' UFOs, instead of being a genuine scientific study. Mainstream scientists are coming around to saying that it's a subject worthy of study, and while I don't know what UFOs are (and anyone who says they do is probably pulling some kind of grift) the ET hypothesis has remained popular for a number of good reasons. It's still unlikely, but the solution to the fermi paradox might be that they already have found us and we just took 80 years to figure that out.
I love that last sentence.
But, your solution to the Fermi Paradox is essentially that they aren't interested in us and we aren't smart enough to figure out where they are. Which, fair. But that is just a hypothesis that is untestable. There is no way for us to know if that is true, just like we can't prove if God exists. So, it's a neat idea, but kinda useless for solving the Fermi Paradox.
There's also the issue that life wouldn't have formed just 8 billion years ago. It would be evolving right now. On another planet, it would have evolved till human intelligence a million years before we did. On another, a billion years. Or really, any number between 0 to 8 billion years. Which means, just like life on Earth, life in the Milky Way would be in multiple stages.
Maybe the ones that are 8 billion years old have achieved nirvana and don't care about Earth, aren't curious about humanity, and don't want to harvest our Sun for energy. But can the same be said for species that are only a million years older than us?
Hell, Alpha Centauri is only 4 light years away from us, and there's a planet in the habitable zone there. So they would just need to travel a maximum of 4,000 years to reach us (if they can travel at the speed of our fastest probe). I mean, there are a bunch of other planets close enough to have life that has had enough time to reach us and that may be close to us in their evolutionary stage. That's the Fermi Paradox, if there is life anywhere else, why haven't we discovered it? Even if we're like bacteria to the Great Ones, there have to be other bacteria for whom we are food. **Where are they? **
ALSO, I wouldn't dismiss anyone for thinking UFOs are real. They might be. I hope they are.
After some thinking I don't really have an answer for the rest of your points on the Fermi Paradox, so fair enough.
Guess I'll just go all in on the UFOs then and point out the following: per this excellent paper (https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/21/10/939/htm) going over a number of quite credible UFO sightings that are - at minimum - radar-visual sightings, the objects in question displayed acceleration sufficient for interstellar travel by way of exploiting relativistic effects.
Even the slowest estimated acceleration among the objects would be able to (from their perspective) get from TRAPPIST-1 to here in only 58 days, and from Proxima Centuari to here in only 43. The highest acceleration observed, 5000 g, would mean that (from their perspective) it would take 1.4 days to get from Proxima Centauri to here, and 1.7 to get here from TRAPPIST-1.
If the sighted objects are aliens flying around, then if they didn't care about the timeskips (and there's many reasons they might not, maybe they don't age, maybe they're automated drones or robots, maybe they're nomadic, etc) that's a very workable speed for interstellar travel.
Part of the problem could be current technology. We blast radio waves into the ether, but those radio waves degrade over distance. Any radio we put out will be just background noise by the time it reaches an advanced alien civilization. It could be radio isn't even the dominant form of communication, so that's why we aren't receiving any kind of space chatter.
I wouldn't say that the Fermi Paradox is nonsensical. It's based on theories of habitable planets, age of the universe, and similar technological advancement in habitable planets. I agree there must be alien life out there, but it is strange to not see any clear signs yet. The galaxy is mapped, stars/planets move in an orderly fashion. Something very large moving in a way that doesn't make sense with it's gravitational orbit should be a clear sign of alien life. Hasn't happened.
Now why an alien species would make a dinner plate the size of a planet and attach thrusters to it is another question, but even so, you'd expect to see something.
Any K2 civilization would be observable from earth, provided they've been K2 long enough for the light to have reached us.
Right, exactly. To me, the fact that we haven't seen any evidence of megastructures suggests that there cannot exist such a thing as a K2 civilization, or anything particularly close. We can see millions/billions (not sure on the #, see below) of stars, but apparently not one sign of a megastructure. This is a much broader sample size than with conventional SETI listening for radio messages. I'm confident that if even one megastructure has ever been built in the history of the universe, there would be at least one that we could see.
Or at least that's what I was going to say, but apparently only 10,000 stars are visible to astronomers, which is a fairly small sample size. So who knows.Wait, what? With telescopes and shit there's no way we can only see that few.
Oh wait, I misread the search results. 10,000 is the total number that can seen from (all points combined on the) Earth by the naked eye. I can't find a number for, say, the Hubble, but it seems to be much higher.
Any speculation on this topic must also consider the fact that Humanity's most advanced civilization spent 60 years suppressing research into the UFO phenomenon, a phenomenon the US Defense Department just recently acknowledged for the first time.
That shit is literally just cold war propaganda. Those videos are that were released were easily debunked too.
Yes it is.
https://youtu.be/mfhAC2YiYHs https://youtu.be/3viYcYPRdu4 https://youtu.be/jWWGmiZs4JA
It's all fucking horseshit. All of it. It expected better from socialists and communists. It would be cool. But it just isn't real. Cope. Please all. Please fucking cope.
I'm not always a sucker for the DoD but when I am it's because of baseless short clips taken from some random flight footage where pilots in their boredom manage to track a flying goose.
Anytime something about aliens comes up people shit out their brains or something.
Y'know how humans just go "oh, ants" and ignore them? Y'know how ants probably cannot begin to comprehend what they're looking at when they see a person?
Yeah, humans are just the ants of space, at least to any intergalactic society. No species sufficiently advanced enough to know about us would give enough of a shit about a species that can't leave its own planet's orbit and can't stop blowing each other up over territory and resource disputes that could be resolved by just working together and expanding outward instead.
Humans study ants though. Humans do phds in ants, make documentaries about ants, collect ants, etc. I think intelligent aliens (if they exist) would be interested but who knows if they'd be interested in mutual contact
I think that any species advanced enough to colonize the galaxy, would have enough knowledge about the actual fabric of the universe that exploring out spatially would just seem silly. They'd much rather explore what's 'beyond the simulation' (using the term simulatiion very loosely here)
That's a good point. Assuming unlimited resources and FTL travel, alien species are prob more interested in what the hell is going on with the expansing universe.
Depends on what version of the "paradox" we're talking about, is it signals or direct contact?
If it's lack of direct contact the answer is simple, they're not going to talk to us and for good reason, you'd have to be barking mad to want to engage directly with this planet. Who would you even introduce yourself too, there are 200 nation-states most of whom have a history of inflicting savage violence on their own populace, you think any intelligent being is going to objectively look at that and think "yeah lets kick that hornets nest", the best you can hope for it that we're at least interesting enough to be the subject of extensive remote observation and study
If we're talking about signals, then it's probably because we're either not listening properly, we're not listening for long enough, or they're not transmitting signals we can detect
The thing is, any civilization capable of coming here from another star is far enough beyond us that we pose no threat.
Sure, you could say that they have nothing to gain from introducing themselves to this mess, but there would have to be some kind of deliberate extreme quarantine if they can prevent every member of an alien civilization from making contact individually.
Reverse Posadism: All the aliens are trapped in capitalist/feudal/fascist hell holes and we must be the socialist aliens to liberate them.
Mostly joking. Assuming FTL travel is real and possible, I don't think it's that hard to imagine that whatever community would exist out there, whether one species or a collective of species, would have a sort of prime directive-style rule which would exclude us from interacting with them. It's not hard to imagine what kind of freakish hell capitalists would turn earth into if they got their hands on tech far beyond our own. But that's just me hoping that there are Trek-like communist aliens living the dream while I'm stuck watching the planet die. :doomer:
Was gonna come here to talk any the great filter. It's basically that there are big road blocks toward becoming interstellar and all species eventually are stopped at one of there roadblocks. The sample size of one, humanity, shows this is pretty likely. Assuming humanity isn't special and assuming we actually do destroy ourselves (we're trying real hard as a species!) then it follows that it's pretty likely that this is a common outcome
I mean it's possible (albeit unlikely) that we're the first example of intelligent life. Universe is fucked though if we're the si-fi precursor species.
Firstly, that is a very big if. There isn't any proof that FTL isn't possible either and so solving the Fermi Paradox that way is as useful as saying life was created only on Earth by God.
But let's assume that FTL isn't possible. Well, the Fermi Paradox is still not solved. The universe is 14 billion years old. Within a few hundred million years, stars, followed by galaxies, had begun to form. Milky Way is at least 13 billion years old.
Now, life on Earth began pretty quickly after the Earth was formed, which itself was pretty quickly after our Sun was born. All this happened within the last 5 billion years. So life has taken at most 5 billion years to evolve to our present intelligence. Let's say that is the average time needed for a space faring civilization to evolve.
Given that life on Earth started really quickly after our Sun formed, and the earliest stars in the Milky Way were born 13 billion years ago, there should be life that began along with them. Taking 5 billion years to evolve to our present intelligence, that means there should be intelligent life in the Milky Way as early as 8 billion years ago. That life had 8 billion years to travel around the galaxy.
Now, Milky Way is only 2 million light years in diameter. This means our space-faring alien civilization would need to travel 2 million light years in 8 billion years. That is 0.00025 light years in a year. That is a bit more than 2 billion kms. The Parker Solar Probe will travel at 700,000 km per hour, or 6 billion km a year, more than thrice the minimum speed needed for our space-faring civilization to reach us. "Designing something to go fast in space is pretty much the same as you would design it to go slow in space; space has nothing to really impede its progress," was what the project manager for the probe had to say. So there is no reason they wouldn't reach Earth much, much sooner than this. After all, they have literally 8 billion years to progress scientifically.
If life is there in the Milky Way, which it has to be if life is there anywhere else in the Universe, then we should have already interacted with it. Well, more accurately, they should've already interacted with us. And thus, the Fermi Paradox.
Let’s say that is the average time needed for a space faring civilization to evolve.
This is a wild assumption to make. Fuck's sake, we're not a space faring civilization. Let's say space is an ocean - we're a civilization that has gone up to the shore and walked around in the tide - arguably we've done a bit of swimming but we're still right up against the shore, and has launched a few messages in a bottle in the hopes that maybe someone will find them. We're not a space faring civilization.
Yeah, for sure, when you're thinking about it in terms of a human lifespan. But the time scale we're talking about is insanely huge. So your argument doesn't make much sense.
The current estimate for when life on earth began is actually 3.5 billion years. But I was being generous with the numbers. In this timeline, we have 1.5 billion years left to become space-faring. You gotta remember the scale, man.
We don't know where 96% of the universe's matter is, maybe it involves some funky shit ¯_(ツ)_/¯
