I don't know if this is an original thought but it occurred to me that we might be in a cosmic proportioned "terrarium".
What better way to keep an intelligent species from escaping than limiting the velocity of information transfer and putting everything interesting at distances that are large multiples of the maximum velocity.
In other words, maybe the simulation architect doesn't want us to escape and find (contaminate) the other experiments? :)
The fact that we exist as carbon based life forms makes it somewhat likely other life forms exist. We're made of the most common elements, whose signatures we observe in other stars. But in order to exist, we needed time for first and second generation stars to create heavier elements. So, space is only part of the limitation, time may be the more key reason we don't hear alien contact.
This is pretty similar to what is described in Stanisław Lem's "The New Cosmogony" (a work of fiction, included in the book "A Perfect Vacuum"). Only there the terrarium-like isolation of intelligent species is a self-imposed restriction: The earliest civilisations of the cosmos engineered the laws of physics that way.
Seems a little inconvenient for the architect to have to account for all the laws of physics and allocate millions of cubic light years of space just for our tiny rock when they could just squish those of us that escape, or at least discover the true nature of our environment, like we would ants on a kitchen work top.
Ants don't have a pernicious ability to build progressively better technology in an attempt to escape the kitchen work top and conquer the refrigerator. Or, rather, they do, in the sense that they are life and life has this tendency, at least in the one case study we have access to.
What do you think happens to those ants, sir? Coming back with tales of being brought up in a flash of light, anally probed, seeing mosquitoes spontaneously exploded, giant ships transporting them to earth.. socially ostracized, is what. Made fun of on the front page of Ant Times.
Speed of Light does a pretty good job of creating a natural bubble. An advanced galactic society may have the knowledge and tech to detect patterns in solar systems that may produce life in the future and predict which star systems may have life.
Is humanity even generating enough radio signals that may be even remotely possible to detect on Alpha Centauri (4.367 light years away)?
What better way to study an intelligent species behaviour that to put it in a dense rich easily traversed environment it could spread through and populate, generating lots of data.
fyi, Preliminary result is that they didn't find anything.
It's funny how movies always show a telescope operator falling asleep listening to deep space as if that's what he does every day and every night....
... and then the reality of these papers showing that SETI does very brief checks for a handful of hours (11hrs in this case) maybe once per year, and only looking in one direction, and only at a narrow frequency band.
I think that trope is often of “the earnest researcher” who has so much hope and faith that he/she does it in their spare time. So rather than a job to listen, it’s their hobby to listen.
I love it, because the silly fantastic odds of the system finding anything, much less of that thing showing up while a person happens to have the headphones on and not be distracted, are just Indiana Jones level entertaining to me. I’ll buy in every time. :D
These days I imagine it would be getting an email alert from the analysis system. Or maybe more realistically the unveil of the true result after doing blind analysis on both junk and real data, not sure what is what (as is becoming common in some areas of physics, to help prevent biases seeping in). Still some drama to be had :-)
In the old days of USENET there was this signature saying something like "The proof that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe is that they didn't attempt to contact us".
They are probably moving to harder to detect high frequency, low power, encrypted transmissions just like earth, for the same reasons. There is likely only a short window when they are detectable.
In the tiny bubble of radius ~130 light-years that we've managed to send radio waves to, maybe. The radius of the observable universe is about 46.5 billion light-years, who knows what else is in there. The ratio between these two numbers is about 1 in 358 million.
Saying that we're alone because we haven't heard back after emitting radio waves for only 130 years is like being at a point in space, looking half an inch around us (1.3 cm) in all directions and declaring that Occam's Razor says there's probably nothing within a radius of 2,900 miles (4,650 km).
Given that It's easier to search in quieter wavelengths like 0.7 and 93 GHz. But is there anything on Earth 1) transmitting unique signals 2) in that range with 3) the kind of power that would survive the rigors of the journey through hundreds of light years?
What is our interstellar beaming frequency? At what power? Why else would there be any signals between 0.7 and 93 that aren't -300dB down? Radio waves spread. And scatter.
You're going to travel in the mountains in a remote region of a planet with no ionosphere. You want to eat your meals while listening to music. Do you take a shortwave radio or an FM radio?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We're looking for the lost keys under the streetlight.
> The galactic center, according to the scientists, “provides an ideal” central location for “advanced civilizations to place a powerful transmitter to efficiently send beacons across the entire Milky Way,” in what is yet another advantage to this strategy.
Can anyone comment on this? What is the idea of such a beacon?
Whenever I hear about putting beacons in space I'm always reminded of the plot of the book The Dark Forest. I remember too about a decade ago that it was decided the idea of broadcasting our location in deep space might be a bad idea.
The books don't really specify that *all* civilizations are actively hostile to each other but hints that the best chance for survival is basically being quiet since there are unknown civilizations that yield tremendous power and are in fact actively hostile to any signs of other intelligent life which they can destroy with relative and terrifying ease.
It's that sort of status-quo that makes the dark forest theory so scary and why everybody that eventually reaches that conclusion would want to remain hidden and/or silent. Throughout the story we only ever get to see from the point of view of two civilizations so who knows if there wasn't something like a star-trekian federation at some place or time since we do eventually get to know that there were many many civilizations in the end.
It does get really crazy, but I personally found the whole trilogy really awesome. It would be hard to build such a story relying only on our current understanding of physics and technology and even some of the crazier parts are still kind of based out of real theories and hypothetical developments or discoveries.
I still highly recommend this trilogy to any sci-fi/first contact fan.
If a civilization has sufficiently advanced technology, then I would imagine they would be scouring the cosmos for more resources.
Ultimately, every species is biologically trained to propagate itself, consuming resources and expanding presence, unless there are other external factors governing (for example, long gestation periods, limited offspring, etc)
So, advanced civilizations might put communication mechanisms in convenient places to contact inferior species.
>If a civilization has sufficiently advanced technology, then I would imagine they would be scouring the cosmos for more resources.
Stable elements are not scare, life is scarce. I would hope that any civilization advanced enough to travel the verse would be able to strip mine the elements it needs from lifeless rocks and leave planets with life alone.
Bezos is right that we should ultimately move resource extraction to space.
Also extracting resources from astroids avoids the problem of getting them out of the gravity well. Sure they could mine Earth, but they would have to haul it off Earth too.
Or an advanced enough civilization might on the contrary use their resources efficiently with long term planning and population control and stay on their planet / solar system - "advanced" and "ever-expanding" don't have to come together.
I should think any civilization capable of producing, operating and placing such a beacon would be able to detect us on their own and might have the same interest in communicating with us that we have with ant colonies. WE think everyone wants to find and communicate with us but there is no reason that we should assume THEY feel the same way.
To me a plausibile answer is that we can at least observe specific dynamics within our own life based world where we keep ants (based on dna like us) in a cage and they’re totally unaware they even are in a cage. For them that’s their universe. They go along and discover new things thinking in their own way why no other life form has contacted them. Even though we literally lift them using our hands. They simply think that’s a natural phenomenon.
To me it seems plausibile that other life forms that are probably not even based on dna are very likely to be imperceptible to us, the same way we are to ants.
Thus I’d like to think the universe is probably our cage and we’ll never possess the mental capacity to distinguish alien beings from actual natural phenomena.
Even worse than that, the ants know nothing about the ocean and fish nor space and the moon. Those things are not even near their scope, even if they are aware of us. What about math? And time (time keeping and calendars, tenses)? What about music and art? The ants are simply not able to comprehend any of it.
So if we are like ants in the universe, then the reality we are in is probably insanely complex - we are just interacting with the little slice of it we can interpret, just like the ants.
If anyone finds this perspective intriguing, you may be interested in the novel "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
In the story, a character proposes that humans are effectively like frightened forest critters with no ability to understand the nature of the seemingly magical rubbish that extraterrestrial picnickers could have left behind after a brief stop on Earth.
One possibility is that if we are talking about biological life, it might not be possible for life from planet A to digest matter from planet B. After all terrestrial life has special enzymes and processes to deal with other terrestrial life.
In that case if you wanted to colonize another planet you’d have to look for an empty one, or you’d have to erase the whole native ecosystem and start over. Looking for an empty planet might be a lot easier, therefore expansionist civilizations might be specifically avoiding inhabited planets. Maybe?
Well, it seems pretty much certain that faster than light travel is impossible. Otherwise one of those 60 million would have been making noise of some kind.
nothing will ever be found. the experiment was flawed/doomed to begin with due to the huge galactic distances involved. satellite data has ruled out any habitable planets in a close enough radius to ever be detectable by seti even if they did have intelligent life
As if planets were still a necessity for advanced enough civilization once they get their megascale engineering going to fix all their resource and energy problems.
IMHO that's how we will detect the aliens, by spotting one of their megastructures or their side effects (waste heat, gravitational effects, light blocking, stray directional coms traffic, etc.), not by getting any targeted message handed to us on a platter.
Could be we are seeing some of that now, thinking it's a some kind of a weird but natural phenomenon.
How did satellite data rule that out? We've seen a variety of earth-like exoplanets, and we're sending up satellites to study their atmospheres. Seems to me like they haven't ruled it out, why else send up the James webb?
Not OP, but “close enough radius” alludes to the fact that earths current radio output would only be detectable in a radius some hundreds of light years away (signal would
become too weak past that). And I’m pretty sure our radio signal output is now decreasing in energy. So it becomes increasingly less likely with distance that a radio source would exist that we could currently detect. But I guess this study states that it could detect a theoretical “beacon” that is intentionally incredibly powerful.
This[1] page claims that cold war military radar systems would be prominent for "hundreds" of light years, as opposed to earlier, lower power signals. Since these have only been running for approximately 60 years the diameter of the sphere in which these signals exist is only about 0.1% of our galaxy. So the real limit for the foreseeable future is the speed of light.
Those Cold War systems have since been replaced with much more efficient systems that don’t just spew signals into space, so there’s only a ten or twenty year window during which another civilization could have looked to see those signals. Since then, we’ve become much quieter because signals that can be detected hundreds of light years away are expensive and not necessary for a specie that lives within an 8 minute light radius.
Right, so if another species does what we do, then we'd be lucky if we were inside the 200 ly radius of them at a time where they sent enough signals for us to notice?
I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe. Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone, and if we're not then it's anyway going to be basically impossible to communicate with them due to speed of light limitations.
P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start, to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ...
> Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone
This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet. As far as we can tell it could be very low, and earth could very well be a unique combination of factors that allows it. Remember, there are many more possible deck of 52 cards than there are planets in the universe.
There's also the possibility that the existence of one civilization in a cosmic neighborhood tends to preclude the emergence of other civilizations in that same neighborhood, due to the tendency of civilizations to rapidly expand and take resources that might have been used by others, before those others even get a chance to emerge.
In that case we can't treat our existence as independent of the existence of other nearby civilizations.
If a civilization doesn't have FTL then expansion beyond their solar system seems unlikely. Yes, it is still possible with sub-light travel, but then you run into the problem of motivation.
When limited to sub-light speed trade between colonies and the home system is so slow that you probably can't usefully import resources from the colony systems.
When you are stuck with sub-light, colonizing another system (unless perhaps you are in a place with a lot of stars close together) is more accurately described as spending a whole lot of effort to establish another system that then won't really have much interaction with or effect on your system.
Even the old classic of kicking out your undesirables who then go on to start a new civilization doesn't really work, because it is so expensive. If you dislike them so much that exile is the only answer and you don't have someplace in your system to exile them to you are far more likely to just kill them.
> If a civilization doesn't have FTL then expansion beyond their solar system seems unlikely. Yes, it is still possible with sub-light travel, but then you run into the problem of motivation.
> When limited to sub-light speed trade between colonies and the home system is so slow that you probably can't usefully import resources from the colony systems.
I mean this seems to disregard our entire history as a species. There have always been "others" within a population that seek, above anything else, to find a new place to go in order to live life they way they want to.
We are also moving into an age where data and knowledge are raising to supreme importance. Both of these things can be transported at the speed of light, so a multi-solar system civilization that is able to increase is total resources available to acquire new information and knowledge will be at an advantage. Then, of course, there is the desire to preserve the human species as a whole by "spreading our seeds" so to speak.
> I mean this seems to disregard our entire history as a species. There have always been "others" within a population that seek, above anything else, to find a new place to go in order to live life they way they want to.
Sure, but those who have successfully done that have either went to a place near enough that they could take all the food and other supplies they would need during the trip there with them, or have went to a place where food and other resources were available on the way.
I can't think of any human group that did a migration that had to cross a span that provided no food or drinkable water and was too long for them to cross on what food and water they could carry with them.
With sub-light migration to other solar systems we are talking about crossing empty spans that will take several lifetimes to cross. There are ways to deal with that, but they are likely to be major undertakings that require a heck of a lot of resources so that to do it you need widespread support from the people who aren't going.
My guess is that you'll need a pitch much stronger than "We want to go someplace to live our way" (especially since the people who leave won't be the ones who arrive at their destination--it will be their descendants).
> I mean this seems to disregard our entire history as a species. There have always been "others" within a population that seek, above anything else, to find a new place to go in order to live life they way they want to.
If the energy and time requirements are great enough, space between solar systems will work as the same sort of barrier space does for the rest of life on Earth.
"There's also the possibility that the existence of one civilization in a cosmic neighborhood tends to preclude the emergence of other civilizations in that same neighborhood"
Interesting. That's a point I haven't heard before. Or perhaps it's my lucky 10,000 day. :-)
Although our path through the galaxy is somewhat unique. Stars don't really move in unison in the greater timescales, but more like slip past each other. Assuming Sol was born as a binary star, its sibling could be other side of the galaxy by now.
Another thought is that if WE do expand to the stars, how long until our distant ancestors aren't really the same civilization anymore, but something completely alien to each other? Evolution could take some rather unexpected steps in the long run.
The concept of "cosmic neighborhood" is deliberately left a bit vague in my description, but it definitely doesn't mean the stars that were near the sun when the sun was born.
Rather, it refers to those stars which are within reach of us, now, in a timescale that is short relative to the typical interval between births of civilizations that distance apart. That could be anything from a corner of a galaxy to a galactic supercluster, depending on the speed with which civilizations can expand and the frequency with which new ones arise in the universe.
Note that if civilizations expand at sufficiently close to the speed of light, then there is only a tiny window of time between when their light arrives and when their colony ships do. So under this model, it is quite unlikely that a new civilization waking up for the first time would look around and see anyone. Most likely, either the light from those other civilizations hasn't yet gotten here, in which case we see nothing, or their colony ships have already gotten here, in which case we wouldn't be born in the first place.
But if we had precluded the emergence of other civilizations in our neighborhood, wouldn’t we have known about it when we were taking resources away from those other living creatures? Based on that theory, a prerequisite to preventing the arising of other civilizations is the knowledge of the existence of other living beings at the very least.
The other end of the argument is also interesting. It is possible that this has already happened before the age of Homo Sapiens, and we lack the one crucial thing that makes fusion power possible, say, deuterium oxide (heavy water) in sufficient quantities. It’s a ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’ situation — we could be living on a stellar neighbourhood that is already tapped out of that crucial resource, forever doomed to travel the slow way, never able to go more than knee deep into the vast ocean beside us.
1) The idea is that we will do it, not that we have done it already. (How does something we will do in the future affect what we see today? It doesn't, at least not causally. It's just that some civilization had to be first in the neighboorhod, and that civilization will be the one to preempt the others, at least according to this model. So it's more of a probabilistic conditioning effect than a causal effect: conditional on existing, that means no one preempted us, which means we're the first, which means we'll preempt everyone else.)
2) The preemption happens well before the other civilizations come into existence. For example, we might deplete their stars of energy so that evolution doesn't happen at all on their planet.
What evidence have we that they would not? Life on earth certainly expands as rapidly as the environment can support, or even faster than it can, in many cases. Also "rapid" is a relative term, right? If we humans start expanding to other planets even within 10,000 years that would be quite rapid relative to the length of time it took for us to evolve.
Worse. von Neumann probes show that none of them can be expansionist, otherwise the galaxy would have been overrun in half a million years.
So then.. maybe only the civilizations that aren't expansionist survive? Or everyone changes their mind and no one is expansionist by the time they get the right tech? Or maybe it's physically impossible to build von Neumann probes for some reason we don't yet understand? Or who knows what else. In any case, it's got to be zero in the history of our galaxy.
There could be good reasons we wouldn't see von Neumann probes. They could be extremely dangerous to deploy similar to the arguments that are currently being made against autonomous weapons systems. That might result in them having many built in limitations such as needing to phone back periodically or being saddled with multiple redundant systems or safeguards that would prevent them from mutating into something that could harm the originating civilization.
Also don't forget that the purpose of the probes is exploration and/or resource harvesting. For exploration you only need a handful of probes at each star system and they may depart after completing their survey which would result in a very small footprint. For resource extraction you need some means of transporting the resources back to where they will be used in a timely manner which puts limits on the effective distance at which they can operate.
A civilization may even decide that it's pointless to explore the entire galaxy this way since it would take millions of years to gather and transmit the information, what government do you know of that's capable of planning over that kind of timescale?
I mean, let's try to build a von Neumann probe. How? I don't believe that our knowledge will continue to increase exponentially. Hard AI may never be achievable (although von Neumann probes don't necessarily need it). In order to build a von Neumann probe, once you need the very first microchip or anything resembling one, you're screwed. Will the von Neumann probes also be able to build an entire fabrication lab?
> This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet
Life is not only probable, it's inevitable. Given the proper conditions, it's just a matter of time. And the same happens with intelligent life, it just needs more time without being hit by a meteor.
Given the proper conditions, life might form once in a thousand planets, and intelligent life might be one in a billion. We don't know, but there's some probability for both. It could be really low, or it could be relatively high.
The Rare Earth solution to the Fermi Paradox is as good a guess as any. Life of some kind might be relatively common, but intelligent life could still be really rare. We are the only species on Earth in 3.5 billion years to make radio telescopes and spacecraft.
On other worlds, it might never happen because of the thousand different factors that led to hominid evolution which might be different elsewhere. For example, If the non-avian dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct from a large meteor impact, who knows whether any technological civilization would have ever formed. At any rate, mammalian evolution would have gone differently, and it's anyone's guess whether some non-hominid intelligent species would have evolved instead. They didn't during the age of the dinosaurs.
We don't even know whether multicellular life is a low probability event. Maybe Cambrian explosions don't happen very often.
There's no inevitability here, only unknown probabilities.
We are, since Earth has the only life known in the universe to date. The other possible conclusions are any probability < 1, which means not inevitable.
> I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe.
FWIW, the actual paper does not put it like that. It instead calls it "one of the most profound and fundamental questions posed to science". That seems reasonable.
> Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone, and if we're not then it's anyway going to be basically impossible to communicate with them due to speed of light limitations.
Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find other life? I certainly do.
Ignoring the huge philosophical implications intelligent life elsewhere would have, it would also provide some very useful bounds on a bunch of the quantities involved in e.g. Drake's estimate. It would also offer some clues as to whether or not a great filter is likely, and wheter or not it lies ahead of us or behind us. Surely massively important!
> P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start
Important, yes, but not a scientific question (it is a mathematical one).
> to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ...
A complete understanding of consciousness would also be monumentally important, I agree. But fusion and space exploration? Great, but surely "just" (huge and important) technological advances, rather than fundamental scientific questions?
> Don't you find it fascinating that we think it's wildly improbable that we are alone, yet have not been able to find other life? I certainly do.
Given that we can scarcely communicate with a chimpanzee, our nearest living relative, nor fully comprehend how any other species on Earth communicates (those which evolved under the same conditions that we did), I find it totally unsurprising that we're unable to communicate with aliens.
Humans have determined that chimpanzees and other species do communicate, and in many cases how they communicate, even if those who study such things don't understand the communications in anything but the broadest sense. Being able to communicate with aliens isn't really what we're asking for, but merely detecting that communications are happening at all.
That's as much as we can manage with chimpanzees - our immediate relatives, who we have physical contact with.
Humans scarcely care how other earth-bound species communicate enough to identify it as communication - how do insects and plants and fungi communicate? What information is whale song (mammal) transmitting? Is the 52 Hz whale communicating, or not?
Alien communication will look far more different even than that.
There are really really good reasons why our status in the universe matters so much and they all have to do with what is next for us as a species.
In part this has to do with the Fermi Paradox. Are we alone because we're in a protected garden? Alone because the half-life of civilizations is very low? Alone because there is a firewall that takes out all civilizations at a particular level of development (like say climate change)? Maybe if we learn about the firewall we can do something about it? The list of answers to the Fermi Paradox is immense and many of those answers could make a concrete difference to us.
Who is to say that we can't communicate? Some theories of physics might allow for wormholes or something like that (this is not likely at all due to time travel paradoxes, but who knows).
Even just learning about another civilization and measuring the rough properties of the atmosphere of their planet could be a revolution. If we discover that the atmosphere is totally unlike what we have, that a totally new kind of life is possible, we could open up entire new fields of science.
The most obvious way to communicate is to put out basic facts about the universe, like say the energy states of your favorite atoms or something like that. What if their version of the basic facts is thousands of years ahead of ours? Physics works off of very little evidence, a small nudge toward the right answer is all that it would take to change everything.
Even if we can't communicate in a lifetime or two, maybe we can communicate over the span of 200 years. Imagine what could be learned through an exchange with a culture that has followed a totally technological and scientific arc. We could be in a local minima missing really important things about the universe.
We're in a pretty crappy place when it comes to AI. We know how to do some things, but the overall picture of figuring out what intelligence is, we're in the dark about that. We don't even know how to ask the right questions. Access to a totally different intelligence would change that completely.
I could go on from fields like linguistics, to psychology, everything that communicating with an alien species touches upon would be revolutionized. Imagine how chemistry would change if we knew for sure that ammonia-based life was possible? We would invest massive sums and figure it all out, and all it would take is a bit of knowledge about the gross statistics of their atmosphere.
Most of that can be said about whales, but we still don’t see many whales-motivated scientific research being carried out even if there’s a possibility we could communicate. Who’s to say aliens would be any different?
I'm not sure what to say to this.
Whales are obviously not intelligent in the way humans are? They have no technology, no language, and don't engage in any scientific inquiries. So.. no. None of this can be said about whales.
Whales have at least a rudimentary form of language. There is evidence for syntactic structure, even if the information density is an order of magnitude (or more) less dense than human speech.
Whales also teach each other new hunting techniques and have other complicated social behaviors.
Without a better understanding of whale language and cognition, I don't think you can safely say they don't engage in a form of scientific inquiry.
Right, so they are intelligent in a different way, which I would argue is going to be no different with the aliens we discover. Their language will be intractable. As for scientific inquiries, that’s kind of unknowable and dubious considering that whales can get quite inventive with their hunting techniques, involving experimentation and cunning in a way that’s pretty similar to the scientific method of inquiry with hypothesis testing. Technology, I will grant that’s an exception.
Whale share a significant part of their developmental history, genetics and brain chemistry with us humans. They don't really qualify as alien in any of the interesting ways that were mentioned.
They’re biologically related to us, and yet we still can’t communicate with them. That should show how motivated or able we are to figure out language with other species.
It’s not basic imitation if they can communicate using the language of another species [1] nor is it that big of a stretch when they have larger brains than us.
I don't think you can generalize the level of motivation. If we had aliens to communicate with, there would be much higher levels of effort deployed than we have put into whale communications.
However, it might give us a clue about how hard cross species translation can be.
Given that we haven't even done a thorough search of a single planet in our own solar system yet(we're only beginning to scratch the surface on Mars), these sort of articles should be taken with a giant grain of salt. They failed to detect megastructures and radio waves on certain frequencies. Given these metrics life on earth would have been entirely undetected until the last ~100 years despite life having existed here for billions of years. What if aquatic life is the norm in the universe, and we are outliers? Perhaps there are millions of super-intelligent whale-like species out there. Our current search methods would detect nothing.
How smart could whales become if they had a billion more years to evolve without having their environment destroyed by humans or some other "smart" species?
>I've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe.
That is an odd thing. The one that I'm curious about is the drum-banging for spotting (probably highly simple) lifeforms on places like Mars. Given the ability of rocks to hop planets, it's a totally reasonable thing to find I think as you don't even need from-scratch bootstrapping.
I expect it's partly a product of PR departments as you have to keep the public engaged, not unlike the occasional production of aesthetically pleasing images.
It seems to me that it's enough to push for off-planet permanent human settlement. Heck, given the long-term possibilities of AI and von Neumann probes, distance isn't even an unassailable problem, you just have to change your time horizons.
I think the question isn't whether or not we are alone, but why don't we know the answer. As you said, it's 'wildly improbable that we are alone.' So the great question is, why is the universe so quiet?
Fermi was operating under the assumption that travel between solar systems would not only be possible, but it would be desirable. The answer to the Fermi paradox might be as simple as "solar systems are too far apart".
That's Frank Drake's answer to the Fermi Paradox. He doesn't think it is a paradox, because he thinks it's just a matter of time before SETI makes a detection. It's just that the search needs to be thorough enough since the aliens stick to their solar systems.
Jill Tartar has talked about how we would need to think about investing in a powerful radio beacon for 60,000 years if we wanted other aliens to know about us. That gives one an ideal of the scale of time and distance SETI is dealing with, assuming their assumptions are more realistic than Fermi's was.
Or we're in a simulation, and everything we perceive as "out there in the expanse of space" is just fake data like a background on a website...from a processing standpoint it'd be much easier to feed/render certain views only under observation, otherwise just nothing exists there...it's save resources for a simulation from a computing standpoint...
Like in a video game where new areas are rendered as you discover them....
Not to start a massive flame war, but just a personal opinion: I rather prefer humans to be the only intelligent species in the observable Universe - that means it will be all ours to play with.
The speed of light (or compensated with very long travel time) is limiting, though. Much less volume within reasonable, for your definition of reasonable, reach both for ourselves and others. The universe, to put it mildly, is ginormous.
This is true, we can travel only up to 8.2 billion light years (radius of the affectable universe/2) which is the largest completely causally connected region, in the sense that every point can observe and reach every other. 8.2 billion light years is the furthest distance that we could reach and then return from at the speed of light. And it is much smaller than the radius of the observable universe (46.4 billion light years)
Certainly there may be loopholes ;-) Anything I've seen with things like wormholes would require massive amounts of energy and/or exotic matter, as well as difficulties in things like stability and actually traversing with non-negligible mass. No free lunches!
Being the only intelligent life means that it's far more likely that we have a long and promising future. If there is other intelligent life out there... we have to ask why they aren't _everywhere_.
Because unless we're missing something big, it would be clear that intelligence is either perpetually stuck in their own tiny tiny corner of the universe, or kill themselves off before they can reach the rest of the visible universe.
One of the explanations for Fermi paradox is that we just got lucky to be one of the first civilizations to the party. A few billions years from now Universe will be filled to the brim with life and sentience.
Given a premise that perfect evolution is possible:
The following is dependent on the unknown likely duration to perfect evolution, and how it overlaps with unknown (but widely-assumed to be light-speed) travelling limits.
Given appropriate overlap distance of the two, there will inevitably arise the first civilisation to perform the following steps in order:
1) Attain self-mastery of internal planetary conflict and resource management. (Permanently sustainable peace and sustenance.)
2) Use their now abundance of time to perfect mastery of physics as is physically possible (something we know to have barely-conceivable limits in terms of size/scale etc).
3) Traverse the universe looking for any others, who - by not being the first - will therefore likely be behind them in terms of any conceivable aspect.
4) Immediately upon finding them, imprison them virtually in a seemingly "empty" but otherwise identical universe. This forces the same conditions upon them that were known to cause success, and also eliminates all risk of contamination of the existing peaceful equilibrium.
6) Wait.
7) The found species either:
a) achieves mastery of peace and sustainability, at which point contact is initiated as peaceful equals.
b) the species fails and dies.
8) Permanent universal peace is the only possible outcome, no matter how many times the above process is repeated.
Given the age of the universe, and how far we have come in such a short time, to me the above seems a likely resolution to the paradox.
With slight modification, it also explain various unexplained "contacts".
Perhaps the "virtual imprisonment period" does not ideally have a definitive binary on/off, instead is progressive in a reversible way (hence the lack of believability and proof for many "encounters"). Such non-invasive contact events may serve as research/assessment, and non-polluting "helping hands" for those who may be watching and waiting.
It would certainly appear we are very near (relatively speaking), to the point mastery of the physical world, making us likely virtual imprisonment and observation targets.
Whether we can do the peace and sustainability bit remains to be seen.
Yes, that is the least scary. If species like us are stuck in our own solar system, we're eventually doomed. If we're not, it would only take a few million years to colonize the galaxy. If two non-stuck colonizing species exist at the same time they have to arise within a few million years of each other, in a galaxy thirteen billion years old.
Frankly, us being the only/first sapient species is by far the most optimistic possibility.
Basically, for us to colonize another star system I think we have to be a space native species that no longer needs to.
I think by the time we colonize anything beyond alpha centuri, there are more of humanity living on o'neil cylinders than on any planet, and the people living on planet are the ones that desire to live somewhere 'wild'
Sure, but given that humans are only about 500k years old, that makes us the only intelligent life so far.
The lack of any other intelligent life so far means that we have no evidence one way or another that we will succeed or fail. Better than if 100 million civilizations already tried and died.
I vaguely recall a story to that effect? Scientists finally receive a brief interstellar message of intelligent origin. After painstaking study, a breakthrough and finally they decipher it:
I was about to comment that it's somewhat similar to The Three Body Problem that's often discussed on hn's comments sections from time to time but decided to search for that last phrase and apparently it's from a /r/nosleep story:
...or the intelligent life in the universe is so beyond us that, even though they have the capability to communicate, or even visit, they don't see us as worth contacting. Perhaps them talking to us would be like us talking to a tree stump or a bucket of plankton.
Perhaps it's not even a conscious decision on their part. Perhaps all our achievements, everything we are, isn't recognized amongst alien-kind beyond a short 1 line entry in an alien log file,. Perhaps their monitoring system detects and discards a thousand worthless blips like us every day.
The speed of light is too slow for them to pull that off. They are limited by the same physics as us. There are some possible loopholes like wormholes, but even they are limited.
Dark matter may not exist, in fact many observations conflict with our dark matter models. IMO I just think our understanding of physics is incomplete.
Only 5% of all matter is "regular" matter, and ~27% is dark matter which makes it be 85% of all mass but not of mass-energy since there is ~68% of dark energy.
It's the combination of dark matter + dark energy that makes for ~95% of the universe's total mass-energy.
I've prefer this as well. If humans do ever cross the vastness of space to other solar systems, the travelers would eventually become a separate species anyway - wouldn't they? It would be a split, unless there is regular travel between star systems, but I can't see that happening without Star Trek like technology.
On one hand I see where you are coming from, but on the other hand I really, really want to witness First Contact and the subsequent reaction from the world.
It will be the single most monumental moment in human history.
I doubt it. Based on the past year, many/most people would think it is fake news or some conspiracy to control them that they are too smart to fall for.
For others, they’ve seen so many aliens in video games, TV shows, movies, etc. that they will be blasé about it and complain that the aliens in video game X looked more realistic than the real thing.
Others will be interested for a day or two, then will move onto the next new thing on the news cycle.
Others will be so self absorbed by social media that they will only care if they can use footage to make TikTok memes.
Others will be know it all’s that will want to point out to everyone that they always said there was extra terrestrial life and everyone should acknowledge how smart they are.
Others will see this as a great opportunity to write a book in the hopes of striking it rich.
Others are just trying to scrape by and are too worn down, tired, depressed, etc. to pay any attention.
Many people live subsistent lifestyles and don’t have access to news feed to even know it happened.
I would expect exceedingly few to really give this sort of event the acknowledgement it deserves.
That also means we need to survive here on Earth, and perhaps change as a species in various aspects in order to even make a small step of becoming an interplanetary and then, in long the run maybe even interstellar species.
If intelligent life were common then the Great Filter would likely be ahead of us, not behind us. Finding that ETI would be the worst news humanity ever receives.
I don't believe in The Great Filter, as I disagree with it's basic premise, i.e. the Fermi paradox. The Prime Directive is the most plausible explanation.
That would require a uniformity of purpose over billions of years, not only in our galaxy but in galaxies at cosmological distances (where we could detect K3 civilizations).
It would only require such uniformity for some millennia, that is how long civilization has existed. A hundred thousand years tops, if you're to believe traditional tales and mythology ;)
We don't know if alien civilizations interfered a million years ago.
It would require a prohibition on colonizing planets on which intelligent life might arise in the future. This would have to be enforced over the 4.5 billion years Earth has existed.
That's a good point & divergent evolution once enough systems get settled should produce many interesting alien cultures anyway, so not a huge problem. :)
What better way to keep an intelligent species from escaping than limiting the velocity of information transfer and putting everything interesting at distances that are large multiples of the maximum velocity.
In other words, maybe the simulation architect doesn't want us to escape and find (contaminate) the other experiments? :)