"It's like winning the lottery," Taras Gerya, a geophysicist at the research university ETH Zurich in Switzerland and an author of the study, told Mashable. "It can be so rare that we don't have much of a chance to be contacted," added Gerya, who coauthored the study with Robert Stern, a geoscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas. -article
Rare Earth by Peter Ward is what you're after here. I took an elective in college that effectively was reading a bunch of space science (and history, it was odd) and discussing. This one caught me off guard but was a decent breakdown of a possible answer to Fermi.
I don't necessarily agree with the supposition, mainly because it still comes from a place of specifically carbon-based life as the end goal. But they do lay out reasoning in an easy to understand way that was super neat to learn.
Perhaps we're just not as interesting as we think. Maybe aliens don't want to contact us for the same reason I don't want to contact kids playing in the park: I'm simply uninterested in whatever they're doing.
It's also likely that an alien species capable of interstellar travel doesn't want anything we have. Our resources aren't anything special, they have no need for slave labor and we don't produce anything of interest to them. It's a long drive. Why burn the gas and waste the time?
Why are there scientists here on Earth studying the most boring subjects imaginable to anyone but them? Why does every tiny organism have a small, but dedicated group of scientists studying it at some point?
We must know - we will know! is a quote which represents humanity well. A factually wrong quote since we will not know everything but, an objective nonetheless. Why should other species believe different?
It's not so much that we're boring, it's that we're so far away and not trivial to send mass and energy towards.
I think that a sufficiently advanced civilization that could come over for a visit wouldn't want to.
I also think a sufficiently advanced civilization with the curiosity and desire to learn about us could do so via probes and we'd never know they visited us.
There are many ideas and no definite proof. I like the idea that species either try to reach the stars and fail because it costs too much energy, or they find a sustainable lifestyle and not leave their home planet as Dr. Fatima pointed out in a good video
Nice, thanks. I’m of the opinion that any form of civilisation is doomed in about 200 Earth years’ equivalent past their industrial revolution. It is a bit crude, but I will say: so far 100% of the cases I’m analysing have collapse as an expected outcome.
What even makes you think the industrial revolution is a given? It happened exactly once at earth. Also: We are not doomed. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism but both are possible outcomes
Blipblop: “Those creatures on that planet are perplexing. Constantly at war, decimating their natural resources, consuming everything in their paths. Like a cancer overtaking an organism. Should we contact them?”
I'd seen this before, but was happy to reread it for gems like this:
"You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
I like to think about it differently:
That this planet is an incredibly unique and rare thing and humans are even more incredibly unique in the universe. And from that one thing makes us and our planet very very special.
Timeline wise, we could be at the beginning of when other species are becoming sentient. Or we could have missed them by a billion years. The gap to get in contact is so massive that the odds are stacked against it ever happening.
Distance and time. No one seems to have a clue how far a light year is ... I mean maybe ur finding someone in ur own galaxy over a big enough timeline but sorry 2000 light years to the nearest galaxy? Not a chance.
Yep, relativity is a bitch. Even if we could do the speed of light, our time here would pass so quickly that by the time we reached some place that had life, ours might have stopped existing.
And yes, I know a light year is not a measure of time, but distance, but it still takes time.
100 different civilizations could have happened in our galaxy in the last 1 million years with only a few centuries of them emitting detectable signals.
And it could be worse, it could be 10 civilizations in the last 1 billion years.
I think this is part of it. If the speed of light is the speed limit of matter, it would be very difficult to travel anywhere within reasonable amount of time considering norminal life spans of even the longest living things on Earth.
Even on the remoteest of chances that there is it a sapient life form capable and technologically advanced enough to contact us in this galaxy cluster, much less nearby?
Why the hell would they? We are obviously fucking crazy.
Xenoanthroplology. We're obviously not crazy and our many cultures are presumably much different from theirs. There would be enormous amounts to learn from studying our differences and our similarities.
Unless they've already simulated alien life in computer models... Then there's not a lot left to learn.
So their whole argument is that tectonic plates are needed for complex life to emerge. There isn't much proof for it either way obviously but I find the argument flawed.
In any case, here is why I think aliens are here, either waiting for us to divest ourselves of our economic system and destructive ways (capitalism breaks when you mix in easy space exploration and heavy automation) or observing us and how changes emerge in our society like we do with secluded tribes.
Any advanced civ can tell a planet has life on it from a great distance. If simple life is rare, they would of had a probe here a long long time ago.
We started modifying the climate over 3000 years ago. Any civ within an 1000 light year range would have had enough time to notice and make it here. That is around 7 million star systems.
An advanced civ would have covered every single solar system with Von Newman probes.
I think the fernie paradox is more of a test than a rule. Any civ that can't pull itself out of the muck is probably bad news for galactic society, so they wait and see.
I find the idea that all intelligent species have the same dominator instinct driving them to explore, exploit, and colonize to be flawed. Not even all humans have this instinct, it's just that our western societies are all about domination so we grow up thinking it's the norm.
I agree, that is why I didn't bring up the possibility of enslavement or colonization. I'd even say the chances are higher of a civ being benign than not when reaching a space faring stage. I base this on mostly nothing.
I do believe an intelligent creature is probably at least mildly curious. Couple that with the likely hood of an advance civ having enough resources to build whatever projects they want, only a small subset of their population would need to be curious enough to make it a reality.
The argument David Kipling made seems reasonable. Statistically the chance if there being almost no civilisations or the universe just teeming with life are the biggest. The parameters have to be tweaked just right for there being just a few civilizations in a galaxy. It's not teeming with signals and chances of parameters being just right is low, so most probable is we being alone.
What, it wasn't enough to just gesture meaningfully at the state of the entire godamn planet when looking for reasons why aliens might want to avoid us?
I was going to say this. To those species who are capable of interplanetary colonization, we look like savage war goblins who can only negotiate transaction-based societies and are compelled by number-go-uo at the expense of letting children starve.
The space is huge and FTL travel is impossible. The only reason someone will visit us is if they built a generational space ship. And the only reason to do that is if you have destroyed your own planet and have to colonise another one. We will only see those, who came for our planet and don't care about us.
Yup. It's the answer that conflicts with sci-fi, but fits out best understanding of how things work. It's also the answer people don't want to hear.
Also we only know of one planet that has life on it. There's really nothing we can do with statistics with a sample size of one. So it's just as likely that we're the only sentient life in the universe as it is there's millions of of sentient lifeforms out there. That is to say we simply don't know.
But I still like sci-fi where there's a lot of interesting aliens that can fairly easily warp around the universe to hang out. But it is fiction.
Why would they contact us? Kopernik got a lot wrong, but he was right in that we are nothing special. A species advanced enough to contact other lifeforms must run across planets in various states of ruin 12 a day.
What if we are the only ones obsessed with alien and space travels? What if there are quite a few aliens, but they are busy eating fruit and sleeping in the sun.
