Why the clickbait? Just put why in the title
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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The whole article is the why. Not just a single headline-appropriate bullet point.
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(4 replies)
It's because we have chins. They think we're weird.
Time.
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.
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.
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.
This is the answer,
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.
So if they are right, the Earth is incredibly rare and would be a great find for space faring civilizations. They also had plenty of time to pass by and find this incredibly rare life bearing sphere. But they didn't. You can flip things how ever you want, the question remains - why haven't we seen anyone?
It's simple. We're the first intelligent life in the galaxy. There is nobody else yet in our galaxy.
Also, probably nobody capable of traveling the stars wants to settle a planet. Once you figure out how to make huge spaceships (which you'll need to travel interstellar space) you've essentially learned how to make cities in space. Our solar system would support a lot of people if we just used the resources available for space habitats, and by "lot" I mean in the quadrillions. And it turns out that all you need to support that population is a star to provide energy, and some planets to source materials from.
So with that in mind, why bother finding another habitable planet?
The thing is, out of a population of trillions (or even quadrillions as you say), you only need a few thousand to travel to the stars to colonize another planet. With how large the population is, that is bound to happen. Just like there were bound to be pioneers travelling to the new world to settle it, despite how dangerous the journey was. And how there will be pioneers to settle the moon or mars or further out.
And a civilization like that would absolutely send stuff to other star systems, if only for science, so most of the research for the journey would already be done. And this is assuming that a civilization wouldn't want ever greater quantities of resources for ever greater projects, or access to other star systems for reasons we cannot fathom today (maybe neutron stars or black holes have some incredibly tempting uses? Or maybe there's some useful resources out in the galaxy that we have yet to discover?)
Basically, a successful civilization like that is bound to spread out, it's difficult to see scenarios where a successful civilization would be so homogenous in thought as for that to not happen. Amd then it's before we even get to sending AI probes to "colonize" space and gather data.
Also, probably nobody capable of traveling the stars wants to settle a planet. Once you figure out how to make huge spaceships (which youβll need to travel interstellar space) youβve essentially learned how to make cities in space.
I don't think it is a valid point. Yeah, if we can build a ship that take us to Alpha Centauri it would lool like a small city, but that does not mean that it can last forever and the traveller would never need to settle on a planet. And looking what the humans did in the past, it seems logic that while a part would want to continue to explore, another part would want to settle on a planet.
Our solar system would support a lot of people if we just used the resources available for space habitats, and by βlotβ I mean in the quadrillions. And it turns out that all you need to support that population is a star to provide energy, and some planets to source materials from.
So with that in mind, why bother finding another habitable planet?
Because it is habitable and can be used as a transit point, advanced outpost, refuelling base or any other use you can do of an habitable planet where to do things you have not to fight even with the environment (tourism for example).
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(4 replies)
Maybe it's because we're not as evolved as we think. If aliens did appear, how many kooks would want to attack them because they are different?
If they land in one country, would other countries get jealous or scared, thinking that country now has an advantage? Shit, what happens if the neighbouring country had nukes; would they launch?
More likely is that if aliens had detected life here, Earth would be marked as a red, no-go zone, because of how unstable, tribal and violent we are.
Every conservative on earth would demand we attack the flying illegal aliens. Our planet's dumbest of dipshit right-wingers would be outside shooting at clouds all night long.
Maybe it's impossible to travel faster than the speed of light? So it may not be a thing where aliens can just swing by our solar system to snap a few photos before heading off to the next one.
I'm sure that's the case. You can travel to other stars without ftl, it's just a lot slower and probably one way. It's really pretty limiting for society, for instance, without ftl an interstellar "civilization" is basically out of the question, you can't govern another star system without at the very least faster communication.
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(9 replies)
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?
Knowledge.
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.
Surely if intelligent life is rare, theyβre all of interest
Lol makes me imagine that the alien species have a law against approaching humans or be charged with pedophilia.
Nah, they just have a bunch of myths about the evil homo sapiens abducting their alien babies.
It is homo phobia.
Bravo.
I remember a comedian making a joke about this. It's like getting a signal from your dog to come out to the back yard.
Blipblop: βThose 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?β
Morklorp: βAre you fucking crazy?β
Have you read the one about the talking meat?
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."
Such a beautiful description of the human voice.
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(3 replies)
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.
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(2 replies)
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
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(3 replies)
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.
I think it's fundamentally interesting to see other biology. Just look at us trying to catalogue every possible life on earth, no matter how mundane.
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(1 replies)
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.
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