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The Fermi Paradox Where Are All The Aliens?
hawkwing43
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqzMAnPKa_s
But im interested in the idea, maybe they DO exist but they are waiting for us to not be more advanced
Similar to Starfleets non interference policy, we aren't ready for them yet.
My character Tsin'xing
Or maybe there just aren't very many advanced life forms that actually want to leave their homeworld, much less meet the neighbors - even here on Earth it's mostly a cultural thing. (Imagine how little use a world dominated by the old Chinese Empire's ways of thought would have for an organization like NASA. If we already live in the Middle Kingdom, why leave it?)
Or maybe we're the Elder Race, and none of the other intelligent races are as far advanced as we are. Or maybe it's rare for a sapient species to make it past the "bottleneck" when they develop weapons of mass destruction (this world's teetered on the ragged edge of recycling us a frightening number of times in the past). Or maybe there's some even worse bottleneck awaiting us in the future, that also tends to get them. Or maybe there is a network of aliens, but FTL is either impossible or expensive and they communicate by microwave-frequency lasers (which we'd never see unless they happened to aim one directly at us for some reason).
Or maybe (worst-case scenario, IMO), we really are alone in the universe. I don't like that option, but it's still there.
If this is the case, then our mission as a species is clear. If we are the only race capable of space travel for the foreseeable future, then we have to drag the various races into space. If we are the only intelligent race out there, then we have to kickstart evolution on a ton of planets.
Personally, I prefer the idea that we are being quarantined from the rest of the universe or Earth is the longest running sitcom in the universe with the Series finale involving humans realizing that all their civilizations were being observed and scrutinized constantly by aliens beyond our comprehension.
1) Faster than Light Travel is impossible. Really.
2) Creating a viable ecosphere or a viable machine that can be send to fly through space for centuries or millennia required to get anywhere interesting is not practical, fuel runs out too soon, or the ship breaks apart too soon.
3) The upper signal strength for any civilization is limited to such an extent that you can't send one over hundreds of light years.
Sure, people may have come up with that Technology classification system where a Type II civilization can harness the full power of a star - but maybe you just can't get there from a Type I civilization? Maybe there just isn't enough building material and enough fuel or other energy sources that you could last long enough to build a Dyson Sphere?
Maybe there is hope with my point 3 - maybe you just can't really send such signals effectively in every direction, or only with a long delay between tries - since we've listed for probably less than a century so far, we just missed the last try someone signalled in our direction.
http://gizmodo.com/the-fermi-paradox-where-the-hell-are-the-other-earths-1580345495/+ashleyfeinberg
Alien writing spelling out the terms of our planets Galactic- ASBO...
Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...</b></size></center>
Sapient species may be rare - we've only been around recognizably for a tiny blip on Earth's biological history. Statistically, aliens doing a biological survey were more likely to find dinosaurs, and they haven't been by for a re-sweep yet.
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I also believe in the Great Filter theory. We aren't first, we aren't special, and we're probably not going to live for very long.
Life probably existed on Earth multiple times in the Archean Eon, before the harsh environment wiped out the Primordial Ooze until whatever was left was able to survive and flourish into what we have today.
When we consider human survival, we have to consider it from the Hadean-Archean Eons and onwards, since our existance is tied to that of the rest of the planet. That includes every major extinction event. Cosmic impacts. Volcanic eruptions that disrupt the atmosphere. Diseases. Famines. And eventually human-created problems that threaten the planet.
If our own existance is anything to go by, the odds of having a sentient species like us make it through "The Great Filter" is so great, that it makes us extremely lucky -- nothing more.
We're the lottery winners in the great cosmic gamble. The deck has been heavily stacked against us from the very beginning of the formation of the Earth. As we continue to evolve technologically and intellectually, we find more and more ways to end our existance on Earth.
Think of the Cold War. Think of how many other planets (kind of like Vulcan) actually decided to have a global nuclear war. Only instead of surviving, everybody died. Think of the Bubonic Plague -- consider other civilizations who simply succumbed to a similar disease and was wiped out entirely. Think of how many impact events killed off any sentient species instead of forcing them into a genetic bottleneck like in our history.
The universe wants to kill us every day. We're not done playing the cosmic gamble. The deck is still stacked heavily against us. We've never "made it". The thing with the Fermi Paradox is that if for whatever reason we wipe ourselves out -- we'd just be another example of the Fermi Paradox to another planet in some distant galaxy who is thinking the same thing we are. Civilizations who just get caught in the great filter and are never heard of or discovered.
Consider all the times we came close to losing it all over one event or another. Then consider on some other Earthlike planet who managed to beat the cosmic odds up until that point -- decided to make the wrong decision that resulted in their extinction.
So in the paraphrased words of Arthur C. Clark, we're likely a primitive tribe on an island listening for distant drumbeats from other islands when in fact the air around us contains signals and information so sophisticated that it's beyond our ken. The aliens could be using directed laser communications which are not only energy efficient, but information efficient as well. The catch is, such a means of communication would have to be pointed directly at the recipient for them to receive it because of its tight, narrow focus. If it's not pointed at you, it's not going to reach you. Or they may have figured out how to use quantum entanglement or something even more bizarre and unimaginable.
It's frankly laughable to think that advanced civilizations would be using the same primitive technology that we ourselves are currently outgrowing.
You bring up a good point here. The big problem with a "Prime Directive" type of explanation (i.e. the aliens are refraining from contacting us because we are not ready for it) is that the Earth was prime real estate for colonization for anybody who likes our type of environment ever since the Permian era (300 million years ago), yet there was nothing even remotely human-like (and probably nothing sapient native to Earth at all) until less than ten million years ago. Thus, we must explain why no aliens moved in and set up shop when Earth was essentially free for the taking. The implication is that nobody for three hundred million years was both able and willing to set up shop on an unclaimed planet with our type of biosphere. It seems hard to believe that all alien species capable of reaching Earth would willingly choose to avoid claiming the planet over such a long time span, so we are left with the assumption that either none have come by, or else they found our planet unattractive (e.g. because their biochemistry is incompatible with ours, thus requiring them to supplant our lifeforms with their own if they were to colonize Earth).
That one is so stupid, he lost a Rock/Paper/Scissors game to a Pony.
My character Tsin'xing
Well, on the plus side, we seem to be finding out that planet formation is pretty common so that's one variable that's mostly solved.
I know it's sad and depressing, but i think exactly like you do.
Just look at the news every day. Plain said, people are too stupid, selfish and paranoid to survive. And even IF we would magically grow up and behave like adults (yes you politicians and mighty ones i mean YOU!) it would be almost impossible to guarantee the survival of the human race so they can populate the universe one day.
Instead we argue and fight about indifferent things and resources instead of taking good care for the planet we live on. The people in charge don't seem to think in big time frames, like 1000 of years for ex. Instead of that, we live from hand to mouth (so to say) and we are busy sawing off the brach we are sitting on.
I think humanity won't be extinct in one big boom, but instead it will shrink because of famine, diseases and wars about the last useable resources (like water and food, yeah you can't eat money in the end).
The only way to survive in a long term which i can imagine is to fuse with machine. (but that's completely out of our reach today, thankfully. lol).
Also, look at how fine balanced everything has to be to support human life. (gravity, temperature, Atmosphere composition/pressure, protection from radiation and so on).
So i don't think we will find many habitable planets like ours, even if we had access to warp drive (which is highly unlikely, anyway.)
As for the evolution of life qua life, an examination of some of the less pleasant parts of our own planet show that once it gets a foothold, life is nearly infinitely adaptable - from the extremophiles living in the sulfurous waters around volcanic vents on the floor of the ocean, to microbes and tiny shrimp-relatives in lakes hidden beneath the Antarctic ice, to cockroaches that live on every continent on the planet, it's all over our world. Given the likely characteristics of Earth when life first evolved here, it seems probable that just about every world that has the potential for a biosphere has life of some sort - heck, there's either a microbial life form on Titan, or there's some previously-unknown chemical reaction taking place on the shores of its hydrocarbon oceans.
Now, complex life may well be another question...
..Wherever you left them last, of course!
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And assuming we don't do anything stupid to our ecosystem (the "Great Filter" referenced earlier), our time here is effectively unlimited - the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies won't collide for about three billion years yet (projections indicate the Solar System will probably be ejected into intergalactic space by the gravitational effects), and isn't scheduled to exhaust its hydrogen fuel and leave the main sequence until two or three billion years after that. Not exactly a short deadline.
Of course, we still haven't made it all the way past the Filter - the odds of nuclear war are diminishing constantly, but we still have climatic effects to deal with, as well as the need to find some way to defend against the larger bits of cosmic debris (most of the asteroids and comets that might hit Earth already have over the past four billion years, but probably not all).
Even if faster-than-light travel turns out to be impossible, we should be able to create slow interstellar ships in a millennium or two if we don't wreck our civilization before then.
While we may not encounter any starfaring civilizations out there (and almost certainly nobody close enough in tech level to our own that a war would not be horribly one-sided--just a few centuries' difference would let one side wipe the floor with the other, much like Europeans conquering the Americas), current astronomy is leading us to the conclusion that there should be a lot of "cold Venuses" out there (i.e. planets that could be terraformed given the tech, resources, and time).
Jonsillis brought up a good point as well--life on Earth existed for three billion years before anything more complex than algae arose. For every planet with complex life (i.e. Cambrian or later equivalent), there will probably be several (or even dozens) that have only microbes.
Which makes the whole point of alien invasion pointless. Assuming there are lots of planets that have the right conditions for life, why invade a planet that can put up a resistance when there are plenty of planets where the most complex lifeform is algae.
You can't make sexy alien slave erotica with space algae.
Well, I have been accused of being a prude before. So, I can definitely cede I may not be quite that adventurous or imaginative.
"Thankfully?" How so? If it really were far out of our reach (and I'm not so sure you're right about that with the latest experiments in controlling computer and robotic reactions with mental thought), I'd consider that quite unfortunate. I personally hope I live long enough for cybernetic enhancement to become a reality.
Personally, I think we will bypass cybernetics entirely and go straight to nanotechnology.
Isn't that up to personal choice for what hardware people want?
It depends imo.
If you could get cybernetic implants, who can guarantee you they aren't permanent connected to the internet and someone other than you can control it?
Additionally i am sure if it where possible to get a internet link with the brain, many people would do it. I think we all know to what this would ultimately lead. (just look how many people willingly share their private life on the internet, without any second thought.)
Sooner or later it would become a necessity in order to take part in society. Everyone who wouldn't want to join would be disadvantaged, discriminated or even worse.
No that's not the future i would like to live in.
Personally, I agree with webcartoonist Joel Watson. The minute uploading to a cybernetic body is certified safe, I'm heaving this out-of-warranty meat pile into a ditch!