“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.”
—Bill Watterson
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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It's typically interesting reading about speculation regarding the Fermi Paradox and/or Great Filters. I of course have no special knowledge, but my guess is that space is simply so large and empty that most civilizations turn inwards instead of outwards. There's a decent chance that while life is common, technologically advanced life isn't - life evolved almost as soon as conditions allowed (on a geological timescale) but it took a lot of good fortune and time for humans to appear.
There are an estimated 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy. If there are only a handful of advanced species at our level or greater then perhaps such civilizations reach out, hear nothing for millennia, potentially colonize a few nearby stars at slow speed on an interstellar scale, and then retreat into themselves via constructs like virtual universes. It could be that recreated universes indistinguishable from reality are more feasible than spending huge amounts of time in transit to the stars with planets that might be able to support your species. In that case you wouldn't be visiting Earth and it could explain the silence.
I have to wonder if motivations remain the same past a certain point in a species' development. Our expansionism on earth and in our solar system is driven by our need for resources, which is driven by our population growth, which is driven by the basest of biological instincts. If we become largely non-biological and functionally immortal, is the desire to procreate still there? It's really an extension of what you said, but maybe that "turn inward" is not only a question of feasibility, but also maybe intelligent life just becomes satisfied at some point, a kind of cybernetic nirvana.
I vote we expand anyway, even if it's done automatically while we're in some kind of degenerate party simulation. It just seems like a shame not to build things for real.
Don't forget the whole 13 billion years thing. The universe could be teeming with technologically capable life in the absolute sense yet have only a few intelligent/sapient species arise within the same hundred thousand year period, for example. Missed connections may abound.
Also, intelligence might not be the evolutionary advantage we think it is. It has a lot of drawbacks too (it's very energy-intensive for one). Sharks are older than trees and never really changed since they evolved, with not that much intelligence to show for it.
Ever read Blindsight?
Oh yes, brilliant book.
That breaks if they expand, though.
There’s a decent chance that while life is common, technologically advanced life isn’t - life evolved almost as soon as conditions allowed (on a geological timescale) but it took a lot of good fortune and time for humans to appear.
I don't know, we're not the only species that's started using stone tools, for example. As far as I can tell species get more or less prehensile and intelligent over time fairly randomly, and it's just a matter of diffusion for one to reach the capability of using technology.
I really enjoy Liu Cixin's 'The Three Body Problem', but like a lot of sci-fi, I think it fails as a good description of a likely future. That's because it's structured for good dramatic storytelling. It has 'special' heroes, born with unique destinies who are on hero's journeys, and those journeys are full of constantly escalating drama and conflict. Great Screenwriting 101, but a terrible model of actual reality.
If simple microbial life is common in the Universe, with current efforts, we will likely find it in the 2030s. Real 'first contact' will be nothing like the movies.
The problem is that goant corporations have taken control over science fiction media, and they dont want anyone questioning their place too much.
There's a degree of that, but also reality is just boring and unwatchable a lot of the time. The stuff that gets closest is often panned as being angsty art that nobody likes.
Personally I think it's probably just that our environment is rare.
You probably need a jupiter, a moon, a specific amount of tectonic activity and so on.
And afaik evolution can settle like it did with the dinosaurs, where nothing much new happens. Like you need a specific pattern of extinction events in order for it to arrive at intelligence.
And further, why establish contact with humans? I'd just observe them and store as much data as possible. For example to be able to bring back extinct animals, and even culture and languages. And then just let them deal with their challenges in order to mature.
Ya, personally I lean more towards a combination of rare complex life and rare intelligence. For all its value in the modern world, a big slow brain that wastes a lot of reaction time and calories on abstract thought is not particularly useful to things like avoiding predators.
Given how long it took for earth to go from having millions of different complex multicellular creatures to having a single one reach complex abstract thought, I am willing to believe that having the luck to beat the evolutionary pressure to make a simpler faster brain is very rare, and we are just lucky that it happened so soon on earth.
Combine with the conditions for complex life to grow and continue existing to roll thouse dice for long periods of time being in and of themselves extremely rare, and I think it’s resonable for us to just be an early outlier.
The problem however with expecting aliens to exist, at least within a few hundred million light years, is that the foundational bedrock physics of our universe mean nearly any advanced technological civilization should be extremely and painfully obvious.
We could miss another world like earth is currently, but on an astronomical timescale humans going from discovering writing to the point where we have solved science and are engaging in galactic cluster scale resource exploration, extraction, and conservation. We live in a reality where on astronomical timescales everything not actively saved will be lost and destroyed, so we would expect any intelligent civilization to try and preserve at least some of it, and anyone doing so should be obvious to us since at latest the first infrared telescopes we’re put up.
It’s not that they didn’t want to bother contacting us, but rather that they would have had to put significant effort to put us in an artificial zoo to not be visible. Even then, we don’t hide the airplanes flying at thirty thousand feet from the elephants on some reserve, and I can’t imagine many reasons to put so much effort into trying.
Far less contrived is for the reason we don’t see any alien activity among the stars to be simply that there isn’t any close enough to be visible yet.
Personally I think it’s probably just that our environment is rare.
That could be. Nobody has any idea under what conditions tectonics start; it could be super narrow. It may or may not be required, but if it is Earth might be exactly the right size and composition to allow long-term good conditions. Speaking of, there's also theories where planets migrate over time. If we had ended up too close to the sun we'd be another Venus.
This is all mitigated by just how many stars there are within nearby galaxies, though, so it has to be really unlikely for aliens to evolve and then roll out big things across interstellar space.
And then just let them deal with their challenges in order to mature.
That's implicitly assuming whig history, just saying.
And afaik evolution can settle like it did with the dinosaurs, where nothing much new happens.
Not quite, it didn't really settle. We compress like 200 million years of dinosaur evolution together in our imaginations, but that's not actually what happened. It's hard to say if technological bird-like creature would have happened without Chicxulub, but given what our ancestors looked like 70 million years ago and how smart existing birds are it doesn't seem far-fetched. Having worked with birds and heard about crocodilian behavior it would be a really weird civilisation, though. Maybe not even a viable one.
And further, why establish contact with humans?
Well, if they exist and expand, it wouldn't be a matter of calling us or not, they'd have to actively hide or we'd see them.
People like that one mostly because it's a cool movie concept, as far as I can tell.
The most dangerous solution to the Fermi paradox is that many things are possible.
lmao i wish these hostiles would contact the Earth. I'd gladly sell out my species to escape this place. Not like the greys could do any worse to me than a settler cop could
If you haven't read (or now, watched) it, I recommend The Three Body Problem. One of the characters gets this choice.
Heard a lot of good things about that book thus far, just hadn't gotten around to grabbing it yet.