Richy, how long have we been looking for aliens? I doubt even a hundred years. We didn't have computers worth a damn until 40 years ago, and we've only ever gotten to the Moon and back. When you are comparing the times involved plus the vast distances...Well, it doesn't seem so out of place. We've been searching for intelligent life for (I'll be generous) 50 years. The galaxy itself is billions of years old, with billions of stars, each thousands of light years away from one another.
Why should we have found life already? We don't know how rare or abundant it is. To say rule out the existence of life that is potentially billions of years old and millions of light years away is, frankly, stupid.
Once again from the top: I'm not ruling out the possibility of alien life millions or billions of light-years away. I'm ruling out the existence of aliens in our galaxy, which is only 100,000 light-years across. That's like the third time I've said that in two pages, and I'm getting tired of repeating it, so please people, pay attention.
The Fermi Paradox isn't about life being so similar to us that we can relate and understand them over afternoon tea. The only thing you really need to prove that intelligent aliens exist is to point to something that's not natural. It doesn't matter whether it looks like something out of your grandmother's attic or something so fundamentally different from us that we haven't got the faintest idea what it is or what it does. It only matters that it could not have existed through some natural process.
The Fermi Paradox is also not about us going out to find them. Quite the opposite, it's about them being here. It's about the galaxy being so old and small and statistically overcrowded with aliens that we should be able to see them everywhere we look.
And that's the fundamental problem with most people's arguments for aliens. They start with reasonable probabilities (so many stars in the galaxy, so much time, that statistically-speaking intelligent life must have occurred a lot before us) but refuse to carry their statistical assumption to its logical conclusion (they should be here). Instead they go 180 and invent improbable scenarios (no alien civilisation ever has been expansionist! They all somehow missed our sector of space!) or impossible agents (there's something that kills expansionist civilisations! we're in a zoo!) to avoid carrying their reasoning to its conclusion. It's really quite sad to watch.
As a side-note, I'm ignoring the possibility of aliens millions of light-years away in other galaxies, because we cannot and will never be able to make contact with them or detect their existence in any way. Which means that, for all intents and purposes, we are alone. Having a neighbour who lives so far away that you will never in any way be aware or affected by his existence is the same as not having any neighbours, from a practical standpoint.
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
Granted though, Fermi's paradox doesn't exclude the existence of intelligent life in a distant galaxy somewhere else in the universe, where they would be so far away that it is and forever shall be impossible for us to make contact or be in any way aware of their existence. Those aliens might exist. But aliens that are relevant to us, in the sense that we could contact them, detect them, or in some way be aware that they are or once were there, do not exist.
I never really understood all the emphasis people place on Fermi's paradox. Besides the near limitless number of social/cultural factors that could lead one alien race to chose to not contact another. Hell, off the top of my head we have:
Prime Directive style society
Multiple societies that keep each other in check and stop contact to prevent advantage to their opponents
Patient alien races (who are studying us before opening discussion)
Evolutionary pressure favoring quiet races (someone who kills any active alien races they find)
etc.
Even leaving aside all that, the biggest problem I have with Fermi is he assumes anyone knows we're here. We're in the ass end of nowhere galactically, and up until the 1940s you would literally need to be either right on top of us or able to see the surface of the planet to know we existed, and since then we've only managed to leave a foot print some 50 odd light years in radius. On the kind of scale we're talking about, it's like wondering why no one ever pays attention to that one beautiful grain of sand on the beach.
Thing is, Fermi's Paradox isn't only about direct contact. The idea is that, even without FTL travel, it would only take a few million years to completely colonize the Milky Way. The Milky Way is several billion years old, so if alien life is as common as people assume, then this colonization would have happened over and over and over... the galaxy should be covered and overcrowded. We shouldn't be searching for aliens, they should be visible everywhere we look!
Let's suppose they decided to hide from us, for whatever reason. That means they somehow manage to perfectly mask all traces of several galaxy-spanning civilizations from us. Absolutely not a single visible or detectable trace, not a piece of trash floating around, not a stray signal, nothing. And they keep round-the-clock patrols to make sure smugglers/thrillseekers/explorers/etc. don't sneak into the "forbidden nature preserve", which is, just like their clean-up effort, perfectly 100% effective. This set of perfect alien powers requires much more of a stretch of the imagination than simply assuming they don't exist.
Why would you colonize when even WITH FTL drives it would take years to get anywhere in the galaxy?
Why would you colonize when even WITH FTL drives it would take years to get anywhere in the galaxy?
There's no advantage to it that I can see.
Also, Reapers.
Pressure from limited space and resources on one planet, risk of your entire civilization being destroyed in one shot, frontier-type people looking for new places to settle, curiosity, science & engineering challenges, just for the heck of it, some weird alien reason, etc.
Really, the question no one has realistically answered is, why would no alien civilization have ever colonized the galaxy?
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
Why would you colonize when even WITH FTL drives it would take years to get anywhere in the galaxy?
There's no advantage to it that I can see.
Also, Reapers.
Pressure from limited space and resources on one planet, risk of your entire civilization being destroyed in one shot, frontier-type people looking for new places to settle, curiosity, science & engineering challenges, just for the heck of it, some weird alien reason, etc.
Really, the question no one has realistically answered is, why would no alien civilization have ever colonized the galaxy?
Because relatively few alien civilizations made it passed pre-space travel advancement before killing themselves off with fusion bombs? That was an episode of The Outer Limits. :P
Really, as many alien species advanced enough to reach space there SHOULD be, there's probably an equal number reasons why we haven't found them.
"Some class 13 worlds destroy themselves through overpopulation and world hunger, a massive nuclear war, environmental pollution... but most end up getting shrunk to the size of a pea by scientists trying to find the mass of the Higgs boson."
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
edited February 2008
The idea that an advanced civilization that is unwilling to colonize, at least in such a way as to be detectable by us is, plausible.
Just because our species is endlessly acquisitive does not make that the universal norm, or even mean that we won't evolve past such tendencies.
As far as looters or smugglers, a hive consciousness is just one way of explaining that away. Or perhaps our presence is toxic on a level we can't detect.
Or other species could colonize in directions we don't yet comprehend. That kind of falls into wormhole/FTL land though.
Also, I don't know which is more stupid. Believing we are along in the entire fucking universe or believing , at our current state, we are important enough to be visited. Goddammit this human centrism BS has to stop.
Why? We've never encountered any extraterrestrial creatures or seen any evidence indicating they exist. Until we find something, human centralism seems pretty damn logical.
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
Really, the question no one has realistically answered is, why would no alien civilization have ever colonized the galaxy?
Did you not bother to read my post? Colonizing the galaxy would require a whole fucking lot of 'people' and a relentless drive to continually expand. How about the point when a species discovers some means of obtaining immortality, and energy~mass conversion, and you can have anything you want, and all the time in the universe to do whatever you want. There's not going to be much pressure to keep on popping out the babies because we need to go populate the next system over. There'll always be time for that later.
You can go hiking in the woods in New York state and see no trash, no cars, planes, or any signs of people in your immediate area. Are you going to try and call that proof that there's no human life on Earth? We can currently detect large planets around nearby stars with a certain degree of accuracy. Planets, as a whole, are probably going to be much larger than spaceships, stations etc. Maybe Dyson Spheres/ ringworlds, and other macro objects have proven to be just too impractical and inconvenient to be commonly built, and so are chances of finding anything both artificial, and large enough for our technology to identify are near zero.
Or maybe, just last week, a huuuuge derelict spaceship drifted nearby, and someone did detect it, but due to our technology, it was labeled as a solid body from the oort cloud in a non intersecting orbit, given a number and forgotten about, because we as of yet don't have any kind of detection gear that goes 'awooga! awooga! Spaceship here!'
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Did he ever. South Park's take on ou planet being a Cosmic Reality Show seems accurate.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
I assert this statement alone proves the falsity of the whole claim.
The Fermi Paradox isn't about life being so similar to us that we can relate and understand them over afternoon tea. The only thing you really need to prove that intelligent aliens exist is to point to something that's not natural. It doesn't matter whether it looks like something out of your grandmother's attic or something so fundamentally different from us that we haven't got the faintest idea what it is or what it does. It only matters that it could not have existed through some natural process.
The Fermi Paradox is also not about us going out to find them. Quite the opposite, it's about them being here. It's about the galaxy being so old and small and statistically overcrowded with aliens that we should be able to see them everywhere we look.
And that's the fundamental problem with most people's arguments for aliens. They start with reasonable probabilities (so many stars in the galaxy, so much time, that statistically-speaking intelligent life must have occurred a lot before us) but refuse to carry their statistical assumption to its logical conclusion (they should be here). Instead they go 180 and invent improbable scenarios (no alien civilisation ever has been expansionist! They all somehow missed our sector of space!) or impossible agents (there's something that kills expansionist civilisations! we're in a zoo!) to avoid carrying their reasoning to its conclusion. It's really quite sad to watch.
As a side-note, I'm ignoring the possibility of aliens millions of light-years away in other galaxies, because we cannot and will never be able to make contact with them or detect their existence in any way. Which means that, for all intents and purposes, we are alone. Having a neighbour who lives so far away that you will never in any way be aware or affected by his existence is the same as not having any neighbours, from a practical standpoint.
Why would you colonize when even WITH FTL drives it would take years to get anywhere in the galaxy?
There's no advantage to it that I can see.
Also, Reapers.
Really, the question no one has realistically answered is, why would no alien civilization have ever colonized the galaxy?
Because relatively few alien civilizations made it passed pre-space travel advancement before killing themselves off with fusion bombs? That was an episode of The Outer Limits. :P
Really, as many alien species advanced enough to reach space there SHOULD be, there's probably an equal number reasons why we haven't found them.
Just because our species is endlessly acquisitive does not make that the universal norm, or even mean that we won't evolve past such tendencies.
As far as looters or smugglers, a hive consciousness is just one way of explaining that away. Or perhaps our presence is toxic on a level we can't detect.
Or other species could colonize in directions we don't yet comprehend. That kind of falls into wormhole/FTL land though.
Why? We've never encountered any extraterrestrial creatures or seen any evidence indicating they exist. Until we find something, human centralism seems pretty damn logical.
Did you not bother to read my post? Colonizing the galaxy would require a whole fucking lot of 'people' and a relentless drive to continually expand. How about the point when a species discovers some means of obtaining immortality, and energy~mass conversion, and you can have anything you want, and all the time in the universe to do whatever you want. There's not going to be much pressure to keep on popping out the babies because we need to go populate the next system over. There'll always be time for that later.
You can go hiking in the woods in New York state and see no trash, no cars, planes, or any signs of people in your immediate area. Are you going to try and call that proof that there's no human life on Earth? We can currently detect large planets around nearby stars with a certain degree of accuracy. Planets, as a whole, are probably going to be much larger than spaceships, stations etc. Maybe Dyson Spheres/ ringworlds, and other macro objects have proven to be just too impractical and inconvenient to be commonly built, and so are chances of finding anything both artificial, and large enough for our technology to identify are near zero.
Or maybe, just last week, a huuuuge derelict spaceship drifted nearby, and someone did detect it, but due to our technology, it was labeled as a solid body from the oort cloud in a non intersecting orbit, given a number and forgotten about, because we as of yet don't have any kind of detection gear that goes 'awooga! awooga! Spaceship here!'