Comment on The great silence or why haven’t we found any aliens yet?
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf 3 days ago
There’s probably life all over the place like on earth but it’s very primitive.
It took 3.5 billion years to get to the point where we evolved enough to be able to ask this question. 3.5 billion years of near misses, mass extinction events, and our star remaining stable enough to not wipe us out. I suspect microbial life is very common, we might even find some in our solar system but sentient life much less so and sentient life existing at the same time that we do is even rarer let alone sentient life creating radio waves over a long enough period to coincide with our very recent attempts to receive it.
SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Earth has been giving off obvious chemical evidence of life signs for eons. Any Type 1 civilization would have seen it a long time ago and we would stand out like glass on the beach.
Even if they haven’t arrived to check it out, which I doubt, they will be watching carefully in various ways.
So: zoo hypothesis seems more likely than anything to me.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf 3 days ago
True, like I said microbial life is likely found all over the galaxy but we’ve only been transmitting radio waves for a little over a century.
How would they travel, realistically? Also what are these various ways that they will be watching?
SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
It’s impossible to be “realistic” about travel, as it is one of the things where we don’t know how little we know. We theorize about alcubierre warp fields and wormholes or generation ships or machine intelligences but isn’t that like saying you can’t canoe to the moon? Do our paleo ancestors have anything to say about ion drives or plutonium energy sources?
I appreciate all the skeptics on space travel, but so many fall down on turning the same skepticism on our own limits to knowledge, and assume we know enough to make conclusive assumptions about something we have never tried.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf 3 days ago
True, but we still have to try and understand the universe within the scientific framework we’ve built otherwise we’re just indulging in science fiction. We know things like the distances involved, the time it would take to travel those distances even at a high percentage of the speed of light, the amount of energy needed to move a specific mass, and so on.
Maybe there are ways around this for sufficiently advanced beings but maybe there is intelligent life within 100 light years of us that is listening to the first radio broadcasts with no way of getting here.