Either the aliens have listed Earth as a no-contact planet or we are probably alone in the universe.

Comments

• roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The universe is vast. The assumption that any species could travel to another is a flawed one.

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  • IggyTheSmidge@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    “Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen…” and so on.

    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And even if they could, it’s hard to imagine a reason to travel to another star system.

    The expansion of a species beyond a single star system for any reason is dubious, there’s really just no reason to do it, and the cost is extremely high (given known physics).

    I say there’s no reason to leave the solar system, but I think that probably needs some explanation, because the obvious reason that may come to mind is probably overpopulation on earth and looking for other habitable planets. The thing is, in order to travel to another star system you need to really master surviving in space; if you can build a colony ship, you can build space habitats. If you can build space habitats, then you have enough material and energy right here in the Sol system to support quadrillions of humans living in space habitats. In other words, there’s no reason to leave for tens of thousands of years.

    All that is to say, if you aren’t traveling to other star systems for your own species, you probably aren’t doing it for others.

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    • BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If we built a self replicating probe and sent it to the nearest system, and from there it sent off 2 more probes and so on, in 2 million years they’d have reached every system. The only cost would be the initial probe. and any species that has mastered it’s own star system could do that. They could send out their own genetic material and spread their form of live.

      They don’t have to go themselves out into space, they can send automated machines. We’ve already started doing just that with very basic machines for scientific curiosity. I see no reason why we wouldn’t send out replicating probes when we have the technology to do it.

      However we do come back to Fermi’s Paradox: the universe is 13800million years old. So far we have no evidence a probe has reached our star system. Where are they? Maybe we just haven’t stumbled across one yet. Or maybe life really is very rare?

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• Illogicalbit@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I read somewhere there are 6 possibilities:

  1. Dark forest theory - read at least book 1 and 2 of three body problem series or google for spoilers
  2. A filter exists, or more plainly something that always causes a civilization to eventually fail.
  3. Similar to Star Trek, other civilizations are waiting for us to pass a threshold before contact is made.
  4. Carl Sagan: the universe is so large and intelligent life is so sparse, we just haven’t come across them yet.
  5. Life on our planet is unique to the entire universe
  6. Could also be a mixture of some of these.

  Whatever it is, it’s a fascinating problem and I like Carl Sagan’s approach.

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  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    An addendum to 4:
    We could be one of the first, so life is unusually sparse during this period of time.

    The universe is old, but it takes a lot to build up the components needed for life as we know it. The first two generations of stars wouldn’t have created the exotic materials in quantitie we needed to seed a world with the requirements for life.
    And life couldn’t have realistically happened much faster in a 3rd generation system than it did in our system.
    There are some very old 3rd Gen stars, but it’s less common and iirc they’re not close to us.

    Tldr
    This is early phases, life is going to get more common over the next few billion years.

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• DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  不要回答，不要回答，不要回答。

  DO NOT ANSWER, DO NOT ANSWER, DO NOT ANSWER.

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• enbiousenvy@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Earth is so big that I’ll never explore every spots on earth. But I think there are still living things in places that I’ll never go to.

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• lordnikon@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It boils down to one thing let’s say they find us or we find them. They set out on a trip to us traveling at near C speed. By the time they reach us we may not be around anymore as thousands of years have passed. The universe is so vast not only do catch them in space but also in time. The lack of contact is just a series of near misses.

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  • Pixel_Jock_17@piefed.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I love this! This is exactly what I think too. It’s just a matter of misses.

    Like space-time is so mind boggling that the idea of aliens is most likely just us from a time before but we will never know because by the time they (we) return, we’re already gone. Some sort of paradoxical loop

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• EndOfLine@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The assumption that other life has both the capacity and desire to explore the universe is flawed. Think of all the variety of life that has ever existed on Earth and how many of those species have ever attempted to travel to space?

  Next imagine a species that does want to explore the universe to find other life. Would it make more sense for them to focus their efforts looking to the outer rim of the galaxy with the lowest number of celestrial bodies, where we are, or more towards the center where there is a statistically higher chance of finding life?

  If there is an alien species with the capability and desire to explore the universe, and they search the less dense outer rim of the galaxy, and they happen to stumble upon our tiny spec of dust in the sandstorm, what if they don’t communicate in a way perceivable by us (and vice versa)? They may have flown right without realizing we were here and we could have looked right past them at the same time.

  It’s also possible that ancient alien theorists are right. We have been visited. They kicked it with ancient humans for a while before heading back home to tell their friends about us and arrange future visits. The round trip could easily take 10s of thousands or even millions of years.

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  • Pixel_Jock_17@piefed.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Going off the ancient alien theory, if real, my belief is that we haven’t been visited again because they haven’t made it home yet to tell anyone about us 😂

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• givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  What?

  You’re literally ruling out the most likely scenario:

  Life is spread out all over, but even if they knew we were here, they’d never get to us.

  Like, there could be a planet on the exact same level as us, thinking the same thing about aliens. But if they’re 1,000 light years away, all the know about Earth is it has water. Something they might not even consider relative in the search for life if they don’t need water.

  And even if they wanted to send us a signal and could figure out where to send it, best case scenario we get it in a thousand years and they have to wait at least two for a response they’d have no idea if we’d be capable of sending back.

  Even if every planet tried to contact the first 10 planets with life they find, eventually the novelty would wear off and they wouldn’t keep wasting all the resources just to add another tally 2k years from now to the list of planets with life.

  Everyone gets hung up on aliens wanting to interact with us, because we want aliens.

  If an alien civilization is advanced to know about us, they don’t give a fuck about us. And they wouldn’t, except if they’re planning on such long timelines that their procedure for finding life is to just steer a couple giant asteroids at us.

  A civilization capable of noticing us, just wouldn’t have anything to gain from interacting with us.

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  • Quilotoa@lemmy.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There are billions of areas in the universe that are millions of years older than us. Considering the amount we’ve advanced in the last 125 years, it seems likely some of them would be space travelors by now.

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    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      it seems likely some of them would be space travelors by now.

      You just said:

      There are billions of areas in the universe that are millions of years older than us

      And:

      amount we’ve advanced in the last 125 years

      Logically, you understand that with two vastly different times scales over that much distance…

      The chances of overlap is infinitly small?

      Maybe they passed by before our solar system even formed. Maybe after our sun burns out they stroll by.

      But why would they choose to spend their time wandering around in a spaceship anyways?

      Even if they had instant travel making distance and time absolutely meaningless. If life is so plentiful and there’s so many that are that advanced, exponentially more at our level, and innumerable planets supporting more basic forms of life…

      Why would they care about us?

      We’re one in trillions to them.

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• PiraHxCx@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  in the huge technological gap needed to interstellar space travel, there is the discovery of fully immersive time dilated virtual reality, any society ends when they can be immortal in dream realms.

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• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I sometimes think about the possibility that other sentient life exists in the universe, but we are the most technologically advanced.

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• Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Our universe is not only vast it is expanding in all directions. The universe almost certainly has intelligent life at various time and places. That any develop sufficiently to communicate by radio broadcasts of sufficient power within the relatively tiny area of our ~100 years or so of our being able to listen considering the time it takes for signals to reach us mean that our sampling window is just too small.

  Imagine a sphere centered around earth spreading out in all directions. The outer edge represents the space where their radio could have reached us by now since we became capable of listening and even bothered carefully listening. Meaningful systematic SETI is like 1970’s and forward. So ~50 light years or so. Anything further hasn’t reached us yet. Anything closer may have already passed us. Maybe they stopped. Maybe they moved onto something past radio, or maybe they are dead.

  For example, humanity has had aproximately 125 years or so of radio where someone could detect us. Not a long time. We are already breeching 7 of 9 planetary boundaries, environmental limits that once breeched work like a timebomb that risk our civilization’s collapse and possible extinction. We could nuke ourselves out of existence at any minute for the last 75 years. How long will we be broadcasting for? That expanding sphere of space where our radio has reached will hollow out if/when we stop broadcasting. So alien civilizations that want to listen to us can only be in that very thin slice of space between when we started and when we stop broadcasting. Compared to the universe, it’s nothing. Our galaxy, the milky way is 84000ly in diameter to give you some perspective.

  For us to find alien life, our imagenary expanding hollow sphere of radio listening has to intersect with their hollow expanding sphere of broadcasting. We’ve barely scraped the smallest corners of our own section of the unfashionable part of the spur on a minor spiral arm of our galaxy.

  Here is a map of stars withing 50ly of us.

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• TheFogan@programming.dev ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I mean the obvious thing is, we haven’t come close to finding a loophole to the speed of light speed limit. in the massively tiny portion of the universe we can see, there’s lots of “seems to have water, could possibly support life” planets, but well over 80 light years away (and those are the “close” ones).

  Then if we do assume some life forms were to have faster than light travel, we are probably not a “no contact”, but rather “low priority”. To a species that far ahead of us technologically. They’d have access to billions of planets, at which point if life is relatively common, we’d be very un-special.

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• NarrativeBear@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Time and Space is so vast that alien civilizations may have already come and gone in that time span.

  Humans have only been around for a blink of a eye in the timeline of the universe. It could be some alien civilizations are only starting to evolve from bacteria at this very moment, or another few have already gone extinct thousands of years ago.

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• HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I am in the camp where I think its more likely that traveling faster than light is less likely than there being a way to travel faster than it. Im not even sure if space really is expanding faster or if we figure out at some point it was something where it seemed like it was but it wasn’t. That means travel would pretty much have to be something like colony ships or seed ships or something with non crewed leading the way. Its taken 5 billion years for the eath to get us here but the galaxy is only like twice that since it settle down (these are realllly rough). there is this thing about if a species went balls out on colonization it could be done in like 100k years but a more reasonable one where they take a few hundred years to build up in each solar system before moving out more is like 50 million but I personally would push it out further to 1billion. heck many would fail or break away or whatever. communication would still be speed of light and likely slower with relays and such. Im going to say a billion. Then we are in an oddly in pretty empty part of both the galaxy and the universe so who knows. Maybe there is some thing happening in most of the universe and we are like on this wierd island. Like those tribes that last I knew were still around that we try to not let the modern world interfere with.

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