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[Leyasu]

So we should be seeing evidence of these civilisations. Yet we only can only detect far away planets through the light dips on their parent star. We can't dirctly view anything and have to send probes to planets in our own solar system to do exactly that. Are people expecting other civilisations to be building "things" that are the size of stars or even bigger? What would there use be? Radio waves could take millenia to get here and are we even tuned to the right frequencies? The questions are nummerous.

I don't believe in this we are unique bollox either. Hopefully we can into the oceans on Europa sometime soon and get the proof of just common life is if the conditions permit it.

 

[Kenpachii]

I had stumbled on 2 paradoxes: The Fermi Paradox and a Technology-Space Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox is summed up as a devil's advocate approach to the scientific question: "Are we alone in the universe?" declaring there is no intelligent life. It says, because the universe is old, there has to be an unquestionable and abundance of life out there. Giving that there is a high probability that a galaxy is harboring a solar system that is harboring a planet within the habitable zone of its local star (sun) (which there are many, in the trillions), then it is fair to say they there must be underdeveloped life (single cell, animals, plants).

On the contrary,

If intelligent life does/did exist, they would, by the probability of time and population, have a civilization(s) unimaginably older than our own. The paradox concludes that we are the only intelligent life simply because:

1. if a civilization had reached light-speed travel, we would have come across countless of their offspring every year of humanity. (Even if we wanted to avoid the astrological reason for "Hollywood's POV of Aliens"*** in that they intentionally don't visit us, we would still see their activity in-universe giving how far we can see in space.

2. If they didn't reach a tech like light speed, those civilizations would take the slow and steady approach and migrate (like an indigenous human did in the past) to every nearby planet, moon, and planetoid millions, billions, and trillions of years (keeping a record of their history) and thus we would still come across countless of offspring of those civilizations.

3.Their intelligence ended up killing their species.
---

***My counterargument towards "an intelligent life wouldn't need us / think of us as lesser beings / visited earth in secret" would be that our own fictitious and human narratives tell us intelligent life could come here for world-building, enslavement, migration, colonialism, military outpost and many more. In fact, I would argue these reasons would be equal to more abundant than what is now called Zoo Hypothesis, essentially we are self-inflicting thoughts on our own species as to why aliens wouldn't publicly visit us or only have done so to early man. Literally, we self identify as a victim, Galactical-ly


Or another way to put it is a "Civilization Prime", a society that is as old or close to the age of the universe itself. Their population would have expanded alongside the universe itself in every different direction.

Now multiply civilization Prime by the possibility of all the habitable zone planet evolving intelligence. We would still have been publicly visited at least once by an intelligent civilization that does only tourism or enslavement. Of course, Civilization Prime would have to have reached intelligence (space shuttle, living in space) to leave their home planet before intelligence kills them.

Based on us, leaving your home planet must not be hard in the universe, but maybe living on a new planet IN MASS is hard for many civilizations.
Also, a meteor killing all of the dinosaurs might have helped us a little in becoming the dominant species. That might be the missing link.

It's probably an infinite number of planets still in a prehistoric state


Which in a weird way confirms that dinosaurs might actually still exist.

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Technology-Space Paradox. basically says that technology will advance so much that the desire to travel into space will become lesser each generation.

When you add The Fermi Paradox to Technology-Space Paradox., the realization that there isn't any intelligent life in the universe, no old DUNE civilization, no known STAR TREK federation, and no STAR WARS space religion, there then is simply no point or need for anyone to have the desire if our own technology can and will produce it in movies and video games.

No clue which my theory is, but this is the most logical explanation i can think off.

Lets start

Society's that are 10+ billion years old are far far far far more advanced then we are today. Its beyond far.

If a society is 10 billion years old ( universe is older but lets just say 10b ) and moved to a modern society, they are so far ahead its not even funny. it's like u wanting to communicate with this, u can't even see / perceive it let alone have any discussion with it or use for it.

and that's only 4,3 billion years old, now imagine twice that.

It's completely and utterly pointless to even care. they probably visited millions of those and frankly another one? great next.

So with that out of the way, slavery / all the human desires / all the human traits are all out of the window directly. Nothing like that will matter even remotely or is relevant.

And with that any reason to visit us no matter if there are millions of planets under there realm like this aren't that much interesting anymore. It's like you wanting to inspect every single grain of sand on the beach. u look at maybe 1000 of them and then u give up its simple not relevant and we are even less relevant then that.

As we are considered completely nothing, now lets look at there society.

A good example is media and i always found a good example and really well made in a series called stargate sg1, thor and its race.


Here you got one, the asgard.

100k years old

and this guy, 30k years old same race.

Super high advance race far beyond humans ended up dying because clone issue's.

Their final attempts to repair the genetic degradation caused by continuous re-cloning failed, and unwilling to allow their technology to be plundered by other races, the Asgard decided to commit mass suicide and destroy their planet, but not without passing on their legacy. They gave Stargate Command an Asgard computer database containing all their knowledge, and made significant modifications to the Odyssey consisting of all their most recent technology.

Early history

The Asgard evolved on the planet Hala, in the Othala galaxy. Their collected history and culture would span over 100,000 years. They began exploring outside their galaxy around 28,000 BC. At some point, the Asgard began a program of cloning their people and transferring their minds into these bodies as a means of vastly extending their lifespans. At some point in time, the Asgard were hit by a plague that they called Barion's syndrome, a disease that wiped out 60% of their population and within a generation over 75% of the survivors of the disease became sterile and suffered from cellular degeneration. The remaining 10% of the population did not have the necessary genetic diversity to reverse the trend away from genetic breakdown

Here's anther picture of the 100k old one.

The interesting part about this is, that u can see he's shaped different from human and evolution takes place which deforms him into something else.

A good example of this with humans is this 100k years ago

humans today.

our form changes.

Now another thing what's interesting is the body of that alien which is small, tiny and weak.

It's very well possible our physical body's will be that of that alien. maybe not 100k years but there is a long time between 100k and 10b its so far we will be 1000 times further along.

This is logical when u move forwards in time, because physical strenght and movement is less and less needed and with that probably eating and sexual intercourse will probably also move away at some point or become irrelevant, we already see this in more advanced society's where kids are less considered and poor / less wealthy and succesful country's have lots of kids.
Imagine how this could evolve where we just clone ourselfs into new body's and kids are no longer useful ( Q trying to kill himself in star trek, he just wants to end it = population reduction ), disable brain cells that have the urge to have sex and are degraded so bad its no longer possible ( because its a dna shitfest, so nobody cares ) and sex suddenly is gone overnight.until the dna degrades so bad or a virus hits them or something they can't anticipate and its rip.

(This also could explain why extreme advanced society's also regress on the will to move out of there planet and colonize when they simple have population issue's themselves which validates absolute no need for any of it, and can be even seen as negative as result to pointless, a good human example of this is moon landing, suddently space exploration was gone after it for many years just to return because they can make money with it probably and that's about it.)

So if we don't die, from environmental troubles, rock slams earth, nuclear winter, viruses, volcano's or whatever else, its very good possible we will die out anyway no matter how advanced we get. because of technical limitations like those aliens in SG1 and decide at some point to just zone out entirely.

For example when u get sick, do u still want to travel? or just stay at home and sit it out until u feel better? Does anything still matter what happens anywhere when u are busy with yourself? not really.

It's interesting when u look at this stuff. it could very well mean that exploring / conquering / moving out / colonising is all based on old tribal cells that eventually will fade when we start to evolve more and more and get more intelligent to the point exploration could be completely off the table at the point we can, because there is no demand for it or interest. The same way as there is no demand to invade your neightbour country to enslave them in todays age, but that was probably not the case 100k years ago, where it could be the prime motivator.


When u think about this, its very easy to understand that whatever people are thinking, the reality is simple. We didn't got into contact with alien life and we have no proof of any of it. Yet we still exist and others could have also existed. Maybe we are just another "intelligent life form" that's working towards its prime stage but eventually much like what we do right now, get older ( society ) and die out.

Its probably the most logical explanation out of them.

 

[Soodanim]

I assume the thread continued having thoughtful responses that I’m going to go back and read later, but a quick take on the thread’s concepts before I leave for now:

When you take away all conjecture and human concepts of carbon based life, all you’re left with is statistical probability. When you’re up to the trillions of planets for the known universe (and an unknown count in the unknown universe), it’s statistically probable that life exists. Intelligence can’t be a part of that, because it’s conjecture and can’t be quantified. That’s way too many variables and definitions to count, which either works for or against the ideas being discussed. Either the amount of variables that led to our intelligence makes it unlikely, or the infinitely broad number of possibilities makes it likely that there’s something. But that gets too close to conjecture for my liking.

 

[Ionian]

Thanks bro for ur take. Always hugely valued.

i just question the use of the word 'advanced', it's a human conception and i don't think it's a universal trait of civilization to 'advance'... i think advancement is bred by some kind of adversity, and i don't think adversity is a given. Maybe what we see as advancement - interstallar travel, telepathy, whathaveyou - never occured to them in all their billions of years, maybe for them advancement is the perfect asteroid parfait?

The Native Americans and Aboriginies of Australia were around virtually as long as Europeans (far longer in the person of the Australian Aboriginies possibly,, i wonder if Europeans were percolating 60,000 years ago?) are were just as warlike, and just as densely populated, what held them back from forging steel and developing firearms? Surely not resources, both nations are rich in the requisite minerals - maybe it was because their animism worked just as well for them? (-Edited in)

I also posit that any civilization that has lived that long must by implication overcome warlike motivations, and territorial landgrabs, otherwise their society would not have been sufficiently sustainable to exist so long. (-Edited in)

I also don't think time=advancement. Time=death if humanity is anything to go by - i guess the suggestion is any civilization that has survived long enough must have overcome these things (a core part of the Star Trek philosophy) - time can also mean stability. Unchanging, sustainable, stability.

i mean, of course, anybody can logically say that a planet of makdonaldz restaurants is somewhere out there, anyone can say that the enterprise is flying around somewhere with a bald captain called jean luq picard, i'm just saying that talking about 1970s space civilizations existing as a matter of innuendo, as a matter of implication, grinds mai gears...

Dogs are colourblind. Certain crustacean's eyes are just hollow tubes, Platypus are just way the hell outta here, and we all belong to the same set of environmental influences.

Anyway, look, anyone's allowed to suppose things, i'll never say that's not true, but yeah, i just have a thing with armchair thinkers trying to tell me that there's a space USA out there and a space Soviet Union. Because that's basically what the motivation for evil space empires was when most of these theories were being propounded.

i'll rephrase my conversation here a bit to get my point across:

"If there is life out there, there are even odds that it might take the form of machiavellian, nationalistic, militaristic space roombas. It's equally likely that they have none of our social constructs or conventions and they do not perceive the universe in anything remotely like our way. If indeed they 'perceive' at all as we understand the bio-process."

One final attempt: I just want people to acknowlege that these things are unknowable, and trying to paint the stars with interstallar empires is like trying to bend spoons with your mind. You just can't see the unknowable, unmoving, unyeilding spoons floating around alpha centauri from here.

Started reading, saw the stupid font colour changes.

So stopped, screw that. Imagine submitting a paper like that.

 

[Woffls]

Youtuber Isaac Arthur has some great videos on this stuff.

Fermi Paradox playlist of like 40 videos.

 

[Tschumi]

Started reading, saw the stupid font colour changes.

So stopped, screw that. Imagine submitting a paper like that.

Did you seriously just quote me to reveal your inner fuckwit?

Edit: if i ever submit a paper on this stuff you can trust that i will cover it in potpourri in your honour

Anyway that text was edited in, i changed its colour to indicate that

I was walking to a restaurant just now and i saw some lady bend over to pick up her tired puppy. I care more about the next time that random puppy gets is asshole hair clipped than i do your font colour preferences.

 

[Morrie’s wig shop]

It’s always fun to let your imagination run wild about other intelligent life in the universe, considering the accepted age is 12+ billion years old.
I like to think just on this planet alone there was already an intelligent species at some point in time, this planet alone is already 4+ billion years old. The dinos went extinct 65 million years ago and modern human has been around what? Only 120,000+\- years. Even if this imaginary species thrived for 5million years, let’s say 35 million years ago there would be no evidence because the planet would’ve swallowed it up 10s of millions of years ago.
The most disappointing theory for me is that we are the first intelligent life in this entire universe and it takes 12+ billion years just hit the point we’re at right
now, how boring if that was the case.

 

[synchronicity]

We tend to see things through the lens of our limited understanding/capacity to understand. We make assumptions about things that may not apply at all to a greater intelligence.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

I don't buy this premise. This theory must have been made during the mid-century golden age for sci fi novels in which everyone thought that any civilization out there is bound to be futuristic hyperbeings.

There is absolutely no reasonable cause to expect that any other civilizations out there in space would be older than us, more advanced than us, or anything like that. Like, I mean to say there's just as much chance they're in the Stone Ages, or there in their equivalent of monkey-phase, as there is that they're superdeveloped civilizations.

There's also no reasonable cause to expect that these other life forms have evolved in naything like the same way we have, with anything like the same objectives. Maybe they don't have a concept of expansion and development? Maybe they live on a planet of pink crystals and their solar powered secretions are all they need, so they've been sucking on shiny pink rocks for the last 100,000 years?

we have no way of knowing, so it is entirely on the side of the supposer to suppose that they're somehow our superiors, or equally interseted in exploring the heavens, or using radio waves or the like...

If there's one thing that always makes me laugh, it's when people apply human characteristics to faraway, unknown beings, existing in one of an infinite spread of potential environmental conditions... I particularly love it when people say "what would you do if you saw an ant in your kitchen?" or whatever, at a stroke applying a dozen human characteristics to what is, for all we know, a pregnant cloud of static which seeks out metallic deposits in the asteroid belts surrounding its place of origination.

All the above is to say this: There is no doubt in my mind that other things exist in this universe, other things that are self powered and locomotive and produce amino acids or whatever it is that is required for have a designation of 'living', but any human who applies human philosophies to their social, developmentaly tragectories is, just, whack, to my mind.

For me, unless there's proof of other aliens out there I'm sticking to Earth as the only creatures.

I dont care how many millions of solar systems there are out there. Unless Star Trek and Star Wars is truthful and you can have living creatures on dead planets halfway zooming into a blackhole with Jabba the Hut and Q being possible intelligent life, the vast vast vast majority of planets are not livable to begin with. So unless there really are people like Q teleporting around the galaxy who can hop from one planet to the next, 99.999% of planets wont carry life on it already.

As to the small number of planets like Earth that have reasonable environments, maybe there's life. Maybe not. And if there is, I dont get why space lovers always assume it'll be technogeek brainers that are always stronger and smarter than humans. Complete with ray guns and space shields like War of the Worlds. And always creepy demon like creatures, but all have this thirst for domination while holding a laser pistol with human like hands.

Maybe there is life on Planet SniperDude999, but it's mold on a rock. That's all you get on that planet.

If anyone goes to a beach which has billions of sand particles, is there a guarantee there will be gold? Not necessarily. Just because there's half a trillion sand bits doesn't mean there's a guarantee there's lots of silver, gold and rubies buried in the sand. Maybe there is. Maybe not.

 

[Tschumi]

For me, unless there's proof of other aliens out there I'm sticking to Earth as the only creatures.

I dont care how many millions of solar systems there are out there. Unless Star Trek and Star Wars is truthful and you can have living creatures on dead planets halfway zooming into a blackhole with Jabba the Hut and Q being possible intelligent life, the vast vast vast majority of planets are not livable to begin with. So unless there really are people like Q teleporting around the galaxy who can hop from one planet to the next, 99.999% of planets wont carry life on it already.

As to the small number of planets like Earth that have reasonable environments, maybe there's life. Maybe not. And if there is, I dont get why space lovers always assume it'll be technogeek brainers that are always stronger and smarter than humans. Complete with ray guns and space shields like War of the Worlds. And always creepy demon like creatures, but all have this thirst for domination while holding a laser pistol with human like hands.

Maybe there is life on Planet SniperDude999, but it's mold on a rock. That's all you get on that planet.

If anyone goes to a beach which has billions of sand particles, is there a guarantee there will be gold? Not necessarily. Just because there's half a trillion sand bits doesn't mean there's a guarantee there's lots of silver, gold and rubies buried in the sand. Maybe there is. Maybe not.

I am 100% with you on the bold orange.

Actually, considering that you quoted my post i guess you realise that we're actually in agreement. There is life out there, but there's zero basis to these pipe dreams about advanced civilisations and stuff. It's all born from space race/cold war proxy political sci fi...

But just to the first paragraph or two...

I think the flaw in your logic is that you're underestimating the amount of liveable planets there are out there. You don't really have any basis to say the vast majority of planets are not liveable, for all we know that is exactly wrong - even if it is right, the fact is that even if .0001% of planets were habitable that would still equate to millions of planets.. and habitable would mean habitable, life supporting, not hurtling towards black holes etc.

This has been said by far smarter dudes than myself.

All we need to say there's life on other planets is some mold. A few flakes floating in an under ground ocean. That's all I myself would need, at least.

Have you ever heard of gold in a beach? If so, that's your answer. Somewhere on this planet there's gold in a beach, indeed there's probably gold in more than one beach.

I'm just going to go ahead and make some of this text colourful to taunt this thread's font colour Nazi.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

I am 100% with you on the bold orange.

Actually, considering that you quoted my post i guess you realise that we're actually in agreement. There is life out there, but there's zero basis to these pipe dreams about advanced civilisations and stuff. It's all born from space race/cold war proxy political sci fi...

But just to the first paragraph or two...

I think the flaw in your logic is that you're underestimating the amount of liveable planets there are out there. You don't really have any basis to say the vast majority of planets are not liveable, for all we know that is exactly wrong - even if it is right, the fact is that even if .0001% of planets were habitable that would still equate to millions of planets.. and habitable would mean habitable, life supporting, not hurtling towards black holes etc.

This has been said by far smarter dudes than myself.

All we need to say there's life on other planets is some mold. A few flakes floating in an under ground ocean. That's all I myself would need, at least.

Have you ever heard of gold in a beach? If so, that's your answer. Somewhere on this planet there's gold in a beach, indeed there's probably gold in more than one beach.

I'm just going to go ahead and make some of this text colourful to taunt this thread's font colour Nazi.

I think were in agreement as a whole.

Problem is people (understandable as humans like to dream) think that aliens out there are all super superior civilizations. Even if in our lives scientists find life on a distant planet or embedded within an asteroid flying through space, I'd bet any money what is found will be a lot closer to desert leaches like in Wrath of Khan than Krypton.

So for whomever is begging for alien life before they die, dont be surprised if what is revealed is alien bacteria or a moon grub than Klingons.

 

[Tschumi]

I think were in agreement as a whole.

Problem is people (understandable as humans like to dream) think that aliens out there are all super superior civilizations. Even if in our lives scientists find life on a distant planet or embedded within an asteroid flying through space, I'd bet any money what is found will be a lot closer to desert leaches like in Wrath of Khan than Krypton.

So for whomever is begging for alien life before they die, dont be surprised if what is revealed is alien bacteria or a moon grub than Klingons.

 

[darrylgorn]

Does it really matter to know the answer to any of this?

 

[Zippitydodaday]

It’s funny how intelligent we are to understand that we are also still primitive

 

[QuantumZebra]

Fermi paradox completely fails to appreciate just how mind bogglingly huge the universe is. You could cheerfully have an advanced civilisation of trillions across the other side of the known universe, who have faster than light travel, and we’d still never know about them.

This.

To me it’s mathematically improbable if not impossible that there is not other sentient life in the known universe.

Conversely, said universe is so big we will almost certainly not keet