Why havent aliens landed yet on earth?

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Maybe they see us as toys and like coming by our house to play with us for a minute and then leave. They know we are too young to play with the big boy toys so they keep those hidden.

Can't drive daddy's car until you are mature enough
 
Aliens 3 billion light years away would find an inhabitable Earth and therefore think that there is no life on it.
 
Otakumegane said:
Also I highly doubt that Earth would be "hospitable" for other life out there. I mean it took billions of years before life was able to adapt to earth, how long would it take for other life not from earth?
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it's a bit more complicated than that. it's not only that life adapted to Earth, but also that life transformed Earth over billions of years and life has evolved along with it. it's a very tightly bound feedback loop between life influencing the environment and the environment influencing life.

as to the suitability of earth for other aliens species, that would be purely coincidental based on the path their evolution has taken and how much further along that path they are i.e. they might be on exactly the same path as humans, but much further along, making Earth's current environment inhospitable to them.... perhaps they're lizard people that prefer a warmer climate.... ?!
[/conspiracy]
 
1. Space. It's reallllllllllllllllllllllllllly massive. Very difficult for another race to reach us if even they're just several galaxies away.

2. Time. Probably an even larger factor than distance. The likelihood that 2 comparable races could realize each other exists, is very very very tiny when we're talking about billions of years. There might have been a comparable race that spotted earth when it was just forming, but ended up dying off millions of years later, still billions of years before humans.....
 
We are the most intelligent creature in our part of the universe . It sucks but that's reality. We are the aliens. Enjoy.
 
Cudder said:
do you think that's a long time in the scope of the universe?
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That's actually a fairly long time.

Seth C said:
We are the most intelligent creature in our part of the universe . It sucks but that's reality. We are the aliens. Enjoy.
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I think this is it. There are what, 200 billion+ galaxies? I'm sure there's a lot of hyper-intelligent life out there, just not in our neighborhood.
 
One idea I like is that there is tons of life out there but intelligent life is very, very rare. It could be that on planets that have never experianced any major shifts in evolution they are filled with dumb creatures. We only came into existance as a species because the dinosaurs became extinct.
Also there's a good chance intelligent species destroy themselves one way or another. Add all the other hurdles to overcome and the chances of contact are immeasurably slim.
I do think intelligent life exists in our galaxy but finding evidence for it may be impossible.
 
I like to think we just live in the bad part of the Galaxy that no one likes to visit.

If Aliens ever visited us, they'd be so technologically advanced and ahead of us that the only reason they'd ever come here is to take over and make us slaves.
 
What if Aliens live deep in the water?

We have discovered less than 10% of the Oceans depths, what makes you think they're land creatures?
 
Unfortunately, probability is likely against us. Space is vast and may simply be uncrossable. Time is deep, and every advanced civilization other than us may already be extinct, and by the time new ones pop up, we'll be extinct. Also, while I believe life is common at the bacterial level, it becomes less common the more complex you go. Advanced civilizations could be rare. They might number in the hundreds, but hundreds spread out over a galaxy would be like a few grains of sand scattered about the ocean. There most likely are aliens, but it would be pure luck if they exist near enough, within the same time frame, and be advanced enough for us to ever meet them.
 
There are a lot of possible reasons:

1. There are no aliens. This is statistically unlikely given the size of our universe, but it is possible.

2. They exist, but do not know of our existence.
- This would likely be due to us being the most technologically advanced species, or close to it, resulting in a lack of contact even in deep space scans/exploration.

3. They exist, and know of us, but can't contact us.
- This would also be due to a technological limitation on their part, they could see us with powerful telescopes or other manners of examining space, but their communications are limited.

4. They exist, know of us, and refuse to contact us.
- This could be due to them seeing us as a threat, believing that we have a right to determine our own future without outside intervention, or there could be a whole galactic lawmaking body that has laws against contacting pre-spaceflight civilizations.

5. They exist, know of us, and are trying to contact us.
- This could be realized in many ways. For one, they could use a method of communication that we have no way of understanding, i.e. they exist in more/fewer dimensions than us and communication is incompatible due to as-of-yet unknown scientific reasons.
- They could use a method of communication that we just accept as part of the universe and don't analyze as possibly being communication, i.e. communicating via cosmic radiation.
- Then there's the possibility of limited communication speed, where they could be using radio/television frequencies we use, but they are so far away that their signals haven't reached us yet.

It's really an interesting thing to think about.
 
DragonGirl said:
Unfortunately, probability is likely against us. Space is vast and may simply be uncrossable. Time is deep, and every advanced civilization other than us may already be extinct, and by the time new ones pop up, we'll be extinct. Also, while I believe life is common at the bacterial level, it becomes less common the more complex you go. Advanced civilizations could be rare. They might number in the hundreds, but hundreds spread out over a galaxy would be like a few grains of sand scattered about the ocean. There most likely are aliens, but it would be pure luck if they exist near enough, within the same time frame, and be advanced enough for us to ever meet them.
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image.php

I'm sure that's what you want us to think.
 
DragonGirl said:
Unfortunately, probability is likely against us. Space is vast and may simply be uncrossable. Time is deep, and every advanced civilization other than us may already be extinct, and by the time new ones pop up, we'll be extinct. Also, while I believe life is common at the bacterial level, it becomes less common the more complex you go. Advanced civilizations could be rare. They might number in the hundreds, but hundreds spread out over a galaxy would be like a few grains of sand scattered about the ocean. There most likely are aliens, but it would be pure luck if they exist near enough, within the same time frame, and be advanced enough for us to ever meet them.
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I think human level intelligence merely capable of technology is far rarer than that, perhaps 1 per galaxy or less. Why? Because we are here due to pure fucking luck.
 
RustyNails said:
I am getting frustrated. The earth has been habitable for 250 million years now and provides all sorts of sustenance. Why haven't they landed on Earth yet? Does this mean that aliens are probably not as advanced as we thought, or does it mean that they are so far advanced that they don't want to "pollute" our ecosystem by entering it? Come on aliens, come visit us.
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But I read that the English queen was in fact a lizard, are you saying that this is not true? Man, the things you learn in the internet.
 
If an alien race is capable of visiting, and is benevolent and chooses not to, I wonder when it would decide to make its presence known. Certainly they would avoid doing so anytime too soon as we still have billions of superstitious people who may judge them harshly, perhaps considering them demons, or who's revelation would shock them on a fundamental level. There are what, a billion muslims, a billion catholics, hundreds of millions of other christians, hundreds of millions of hindu all deluding themselves about the universe around them.
 
Log4Girlz said:
If an alien race is capable of visiting, and is benevolent and chooses not to, I wonder when it would decide to make its presence known. Certainly they would avoid doing so anytime too soon as we still have billions of superstitious people who may judge them harshly, perhaps considering them demons, or who's revelation would shock them on a fundamental level. There are what, a billion muslims, a billion catholics, hundreds of millions of other christians, hundreds of millions of hindu all deluding themselves about the universe around them.
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The point at which we started actively searching for them and sending signals attempting to contact them would be a good point to appear.

The idea that there would be a global panic, that people would lose their minds as such is so ingrained in the fiction surrounding aliens at this point it's hard to have a conversation without someone repeating it, but making no real arguments for it being true. I don't believe there has ever been a case of a native population, previously uncontacted, losing their minds and panicking when faced with technologically sophisticated people who look very different from them physiological.

There is a really large percentage of the population that already believes that Aliens exist. There is a smaller, but still fairly sizable portion that believes they have already contacted us, and that it's being kept from us by the government. Many religious people have already come to terms with the possibility of their being extraterrestrial life, they're not all going to explode in a fit of theological confusion.
 
Once you are able to get some type of idea of just how big the universe is and just how slow the speed of light is then you'll realize we have a much, much, much higher chance of going extinct long before any ETs land on the White House's lawn.
 
ThoseDeafMutes said:
The point at which we started actively searching for them and sending signals attempting to contact them would be a good point to appear.

The idea that there would be a global panic, that people would lose their minds as such is so ingrained in the fiction surrounding aliens at this point it's hard to have a conversation without someone repeating it, but making no real arguments for it being true. I don't believe there has ever been a case of a native population, previously uncontacted, losing their minds and panicking when faced with technologically sophisticated people who look very different from them physiological.

There is a really large percentage of the population that already believes that Aliens exist. There is a smaller, but still fairly sizable portion that believes they have already contacted us, and that it's being kept from us by the government. Many religious people have already come to terms with the possibility of their being extraterrestrial life, they're not all going to explode in a fit of theological confusion.
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The degree of physical difference could be tremendous, far exceeding the differences between any given human races. Would we be accepting of a potentially monstrous looking race? What if it was a monstrous looking race who were atheist or had dramatically different religious beliefs? I can easily imagine a huge panic even if they came in peace. The magnitude of difference between us and them may dissuade contact. For now.
 
It's actually possible that we're the only intelligent life in the whole Universe. Complex life itself could be extremely rare.
 
Maybe they are at the same developmental state we are? We can't even put a human on Mars yet

Maybe they watched from the dark side of the moon and realised we aren't worth toying with right now

Maybe the aren't hungry

Maybe they died a billion years ago.

Maybe they've been an gone an nobody knows

Maybe they've been and gone/stayed and some people know

I cannot believe for a second that we are the only planet with life in the universe. It's just too vast to have accidentally formed all manner of life on this planet and none whatsoever on others. There are jungles out there, seas, wastelands, deserts, cities, civilisations. Somewhere. And we'll maybe never see them or even know for sure they existed.

I can believe that the distances are so vast to make it difficult if not impossible to communicate let alone meet. Or that maybe we are ahead or not far behind other "advanced" races so they are asking the same questions we are.

With the time scales involved and the relative advances we have made in just 100 years I feel it unlikely that we are the most advanced species in the universe. Any that started development just a few hundred years before humans did could appear and do magic for us. Any that didn't go through a dark ages for example might also be more advanced.

Human life has existed for a phenomenally short period of time relative to the planet, let alone the universe. Others could have come, built dynasties and space colonies long before we ever were, and died in any manner of ways.

I genuinely don't know how the world as a whole would react if we met an alien. Film history says Americans will shoot them and save the world after they try to kill us all. Or they'll settle in South African slums.

Realistically every major power will want face time, they wouldn't want America or Russia or China having the only contact, for fear of them getting technology that they can't hope to replicate or influence over the future of the entire planet.
 
"Sir, we found a planet that is in a decent distance to its star and the spectrum shows there is water, can we go check and see if there's intelligent life?"

- "Yeah, sure, just use that super expensive spaceship of ours with near light speed capabilities using the energy of a dozen suns to travel for a few hundreds of years so that your ancestor can check if there's someone to talk to."

*smacks alien's head*

- "Also, that must be the 10,000th of these planets your telescope discovered. From the 50 that were "close" enough to check only one had some microorganism slime that MAY evolve into something in a few billion years. Concentrate on building our fucking Dyson sphere instead."

"But siiiiir, then where are these rumors of naked fleshy Ape-like creatures come from who are sneaking onto our ships in hopes to get their anal orifice probed."

- "..."
 
We've only started giving of obvious signs of advanced life in the last century. If a race even had the ability to make the trip, it's unlikely that they'd have even noticed yet, let alone travelled all the way here.
 
Let's be honest here, why would any aliens visit our planet? We're the dominant species and we're scum, literal scum. We're destroying ourselves, the other species on our planet and our planet itself and we don't seem to give a damn. Our species is awful, it really is.

We'd rather spend more money killing each other than we would learning more about and exploring the universe. It makes no sense. I know if I was an other worldly being and I saw what humans were doing I'd ayyy lmao and leave instantly. I mean we could've explored much more of the universe by this point, we could've even had a human step foot on mars (which imo is pointless until we learn how to start building colonies on other worlds which have different environments to our own) but no, let's just kill some more humans who have a different skin colour to us or a different religion.
 
Log4Girlz said:
Its about as possible as you being an AI construct.
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No, you're wrong. It doesn't necessarily mean it is right, but it is very possible we are the only intelligent life in the Universe.

First of all, we don't know for sure how complex life was originally formed, but there are theories. All complex life is basically made up of the same building blocks: Eukaryotic cells. As all complex life is basically the same in this sense, scientists are fairly certain it only happened once.

There is a theory of how that original Eukaryotic cell was formed known as the 'fateful encounter hypothesis'. Basically the theory is that two different simple-celled organisms somehow merged with each other, and in a way that allowed both to exist together with one cell giving its energy to the other and multiplying. The possibility of that happening could be extremely rare.
 
leadbelly said:
No, you're wrong. It doesn't necessarily mean it is right, but it is very possible we are the only intelligent life in the Universe.

First of all, we don't know for sure how complex life was originally formed, but there are theories. All complex life is basically made up of the same building blocks: Eukaryotic cells. As all complex life is basically the same in this sense, scientists are fairly certain it only happened once.

There is a theory of how that original Eukaryotic cell was formed known as the 'fateful encounter hypothesis'. Basically the theory is that two different single-celled organisms somehow merged with each other, and in a way that allowed both to exist together with one cell giving its energy to the other and multiplying. The possibility of that happening could be extremely rare.
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No you're wrong. There is nothing special about earth or its chemistry. There are 100 billion galaxies at least each with at least 100 billion stars. Stars outnumber all the sand in all the beaches of the world. There is practically no chance that there is not any other intelligent, technologically advanced life, let alone multicellular life in the Universe. I would sooner believe you were a muffin.
 
Chris Murphy said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama)

People freaked the fuck out. It was a long time ago though. I think we would be ok now.
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People freaked out because they thought they were experiencing an imminent extraterrestrial invasion. I imagine that if you broadcast a series of realistic looking news stories today about mass scale terrorist attacks on the United States, you might similarly create a lot of panic if people didn't realize it was a fake.

Log4Girlz said:
The degree of physical difference could be tremendous, far exceeding the differences between any given human races. Would we be accepting of a potentially monstrous looking race? What if it was a monstrous looking race who were atheist or had dramatically different religious beliefs? I can easily imagine a huge panic even if they came in peace. The magnitude of difference between us and them may dissuade contact. For now.
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Highly alien physiologies would be less likely to be terrifying than something resembling specific terrestrial organisms that we have evolved to be scared of - for example, a race of spider aliens would be scarier than a strange geometry alien, or the Asgard from Stargate SG1.

But regardless, it's alien capabilities and intent that are more significant than what they physically appear to be like. Teddy bear aliens that were blowing cities up would be far scarier than Ogre-like aliens that were coming in peace. We don't have to let them walk freely among us just to "make contact".

Why would people be panicking, exactly? You say you can imagine people panicking, but what would they be panicking about? Something disagreeing with a lot of peolple's philosophical or religious preconceptions isn't going to cause rioting in the streets. An actual alien invasion would cause a lot of people to shit their pants, but then again, actual historical invasions where people in flying death machines were raining bombs on cities proved that people are quite psychologically resilisent.

I think the whole trope is primarily extant because it's fictionally convenient, providing a ready made excuse for why gov organization X would need to act in secret to fit in with alien conspiarcy archetypes. Not because it's certain, or even very likely.
 
Log4Girlz said:
No you're wrong. There is nothing special about earth or its chemistry. There are 100 billion galaxies at least each with at least 100 billion stars. Stars outnumber all the sand in all the beaches of the world. There is practically no chance that there is not any other intelligent, technologically advanced life, let alone multicellular life.
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But there could be something unique about 'complex' lifeforms. Simple lifeforms on the other hand could very well be extremely common. However, it seems there could be an evolutionary bottleneck that needs to be overcome for 'complex' life to form. It is simply the mathematical probability of it.
 
ThoseDeafMutes said:
People freaked out because they thought they were experiencing an imminent extraterrestrial invasion. I imagine that if you broadcast a series of realistic looking news stories today about mass scale terrorist attacks on the United States, you might similarly create a lot of panic if people didn't realize it was a fake.



Highly alien physiologies would be less likely to be terrifying than something resembling specific terrestrial organisms that we have evolved to be scared of - for example, a race of spider aliens would be scarier than a strange geometry alien, or the Asgard from Stargate SG1.

But regardless, it's alien capabilities and intent that are more significant than what they physically appear to be like. Teddy bear aliens that were blowing cities up would be far scarier than Ogre-like aliens that were coming in peace. We don't have to let them walk freely among us just to "make contact".

Why would people be panicking, exactly? You say you can imagine people panicking, but what would they be panicking about? Something disagreeing with a lot of peolple's philosophical or religious preconceptions isn't going to cause rioting in the streets. An actual alien invasion would cause a lot of people to shit their pants, but then again, actual historical invasions where people in flying death machines were raining bombs on cities proved that people are quite psychologically resilisent.

I think the whole trope is primarily extant because it's fictionally convenient, providing a ready made excuse for why gov organization X would need to act in secret to fit in with alien conspiarcy archetypes. Not because it's certain, or even very likely.
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I think our fear and superstitions would at this point make it pointless to visit. Aid workers are being killed in certain areas of Africa because they are believed to be spreading ebola. Some crazy people already believe the government is infiltrated by shape shifting aliens. Those are crazy people clearly. But how many will become suspicious once aliens actually make themselves known? Lives absolutely will be lost, but how many? Would it be worth it to appear if the race is truly benevolent?
 
Space is big. So big, it surpases all your notions of the word "big". Interstelar flight is really hard if not practically impossible... assuming your species can develop long enough to even consider it.
 
Log4Girlz said:
I think our fear and superstitions would at this point make it pointless to visit. Aid workers are being killed in certain areas of Africa because they are believed to be spreading ebola. Some crazy people already believe the government is infiltrated by shape shifting aliens. Those are crazy people clearly. But how many will become suspicious once aliens actually make themselves known? Lives absolutely will be lost, but how many? Would it be worth it to appear if the race is truly benevolent?
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If anything we'd meet "first contact" with guns and kill whatever comes here anyway. :/

Space is big. So big, it surpases all your notions of the word "big". Interstelar flight is really hard if not practically impossible...
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Or so human science dictates currently. We don't know every little thing about the universe with absolute certainty. It's possible that everything we've believed up to now and all our mathematics is wrong. It's unlikely but it's entirely possible and we won't know until it happens.

For example we believe that all life needs to have evolved like us and be carbon based, but there's no rule written anywhere in the universe that this has to be true, it's just all we know about currently.
 
The Real Abed said:
If there are "aliens" they are probably exactly the same as us and in the same boat. Whereas their space program is so far behind and they haven't invented super fast space travel yet. (Maybe it's literally not possible, in which case it means we'll never meet them unless a group of us or them decides to build a fast moving self sustaining "cruise ship" in space like in Wall-E where they live on it for generations upon generations looking for inhabitable or inhabited planets.)

I never understood why we assume aliens would be drastically different. If we all were created when the universe was created then we probably all evolved the same speed and developed similar religions and technology.

Basically when we do meet other lifeforms, it won't be until technology has evolved enough, and even then only the people on the mission will ever know.
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False line of thinking. We weren't all created at the same time. Earth isn't as old as the galaxy is and the galaxy isn't quite as old as the universe is.
A planet in another solar system can be older or younger than Earth. A planet could have become habitable or inhabitable at some point of its life. A planet could have had less mass extinctions or at different intervals allowing life to develop further at a lower age of the planet (theoretically it's possible that a planet had no mass extinctions at all too, though quite unlikely). Another race somewhere in the galaxy could have become capable of basic space travelling already hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago.

There is also a countless amount of things that made us end up like we did. Even the planet itself has been shaped by life within the time that life has been here (and likewise the planet and those changes have shaped life).

The Dennis System said:
Colonizing other planets wouldn't solve the problem of overpopulation on Earth. If the Earth had a limited number of people it could sustain, say 50 billion, then once we hit that limit we'd have to ship out to another planet the same number of people who are born every day on Earth beyond that 50 billion limit. Presumably, millions of people would be born every day, and so we'd have to ship out millions of people to a distant planet every day, which would be financially and technologically impossible.
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Theoretically speaking, we wouldn't necessarily have to throw the people out of this planet to another planet in such a case, but to get resources from that new planet to our planet to keep sustaining life in here.

PlayALLtheGames said:
If a species is "much more intelligent" I don't see why we couldn't assume they'd actually be far more peaceful than us. A species that has developed enough to travel through space presumes cooperation in various ways. I don't know. I certainly hope that an advanced species would be like that. If they're really violent and happen to be super intelligent...that would be a fucking nightmare.
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There's no reason to assume something like that. You can see how a lot of encounters between different cultures have gone in the history, when one of the cultures has been more developed. Generally it hasn't ended up well for the culture that is less developed.

Just because a species would've got into space doesn't necessarily mean they'd be that peaceful either. It's possible they would still have wars in their own planet too, and it could be different nations of that planet who would be capable of space travelling.

Even if that other species would have become enough peaceful to be able to have no wars of their own anymore, it wouldn't necessarily mean they'd be super peaceful towards another race. As ThoseDeafMutes's link points out, humans have a lot of mental barries keeping us from killing another person, but majority of those barries aren't there when we think of animals. Sure a lot of people condemn killing things like whales, but still they are killed despite them being quite intelligent even.
 
RustyNails said:
I am getting frustrated. The earth has been habitable for 250 million years now and provides all sorts of sustenance. Why haven't they landed on Earth yet? Does this mean that aliens are probably not as advanced as we thought, or does it mean that they are so far advanced that they don't want to "pollute" our ecosystem by entering it? Come on aliens, come visit us.
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I bet they think the same about us.
 
Some possibilities:

1. We're the most advanced civilization in the universe. Small chance, but there has to be a "first" civilization to do space travel, and it could be us.

2. Every civilization goes extinct before they're able to travel far enough in space to find anyone else.

Hopefully we last long enough to at least find planets with traces of extinct civilizations on them.
 
Why the frustration? The desire to see aliens land is the modern version of the Second Coming of Jesus. We want some transcendental "other" to come and judge/save/destroy humanity from the skies. It's very Christian.
 
I just think that as sad as it sounds, the vast distances and the absolutely mind melting numbers involved finding even a single habitable planet would just mean the odds of two intelligent civilizations finding each other are quite low :(
 
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