Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Yes, the sophon is causing all the shenanigans happening on earth rn but it decided to ramp up its game.
The chances of extra terrestrial life to have visited earth is very, very small.
The chances of life to occur are small enough,
The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,
The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,
The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.
The universe is huge, there’s almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.
Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.
Wouldnt have to do it faster, just first
Wait, what?
That’s like saying you don’t have to drive faster to win the race, you just have to cross the line first.
Maybe more like saying “you don’t have to be fastest to finish first if you get enough of a head start”?
This is a valid reading of the Fermi paradox. But just for balance I’m going to devil’s advocate all over it.
The chances of life to occur are small enough,
Not known. At the moment the data set is one habitable planet = one occurrence of life, so the odds might be very high indeed, even approaching 1:1
The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,
They are smaller, but how much smaller is impossible to tell. What if extinction events are less frequent than they are here? What if 100% extinction events are as rare as they are here? What if intelligence is a natural point of evolution everywhere?
The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,
This one’s not true. The earth is relatively young at 4 billion years compared to 15 billion for the universe. A billion year headstart is completely plausible
The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.
Agreed that the earth’s position in the milky way is a bit of a galactic backwater. At 25000 light years from the centre, stars are more sparse here than they are at the centre. But our nearest star is 4ly away. We could have a probe there within half a century with our current technology if we wanted to. So I disagree on the “near impossible” part.
The universe is huge, there’s almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.
Can’t really argue with that. Until we see some evidence, ghosts and galactic visitors are in the ‘conspiracy nut’ bin. But it doesn’t mean life on other planets doesn’t exist. There are many theories why we wouldn’t have seen or met alien life if it does exist. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.
Hubble expansion isn’t a big factor at the galactic level. Galaxies are traveling away from other galaxies at relative speeds faster than light, but for stars within the galaxy, the scale is infinitely smaller and the expansion is so small it’s difficult to even measure.
I have coined a theory I call “Galactic spring.” It’s that the emergence of intelligent life is a manifestation of and synchronized by some underlying phenomena - perhaps just the natural growth in informational complexity in a galaxy-wide entanglement network. Perhaps just a matter of sufficient amounts of the needed elements being available. The specific underlying mechanism isn’t that important, unless we have an understanding about the initial emergence of life to compare it to. But the theory is that there is a larger synchronizing factor.
Like spring, there are some species that may emerge early. But also like spring, the emergence of one heralds the emergence of others. Every other “the earth is the unique snowflake of the universe” theory has failed. We are simply emerging. The conditions are occurring that generate intelligent life, and there’s no strong reason to believe that our circumstance in that regard is unique.
Jeremy England proposed a while back that life is just an expression of entropy increase. Interestingly, if this could be verified (I don’t think it can) it would point to life being universally abundant.
That we’re not special is one of the founding principles of astrophysics, the Copernican Principle. It goes that we aren’t special, we don’t have a privileged viewpoint, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It does get applied in other fields of science in one form or another, since it’s more a way of thinking than a theory as such. Again, it’s not falsifiable but it does seem reasonable.
Interesting, but i have to disagree with “and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction.”
Everywhere we look, we see asymmetry and variegation, along with instances of homogeneity and monoculture, as one thing wins out in a small domain.
So, yes, in some sense, same in all directions, but that “sameness” sure has a heck of a lot of play. And not being special, per se, doesn’t mean lack of uniqueness. Even cloned plants on the same shelf have differing viewpoints, though perhaps not “privileged”, unless one happens to be closer to a sunny window. But that happens.
I’ve also thought about life being an expression of entropy increase, but I can’t say I fully agree. There are aspects of that at play - somewhat more noticeable in thought and consciousness, and the efficiency of organizing thought - but I think that an assumption of universal entropy is just another local-phenomena-first issue. Although it applies in systems we isolate from the universe as a whole, the broad tendency for substance clumps (i.e., organization) and variegation is also universal.
I suppose that’s fair, since “looks the same in every direction” is a bit of an oversimplification. The principle is an assumption, rather, that we are not privileged observers, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It then follows that we should be very interested to understand why when it doesn’t.
I can’t agree with you that the assumption of universal entropy increase is at all unreasonable. The laws of thermodynamics appear to hold everywhere, therefore entropy must be increasing everywhere. England’s extrapolation to presume that life is an expression of this law might be tenuous, but the law is pretty much ironclad. That’s not to say that structure can’t arise; it clearly can because: hello. But the tendency of the universe as a closed system with a one directional arrow of time is heat death. That’s just a result of thermodynamics. Eventually.
What caused the initial imbalance, and what prevents it from happening again?
Nothing. It’s happening, and has always been. Anything that claims the universe as a whole is deteriorating is absolute bollocks, as it requires a creation myth, just as it postulates destruction.
If the universe is anything that we currently have theories for, the universe is a strange loop.
What caused the initial imbalance, and what prevents it from happening again?
Now you’re talking about some of the biggest unsolved problems in physics :)
I don’t know if it necessitates a creation myth, though. The big bang theory doesn’t imply a creator, but also doesn’t require a steady state.
What’s this about a strange loop? I don’t know if I’ve heard of this before.
I’m pretty much on board, though how much anyone can agree is a matter of relativity.
We know about the closest stars and the planets within them, and based off spectrometry, we’re confident the planets “close” to us haven’t had life, though they might be capable.
The chances of there being no mass extinction events in the millions of years following abiogenesis is arguably smaller than surviving the five or so we’ve had. Given everything we know about astrophysics, we owe the asteroids a few clean hits, we have been astronomically lucky, and that’s not even taking into consideration every other cause of mass extinction.
15 billion years is still considered early in the grand scheme of things, it’s likely that we are the early ones. A billion years head start is plausible, sure, but it’s certainly less plausible than our existence.
All of this is to say that life is rare enough without them being a stones throw away.
And this is all disregarding any possible intent behind a visit. Any being capable of space travel does not need our resources.
Unless they’re sex tourists, which would explain all the anal probing.
On second thought, I choose to believe.
I’m incredibly fascinated by the ghost comparison. Is the probability that ghosts are a real physical phenomenon higher or lower than the probability that aliens exist or have visited us? That’s an extremely interesting question, and I’m sure someone could do a statistical meta-analysis comparing the incidence of, say, UFO sightings with the incidence of paranormal experiences (if such an analysis doesn’t already exist). Both questions seem like the things that should be generally empirically falsifiable (and indeed, specific instances certainly are), but humanity’s curiosity about both has proven remarkably durable despite centuries of curiosity and myriad efforts to settle (negatively) both questions once and for all.
They’re both so near zero as to be hardly worth considering.
The thing to think about is the fact that, in either case, ghost or alien are in any way especially indicated by the evidence. People don’t see something strange and conclude aliens because they have good reason to believe from the evidence that something traveled vast distances across space, but rather they simply don’t have anything good to believe right now.
Having unusual evidence that doesn’t seem to point at the simple, mundane explanation isn’t the same as having evidence that does point at a supernatural or extraterrestrial explanation
There’s actually a fairly decent argument that life may have developed literally everywhere in space in the first few hundred million years of the universe, since yes it started insanely hot and compressed, but as it expanded there had to be a time period of up to a hundred million years or so, that everything outside of stars was at the proper temperature for water to be liquid. The end result being that you’ll find single cellular life existing literally anywhere it possibly can.
Depending on your interpretation of the Drake equation, they are either impossible or inevitable.
Ah, the ol’ Drake Equation, providing useful input since 1961
I propose a more elegant equation called the Fifty Cent Equation:
p(A) = x
If x equals 0, then there’s no aliens. If x equals 1, there are definitely aliens. If x is between 0 and 1, non-inclusive, then maybe there’s aliens.
It’s math yo. I’m helping with math.
Nope.
deleted by creator
I lean towards no, which is a minority scientific position. The Fermi paradox is strong evidence against technological aliens, and of all the evolutionary history we have immediate abiogenesis is the most weakly supported. It happened early, but there’s still a 10% chance of a thing randomly happening in the first 10% of geological history (to oversimplify the math).
If it’s not that, it’s eukariogenesis, but that seems a bit more inevitable given how cooperative bacteria can already be. The development of technology seems inevitable once a thing by chance becomes smart and dexterous enough, and every other step along the way has happened more than once. Earth-like planets are still thought to be abundant.
Edit: Oh, and no to any conspiracy. It would be really hard to hide obvious alien life, and there’s no real motive for all world governments to unanimously do so. And conspiracies don’t exist, because we’re too disorganised to keep a huge secret for long.
I have something new to say about this. Hold on.
I refuse to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, even though for most humans that bar is pretty low.
When I finally “die” I’ll no doubt get kicked back out into the real world and have to plug in another quarter.
You will never die. You will watch everyone else die out over the next million or so years, and then you will be alone until you figure out how to create new people.
…story of my life.
Story of all our lives, unfortunately
I assume other life exists somewhere, because the universe is practically infinite in size, but I also assume that we will not meet them, because the universe is practically infinite in size.
Basically my thoughts. The speed of light, while the fastest thing we know, is as slow as smell on the scale of the universe. Any race of beings able to get here, check us out, and leave, would need technology that would break physics as we understand it. Not to say it’s impossible, but we’ve now firmly stepped into beliefs, rather than anything based on observable data. Also, the notion of a race being so advanced they can travel faster than light accidentally crashing on our planet is pretty silly to me.
GET THIS MAN HIS VOTES
I mean, we could potentially see them if they’re in any of the neighboring galaxies, and if they’re in ours they should have arrived and turned Earth into a colony long ago. Space is big, but time is long. Loud aliens would have to be truly rare indeed for this.
I don’t know, if this is worth arguing over. Depending on how far advanced you expect such a life form to be, obviously they might be capable of things that we currently consider impossible. But well, to illustrate what I mean:
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The next galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy. It is 2.5 million light years away. There could be life over there right now, but we wouldn’t know, until about 2.5 million years from now.
Compare that to the emergence of modern humans, which was 300,000 years ago. We didn’t start sending out radio waves until some generations ago.
None of this means that it’s not possible for life to have existed on some planet 2.5 million years ago, so we’d be seeing their radio waves right now, but even then, we might interpret them as background noise. -
The next star is Proxima Centauri. It is 4.24 light years away. So, we could see things from there in 4.24 years, which is pretty good, although still absolute hell of a delay for exchanging messages.
But for them to actually visit us, even if they go at 1% the speed of light, that would mean they’d need 424 years of travel time. With little sunlight or other energy sources on the way.
And 1% of the speed of light is an insane 10,800,000 km/h. Compare that to the fastest man-made object, the Parker Solar Probe, which is expected to go 720,000 km/h, when it closely passes by the Sun.
Basically, we can be extremely generous with these examples and still see practically insurmountable time frames.
Worm holes could theoretically exist. Maybe a sufficiently advanced race could defy physics as we know it. But if they can’t, that’s a pretty good explanation why they’re hiding.
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The potential existence of sentient life out there? Sure. Space is big.
Anything that’s ever interacted with us or is likely in a position to ever be able to do so? No. Space is big.
The universe has so many planets that it is unlikely that life only started on earth. However, the universe is simply too big. We are alone in the universe. And the aliens, they are alone too.
I like those last three sentences. You managed to capture the infinite size of the universe and what it means. Bravo.
Yes, though I doubt any have come to visit. For one thing, although we have seen UFO’s on Earth, it’s awfully strange nobody has seen them through their telescopes. It’s almost as if they’re not a space thing after all.
Hollow Earth theory intensifies
I do I just wish they believed in me.
sigh
Can imagine the disillusionment aliens would feel having seen us from 10 light years away and constantly watching us as they approach until they get close enough for the data to be virtually current. I wouldnt wanna visit either. Probably be attacked on sight.
At this point, I’m beginning to think the gulf of space is too much to bridge, and if it were possible, they wouldn’t bother hiding / being sneaky / probing whatever.
Is there other intelligent alien life in our Galaxy? Probably. Given how fast life formed on Earth, there must be millions of other life-bearing planets, and intelligence can’t be that rare, but it might be short-lived.
Are there UFO sightings? Yes, people do see unidentified flying objects. Some of them can be explained, some cannot.
Are the UFOs aliens? I don’t know, I’m a “curious agnostic” on the subject.
There’s a LOT of UFO sightings, and evidence from good observers, including US Navy aviators. The US Air Force continues not to cooperate, and officially denies any sightings exist. The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence, aside from Project Blue Book, is suspicious.
It’s technically plausible that someone within 50-ish light years of Earth could have heard our radio, sent a ship here, and use drones or manned ships to observe us without interacting. There could also be many other explanations.
We don’t know, and until the last couple years there was no effort to investigate.
The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence
That just makes me think the air force knows exactly what the UFO was because they were flying it.
With your last statemate that is not true there are records of the american government looking into this back into the sixties. Also researchers like Jacques Vallee have spent decades doing real investigation into the subject.
Governmental research. There was Project Blue Book, as I mentioned, which was inconclusive and then ended.
