Poll: Fermi Paradox: Where are they? (About Aliens)

[Mr.Mattress]

The Fermi Paradox asks the simple question: "Where Are They?" Named after Physicist Enrico Fermi, the Paradox states that, given the size of the known Universe, and the probability of Planets within Habitable Zones around their stars orbit, that Intelligent Life akin to our own should be visible, known and contactable, but we have found 0 proof of any other's existence. Yes, Scientists have theorized there might be life on other planets, but we have not found concrete proof of any aliens existence.

As some smarter people may point out, the Fermi Paradox is (apparently) built on faulty math, but this isn't a scientific question. This is me, curiously asking the forum goers, what they think about Alien life, and how come we haven't met any yet. Do they think that we are the only Intelligent life in the Universe, either due to pure random luck, or because the other life forms have all killed themselves? Do you think the Universe is an illusion created by Aliens to observe us? Do you think the Aliens are avoiding us entirely, or are so completely different from our ideas of intelligence that even if we did find them, we wouldn't understand them and they wouldn't understand us?

Personally, I think either Alien Life is so alien we wouldn't comprehend them, and they wouldn't comprehend us, or there is no Alien Life at all. So what do you guys think?

 

[Hawki]

My guess is that alien life exists in some form, somewhere. But compounded by distance (size of the universe) with the chance of that life being developed enough to make contact (even something beyond prokaryotic life seems unlikely), I doubt we'll ever make contact with them.

 

[Saelune]

I have no doubt sentient civilizations of aliens exist out there, but due to random chance, things havent lined up yet to meet them.

...Or they are watching us waiting for us to reach a point before inviting us into their own galactic civilization.

For all we know, Alien Picard is up there questioning if he should break their Prime Directive and save us from ourselves, or let us "go our course".

Please pick A Alien Picard

 

[davidmc1158_v1legacy]

Or (the possibility no one seems to want to bring up) alien life may or may not exist in our region of the galaxy at this general point in time, but our understanding of physics is fairly solid and it turns out that faster-than-light travel is impossible and there is no reasonable way for alien civilizations to ever actually make contact.

Hell, for all the work SETI has put in listening for radio signals, it turns out that our own human-produced radio waves break down and haven't even reached Alpha Centauri in anything that would be recognizable as an artificial signal.

I kind of like the idea tossed out years ago that posits the reason why humans have never had obvious contact with any alien civilization is that humans are not actually native to Earth. We're actually the galaxy's sanitarium for the incurably insane.

 

[Silent Protagonist]

The Fermi Paradox is always fun to think about. I always found the alien life is so alien we can't comprehend or recognize that it is alien life solution to be a massive cop out. Maybe the bits of gravel on the side of the road are really members of a highly advanced civilization but they are so alien we can't in perceive how they interact intelligently with reality and maybe even vice versa. Who are we to say rocks don't think and act on a plane we can't perceive. I don't even think it even really answers the question, as there is still the unexplained absence of "conventional" life, or at least something close enough to it to be easily recognizable.

My guess/opinion is that life is probably so insanely rare that even given the size and age of our universe it is nothing sort of miraculous that we've even had one planet with life, much more so one that sustained life long enough for a tiny fraction of it to become self aware, and even more so for an even tinier fraction of that to become intelligent enough to use tools and wonder why the universe is so damn empty.

My silly guess is that the only thing the aliens' super advanced cloaking tech can't hide is their gravitational effect, and there seems to be a suspiciously large amount of stuff in our universe that only affects gravity.

 

[FalloutJack]

I never liked Fermi's line of reasoning. It basically assumes that we know enough about the universe, and we don't. He assumes they would've found us or we them by now. Really? Have you SEEN the universe? It's big. It's so big that Douglas Adams became famous for lampshading it. The only proper answer to 'Where are they?' is 'Not here yet'.

The universe is vast, and we dunno how far it goes yet. We also don't see everything that happens in the areas that we CAN see, AND there's a time differential to deal with whenever we see something that's really far away. So, that one controversal topic where scientists were trying to figure out what was going on with a distant star where one of the possibilities was that an artificial structure was blocking it? Well, regardless of whether someone built something there or not, that was a fair few light-years away. It already happened years ago, and the cause of it has already moved on, probably.

So, what do I think? Like I said, it's a big universe. I don't think we're even a blip on the radar yet. See, as much as people think they'd be hiding or experimenting or screwing around with us, I think that that kind of behavior's a bit pointless. Let's reverse the roles a little. You've watched Star Trek, probably. Do you think we're going to take aliens out of their homes and probe them when we get interstellar travel? The only reason Star Trek has a Prime Directive is because of guilt regarding the treatment of ethnicities on Earth, to prevent history from repeating itself.

 

[skywolfblue]

Even assuming FTL travel is impossible, and only a tiny fraction of the population is actually interested in space colonization, as long as they can reproduce along a exponential curve, they can still colonize the whole galaxy on the order of tens of millions of years.

I'll go with Rare Earth. Microbial life may be common in the universe (I don't think it is). But the path from Microbial to Intelligent was highly unique here on Earth. So far, only Humans made the jump, out of millions of species.

...but our understanding of physics is fairly solid...

We know a lot more about physics then we used to. But at the moment 95% of all matter is made up of this "mystery" stuff we don't quite understand very well (Dark Energy/Dark Matter), so our understanding is far from complete.

 

[davidmc1158_v1legacy]

Even assuming FTL travel is impossible, and only a tiny fraction of the population is actually interested in space colonization, as long as they can reproduce along a exponential curve, they can still colonize the whole galaxy on the order of tens of millions of years.

I'll go with Rare Earth. Microbial life may be common in the universe (I don't think it is). But the path from Microbial to Intelligent was highly unique here on Earth. So far, only Humans made the jump, out of millions of species.

...but our understanding of physics is fairly solid...

We know a lot more about physics then we used to. But at the moment 95% of all matter is made up of this "mystery" stuff we don't quite understand very well (Dark Energy/Dark Matter), so our understanding is far from complete.

I only toss it out as a possibility that never seems to make its way into any discussions of the Fermi Paradox (at least that I've ever seen).

Besides, if I was to give a super cereal answer, it would simply be a matter of timing. Humans have only been thinking about interstellar travel and potential alien civilizations in that context for a couple of hundred years. The universe is how many billions of years old? (seriously, I'm not certain because they keep updating the estimated time span) Intelligent life that technologically has developed in a fashion to try and build an interstellar transportation system, however limited or grandiose) may have already developed in some remote region of the galaxy, only 1 or 2 billion years ago and thanks to the time scales involved, the odds are that meeting said civilizations is just that unlikely.

 

[Queen Michael]

There are no aliens, and certainly not of the invading variety (just in case you have been told differently). Please go about your activity as usual, my fellow earthlings.

 

[Marik2]

 

[Asita]

I never liked Fermi's line of reasoning. It basically assumes that we know enough about the universe, and we don't. He assumes they would've found us or we them by now. Really? Have you SEEN the universe? It's big. It's so big that Douglas Adams became famous for lampshading it. The only proper answer to 'Where are they?' is 'Not here yet'.

The universe is vast, and we dunno how far it goes yet. We also don't see everything that happens in the areas that we CAN see, AND there's a time differential to deal with whenever we see something that's really far away. So, that one controversal topic where scientists were trying to figure out what was going on with a distant star where one of the possibilities was that an artificial structure was blocking it? Well, regardless of whether someone built something there or not, that was a fair few light-years away. It already happened years ago, and the cause of it has already moved on, probably.

So, what do I think? Like I said, it's a big universe. I don't think we're even a blip on the radar yet. See, as much as people think they'd be hiding or experimenting or screwing around with us, I think that that kind of behavior's a bit pointless. Let's reverse the roles a little. You've watched Star Trek, probably. Do you think we're going to take aliens out of their homes and probe them when we get interstellar travel? The only reason Star Trek has a Prime Directive is because of guilt regarding the treatment of ethnicities on Earth, to prevent history from repeating itself.

Just to expand upon this, the reasoning itself strikes me as a bit...disingenuous. It assumes that the sheer immensity of the universe to make the presence of life inevitable, but it also assumes such a density that we've have either found or been found by other life by now. The guy's logic arguably assumed a large size to guess at a "number of times occurred" figure and then assumed a small size to guess at a "likelihood of contact" figure. Space is huge. Bigger than any of us are probably capable of grasping. Aside from our sun - which is just over 8 light minutes away - the closest star is Alpha Centauri, which is just over 4 light years away. On scale, if you made a mural where Earth was represented by a point the size of a grain of sand, Alpha Centauri would be six miles down the street.

In terms of travel time, let's look at the New Horizon probe. It was launched in 2006, reached Jupiter in 2007, and reached Pluto in 2015. Pluto is 327 light minutes (0.000624 light years) from Earth. Based on space shuttles as of 2016, it would take 165,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor. For comparison, known Homo Sapien fossils date back 160,000 years. Known recorded history only dates back 3800 years.

This in turn ties to Fermi's actual argument, which wasn't that extraterrestrial life didn't exist (that idea can be credited to Michael Hart on the galactic scale, and Frank Tipler on the universal scale), but that Interstellar travel might either be impossible in a reasonable time frame or otherwise not worth the effort.

Additional possibilities include "there's no reason for extraterrestrials to be interested enough in our solar system to make the journey", "human technology is actually comparatively advanced", and the simple fact that anything else might simply be too remote for us to either send or receive signals we'd recognize as signs of life, or we could be looking for the wrong thing entirely. There are a lot of possibilities, and boiling it down to "we haven't seen them, therefore they don't exist" seems ridiculously closed minded.

 

[lacktheknack]

Everything I read about habitable planets keeps making Earth look more and more amazing for life in ways that are nearly mathematically impossible, to the point that I have no qualms buying the rare-Earth explanation. It bloody hard to find a habitable planet, and it's infinitely more bloody hard to get anything breeding on it.

After all, if you multiply 1E50 (mindbreakingly large number of planets) by 1E-50 (mindbreakingly small chance of successful life), you get... 1.

 

[Old Father Eternity]

I see someone has already posted Kurzgesagt vids. Here is another set of things on the topic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA&list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU

 

[Kyrian007]

Not exactly sure which this falls under, but. I guess I'm fairly sure life, intelligent life exists out there somewhere. The universe is vast and its pretty arrogant to assume there's anything all that special about humans. But will we ever contact alien life... not for a very, very long time. We haven't advanced far enough to exist under a single world government, until we stop expending massive resources fighting and preparing to fight one another we can't possibly advance far enough to explore and expand far enough to perhaps contact life outside our own world. I'd bet on us facing extinction long before we advance that far. There's a significant number of us that believe that because "God" (or whomever) made the earth its somehow impossible that anything we do as a species could possibly harm the planet. Not even accepting the possibility that as a species we could cause our own extinction in the face of scientific evidence that says its easily possible.

But "sightings" and such, all complete nonsense. Any alien intelligence advanced enough to actually travel here, is advanced enough we will be completely unaware of their presence or monitoring. They're not going to travel interstellar distances just to slam into a telephone pole and crash in New Mexico. No intelligence is going to develop some measure of FTL capabilities without developing the concept of "safety." We have backup cameras on soccer mom SUVs, fairly sure safety systems on interstellar craft will be correspondingly advanced. They will be able to monitor us undetected for as long as they like. Probably are right now. And it will be awhile before any sane intelligence at that level would bother making contact. We're just too backwards by those standards to bother with.

 

[TilMorrow]

"And remember this is your friendly galactic travel tribunal reminding you to avoid the Class 6 water habitat planet Ego-centri-5. The spheroid continues to send out harrowing data transmissions that have been known to cause distress and they are known to dump strange constructs into their atmosphere which is quite triggering to Opanarians. We repeat, avoid at all costs."

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

It's statistically unlikely that there is no extraterrestrial life. It's also statistically unlikely that we will ever find any, let alone meet them. Plenty have mentioned it, but it bears repeating: space is really, really, really, REALLY big. And we've only really had the ability to detect any alien signals for about a 100 years. That is a laughably small timeframe in galactic terms.

Perhaps they're so far away their signals decay into an unrecognizable mess long before they reach us. They could easily be so far away any of their signals still have 1000s of years to go before we could possibly detect them. Maybe their signals have in fact reached us ... a million years ago and they have since gone extinct or, assuming they are still around in whatever form they evolved into, simply developed means of communication we can't detect (yet).

And then there's the possibility that alien life exists within our detection sphere, but we can't detect them because they don't have anything to detect. Maybe they haven't developed it yet, maybe they're a species that feel/have no need for it. One of the flaws of the Fermi Paradox is that it assumes intelligent alien life will be intelligent in a way similar to ours and has developed in a way similar to ours. Which is only natural, I suppose. We're the only benchmark we have. Doesn't mean there aren't other ways.

 

[sXeth]

The odds are that in the vastness of the universe, some form of life, even intelligent life, exists other then our own.

The odds of it being within a zone we can interact with are almost impossible though.

If we assume they are a hypothetical advanced alien civilization. Then they likely also have tech that would make it near pointless to actually cross the stars to us. Passing the singularity, or having 1:1(or greater) matter-energy conversion technology basically eliminates much of the reason you'd have to go traipsing across the galaxy. You'd have to a very specific government-aspiring mindset of alien who is maintaining their empire (or variation thereof), for them to have any reason to come here.

A suitably primitive species wouldn't register to most of our detection methods.

The main occasion for a contact would be a species not terribly advanced beyond our own, that was forced into being space nomads by some sort of crisis. Which requires alien life, to be hit by such a crisis at the proper point in its evolution, have time to prepare a space evacuation, then pick a trajectory that in all the vastness of space runs into us. Then they have to survive however many centuries of travelling as such, without finding another planet to setlle on.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

I don't really think it's very likely we'll ever observe alien life. Such life would have to be big enough to be observable through the means available to us, close enough to be within our view and immediately recognizable as a living organism. Plainly speaking, in a universe this big it's just nor very likely we'll ever run across lifeforms that fit this description. Maybe some, like, microbes and stuff but no plant or animal life as we know it and certainly no intelligent lifeforms comparable to humans.

 

[bjj hero]

Habitable planets are like an oasis. They are far apart seperated by death. You are highly unlikely to know where the next oasis is or if something lives there.