Why Haven't We Ran Into Alien Lifeforms Yet?
Lately, I've often found myself fantasizing about us making contact with intelligent extraterrestrial lifeforms, if only just to see how Trump would try to deal with them. Yet is it really so far fetched? Considering the age and size of the universe, (old and big respectively,) is the probability of facing an alien invasion really much lower than electing a leader whose first response would likely be to build a giant floating wall to keep them out? Or perhaps we are truly alone in the universe, well at least to whatever extent sharing a planet with a trillion other species could qualify as 'alone'.
I bet I could teach my dog to catch these
The Age and Size of the Universe
The best thing about the universe is that although it's expanding at an exponential rate, it never gets offended if you inquire about its size or age. The universe is approximately 100 billion light years from end to end according to my measuring tape and about 14 billion years old.
As you know, I lend my Hubble telescope to scientists when I'm not using it to keep an eye on what my ex is up to, and last year they were able to use it to discover that the observable universe contained at least 2 billion galaxies: roughly 10 times more than originally thought. Each galaxy has around a trillion stars, and a good proportion of them have a planet that is similar to ours. So by my calculations there are 80,000 trillion habitable planets in the universe exactly!
Hmm, I can see my house from here
Fermi Paradox
Even assuming that the only planets out there capable of sustaining lifeforms need to be very similar to ours, that's still a lot of planets with the right qualifications. So the natural question is why are we so isolated from any other signs of intelligent life that we're forced to view some ice deposits on mars with the same level of excitement as being part of an intergalactic war against the Zerg? With at least a billion habitable planets within our Milky Way galaxy alone, and 14 billion years of opportunities for any one of them to evolve intelligent beings capable of interstellar travel, you'd think we'll all be worried about paying E.T.'s phone bill?
This is known as Fermi's Paradox: on the one hand the independent opportunities of harboring life in the cosmos seems staggering and galactic scale civilizations over the course of 14 billion years is almost guaranteed. On the other hand, we have failed to make first contact with any other intelligent species originating from outside our own planet. Much like how there's 4 billion human females on the planet, the probability of not a single one of them being willing to go out with me seems so low, yet its also palpably staring at me in the face. What could be some possible explanation to this apparent paradox?
Errr...we're going to need a bigger wall to keep this one out
Theories
One possible explanation is that while there are an abundance of planets that provide habitable environments, almost none of them have the conditions required for life to begin. The process of how the first life originated on the planet from inanimate physical objects is not fully understood. It's not like a rock just started mating with another rock out of the blue and gave birth to the first turtle. The process for life to begin could be infinitesimally unlikely, to the point where even though there are trillions of habitable planets, the probability that almost none of them contain life is still every high. Therefore, maybe no one is out there which is why in space no one can hear you scream.
I is the first lifeform ever
Another theory is that while its not too difficult for life to begin, every intelligent civilization ultimately and inevitably ends up destroying itself by, say, electing an unintelligent leader who starts a nuclear war that destroys their entire planet. Or perhaps some doomsday piece of knowledge lies ahead of us, its mere discovery will ensure our total annihilation irrespective of how benign our intentions are. If that's the case then we might as well all just be assholes, as we're screwed anyway. I'm way ahead of most of you in that respect.
Arthur C. Clarke remarked “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” I don't know why he thought sitting around playing Mario Kart in the lounge room is as terrifying as having our planet vaporized by a passing Death Star, but I do happen to agree with the first, and less profound, half of that quote.
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I've seen four UFOs in my lifetime. All great experiences. I believe. Peace
woah, you gotta take a pic next time and post it on here to earn a pretty penny
I don't know why I've seen so many this was before cellphones good stories about them though on the last one I saw I called the news and men in black came to my house and they said others in the area had seen it to and they all described it the same
I am fairly certain ailen life is out there, however for them to reach here they would have to have master faster than light travel, which may or may not be possible. It is possible that they are struggling with this and reside in a different galaxy then we do.
If they exist, one would assume they would be emitting all sorts of EM radiation, but there isn't anything out there really doing that. So either the intelligent life is much much more advanced then we are and has figured out other means of communication, or they are much much less advanced then we are and there is no chance of contact as of yet.
The universe is also massive, so its possible that intelligent life exists somewhere right now, but the light/EM radiation has not yet even reached earth, and may not do so for tens of thousands of years.
Yes, but the probability of intelligent life form occurring in our galaxy shouldn't be dismissed either. We don't know for sure, but a lot of planets have been habitable for a long time. Intergalactic travel may be extremely difficult, but inter solar system travel, far less so
Here's another NASA fanboy with his thumb up his ass. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Aliens are nothing but a psy-op. You've bought into the lie and now resemble something of a science fiction author. I assume your a Stephen Hawking fanboy too?
If humans are the only sentient life forms....then this universe sucks.
Judging from my scientific experiment on magic mushroom I'd say they have master faster than light travel but that's only pure musing.
On another train of thought some have advance the idea that maybe galaxy give rise to quite a lot of Earth like condition and Earth like condition mostly give rise to intelligent ape or at least conditions where then environment push on the animals to smarten up their brain to the point of intelligent like abilities.
It might seem really far fetch at first but I don't see why this theory should be dismiss out right. I think it has some merits. People might think ape were only possible because dinosaur got kill by an asteroid but I'd say mammal would have most probably over took Earth whether or not this asteroid impact happened. Cool article by the way.
I'm going to sound really f*kin crazy....but I don’t care.
You can travel faster than light if you are massless. Gravity is only a creation to a "substance" which can not be perceived in the 3rd dimension (it has an super high frequency). 3rd dimension or physical reality is actually very small in this universe. If you are able to alter the speed of matter on a fundamental level you can move into higher dimensions. You create an electromagnetic field around you which creates you own "space" that’s how you move in and out of this dimension.
Humans are probably the least evolved of all sentient lifeforms. And there are many sentient life forms that exist that don’t contain any organic matter and survive off radiation from suns.
OMG I sound crazy.
Super
Several years ago, I read a full book about this subject:
"If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life" by Stephen Webb.
As I remember, it started with a joke: The aliens are already there: they are the Hungarians.
(my wife is Hungarian)
Lol I can't even imagine how Trump would react... He would probably tell them if they fly in our airspace again we will build a wall around earth. They must visit us legally!
haha ya very likely
Why? the earth is flat, no space its all lie and manipulation , its flat folks
Here is one article by Dr Hugh Ross on the probability of life (just copied and pasted). Followed you @trafalgar and will be looking forward to more of your posts.
Probability for occurrence of all 322 parameters ≈ 10-388
dependency factors estimate ≈ 10-96
longevity requirements estimate ≈ 1014
Probability for occurrence of all 322 parameters ≈ 10-304
Maximum possible number of life support bodies in universe ≈ 1022
Thus, less than 1 chance in 10282(million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion) exists that even one such life-support body would occur anywhere in the universe without invoking divine miracles.
haha thanks
I guess they'll be a lot of variations in estimates as we don't have a lot of the key data like what is the process of life to begin
The prime directive! I don't know how much more obvious it could be. If a species was advanced enough to reach us, the chances they are benevolent is very high (though not guaranteed) because otherwise their likelihood of self-destruction is just too high. And if they are that advanced, they would probably not want to recklessly interfere with the development of another species. There are a lot of New Age theories about this, I don't fully buy the specifics of any of them but in general this situation has always seemed extremely likely to me and it was right out there for me to ponder since I was a kid watching Star Trek.
I also think we are too stuck in our perspective to see many other likelihoods. We assume that we have a pretty solid definition of life, but we really have no way of disproving Gaia theory, who is to say that planets themselves are not forms of intelligent life. Who is to say there isn't life we are unaware of in different realms, if aliens visited us, we might not even be able to perceive them. Once again, lots of conspiracy theories that talk about this, no need to put full faith in the details but it seems pretty likely once you realize that humans always seem to think they know much more than they do.
If there are intelligent species out there, and it seems likely that there are more than one, it the most sense that they are patiently watching us, either hoping to make contact and help us advance when we are ready to do so peacefully, or ready to shoot us down when we become a threat, probably both.
yes this is an plausible observation, indeed life can probably be vastly different to what we are, but even if they're cant, there should be ample opportunities for the galaxy to be full of intelligent beings similar to us.
To assume that we are intelligent enough to handle being part of an intergalactic community is a very human perspective. :-D The one's like us are all probably in situations similar to us, not yet able to travel to us or in the process of self-destruction. If we can learn to stop looking for enemies and create a culture where love and inner peace guides our decision making, the ETs will appear, I promise.
something else to consider - would we even be capable recognizing certain alien life forms...?
I mean sure, there might be the little guys with the funny shapes heads. But it could also be possible that there are certain dimensional beings existing on frequency spectrums that might not appear as physical. we might not even possess the ability to perceive/translate those frequency spectrums (yet).
or, what's to say there aren't aliens amongst us in human form? or perhaps, we ourselves are even aliens?
or that those crazy ass deep sea creatures aren't alien?
considering "aliens" are supposed to be from different galaxies, dimensions, etc - most people's conception of them as showing up as something simply physical might be rather unrealistic and limited...
Thats true, they may be so radically different that they're undetectable by us directly or through current technology :)
forget the word alien for a moment..............sentient life forms do exist........many assume if they don’t look or operate like us then they are not intelligent. i would say this galaxy is sentient. More complex than the human brain.
Egocentric bias.
Imagine instead you're an ant living in an ant-hill in the middle of the Amazon feelling around with your feelers, wondering why you haven't seen any any other type of intelligent life capable of building such awesome ant-hills. Our problem as a species is, we intrinsically think we must be special enough that any other species should want to travel to our specific anthill and/or communicate with us if they had the ability to --rather than generally ignore us as uninteresting as we humans would an anthill. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe. Now we wonder why aliens don't communicate across the light-years in a way we can detect with our primitive ant-feelers.
That said, it does appear we may have detected repeated energy bursts in the range that would be ideal to push solar sails between solar systems.
The fact that Homo sapiens is not intelligent, doesn't prove that there is no intelligent life in the universe at all. :)
Mabye because really intelligent creatures would be intelligent enough to avoid meeting us. :-)
I personally would be very surprised if no intelligent forms of life were existing at uncountable places of the universe. We thought sun was circulating around the earth, we fought against the fact that evolution is the reason for our existence, and sooner or later we will have to accept that also our planet is not as special as we like to see it.
One problem (between many others) to detect (or even communicate with) extraterrestrial life are the huge distances. If for example we receive light (or electromagnetic waves) from a place which is one million light years away from us, the arriving waves give us information about the prevailing conditions one million years ago: we look into the past but don't 'see' the presence. Imagine how long a communication signal from a sender to a receiver and then back to him would last ... Of course if we are lucky we may detect life nearer in our 'neighborhood' one day. :)
Not long ago I read "The Three-Body Problem" from the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin which offered quite some food for thoughts - just in case you are interested.
It turns out that aliens stay away because we smell bad. If you could travel interstellar distances, would you bother visiting the scum that crops up on just any planet? It's like having a moldy dish of food in the refrigerator and not wanting to bother cleaning it out just now. It smells funny, and there is an unpleasant life form in there that can wait till later.
Hahahah I love this
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
You may be on to something! LOL
It seems the most logical conclusion to me. I simply do not think that we have this big, empty universe all to ourselves, and a lot of the human occupied areas on the surface of this planet are like the inside of a stocked refrigerator that has been left unplugged too long.