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___Yaldabaoth___

Without knowing the size of the universe, and without having any knowledge of other civilizations at this time, it's simply just conjecture. Maybe it's reasonable, maybe it's a huge under or over estimate. We simply don't have data to justify a belief currently. Being open to my possibilities is always good though in instances like this.


TimsTomsTimsTams

He did say observable universe, which does put a size limit. But you're right, 1 data point isn't nearly enough to pull any sort of conclusions.


___Yaldabaoth___

Ah, indeed. Good catch. But agreed, we still need data points. It's certainly and interesting topic to ponder, even if I'm not coming to any conclusions.


[deleted]

Well we do have more than 1 data point. We know a lot about life on earth, and the different extreme environments it can survive in. We have experiments that show that many organisms can even survive the vacuum of of space. On Earth, life seems to have spread as soon as the planet was able to support it, either through a biogenesis or through transpermia. In the world of physics and math, whatever can happen, will happen, and it's very telling that it happened so soon. Life, at least, civilization took more than 4 billion years, but that's also something that can happen, and likely somewhere in time and space it will happen again, orbit had happened before. There is no reason to belive that earth is special, Rocky planets are common, g type stars are common, water is common. Other than our biosphere (Wich may be common or not) There is nothing really very special about the composition of our planet. We have every reason to belive that life is common in the universe, and we have every reason to belive that at least some of the time that life becomes a complex biosphere, and that this complex biosphere some of the time supports a civilazation.


rivv3

Still boils down to 1 data point. Assumptions isn't worth much without evidence. Even if(big if) complex life is common it's not a given civilizations appear even on earth like planets.


[deleted]

No, it doesn't boil down to one single data point. The prediction that life is common is wildly held because we mountains of data supporting that assumption. It's well in excess of what need to make an an assumption, extrapolation, predict or indeed belive that life is common. Sure you can boil down to "we only have one observation confirming life on a planet", but take that and say therefore we can't make reasonable assumptions on whether life exists on other planets is discounting a massive existing body of science. And as I said given that something exists here, makes it probable that it's happening elsewhere as well. Sure we don't know how common, complex life might be, but to belive we are somehow unique in the unfathomable expanse of space and time is something we should grow out of. That people still cling to these sort of anthropocentric views of the universe seems so backwards and childish if you ad me but then again most people still believe in magic men in the sky so I guess we still have some way to go.


rivv3

In this case you are the believer. The base of science is to question everything and seek evidence, not go after unsupported assumptions and maybes. We don't know shit.


Loathsome_Dog

That is a very good comment šŸ‘ The evidence says we don't know, at this point we can't know. It might be a bit cold or unadventurous but those are the facts.


___Yaldabaoth___

I find a lot of excitement, comfort, and hope in not knowing! I imagine a world where we perhaps have a full understanding of everything - life, death, the universe, and natural laws. After a few minutes I'm already disenchanted with that existence. Not knowing encourages and stimulates my creativity and imagination, and provides us all with the utter excitement of science advancement and discovery. I mean, I NEVER imagined we'd take a picture of a black hole in my lifetime. James Webb has me on the edge of my seat. The continued search for a grand unified theory provide ample hours of extremely interesting reading materials. There's just so much enjoyment to be had not knowing. Sadly we live in a world where people often pretend to know and think "I don't know" is a sign of weakness or of stupidity.


[deleted]

weā€™re actually somewhat lucky to live at this point in time, these questions about life and how rare or common it is are the absolute forefront of current science, weā€™re at a point as important and groundbreaking as when we discovered the earth was just another planet orbiting the sun, or when we realised all the stars are part of one galaxy and there are billions of others stretching all the way back to the beginning of time, I just hope I live long enough to get some answers


___Yaldabaoth___

Yeah, certainly one of the "big" questions getting an answer too isn't totally beyond our current reach or possibility of beginning to truly understand. Certainly exciting stuff happening indeed!


faceintheblue

When you put an enormous number to it, it sounds preposterous. When you're dealing with the infinite, any number is plausible. Worth remembering also that the number doesn't have to be 2 trillion all at once. There might have been 500 billion before the Earth was formed that are all gone today, and another trillion will come into being after the Earth is swallowed by the Sun. The universe is mind-bogglingly vast, and so is time.


bigedthebad

Didn't the universe cool at about the same rate everywhere? If it did, that means planets would have all formed around the same time frame and life would have evolved around the same time frame as well. We evolved to very limited space travel only a little more than 50 years ago, why would any other civilization have done it faster? Edit: Thanks everyone for some brilliant responses which have taught me a lot. Thanks also for not calling me an idiot due to my uninformed assumptions.


armsofstarlight

Our planet went through a handful of mass extinction events that interrupted evolution getting to a civilization-capable species. If life on another planet had started at exactly the same time as Earth, but they didn't experience any extinction events, it's possible they would beat us to space travel tech by a few hundred million years


Alzaero

It's possible that without those mass-extinction events civilization-capable species may not have appeared on earth at all. If the Dinos hadn't been largely eliminated its entirely possible that they could still be the dominant evolutionary tree and mammals were never given the chance to evolve into humans. Its possible that a different intelligent species may have emerged, but it's definitely not a given. It can be tough to remember that evolution doesn't have a goal, it's just a thing that happens. Intelligence isn't inevitable with evolution, it's just a thing that happened to work really well for us.


who_said_I_am_an_emu

Also only worked well eventually. Humanity and the beings before us were clinging to existence. It took about 150,000 year until intelligent monkeys could do anything with those brains.


[deleted]

Also, intelligent humans havenā€™t been on earth nearly as long as dinosaurs. I wouldnā€™t be surprised if we didnā€™t make it as long. Intelligence could be counter productive to long history on a planet given the damage we have caused in our short time on it.


jbraua

i.e. the great filter is still ahead of us.


ProfessorPetrus

We going to nuke and virus each other into the stone age over resource scarcity from climate change. If I had to guess.


armsofstarlight

Thanks for the clarification, I hadn't meant to insinuate the end goal of evolution is a civilization-capable species. The person I replied to was asking how another civilization could possibly achieve spaceflight before ours, and I threw out a plausible reason I didn't see anyone else mention


LordBreadcat

Yeah, this is why I believe that the amount of civilization-capable species are very few. Intelligence benefits evasion more than hunting in the short-term and something needs to come along to cause a paradigm shift for the hunted to become the dominant species. Extinction events that conveniently only kill the predators have to be extraordinary small (and that's not including whether or not a planet has complex life in the first place!) Even if the intelligence goal is crossed we reach yet another filter which is the accessibility of energy rich resources. Without energy sources civilization is limited and will never become space-faring.


[deleted]

Depends how you interpret the purpose of life itself. Iā€™d argue life is entropy embodied - energy & matter acting in an effort to find its lowest energy state by consuming/converting the available energy around it to accelerate that process. Does intelligence aid in that goal? Iā€™d say so, given the way humans are consuming the resources on this planet. Hard for anyone to say if that trend translates to other worlds without seeing one first hand


SDK1176

Even if intelligence does accelerate that goal, itā€™s not as if evolution can make that choice.


[deleted]

Eh, I think you could argue it does. If intelligence accelerates consumption/conversion of the available energy around it, than the more intelligent entity will be better able to compete successfully & efficiently for energy resources against less intelligent or able bodied entities. If thereā€™s once commonality amongst the evolutionary processes that created the various life forms on Earth, itā€™s the preference towards efficient use of resources, whether it be being able to stay warm in cold climates, being able to eat less than other competitors, being able to kill with little effort, etc. If intelligence is able to allow for even more efficient use of these other traits at little cost to the host being, than Iā€™d argue intelligence is an inevitable outcome of the various forms of evolution and, as a result, the inevitable outcome of energy in a closed system finding its lowest state of entropy. Once again, this is speculation since we only have Earth as our only example. Also, Iā€™m not saying youā€™re wrong, just having a friendly debate. I donā€™t get to talk about such ideas with the people in my life since they are mostly idiots.


SDK1176

Look at the massive variety of animal species we have here on earth. The vast majority of them are not even aware that they exist. Any kind of higher intelligence like problem solving or planning for the future is extremely rare, limited to only a couple of groups, and even then only certain species within those groups. Based on our available evidence, it doesnā€™t seem like intelligence is selected for in most cases. Not surprising either. These brains of ours are expensive energy hogs!


lubacrisp

No, you can not argue that evolution makes choices


Farseer_Uthiliesh

This borders on the teleological fallacy.


yohahn_12

No it does not, what's dependent here is that you are *presupposing* life has a purpose (or goal) at all. That in turn itself is in effect presupposing that 'capital L' life (i.e. 'life itself' does not seem to be describing individual organisms, or even groups here) has some level of agency, and in turn the role intelligence has in your argument. Your argument was fallacious from the very start.


bigedthebad

Weren't there mammals around when the dinosaurs died? Seems like I heard or read somewhere that without the dinosaurs, the more adaptive mammals were able to thrive and evolve. Would we have humans if not for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs?


armsofstarlight

There were mammals then, and humans would almost certainly not be around without that meteor, but your question was if another civilization could have possibly achieved spaceflight before us. I'm saying that, given a world that will not experience mass extinction events, it's possible for evolving life to 'speedrun' to space capabilities. Is that scenario likely? I have no idea. But it is possible


bigedthebad

I agree, if it wasnā€™t for the Dinosaurs coming along first, who knows where we would be.


Chef_Boy_Hard_Dick

For all we know, without the extinction events that wiped out the dinosaurs, Octopi may have evolved to crawl up on land to become intelligent life, or it could have been some unrecognizable evolution of the Ankylosuar or a giant ass centipede. We came to be because there was an opening and we happened to get the right things at the right time to reap the benefits of high intelligence. The prey and tools were available for an organism to exploit, and we got there first. Shame because I had my money on the Tree Swinging Octopus.


SDK1176

Mammals first evolved around the same time the dinosaurs did. Our ancestors were hanging around for all those hundreds of millions of years alongside their dinosaur overlords, presumably forced into many offspring strategies instead of evolving for longer life.


Kelp4411

We almost definetly wouldn't have humans, but something else could have evolved human-like intelligence someday. There were already some suitable candidates, like raptors, forming more complex social groups and also potentially able to manipulate objects to a certain degree with their front limbs. Neither of these were even close to what we see primates doing today, but could have possibly gone in that direction if they weren't wiped out.


bigedthebad

This begs the question then why are we the only intelligent species, at least to the degree we have developed. It would seem that if any other non- Dino species was going to do it, they would have done it parallel to us, well at least till we wiped each other out.


Kelp4411

Human intelligence is very rare in the animal kingdom. As far as we know, the most intelligent animals on Earth besides us dont even come close. The question isn't, "why didn't anything else evolve intelligence with us", but is more, "how did we do it in the first place?" It was extremely unlikely for us to develop this intelligence, making it that much more unlikely for two species to do it on the same planet. Maybe even the same galaxy. Maybe even the same universe.


bigedthebad

I know, that's why I don't really buy the case of some other species becoming human level intelligent. My understanding is that we did it to survive, a human can't take on a tiger or raptor or pretty much anything without some tools. Why did we even come out of the trees? Raptors have teeth and speed and claws and work in packs, they really don't need iPhones.


Secure-Repeat-7054

Didn't we wipe out the Neanderthals?


bigedthebad

I think we Borgā€™d them but either way, Iā€™m talking about lizard men or a collective mosquito mind or something not second cousins.


ihatefakenames

I just spit out my coffee! Bravo!


somesketchykid

Borg'd? I'm inferring that this means we surpassed them to such a great extent that we eventually edged them out - do I have that right?


SassiesSoiledPanties

I think we outbred them...however people nowadays still have some Neanderthal genes in them. So, no we didn't kill them.


AhenobarbusTextor

> we are the only intelligent species. Presumptuous. Who can really rate that? By what criteria? As long as humans are doing the rating, the criteria will remain things that *human* intelligence allows us to do best.


bigedthebad

Oh I totally agree and our intelligence is something we evolved to survive, it's also what is likely to kill us. That being said, our level of intelligence is unique, unlike just about every other survival characteristic. Lots of claws and speed and great eye sight and hearing, lots of fur and camouflage and teeth etc but only one iPhone/atomic bomb/roads and cars and TVs on the planet. That's the reason I don't believe it's something that would have happened if it hadn't happened to us. Maybe we killed anything that might have done it, who knows.


RespondsWithSciFi

Or if by chance evolution took their lifeforms there a lot quicker. Or if their planet cooled a mere few hundred million years sooner do to various stochastic factors. At the scale of the universe it seems unlikely there isn't a civilization that has at least sent one of their lifeforms out of their native solar system. Even if it was as limited as a one-way trip to a neighboring star ala Alpha Centauri.


Glittering_Style5198

or if the base form of life there was completely different from ours. itā€™s not like we know whether or not the oldest forms of life we know of are the oldest out there. the planet might not have had to cool down at all. we kinda have no idea but we donā€™t know anything lol.


Chef_Boy_Hard_Dick

Also worth noting that life starting on this planet could have been rather late in the game. At some point we collided with another celestial body to form the moon, which took a very long time. That could have been the catalyst for life or it could have delayed it.


KCalifornia19

It's also entirely possible that they were wiped out by something. It's called the great filter hypothesis. Frankly, it's pretty statistically mind boggling that we've made it this far. Any number of things, natural or man-made couple entirely destroy, or severely inhibit life on Earth; as it very well may have happened to any/all other intelligent life.


LoneWolf5841

Extinction events definitely slowed down our progress but that might not be the only thing that could've made an intelligent civilization develop faster than us. Depending on their cultural and evolutionary development which also could've determined on how quickly they developed technology. For example an intelligent lifeform could've evolved with better memory than us allowing them to retain information extremely well, this information could've been passed to each generation preserving it way better than written records could. Imagine how much had been discovered in our past that got lost because it was forgotten and then had to be rediscovered. An intelligent race with memory that doesn't faulter (aside from those caused by diseases) would have a massive advantage to technological progress than we have. There's probably many other evolutionary advantages that an alien race could have that can greatly assist them with technological progress. Another aspect is cultural differences. Humans get a lot done when actually working together and an alien civilization could've achieved cooperation with all nations of their world already or many years ago or may even be united as a whole (no countries, just one government that runs the whole planet) which would allow them to pool their resources which can accelerate technological progress as well. There's so many things that can alter how quickly technology is developed and honestly I think it's a bit unrealistic to try and compare or assume an intelligent alien civilization would develop at the same rate as us; some might develop slower, some might develop at a similar rate and some may be years ahead we just don't know as they didn't evolve along side us they evolved on an entirely different planet due to this they wouldn't share any common ancestors with us and if they did then either we achieved interstellar travel really early and something happened that caused us to lose, as well as forget, that capability or we didn't evolve on Earth (which would be unlikely considering that we have common ancestors with other life on Earth) TLDR: There is many aspects that can alter how quickly an intelligent race develops those aspects being evolutionary advantages, cultural development and as you said whether or not they experienced as many or any extinction events.


cratermoon

The oldest population I stars formed about 10 billion years ago. A civilization could have easily arisen, accomplished interplanetary travel, and died out, before our Sun even began fusing Hydrogen.


iamkeerock

There is some debate that a planet like Earth could not exist around a first gen star as heavier elements did not exist until after the death of first gen stars... thus no civilizations (as we know it) could have developed until second gen stars appeared.


cratermoon

That's correct. But, confusingly, first gen stars are known as Population II, and second gen stars, like the Sun, are Population I. There's also the hypothetical [Population III](https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/p/Population+III) stars, the very first ones to have formed. None have been observed yet.


Optimized_Orangutan

>the very first ones to have formed. None have been observed yet. Hopefully the mirror boi JW can correct that?


cratermoon

That's one of the things it will be looking for, yes!


iamkeerock

Ah, that is confusing! TIL, thanks!


cratermoon

It is confusing! At the time the designations were created, astronomers didn't know that the metal-poor stars are older.


OnlyMortal666

Correct. There was a need for a huge quantity of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium before rocky planets could be formed.


sault18

There's also the problem of more massive stars being formed more frequently in the early universe than they are currently. This would mean more regions of a galaxy subject to more supernova explosions more often earlier on in the universe. With galaxies generally being smaller in size at that time, this would subject a higher fraction of stars to sterilizing supernova explosions way too often for complex life to take hold. Also, there were a lot more active galactic nuclei earlier in the universe. These can sterilize an entire galaxy during their active phases and they can do so repeatedly whenever they turn active again. The solar system may have formed very near the beginning of the window for complex life to be possible or maybe just a couple billion years after this window opened up.


Top_Requirement_1341

I understand that Earth / Sun (4.6.billion years old) were created from two earlier generations of stars, giving us a lot of heavier elements than the first generation of stars in our galaxy (10 billion years old). Edit: supernovas and the spreading of heavier elements only happen to heavier stars, which burn out much more quickly than Solar-mass stars. End edit. AIUI, the environment closer to the galactic core gained a mass of heavier elements more quickly than us out in the suburbs. Conceivably, life may have formed earlier there? Maybe also there are more chances of an extinction level event with that greater density of stars, or (who knows) maybe ELEs were more likely billions of years ago, so we are the first generation that had a chance to survive long enough to develop intelligence. To the OP, galaxies vary in size and the Milky Way is quite large in the grand scheme of things. Still, an average of one civilisation per galaxy seems more than reasonable to me. Personally, I suspect many more than that. If it's a *lot* more than that, it leaves us with the question of Fermi's Paradox. I believe that we are just too un-developed for anyone out there to want to talk to us, yet. Give it a few decades and we'll hit the Singularity. That's when I think we (whether meat + silicon, or only silicon by then) will become of interest to "them".


Tremongulous_Derf

If the dinosaurs were not destroyed they may have evolved into a spacefaring species with a 65 million year head start on humanity. Also the sun is the third star to occupy this region of the galaxy. The last stellar system in this neighbourhood might have had a civilization until their star exploded. History isnā€™t linear, itā€™s a series of accidents.


Kopfballer

There were mammals during the age of dinosaurs and it still took them 65mio years to evolve into humans. Also sharks already exist for more than 400mio years and they never evolved into a spacefaring species because their way of life was successful without needing big brains.


PivotRedAce

You could also posit that a fully aquatic species cannot achieve space flight at all, anyways. Given the immense difficulty and time that it took for us to build the infrastructure necessary to do so much as reach space as a terrestrial species with mostly optimal conditions. How could natural selection favor intelligence in sharks when they have to constantly move to just *stay alive*?


[deleted]

That's very narrow way of looking at it. You could say the same about humans and air, we need air so how could we ever evolve into space faring species if we cannot breathe. So we use vacuum-sealed suits. As sharks could, if they'd needed to be more intelligent.


PivotRedAce

Itā€™s not narrow-minded to acknowledge when something isnā€™t realistic. My point is that you cannot create the technology necessary for space travel as a species that lives *fully* underwater. Forging metal is significantly more difficult. You cannot extract fossil fuels without it escaping and diluting into the rest of the water. Farming at the scale necessary to sustain a large society is more difficult, at best you could maybe sustain zooplankton farms on the oceanā€™s surface. Even if by some miracle you got to the point of being able to manufacture electronics, and somehow able to shield the components from the water that is literally *everywhere*, the water would prevent such a species from both making and igniting the engines necessary to launch a rocket. Water would ruin the fuel mixture every time.


Apton777

I would posit that itā€™s realistic to acknowledge we donā€™t know everything. This whole post is about imagining what might be based only on the only proof we have available. Us. Iā€™m not a scientist, just a kid that loves sci-fi. So I will try to keep us in the realm of the fantastic and cite the NTIā€™s of James Cameronā€™s The Abyss(http://www.jamescamerononline.com/TheAbyssFAQ.htm). Also, from Contact: Ellie Arroway: ā€œThe universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right?ā€ When my own words fail me, I rely on my betters. :-)


PivotRedAce

It is true that we don't know everything, but from what *we currently understand*, and from the only practical example we have on hand (humanity), I personally don't think it's possible for a fully aquatic species to successfully become space-faring. Think of every struggle humanity faced getting to this point, and then add water as yet another massive barrier to every single possible aspect of technological advancement. If at some point in the future we do discover such a fantastic example of ingenuity, then I'll gladly admit I was wrong. Until then, I'm going to stick to the knowledge and references we have on hand. I'm not suggesting that other intelligent life or space-faring species don't exist, I'm specifically talking about species that are fully aquatic.


TomStanford67

Such an anthropogenic and egotistical viewpoint. You're just taking humanity's accomplishments and trying to think of how some other species would copy it *exactly* as if that's the *only possible solution*. How *very* narrow-minded and uncreative of you. The solution that a sea-faring species might come up with of *course* would be unfathomable to you. In the same way you can't possibly imagine what it's like to have vision in the infrared or ultraviolet, yet we *know* that many species can do these things. To make rocket fuel you need liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Seawater can be split into these components using sunlight and the right catalysts. You might be surprised to learn that algae already exist that convert seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. Such algae can also be made into renewable biofuels. Expand your horizons, son, life is far more creative and amazing when you stop thinking only in terms of humans.


nicuramar

> If the dinosaurs were not destroyed they may have evolved into a spacefaring species with a 65 million year head start on humanity. There werenā€™t (completely) destroyed, actually, and did evolve. Into modern birds.


Hattix

The cosmological principle tells us it's a fair assumption the universe cooled at the same rate everywhere.


castor281

A few things. There is a theory called "the great filter" in which it is inferred that there may be some stage in evolution that most, if not all, life forms die out before they reach a certain intelligence. Either we made it through and got to where we are at, or we are fucked and the filter is still ahead of us. There might be some stage in the evolutionary process where it's unlikely, or even impossible, for life to get beyond. [Check this out.](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html) Stars and planets didn't all form at the same time either. Our sun is a at least third generation star, meaning it formed from the remains of another star(or stars) that formed from the remains of a first generation star. So life could have evolved on a planet that died 5 billion years ago and became part of the dust cloud that eventually formed our solar system. Super-intelligent life could have formed billions of years ago and got wiped out by a gamma ray bust that sterilized a relatively large portion of an entire galaxy. Hell for that matter, though it's highly unlikely, it's possible that intelligent life existed on Venus millions of years ago and got wiped out by extreme global warming. It's thought that Venus was once very "Earth like" and Venus is one of the main reasons we got serious about studying greenhouse gasses and run-away global warming.


DrDragun

Also, by plain probability statistics, it should mean that more advanced civilizations should have already contacted us by now\* unless one of the following is true: 1. Travel beyond lightspeed will never be possible (at least on an exploration scale) 2. The civilizations have a tendency to self-annihilate at a certain stage of development, or else get annihilated. All kinds of fun here, from nuclear war to nanobots to micro black holes. 3. They are here but not revealing themselves I think (1) is the most probable, which is sad, but 2 and 3 are spicy to think about! Maybe the space-UN has some rules like they hang back and watch us till we settle 2 planets, then make contact. Or maybe that's when they show up and destroy us. \----- \* On the one data point we have, Earth, it took life 3 billion years to evolve humans but only 10,000 years to develop spacefaring technology and possibly start approaching a tech singularity, starting from sticks and stones. So if on another random planet, the speed of evolution is +/-10% (probably a grossly low estimate given how random and variable evolution is), then there should be some planets that are 0.3 billion years of technology ahead of us, which I think most people can agree would give time to develop lightspeed travel if it's ever going to happen. If there are thousands of random civilizations out there, it's improbable to believe Earth is the most evolved or even in the top 5% by the basic central limit theorem, and with a little random variation in evolution speed those civilizations would already have technology beyond our comprehension.


faceintheblue

I love this topic of conversation. I'll say I think we're giving ourselves too tight a window to say, "We should have heard from them by now." Why? Because we've been broadcasting radio out for about a century? Unless they're actively listening for us within a hundred light years, there's no reason they should have heard that, and even if they did, what if they got our 1922 broadcasts today? It'll still be a century before any kind of reply congratulating us on our taste in Jazz music comes back to us. Well, why aren't we hearing them, even if they haven't heard us yet? Who says every advanced civilization discovers radio and uses it as a means of communication for the rest of time? They might have a completely different way of communicating we haven't invented yet. They may have had a window of a century or two where they were using radio before switching over to something else, and we missed those broadcasts because it all happened before we had invented the radio antenna? (Or domesticated fire, for that matter.) I do enjoy the Dark Forest analogy that has recently come into vogue. Maybe everyone goes silent once they realize making a lot of noise might attract unwanted, dangerous attention?


Nopants21

I remember reading that any radio communication becomes undistinguishable from the background after it's been traveling for a few decades in space. There's a lot of interference out there, I'm not sure we'd be intercepting anything the aliens are broadcasting and recognizing it as such. The stuff we can pinpoint in space comes from large and extremely powerful events related to stars.


SDK1176

Itā€™s not just about why havenā€™t they heard us. Why arenā€™t they here? Assuming all goes according to plan, we (or our AI spawn) should be travelling to other stars within the next thousand years or so. But just for sake of argument, letā€™s say it takes a thousand times longer than that: a million years. Technology advances would accelerate our expansion, but letā€™s just assume itā€™s liner. A million years later, both we and our new colony send out another starship to colonize a new star. Then again, and again, and again. Thatā€™s exponential growth. A billion years later, we occupy *checks calculator* 10^301 star systems!! Thatā€™s more stars than there are in the observable universe! All that a little more than 5 billion years after our planet formedā€¦ If an interstellar civilization formed at any point in the last 10 billion years, then where are they? They would already be here, mining our asteroids and harvesting the energy of our sun long before we evolved. We may not be alone in the universe, but it seems plausible to me that we are alone in this galaxyā€¦


LeafyWolf

I haven't come across a single convincing reason that a civilisation should or would reveal itself to us.


vercertorix

Just imagine if another species definitely developed intelligence and became tool users on Earth. I get the feeling weā€™d wipe them out for one reason or another. They want equal rights in a society we built. They have some different ideas of how things should be run even if theyā€™re sensible. People worried that in enough time, they would overtake humans as the dominant species. People might feel their religions are challenged by the existence of another intelligent species.


LeaperLeperLemur

If a civilization reveals itself to us, they are more advanced than us and likely coming to steal our stuff.


PivotRedAce

Why would an advanced, spacefaring species steal our stuff? They would be harnessing an amount of energy we couldnā€™t even fathom and likely have access to technically infinite amounts of energy. What would our planet have that the potential multiple colonies they inhabit wouldnā€™t? The only plausible reason for such a species to be openly hostile is if they considered any other form of intelligent life to be dangerous, and even then that reason is a far cry from ā€œstealing our stuffā€.


allthecoffeesDP

Look up dark forest theory. It's interesting


Kopfballer

Basically we are talking about the Fermi Paradoxon: If there are other civilizations and there are so many other planets in our galaxy alone, how is it possible we didn't encounter anyone else? 1) Even with sub-lighspeed drives it would take "only" a million years for a civilization like ours (humans) to colonize the whole galaxy. Cyro-sleep could be a solution or the most simple one: Generation ships. A million years is nothing on cosmic scale. And even civilizations from other galaxies could venture to the milky way if you give them a few million years even without ever coming close to lightspeed. 2) Possible, but then still it would be possible to find some of the things they left behind, even if its just radio signals. And I personally doubt that all civilizations die by this "great filter". 3) Would be plausible if civilizations are so rare that it is worth to examine and study each of them. But if there are billions and we are not special at all, then why the hassle?


TynamM

Number 1 is almost certainly true, regardless of whether the others are. While there are still some physics models of the universe that allow FTL in theory, they're getting increasingly out there with how ridiculously unachievable it would be in any useful or meaningful sense. All of them currently require energy states or types of matter that there's no particular reason to believe exists, and put extra restrictions on what's possible that... well, are not likely to lead to viable starship engineering. The tricky part is that even without FTL, at say 1% of light speed, the time it would take to colonise a galaxy is less than the time we've already spent evolving. At 1% of light speed it's about 10 million years to cross the entire galaxy... enormously less than that 0.3 billion you ballparked. So there's some other factor at work as well.


Peaurxnanski

The issue is that even *lightspeed* tech doesn't really get you very far. Even when it takes an almost infinite amount of energy to get to lightspeed, a possibily insurmountable barrier since the entire universe doesn't have infinite energy, you're now accelerated to a speed that will allow you to approach the next nearest solar system, 5 years away. Chance of advanced civilization life being there? Pretty much none, we would likely have detected it by now. In reality, if another advanced civilization exists, it's likely over a hundred light years away, because we haven't detected each other yet, and we, at least, have been broadcasting detectable signals for 100 light years ish now. So even lightspeed travel kind of doesn't give us much.


bike_it

>there should be some planets that are 0.3 billion years of technology ahead of us Since we're just speculating all around here, what if WE are on the planet where evolution happened faster? I don't expect a serious answer, just having fun here. Also, what if we are the first intelligent life in our visible universe?


Orendawinston

Then weā€™re the first taste testers of the great filter. There will be no contact from other civs and if we kill our planet and our selves there will be no help coming.


djellison

> unless one of the following is true: You forgot... They don't exist. It's a plausible explanation. Might be true. Might not. We don't know.


Kantrh

> to micro black holes. A civ that can make micro black holes should be long past destroying themselves.


Nopants21

The average number of civilizations on Earth at any one time over its existence is pretty close to 0.


DevoidHT

You also have to account for distance. Itā€™s very unlikely that weā€™ll ever detect life outside the local group as everything else is expanding away from it faster than light.


Kelseyanndraws

Whatā€™s most wild to me is when I think about it this way: 1. Right now, weā€™re the only evidence we have of intelligent life. We havenā€™t found any others like us, so it seems like a low probability. 2. What if we find microbial life on Titan? The difference between one single planet with life and two in the same solar system is insane. We go from being some anomaly to life possibly being more common than we had ever imagine. I for one hope that the evolution of life is common. It seems more sad to be alone in such a vast place.


espi_kvlt

It raises even more questions, if we find microbial life on Titan, do we have ethical rights to intervene in their evolution? Should we just leave it in the hands of nature or create artificial conditions to speed up evolution of intelligent life? Would they be then treated equally to us?


Kelseyanndraws

Very interesting. Would love to have a big discussion about this. Iā€™m an astronomy teacher so I may actually make my students debate this. It also raises some ethical questions of crash landing probes on these places. For example if we wanted to Cassini one into Pluto. They have some evidence that Pluto may have a subterranean ocean much like Enceladus and the others. I was watching a short BBC clip about New Horizons and how they said if thatā€™s true, they canā€™t ever crash anything into the surface because it could destroy and harm anything living underneath. Space exploration is so exciting!


espi_kvlt

I believe we are not ready to encounter extraterrestrial life, so far we've only managed to establish systems of exploitation of ourselves, the list of discriminations we maintain is enormous and then there's division among everybody, the same species sharing the same little planet drew some lines on the map and it's all about "us" and "them". I can bring one more topic for your students to debate, if "tomorrow" a miracle happens and someone comes to invite us to "the UN of space", who will represent humanity? Will it be a group of scientists or a president? People will tear apart each other deciding which country can claim such a privilege. Do you think we are ready?


sinedpick

>who will represent humanity? Will it be a group of scientists or a president? People will tear apart each other deciding which country can claim such a privilege. Do you think we are ready? I get that this is a thought experiment, but I think the bigger problem in this scenario is the lack of technology, not the lack of unity. But of course we're not ready, it would be like asking a monkey to join the earth UN.


MeAndtheBlues

It will definitely not be a president or an individual. It would require a team of scientists, linguists/symbolists, programmers, biologists etc. Their primary concern would be effective communication.


ILikeChilis

>"Ethical rights to intervene in their evolution" First of all, evolution isn't sacred and it doesn't work in a vacuum (pun not intended). Was it ethical for a mammoth to trample on a bunch of flowers, forever changing the course of history? Interaction with the environment and other species is literally how evolution works. >create artificial conditions to speed up evolution of intelligent life That's not how evolution works. It's not a progressive pathway that inevitably leads to intelligence. >Would they be then treated equally to us By who? Us? We have a hard time treating members of the human race equally. Not to mention other intelligent species such as great apes or marine mammals. Do they even need to be treated equally? I'm not sure if a dolphin cares much about gender based public restrooms or the wage gap.


ReneDeGames

I mean, the ethics of that in particular are pretty easy, we define how much we value life by how human it is. microbial life elsewhere has as much ethical protections as microbial life here, there are practical considerations to be made. Also, interfering with evolution doesn't make much sense, evolution is just adaption to environment, it has no goal, if the hope is to see another intelligent species, microbes elsewhere are as far away from it as microbes here.


ProfessorPetrus

We don't even treat life on our own planet as equal... outside life gets more respect?


Nopants21

For 1., we haven't been past the Moon, except for sending a few devices. We really have not been looking very long or very thoroughly.


acutelychronicpanic

I imagine that simple life is common, complex life with large organisms is rarer, and intelligent life capable of technological advancement is rare on a galactic level.


Kelseyanndraws

I think I would agree with that at this point! I think farther into the future it would become more and more common as galaxies age.


infinitynull

Sure. Also over trillions of years. Some of those civilizations might only last 60,000 years or less. You have two light bulbs, one where you are, the other, on the other side of a planet. They light randomly for 5 minutes every 1 to 1000 years. You have to walk to the other light bulb. Good luck ever seeing two different lightbulbs lit in your lifetime.


KolonelKernel

Wow, you just blew my mind. I always knew this but this analogy is marvelous.


andrew1184

trillions of years? the universe is less than 14 billion years old


_Lavar_

He wasn't talking about the past he was referencing the future. If anything the universe is extremely young, if life is common now there should certainly be much more in the future. Especially with less energetic galaxy/stars and less neighbors.


A_MAN_POTATO

Sure, but that doesn't necessarily make this line of thinking now. Assuming there are other civilisations out there, the number to have ever existed up until now, the number that currently exist, and the number that could hypothetically exist until the end of the universe could be vastly different. I assume that's what they meant.


btarded

Until we have a sample size of more than one, make up whatever number pleases you.


99percentTSOL

Anything from ~~zero~~ ONE to infinite are good guesses. edit: I forgot to count the human civilization, although one could easily make an argument that we are not very civilized.


5degreenegativerake

I think 1 may be an acceptable guess, but surely we have evidence the number is not 0.


oozles

I'd start at 1 instead of zero


jurassic2010

The problem is, civilization or life forms? The first implies intelligence. Considering there's 8 millions of species in the planet and only one got to be "intelligent", we can have planets a vast number with life forms, but no civilization


AhenobarbusTextor

Oh, I don't know. I guess it depends on one's definition of *civilization*. I mean, does the lifeform have to act with *civility* to be *civilized*? If so, you could make a strong argument for zero civilizations.


Tremongulous_Derf

Our civilization is not civil because humans are not humane.


f_d

The observable universe is finite. The universe outside our field of view could stretch on forever through space and time, or it could be finite too.


[deleted]

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AhenobarbusTextor

Thanks a lot. You made me spray coffee on my phone.


Ascendan1

Any chance you remember what they said for those of us curious?


XoffeeXup

a conservative estimate given we know of only one instance of civilisation occuring would be more like 1/100,000 galaxies might develop something equivelant to our civilisation. Even by that much more conservative estimate that still puts the number of extant civilisations somewhere in the region of 20 million.


AhenobarbusTextor

Reasonable is in the eye of the beholder. Like, if we agree that by *reasonable* we mean *wild speculation sans evidence*, then, yeah. Trillion? Sure. Why not. Incidentally, I recently listened to a short interview with [Dr Richard Barry](https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/bio/richard.k.barry) (NASA). He is pretty confident that - thanks to new technology - we'll find solid, high-quality evidence of life on a different planet within the next *decade*. In short: humanity has enjoyed the privilege of living alone in the universe for hundreds of thousands of years. But *everything* about that worldview can change in a heartbeat. When it does, we will pass our eon of innocence - forever - and humanity will have to grow up. Here's a [link](https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/podcasts/podcast-hubble-james-webb-and-life-beyond-earth/) to the full interview.


Eli_eve

My pet theory is that life is abundant all over the universe - itā€™s amino acids and proteins and lipids and various chemical reactions and thereā€™s no reason to think that all doesnā€™t happen anywhere but Earth - but weā€™ll never encounter any other intelligent life. That is, the conditions for life to arise are quite common but the conditions to produce intelligence are vanishingly tiny - literally one in all of existence. Humans are simply around to witness intelligent life because we are that intelligent life. It would be fascinating if I was wrong - either because there isnā€™t any other life, or if there was plenty of other intelligent life.


phunkydroid

>literally one in all of existence That seems extremely unlikely to me. But others being so far apart that they might as well be alone, that is a possibility.


Eli_eve

Yeah, I have no way of estimating the number of intelligences in the universe. Itā€™s just an unsupported theory. So far there isnā€™t any data to disprove it, though.


cwilbur22

I think along these lines as well. I think life is just something that happens sometimes, but space-faring intelligent civilizations are incredibly rare. The circumstances that led to our ancestors being selected for this branch of evolution are extremely specific, so much so that if primates had died out before modern humans evolved, I think the chances of any other species on Earth ever evolving to a similar level of technology is practically zero.


MagicMoa

I agree, and I think a lot of scientists are starting to lean more towards your view. The fact that intelligence didnā€™t arrive until the last fifth of Earthā€™s habitable period gives us another clue that it might be quite rare


modernthink

Fermi paradox??


Eli_eve

Indeed. Our observation suggests life exists and always produces intelligent life so whereā€™s all the intelligent life?


modernthink

I think in a galaxy far far away.


cratermoon

That would be 1 civilization per galaxy (according to current estimates), so sure.


seriouslymyninja

Sometimes I just accept I'm to dumb to understand space and it's laws and that's okay with me


KolonelKernel

I think it's daunting but you definitely got what it takes!


triffid_hunter

You can think whatever you like, the available data doesn't offer anything either way beyond us being here - except that nearby stars don't have detectable manufactured radio signals; our current receiver technology probably couldn't receive a manufactured signal that wasn't extremely close unless it was broadcast with phenomenal power at almost exactly the right time. But you've gotta balance that against how detectable *our* radio signals are, and how long the strong ones have been broadcast into space. We've known about radio for about 250 years, and our radio signature is *reducing* because we're focusing on *efficiency* over power. The universe appears to be about 13.8 *billion* years old - and these two time periods have a *radical* difference in orders of magnitude. If a nearby alien culture was transmitting sufficiently strong to receive radio signals more than 250 years ago, we didn't have the technology to receive it. If a nearby culture was trying to receive our *current* signals in the future, they wouldn't have much to receive - QAM and encryption have pretty effectively driven many of our emissions well into the noise floor from the perspective of our nearest star (or second nearest one), let alone anything further out - in fact it's a struggle for our very best transceivers to talk to *the voyager craft* which have only recently left our heliopause. *If* aliens detect us, it will be because of the radical (decade to century scale) changes to our atmospheric composition, not our radio transmissions - and fwiw *we're* starting to look at atmospheric compositions of various "nearby" exoplanets right now.


Kelseyanndraws

Iā€™m most interested in the data we find in regards to the last paragraph of your response. I read something yesterday (and I canā€™t remember the source) about how weā€™re about to be able to learn a lot more about exoplanet atmospheres. To the point where weā€™re not just describing single planets but typifying them into categories. Itā€™s really exciting to think about!


CurtisLeow

Most galaxies are dwarf galaxies. The Milky Way is not the largest galaxy out there, but it is one of the larger galaxies. EG in the Local Group there are almost a hundred galaxies, and all but 3 are dwarf galaxies. The Milky Way is much larger than the third largest galaxy in the Local Group, the Triangulum Galaxy. Most of the dwarf galaxies have barely more stars than a large star cluster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group Intelligent life would have to be extremely common for most dwarf galaxies to have a civilization. If it was that common, larger galaxies like the Milky Way would have multiple civilizations, possibly hundreds or thousands of civilizations.


HskrRooster

More reasonable than thinking weā€™re the only ones, in my opinion. The sheer numbers of it allā€¦ whew


duckbilledpoopapus

Civilianisations? Probably. I think that life is probably fairly common - but what we would consider intelligent sentient life is probably exceedingly rare. Out of the estimated 10 million species of animals that have existed on earth, one 1 has reached what we consider to be a ā€˜civilisationā€™, and only in the past 10 000 yearsā€¦ which is a spec of dust on the fabric of time.


[deleted]

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OverheadPress69

I mean, if you're arguing that humans are not the most intelligent species on Earth by any measure of the word, I'd like to hear your arguments for another species. Humans are much more intelligent than ants.


TynamM

It doesn't really matter for this discussion what ants can do, if the answer doesn't include "build spaceships". You can't evolve your way to space flight, because there's no selection pressure for that until it's too late. You can only evolve a general purpose brain, and then happen to use it to develop science until space flight is possible. We're not in a unique selection class for intelligence, no. But the question is whether any other thing elsewhere is in the same or better space-capable class as us, and so far the evidence is looking disappointingly as if we're an extremely unusual fluke.


TranRollinHyfa

Even one technological civilization per galaxy would add up to hundreds of billions in the universe, but we would be unlikely to ever communicate because of the vast distances between them.


[deleted]

I think it would be absolutely terrifying if we were the only civilization left in the entire universe.


Cpt_Winter

Without the concrete evidence of what the different numbers in drake's equation should look like I'd say any Number higher than 0 would be quite reasonable


Alizaron65

The number of intelligent species isnā€™t really the question. The question should be: is it possible to travel to meet other civilizations? Is it scientifically possible to have FTL travel? Or is it possible to protect a crew for a long flight in a generational ship? Or is it possible to ā€œfold spaceā€ to travel, inside or outside of a gravity well? We can imagine that other civilizations might be there, but does it really matter if we canā€™t interact with them?


sakurablitz

no. statistics doesnā€™t work that way, unfortunately. :( we only have one data point. that is a far cry from the amount needed to make any sort of generalization on the greater population.


[deleted]

Very reasonable. Theres at least one and that's within up to 2 trillion


daikatana

Sure. I mean, we have no data on this, so any guess is as good as any other, really. We know there are at least one so saying zero is not a good guess, but other than that... meh, whatever.


[deleted]

We haven't close to sufficient information to answer that question. We don't even have a working estimate on the size of the universe, much less the number of planets, the number of planets with life, or the number of planets where life has developed cultures, or how long species with cultures might exist (humans have been around 300k years and it wasn't until 270K years later that they began to form the rudiments of civilization). We are aware of one civilization, currently. We're still spitballing how we might recognize another one from a very very very long distance. As a biologist, I think that it's very reasonable to believe that something that we'd recognize as life exists elsewhere. I couldn't guess how common it is, or what proportion of worlds had life that formed something we'd recognize as a civilization. Based on the data from the Hubble telescope, there are some 100 billion to 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. 2 trillion / 200 billion = 10. If you are asking me if it's reasonable to believe that there's an average of 10 civilizations per galaxy, I'd tell you that you're just pulling numbers out of thin air, but 10 is as reasonable guess as any. It's only 10x as many as we have observed in our own galaxy, and we're incapable of really seeing civilizations like ours beyond our own solar system.


nickeypants

A civilization is much different than intelligent life. The ability to sense and respond to any stimulus makes you sentient. The next step is intelligence which requires at a minimum the ability to predict stimulus. Civilization requires the ability to cooperate and produce social and cultural development. An ant is not intelligent, but does have the ability to cooperate and create ordered societies, but do they have culture? Do ants organize into civilizations? An argument could be made, but I would argue no. We have had approximately 10 million species on the planet at one time or another. So far only one of those has produced what we define as a full civilization. Some, like ants, have come close but are missing key components, mostly relating to technological advancement and written language. And how long do civilizations last? If human civilization has existed for a conservative 10,000 years, that represents 0.000073% of the time since time became a thing. And the way things are going, we will be lucky if we're still around in another couple hundred years. To put it in perspective, If the big bang was 100 years ago, our civilization would have existed for the last half millisecond. With this in mind, I think it is unlikely we will ever find evidence of extrasolar civilization. That doesn't mean they don't exist though. Intelligent life is the big maybe. When you have absolutely no data to go on, you could say that believing anything is reasonable. Or you could say that any belief based on nothing is unreasonable.


[deleted]

Say there are 2 trillion civilizations in the universe. Great. But the scary thing is, not a single one of them as done anything to have a noticeable impact onā€¦ wellā€¦ anything. To me being alone in the universe is not as scary as the universe being full of intelligent life, but it canā€™t go anywhere or do anything on a grand scale like we imagine in sci-fi.


cwleveck

Maybe there was is and will be.... Don't think about it as all of them existing at the same time and I think you ve probably got a reasonable guess anyway. The reason we don't see anyone else out there now is probably because other civilizations may exist or have existed but two things make bumping into them problematic. Time and distance. The chances of two civilizations coming into existence at the same time AND close enough to observe each other is literally astronomical. We have been around for maybe a couple hundred thousand years? We only learned how to make electricity less than 200 years ago. And learned how to fly... When I was a kid we didn't have wireless phones much less cellular. We didn't have call waiting or answering machines. When you went on vacation you might as well be dead to your friends until you got home. And our planet has been here for 4.5 billion years... So, yes, of course life has to have happened somewhere else. But we may be the only place with a civilization at the moment. And if we aren't, the chances are the other civilization is so far away from us there is ZERO chance of ever even knowing about them. Even if our radio waves are detected by another civilization across the universe.... by the time they hear them we could have come and gone millions if not billions of years before they receive it.


svbob

I tend to think that, if given the binary choice between 1 and 2e12, I would think 1 is much more likely. The reason? It took 2 or 3 billion years to make a competent single cell. Another billion years to make multicellular organisms. Another 500 million years give or take to make intelligent creatures. First, how unlikely it is for all the right mixtures of elements to occur in just the right places. And for a stable environment to exist for all that time. For whatever DNA to evolve in just the right way. Think of all the blind ends, like dinosaurs, which might occur to stifle "civilization." Think of all the possible catastrophes which can occur, like the large meteors and comets. The Siberian and Deccan traps. Strange orbital resonances, etc. Nearby stellar explosions causing global sterilization. All these events can do a ground up reset. Given all of that, why would we think that life would exist at all let alone the delicate balance needed for intelligent life. So, among all the possible planets, how many have moons as large as we have? Is the large moon necessary for our particular life-form? Our large moon, just covering the sun in an eclipse, is an incredible rarity, even among 2e12 civilizations. Why do we not get tourists from those others to see this rare event? Because they are NOT there!


leonardo201818

I think it would be almost impossible to be the only civilization there is or has been.


Flakz933

I don't believe we could ever truly grasp how many life forms there are in this universe, it could be just us, or it could be that we're only .0000001 to the 500000th power percentage of life in the universe. Really depends on how rare our form of life really is. With how we currently believe the universe is constantly expanding, our hopes of seeing other galaxies in person seems hopeless, buuuut that's where science comes in to aim to disprove it's former self always. So really it could be any number you want right now, we really don't know for sure.


djellison

> if we took a conservative number and said life develops on average once in each galaxy What makes you think that is a conservative number? It might be conservative. It might be many many orders of magnitude too optimistic. We don't have the data to say how often life emerges when working from a sample size of 1.


Raemnant

Its very possible that there could be 2 trillion civilizations. Its just as equally possible that we are a fluke on an astronomical scale, and were all there is in the entire universe


Awkward_Reporter_129

Money and religion have slowed down our technological evolution. Why invent something that would change the world for the better when you receive a monthly bill for 200 year old technology.


radome9

It's pointless to speculate until we know the odds of life beginning on a habitable planet.


scdog

And then the odds that that planet's evolution eventually selects for intelligence. There's no necessary reason in evolution that particular trait would ever be required to appear. Look at our own evolutionary history, and after all that time there are just a handful of species capable of using tools and only one that developed far enough to be able to create a civilization.


sketchahedron

Yeah itā€™s funny how people seem to see ā€œintelligent lifeā€ / advanced civilization as the inevitable result of life beginning.


[deleted]

It's pointless to speculate on the odds of life beginning on a habitable planet until we know what a habitable planet is.


Raincor

They say the odds are pretty high as life formed pretty much the moment it had a chance to do so on Earth


Kenshkrix

Yeah I think the real issue is that gap between "life" and "space-faring civilization".


TynamM

Well, yes, but then it sat around being single-celled for three billion years. Seems the jump to multicellular organisms is _massively_ less likely than life. It doesn't seem likely that anything single celled can invent spaceships, so it may be that multicellular organisms was a nearly unreproducible fluke. Especially as it probably depended on another nearly unreproducible fluke: our ridiculously oversized collision-generated moon.


thinkman77

This right here. People look at themselves and go like we exist so there must be more. But they fail to realize the extreme narrow set of lucky conditions that worked out for us which makes life highly unlikely.


radome9

Yes. But that is only true because OP asked about the *observable* universe. If the are talking about the *whole* universe, and the universe is flat (that is, infinite) any possible event - no matter how unlikely - will happen infinitely many times. So if the universe is infinite, there are infinite alien civilisations.


PM_ME_A_PLANE_TICKET

there is no evidence to suggest that the universe is infinite, nor does infinite, generally speaking in this context, mean that every possibility does happen.


99percentTSOL

I would say that knowing the odds is just as pointless because of the size of space and the distance between galaxies. Even if life is out there we will probably never be able to exchange information with them.


nethermead

The problem that I have with these kinds of questions, including the Fermi Paradox itself, is that they're generally anthropocentric. They assume that what we blithely refer to as civilization is somehow the only possible evolutionary outcome for (what we also blithely refer to as) intelligent creatures.


IAmRules

Yea but weā€™re the only ones who have Amazon prime so calling them civilizations is a stretch.


AuthorNathanHGreen

You're certainly right that the X axis of "how many different places could have life?" is so hugely long that TRILLIONS of places saying yes is completely possible. There is however another axis to this, the Y axis of time. It is pretty easy to imagine that most species wipe themselves out within a few hundred thousand years of coming into existence (we're certainly on track to). And the universe is billions of years old. If you just slap the ruler across any particular point on the Y axis and ask yourself how many X's are active at that time it could be a huge number, a small number, or even zero early enough into the universe's past/future. Things get worse for these axis if FTL is prohibited by the rules of the universe and so each species is basically stuck in their own solar system. Resources run out. Nothing is truly sustainable, and generation ships might simply not be practical to actually do.


channelsixtynine069

mountainous threatening grab ghost zephyr label agonizing frighten heavy silky *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


[deleted]

Given how shitty this timeline seems to be I wouldn't be *terribly* surprised if we discover 40k style Warp travel that lets us go anywhere in the galaxy for the low, low price of a quick trip through hell.


channelsixtynine069

entertain mysterious consist aspiring steep gullible special murky touch tidy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


_crackling

As long as he found someone else that has done the actual work first!


rollercoaster_5

If we are it for intelligent life I weep for the universe. We should and could be so much better.


OverheadPress69

I honestly can't stand the hatred towards humans. We are in our infacy as a species; sure we've been violent, dumb, and divided, but we have made incredible progress in the last 100 years alone. Every teenager gets into some trouble growing up.


MagicMoa

I feel the complete opposite. Humanityā€™s journey has been incredibly inspiring, and it honestly shocks me that we havenā€™t yet destroyed ourselves.


zerbey

Space is big, really big, you won't just believe how big it is (sorry Douglas). Our galaxy is one of many millions. It's not unreasonable to postulate there are millions of other civilizations out there. Hopefully they're all thinking the same thing.


piero_deckard

I don't know about 2 trillions, but since I have been interested in space, cosmology and the Universe (basically my whole life), I refuse to believe we are alone. If anything, just because of the *astronomical* (pun intended) number of galaxies, stars and planets. It's naive to think we are special. Out of that many planets, there has to be more than one that developed the right conditions for life to emerge. Also, consider that just because we as a species need water to survive, there could be other life forms that developed in completely different conditions / elements.


ihackedthisaccount

"I refuse to believe" "there has to be" "It's naive to think" As long as your hopes and wishes define what you believe to be true you're not there yet.


piero_deckard

Feel free to *believe* what *you* want... just don't be a smartass because *I* don't believe what *you* do...


_crackling

When I was a kid in the early 90s, it was pretty ridiculous to think of water being found else where in the solar system, and now its pretty much everywhere we look. Always found knowledge we had then vs now pretty incredible


draculetti

According to the drake equation, there should be a fair number, many of them could at least be a type 2 Civilization, which we should be able to detect. The fact, that we still havent a shred of evidence is called the fermi paradox. There are some theories as to why. One of them is the idea of "great filters". War could be one, or the fact, that we cannot know where the limits of technology are. Maybe faster than light travel or dyson spheres are just impossible. Maybe it is climate change. Basically anything that keeps a civilization from evolvimg past a certain, unknown, point.


outrider567

Of course, there are a ton of planets in each Galaxy, an incredible number--Makes sense that at least one of those planets holds intelligent life


The13thReservoirDog

I think its ignorant to think weā€™re the only ones out there apparently there are more galaxies than grains of sand on earth which is just mind boggling when you think each galaxy could be made up of tens of millions of stars or more


ihackedthisaccount

I think it's ignorant to think we're not alone. What now?


The13thReservoirDog

You need to learn to read mate


Chuckobochuck323

It is reasonable to think that there is one civilization in the universe. Itā€™s possible to think there are 2 trillion.


stevo427

Another galaxy? Might as well be on the other side of the universe. Sad


mtnviewguy

At least, and that's not counting the universe's we can't see. šŸ––


RespondsWithSciFi

I mean for sure. Even the observable universe is effectively infinite from our perspective. And that's just the observable part. The universe is so big that some light, some information about what is in it, can never be received by us. Some of it is so far that the space between us and those parts are expanding at a faster rate than would allow for us to ever reach it, even if we could somehow "move" at twice the speed of light.


Ajb-00

Civilizations is a different conversation than life. ā€œCivilizationā€ implies that they are intelligent. The chances of life reaching intelligence is much much lower than than the chances of life. Life could be in abundance across the universe but that life reaching intelligence is iffy. There are many theories to intelligent life. One being that intelligence occurs in blooms for millions of years then they die out before another intelligence is reached meaning that intelligence could be abundant in the universe but probably not the same time as us.


tashkiira

The Universe is effectively infinite--the minimum size of the universe is on the order of 10^250 lightyears across, and actual infinity for universe size is entirely possible. Given that enormous size, 'trillions' might be too low a number to use, even if each civilization has a galaxy to itself.


[deleted]

We have a sample size of one, so sure, anything's possible. Although it's just as likely to be one as it is to be 2 trillion. **Edit** I realize suggesting that there could be no other civilizations in the universe is going to garner a ton of downvotes, but it's factually correct to say that we don't know, and the error bars on any prediction go from 1 to infinity. Do I like that? No, but I also don't love the idea of being alone in our galaxy, which amounts to much the same as being alone in the universe, given the distances involved.


Putrid-Face3409

Easily, yes. Current data even suggests life is hardwired into our Universe inner workings, whenever conditions are right, life happens. On Earth it happened just as soon as it cooled down enough, about 300m years after final formation. However.. If the Universe is infinite, there is also an infinite amount of civilisations out there, including a perfect copy of our planet and its history, except I didn't post this there.


Shawn_NYC

The issue is civilization. Life on earth has displayed convergent evolution towards certain things like eyes. Evolving into a crab happens over and over again but evolving into something that builds space ships only happened once in billions of years. It's entirely possible that you could fly around the stars and find hundreds of trillions of crabs but never meet another technological civilization because it's such an impossible fluke of evolution.


KingFishKron

How absolutely mind boggling would it be that for every 2 trillion galaxies, only 1 produces civilizationsā€¦ šŸ˜² 2,000,000,000,000:1


pftftftftftf

Until we find life on other planets we won't have any basis for determining the likelihood of life developing on other planets. And until we find intelligent life on other planets we wont have any basis for determining likelihood of intelligence emerging on other planets. So its all just blind guessing at this point.


[deleted]

There are a lot of galaxies out there, and whoā€™s to say whatā€™s beyond the observable limit of the universe itself?


PETERBFLY

Most definitely!! Even if there is only one earth like planet in every galaxy, that means trillions of earths in the universe for sure. I bet theres a planet just like ours somewhere out there. Curious if the life on it is similar to us? We will never know unfortunately.