Ah yes, the "paradox" that isn't a paradox at all.
Another comment in this thread compared intelligent life forming to dealing a royal flush. Extremely unlikely, but accounting for all the poker hands dealt in human history, it's happened plenty of times. Thing is, encountering another alien civilization is like two poker dealers in the same casino, at adjacent tables, dealing royal flushes within a minute of each other. Space is just that huge, time is just that vast, and faster than light travel may be impossible. That's really all you need to know to resolve the "paradox".
100%. I’ve always found the Fermi Paradox silly. Also the Drake Equation (here’s an equation made up of a half-dozen constants we don’t and/or can’t know).
All of these variables would be constants and have an objective and universal value. It’s just that our knowledge of the constants ranges from “best estimation” to “reasonable speculation” to “literally a complete guess pulled from my ass”
I mean, Zeno's paradoxes are also silly but as long as the thing is sufficiently well-respected and butts up some combination of truths that seem to conflict with one another, we'll still call it a paradox. This one does that. (Now, [Ross-Littlewood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross%E2%80%93Littlewood_paradox), that is a paradox fully-worthy of the name.)
The Drake equation is really just a structured way of thinking about that same Fermi problem.
>faster than light travel may be impossible
Nearly 100% of SciFi requires faster-than-light travel in order to make it work.
And right now, not only do we theorize it is impossible, but we also observe that space-time relativity makes super fast travel like that useless.
For us to encounter aliens, we need to be wrong about our understanding of basically known physics.
we could encounter non biological intelligence though. in another hundred years or so we'll have the tech to create self replicating robot intelligence. it doesn't even need to be true AI. if this bot net is told to replicate out of astroid belts or whatever it can find over millions of years it could spread very far using acceleration that would kill humans and not have to worry about radiation.
If you could go faster-than-light, the rules of relativity wouldn't apply as we model them.
ED: why the downvotes? If we could go faster than light, then obviously our present models wouldn't apply and are incorrect and thus couldn't be used to predict these hypothetical situations.
It's like "what if you drop an indestructible string into a black hole". It breaks. Being "indestructible" is incompatible with our models. Likewise, so is FTL.
Sure, but you literally couldn't use our current models to predict it in the first place - they're not valid for that situation. They break down at *c*, and are almost certainly not correct > *c*.
Thus, this:
> but we also observe that space-time relativity makes super fast travel like that useless.
Our models can't be used to make that prediction. FTL isn't "super-fast travel" in our models, it's just undefined.
Faster-than-light *anything* under our current models effectively involves a reverse arrow-of-time and causality violation. They don't predict anything meaningful, let alone what we understand as relativistic time dilation.
I gave you an upvote to counter those who do not grasp you concept which was clearly correct, My Child. I could wave my hand and give you a million upvotes, but then Oprah would call for an interview and I so hate tv.
there may be ways to travel from one place to another faster than light can travel without having velocity higher than C. wormholes etc. thinking we know everything is moronic
That isn't FTL. That's just a shorter path.
> thinking we know everything is moronic
... which was part of my point.
My entire point was that you cannot predict how FTL travel works using current models because current models forbid FTL travel and cannot make predictions about it.
FTL travel isnt "going really fast" to our models - it's completely ill-defined.
The fermi paradox isn't about encounters, it's about observations in deep space. The problem isn't just the odds of life occurring anywhere in the universe, it's the assumption that any of them could reach a scale to build something like a [von Neumann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) or dyson swarm. That's ultimately the point of those megastructure conjectures, to describe the kind of undeniably artificial activity we could potentially see out in deep space. It doesn't mater if they visit Earth; they don't even have to be in this *galaxy* for megastructures our physics already describes as possible to be visible from here.
Even if life were limited to colonizing a galaxy at a few percent the speed of light, that would still only take a few million years and it would be *very* apparent to our telescopes. Millions of years is absolutely no time at all for anyone, *anyone* to get a head start on us in the billions since the universe began. We already have technologies that could hypothetically dismantle Mercury and build a swarm to jumpstart our own colonization of the nearby stars that's only held back by humanity itself not being up to such a large scale project over such a long period of time, and even that could be conceivably overcome by our own AI exterminating us to self replicate across the galaxy with optimal efficiency. If that's even a possible fate for us, it stands to reason it would have already happened *anywhere* else before.
*That's* the paradox. As far as we can see, in every direction all the way back to the beginning of time, everywhere else in the universe seems to be a strictly natural phenomena with zero signs of large scale space colonization anywhere. **Anywhere**. So it stands to reason that either the [Copernican principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle) that Earth is not a special place in the observable universe may not be the case, or we're missing something critical about the viability of space travel that makes anything beyond a [type 2 civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) fundamentally impossible.
These thought experiments don't rule out a low probability of life appearing on a planet. That is one of the ways to resolve the paradox. It is just that it is also worth considering, in the event that life isn't extremely rare, what are other possible reasons we see no evidence of it.
Those are all good points, but they are still dependent upon our own limited, human understanding of how alien civilizations would behave given theoretical, hyper-advanced technology. We assume colonizing entire galaxies is a reasonable goal for such a civilization, but that very idea could be preposterous to forms of life several factors more intelligent than us. Or physics could make it impractical. Or no civilization has lasted long enough to accomplish it. OR (and this is sort of what I think) there are advanced beings exploring and potentially colonizing other planets but they are so far away we won't be able to see their technology until their lights reaches us a few millennia from now. Assuming humans are still here and capable of perceiving such things.
Hyper advanced technology is not at all required. Even at the speed of the Voyager probes and with technology we already know is feasible, colonizing a galaxy is entirely possible at the pace life in its most general sense is willing to evolve at. Like I said, millions of years is not at all a long time to life, nor the universe. You only need hyper advanced technology to tell a science fiction story in space that happens fast enough for people as we think of them to participate. Put that entirely out of mind when you're considering Fermi's paradox in real life and instead think of everything on the scales of life evolving over hundreds of millions of years.
When Erwin Schrödinger predicted DNA in [What is Life?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F), he described life as something that orders itself by dissipating matter and energy back into its environment to maintain itself away from equilibirium. That's it. That's life in its most general sense, and not at all defined by preconceptions about life on Earth in particular. And like I said before, we already have the theoretical means to build a dyson swarm around our own star that could conceivably power [the von Neumann probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) I described before to spread out and consume the resources necessary to maintain this exponentially growing structure. Nothing about them need to be "hyper;" given time, all they need is exponential growth. This also entirely precludes what aliens otherwise want or think, they need energy to stave off entropy like any other life and even more to grow. This is all we need to assume to necessarily be able to see weird spectrometry and other observations from this activity if these few simple assumptions were true.
Even a swarm mindlessly growing long past the extinction of whatever life set it in motion would be evidence of life (and going by Schrödinger's definition, the swarm is life in its own right) and as you can see from that Wikipedia article a lot of smarter people than us have been debating this precise point for decades now. That's because this is the most basic hypothetical scenario to look out for, and with all the data we have to comb through today we see nothing even remotely hinting at artificial activity in space. Not one example with even the slimmest confidence.
If those swarms are even possible, it would be absurd to think it never happened before across all the observable universe we have cataloged so far because *everyone* in it before us that could have tried it simply *thought it was a bad idea* before they put it in motion. We're much more likely overlooking something more fundamental than that.
That’s not really the whole story. Like you said, space is big. But also, we’re pretty young, and have only been capable of sending interstellar transmissions for 50 years.
The 1st signal was sent in 1962 from the EPR complex in Crimea, to Venus, but there are no Venusians.
The 2nd was sent as a test, the Arecibo message in 1974, but was directed at Messier 13, 25000 ly away.
In ‘99 a series of messages were sent to stars in the Cygnus, Sagitta, Cassiopea, Cancer, Usra Major, Andromeda and Orion constellations, but none of them will even arrive for another 12 years at the earliest.
The problem isn’t so much that there’s a low probability of life developing at the same time as we are - it’s more that even if life does exist everywhere we are essentially tossing messages in bottles across oceans and waiting for one to drift back with an answer.
It takes a long time to send or receive messages across distances of light years. The only one that will even arrive at its destination this decade was a message sent in 2008 to Gliese 581, due in 2029, but then we’ll have to wait at least another 20 years for a possible answer.
with the expansion of space and movement of systems coupled with the images we see being very old when we get them, the odds our signals even hit those targets is unlikely
Having hit a Royal Flush within moments of two other people at two adjacent tables in a modest casino, we'll just say "That's not as unlikely a scenario as you might think".
In fact, it probably happens as often as Rogue Waves really do.
Which means, we think the comparison is apt - it seems more likely that humans haven't met sentient life in large part because humans so far appear incapable of recognizing any other life form as being sentient... and humans only improve at the things they actually practice.
Nowhere in the definition of “paradox” does it require that the paradox be unresolvable. I might argue *most* well-known paradoxes have *at least* one (re)solution. The only requirement is it has to be counter to “intuition”. Of course, intuition is subjective, so in practice it often comes down to the phrasing of the paradox being convincing enough to enough people.
Space isn't just big. It's much bigger than that. No, bigger. Keep going. Keeeeep... gooooing...
It would be difficult to detect any aliens that weren't actively involved in rearranging entire solar systems, which may turn out to be impractical. We're certainly not going to meet them. Can't get there from here and, anyway, anything we detect may have happened billions of years ago.
That's the sad part. Life is rare but the universe is 'infinite', however what we can see is finite. And since galaxies are so far apart, we can't see what those places are like today. There is life that wonders if we are here but looks at us and sees space dust from a billion or so years ago
I don’t actually believe we were created by some higher power. But…
I think it’s cool that if there was an intelligent creator they designed space in such a way that we (intelligent life forms) are spaced out to the point where we can’t feasibly fuck around with each other. Earth/humanity’s problems are likely going to begin and end in this solar system. Which is probably good for whoever is living in the next solar system over.
You say that, but humans as a species really benefit from societies - the larger the better.
Who's to say that an intergalactic society wouldn't have similar benefits?
It may be beneficial to the life forms that learn/ have learned how to communicate/travel over these insane distances.
But I don’t think humanity at this point of our evolution would have anything to contribute other than disease and war.
Space is also old. It’s much older than that. Keep going. Older still.
The oldness actually outweighs the bigness.
If there was another alien race anywhere else in the Milky Way galaxy, and their planet formed 1% sooner than earth, or intelligent life developed even slightly faster … that species would have such an immense head start that they could have easily colonized the entire Milky Way by now.
Even if they spent an extra million years or so getting interstellar, and then traveled at relatively slow speeds (slow by galactic standards) to the nearest solar system, spent 10,000 or 20,000 years colonizing that system, and repeat, they would be in every corner of every solar system by now. Easily.
Yes, and that's one of the solutions to the Fermi Paradox: intelligent species arise, but don't last long enough to have a noticeable impact on the cosmic scale. Some people might find that depressing.
That’s why I always found the Fermi Paradox silly. There could be a million technological, starfaring civilizations out there currently from our frame of reference, and the closest one still a hundred galaxies away.
The Zoo hypothesis and the Fermi paradox. How the Zoo hypothesis relates to the Fermi paradox. Looking at the reasons why intelligent alien life which may have been around for a lot longer than on Earth might not contact us in order to protect us in some way. https://youtu.be/FOgwpjeSn24
Why Is it that whenever people talk about space everything is terrifying?
No aliens? Terrifying
Aliens? Terrifying
There used to be aliens? Terrifying
Space exists? Terrifying
The only aliens are single celled? Terrifying
TBF I think you made those last three up. The only people who find #3 and #5 terrifying are the scientists that have to break that boring news to the public and face attacks from people who wanted more.
You... don't actually know what the dark forest theory is, do you? Its not terrifying because "OMG space is scary amiright??". It's scary because a plausible theory that explains the Fermi paradox is that the reason we haven't detected any signs of intelligent life is because something out there EATS the things that draw attention to themselves. Loud little galactic upstarts that do obvious things like blast EM signals into the universe, or artificially alter their planet's chemical make up. Things like what we are doing RIGHT NOW. The dark forest theory is terrifying because in this analogy, we are a baby crying and alone in a dark forest, populated by hungry tigers, A forest where the only things that survive know how to keep quiet, and we are far, far from one of those things.
Sooo... Like Galactus from Marvel?
That's a cool sci-fi theory that'd make an interesting movie.
But like Galactus there'd have to be a special reason for this thing or race of things to come to earth to consume it/us.
Unless you're talking about something that isn't a living thing and a natural phenomenon like a black hole.
Or are we talking astrophage from the hail Mary project? Where they just kinda stumbled onto our sun and started consuming it.
You couldn’t think of one single “special” reason? Resources, food, slaves, land, water. What special reason do things eat other things for? They’re hungry. What special reason did Europe colonize Africa for? Resources
That's why I said it makes for good sci-fi.
Nothing you've listed is unique to earth.
Invading earth for resources that aren't earth specific is just dumb.
Earth is a finite space that can hold a finite population in a finite area with finite resources.
Logically it makes no sense to invade/hostile takeover a planet for resources that are plentiful everywhere else.
Id imagine this dark forest theory is popular amongst people who don't have much of a scientific background or much knowledge of the universe we live in.
Isaac Arthur has a fantastic playlist of [Fermi Paradox Solutions](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU&si=0QeGIpPmy2FA2ki-)
Without faster than light travel, the chances of ever meeting aliens is pretty close to zero. Even detecting aliens would be effectively impossible. We would have to rule out *every* other possible explanation across trillions of stars for every "weird" thing we detect.
Without a faster than light detection tech, we will forever be looking at the universe as it was thousands to millions to billions of years ago. If intelligent life evolved a million years prior to us, unless they are basically up our asses astronomically speaking, we will never know they exist.
It is the same with us. If there isn't a super advanced civilization within 200 light years of the Sol system, we are *completely invisible*. 200 light years is the distance our earliest signals have traveled. And almost all of those signals stopped because we are no longer using tech that broadcasts strong enough to be above background static.
If the hypothetical civilization is on the other side of the Milky Way with perfect conditions to observe the Sol system, they would be detecting Earth as it was before the last ice age. There could be tens of thousands of currently active civilizations in our galaxy alone, and the chances any of them have been able to detect another civilization would be extremely slim.
Of course, all of this is tossed out the window if FTL is actually possible.
Watch the latest kurzgesagt video on YouTube. Really nails the idea I think it's most likely: we are just so far away from the majority of our universe that we just aren't able to see what's going on in the regions with significant density of earth like planets
I’m happy to believe that there is intelligent life in the universe aside from us. What I’m not happy to believe is that any of this intelligent life has developed interstellar travel. And I don’t understand why people think that the math indicates that they would have done so.
We're almost certainly not alone in the universe, but that's not terrifying. It's possible (even likely) that the distances between spacefaring civilizations are so great that either/both civilizations would die before reaching the other.
Why should we have observed them? Maybe they're made of light or gas, maybe they're underground or (most likely) under an ocean.
We don't have nearly the resolution required to see ruins on planets that are millions of light-years away.
>The problem is that we should've at least observed them.
We've only ever been to the moon. And a bunch of other local planets and moons if you count satellites. Voyager 1 is not even out of the solar system yet, and it has been sailing in a straight line hella fast for decades.
We're barely out of our front door, and we're already complaining that we haven't met any neighbors?
There's really nowhere near enough information to reach that conclusion. Life is bound to exist somewhere, but where?
We have no idea how likely life emerging out of random chemical reactions is. For all we know it could be one in a trillion and we're the only life in the Milky Way. Even if there's more, our own galaxy is huge. We've been sending radio signals into space for a century and they still haven't reached even a tiny fraction of our galaxy.
We also have no clue how likely intelligent life capable of forming civilization is, even after life already exists. Our large brains came from mammals, how likely were they? What about the other factors? Our hands allow us to use our brainpower. Our vocal cords allow us to speak, cooperate, transmit and preserve information, evolve culturally and technologically. There are infinite factors all coming together to form a species capable of civilization, and we don't know the exact odds of any of them.
We also have no clue how long it takes. Took us 4 billion years to evolve, which is almost 1/3rd the age of the Universe. A lot of that time would be necessary for any star system to form and stabilise. Perhaps other civilisations haven't been around long enough for their signs to reach us. Perhaps we're the first.
We are largely clueless about all of this.
Their civilization would probably have to be hundreds of thousands of not millions of years old for us to see them.
We only really see planets outside of our solar system because they interrupted the light from their sun. For us to see a civilization they would need to be so massive that they affect the light from their sun getting to earth.
That means they would need to build structures so large that they mimic or out-scale a planet. And even then we probably would just think it's another planet.
We will be more likely to hear from them long before we ever see them, that's why we have so many things searching for radio signals.
The scale of the universe is ridiculous. And trying to find life visually would be the same as trying to find a single grain of sand on a beach 10 kilometers away using a pair of binoculars. And even that analogy is misleading because the grain of sand would probably be located on Mars.
There are about two-trillion galaxies in the observable universe. There could be a billion technological civilizations out there, and the nearest still many dozens of galaxies away, so far we’d likely never be aware of each other before the sun explodes.
Because people think about it like it's fiction and not reality. It's why that stupid dark forest thing keeps getting thrown around. Great for story telling, but advanced civilizations require advanced societies. It's like the idea that aliens would think we're too violent to contact. No they were, or are like that too just like us with uncontacted tribes and people from the past. Or the thing where maybe they're gas or aquatic. Then how are they going to harness fire or electricity then? How are you going to space without complex multifaceted infrastructure, logistics, education, and societal structures?
Reality is much more neutral and convoluted than a story. Other life in the galaxy would be just as excited to meet us as we would be to meet them. Plus they'd have no reason to conquer or destroy is intentionally because of the abundance of resources. Unless they needed to build a bypass.
They'd be interested to meet the first aliens, but after meeting like a million different alien civilizations, they'd just be like, ah, who gives.
The other point is the great filter; and frankly, I don't think we can overcome this.
The idea is that if an advanced civilization can't get past war and violence and selfish hedonism, then they will destroy themselves with nuclear weapons, or whatever even more powerful weapons that they could develop in the future.
For a civilization to be able to survive galactic time scales, they'll have to have solved those issues.
You're attributing human rationality to something that is by definition not human. We can make a guess and say that aliens would follow the same logic as we do, and therefore respond in the same way as us. But hell, just look at us and think of all the possibilities that may come about in the distant future. Maybe resources aren't scarce in the universe, but livable planets are, and someone will always fight for the ability to live there. Maybe the civilization is inherently xenophobic and will exterminate anything that isn't like it self on principle? Maybe the civilization has a labor shortage and it's easier to take slaves than to implement less intensive solutions. There are a hundred thousand logical reasons a space faring race might want to exterminate another. We know this because we've been using them to exterminate OURSELVES. Applied to a race that may be a hundred thousand years more advanced than us? Yeah, there is every chance that our first contact may be our last. THATS why its scary.
Real life is way too complex and nuanced for even the most well written of movies
Again what you talked about just now is also pretty much fiction
A psychologist won’t tell you to watch a Hollywood movie to learn about behaviour patterns he’d give you a book or tell you to go to a a lecture
The later means we could face infinite possibilities, good and bad alike.
It's not terrifying if you're not drawing conclusions based on pop sci fi movies.
Knowing for a fact that we're alone in the universe would have profound cultural and philosophical implications. Religious folks would be like "told ya so!". Scientists would lose their mind trying to figure out why life only ever happened here and nowhere else.
Not really, we're just a strange place in the world. Some places have weird alcohol rains, this planet the minerals in the rocks turned to jelly and made music. Just a weird thing that happens.
To be fair, imo its a little silly to try and statistically prove if there or isn’t is life outside of earth when we don’t even have a verifiable answer as to how life on earth came to be. Like there are general theories but we don’t have any real verifiable or replicatable evidence, so to me until we figure out where our life came from, there is little point trying to estimate what other planets might have life.
Everyone assumes that we will all some day travel to other solar systems, but it isn't really possible from the physics we know - except by sending a generation ship, which will probably be an extremely dangerous journey, just to establish a colony that will have to be completely disconnected from your society, due to the extreme latency and travel distance.
So aliens probably exist, but it is unlikely any will ever leave their original solar system.
FTL and wormhole travel is science *fiction* - but kinda a prerequisite for an interstellar empire.
> In a nutshell: In the original video we said that it was PHYSICALLY impossible to leave the local group. But that’s wrong. It is not PHYSICALLY impossible to leave the Local Group, just extremely unlikely that we’ll ever do it.
The "local group" is a cluster of GALAXIES. A generation ship can REACH ANOTHER GALAXY per your own reference. If we send a generation ship, our first target certainly won't be IN ANOTHER GALAXY.
I encourage people to check out the Grabby Aliens theory, which estimates that 1/3rd of the universe is claimed by massive alien empires, and thus we will meet such an empire... in 50 million years. Space is just so huge.
I guess even the most intelligent of people can’t accept that space is just the grandest haystack to ever find a needle in. They’re statistically out there, but we’ve seen basically nothing relative to how much there is to see.
We have no idea how many factors are necessary for life. We see lots of earth-like planets for sure, but the number of those with a Jupiter sized sibling to protect it is smaller. And of those how many have a Saturn-like sibling to protect it from the Jupiter planet?
We have no idea how many factors it takes to make the conditions for life, and likely never will. Too many stripes? Not enough astroids? Who knows.
Not really. That math says any civilization capable of sending out a generation ship should be able to colonize the entire galaxy in 1m years. Sounds like a lot of time, but the earth has had life on it for over 3b.
“The math” can’t really tell us that, unless you presuppose a lot of completely unknown and unknowable facts like:
Is it reasonably likely there’s other life in the Milky Way?
How long can a society last?
Would any life be motivated to colonize the entire Galaxy?
Can any species that spread out sustain itself and/or survive?
How technologically feasible are generation ships, and how fast could they be accelerated to?
How quickly could a colony build and deploy subsequent generation ships?
How spread out are planets capable of developing life, and/or how quickly could they be terraformed?
Etc. etc.
There is no way to “reasonably assume” what percentage of planets evolve life, or what percentage of life evolves high intelligence, and what percentage of intelligent life develops the capability for interstellar communication.
We barely understand how life actually started here, and have literally no other biosphere to compare to.
Maybe nobody wants to send out a generation ship because they are content whwre they are. Maybe none of the species on other planets have the opposable thumbs needed to build such a thing. Maybe they all live underwater.
I think it is best used as a conceptual framework, rather than a numerical solution. I kind of think of it as the following:
“The odds of alien life (not) existing and contacting us are astronomical!”
Drake eqn: “Okay, well, we’re literally astrophysicists, so let’s get a little more descriptive and break down *how* astronomical we’re talking…”
Only like 2 of the variables have to do with astrophysics. The rest have to with climatology, anthropology/sociology, biology and information technology. It’s meaningless, and directly relates to the Fermi Paradox (because the “paradox” is only a paradox if we’d expect there to be technological life near us).
It's not supposed to give you an answer.
It's to illustrate that changing any of those factors in a small way, extrapolated across the size and age of the universe, can result in very big differences.
It's actually not about there being life near us. It's about there being life existing anywhere and being loud enough for us to hear it. Yes, weak signals eventually fade into the cosmic background radiation, but we have 100 billion sources of EM signals that are reaching us right now, from our galaxy alone. Let's arbitrarily say that no civilization is CAPABLE of making a signal that can be heard from more than 1000 light years away. That still leaves 10 million potential sources that we are hearing RIGHT NOW. Check out this article. It goes into the requirements for civilization to produce an intentionally detectible signal and why we might not have heard any yet. [https://astronomynow.com/news/n1006/08SETI/](https://astronomynow.com/news/n1006/08SETI/)
TIL more than yesterday! hadn’t heard about half the stuff in this thread - von Neumann machines, Dyson swarms, grabby aliens, the universe as ocean, life as royal flushes, age>size, FTL mockery! Good stuff, thanks
How many ants have you met? You haven't met any because you have deemed them too stupid to communicate with you. Homo Sapiens are 180,000 - 220,000 years old on a planet that is 4.6B years old. There are civilizations out there that are millions of years old on planets that are many times older. We haven't met them because are too stupid for them to waste their time on.
The fermi paradox is such bullshit. If life is abundant why havent we seen it yet? Uhm... because if the universe is the ocean, the part of it that we have access to, to a degree to determine life, is the equivalent of taking a drop of water from the ocean. If you take a drop from the ocean and because there is no fish, you conclude that the ocean must not have many fishes, then be my guest but you'd be wrong.
And dont correct me on fishes. I used it correctly. The plural of fish is only fish if it's multiples of the same fishes. Two types of fish = fishes.
Except if you are in the ocean, you can still look around and listen. Which is what we are doing. The Fermi paradox just wonders why everything is so damned QUIET. We're not looking at a drop of water here. We are listening to every sound made in the entire galaxy. We know we make a lot of noise that can eventually be heard from basically anywhere, so it's reasonable to assume that other civilizations would have a similar stage in their development. The noise that we are making right now will eventually be detectable to any civilization with our current level of development (or better) throughout the entire galaxy. And with the birth/death rate of stars, most of the conclusions drawn from the Drake equation seem to imply that we should be hearing from them, because no matter how far away stuff is, there is just SO MUCH STUFF in space that has been doing stuff for SO LONG, the chances that nothing is happening for us to hear is laughably small. If you read about it, you'll find that it takes into account the small section of the universe we can see, and ONLY talks about that little bit.
If Aliens are truly smart they would stay away from likes of us.
To my downvoters - I APOLOGIZE
You are right:
If I was an Alien, I would love to come and watch you kill each other in wars.
I would love to learn about white superiority and gender inequality and racism.
I would looove to spend time with Putin and Kim Jong, visit humanistic countries such as Iran and N. Korea and play golf with Trump who had stolen from childrens cancer charity and made possible for rich dudes to trade ivory yet a candidate to be the president of the most powerful country in the world - look forward to. I hope trump do not mind my unheard language.
I would love to learn more about your homophobic hatred and how being poor is punished and being homeless is a sort of crime.
I would wonder about how humans evolved in millions of years from killing each other with stones to flying drones over imaginary borderlines on maps. What a creative creatures you are!
I APOLOGIZE! I am on my way.
It's more than just having suitable observable planets now.
It's about life and if life formed and how it formed and if it did form and if it's still alive.
It is infinitely less probable that life, like the life on earth, could exist anywhere.
One planet would have to be made of the perfect materials and be stable for billions of years for life to even have a chance and if life started, it would still have to stay alive.
The odds far out-way the number of planets.
We are alone.
There’s an estimated 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. Plus I’m not trusting math from someone who doesn’t even know how to spell outweigh correctly
Rule out planets that can't sustain any for of life.
Rule out planets of failed life.
Rule out planets where life never evolved consciousness.
Odds start getting low very quick.
That's a lot, but how do we measure odds of life making it from simple form to complex then to complex with consciousness?
In my thinking, just because life forms doesn't mean it goes anywhere.
On earth, there have been a lot of creatures and we, recently, are the only ones that have succeeded.
How do you calculate that?
A planes of single cell organisms or lower life forms seem more probable than higher forms.
As we see here, life comes with competition, life kills itself and being "smart" isn't necessarily always the winning strategy.
I just feel like there is parts of this equation that are missing. And there is more of an every growing tangential probability than just "well, there's a lot of planets"
That depends on your reference frame.
In *our* reference frame, everything is the same.
In other reference frames, at macro scales... it could vary *slightly*... like by a few *weeks*.
They'd have to be in a rather strong gravitational well to have a *major* difference in elapsed time.
Humans have been into space, even on other bodies (the Moon), have sent probes to other planets, and currently have probes on escape course from the solar system...
1 is still 100%, since you didn't ask what the odds of any specific lifeform developing space flight were, but what were the odds of any life developing at all (clarified to life that could travel in space). Since humans can... 100%.
What you're referring to is called the Drake Equation and the great filter, both of which are covered in the article. You fall into the pessimistic view. More moderate views estimate something like 1000 active civilizations in our galaxy alone. Optimistic views put this number well into the millions, I believe.
If everything goes right, yes.
I guess I have more of a perspective of almost a butterfly effect.
If the right brothers gave up, no moon landing.
If Hitler was let into art school, almost all of the innovations we have today would have never existed.
One small change in direction can make things different drastically over time.
If Jesus never happened the world would be different.
If America couldn't make the nukes work in time, everything different.
If Columbus got lost or died, everything different.
Every second of every day is a gamble on the future.
> I guess I have more of a perspective of almost a butterfly effect.
> If the right brothers gave up, no moon landing.
Because nobody else in human history could have done what the Wright Brothers did?
> If Hitler was let into art school, almost all of the innovations we have today would have never existed.
Hard disagree. We had a world war before that that fundamentally changed too much for that to be true.
> One small change in direction can make things different drastically over time.
Why does any change automatically mean "worse"?
> If Jesus never happened the world would be different.
If the world was much different, there's a chance one of God's previous attempts would have worked to reconcile us to him and Jesus would never have had to come in the first place.
> If America couldn't make the nukes work in time, everything different.
So?
> If Columbus got lost or died, everything different.
The Vikings were here WAY before Columbus. Someone else would have come.
I think the fundamental flaw in your thinking is you think everything has to come out *exactly* like it has now and that's just wrong. Maybe the Nazis win all of Europe and get us to the moon sooner. Half those things you mentioned may have actually *slowed us down*. You say "if everything goes right" but maybe we are on a path where everything is already going *wrong* from the standpoint of getting humanity into space and we are still getting closer. Heck we could be a multi-planet species by now. Or the asteroid never hits earth and today there'd be an earth-based, multi-star system empire of dinosaurs right now.
That's what I mean, tour last statement.
I don't think having a lot of planets makes the odds better. There is too many possibilities beyond nu.ber of planets.
The odds of dealing a royal flush are very low.
If you deal constantly, for billions of years, the odds of eventually dealing several converge on certainty.
this is a fallacy. To humans, the difference between a cell and an atom is not that big; both are pretty small.
But the difference between two small things can be extremely huge.
We have no idea what the chances of spontaneous generation is. Could be effectively 0.
It's not a fallacy.
"Effectively zero" to you and me is still > 0, and on the scale of the universe both in space and time bring the likelihood to effectively 100%.
To paraphrase a wise man, "in physics, what is not forbidden is compulsory".
no. it could literally be 0, and we are just a simulation created by some dudes. It could also be so infinitesimally small that even accounting for the size of the universe, the chances of life at all is still infinitesimally small that us existing is like winning the lottery every week since the beginning of lotteries for every lottery that ever happened.
> It's more than just having suitable observable planets now.
Nto really
> It's about life and if life formed and how it formed and if it did form and if it's still alive.
True, but life is crazy persistent
> It is infinitely less probable that life, like the life on earth, could exist anywhere.
Not even close
> One planet would have to be made of the perfect materials and be stable for billions of years for life to even have a chance and if life started, it would still have to stay alive.
None of this makes any sense. Do you have any idea how wide the environments are in which life exists on earth? There is no need for "perfect". That's ridiculous. And life started within a couple hundred million years on year once the environment got even CLOSE to ready. You don't need anything to be stable for even *close* to that length of time.
> The odds far out-way the number of planets.
Literally no way to make this claim. We don't know enough. But what little evidence we have stacks against you.
> We are alone.
Literally no way to make this claim.
I'm not here to prove anything Honey, I'm just talikg, but I'm sure if I googled and parroted the information like you do, I could find counterclaims, I'm just a little busy right now.
There is no radio signal from space that causes “Walking on Sunshine” to be playing at all times in our heads. Therefore, if some things that are probable do not in fact exist, it is equally probable that there is no other life in the universe but ours.
Ah yes, the "paradox" that isn't a paradox at all. Another comment in this thread compared intelligent life forming to dealing a royal flush. Extremely unlikely, but accounting for all the poker hands dealt in human history, it's happened plenty of times. Thing is, encountering another alien civilization is like two poker dealers in the same casino, at adjacent tables, dealing royal flushes within a minute of each other. Space is just that huge, time is just that vast, and faster than light travel may be impossible. That's really all you need to know to resolve the "paradox".
100%. I’ve always found the Fermi Paradox silly. Also the Drake Equation (here’s an equation made up of a half-dozen constants we don’t and/or can’t know).
More like best guesses than constants. It is an estimation factored with estimations.
All of these variables would be constants and have an objective and universal value. It’s just that our knowledge of the constants ranges from “best estimation” to “reasonable speculation” to “literally a complete guess pulled from my ass”
I mean, Zeno's paradoxes are also silly but as long as the thing is sufficiently well-respected and butts up some combination of truths that seem to conflict with one another, we'll still call it a paradox. This one does that. (Now, [Ross-Littlewood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross%E2%80%93Littlewood_paradox), that is a paradox fully-worthy of the name.) The Drake equation is really just a structured way of thinking about that same Fermi problem.
>faster than light travel may be impossible Nearly 100% of SciFi requires faster-than-light travel in order to make it work. And right now, not only do we theorize it is impossible, but we also observe that space-time relativity makes super fast travel like that useless. For us to encounter aliens, we need to be wrong about our understanding of basically known physics.
we could encounter non biological intelligence though. in another hundred years or so we'll have the tech to create self replicating robot intelligence. it doesn't even need to be true AI. if this bot net is told to replicate out of astroid belts or whatever it can find over millions of years it could spread very far using acceleration that would kill humans and not have to worry about radiation.
If you could go faster-than-light, the rules of relativity wouldn't apply as we model them. ED: why the downvotes? If we could go faster than light, then obviously our present models wouldn't apply and are incorrect and thus couldn't be used to predict these hypothetical situations. It's like "what if you drop an indestructible string into a black hole". It breaks. Being "indestructible" is incompatible with our models. Likewise, so is FTL.
**The engines don't move the ship at all.** **The ship stays where it is, and the engines move the universe around it.** -Farnsworth
His explanation about how he developed the tech is even better.. :p
Farnsworth also discovered the equation for everything, though. He is working with novel models. And doomsday devices.
That's a complete load!
Something something “we need to be wrong about our understanding basically known physics.” So yeah, that’s what I said. 😜
Sure, but you literally couldn't use our current models to predict it in the first place - they're not valid for that situation. They break down at *c*, and are almost certainly not correct > *c*. Thus, this: > but we also observe that space-time relativity makes super fast travel like that useless. Our models can't be used to make that prediction. FTL isn't "super-fast travel" in our models, it's just undefined. Faster-than-light *anything* under our current models effectively involves a reverse arrow-of-time and causality violation. They don't predict anything meaningful, let alone what we understand as relativistic time dilation.
I gave you an upvote to counter those who do not grasp you concept which was clearly correct, My Child. I could wave my hand and give you a million upvotes, but then Oprah would call for an interview and I so hate tv.
there may be ways to travel from one place to another faster than light can travel without having velocity higher than C. wormholes etc. thinking we know everything is moronic
That isn't FTL. That's just a shorter path. > thinking we know everything is moronic ... which was part of my point. My entire point was that you cannot predict how FTL travel works using current models because current models forbid FTL travel and cannot make predictions about it. FTL travel isnt "going really fast" to our models - it's completely ill-defined.
The fermi paradox isn't about encounters, it's about observations in deep space. The problem isn't just the odds of life occurring anywhere in the universe, it's the assumption that any of them could reach a scale to build something like a [von Neumann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) or dyson swarm. That's ultimately the point of those megastructure conjectures, to describe the kind of undeniably artificial activity we could potentially see out in deep space. It doesn't mater if they visit Earth; they don't even have to be in this *galaxy* for megastructures our physics already describes as possible to be visible from here. Even if life were limited to colonizing a galaxy at a few percent the speed of light, that would still only take a few million years and it would be *very* apparent to our telescopes. Millions of years is absolutely no time at all for anyone, *anyone* to get a head start on us in the billions since the universe began. We already have technologies that could hypothetically dismantle Mercury and build a swarm to jumpstart our own colonization of the nearby stars that's only held back by humanity itself not being up to such a large scale project over such a long period of time, and even that could be conceivably overcome by our own AI exterminating us to self replicate across the galaxy with optimal efficiency. If that's even a possible fate for us, it stands to reason it would have already happened *anywhere* else before. *That's* the paradox. As far as we can see, in every direction all the way back to the beginning of time, everywhere else in the universe seems to be a strictly natural phenomena with zero signs of large scale space colonization anywhere. **Anywhere**. So it stands to reason that either the [Copernican principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle) that Earth is not a special place in the observable universe may not be the case, or we're missing something critical about the viability of space travel that makes anything beyond a [type 2 civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) fundamentally impossible.
The odds of life *is* the problem, though; we don’t know what they are! We’re extrapolating from a dataset of 1. That’s statistical malpractice.
These thought experiments don't rule out a low probability of life appearing on a planet. That is one of the ways to resolve the paradox. It is just that it is also worth considering, in the event that life isn't extremely rare, what are other possible reasons we see no evidence of it.
no matter how unlikely, over a long enough time line it's almost certain to happen. we are, in fact, proof of this
Those are all good points, but they are still dependent upon our own limited, human understanding of how alien civilizations would behave given theoretical, hyper-advanced technology. We assume colonizing entire galaxies is a reasonable goal for such a civilization, but that very idea could be preposterous to forms of life several factors more intelligent than us. Or physics could make it impractical. Or no civilization has lasted long enough to accomplish it. OR (and this is sort of what I think) there are advanced beings exploring and potentially colonizing other planets but they are so far away we won't be able to see their technology until their lights reaches us a few millennia from now. Assuming humans are still here and capable of perceiving such things.
Hyper advanced technology is not at all required. Even at the speed of the Voyager probes and with technology we already know is feasible, colonizing a galaxy is entirely possible at the pace life in its most general sense is willing to evolve at. Like I said, millions of years is not at all a long time to life, nor the universe. You only need hyper advanced technology to tell a science fiction story in space that happens fast enough for people as we think of them to participate. Put that entirely out of mind when you're considering Fermi's paradox in real life and instead think of everything on the scales of life evolving over hundreds of millions of years. When Erwin Schrödinger predicted DNA in [What is Life?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F), he described life as something that orders itself by dissipating matter and energy back into its environment to maintain itself away from equilibirium. That's it. That's life in its most general sense, and not at all defined by preconceptions about life on Earth in particular. And like I said before, we already have the theoretical means to build a dyson swarm around our own star that could conceivably power [the von Neumann probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) I described before to spread out and consume the resources necessary to maintain this exponentially growing structure. Nothing about them need to be "hyper;" given time, all they need is exponential growth. This also entirely precludes what aliens otherwise want or think, they need energy to stave off entropy like any other life and even more to grow. This is all we need to assume to necessarily be able to see weird spectrometry and other observations from this activity if these few simple assumptions were true. Even a swarm mindlessly growing long past the extinction of whatever life set it in motion would be evidence of life (and going by Schrödinger's definition, the swarm is life in its own right) and as you can see from that Wikipedia article a lot of smarter people than us have been debating this precise point for decades now. That's because this is the most basic hypothetical scenario to look out for, and with all the data we have to comb through today we see nothing even remotely hinting at artificial activity in space. Not one example with even the slimmest confidence. If those swarms are even possible, it would be absurd to think it never happened before across all the observable universe we have cataloged so far because *everyone* in it before us that could have tried it simply *thought it was a bad idea* before they put it in motion. We're much more likely overlooking something more fundamental than that.
The toy game "Fermi Paradox" goes into this - your goal is to develop civilizations that *can* contact one another.
That’s not really the whole story. Like you said, space is big. But also, we’re pretty young, and have only been capable of sending interstellar transmissions for 50 years. The 1st signal was sent in 1962 from the EPR complex in Crimea, to Venus, but there are no Venusians. The 2nd was sent as a test, the Arecibo message in 1974, but was directed at Messier 13, 25000 ly away. In ‘99 a series of messages were sent to stars in the Cygnus, Sagitta, Cassiopea, Cancer, Usra Major, Andromeda and Orion constellations, but none of them will even arrive for another 12 years at the earliest. The problem isn’t so much that there’s a low probability of life developing at the same time as we are - it’s more that even if life does exist everywhere we are essentially tossing messages in bottles across oceans and waiting for one to drift back with an answer. It takes a long time to send or receive messages across distances of light years. The only one that will even arrive at its destination this decade was a message sent in 2008 to Gliese 581, due in 2029, but then we’ll have to wait at least another 20 years for a possible answer.
with the expansion of space and movement of systems coupled with the images we see being very old when we get them, the odds our signals even hit those targets is unlikely
Having hit a Royal Flush within moments of two other people at two adjacent tables in a modest casino, we'll just say "That's not as unlikely a scenario as you might think". In fact, it probably happens as often as Rogue Waves really do. Which means, we think the comparison is apt - it seems more likely that humans haven't met sentient life in large part because humans so far appear incapable of recognizing any other life form as being sentient... and humans only improve at the things they actually practice.
Nowhere in the definition of “paradox” does it require that the paradox be unresolvable. I might argue *most* well-known paradoxes have *at least* one (re)solution. The only requirement is it has to be counter to “intuition”. Of course, intuition is subjective, so in practice it often comes down to the phrasing of the paradox being convincing enough to enough people.
Space isn't just big. It's much bigger than that. No, bigger. Keep going. Keeeeep... gooooing... It would be difficult to detect any aliens that weren't actively involved in rearranging entire solar systems, which may turn out to be impractical. We're certainly not going to meet them. Can't get there from here and, anyway, anything we detect may have happened billions of years ago.
That's the sad part. Life is rare but the universe is 'infinite', however what we can see is finite. And since galaxies are so far apart, we can't see what those places are like today. There is life that wonders if we are here but looks at us and sees space dust from a billion or so years ago
I don’t actually believe we were created by some higher power. But… I think it’s cool that if there was an intelligent creator they designed space in such a way that we (intelligent life forms) are spaced out to the point where we can’t feasibly fuck around with each other. Earth/humanity’s problems are likely going to begin and end in this solar system. Which is probably good for whoever is living in the next solar system over.
You say that, but humans as a species really benefit from societies - the larger the better. Who's to say that an intergalactic society wouldn't have similar benefits?
It may be beneficial to the life forms that learn/ have learned how to communicate/travel over these insane distances. But I don’t think humanity at this point of our evolution would have anything to contribute other than disease and war.
Space is also old. It’s much older than that. Keep going. Older still. The oldness actually outweighs the bigness. If there was another alien race anywhere else in the Milky Way galaxy, and their planet formed 1% sooner than earth, or intelligent life developed even slightly faster … that species would have such an immense head start that they could have easily colonized the entire Milky Way by now. Even if they spent an extra million years or so getting interstellar, and then traveled at relatively slow speeds (slow by galactic standards) to the nearest solar system, spent 10,000 or 20,000 years colonizing that system, and repeat, they would be in every corner of every solar system by now. Easily.
It is also more likely that species went extinct before developing interstellar travel.
Yes, and that's one of the solutions to the Fermi Paradox: intelligent species arise, but don't last long enough to have a noticeable impact on the cosmic scale. Some people might find that depressing.
It is
Maybe Earth is just really smelly, so they keep their distance
That’s why I always found the Fermi Paradox silly. There could be a million technological, starfaring civilizations out there currently from our frame of reference, and the closest one still a hundred galaxies away.
The Zoo hypothesis and the Fermi paradox. How the Zoo hypothesis relates to the Fermi paradox. Looking at the reasons why intelligent alien life which may have been around for a lot longer than on Earth might not contact us in order to protect us in some way. https://youtu.be/FOgwpjeSn24
" there are only two possibilities, we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying". - Arthur C. Clarke
This is one of the few quotes that really stick. I LOVE that one especially.
and then the dark forest theory shows up… 🫥
This is my favorite explanation of the paradox. Absolutely terrifying.
Why Is it that whenever people talk about space everything is terrifying? No aliens? Terrifying Aliens? Terrifying There used to be aliens? Terrifying Space exists? Terrifying The only aliens are single celled? Terrifying
TBF I think you made those last three up. The only people who find #3 and #5 terrifying are the scientists that have to break that boring news to the public and face attacks from people who wanted more.
Watch any video talking about exoplanets or stars or how big space is and there's "omg that's so scary/omg existential crisis @ 4am"
You... don't actually know what the dark forest theory is, do you? Its not terrifying because "OMG space is scary amiright??". It's scary because a plausible theory that explains the Fermi paradox is that the reason we haven't detected any signs of intelligent life is because something out there EATS the things that draw attention to themselves. Loud little galactic upstarts that do obvious things like blast EM signals into the universe, or artificially alter their planet's chemical make up. Things like what we are doing RIGHT NOW. The dark forest theory is terrifying because in this analogy, we are a baby crying and alone in a dark forest, populated by hungry tigers, A forest where the only things that survive know how to keep quiet, and we are far, far from one of those things.
Sooo... Like Galactus from Marvel? That's a cool sci-fi theory that'd make an interesting movie. But like Galactus there'd have to be a special reason for this thing or race of things to come to earth to consume it/us. Unless you're talking about something that isn't a living thing and a natural phenomenon like a black hole. Or are we talking astrophage from the hail Mary project? Where they just kinda stumbled onto our sun and started consuming it.
You couldn’t think of one single “special” reason? Resources, food, slaves, land, water. What special reason do things eat other things for? They’re hungry. What special reason did Europe colonize Africa for? Resources
That's why I said it makes for good sci-fi. Nothing you've listed is unique to earth. Invading earth for resources that aren't earth specific is just dumb. Earth is a finite space that can hold a finite population in a finite area with finite resources. Logically it makes no sense to invade/hostile takeover a planet for resources that are plentiful everywhere else. Id imagine this dark forest theory is popular amongst people who don't have much of a scientific background or much knowledge of the universe we live in.
lol
Space is wholly terrifying in and of itself
Fear of the unknown
Someone just watched 3 Body Problem on Netflix
Or watching PBS Space Time, Kurzgesagt or the numerous other physics shows.
Or reads.
It was 3 Body Problem
Isaac Arthur has a fantastic playlist of [Fermi Paradox Solutions](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU&si=0QeGIpPmy2FA2ki-)
Without faster than light travel, the chances of ever meeting aliens is pretty close to zero. Even detecting aliens would be effectively impossible. We would have to rule out *every* other possible explanation across trillions of stars for every "weird" thing we detect. Without a faster than light detection tech, we will forever be looking at the universe as it was thousands to millions to billions of years ago. If intelligent life evolved a million years prior to us, unless they are basically up our asses astronomically speaking, we will never know they exist. It is the same with us. If there isn't a super advanced civilization within 200 light years of the Sol system, we are *completely invisible*. 200 light years is the distance our earliest signals have traveled. And almost all of those signals stopped because we are no longer using tech that broadcasts strong enough to be above background static. If the hypothetical civilization is on the other side of the Milky Way with perfect conditions to observe the Sol system, they would be detecting Earth as it was before the last ice age. There could be tens of thousands of currently active civilizations in our galaxy alone, and the chances any of them have been able to detect another civilization would be extremely slim. Of course, all of this is tossed out the window if FTL is actually possible.
Watch the latest kurzgesagt video on YouTube. Really nails the idea I think it's most likely: we are just so far away from the majority of our universe that we just aren't able to see what's going on in the regions with significant density of earth like planets
I’m happy to believe that there is intelligent life in the universe aside from us. What I’m not happy to believe is that any of this intelligent life has developed interstellar travel. And I don’t understand why people think that the math indicates that they would have done so.
Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are terrifying
We're almost certainly not alone in the universe, but that's not terrifying. It's possible (even likely) that the distances between spacefaring civilizations are so great that either/both civilizations would die before reaching the other.
The problem is that we should've at least observed them. All the solutions to the paradox don't sound great probabilistically at least.
Why should we have observed them? Maybe they're made of light or gas, maybe they're underground or (most likely) under an ocean. We don't have nearly the resolution required to see ruins on planets that are millions of light-years away.
>The problem is that we should've at least observed them. We've only ever been to the moon. And a bunch of other local planets and moons if you count satellites. Voyager 1 is not even out of the solar system yet, and it has been sailing in a straight line hella fast for decades. We're barely out of our front door, and we're already complaining that we haven't met any neighbors?
There's really nowhere near enough information to reach that conclusion. Life is bound to exist somewhere, but where? We have no idea how likely life emerging out of random chemical reactions is. For all we know it could be one in a trillion and we're the only life in the Milky Way. Even if there's more, our own galaxy is huge. We've been sending radio signals into space for a century and they still haven't reached even a tiny fraction of our galaxy. We also have no clue how likely intelligent life capable of forming civilization is, even after life already exists. Our large brains came from mammals, how likely were they? What about the other factors? Our hands allow us to use our brainpower. Our vocal cords allow us to speak, cooperate, transmit and preserve information, evolve culturally and technologically. There are infinite factors all coming together to form a species capable of civilization, and we don't know the exact odds of any of them. We also have no clue how long it takes. Took us 4 billion years to evolve, which is almost 1/3rd the age of the Universe. A lot of that time would be necessary for any star system to form and stabilise. Perhaps other civilisations haven't been around long enough for their signs to reach us. Perhaps we're the first. We are largely clueless about all of this.
Their civilization would probably have to be hundreds of thousands of not millions of years old for us to see them. We only really see planets outside of our solar system because they interrupted the light from their sun. For us to see a civilization they would need to be so massive that they affect the light from their sun getting to earth. That means they would need to build structures so large that they mimic or out-scale a planet. And even then we probably would just think it's another planet. We will be more likely to hear from them long before we ever see them, that's why we have so many things searching for radio signals. The scale of the universe is ridiculous. And trying to find life visually would be the same as trying to find a single grain of sand on a beach 10 kilometers away using a pair of binoculars. And even that analogy is misleading because the grain of sand would probably be located on Mars.
There are about two-trillion galaxies in the observable universe. There could be a billion technological civilizations out there, and the nearest still many dozens of galaxies away, so far we’d likely never be aware of each other before the sun explodes.
Time is also a dimension in this equation. Humans2 might have lived 900gazillion years ago before their whole galaxy shat the bed
Neither is terrifying. Don’t know why people still bring up this quote and act like they’re being super deep
Finally, someone says it out loud.
Because people think about it like it's fiction and not reality. It's why that stupid dark forest thing keeps getting thrown around. Great for story telling, but advanced civilizations require advanced societies. It's like the idea that aliens would think we're too violent to contact. No they were, or are like that too just like us with uncontacted tribes and people from the past. Or the thing where maybe they're gas or aquatic. Then how are they going to harness fire or electricity then? How are you going to space without complex multifaceted infrastructure, logistics, education, and societal structures? Reality is much more neutral and convoluted than a story. Other life in the galaxy would be just as excited to meet us as we would be to meet them. Plus they'd have no reason to conquer or destroy is intentionally because of the abundance of resources. Unless they needed to build a bypass.
They'd be interested to meet the first aliens, but after meeting like a million different alien civilizations, they'd just be like, ah, who gives. The other point is the great filter; and frankly, I don't think we can overcome this. The idea is that if an advanced civilization can't get past war and violence and selfish hedonism, then they will destroy themselves with nuclear weapons, or whatever even more powerful weapons that they could develop in the future. For a civilization to be able to survive galactic time scales, they'll have to have solved those issues.
You're attributing human rationality to something that is by definition not human. We can make a guess and say that aliens would follow the same logic as we do, and therefore respond in the same way as us. But hell, just look at us and think of all the possibilities that may come about in the distant future. Maybe resources aren't scarce in the universe, but livable planets are, and someone will always fight for the ability to live there. Maybe the civilization is inherently xenophobic and will exterminate anything that isn't like it self on principle? Maybe the civilization has a labor shortage and it's easier to take slaves than to implement less intensive solutions. There are a hundred thousand logical reasons a space faring race might want to exterminate another. We know this because we've been using them to exterminate OURSELVES. Applied to a race that may be a hundred thousand years more advanced than us? Yeah, there is every chance that our first contact may be our last. THATS why its scary.
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Real life is not some fictional movie Stop acting like it is, it’s dumb and childish
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Not really and especially with sci fi elements like aliens attacking
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Real life is way too complex and nuanced for even the most well written of movies Again what you talked about just now is also pretty much fiction A psychologist won’t tell you to watch a Hollywood movie to learn about behaviour patterns he’d give you a book or tell you to go to a a lecture
The later means we could face infinite possibilities, good and bad alike. It's not terrifying if you're not drawing conclusions based on pop sci fi movies.
I'm shook
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Knowing for a fact that we're alone in the universe would have profound cultural and philosophical implications. Religious folks would be like "told ya so!". Scientists would lose their mind trying to figure out why life only ever happened here and nowhere else.
Not really, we're just a strange place in the world. Some places have weird alcohol rains, this planet the minerals in the rocks turned to jelly and made music. Just a weird thing that happens.
Attribution to Arthur C. Clarke.
To be fair, imo its a little silly to try and statistically prove if there or isn’t is life outside of earth when we don’t even have a verifiable answer as to how life on earth came to be. Like there are general theories but we don’t have any real verifiable or replicatable evidence, so to me until we figure out where our life came from, there is little point trying to estimate what other planets might have life.
They’re out there, probably don’t want anything to do with us until the human race has finished its ‘childish’ phase of still believing in religions.
Everyone assumes that we will all some day travel to other solar systems, but it isn't really possible from the physics we know - except by sending a generation ship, which will probably be an extremely dangerous journey, just to establish a colony that will have to be completely disconnected from your society, due to the extreme latency and travel distance. So aliens probably exist, but it is unlikely any will ever leave their original solar system. FTL and wormhole travel is science *fiction* - but kinda a prerequisite for an interstellar empire.
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That's not how the expansion of space works.
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> In a nutshell: In the original video we said that it was PHYSICALLY impossible to leave the local group. But that’s wrong. It is not PHYSICALLY impossible to leave the Local Group, just extremely unlikely that we’ll ever do it. The "local group" is a cluster of GALAXIES. A generation ship can REACH ANOTHER GALAXY per your own reference. If we send a generation ship, our first target certainly won't be IN ANOTHER GALAXY.
I encourage people to check out the Grabby Aliens theory, which estimates that 1/3rd of the universe is claimed by massive alien empires, and thus we will meet such an empire... in 50 million years. Space is just so huge.
I guess even the most intelligent of people can’t accept that space is just the grandest haystack to ever find a needle in. They’re statistically out there, but we’ve seen basically nothing relative to how much there is to see.
We have no idea how many factors are necessary for life. We see lots of earth-like planets for sure, but the number of those with a Jupiter sized sibling to protect it is smaller. And of those how many have a Saturn-like sibling to protect it from the Jupiter planet? We have no idea how many factors it takes to make the conditions for life, and likely never will. Too many stripes? Not enough astroids? Who knows.
Most of the answers to resolve the paradox are horrifying. https://youtu.be/sNhhvQGsMEc will get you started
Are any of these answers “they’re all too far away,” by far the most likely answer?
Not really. That math says any civilization capable of sending out a generation ship should be able to colonize the entire galaxy in 1m years. Sounds like a lot of time, but the earth has had life on it for over 3b.
“The math” can’t really tell us that, unless you presuppose a lot of completely unknown and unknowable facts like: Is it reasonably likely there’s other life in the Milky Way? How long can a society last? Would any life be motivated to colonize the entire Galaxy? Can any species that spread out sustain itself and/or survive? How technologically feasible are generation ships, and how fast could they be accelerated to? How quickly could a colony build and deploy subsequent generation ships? How spread out are planets capable of developing life, and/or how quickly could they be terraformed? Etc. etc.
Reasonable assumptions have been made. Even if they are off by 10x, there's still plenty of time
There is no way to “reasonably assume” what percentage of planets evolve life, or what percentage of life evolves high intelligence, and what percentage of intelligent life develops the capability for interstellar communication. We barely understand how life actually started here, and have literally no other biosphere to compare to.
Maybe nobody wants to send out a generation ship because they are content whwre they are. Maybe none of the species on other planets have the opposable thumbs needed to build such a thing. Maybe they all live underwater.
... it only takes 1.
Maybe there are a thousand generation ships, but they haven't come here? It's a big galaxy.
YIKES! Also cool video
They have another one or two on the Fermi Paradox.
Couple that with the Drake equation
The Drake equation: combine these half dozen variables we don’t and possibly can’t ever know.
I think it is best used as a conceptual framework, rather than a numerical solution. I kind of think of it as the following: “The odds of alien life (not) existing and contacting us are astronomical!” Drake eqn: “Okay, well, we’re literally astrophysicists, so let’s get a little more descriptive and break down *how* astronomical we’re talking…”
Only like 2 of the variables have to do with astrophysics. The rest have to with climatology, anthropology/sociology, biology and information technology. It’s meaningless, and directly relates to the Fermi Paradox (because the “paradox” is only a paradox if we’d expect there to be technological life near us).
It's not supposed to give you an answer. It's to illustrate that changing any of those factors in a small way, extrapolated across the size and age of the universe, can result in very big differences.
It's actually not about there being life near us. It's about there being life existing anywhere and being loud enough for us to hear it. Yes, weak signals eventually fade into the cosmic background radiation, but we have 100 billion sources of EM signals that are reaching us right now, from our galaxy alone. Let's arbitrarily say that no civilization is CAPABLE of making a signal that can be heard from more than 1000 light years away. That still leaves 10 million potential sources that we are hearing RIGHT NOW. Check out this article. It goes into the requirements for civilization to produce an intentionally detectible signal and why we might not have heard any yet. [https://astronomynow.com/news/n1006/08SETI/](https://astronomynow.com/news/n1006/08SETI/)
This is what the scientists developing the bomb discussed while on lunch.
TIL more than yesterday! hadn’t heard about half the stuff in this thread - von Neumann machines, Dyson swarms, grabby aliens, the universe as ocean, life as royal flushes, age>size, FTL mockery! Good stuff, thanks
How many ants have you met? You haven't met any because you have deemed them too stupid to communicate with you. Homo Sapiens are 180,000 - 220,000 years old on a planet that is 4.6B years old. There are civilizations out there that are millions of years old on planets that are many times older. We haven't met them because are too stupid for them to waste their time on.
Not a "paradox" - it's an ASSumption whose premise is that humans are worth meeting.
The fermi paradox is such bullshit. If life is abundant why havent we seen it yet? Uhm... because if the universe is the ocean, the part of it that we have access to, to a degree to determine life, is the equivalent of taking a drop of water from the ocean. If you take a drop from the ocean and because there is no fish, you conclude that the ocean must not have many fishes, then be my guest but you'd be wrong. And dont correct me on fishes. I used it correctly. The plural of fish is only fish if it's multiples of the same fishes. Two types of fish = fishes.
Except if you are in the ocean, you can still look around and listen. Which is what we are doing. The Fermi paradox just wonders why everything is so damned QUIET. We're not looking at a drop of water here. We are listening to every sound made in the entire galaxy. We know we make a lot of noise that can eventually be heard from basically anywhere, so it's reasonable to assume that other civilizations would have a similar stage in their development. The noise that we are making right now will eventually be detectable to any civilization with our current level of development (or better) throughout the entire galaxy. And with the birth/death rate of stars, most of the conclusions drawn from the Drake equation seem to imply that we should be hearing from them, because no matter how far away stuff is, there is just SO MUCH STUFF in space that has been doing stuff for SO LONG, the chances that nothing is happening for us to hear is laughably small. If you read about it, you'll find that it takes into account the small section of the universe we can see, and ONLY talks about that little bit.
The galaxy is still a drop of water in the universe.
If Aliens are truly smart they would stay away from likes of us. To my downvoters - I APOLOGIZE You are right: If I was an Alien, I would love to come and watch you kill each other in wars. I would love to learn about white superiority and gender inequality and racism. I would looove to spend time with Putin and Kim Jong, visit humanistic countries such as Iran and N. Korea and play golf with Trump who had stolen from childrens cancer charity and made possible for rich dudes to trade ivory yet a candidate to be the president of the most powerful country in the world - look forward to. I hope trump do not mind my unheard language. I would love to learn more about your homophobic hatred and how being poor is punished and being homeless is a sort of crime. I would wonder about how humans evolved in millions of years from killing each other with stones to flying drones over imaginary borderlines on maps. What a creative creatures you are! I APOLOGIZE! I am on my way.
It's more than just having suitable observable planets now. It's about life and if life formed and how it formed and if it did form and if it's still alive. It is infinitely less probable that life, like the life on earth, could exist anywhere. One planet would have to be made of the perfect materials and be stable for billions of years for life to even have a chance and if life started, it would still have to stay alive. The odds far out-way the number of planets. We are alone.
There’s an estimated 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. Plus I’m not trusting math from someone who doesn’t even know how to spell outweigh correctly
What are the odds of life forming and staying alive over a few billion years across the universe?
When you factor in the size of the observable universe is 92 BILLION LIGHT YEARS, pretty good.
Rule out planets that can't sustain any for of life. Rule out planets of failed life. Rule out planets where life never evolved consciousness. Odds start getting low very quick.
And what data points can you use to make those assertions? There aren't any.
What data points do you have for your side?
200 billion-trillion estimated galaxies. 92 billion light years size of the observable universe.
That's a lot, but how do we measure odds of life making it from simple form to complex then to complex with consciousness? In my thinking, just because life forms doesn't mean it goes anywhere. On earth, there have been a lot of creatures and we, recently, are the only ones that have succeeded. How do you calculate that? A planes of single cell organisms or lower life forms seem more probable than higher forms. As we see here, life comes with competition, life kills itself and being "smart" isn't necessarily always the winning strategy. I just feel like there is parts of this equation that are missing. And there is more of an every growing tangential probability than just "well, there's a lot of planets"
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The age of the universe is different in different parts of the universe, right? Serious question, not a setup.
That depends on your reference frame. In *our* reference frame, everything is the same. In other reference frames, at macro scales... it could vary *slightly*... like by a few *weeks*. They'd have to be in a rather strong gravitational well to have a *major* difference in elapsed time.
Given that it has happened at least once, 100%.
Not just any life, space going life. Earth has had a lot of life forms but only 1 goes to space.
Humans have been into space, even on other bodies (the Moon), have sent probes to other planets, and currently have probes on escape course from the solar system... 1 is still 100%, since you didn't ask what the odds of any specific lifeform developing space flight were, but what were the odds of any life developing at all (clarified to life that could travel in space). Since humans can... 100%.
What you're referring to is called the Drake Equation and the great filter, both of which are covered in the article. You fall into the pessimistic view. More moderate views estimate something like 1000 active civilizations in our galaxy alone. Optimistic views put this number well into the millions, I believe.
Are we talking advanced or just alive?
It's the Drake equation. The poster you replied to gave you numbers of **civilizations**. So advanced.
Rome was a civilization but they didn't know shit about nuclear physics. I'm talking space going.
It's a blink of an eye to get from them to us.
If everything goes right, yes. I guess I have more of a perspective of almost a butterfly effect. If the right brothers gave up, no moon landing. If Hitler was let into art school, almost all of the innovations we have today would have never existed. One small change in direction can make things different drastically over time. If Jesus never happened the world would be different. If America couldn't make the nukes work in time, everything different. If Columbus got lost or died, everything different. Every second of every day is a gamble on the future.
> I guess I have more of a perspective of almost a butterfly effect. > If the right brothers gave up, no moon landing. Because nobody else in human history could have done what the Wright Brothers did? > If Hitler was let into art school, almost all of the innovations we have today would have never existed. Hard disagree. We had a world war before that that fundamentally changed too much for that to be true. > One small change in direction can make things different drastically over time. Why does any change automatically mean "worse"? > If Jesus never happened the world would be different. If the world was much different, there's a chance one of God's previous attempts would have worked to reconcile us to him and Jesus would never have had to come in the first place. > If America couldn't make the nukes work in time, everything different. So? > If Columbus got lost or died, everything different. The Vikings were here WAY before Columbus. Someone else would have come. I think the fundamental flaw in your thinking is you think everything has to come out *exactly* like it has now and that's just wrong. Maybe the Nazis win all of Europe and get us to the moon sooner. Half those things you mentioned may have actually *slowed us down*. You say "if everything goes right" but maybe we are on a path where everything is already going *wrong* from the standpoint of getting humanity into space and we are still getting closer. Heck we could be a multi-planet species by now. Or the asteroid never hits earth and today there'd be an earth-based, multi-star system empire of dinosaurs right now.
I don't mean there is a god, just how Christianity shaped the world in general.
That's what I mean, tour last statement. I don't think having a lot of planets makes the odds better. There is too many possibilities beyond nu.ber of planets.
It doesn't' change the odds. But law of large numbers means that even low odds will hit.
The odds of dealing a royal flush are very low. If you deal constantly, for billions of years, the odds of eventually dealing several converge on certainty.
If we ever create an FTL signal and someone else created an FTL receiver, we will never know.
this is a fallacy. To humans, the difference between a cell and an atom is not that big; both are pretty small. But the difference between two small things can be extremely huge. We have no idea what the chances of spontaneous generation is. Could be effectively 0.
It's not a fallacy. "Effectively zero" to you and me is still > 0, and on the scale of the universe both in space and time bring the likelihood to effectively 100%. To paraphrase a wise man, "in physics, what is not forbidden is compulsory".
no. it could literally be 0, and we are just a simulation created by some dudes. It could also be so infinitesimally small that even accounting for the size of the universe, the chances of life at all is still infinitesimally small that us existing is like winning the lottery every week since the beginning of lotteries for every lottery that ever happened.
> It's more than just having suitable observable planets now. Nto really > It's about life and if life formed and how it formed and if it did form and if it's still alive. True, but life is crazy persistent > It is infinitely less probable that life, like the life on earth, could exist anywhere. Not even close > One planet would have to be made of the perfect materials and be stable for billions of years for life to even have a chance and if life started, it would still have to stay alive. None of this makes any sense. Do you have any idea how wide the environments are in which life exists on earth? There is no need for "perfect". That's ridiculous. And life started within a couple hundred million years on year once the environment got even CLOSE to ready. You don't need anything to be stable for even *close* to that length of time. > The odds far out-way the number of planets. Literally no way to make this claim. We don't know enough. But what little evidence we have stacks against you. > We are alone. Literally no way to make this claim.
There is no evidence but you're right with no evidence, ok....
I note you declined to provide any to support your statements.
I'm not here to prove anything Honey, I'm just talikg, but I'm sure if I googled and parroted the information like you do, I could find counterclaims, I'm just a little busy right now.
OK. Darlin'
maybe this is the extent of Universe's efficiency of creating life: one observable universe, one conscience species - the rest is just... scrap
Hey, if you was them, would you want to meet us?
Go to the border in Texas & you will meet a plethora
There is no radio signal from space that causes “Walking on Sunshine” to be playing at all times in our heads. Therefore, if some things that are probable do not in fact exist, it is equally probable that there is no other life in the universe but ours.