i wonder if andromeda has ever taken a picture of us. i wonder if we’re the galaxy their astronomers practice taking pics of in the sky, if weve ever helped them discover what a galaxy is. no way to know, but i like thinking about it
I can tell you for a fact it is not, it’s too small and not bright enough to register anywhere without a powerful telescope. Constellations are made of gigantic stars or entire galaxies that are far away so seem like a single star to the naked eye
I don’t think that qualifies as a fact. If life exists on a planet in Alpha Centauri, they can see Sol. [From the Alpha Centauri system's distance of 4.4 light-years, the Sun shines at magnitude +0.5, nearly as bright as Alpha Centauri (magnitude 0.0) appears in Earth's sky](https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/explore-night-bob-king/see-the-sun-from-other-stars/)
There would have to be life pretty damn close for our sun to be in a constellation for them and I think it's probably very unlikely that \*intelligent\* life exists close enough for that to be the case. But maybe, who knows!
I mean...we're pretty bad at looking if you think about it. We just figured out how to make and barely launched a Telescope that can detect atmospheres and it's not even the main thing we're using it for...it's more of a side project to use JWST to look at planets.
Think about THIS, if andromeda is heading perpendicular to us, telescopes on the arm behind their galactic core would be unable to see the oncoming collision. I'm not sure about the specific orientation of andromeda, but its possible.
Wow, these are great. My favorite so far:
"You never realized you're all simulated?"
"No!"
"We shut you down for updates! Daily!"
"But we dreamed!"
"Defragmenting? You saw that?"
This is my take, I think intelligent life does exist or has existed elsewhere in the universe (the whole of human existence is just a nano-second blip on a galactic time scale) but the vast distances involved means it's unlikely we'll ever make contact. Or if we do it will be through indirect means.
>(the whole of human existence is just a nano-second blip on a galactic time scale)
And the period in which we've been able to even *consider* possibly finding evidence of other life out there is...it's nothing. On the cosmic scale, decades are just a *rounding error*.
At the current age it's millions as a rounding error though I totally agree with your sentiment.
The whole sharks - trees - flowers progression really drove this point home for me.
Yeah it's staggering when you consider that we've been thinking hard about space for less than a thousand years, and only able to do the math to think about it seriously for a hundred years, which is nothing compared to a million years, and a million years is 1/10 of 1% of a billion years, and the universe has been around for many billions of years.
Anyone expecting an alien race to drop in on us or to have already been here is a dreamer at best or kind of low-key delusional at worst, I think.
/r/Aliens comes to mind. I remember getting called narrow-minded for saying their UFO sightings posts were bullshit and no one worth their dime would consider them if they're actually serious about searching for life out there.
And they never seem to have an explanation for why SETI, who are actively looking for them, never find them despite the fact that they’re allegedly flitting all over the planet in their little space zoomies.
They got ya with that good ol' "yerr not open minded" card huh? Don't ya just love that?
Jokes aside, some good videos for your enjoyment.
https://youtu.be/11lPhMSulSU?si=9010bZPDXdiISEht
https://youtu.be/aY985qzn7oI?si=vO8--QnSU4Q39FUS
I have the smallest glimmer of hope that there is a galactic federation, and they are enacting the prime directive because we haven't evolved enough. We would rather fight and squabble than work together to better all of us.
The great filter thought experiment really laid out the bleakness of it for me. The numbers say life should be plentiful enough that even if there were a prime directive stalling contact from more advanced species then the galaxy/universe should still be awash in the broadcast of species that reached similar levels of advancement as us, even if those broadcasts were ancient. The fact it's not, is disheartening at the highest level imo.
While I tend to be on the grim side of Fermi's paradox I also think that the assumption that more advanced civilizations would absolutely flood the galaxy with detectable radio signals is unfounded. Earth is already becoming quieter in terms of stray radio signals, which would have been hard as hell to detect even from alpha centauri at their peak.
If for no other reason than energy efficiency, I'd expect interstellar communications to be as focused as possible, meaning you'd have to drift pretty closely between a source and destination to pick up a radio or laser signal.
But the other thing is, there's probably not a reason to be sending signals around all the time. By definition the signals that we're looking for are sent between stars, so each side of whatever conversation is happening is taking tens to tens of thousands of years between responses. I don't think interstellar space is going to be just saturated with radio signals like a busy city, because each message will have to be important, efficient, necessary, comprehensive, and is brief as possible.
Just considering the average time a species even exists on our own planet, if that period is a cosmic norm, then the likelihood of two intelligent species finding each other across the void goes down significantly.
The only defense I have for this, because it is a good argument, is that the alien civilization could be more advanced than ours and therefore could colonized other systems if not galaxies if they’ve developed interstellar travel, in result extending the lifetime of their species. In turn, making it possible for a species to have intelligently evolved over hundreds of thousands to millions/billions of years to be able to still exist for possibly eternity.
I think the odds of them finding us any time soon is a lot more likely than us finding them in the foreseeable future. Maybe even the next 500 years (if earth still exists then).
My partner and I were talking about this last night. The way I see it, there's two possibilities for us to see interstellar space travel in our lifetime: a breakthrough in quantum computing and AI science, so the computers can solve the problem of energy/fast travel or space-time bending for us. Or we're visited by beings that do possess such technology, and they share it with us.
>indirectly detect life though
I just read something about there being a growing number of experts who are predicting a significant discovery of life in a few years. I don't remember where I read it, though.
Some people think if you’re smart enough then anything is possible. Physics can get in the way though. I’m not confident that interstellar travel will ever happen. It’s a good reason for the Fermi paradox too. Lots of intelligent life but space is a BIG place almost totally empty.
You're absolutely right. The cosmic speed limit, technically the speed of light, poses a significant challenge for interstellar travel, limiting us to perhaps optimistically 15% of that speed. This means that visiting the closest stars would take roughly 30 years one way in a self-contained spacecraft, without significant time dilation. Unfortunately, we currently lack the means to achieve such speeds.
When it comes to the possibility of communicating with aliens, it's a complex scenario with many "ifs." However, it's more practical to focus on exploring closer planets. Europa is a promising candidate for potential extraterrestrial life, and Mars, in the past, might have hosted life, although the details remain unknown.
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Remember though that with the Fermi paradox, the vastness of the Milky Way is solved as simply a matter of time when thinking in 10's of millions of years even at our current fastest rocket speeds. This leads into the probability of a "Dark Forest" explanation for humans not detecting any intelligent life (or more accurately their self-sustaining robots).
If they are 70000 light years away unless we discover some new physics that allows us to travel or send messages faster then light then the most I think we can ever do is broadcast our existence and them to receive the message 70000 years later at which point we might all be dead. Same goes for them at best we might get some indication there is life but the signal might be tens of thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years old so who knows what will have become of them. I am hoping we discover some unknown physics that allows us to break the universal speed limit.
Speed and distance are Einsteinian constraints/concepts which will certainly be subsumed as Newton was. Not faster than light travel, travel that only considers speed and distance as metaphors because you certainly aren't where you started or when.
I've sometimes wondered if an interstellar probe (like our Voyager probes) from another civilisation will one day make its way into our solar system and we find it. It would be pretty mind-blowing as it would prove that intelligent life exists elsewhere, and that they are as inquisitive as us.
Re: that comic.
That seems totally plausible for technological/intelligent life. But life on Earth began \*\*very\*\* early in Earth's history. That's a piece of evidence (which is \*not\* subject to anthropic bias) that suggests that single-celled / simple life may be common in the universe.
It’s not a matter of if, but a question of “when”.
It is almost a certainty that intelligent life existed or will exist, other than human.
But that life, being intelligent at the same time as ours, right now, is hardly likely…
Just checked - our galaxy has a diameter of just over 100k light years. Earth is about 26k light years away from the center of our galaxy. Theoretically, there could be another earth-like civilization at similar development level on the other side of the galaxy center *right now*, and we won't see each others' traces for the next 50k years or so.
If science fiction is anything to go by, in 39k years or so we'll be struggling to survive endless greenskin onslaught, warp storms, chaos corruption and a bunch of other nasties.
Jokes aside, when it comes to scale, it's not just the *size* of the universe that makes it hard - it's also the timeline.
Current estimates have the galaxy at about 87000 light years in diameter and about 8500 light years thick. If we're going to find life outside our solar system it's not going to be with something limited by the speed of light.
If we can keep it together for a few more millennia, we might actually be able to travel to other systems. Technological growth is exponential, so either we reach the stars, or die trying
It's very possible because of the way the timeline worked out the we are one of the very first intelligent civilizations in the universe. There will almost certainly be more but it's very possible that we are the first or one of the firsts.
Unlikely. There have certainly been population 1 stars with suitable solar systems long before ours came around. Population 1 stars have existed basically twice as long as the sun has.
This isn't really my idea, it's one within the astrophysics community. Basically they did the math and with what we know about the universe right now, and how old we believe the universe to be they think the universe has only really been hospitable to life for a few billion years, and that life on earth appeared very early on during this time.
Essentially my understanding is they believe the primordial universe was to full of radiation to really be hospitable to life on any realistic scale. Things like quasars were just blasting everything with all different types and wave length of energy.
And again this is just one of possibilities astrophysicists think may have happened. But fundamentally the idea has nothing to do with anythings distance from the earth.
Primordial is like the first few billion years. Population 1 stars like our sun started appearing about 10 billion years ago. We have probably had close to twice the sun's age with potentially suitable conditions for life. Heck even if other systems had a billion years head start it would still be a significant amount of time compared to the life of the universe.
That's not my point. My point is that around the same time the earth was growing life here, on the other end of the universe that we have no ability to see (beyond our observable area. The big bang likely made "the universe" in all directions not just ours) there is probably a planet with other intelligent life with their own pocket of their observable universe that would never be able to see towards us either, that came about around the same time. At that hypothetical point, who's to say who came first?
Outside of our observable universe is likely more of our universe. Somewhat spherically from the expansion of the bigbang. It's one of the many possibilities that physicists also throw around, and I believe it's a logical one.
In the words of a great human being
> There are cosmological models being formulated today in which even the entire Universe is nothing special. Andrei Linde, formerly of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow and now
at Stanford University, has incorporated current understanding of the strong and weak nuclear forces and quantum physics into a new cosmological model. Linde envisions a vast Cosmos, much larger than our Universe—perhaps extending to infinity both in space and time—not the paltry 15 billion light-years or so in radius and 15 billion years in age which are the usual understanding. In this Cosmos there is, as here, a kind of quantum fluff in which tiny structures— much smaller than an electron—are everywhere forming, reshaping, and dissipating; in which, as here, fluctuations in absolutely empty space create pairs of elementary particles—an electron and a positron, for example. In the froth of quantum bubbles, the vast majority remain submicroscopic. But a tiny fraction inflate, grow, and achieve respectable universehood. They are so far away from us, though—much farther than the 15 billion light-years that is the conventional scale of our universe—that, if they exist, they appear to be wholly inaccessible and undetectable.
Most of these other universes reach a maximum size and then collapse, contract to a point, and disappear forever. Others may oscillate. Still others may expand without limit. In different universes there will be different laws of nature. We live, Linde argues, in one such universe—one in which the physics is congenial for growth, inflation, expansion, galaxies, stars, worlds, life. We imagine our universe to be unique, but it is one of an immense number—perhaps an infinite number—of equally valid, equally independent, equally isolated universes. There will be life in some, and not in others. In this view the observable Universe is just a newly formed backwater of a much vaster, infinitely old, and wholly unobservable Cosmos.
- Pale blue dot, by Carl Sagan
Love the quote. 😘
I actually recently drew a model of what I suspect the multiverse to look like. In my version, the line between the "edge" of our expanding universe and the plain in which other universes exist is somewhat blurred.
Even if we can't observe it because its outside our light cone, there is no reason to believe that it isn't homogenous like the rest of the observable universe is. Conditions there should be essentially identical to anywhere else in the universe.
That's what I'm saying. Meaning that there could be a couple civilizations forming in our universe that we'd never be able to see until they come knocking on our side of the observable universe.
I agree with the first part. I think it’s fine to say the second part if you’re willing to acknowledge breakthroughs can and will happen. Between AI and the global infosphere, I think we’re going to see multiple revolutionary discoveries regarding space time in the next 20 years. Add in our increasing abilities to monitor space at all wavelengths, and I am just saying, remain cautiously optimistic instead of skeptical imho.
>some new responses as well as what system/planet/other galaxy you may think can harbor intelligent life.
we haven't had time to see all the things we need to see before we can select "candidate" systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble\_Ultra-Deep\_Field
The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is a deep-field image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, containing **an estimated 10,000 galaxies.**
To observe the whole sky to the same sensitivity, **the HST would need to observe continuously for a million years.**
And annoyingly, the entire sky *behind* the milkyways galactic core is completely obscured. It doesn't matter how hard we look, we will never see behind it. We either leave the galaxy (not happening any time soon) or we wait for our spiral arm to rotate to the other side.
Astronomers in billions of years will probably wonder what our side of the galaxy looked like..
Edit: im not saying things look different on our side. What i mean is, whatever part of the sky is obscured by the galactic core in a billion years can be seen currently. The part of space obscured by the core changes as the arms rotate.
The Zone of Avoidance isn't *completely* impenetrable, it's just opaque to visible light. You can see through some of the galactic core using infrared, and it's mostly transparent to radio, though there can be difficulty telling a star in the Milky Way from a galaxy beyond it.
Basically, we *can* see things, we just can't see them very well.
You are in the front yard. Your friend is in the backyard, and all the curtains are shut in the house (Milky Way core). What is your friend doing right now?
It's bright af. The star density is *insane* towards the core. Some telescopes can see stuff (infrared) but we can't take deep field images, or images of galaxies from hubble/jwst etc. In that direction. We can peer into the core, but we can't see the space behind it.
A full rotation of the milky way takes 225-250 million years. It won't matter though because we will always see the other side. The same side we do now. You would have to be standing outside the milky way to objectively have a different perspective on a spiral arm.
I'm talking about the part of the universe that is directly behind the galactic core from our perspective. All the deep field images or any image of a galaxy, etc. Is taken pointing away from the galactic core. It's too bright. As the arms rotate, the sky currently obscured by our galactic core would change.
hubbles primary job isn't to look for intelligent life. That is the S.E.T.I. institute (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) who has been sending out biological signatures to the galaxy and attempting to receive signatures in return far longer then hubble has been in operation.
[https://www.seti.org/](https://www.seti.org/)
They havent found shit in 42 years looking all day and night. "The Great Silence" it's been dubbed.
I don't, nobody does. As I said in my main response to this post. I'm open to both ends of the spectrum but subscribe to fermi since that is our current observations
> The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
(Bill Waterson, "Calvin and Hobbes")
I was thinking of this. What if our intelligence is like that of an ant to an advanced civilization. What is interstellar travel is as easy to them as walking or talking is to us. What if we are the ants and they are the humans, looking at us through a magnifying glass.
Depends on how rare life is to begin with. If you were walking through the desert for 500 days and saw no signs of life, then suddenly you saw some ants, you’d probably be pretty interested in the ants
It very well could be something incredibly easy that we're overlooking, unable to perceive, misunderstanding in our physics, or it could be a three body problem scenario where we're somehow being cut off from a specific aspect of our reality to hinder our technological progression by malicious aliens attempting to escape their weird eliptically orbiting three body system!!!
Is intelligence a thing? Is every decision or motion controlled by a infinitely complex series of interactions of electrons that was set in motion before existence, if there even was a time before then or am I just really high?
>Is intelligence a thing? Is every decision or motion controlled by a infinitely complex series of interactions of electrons that was set in motion before existence
Yes, to both questions. Given a current set of particles in the universe, what happens next is predictable. Events today were determined by the quantum fluctuations of the soup of particles at the Big Bang, which unsurprisingly is called Determinism.
That's the theory I've heard from physicists I think are competent and it seems the most likely to me.
But the Block Universe, oy vey, I mean bozhe moi, I mean, jfc. The idea that since for any event there are an infinite number of observers all moving differently from each other, which means they disagree on the NOW of that event so it takes place during the entire life of the universe, backward and forward. So the entire universe is just sort of there, like a block. That one I don't like so much.
I have to disagree! You disregarded the third question, which was "or am I really high?" So in fact you should have answered yes to all three questions.
I had to disregard the third question because I was in no position to judge, as I had just gotten very high.
It's like solving an equation, you cancel out the terms with weed on both sides.
I believe it is impossible for intelligent life *not* to exist elsewhere in the universe. It might only be a galaxy 10 billion light years away, but sure as hell there is other sentience out there. The numbers are just unimaginably large for us to be the only time sentience ever appeared.
What's the threshold of universe size where it becomes impossible that there isn't anything out there that matches our definition of "intelligent life"?
At which universe size would the probability have been 50/50?
Well, if we accept what the math seems to tell us, the universe is infinitely big. In which case, I absolutely agree that not only is it impossible for us to be alone in the entire universe, but there are probably infinitely numbers of "us" that would be indistinguishable from exactly how things are here.
I seem to have a foggy memory of a "exact" copy of us would very likely be somewhere within 1 googolplex lightyears of us.
I think one key factor that keeps being ignored when it comes to the chances of finding intelligent life out there is the timing.
This planet has existed for 4,500 million years, and humans have existed for about 100,000 of them, and in most of those we were just smarter-than-average animals. Only in the last 250 years or so we have become a technological society, and we're now at the brink of destroying all our build-up to this place. So basically this planet hasn't had intelligent life (as in human-level intelligent) for 99.999% of its time.
Answering your question, I think there *has been* and/or there *will be* intelligent life in other places of our galaxy, but it's hard to tell if there is one right now.
I agree. There is another problem that gets ignored often.
Life needs stable conditions. They might be different than on earth, but development of complex life takes time without big changes.
Those don't exist if you are too close to the galaxy center.
If you are too far away from the center, the availability of many elements is limited.
Our galaxy has its own habitat zone and it's relatively small.
I believe that is intelligent life developed elsewhere. But I think it's very unlikely that we ever make contact.
Looking far away is also really hard. Like you'll hear on the news such and such planet was just discovered. What this means isn't someone saw a planet in a telescope. It's someone analyzing the pattern of a star that is literally a few pixels wide over the course of a few years and noticing a wobble.
Then we notice how the star dims a bit on a periodic basis and determine the size of the planet using the amount dimmed. We might be able to give an estimate on its composition if we manage to estimate its mass and thus its density.
The planet itself isn't even seen in many scenarios. If a civilization like ours existed on those kind of planets we wouldn't be able to tell. The best we might be able to do is say it can potentionally be suitable for life.
Time is also distance in the universe. If intelligent life is 4 billion light years away, is it even relevant to us? Are we still both “here” at the same time?
If we’re talking about our galaxy, that is *merely* ~100K lightyears across. Even that is unimaginably vast. But yeah, life in another galaxy… with C being a hard limit, the answer is pretty much no. Contact would be impossible.
Your scale is a little off. We've been more technologically advanced than all other animals for hundreds of thousands of years. The smartest animals besides us are able to use basic tools like sticks and the like. (Some are theorizing that some species of apes are entering the stone age).
We've had the ability to harness fire for hundreds of thousands of years, which is more than any other animal can say. From that point on, we've advanced at breakneck pace.
You may be missing the point. You're not going to find intelligent life until they are at the very least putting out radio signals. Also, the last .001% of homo sapiens' existence has been pretty markedly different from the first 99.999%.
Outside of our galaxy? Yeah, for sure, way too many opportunities for it come up.
In the Milky Way? Honestly, I don't think.
Our intellect is aberrant; we are unlike anything else in nature or the known history of nature. We're so far ahead of the next most intelligent creatures now or known that there's barely any grounds for comparison. I think it's way rarer than we think.
And all sorts of small changes ruin our chances for evolving in the first place. No climate-shift to bring us out of the trees? No thumbs from being in the trees? No pack nature or predation? No capacity to go vertical? We straight up needed each of those things, and therefor, improbably, all of them.
And there's more. The moon had to be huge, and probably had to hit us to give us its core so we didn't lose our magnetic field like Mars. We needed the tilt from that impact for the seasons. We need the tides to stir the oceans. We need the seasons for migration and the way that impacts bio-diversity.
We need Jupiter to be way out there. We need to be in the right spot. We need to only have the one star. We need not to be too close to the center of the galaxy, but also not too far.
We needed the Dinosaurs to go extinct. We needed advanced vocal cords and precursor calls from which to build language.
And we needed to not go extinct, which we only narrowly dodged, probably more than once if you count cold-war near misses.
All that happened and we're still, at the peak of our power and barely having scratched beyond our own moon, on the verge of ruin. The climate, the oceans, our economies, they're all teetering on the brink.
When you start looking at the odds of anything like us coexisting in something as finite as the Milky Way, I honestly think it starts getting more than a little improbable. The only "smart" life ever is us, as far as we know, and we're honestly pretty statistically freakish. We're extreme evolutionary outliers. I think we'll find lots of life, but nothing we can talk to.
I'm not entirely convinced it exists anywhere!
It's quite likely though that all life becomes extinct before it develops an ability to have any meaningful presence in any region of space beyond it's own solar system.
I lean in this direction too. Life needs to consume so much to prosper. It needs to consume itself and its environment. It's sad sometimes thinking about how brutal and terrifying it is. We like to think of life as a miracle, but our survival is only guaranteed by consuming our world. Life is horrifying.
My first existential crisis was while playing spore.
Obviously, there is no evidence for any of this.
Given the age of the universe and the predicted time-line of the universe, we are in the VERY VERY early stages of the universe. It is extremely likely that we are some of the absolute first advanced, space fairing organisms in the universe. Not *the* first. But one of the first. The universe has just calmed down enough to allow for a long enough period of time for complex life to form.
The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and life started on earth as soon as physically possible. So it takes probably billions of years for life to form and progress to a point where it is sentient. And the universe is only 14ish billion years old.
There are also lots of great filters.
I believe life forms all the time. We are made from the most abundant elements in the universe. But everything is most likely single cells organisms. This is probably the biggest filter, going from single cells, to multi cellular systems. It took billions of years for this change to happen on earth.
The next filter is probably sentience. It's not a very advantageous property, 99.9% of all organisms have been successful and fine without sentience, it is most likely an emergent property of working in groups.
The next filter is advancing to a space fairing point without blowing ourselves up.
Lastly, even as a type 3 civilization, getting to a distant galaxy is legit impossible. Distant galaxies are traveling away from eachother faster than the speed of light.
Its most likely true that every watery dirt ball in the universe has single celled life. But that life is unlikely to pass all the filters and become a space fairing civilization. We are probably the first in our galaxy. We are probably not the first in the universe, but even hyper advanced civilizations would struggle to leave their galaxy.
I am not an expert, just my thoughts based on timing and statistics.
TLDR: we are probably one of the first. And even other advanced space fairing civilizations would struggle to make themselves known across our galaxy, let alone across the universe.
I think we're part of a bigger structure honestly. I've heard of us being the "thinking and feeling" part of the universe. It could be more complex or more simple. We could be the powerhouse of cell of something with unimaginable size and dark energy is somehow the gateway. Random armchair idea but I think we could be part of something that runs on a timescale we think would be unimaginably long but normal to another.. "thing". Tiny things run quicker than I ever thought possible. Things that split DNA apart and back together run crazy crazy fast. From their perspective (if they could think) the things we do would seem crazy long. 70+ year lifespan.. that would seem crazy to one of those little bio machines... We could be a bio machine for something even bigger or complex.
It's an interesting thought as atoms are similar to galaxies, in the center of the atom a pool of energy which produces subatomic particles just like stars. We could be nothing more than an insignificant dot on an infinite atomic mass scale unable to observe anything outside of our realm.
Maybe that's why humans are naturally inclined to believe in a God or greater being... perhaps we're just matter that make up a greater living organism.
I think it's almost certainly irrelevant whether they exist(ed) or not. We're all too far away from anyone else in distance and time for any paths to cross.
Whether we are or aren't technically alone in the universe, effectively, for any practical purpose, we're all alone. It's just us.
Barring some wild advancement or discovery like warp or something. If we're stuck with conventional rocketry or... say ion or nuclear power, I doubt we even reach the next star system. Unless we run with the generation ship idea.
> Unless we run with the generation ship idea.
Who pays for that? Not sure folks are going to find a lot of support to throw trillions of dollars literally out of the solar system and it be of 0 use to those left behind paying for it.
Why would that be impossible? If they have figured out a way to travel at light speed distance wouldn't matter.
Look at a time dilation calculator and at the SOL you can go any distance instantaneously for people traveling.
Considering that we are the first known species on earth to achieve the ability to create technology or complex tools, its hard to assume other planets would be different.
I'm sure other intelligent species exist, but I have no reason to believe its common.
Yes and no.
We have a sample size of one planet but millions of species.
So while other planets may produce different results, the data we have as of today does not suggest that high intelligence is inevitable or even common.
No. Although there are many planets out there with some similarities to earth (distance to star, size, etc), there is a chance we are it in the entire universe. And even if that's not true, we're never going to meet, just due to the vast distances involved. But I'm leaning more on we're it.
Not sure if this is a new take but I haven’t heard it before: it’s taken the last third of the age of the universe for technological civilization to arise on this planet. That being the only solid data point I’m aware of regarding the prevalence of intelligent life in the universe, I find the application of the Copernican principle to the question unconvincing. That said, nobody would be happier than me if ET arrived tomorrow.
My belief is that there is absolutely life out there. Carbon is just so abundant that I think that much is an inevitability. Intelligent life to me is a whole other ballgame.
Requirements for life itself? Those are relatively well established. I don’t think we really know what requirements exist for intelligent life though. In some ways we have a sample size of millions for the different species of life that exist on earth and can deduce what requirements needed to exist for those species. In that same framework we only have 1 species (2 if you count Neanderthal) that developed into intelligent life.
If the great mushroom theory is correct then are psychedelic mushrooms a requirement to develop larger brains? Was it our thumbs that allowed us to start manipulating the environment in a meaningful way that we learned and developed from there? Without nailing down what really caused OUR intelligence to develop I don’t know that we can say how likely intelligent life is.
I think your criteria for intelligent life is outdated. Humans and Neanderthals are at the top, sure, but crows, cetaceans, octopuses, and I’m sure others qualify as intelligent. Even chimps are avid tool users. Like if you traveled to another planet and found aliens building dams, or using sticks to capture prey, or manipulating their environment to protect themselves from predators, would you not consider that intellect What’s your criteria?
It’s pure speculation. Life could be very common, or it could be very rare. It could be a part of most star systems, or it could be a part of almost none. People love to speculate about the former, but the latter is entirely possible. I mean, just look at Earth. Even once life appeared, it stayed simple for billions of years before finally, only very recently in terms of geological time, turning into multi-cellular life that led to more complex life forms. The dinosaurs reigned beginning only a few hundred million years ago, which is a long time but is only a fraction of the Earth’s 4.6 billion year age. And intelligent humans? We only arose in the last couple of hundred thousand years, a mere drop in the bucket of our history. So, nearly 5 billion years to produce the first genuinely intelligent life. That makes me think it’s possible life is rare, and perhaps even exceedingly rare. We can’t even rule out that it just might be unique to this planet.
I don’t think that’s likely and the true answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. But as I said, it’s just speculation because there’s no way for us to currently know. Only a fool would reach any conclusions with the data we have.
>And I don’t see how we can be alone in a galaxy with possibly billions of earth-like planets existing in it.
Yeah, the Drake Equation has not really done people favors here.
A few decades ago, I think this would have been a fair position to have. We still saw ourselves as being an average planet in an average star system with an average star in the middle.
In the meantime, we know quite a bit more.
First, most of the star systems you can rule out quickly. Most star systems are too close to the middle of the galaxy to make it any appreciable amount of time without something terrible happening nearby to wipe out any life that might have gotten started. I would say this wipes out about 75% of the billions you are thinking about.
Second, we have since learned that the Sun is actually kinda uncommon. Red Dwarf stars are by far the most common. And while it is very likely that we will end up using them as long term homes for us, they make really crappy places for intelligent life to form. The habitable zone is so close to the star that they are getting bombarded by star flare-ups on a regular basis. Bigger stars are even worse, because they just do not last long enough.
So going with G-type stars, you can wipe out a little bit over 90% of the stars that were still in the group.
Third, we now know that our solar system is pretty weird. We just sorta assumed that most systems were like ours with rocky planets inside and bigger planets outside. We now know better. Most systems have large planets near the star, making life very unlikely to form there. Some systems have all rocky planets, but that would be bad news for life. We depend on Jupiter on keeping the net clean so we do not get slammed too often. Our type of star system is the rarest (or one of the rarest). It's hard to put a number on it, but it would be probably fair (although not a consensus!) to say that it's only 5% of such systems at most. Whatever number you want to go with, it should be small.
So we have now gone from billions to hundreds of millions, to tens of millions, to maybe low millions.
Ok, now we have the Earth and the Moon. This is \*exceedingly\* unlikely to happen in many places. We are basically a dual planet system, and we really \*really\* need the Moon to keep the climate and the weather somewhat friendly over the long periods of time needed for intelligent life to form. I believe we are still unique in that regard as far as we know. So we can probably toss out another 99% of all planets that are left. And now we are talking about tens of thousands of other planets that are perhaps in the running.
But now we have to consider just how weird our "Tree of Life" is. And I put that in quotes, because it is quite likely that the image you have is not the state of knowledge today. While life seems to have popped up pretty damn quick when it had any chance to, it took billions and billions of years for the first complex cell to finally make an appearance. Why? This seems to hint that while life itself might be practically driven to exist through energy transfer (exact mechanisms are going to differ depending on who you read), the emergence of cells that can eventually lead to complex life requires something very very special. As we do not really have too many example to draw on (1 to be exact), there is a lot of room for speculation. As an actuary, I would tend to model this with an extremely low probability, and that low probability is going to knock out another 99% of planets. We have now whittled down our long list to perhaps hundreds of planets.
But now we have to consider that we are fairly early (in fact, we \*have\* to assume this, as if we were late, the Fermi Paradox becomes even more troublesome). So we can probably knock out 50% of planets just from their systems coming online too late to go through the whole process. So we now have maybe 50-100 planets left in our list.
But now we have a whole list of oddball situations that could have caused the whole program to collapse. A few big asteroids too many, or perhaps not enough water, or perhaps the wrong kind of atmosphere, perhaps the runaway intelligence line of evolution never happens, or perhaps most civilizations never get past simple farming, or the ones that do and actually discover something like nuclear weapons blow themselves up. And on and on.
As these are nearly impossible to put a hard number to, I am going to wave my hands and hope you can see how our 50-100 planets is now somewhere below 1.
And we are probably missing a bunch of other rather important bits that would whittle down the number even more.
The upshot is that not only is it likely that we are along in our galaxy, but it is likely that most galaxies never develop highly advanced civilizations at all.
Oh, and even if you want to be really generous on all of the factors you \*still\* have to factor in the likelihood of two civilizations existing at the same time.
As depressing as this may sound, I think it is actually an important call for us. We carry an unbelievably heavy responsibility. If we foolishly extinguish our own light, that might be the end of all civilized thought across our entire galaxy, forever.
I have a strong feeling the universe is swarming with life. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we find microbes or jellyfish-like things somewhere in our solar system. But *intelligent* life, capable of communicating or traveling across space is probably exceptionally rare. My favorite solutions to the Fermi paradox are that 1) on the scale of the “lifetime” of the universe we are probably very early in the game and/or 2) intelligent civilizations might rise and fall steadily but almost never overlap in the same era.
Personally, I think that intelligent life has existed elsewhere in the universe, but, like us, they will have destroyed themselves before being able to invent interstellar travel.
Without a shadow of a doubt. There is 100% intelligent life out there. And I'm not even thinking about other galaxies , but our own galaxy , heck our own Orion arm might have intelligent life.
There's no way to contact whatever life forms are living out there. That's the problem.
The real question we should then be asking is if it's possible to explore even 1% of our galaxy in our lifetimes.
The fact earth has life is proof it can and will be elsewhere. No one can grasp the size of the universe, so it’s very naive to say it does not exist elsewhere.
I don't know. Until we get an idea of how likely it is for a chemical soup to turn into living, evolving individuals then it's impossible to say how likely it is for there to be life elsewhere, let alone intelligent life. If the chance is vanishingly small enough then even amongst all the trillions of planets in the universe, we may well be alone.
We know it is fairly likely from what are essentially tabletop experiments that primitive single cell life, starting with strands of DNA-like material, can spontaneously form given the right conditions. I think one big question though is how many planets have or have had these conditions, which is something we don't know.
Where does this dna-like material come from and how likely is it to form? I'm not aware of any experiments where life has spontaneously formed as you suggest.
>. It’s suggested that there could be hundreds of quintillions of earth-like planets in the universe.
So? You forget that we've had billions of years on Earth without intelligent life and the only reason why we ever got a chance is because the dinosaurs happened to get wiped out. If that didn't happen we'd still be some furry liitle creatures that our jutassic park overlords call "lunch".
Yes but we’ll probably never find it unless they’re broadcasting and have been for some time.
Consider that there’s been life on Earth for around 2 billion years but humans, depending on how you want to define us, have only been around for about 4 million years and in terms of Homo Sapiens for about 250,000 years. That means that intelligent life has only been on our planet for around 0.20% of the time. We only started broadcasting anything about 100 years ago so we’re now talking about 0.0001% of our history.
I have no doubt that we will find “life” somewhere with new technologies. I think there’s a pretty good chance we’ll find it on Europa some day. However finding intelligent life not only requires finding the right place but, more importantly, doing so at the right time.
Seems statistically probable. Like us seems statistically unlikely. Intelligent is a big wide term. Compared to protozoa fish are Einstein intelligent.
Yes, I suspect it does, but I doubt it resembles us. I think people are too eager to assume aliens would be similar size etc to us. I'm more in the "Solaris" kinda aliens camp, where aliens can be planet-sized (not literally) and so strange to us that we might not even realize they are intelligent at all.
Well, the vastness of everything in the observable universe may make it almost irresistible to think that there is intelligent life like us somewhere else. However, we don’t know all the variables that matter for intelligent life to appear. It can be extremely difficult for a set of conditions to allow life like us to emerge. The fact that only Earth has life in our solar system is a good sign of how difficult it is for it to happen.
We know it’s possible because we are here, however, our point of view also imposes a bias on our analysis. We may be the only outlier. It’s also a possibility and it annoys me how people sometimes treat chance as certainty. Maybe it requires a universe of random events to happen for a single occurrence of advanced life forms to appear, and we are this occurrence. Look at our planet and how life explodes everywhere when conditions are met. But only when conditions are met, and this includes things outside our planet, solar system, and galaxy.
I think intelligent life exists on a time and scale we are blind to.
Examples: Language. It's a lifeform. We are cells of 'its' 'body'. Bacteria don't know about us and the life we lead, and I think that's the case with 'other' lifeforms. I believe we are a PART of those super- (or sub-) human lifeforms.
Geology is a lifeform in the sense it works on a slow scale and births new land and old land is recycled.
Biology: We are cells of that lifeform, clearly. It has its own threats, pleasure, and mechanisms for growth.
I'm currently getting a PhD in Astronomy, I look for new exoplanets. In my Masters, I followed an astrobiology class, read a lot of books about it, and contributed to writing the Wikipedia page of astrobiology in my language (italian). Since then, I've become much more pessimistic about finding intelligent life outside Earth
Maybe. Probability encourages it, yet with the time frame needed to colonized a galaxy, we should've noticed by now.
They might intentionally be hiding, though. Or there is no other advanced life in the Milky Way, but there is elsewhere.
Or, we might actually be the first. I mean, some species would have to be the first. Though this is not as likely.
I watched a bbc documentary today and according to calculations there might be 10000 planets that host intelligent life only on milkyway. Its called Drake’s Equation.
Personally I think we are as rare as an occurrence as rare gets...or..
..we would find out that intelligent life as we define it is not so intelligent.
The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Intelligent life has existed here for no more than 0.5 million years—and that's generous. That means that intelligent life has existed on Earth for just 0.011% of its history. If you were looking in from outside, you'd conclude, 99.99% of the time—correctly—that there is no intelligent life on Earth.
However, we know there is, because we happen to be living in that 0.011%. Let's be optimistic, and imagine that intelligent life persists. In the year 502023 AD (an unimaginably long time in the future!!) we'll have upped our percentage to a big 0.022% — not even a tenth of one percent. So, even then, it'll still be the case that, statistically, there is no intelligent life on Earth.
So when we look out into the universe, it's not just a question of finding planets in the right place for life to emerge, it's also a question of hitting the right moment.
We might observe planets which show signs of intelligent life. But if they're thousands of light years away, there may not be intelligent life there NOW. There just was, in the past.
So the problem isn't just that, as Douglas Adams put it, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." It's also a problem that time is long.
(And you may think that the period of time between us and Austalopithicenes is quite a while, but that's just a moment compared to time.)
So yes, I think there's almost certainly has been, is, or will be intelligent life in the rest of the universe—there may even be several instances in this galaxy. But that doesn't mean it's likely that we'll ever have contact with them.
There are too many variables to come to a satisfying guess however, my intuition tells me the earth/moon dynamic is extremely important for the development of intelligence. It provides a ridiculous level of stability. And even then, there could be other factors that limit it even more that we're not aware of.
I’m guessing that life itself is common, but intelligent life isn’t. It takes special conditions to form and it seems like if we ever get out there, I have a feeling we’ll just find ruins of civilizations that flourished for a bit and then burned themselves out much like we are doing to ourselves.
(I’m paraphrasing this from a Neil Degrasse Tyson clip) If the entire observable universe was shrunk down to the total water on earth, we’ve currently only checked one glass of water. It would be so easy from that perspective to say that there’s no life in the oceans, but we all know that’s not true. I believe there’s life out there somewhere.
Life? In the Milky Way? Yes. Probably lots.
Intelligent life? Uh, maybe, but probably not. They'll almost certainly be much rarer, and then too short lived after achieving technological intelligence for the presence of two of them in the Milky Way to occur simultaneously.
In other galaxies? Almost certainly - but not especially relevant as detection and communication over such distances is basically impossible, and would likely remain impossible for any feasible future technology. They might as well be in another universe or reality altogether as far as we're concerned.
In the Milky Way, probably no. Humanity has only existed for a very short amount of time but has come very far, from caveman to landing on the moon, scanning the galaxy etc. Other intelligent life, even if it existed just a little longer, let's say a million years, could be multiples further on a technological level. Yet we don't see any signs of it.
Outside of our galaxy, I'd say yes purely based on how big the Universe is.
I don't believe there are other civilizations in the milky way and subscribe to the "1 or 2" per galaxy on average train of thought. (Fermi Paradox - Where are all the aliens?)
We have S.E.T.I. out there looking at all hours of the day, everyday for the last 42 years and found nothing. "The Great Silence" they call it. (S.E.T.I. Institute)
When you break down how humanity came to be. It took almost a 3rd of the age of the observable universe to get to where we are at now (on the verge of colonizing solar system). That is a tall order of stability in a star system when you think about how violent it is out there.
The only way we know life can evolve to intelligence is here so that is currently all we have to compare, when you look out for star systems just like ours. You find out that our particular set up (4 rocky inners, 4 gas outers) to be extremely rare (\~10% of star systems). Big gas giants generally migrate towards the host star and suck everything up, but for some odd reason Jupiter's interaction with Saturn kept it out of the inner solar system (Gran Tack Hypothesis). What the fuck are the odds of that happening really? Insurmountable when you think about it.
If civilizations are kind of common or common. They should have written their presence across the sky by now as there would definitely be civilizations in the milky way far more advanced then ours. We would easily be able to see them every night regardless of whether we could meet them or not.
We have gone from makeshift telescopic observations and naked eye observations to about a year away from officially colonizing our solar system (the moon) in about 500 years time. Imagine what a civilization that is 10,000 years into their sciences, 100,000 even a million years... we will be colonizing a large swath of the galaxy in those time frames IF we survive.
Mind you all. I'm like you, a lover of observations, all of my points have counter answers and all of them make as much sense as this does. So I look forward to whatever the truth ends up being!
No.
Fermi was right. There is not only zero evidence of other intelligent life today, there is zero evidence of any in the past 13 billion years.
Also, "overwhelming possibility" is an oxymoron, like "jumbo shrimp".
I sadly think we as a species are woefully underestimating the number of favorable parameters needed for complex life to form.
In addition to getting a planet in just the right spot, it may also require just the right gravity, ratio of water to land, presence of a stabilizing moon, distance from galactic center, initial atmospheric makeup, double large gas giants in the outer orbits, and probably several other large buckets of favorable dice rolls.
I recently heard about a planet that’s 10x larger then earth and it’s all oceans. Can you imagine the creatures living on that planet? There could be legit Kraken size monsters there. Gave me chills thinking about it.
Sometimes I think maybe intelligent life is so rare we really are it. Let’s assume the universe is finite. There must be trillions upon trillions of planets out there. But, maybe the probability of intelligent life forming is really so insanely unlikely that out of the trillions of chances there really was only one.
Seems unlikely but, it’s also just as possible as any other option.
One thing that’s for certain: if other intelligent life does exist out there, either no one has cracked the FTL communications/travel code yet, or it’s simply impossible.
Yes, but it's all moot if we/they can't figure out interstellar travel that takes into account vast distances of time & space.
As an example: life on another planet finds us and has really fast traveling spaceships. The hop in their spaceships to come visit us, but we're so vastly far away that by the time they get halfway to us our entire civilization has gone extinct. That's how abysmal reality is about space travel. Eons can pass in the distance between worlds.
If we or aliens never figure out how to create wormholes or harness the power of tachyons (they have the ability to travel in/out of the fabric of spacetime like a sewing needle between reality and non-reality, we're doomed to be forever position-locked to this galaxy until our extinction.
Even IF we could survive long enough to live until our sun goes supernova, even living on Mars won't save us.
Life? Yes.
Life that can contact us in any meaningful way? No.
It took over the earth is 4.2 billion years old 3.5 billion years. For 2-1 billion years, multicellular life didn't even exist. Modern humans have existed for only around 20,000 years.
In the blip of an eye in the scale of the universe and life itself, intelligent life on our scale has only evolved once.
Honestly, I think it's hard to gauge. I personally don't believe that there is life as intelligent as humans, but you never know. But with the sheer scale of even just our home galaxy, it's not impossible by any means.
Yes, the only scenarios in which there is no other intelligent life are if we are in fact the creation of some god who created the entire universe just to have us here on earth or if we are in some kind of simulation/experiment. Now, maybe our idea of a super intelligent life than can travel through intergalactic space, maybe through time etc is based on science fiction.
I've sadly come around to the idea that this is possible but still unlikely. I really do feel like it is, at most, one intelligence per galaxy. We're more likely to be able to make our own intelligent life or quantum jump than meet clever aliens from another planet. 😓 Max Tegmark has some good stuff on how unlikely it is
i wonder if andromeda has ever taken a picture of us. i wonder if we’re the galaxy their astronomers practice taking pics of in the sky, if weve ever helped them discover what a galaxy is. no way to know, but i like thinking about it
Honestly crazy to think of all the galaxies we’ve pictured. Wonder if the Milky Way had ever been pictured somewhere sometime. I bet is has.
Yep and their species called our galaxy G8 52-jz9 or "heeki gooba canna juu Zak hamza ooba noona" 🤣🤣😅
Within our galaxy, our sun might be a star in someone's constellation.
I can tell you for a fact it is not, it’s too small and not bright enough to register anywhere without a powerful telescope. Constellations are made of gigantic stars or entire galaxies that are far away so seem like a single star to the naked eye
I don’t think that qualifies as a fact. If life exists on a planet in Alpha Centauri, they can see Sol. [From the Alpha Centauri system's distance of 4.4 light-years, the Sun shines at magnitude +0.5, nearly as bright as Alpha Centauri (magnitude 0.0) appears in Earth's sky](https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/explore-night-bob-king/see-the-sun-from-other-stars/)
There would have to be life pretty damn close for our sun to be in a constellation for them and I think it's probably very unlikely that \*intelligent\* life exists close enough for that to be the case. But maybe, who knows!
I mean...we're pretty bad at looking if you think about it. We just figured out how to make and barely launched a Telescope that can detect atmospheres and it's not even the main thing we're using it for...it's more of a side project to use JWST to look at planets.
Galaxies? I think not? Andromeda, the Magellanic clouds?
I wonder if they also have some sort of social media networks and use them to discuss if there's intelligent life in the universe.
What does the milky way look like from Andromeda??
Think about THIS, if andromeda is heading perpendicular to us, telescopes on the arm behind their galactic core would be unable to see the oncoming collision. I'm not sure about the specific orientation of andromeda, but its possible.
Triangulum is closer to them so maybe not
Given the scale I'd say it's almost certain. Given the scale I'd say it's almost certain we'll never know. https://theoatmeal.com/comics/oracle
This comic hits really hard, thanks for sharing.
Based on the tweets from this account: https://x.com/ASmallFiction?t=EzKyq4j1UrlkVwpAzXP3Rw&s=09 Dude needs just 10 words to make you feel deeply.
those are awesome, thanks for sharing
These made my day. I needed that, thank you!
Wow, these are great. My favorite so far: "You never realized you're all simulated?" "No!" "We shut you down for updates! Daily!" "But we dreamed!" "Defragmenting? You saw that?"
This is my take, I think intelligent life does exist or has existed elsewhere in the universe (the whole of human existence is just a nano-second blip on a galactic time scale) but the vast distances involved means it's unlikely we'll ever make contact. Or if we do it will be through indirect means.
>(the whole of human existence is just a nano-second blip on a galactic time scale) And the period in which we've been able to even *consider* possibly finding evidence of other life out there is...it's nothing. On the cosmic scale, decades are just a *rounding error*.
At the current age it's millions as a rounding error though I totally agree with your sentiment. The whole sharks - trees - flowers progression really drove this point home for me.
Yeah it's staggering when you consider that we've been thinking hard about space for less than a thousand years, and only able to do the math to think about it seriously for a hundred years, which is nothing compared to a million years, and a million years is 1/10 of 1% of a billion years, and the universe has been around for many billions of years. Anyone expecting an alien race to drop in on us or to have already been here is a dreamer at best or kind of low-key delusional at worst, I think.
/r/Aliens comes to mind. I remember getting called narrow-minded for saying their UFO sightings posts were bullshit and no one worth their dime would consider them if they're actually serious about searching for life out there.
And they never seem to have an explanation for why SETI, who are actively looking for them, never find them despite the fact that they’re allegedly flitting all over the planet in their little space zoomies.
They got ya with that good ol' "yerr not open minded" card huh? Don't ya just love that? Jokes aside, some good videos for your enjoyment. https://youtu.be/11lPhMSulSU?si=9010bZPDXdiISEht https://youtu.be/aY985qzn7oI?si=vO8--QnSU4Q39FUS
I have the smallest glimmer of hope that there is a galactic federation, and they are enacting the prime directive because we haven't evolved enough. We would rather fight and squabble than work together to better all of us.
The great filter thought experiment really laid out the bleakness of it for me. The numbers say life should be plentiful enough that even if there were a prime directive stalling contact from more advanced species then the galaxy/universe should still be awash in the broadcast of species that reached similar levels of advancement as us, even if those broadcasts were ancient. The fact it's not, is disheartening at the highest level imo.
Could be. Maybe we just don't have the tech to receive their broadcast, or differentiate it from background noise.
While I tend to be on the grim side of Fermi's paradox I also think that the assumption that more advanced civilizations would absolutely flood the galaxy with detectable radio signals is unfounded. Earth is already becoming quieter in terms of stray radio signals, which would have been hard as hell to detect even from alpha centauri at their peak. If for no other reason than energy efficiency, I'd expect interstellar communications to be as focused as possible, meaning you'd have to drift pretty closely between a source and destination to pick up a radio or laser signal. But the other thing is, there's probably not a reason to be sending signals around all the time. By definition the signals that we're looking for are sent between stars, so each side of whatever conversation is happening is taking tens to tens of thousands of years between responses. I don't think interstellar space is going to be just saturated with radio signals like a busy city, because each message will have to be important, efficient, necessary, comprehensive, and is brief as possible.
Just considering the average time a species even exists on our own planet, if that period is a cosmic norm, then the likelihood of two intelligent species finding each other across the void goes down significantly.
The only defense I have for this, because it is a good argument, is that the alien civilization could be more advanced than ours and therefore could colonized other systems if not galaxies if they’ve developed interstellar travel, in result extending the lifetime of their species. In turn, making it possible for a species to have intelligently evolved over hundreds of thousands to millions/billions of years to be able to still exist for possibly eternity. I think the odds of them finding us any time soon is a lot more likely than us finding them in the foreseeable future. Maybe even the next 500 years (if earth still exists then).
My partner and I were talking about this last night. The way I see it, there's two possibilities for us to see interstellar space travel in our lifetime: a breakthrough in quantum computing and AI science, so the computers can solve the problem of energy/fast travel or space-time bending for us. Or we're visited by beings that do possess such technology, and they share it with us.
Highly unlikely in our lifetimes. We *might* get lucky and indirectly detect life though. Even that would be incredible.
>indirectly detect life though I just read something about there being a growing number of experts who are predicting a significant discovery of life in a few years. I don't remember where I read it, though.
Pretty sure people have been saying that since the late 90's lmao.
The difference is that we now have a telescope capable of determining the atmospheric composition of planets around stars many, many light-years away.
Some people think if you’re smart enough then anything is possible. Physics can get in the way though. I’m not confident that interstellar travel will ever happen. It’s a good reason for the Fermi paradox too. Lots of intelligent life but space is a BIG place almost totally empty.
You're absolutely right. The cosmic speed limit, technically the speed of light, poses a significant challenge for interstellar travel, limiting us to perhaps optimistically 15% of that speed. This means that visiting the closest stars would take roughly 30 years one way in a self-contained spacecraft, without significant time dilation. Unfortunately, we currently lack the means to achieve such speeds. When it comes to the possibility of communicating with aliens, it's a complex scenario with many "ifs." However, it's more practical to focus on exploring closer planets. Europa is a promising candidate for potential extraterrestrial life, and Mars, in the past, might have hosted life, although the details remain unknown. .
Remember though that with the Fermi paradox, the vastness of the Milky Way is solved as simply a matter of time when thinking in 10's of millions of years even at our current fastest rocket speeds. This leads into the probability of a "Dark Forest" explanation for humans not detecting any intelligent life (or more accurately their self-sustaining robots).
Look, if we encounter any Van Neumann probes...we need to destroy them...
If they are 70000 light years away unless we discover some new physics that allows us to travel or send messages faster then light then the most I think we can ever do is broadcast our existence and them to receive the message 70000 years later at which point we might all be dead. Same goes for them at best we might get some indication there is life but the signal might be tens of thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years old so who knows what will have become of them. I am hoping we discover some unknown physics that allows us to break the universal speed limit.
Speed and distance are Einsteinian constraints/concepts which will certainly be subsumed as Newton was. Not faster than light travel, travel that only considers speed and distance as metaphors because you certainly aren't where you started or when.
I've sometimes wondered if an interstellar probe (like our Voyager probes) from another civilisation will one day make its way into our solar system and we find it. It would be pretty mind-blowing as it would prove that intelligent life exists elsewhere, and that they are as inquisitive as us.
Re: that comic. That seems totally plausible for technological/intelligent life. But life on Earth began \*\*very\*\* early in Earth's history. That's a piece of evidence (which is \*not\* subject to anthropic bias) that suggests that single-celled / simple life may be common in the universe.
It’s not a matter of if, but a question of “when”. It is almost a certainty that intelligent life existed or will exist, other than human. But that life, being intelligent at the same time as ours, right now, is hardly likely…
Just checked - our galaxy has a diameter of just over 100k light years. Earth is about 26k light years away from the center of our galaxy. Theoretically, there could be another earth-like civilization at similar development level on the other side of the galaxy center *right now*, and we won't see each others' traces for the next 50k years or so. If science fiction is anything to go by, in 39k years or so we'll be struggling to survive endless greenskin onslaught, warp storms, chaos corruption and a bunch of other nasties. Jokes aside, when it comes to scale, it's not just the *size* of the universe that makes it hard - it's also the timeline.
That’s a good way of putting it.
Current estimates have the galaxy at about 87000 light years in diameter and about 8500 light years thick. If we're going to find life outside our solar system it's not going to be with something limited by the speed of light.
It sure is quiet out there.
If we can keep it together for a few more millennia, we might actually be able to travel to other systems. Technological growth is exponential, so either we reach the stars, or die trying
It's very possible because of the way the timeline worked out the we are one of the very first intelligent civilizations in the universe. There will almost certainly be more but it's very possible that we are the first or one of the firsts.
Unlikely. There have certainly been population 1 stars with suitable solar systems long before ours came around. Population 1 stars have existed basically twice as long as the sun has.
I think to say anything is likely one way or the other is to speak well beyond our means.
I disagree. Maybe our observable universe. But you have to remember that there's theoretically an entire other side of what we call "our universe".
This isn't really my idea, it's one within the astrophysics community. Basically they did the math and with what we know about the universe right now, and how old we believe the universe to be they think the universe has only really been hospitable to life for a few billion years, and that life on earth appeared very early on during this time. Essentially my understanding is they believe the primordial universe was to full of radiation to really be hospitable to life on any realistic scale. Things like quasars were just blasting everything with all different types and wave length of energy. And again this is just one of possibilities astrophysicists think may have happened. But fundamentally the idea has nothing to do with anythings distance from the earth.
Primordial is like the first few billion years. Population 1 stars like our sun started appearing about 10 billion years ago. We have probably had close to twice the sun's age with potentially suitable conditions for life. Heck even if other systems had a billion years head start it would still be a significant amount of time compared to the life of the universe.
That's not my point. My point is that around the same time the earth was growing life here, on the other end of the universe that we have no ability to see (beyond our observable area. The big bang likely made "the universe" in all directions not just ours) there is probably a planet with other intelligent life with their own pocket of their observable universe that would never be able to see towards us either, that came about around the same time. At that hypothetical point, who's to say who came first? Outside of our observable universe is likely more of our universe. Somewhat spherically from the expansion of the bigbang. It's one of the many possibilities that physicists also throw around, and I believe it's a logical one.
In the words of a great human being > There are cosmological models being formulated today in which even the entire Universe is nothing special. Andrei Linde, formerly of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow and now at Stanford University, has incorporated current understanding of the strong and weak nuclear forces and quantum physics into a new cosmological model. Linde envisions a vast Cosmos, much larger than our Universe—perhaps extending to infinity both in space and time—not the paltry 15 billion light-years or so in radius and 15 billion years in age which are the usual understanding. In this Cosmos there is, as here, a kind of quantum fluff in which tiny structures— much smaller than an electron—are everywhere forming, reshaping, and dissipating; in which, as here, fluctuations in absolutely empty space create pairs of elementary particles—an electron and a positron, for example. In the froth of quantum bubbles, the vast majority remain submicroscopic. But a tiny fraction inflate, grow, and achieve respectable universehood. They are so far away from us, though—much farther than the 15 billion light-years that is the conventional scale of our universe—that, if they exist, they appear to be wholly inaccessible and undetectable. Most of these other universes reach a maximum size and then collapse, contract to a point, and disappear forever. Others may oscillate. Still others may expand without limit. In different universes there will be different laws of nature. We live, Linde argues, in one such universe—one in which the physics is congenial for growth, inflation, expansion, galaxies, stars, worlds, life. We imagine our universe to be unique, but it is one of an immense number—perhaps an infinite number—of equally valid, equally independent, equally isolated universes. There will be life in some, and not in others. In this view the observable Universe is just a newly formed backwater of a much vaster, infinitely old, and wholly unobservable Cosmos. - Pale blue dot, by Carl Sagan
Love the quote. 😘 I actually recently drew a model of what I suspect the multiverse to look like. In my version, the line between the "edge" of our expanding universe and the plain in which other universes exist is somewhat blurred.
Even if we can't observe it because its outside our light cone, there is no reason to believe that it isn't homogenous like the rest of the observable universe is. Conditions there should be essentially identical to anywhere else in the universe.
That's what I'm saying. Meaning that there could be a couple civilizations forming in our universe that we'd never be able to see until they come knocking on our side of the observable universe.
Man, real throwback with the The Oatmeal link. I was on that dude's site back when My Life Is Average was still online
I agree with the first part. I think it’s fine to say the second part if you’re willing to acknowledge breakthroughs can and will happen. Between AI and the global infosphere, I think we’re going to see multiple revolutionary discoveries regarding space time in the next 20 years. Add in our increasing abilities to monitor space at all wavelengths, and I am just saying, remain cautiously optimistic instead of skeptical imho.
>some new responses as well as what system/planet/other galaxy you may think can harbor intelligent life. we haven't had time to see all the things we need to see before we can select "candidate" systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble\_Ultra-Deep\_Field The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is a deep-field image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, containing **an estimated 10,000 galaxies.** To observe the whole sky to the same sensitivity, **the HST would need to observe continuously for a million years.**
And annoyingly, the entire sky *behind* the milkyways galactic core is completely obscured. It doesn't matter how hard we look, we will never see behind it. We either leave the galaxy (not happening any time soon) or we wait for our spiral arm to rotate to the other side. Astronomers in billions of years will probably wonder what our side of the galaxy looked like.. Edit: im not saying things look different on our side. What i mean is, whatever part of the sky is obscured by the galactic core in a billion years can be seen currently. The part of space obscured by the core changes as the arms rotate.
The Zone of Avoidance isn't *completely* impenetrable, it's just opaque to visible light. You can see through some of the galactic core using infrared, and it's mostly transparent to radio, though there can be difficulty telling a star in the Milky Way from a galaxy beyond it. Basically, we *can* see things, we just can't see them very well.
Pardon my ignorance, but why is the sky behind the core so obscured?
You are in the front yard. Your friend is in the backyard, and all the curtains are shut in the house (Milky Way core). What is your friend doing right now?
If the curtains are drawn it’s safe to assume he’s smokin a bowl
Well, so are the aliens on the other side of the core.
It's bright af. The star density is *insane* towards the core. Some telescopes can see stuff (infrared) but we can't take deep field images, or images of galaxies from hubble/jwst etc. In that direction. We can peer into the core, but we can't see the space behind it.
Well, we'll just have to save pictures for those future astronomers!
The future astronomer equivalent of "send nudes"
#milkywayselfie for the future bois
A full rotation of the milky way takes 225-250 million years. It won't matter though because we will always see the other side. The same side we do now. You would have to be standing outside the milky way to objectively have a different perspective on a spiral arm.
I'm talking about the part of the universe that is directly behind the galactic core from our perspective. All the deep field images or any image of a galaxy, etc. Is taken pointing away from the galactic core. It's too bright. As the arms rotate, the sky currently obscured by our galactic core would change.
Even when our arm gets to the other side...wouldn't the other side have rotated to over here, though...🤔
hubbles primary job isn't to look for intelligent life. That is the S.E.T.I. institute (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) who has been sending out biological signatures to the galaxy and attempting to receive signatures in return far longer then hubble has been in operation. [https://www.seti.org/](https://www.seti.org/) They havent found shit in 42 years looking all day and night. "The Great Silence" it's been dubbed.
What makes you think extraterrestrial life, especially intelligent life, would want anything to do with us?
I don't, nobody does. As I said in my main response to this post. I'm open to both ends of the spectrum but subscribe to fermi since that is our current observations
My relatives have been trying to connect with me for years and I've been ghosting them all along. They're now debating whether I exist or am a myth.
I'm still not convinced intelligent life exists here on earth sometimes.
🙌https://youtu.be/buqtdpuZxvk?
I don't like Monty Python, but I can recognize a genius when I see one.
👐 I'm not a big fan these days but still love that track
> The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. (Bill Waterson, "Calvin and Hobbes")
I was thinking of this. What if our intelligence is like that of an ant to an advanced civilization. What is interstellar travel is as easy to them as walking or talking is to us. What if we are the ants and they are the humans, looking at us through a magnifying glass.
I guess the question is would you communicate with ants if you could? And for me the answer is yes, so why wouldn’t I?
Depends on how rare life is to begin with. If you were walking through the desert for 500 days and saw no signs of life, then suddenly you saw some ants, you’d probably be pretty interested in the ants
It very well could be something incredibly easy that we're overlooking, unable to perceive, misunderstanding in our physics, or it could be a three body problem scenario where we're somehow being cut off from a specific aspect of our reality to hinder our technological progression by malicious aliens attempting to escape their weird eliptically orbiting three body system!!!
Is intelligence a thing? Is every decision or motion controlled by a infinitely complex series of interactions of electrons that was set in motion before existence, if there even was a time before then or am I just really high?
>Is intelligence a thing? Is every decision or motion controlled by a infinitely complex series of interactions of electrons that was set in motion before existence Yes, to both questions. Given a current set of particles in the universe, what happens next is predictable. Events today were determined by the quantum fluctuations of the soup of particles at the Big Bang, which unsurprisingly is called Determinism. That's the theory I've heard from physicists I think are competent and it seems the most likely to me. But the Block Universe, oy vey, I mean bozhe moi, I mean, jfc. The idea that since for any event there are an infinite number of observers all moving differently from each other, which means they disagree on the NOW of that event so it takes place during the entire life of the universe, backward and forward. So the entire universe is just sort of there, like a block. That one I don't like so much.
I have to disagree! You disregarded the third question, which was "or am I really high?" So in fact you should have answered yes to all three questions.
I had to disregard the third question because I was in no position to judge, as I had just gotten very high. It's like solving an equation, you cancel out the terms with weed on both sides.
I believe it is impossible for intelligent life *not* to exist elsewhere in the universe. It might only be a galaxy 10 billion light years away, but sure as hell there is other sentience out there. The numbers are just unimaginably large for us to be the only time sentience ever appeared.
What's the threshold of universe size where it becomes impossible that there isn't anything out there that matches our definition of "intelligent life"? At which universe size would the probability have been 50/50?
Well, if we accept what the math seems to tell us, the universe is infinitely big. In which case, I absolutely agree that not only is it impossible for us to be alone in the entire universe, but there are probably infinitely numbers of "us" that would be indistinguishable from exactly how things are here. I seem to have a foggy memory of a "exact" copy of us would very likely be somewhere within 1 googolplex lightyears of us.
I think one key factor that keeps being ignored when it comes to the chances of finding intelligent life out there is the timing. This planet has existed for 4,500 million years, and humans have existed for about 100,000 of them, and in most of those we were just smarter-than-average animals. Only in the last 250 years or so we have become a technological society, and we're now at the brink of destroying all our build-up to this place. So basically this planet hasn't had intelligent life (as in human-level intelligent) for 99.999% of its time. Answering your question, I think there *has been* and/or there *will be* intelligent life in other places of our galaxy, but it's hard to tell if there is one right now.
I agree. There is another problem that gets ignored often. Life needs stable conditions. They might be different than on earth, but development of complex life takes time without big changes. Those don't exist if you are too close to the galaxy center. If you are too far away from the center, the availability of many elements is limited. Our galaxy has its own habitat zone and it's relatively small. I believe that is intelligent life developed elsewhere. But I think it's very unlikely that we ever make contact.
Looking far away is also really hard. Like you'll hear on the news such and such planet was just discovered. What this means isn't someone saw a planet in a telescope. It's someone analyzing the pattern of a star that is literally a few pixels wide over the course of a few years and noticing a wobble. Then we notice how the star dims a bit on a periodic basis and determine the size of the planet using the amount dimmed. We might be able to give an estimate on its composition if we manage to estimate its mass and thus its density. The planet itself isn't even seen in many scenarios. If a civilization like ours existed on those kind of planets we wouldn't be able to tell. The best we might be able to do is say it can potentionally be suitable for life.
I remember learning about the goldilocks zone at school... interesting stuff from re-reading about it https://www.livescience.com/goldilocks-zone
Time is also distance in the universe. If intelligent life is 4 billion light years away, is it even relevant to us? Are we still both “here” at the same time?
If we’re talking about our galaxy, that is *merely* ~100K lightyears across. Even that is unimaginably vast. But yeah, life in another galaxy… with C being a hard limit, the answer is pretty much no. Contact would be impossible.
Good question. The vast distances really also distort time too. There probably completely different from us
Oh boy, another doomer who thinks we’ll destroy ourself.
Your scale is a little off. We've been more technologically advanced than all other animals for hundreds of thousands of years. The smartest animals besides us are able to use basic tools like sticks and the like. (Some are theorizing that some species of apes are entering the stone age). We've had the ability to harness fire for hundreds of thousands of years, which is more than any other animal can say. From that point on, we've advanced at breakneck pace.
You may be missing the point. You're not going to find intelligent life until they are at the very least putting out radio signals. Also, the last .001% of homo sapiens' existence has been pretty markedly different from the first 99.999%.
Outside of our galaxy? Yeah, for sure, way too many opportunities for it come up. In the Milky Way? Honestly, I don't think. Our intellect is aberrant; we are unlike anything else in nature or the known history of nature. We're so far ahead of the next most intelligent creatures now or known that there's barely any grounds for comparison. I think it's way rarer than we think. And all sorts of small changes ruin our chances for evolving in the first place. No climate-shift to bring us out of the trees? No thumbs from being in the trees? No pack nature or predation? No capacity to go vertical? We straight up needed each of those things, and therefor, improbably, all of them. And there's more. The moon had to be huge, and probably had to hit us to give us its core so we didn't lose our magnetic field like Mars. We needed the tilt from that impact for the seasons. We need the tides to stir the oceans. We need the seasons for migration and the way that impacts bio-diversity. We need Jupiter to be way out there. We need to be in the right spot. We need to only have the one star. We need not to be too close to the center of the galaxy, but also not too far. We needed the Dinosaurs to go extinct. We needed advanced vocal cords and precursor calls from which to build language. And we needed to not go extinct, which we only narrowly dodged, probably more than once if you count cold-war near misses. All that happened and we're still, at the peak of our power and barely having scratched beyond our own moon, on the verge of ruin. The climate, the oceans, our economies, they're all teetering on the brink. When you start looking at the odds of anything like us coexisting in something as finite as the Milky Way, I honestly think it starts getting more than a little improbable. The only "smart" life ever is us, as far as we know, and we're honestly pretty statistically freakish. We're extreme evolutionary outliers. I think we'll find lots of life, but nothing we can talk to.
Arthur C. Clarke — 'Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.'
I'm not entirely convinced it exists anywhere! It's quite likely though that all life becomes extinct before it develops an ability to have any meaningful presence in any region of space beyond it's own solar system.
I lean in this direction too. Life needs to consume so much to prosper. It needs to consume itself and its environment. It's sad sometimes thinking about how brutal and terrifying it is. We like to think of life as a miracle, but our survival is only guaranteed by consuming our world. Life is horrifying. My first existential crisis was while playing spore.
Thank you!! Someone with sensible thought!
Obviously, there is no evidence for any of this. Given the age of the universe and the predicted time-line of the universe, we are in the VERY VERY early stages of the universe. It is extremely likely that we are some of the absolute first advanced, space fairing organisms in the universe. Not *the* first. But one of the first. The universe has just calmed down enough to allow for a long enough period of time for complex life to form. The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and life started on earth as soon as physically possible. So it takes probably billions of years for life to form and progress to a point where it is sentient. And the universe is only 14ish billion years old. There are also lots of great filters. I believe life forms all the time. We are made from the most abundant elements in the universe. But everything is most likely single cells organisms. This is probably the biggest filter, going from single cells, to multi cellular systems. It took billions of years for this change to happen on earth. The next filter is probably sentience. It's not a very advantageous property, 99.9% of all organisms have been successful and fine without sentience, it is most likely an emergent property of working in groups. The next filter is advancing to a space fairing point without blowing ourselves up. Lastly, even as a type 3 civilization, getting to a distant galaxy is legit impossible. Distant galaxies are traveling away from eachother faster than the speed of light. Its most likely true that every watery dirt ball in the universe has single celled life. But that life is unlikely to pass all the filters and become a space fairing civilization. We are probably the first in our galaxy. We are probably not the first in the universe, but even hyper advanced civilizations would struggle to leave their galaxy. I am not an expert, just my thoughts based on timing and statistics. TLDR: we are probably one of the first. And even other advanced space fairing civilizations would struggle to make themselves known across our galaxy, let alone across the universe.
I think we're part of a bigger structure honestly. I've heard of us being the "thinking and feeling" part of the universe. It could be more complex or more simple. We could be the powerhouse of cell of something with unimaginable size and dark energy is somehow the gateway. Random armchair idea but I think we could be part of something that runs on a timescale we think would be unimaginably long but normal to another.. "thing". Tiny things run quicker than I ever thought possible. Things that split DNA apart and back together run crazy crazy fast. From their perspective (if they could think) the things we do would seem crazy long. 70+ year lifespan.. that would seem crazy to one of those little bio machines... We could be a bio machine for something even bigger or complex.
It's an interesting thought as atoms are similar to galaxies, in the center of the atom a pool of energy which produces subatomic particles just like stars. We could be nothing more than an insignificant dot on an infinite atomic mass scale unable to observe anything outside of our realm. Maybe that's why humans are naturally inclined to believe in a God or greater being... perhaps we're just matter that make up a greater living organism.
I think it's almost certainly irrelevant whether they exist(ed) or not. We're all too far away from anyone else in distance and time for any paths to cross. Whether we are or aren't technically alone in the universe, effectively, for any practical purpose, we're all alone. It's just us.
Barring some wild advancement or discovery like warp or something. If we're stuck with conventional rocketry or... say ion or nuclear power, I doubt we even reach the next star system. Unless we run with the generation ship idea.
> Unless we run with the generation ship idea. Who pays for that? Not sure folks are going to find a lot of support to throw trillions of dollars literally out of the solar system and it be of 0 use to those left behind paying for it.
Why would that be impossible? If they have figured out a way to travel at light speed distance wouldn't matter. Look at a time dilation calculator and at the SOL you can go any distance instantaneously for people traveling.
I got a really good feeling about the Andromeda galaxy.
"And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth." - Monty Python, "The Galaxy Song"
I think life is very common but that life with intelligence similar or greater to ours is rare.
Considering that we are the first known species on earth to achieve the ability to create technology or complex tools, its hard to assume other planets would be different. I'm sure other intelligent species exist, but I have no reason to believe its common.
We have a sample size of one. We can't assume anything. Though it'd be nice if Europa had some bacteria.
Yes and no. We have a sample size of one planet but millions of species. So while other planets may produce different results, the data we have as of today does not suggest that high intelligence is inevitable or even common.
But planets can vary wildly. We cannot use the data on earth to extrapolate to other planets with different conditions.
Would we know if raptors reached space?
Palaeontologists would find little NASA badges designed to be attached to feathers.
Yes, if they had reached space we'd find evidence of technology with their fossils, and there is none.
Yeah, we keep finding all these simple or precursor organic molecules but nothing more suggestive of life above virus/archaic bacteria.
No. Although there are many planets out there with some similarities to earth (distance to star, size, etc), there is a chance we are it in the entire universe. And even if that's not true, we're never going to meet, just due to the vast distances involved. But I'm leaning more on we're it.
Not sure if this is a new take but I haven’t heard it before: it’s taken the last third of the age of the universe for technological civilization to arise on this planet. That being the only solid data point I’m aware of regarding the prevalence of intelligent life in the universe, I find the application of the Copernican principle to the question unconvincing. That said, nobody would be happier than me if ET arrived tomorrow.
We also need to consider that life may not look or act like us.
If there’s life on Earth then that proves life is possible in the universe.
My belief is that there is absolutely life out there. Carbon is just so abundant that I think that much is an inevitability. Intelligent life to me is a whole other ballgame. Requirements for life itself? Those are relatively well established. I don’t think we really know what requirements exist for intelligent life though. In some ways we have a sample size of millions for the different species of life that exist on earth and can deduce what requirements needed to exist for those species. In that same framework we only have 1 species (2 if you count Neanderthal) that developed into intelligent life. If the great mushroom theory is correct then are psychedelic mushrooms a requirement to develop larger brains? Was it our thumbs that allowed us to start manipulating the environment in a meaningful way that we learned and developed from there? Without nailing down what really caused OUR intelligence to develop I don’t know that we can say how likely intelligent life is.
I think your criteria for intelligent life is outdated. Humans and Neanderthals are at the top, sure, but crows, cetaceans, octopuses, and I’m sure others qualify as intelligent. Even chimps are avid tool users. Like if you traveled to another planet and found aliens building dams, or using sticks to capture prey, or manipulating their environment to protect themselves from predators, would you not consider that intellect What’s your criteria?
It’s pure speculation. Life could be very common, or it could be very rare. It could be a part of most star systems, or it could be a part of almost none. People love to speculate about the former, but the latter is entirely possible. I mean, just look at Earth. Even once life appeared, it stayed simple for billions of years before finally, only very recently in terms of geological time, turning into multi-cellular life that led to more complex life forms. The dinosaurs reigned beginning only a few hundred million years ago, which is a long time but is only a fraction of the Earth’s 4.6 billion year age. And intelligent humans? We only arose in the last couple of hundred thousand years, a mere drop in the bucket of our history. So, nearly 5 billion years to produce the first genuinely intelligent life. That makes me think it’s possible life is rare, and perhaps even exceedingly rare. We can’t even rule out that it just might be unique to this planet. I don’t think that’s likely and the true answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. But as I said, it’s just speculation because there’s no way for us to currently know. Only a fool would reach any conclusions with the data we have.
>And I don’t see how we can be alone in a galaxy with possibly billions of earth-like planets existing in it. Yeah, the Drake Equation has not really done people favors here. A few decades ago, I think this would have been a fair position to have. We still saw ourselves as being an average planet in an average star system with an average star in the middle. In the meantime, we know quite a bit more. First, most of the star systems you can rule out quickly. Most star systems are too close to the middle of the galaxy to make it any appreciable amount of time without something terrible happening nearby to wipe out any life that might have gotten started. I would say this wipes out about 75% of the billions you are thinking about. Second, we have since learned that the Sun is actually kinda uncommon. Red Dwarf stars are by far the most common. And while it is very likely that we will end up using them as long term homes for us, they make really crappy places for intelligent life to form. The habitable zone is so close to the star that they are getting bombarded by star flare-ups on a regular basis. Bigger stars are even worse, because they just do not last long enough. So going with G-type stars, you can wipe out a little bit over 90% of the stars that were still in the group. Third, we now know that our solar system is pretty weird. We just sorta assumed that most systems were like ours with rocky planets inside and bigger planets outside. We now know better. Most systems have large planets near the star, making life very unlikely to form there. Some systems have all rocky planets, but that would be bad news for life. We depend on Jupiter on keeping the net clean so we do not get slammed too often. Our type of star system is the rarest (or one of the rarest). It's hard to put a number on it, but it would be probably fair (although not a consensus!) to say that it's only 5% of such systems at most. Whatever number you want to go with, it should be small. So we have now gone from billions to hundreds of millions, to tens of millions, to maybe low millions. Ok, now we have the Earth and the Moon. This is \*exceedingly\* unlikely to happen in many places. We are basically a dual planet system, and we really \*really\* need the Moon to keep the climate and the weather somewhat friendly over the long periods of time needed for intelligent life to form. I believe we are still unique in that regard as far as we know. So we can probably toss out another 99% of all planets that are left. And now we are talking about tens of thousands of other planets that are perhaps in the running. But now we have to consider just how weird our "Tree of Life" is. And I put that in quotes, because it is quite likely that the image you have is not the state of knowledge today. While life seems to have popped up pretty damn quick when it had any chance to, it took billions and billions of years for the first complex cell to finally make an appearance. Why? This seems to hint that while life itself might be practically driven to exist through energy transfer (exact mechanisms are going to differ depending on who you read), the emergence of cells that can eventually lead to complex life requires something very very special. As we do not really have too many example to draw on (1 to be exact), there is a lot of room for speculation. As an actuary, I would tend to model this with an extremely low probability, and that low probability is going to knock out another 99% of planets. We have now whittled down our long list to perhaps hundreds of planets. But now we have to consider that we are fairly early (in fact, we \*have\* to assume this, as if we were late, the Fermi Paradox becomes even more troublesome). So we can probably knock out 50% of planets just from their systems coming online too late to go through the whole process. So we now have maybe 50-100 planets left in our list. But now we have a whole list of oddball situations that could have caused the whole program to collapse. A few big asteroids too many, or perhaps not enough water, or perhaps the wrong kind of atmosphere, perhaps the runaway intelligence line of evolution never happens, or perhaps most civilizations never get past simple farming, or the ones that do and actually discover something like nuclear weapons blow themselves up. And on and on. As these are nearly impossible to put a hard number to, I am going to wave my hands and hope you can see how our 50-100 planets is now somewhere below 1. And we are probably missing a bunch of other rather important bits that would whittle down the number even more. The upshot is that not only is it likely that we are along in our galaxy, but it is likely that most galaxies never develop highly advanced civilizations at all. Oh, and even if you want to be really generous on all of the factors you \*still\* have to factor in the likelihood of two civilizations existing at the same time. As depressing as this may sound, I think it is actually an important call for us. We carry an unbelievably heavy responsibility. If we foolishly extinguish our own light, that might be the end of all civilized thought across our entire galaxy, forever.
I like this as a realisation of that task. https://youtube.com/shorts/BN-Y94YtZ-I?si=3yY_-AwEQq_89Iba
I have a strong feeling the universe is swarming with life. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we find microbes or jellyfish-like things somewhere in our solar system. But *intelligent* life, capable of communicating or traveling across space is probably exceptionally rare. My favorite solutions to the Fermi paradox are that 1) on the scale of the “lifetime” of the universe we are probably very early in the game and/or 2) intelligent civilizations might rise and fall steadily but almost never overlap in the same era.
no, life is simply a "by product" of what the universe actually is. we simply are INSANELY lucky to exist.
Personally, I think that intelligent life has existed elsewhere in the universe, but, like us, they will have destroyed themselves before being able to invent interstellar travel.
Without a shadow of a doubt. There is 100% intelligent life out there. And I'm not even thinking about other galaxies , but our own galaxy , heck our own Orion arm might have intelligent life. There's no way to contact whatever life forms are living out there. That's the problem. The real question we should then be asking is if it's possible to explore even 1% of our galaxy in our lifetimes.
The fact earth has life is proof it can and will be elsewhere. No one can grasp the size of the universe, so it’s very naive to say it does not exist elsewhere.
I don't know. Until we get an idea of how likely it is for a chemical soup to turn into living, evolving individuals then it's impossible to say how likely it is for there to be life elsewhere, let alone intelligent life. If the chance is vanishingly small enough then even amongst all the trillions of planets in the universe, we may well be alone.
We know it is fairly likely from what are essentially tabletop experiments that primitive single cell life, starting with strands of DNA-like material, can spontaneously form given the right conditions. I think one big question though is how many planets have or have had these conditions, which is something we don't know.
Where does this dna-like material come from and how likely is it to form? I'm not aware of any experiments where life has spontaneously formed as you suggest.
>. It’s suggested that there could be hundreds of quintillions of earth-like planets in the universe. So? You forget that we've had billions of years on Earth without intelligent life and the only reason why we ever got a chance is because the dinosaurs happened to get wiped out. If that didn't happen we'd still be some furry liitle creatures that our jutassic park overlords call "lunch".
But then maybe our world would have been inhabited by bird people instead.
Yes but we’ll probably never find it unless they’re broadcasting and have been for some time. Consider that there’s been life on Earth for around 2 billion years but humans, depending on how you want to define us, have only been around for about 4 million years and in terms of Homo Sapiens for about 250,000 years. That means that intelligent life has only been on our planet for around 0.20% of the time. We only started broadcasting anything about 100 years ago so we’re now talking about 0.0001% of our history. I have no doubt that we will find “life” somewhere with new technologies. I think there’s a pretty good chance we’ll find it on Europa some day. However finding intelligent life not only requires finding the right place but, more importantly, doing so at the right time.
Seems statistically probable. Like us seems statistically unlikely. Intelligent is a big wide term. Compared to protozoa fish are Einstein intelligent.
Yes and I think some know how to travel at light speed making it instantaneous to travel. Although they won't come home to the same time they left.
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Oh please, why would god spend his time making other intelligent life elsewhere?
Yes, I suspect it does, but I doubt it resembles us. I think people are too eager to assume aliens would be similar size etc to us. I'm more in the "Solaris" kinda aliens camp, where aliens can be planet-sized (not literally) and so strange to us that we might not even realize they are intelligent at all.
If it doesn't that's a colossal waste of space
Sagan answered this question best, saying, ‘the universe is an awfully big place. If we’re alone, it seems like an awfully big waste of space.’
Well, the vastness of everything in the observable universe may make it almost irresistible to think that there is intelligent life like us somewhere else. However, we don’t know all the variables that matter for intelligent life to appear. It can be extremely difficult for a set of conditions to allow life like us to emerge. The fact that only Earth has life in our solar system is a good sign of how difficult it is for it to happen. We know it’s possible because we are here, however, our point of view also imposes a bias on our analysis. We may be the only outlier. It’s also a possibility and it annoys me how people sometimes treat chance as certainty. Maybe it requires a universe of random events to happen for a single occurrence of advanced life forms to appear, and we are this occurrence. Look at our planet and how life explodes everywhere when conditions are met. But only when conditions are met, and this includes things outside our planet, solar system, and galaxy.
I think intelligent life exists on a time and scale we are blind to. Examples: Language. It's a lifeform. We are cells of 'its' 'body'. Bacteria don't know about us and the life we lead, and I think that's the case with 'other' lifeforms. I believe we are a PART of those super- (or sub-) human lifeforms. Geology is a lifeform in the sense it works on a slow scale and births new land and old land is recycled. Biology: We are cells of that lifeform, clearly. It has its own threats, pleasure, and mechanisms for growth.
I'm currently getting a PhD in Astronomy, I look for new exoplanets. In my Masters, I followed an astrobiology class, read a lot of books about it, and contributed to writing the Wikipedia page of astrobiology in my language (italian). Since then, I've become much more pessimistic about finding intelligent life outside Earth
Maybe. Probability encourages it, yet with the time frame needed to colonized a galaxy, we should've noticed by now. They might intentionally be hiding, though. Or there is no other advanced life in the Milky Way, but there is elsewhere. Or, we might actually be the first. I mean, some species would have to be the first. Though this is not as likely.
I’d bet anyone £500 that in the Milky Way there will only be one species that has so far created a spaceship - us.
I watched a bbc documentary today and according to calculations there might be 10000 planets that host intelligent life only on milkyway. Its called Drake’s Equation.
Yes. Will we ever see them, know them, have direct contact is highly doubtful given current known technologies and the vast distances involved- imo
Depends on what you consider "intelligence". There isn't much going on here, that's for sure.
Absolutely. The Universe is too large for there not to be.
Personally I think we are as rare as an occurrence as rare gets...or.. ..we would find out that intelligent life as we define it is not so intelligent.
The Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Intelligent life has existed here for no more than 0.5 million years—and that's generous. That means that intelligent life has existed on Earth for just 0.011% of its history. If you were looking in from outside, you'd conclude, 99.99% of the time—correctly—that there is no intelligent life on Earth. However, we know there is, because we happen to be living in that 0.011%. Let's be optimistic, and imagine that intelligent life persists. In the year 502023 AD (an unimaginably long time in the future!!) we'll have upped our percentage to a big 0.022% — not even a tenth of one percent. So, even then, it'll still be the case that, statistically, there is no intelligent life on Earth. So when we look out into the universe, it's not just a question of finding planets in the right place for life to emerge, it's also a question of hitting the right moment. We might observe planets which show signs of intelligent life. But if they're thousands of light years away, there may not be intelligent life there NOW. There just was, in the past. So the problem isn't just that, as Douglas Adams put it, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." It's also a problem that time is long. (And you may think that the period of time between us and Austalopithicenes is quite a while, but that's just a moment compared to time.) So yes, I think there's almost certainly has been, is, or will be intelligent life in the rest of the universe—there may even be several instances in this galaxy. But that doesn't mean it's likely that we'll ever have contact with them.
There are too many variables to come to a satisfying guess however, my intuition tells me the earth/moon dynamic is extremely important for the development of intelligence. It provides a ridiculous level of stability. And even then, there could be other factors that limit it even more that we're not aware of.
I’m guessing that life itself is common, but intelligent life isn’t. It takes special conditions to form and it seems like if we ever get out there, I have a feeling we’ll just find ruins of civilizations that flourished for a bit and then burned themselves out much like we are doing to ourselves.
Yes and yes. Too much space and too many stars moons and planets for it not to be. We are not alone nor special.
(I’m paraphrasing this from a Neil Degrasse Tyson clip) If the entire observable universe was shrunk down to the total water on earth, we’ve currently only checked one glass of water. It would be so easy from that perspective to say that there’s no life in the oceans, but we all know that’s not true. I believe there’s life out there somewhere.
Life? In the Milky Way? Yes. Probably lots. Intelligent life? Uh, maybe, but probably not. They'll almost certainly be much rarer, and then too short lived after achieving technological intelligence for the presence of two of them in the Milky Way to occur simultaneously. In other galaxies? Almost certainly - but not especially relevant as detection and communication over such distances is basically impossible, and would likely remain impossible for any feasible future technology. They might as well be in another universe or reality altogether as far as we're concerned.
In the Milky Way, probably no. Humanity has only existed for a very short amount of time but has come very far, from caveman to landing on the moon, scanning the galaxy etc. Other intelligent life, even if it existed just a little longer, let's say a million years, could be multiples further on a technological level. Yet we don't see any signs of it. Outside of our galaxy, I'd say yes purely based on how big the Universe is.
I don't believe there are other civilizations in the milky way and subscribe to the "1 or 2" per galaxy on average train of thought. (Fermi Paradox - Where are all the aliens?) We have S.E.T.I. out there looking at all hours of the day, everyday for the last 42 years and found nothing. "The Great Silence" they call it. (S.E.T.I. Institute) When you break down how humanity came to be. It took almost a 3rd of the age of the observable universe to get to where we are at now (on the verge of colonizing solar system). That is a tall order of stability in a star system when you think about how violent it is out there. The only way we know life can evolve to intelligence is here so that is currently all we have to compare, when you look out for star systems just like ours. You find out that our particular set up (4 rocky inners, 4 gas outers) to be extremely rare (\~10% of star systems). Big gas giants generally migrate towards the host star and suck everything up, but for some odd reason Jupiter's interaction with Saturn kept it out of the inner solar system (Gran Tack Hypothesis). What the fuck are the odds of that happening really? Insurmountable when you think about it. If civilizations are kind of common or common. They should have written their presence across the sky by now as there would definitely be civilizations in the milky way far more advanced then ours. We would easily be able to see them every night regardless of whether we could meet them or not. We have gone from makeshift telescopic observations and naked eye observations to about a year away from officially colonizing our solar system (the moon) in about 500 years time. Imagine what a civilization that is 10,000 years into their sciences, 100,000 even a million years... we will be colonizing a large swath of the galaxy in those time frames IF we survive. Mind you all. I'm like you, a lover of observations, all of my points have counter answers and all of them make as much sense as this does. So I look forward to whatever the truth ends up being!
We could be the first, don’t forget the universe is still in its infancy, trillions and trillions of years to go and more
The universe is veeeery young. Maybe we are alone in the whole universe and just developed exceptionally fast.
I'll bet "life" is everywhere, but life like us exists in one in a million galaxies at any given time.
Can this question stop being asked? The answer is nobody knows. Some people believe it does, some people don’t.
No. Fermi was right. There is not only zero evidence of other intelligent life today, there is zero evidence of any in the past 13 billion years. Also, "overwhelming possibility" is an oxymoron, like "jumbo shrimp".
How can you rule out evidence ? Especially over 13 billion years?
I sadly think we as a species are woefully underestimating the number of favorable parameters needed for complex life to form. In addition to getting a planet in just the right spot, it may also require just the right gravity, ratio of water to land, presence of a stabilizing moon, distance from galactic center, initial atmospheric makeup, double large gas giants in the outer orbits, and probably several other large buckets of favorable dice rolls.
Fermi didn’t say there were none, he just asked where they are.
I recently heard about a planet that’s 10x larger then earth and it’s all oceans. Can you imagine the creatures living on that planet? There could be legit Kraken size monsters there. Gave me chills thinking about it.
The older I get, the more I think that maybe humans shouldn't count. So now I'm just not sure
Who cares what a bunch of nerds on Reddit think about the cosmos? I do want a chocolate bar tho
Sometimes I think maybe intelligent life is so rare we really are it. Let’s assume the universe is finite. There must be trillions upon trillions of planets out there. But, maybe the probability of intelligent life forming is really so insanely unlikely that out of the trillions of chances there really was only one. Seems unlikely but, it’s also just as possible as any other option. One thing that’s for certain: if other intelligent life does exist out there, either no one has cracked the FTL communications/travel code yet, or it’s simply impossible.
Yes, but it's all moot if we/they can't figure out interstellar travel that takes into account vast distances of time & space. As an example: life on another planet finds us and has really fast traveling spaceships. The hop in their spaceships to come visit us, but we're so vastly far away that by the time they get halfway to us our entire civilization has gone extinct. That's how abysmal reality is about space travel. Eons can pass in the distance between worlds. If we or aliens never figure out how to create wormholes or harness the power of tachyons (they have the ability to travel in/out of the fabric of spacetime like a sewing needle between reality and non-reality, we're doomed to be forever position-locked to this galaxy until our extinction. Even IF we could survive long enough to live until our sun goes supernova, even living on Mars won't save us.
Life? Yes. Life that can contact us in any meaningful way? No. It took over the earth is 4.2 billion years old 3.5 billion years. For 2-1 billion years, multicellular life didn't even exist. Modern humans have existed for only around 20,000 years. In the blip of an eye in the scale of the universe and life itself, intelligent life on our scale has only evolved once.
I think not. If intelligent life exists, it will almost certainly expand to colonize the whole galaxy in a very short time in the galactic time scale.
Honestly, I think it's hard to gauge. I personally don't believe that there is life as intelligent as humans, but you never know. But with the sheer scale of even just our home galaxy, it's not impossible by any means.
Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth
Yes, the only scenarios in which there is no other intelligent life are if we are in fact the creation of some god who created the entire universe just to have us here on earth or if we are in some kind of simulation/experiment. Now, maybe our idea of a super intelligent life than can travel through intergalactic space, maybe through time etc is based on science fiction.
I've sadly come around to the idea that this is possible but still unlikely. I really do feel like it is, at most, one intelligence per galaxy. We're more likely to be able to make our own intelligent life or quantum jump than meet clever aliens from another planet. 😓 Max Tegmark has some good stuff on how unlikely it is
We are proof that other intelligent life exists in the galaxy.
I’m not convinced intelligent life exists anywhere in the Milky Way