https://www.newsweek.com/scientists-send-transmit-earth-location-aliens-stephen-hawking-warning-arecibo-1694139
of course a :ukkk: scientist would imagine that a sufficiently advanced civilization could only want to exploit and destroy other people they see as somehow lesser beings
I don't like Dark Forest theory, and we're unlikely to ever see alien life, so I don't really care all that much to change my mind... if aliens come they'll be cool space communists, and that's my headcanon
:posadas:
I don’t like Dark Forest theory
What's your preferred explanation for why we don't hear any alien broadcasts?
there's a few limiting factors
- there needs to a civilization within reasonable range, since radio waves weaken exponentially (meaning that the further away a civilization is, the stronger^2 the signal needs to be)
- the time that they emit radio must overlap with the amount of lightyears far away they are ago
- the signal must not look like noise
- we need to be listening in that direction and be explicitly looking for an alien signal
Nobody likes noisy neighbours. If you want to contact me ring my doorbell. Don't blast Metallica loudly and expect me to understand that you ordered the songs to spell out 'can we borrow your lawnmower?'.
I think it's because they are much more principled than me and believe that broadcasting is a form of posting, and thus counterproductive
sorry comrade, I just don't give this a lot of thought haha the other comments cover most of the counterarguments I like, much better than I could!
The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, and 1 billion years later the first life forms evolved. The first Hominids evolved about 2 million years ago, modern Humans 300 thousand years ago. 12000 years ago we developed agriculture. Humans invented the radio in 1890, 132 years ago.
So humans have had the ability to transmit radio waves for 1% of the time we've had agriculture. Humans have had agricultural civilization for only 4% of our species existence. We as a aspecies have only existed for 0.086% of the time life has existed on earth. And life on earth itself has only been around for 26% of the universe's existance.
Even if we assume that life began at roughly the same point everywhere in the universe compared to earth( which is a huge assumption), that still leaves a huge margin for other civilizations on other planets to have evolved, progressed, and died out, long before we even evolved.
The odds that another planet developed sapient life which progressed to a technologically equivalent or superior level to humans at the same exact time that we did is incredibly unlikely, which I think is a far simpler explanation than the dark forest theory.
Edit: forgot to move the decimal over when converting to percentages lmao. Fixed now. Its still exceptionally unlikely, but the numbers I had were way off
that still leaves a huge margin for other civilizations on other planets to have evolved, progressed, and died out, long before we even evolved.
That's what Hawking argues, but his guess for why they're dying out is someone else nukes them when they detected.
The same math makes one wonder why aliens aren't here already. There's billions of stars within a few thousand lightyears. If one of those stars was similar to earth, but cooled just 1% faster, they'd have had a million years to spread out or leave some kind of mark on the galactic neighborhood.
Our society is a dark forrest society. Even if we knew there were hostile aliens out there we would still be a bigger threat to ourselves than aliens would.
if we met aliens our first response would be to try and borrow money and the communist aliens would think we're really stupid
Have to also consider the very earth centric attitude of the Dark Forest theory assumptions.
Earth is all we've known, and it's so perfect (though we ruin it daily). It has the right atmospheric mixture. The right gravity. The right seasons and rotation. All becuase we originated here. And even then we have to live near water because our biology demands it.
So alien comes along, sees earth, probably recoils at it as we might to Venus. Our earth would have a terrible unbreathable atmospheric mixture, gravity too high or low. If they were explorers of some kind motivated as some of us are the emotive desire to discover, they might examine it a bit. If they were conquerers motivated as some of us are by desires of posession and domination, then they may still pass it by cause of the extreme difficulties in holding a location incompatible to their life form as a colonial state.
But, it makes good fiction. There was a book series call The Tripods. Had that situation where the aliens couldn't live in our atmosphere, invaded anyway.
You know now that I think of it, most of the alien invasion literature and movies are from the major colonial powers of the past couple centuries. US and UK. Since a lot of other country has had to live invasion and occupation it probably isn't a popular topic in fiction. But we do it as either a kind of subconcious self reflection, since it rarely seems to be actual self critique, or an ackowledgement we do it and what if the bigger bully comes around and does it to us?
This isnt even to mention that infinite population growth is a capitalist meme anyway. Why would the human population ever expand beyond say 20 billion, eventually everyone is gonna have a low number of kids and the population is gonna reach stability, why too wouldnt the same happen to any aliens. And if you discovered biological immortality, it would probably only extend the average lifespan to like 1000 years before the random chance of getting hit by a bus or whatever catches up with you. Youd have a population equilibbrium much higher, but still way wayyyyy lower than the solar system’s capacity. There is literally just no reason to expand.
Likewise, any non-psychotic civilization would gladly embrace artificial intelligence as part of their civilization. The problem is with the current brainworm AI is viewed as build-your-own-slave, and people's fear of them ultimately stem from the fear of them gaining the upper hand and did to us what we did to them.
I guess that kind of media could be kind of a reference not just to western imperialism, but the fact that western Europe is a pretty small and densely populated area and part of imperial expansion was finding more territory to expand populations into. Except most alien media just has them come and then leave. I don't know how much alien media is about aliens actually colonizing and making humans subjects.
Posadists took an L with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the dolphins will have the last laugh yet.
it's alright when the hypervelocity slug of neutronium splatters the Earth like it were made of syrup we'll all be converted to white-hot plasma so fast we won't even feel it
there is no reason to assume other species want constant expansion, like we do. the only proof we have that this could be true is that we haven't seen other aliens and that might be just because we're at the edge of the milky way or a hundred different other reasons
i think people have gone over it before here, but the logic behind this "dark forest" theory is actually based in outdated capitalist realism and Hobbesian notions.
also if there were a large space empire that was destroying planets and was wide enough to be an omnipresent threat, then we would probably be picking up their radio signals and communications all the time. why should they care about others hearing about them what are we gonna do run from our solar system also this doesn't make sense because there'd be no way for "new" species to learn of the giant space faring empire and thusly no reason to limit communications so this isnt an explanation at all
exactly this. we have developed a uniquely shitty economic system that emphasizes expansion, and have certain sociological drives to explore and meet new people, but assuming other life forms would have any of those is not only a massive stretch but extremely unlikely (the chance would probably be much much much lower than 1)
no, again, this assumes our psychology is universal, when it isn't. there is no reason to assume aliens are capable of fear or even making predictions. they would also know this if they are of "sufficient intelligence", so there'd be no reason for them to be afraid of the "dark forest threat".
this is at best a fancier version of AI bazinga theories. just like AI we have no idea how it would act because we're too stupid to
if we assume that self-preservation is a universal instinct (which we again can't assume because we have no evidence-based observational idea of what e.g. a nitrogen based life form would act like) then it would make most sense to just not give a shit because space travel takes thousands of years to scale any significant distance and no one alive at the time would be affectable by then (assuming said aliens aren't immortal which i guess is possible)
Al Bazinga, famous arabic scholar and neighbour over the fence.
I don't know why you seem to think that complex, intelligent, life can only result in :amerikkka:
This. (Also what @catposter is saying). The only way any species is ever getting to the technological level of being able to facilitate interstellar travel, which may even be literally impossible for very real limits on the laws of physics, is if that species has the ability to cooperate on massive, likely species-wide levels. We aren't getting to Mars via Elon Musk, let alone the stars. It will take global communism for us to be able to have a hope of interstellar travel. And global communism requires cooperation (read some Kropotkin, damnit!) Cooperation at that scale and with intelligence almost certainly requires empathy as well. Perhaps that's a little bit presumptive, but I think most would agree that empathy and cooperation facilitate one another and one is far less likely without the other. Anyway, it's much more likely any species that advanced would also be empathetic. And thus it wouldn't go around wiping out other places where intelligence has arisen but instead fostering it, or perhaps just letting it do it's own thing.
It's probably a moot point anyway, because the Rare Earth Hypothesis is probably correct, but that's already been discussed to death in this thread. (It's just that the number of things that had to line up just right for intelligent life to emerge on this planet are so statistically unlikely that intelligent life could be as rare as happening once per galaxy or less, and if that's the case, we will never see other intelligent life period).
Edit: Also what @wantToViewEmojis said just below. The scenario @riley is talking about in The Three Body Problem, while an awesome scifi thought experiment, is ultimately just more Capitalist Realism.
I'd posit that that the only other methods of reaching such a high level of cooperation would still make it far more appealing to absorb intelligent life into their civilization rather then eradicating it if they ever took interest.
Yeah, there are things we know that is possible that even an ancient species might not know. Knowing things is pretty useful
[OT, but sorry if it's bad form to tag everybody. ? It's just I'm trying to address things brought up by multiple people and wanted to give credit for who was saying what.]
Gah. There's so much to address here, but let me just take the last bit as a means to getting at the rest:
the galaxy looks oddly empty.
No, it doesn't. It looks predictably void of civilizations that are capable of interstellar travel or communication. It actually looks like simple life may be very common in the universe. We simply don't know if that tends to even reach multicellularity or then "intelligence," as that could be so uncommon as to only happen once or less per galaxy as I said above. It's predictably void of interstellar travelers because that requires a level of complexity that may not even be possible. It could very well could literally be a physical impossibility, but even if it's not, it would require such extreme specialization, knowledge, and complexity, that it makes perfect sense it would be extremely rare if it existed at all.
I think we should take this seriously,
I do and I am.
and not try to project our ideas of stages of history
I feel like if anyone is doing that, you are. No offense, but I really do see your concerns as resting on a capitalist realism kind of mindset. It's not about stages of our history, it's about how complexity works and how you can't just jump from one level of complexity to vastly more complex shit without any transitional stages. You don't get society without cooperation. And you don't get interstellar [IS] travel without an extremely advanced society. While I admit this piece is opinion, I think it's ridiculous to think that a species that has reached a level capable of IS travel would not have necessarily developed to the extent of being post-scarcity and in full recognition of the benefits of complete cooperation. All this scifi we consume likes to assume we're just a hop skip and a jump away from being able to do IS, but we're not. Like not even close. As someone else mentioned in this thread, if you have the capacity for IS, you pretty much have to have FTL. If you have FTL, you not only get IS, you quite literally have time travel too.
on something we know nothing about
There are many assumptions that not only we can make, but that we'd be ridiculous not to. For example, we know you need chemical self-replication for life to exist. We know that life increases in complexity by a very specific mechanism: evolution by natural selection. There are even reasons to think that there are certain traits life on other planets would almost certainly share with us. Like life that makes the leap to eukaryotic multicellularity will also almost for sure at some point evolve eyes because of the sheer usefulness of eyes in this universe and the fact that eyes did evolve independently many times here on this planet. There are absolutely assumptions that should be made, or we may as well be arguing about magic wands and unicorns as being possible.
The thing I see people missing a lot in the discussion of "where the aliens at" is:
- you couldn't do complex chemistry until Population I stars formed, so there's a floor on when life appears
- the conditions for life might be rare
- life might be rare
- eukaryotic life might be really rare
- multicellular life could be even more rare
- complex multicellular life might not appear in the lifetime of the planet (we were mostly soup until the Cambrian explosion)
- Life tends to settle in local maxima. If there's no big reset like the mass extinctions of Earth, something in the intelligence local maxima might never appear
- speaking of, mass extinctions might be too rare to provide useful shuffles or too frequent to develop something in a similar niche as humans, or they might kill 100% of life instead of 95%
- back to local maxima: tool using requires a dummy amount of things to go right. Passing down tool use culturally requires even more things to go right
- there's no particular evolutionary guarantee for highly social, highly cooperative, intelligent, tool using, knowledge passing species to evolve
- even if there is, there's no drive to industrial revolution. Modern humans existed 250k years before we figured out agriculture
- and again, too much instability wipes out whatever progress you make. Humanity bottlenecked to less than 10k people at some point. What if we hadn't recovered?
- and once a species is technological, what ensures it won't blow itself up?
- ok, it's made it this far, and it turns out space can't be conquered, or the species simply doesn't have a wanderlust drive
And all this is against the fact that, cosmically speaking, the universe is really young and complex chemistry wasn't possible until somewhat recently because there wasn't enough of those elements. Maybe we're the first to get to this point.
There's no real reason for intelligent, technological species to occur.
Well said. This is what always gets me when people talk about the Fermi Paradox and ponder at all the possible answers. Well, the answer seems overwhelmingly clear, and it's exactly what you just laid it out. Well, that and that there's a general misunderstanding of the distances and therefore time involved, even if technological life were common.
well. i still disagree, but if what you're saying is true, then we need to get off our asses and build communism as soon as possible because the only thing that can stop an evil space empire with a gun is a good space FLAGSPC with a gun
from certain perspectives it is morally necessary that we do so, because any number of civilizations could be being destroyed or enslaved and the suffering could be anywhere from nothing to nearly limitless.
no??? i said we don't know if they would plan forward at all. i literally said the exact opposite of having a specific idea of that. my point is that we have no idea how alien life would act and said alien life would have no idea how other alien life would act. doing "rational decision making" ontology weird shit won't get us anywhere because of that. rational doesn't even mean anything because we have no idea what aliens would care about or work towards.
The Dark Forest theory only makes sense if you assume everyone in the universe possess a psychopathic-Humanlike intellect, has magic physics powers, doesn't care about destroying precious habitable planets, and considers the near infinite bounty of resources the universe provides inadequate
Warhammer 40K theory would be more coherent
If you try and answer the question "where is everybody" like 95% of possibilities are enough to give you recurring night terrors
That being said; I, for one, welcome our new Psychlo overlords.
maybe if you want to overthink it. or maybe FTL travel is just impossible (very likely)
the chance of independently developing intelligent life + the extremely low max speed of travel = why would anyone ever find us? pessimistic theories are just overthinking it
I think the thing scientists are puzzled by is the complete lack of evidence of advanced civilizations anywhere. The universe is very old, and very vast. Even conservative estimates assumed we'd be able to find some evidence of radio signals.
radio signals would take millions of years to get any significant distance and for all we know we just evolved in a span of time right after one passed through our solar system. even a 0.1 degree difference in the direction of travel could make a radio signal entirely miss our solar system too. that combined with the low revolution rate of multicellular creatures means that it's probably just that no one knows where to find others and there's very few people to look
low revolution rate
We should probably do more revolutions to increase it.
The galaxy is huge but even if a civilization could "only" travel at 50% the speed of light ever (and also if a desire to expand is a reasonable thing these civilizations would have) the galaxy would've been colonized within 100K years or so. So if any time between anatomical humans and now there were spacefaring civilizations in the galaxy, we should see evidence for it pretty much anywhere we point our telescopes.
It's not because I want to overthink it; this question has been overthought by many others before us, and of the multitudes of potential reasons they have come up with the amount that aren't the result of something with horrible implications for us is close to 0.
Also notable though is we quickly set aside the concept of alien life being imperceptible (for lack of a better word) by humans so like the least scary way to think of it is we are all lab rats for some 4th dimensional reality TV show or some shit which might not be all that practically different from standard theism
it's not close to zero. wtf are you talking about. the great filter could have just been developing brains. intelligent life might just be a rare result of evolution. maybe nobody found us in the 10000 year life span we were writing down words we understand (real short time in space terms)
there is no reason to torture yourself over something that has a 99% chance of just being the most obvious thing of "nobody developed radio"
mitochondria symbiosis is a pretty interesting filter. It could be most life in the universe is just short lived and uncomplicated cells.
:this: :this: :this: it's 100 times easier for single celled organisms to live and reproduce than whatever the fuck we have going on
hell for all we know we came from the rubble of some progenitor species' planet exploding and all of our "siblings" are billions of light years away by now
we've explored thousands upon thousands of planets and i'm unsure if we've ever seen anything beyond single cell life, so yeah
We haven't even seen single celled life. All we know of exoplanets is the slim information that can be gleaned from the shadows they cast as they pass in front of their star.
then why would we ever expect to be contacted by aliens? have you ever tried contacting a friend by pointing a laser pointer in random directions?
It is rather silly, yes. I personally put more stock in the idea that we're probably on the early side. We may even be the first. 12 billion years is not all that long if you let the physics calculations play out.
I just find it extremely improbable that in a limitless universe, there is nothing but an endless void interrupted by dogs and selfimportant humans.
Very true. I suppose what I like about the "early humans" hypothesis is that it forces one to consider that, as far as we know, this is it. We should treat life as precious because, even if it's common, we don't actually know that.
But isn't that the kind of take only a self important human would have? What makes us special that we are the thing that "interrupts" the otherwise uninterrupted universe?
I’m not only talking of humans, I mean the small speck of multicellular creatures in a seemingly infinite universe. And your second question lends to exactly what I’m saying, I find it borderline narcissistic to think there’s nothing quite like us in the entire universe.
Well what was being discussed above was contact, and single called life isn't going to be able to be doing that.
Regardless, it's still being "self important" to think the universe is essentially empty were it not for this specific configuration of matter that happens to be what we consider "like us." The fact of the matter remains, there is no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere and is probably extremely rare, even if single celled life is common. It's not narcissistic to recognize that super rare even one off events (like a configuration of matter that can be conscious) do actually occur.
universe isn't limitless. we have a gravity group of only two galaxies.
yeah but while the universe is huge and has a ton of stuff in it and likely billions intelligent species, all we can ever hope to know is in the milky way and andromeda and honestly we probably wont ever know everything in these two galaxies
the most we 'explored' thousands of planets is seeing their stars wobble back and forth or dip in brightness and saying 'yep probably a planet', its way too early to rule out single celled life on any of these planets before we can even tell what kind of planet it is
well in that case we have no way to prove any hypothesis and this is all navel gazing for the purpose of paranoia and self-sabotage
What? We have explored like 2 planets, and some moons and asteroids. Telescopes won't really tell you anything about simple life on expolanets. Even our furthest probe is voyager what is .056% of the way to the nearest star and has been traveling for decades.
Some molecules are unstable and unlikely to be in high concentrations but also leave obvious spectra (like O2, O3, CH4). You can tell by atmospheric scattering. I doubt we have any telescopes powerful enough to resolve far enough though, planets are pretty tiny.
Yeah I have some passing familiarity with this from reading a few papers about the Venus phosphine thing from about a year ago that turned out to be a measurement error. If we can mess up measuring the closest planet, think about how hard it is to see planets light years away.
i will agree the "benign" theories are much less popular and less frequently made than the wacky ones but that's probably because there isn't much more to say about them. this "single-cell" theory might make up 0.01% of all theories but the chance of it being true is waaaaaay higher than that
A Christian ‘theorist’ probably - “As more people stan creationism, thereby becoming the majority in discourse, then surely there will be an equal increase in the likelihood of creationism being true” :think-about-it:
The key part of that sentence was "with horrible implications for us." I'm not specifically referring to "Something giant eating us all and killing us" or something like that. I mean to find out we're alone would be horrible, to find out intelligence is a fluke would be horrible, to find out we exist in a blink between the ticking hands of the cosmic clock would suck, a linear model for the experience of time not being the norm wouldn't be great either tbh.
there is no reason to torture yourself over something that has a 99% chance of just being the most obvious thing of “nobody developed radio”
I assure you I only think about this stuff when someone makes a related post, I don't lay awake at night thinking about this stuff because I have more mundane things to keep me awake all night. :P
oh im a dumbass
yeah i sorta became desensitized from crippling existential fear of loneliness thanks to capitalism. not cured just desensitized.
The usual reply is that the universe is old and the galaxy isn't that big even at sub light speeds in geological time.
The dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. The galaxy is 105,700 light years in diameter. If instead of dying the dinos spent five million years becoming sapient and building a 0.5 light speed engine, by now they could have traveled the galaxy edge to edge like three hundred times over.
my response to that is that 300 times is super tiny and unless alien life decided to travel 300 times (or even 600 times) in a mathematically efficient pattern to the edge of the galaxy (which they have no reason to because there's no reason to assume alien life would want to travel anyways, and it would be a massive waste of energy, resources, and people) we would never have even a hundredth of a percent of a chance of seeing them, even if they travelled 600 times in random directions.
Well, I just used 65 million as an example and Earth is 4.5 billion years old and there are much older planets. My point is that galaxy's size and age make factors other that possibility of FTL travel more important to the whole question. Factors like probability of multicellular, sapient life developing and sustaining itself long enough to colonize space.
most likely scenario is big distances + big gaps in time, it would be a huge coincidence for 2 civilizations to emerge close enough in time and space to encounter one another
I've had this idea rolling my head that if FTL travel were possible (by things like stargates), then time would cease to be a meaningful distinguishing factor between civilizations. Like, once you develop the mass-effect gates, or whatever, and use it you ought to appear on the other side where the entire universe already has warpgates and a universe teeming with sentient life because of how FTL travel affects time and causality - even if you're "the first". It'd be like the Star Trek Prime Directive but enforced by some weird-ass phenomena of the physics of the universe.
Especially since the likeliest outcome is either the universe is far more inhospitable than we can imagine, and we're extremely extremely lucky that life on earth wasn't evaporated many times over, or it's the inevitable outcome that intelligent species destroy themselves before they venture out from their own planet. Yeah, basically any explanation is going to be grim.
the most likely outcome is the first. the conditions to develop multi-cellular life forms are very specific and difficult to obtain. no reason to assume anything else.
When you look at the history of Earth, single celled life evolved pretty much as soon as we had liquid water. Multiple cellular complex creatures didn't until something like .5 billion years ago (versus 3.5 billion years of single celled creatures). Even today, most of the carbon being used by life is in single celled creatures or plants/fungus. By biomass, animals are very tiny (like less than 0.5% is in animals most is in plants and over 10% is in tiny single celled things). If you're just counting in terms of copies of genes on the planet, I think single celled life is still winning lol. You have to go through a long circuitous path to get to intelligence and technology that evolution really has no reason to pick other than chance.
I'm pretty sure there are multiple Great Filters, some of which are behind us, but many of which are in front of us. I think it must be extremely rare for a species to learn to harness the energies needed for space travel without destroying themselves, either through environmental catastrophe, or through war. But it's absolutely unthinkable that a species that survived that filter would still be as savage as humans.
but have you ever considered that maybe aliens are super sex driven and they recently found a planet with a ton of intelligent sexy species on it and are too busy
studying the wildlifeto get to exploring these weird radio waves we put outThe real scary thought isn't that they'd come to attack us and rule us. It's that they wouldn't care at all. They wouldn't care to even destroy us. We're simply not impressive or important to them. They're the main characters of their story just like humans are to theirs. They won't come here and give us technology for the same reason that you don't walk down the street and try to explain nuclear physics to pigeons. Now, if we got in their way they might swat us like we swat pests. But if you're that clever then there's not much in your way. They wouldn't need to come here to get resources, they would have figured out scarcity.
Even better: aliens appear but the only proof for it has to be provided by our top scientists and government officials. The proof becomes a piece of culture war that is never resolved ever again. We could never trust them about it yet they would have undeniable proof. They could want to tell us so bad and we couldn't, rightfully, believe them. We would get proof but it would be tainted by our own history and context.
I just started reading the Three-Body Problem this weekend. Good shit.
I love the assumption that if aliens found out we were here they'd want to come and take our shit
like what?
Do you know how much shit there is in space? Do you think, if they can find our signal and come invade, that they are somehow unable to locate exoplanets?
The fuck use is earth to them lmfao. If you can do intragalactic colonialism you can definitely terraform planets
The whole premise is just wack
Aliens saving us from ourselves is more likely than global communism any time soon, so fuck it n go for it tbh.
even if empathy and cooperative effort weren't the obviously superior paradigm for superior adaptation and let's pretend there's some super powered alien civilization eager to come fuck us up, enslave and exterminate us until everything good about our planet is wiped from existence.
you know what I would tell them? take a number and get in fucking line.
:fidel-cool:
I thought all radio broadcasts since the 1930s were essentially giving away our location. Isn't that how the aliens found us in Contact?
