Are we are being watched from afar?

In My Humble Opinion
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Are we are being watched from afar?

The probability that aliens are watching us can be calculated . There are billions of galaxies with billions of planets circling billions of suns.

Milky Way Galaxy, where earth resides

Nebula and galaxies

https://tinyurl.com/yc8ak6mm

That amounts to more probable planets than there are grains of sand in the Sahara Desert.

fiction

fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets.

Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction that typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life

Fiction generally is a narrative form, in any medium, consisting of people, events, or places that are imaginary—in other words, not based strictly on history or fact

Non-fiction

Nonfiction is any document or media content that intends, in good faith, to present only truth and accuracy regarding information, events, or people. Nonfictional content may be presented either objectively or subjectively. Wikipedia

With all the above known, what are our scientists doing to make the first contact-?

Europe’s New Deep-Space Listening Station Rises

The European Space Agency’s new deep-space tracking station in Malargue, Argentina, will serve as a vital communications link to spacecraft exploring the solar system. The 35-meter antenna is part of ESA’s ESTRACK network and was completed in 2012

Earlier this month, NASA’s Kepler Mission announced it had found 54 planets orbiting stars in so-called “habitable zones” in our galaxy, where the climate could be suitable for liquid water.

After the planets were found, NASA alerted the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) of their locations. The institute’s scientists started listening to those planets, and while they haven’t heard any intelligent life yet, there’s plenty of other noise to be heard in space.

What Intelligent Noise Could Sound Like

If scientists at SETI do hear an alien signal, it probably won’t sound like Saturn’s aurora. That signal is astrophysical, meaning it occurs naturally. The SETI Institute is hunting for a signal that doesn’t.

“The reason we look for that,” Tarter says, “is that technology can create such signals very inexpensively — and it doesn’t seem to be possible for nature to do that naturally.”

Like a signal that shows up at only one frequency on the radio dial: Tarter says a signal like that could help answer the question, “Are we alone?”

China Built the World’s Largest Telescope, But Has No One to Run It

China’s FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) is the largest radio telescope in the world, dwarfing the 1,000-foot (305-meter) Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. FAST was a heavy lift for China, with a final price tag of $180 million.

The probability that there are living aliens watching us is extremely high and I believe the reason they have not made contact

SETI Institute and National Radio Astronomy Observatory Team Up for SETI Science at the Very Large Array

Why are they not talking to us-?

So; what remains is the ultimate question, why have they decided not to reveal themselves?

The Star Trek TV series could provide us with one possibility.

The primary code as set out is not to disturb the evolutionary process of developing planets . You can watch, you can record but you cannot touch.

Some day they will say hello and I believe that day will come when humanity ends wars, ends murdering each other. That day will come when we become civilized and that day will come if and only if we do not destroy mankind before then.

What say you, fellow human- what would you say ii, no, when they came knocking on your door?

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Show them I am using base 10 math, and illustrate the Pythagorean theorem.

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I was going to ask, what is 2+2 just to see if they understood me but your answer was much better, at least as soon as I learn the Pythagorean theorem

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Oh, you mean what they call the Nqliho[ri]xj Theorem?

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It has been said that when a technologically advanced society meets a less advanced society, the latter is destroyed. Certainly not always: look at Japan! But it can be bad… (Look at Japan…)

So, maybe “hands off” is the kindest approach after all.

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It seems more likely that there are, in fact, advanced civilizations capable of interstellar transit, we probably just aren’t of enough interest for them to bother with, and potentially not even intellectually developed enough to communicate with them on a useful level. In most popular science fiction we tend to portray humanity as being essentially the equal of all other extraterrestrial species despite the likelihood of being at vastly different states of technological development and what would almost certainly be fundamental differences in how each species would perceive the world right down to the timescales that difference species might operate, and of course, we can expect that an extraterrestrial species would probably have whatever form of language or communication they use built into their neurological structures just as our spoken languages are a result of deep and extensive evolutionary development of our brains.

Star Trek was originally pitched as a “Wagon Train to the stars” and has rarely made much effort to present science, space travel, or extraterrestrial contact in a realistic manner, with most aliens just being bumpy-forehead humanoids with monocultures. Nor, as a popular entertainment, should it try, because the reality of even a peaceful contact would likely be frustrating, confusing, and narratively disinteresting. But if we’re going to make reference to Star Trek it should be noted that they violated their vaunted “Prime Directive” at a frequency approaching the number of times that their holodeck threatened the ship and crew. If even a show with a narrative premise of non-contact can’t stick to that rule, what is the likelihood that an extraterrestrial civilization with no inherent reason to avoid contact would care about it?

As for the notion that an extraterrestrial civilization would be pacifistic (or at least, not overtly warlike), that only comes from the minds of utopiasts who select that concept as a thematic contrast to humanity. An extraterrestrial species might equally be xenophobic, or even more likely, just disinterested in us entirely as a smudge of active organic material inhabiting one small world in a remote area of the galaxy with relatively low star density that hasn’t even managed to control the nuclear forces or directly manipulate spacetime with modulated gravitational waves. In other words, “Mostly Harmless”.

Stranger

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Perhaps the superior aliens of Star Trek are disinterested.
There were superior aliens in the TOS episode, “Arena”, and a TOS episode where the superior aliens made it impossible for the Terrans and Klingons to continue their war. One could make an argument that the Q were superior aliens.

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There are lots of threads on this board discussing Fermi’s Paradox, which this question is related to. Regardless of why Fermi’s Paradox stands, it is clear that we have not detected intelligent space aliens. (And every presidential change gives me hope that I’m wrong, and this one is brave enough to release the data to prove space aliens exist.)

Anyway, to me the biggest issue is time. We’ve had an oxygen atmosphere for a really long time, so anybody in the galaxy looking at Earth is going to see a water planet with lots of oxygen, and guess that means life.

However, we’ve only been doing things that suggest intelligent life for a very short period of time. Only space aliens within a hundred or so light years are going to see the telltale signs of industrial pollution or radio communication. That gives them very little time to have come to visit and look closely.

My thought is that if life is pretty common, then an oxygen rich water planet is not terribly interesting, even if intelligent life is interesting. We just have to give it more time. If life is rare enough that an oxygen rich water planet is interesting, then the rarity alone may be responsible for the lack of contact.

So, my opinion is that we are not under close observation, because I’ve never seen any good evidence that we are. No, some book some guy wrote where he lied about eye witness accounts and other details is not evidence of space aliens. We may never know if we’re under distant observation, because even if a signal was sent, unless it arrived in the last few decades, we wouldn’t know.

It is of course possible to invent any sci fi scenario you want. Millions of years ago some space aliens detected our planet, and dispatched probes here to watch life develop. Even with tens of thousands of years of travel time, they’ve been hiding out in the Oort cloud watching closely since before the dinosaurs.

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You’re looking for a sweet spot between intelligent life being so rare that the closest are too far away to notice and intelligent life being so common, that we are nothing special worth investigating.

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How would aliens in a distant galaxy billions of light years distant be watching us from there? Even assuming they have the imaging technology to resolve a view from that far away, they’d be looking at the solar system as it was billions of years ago, because that’s the light they would be receiving

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Occam’s Razor. Absent other real information, we should consider the simplest probability.

We do not detect other advanced civilization’s, because there are none. This still remains the most likely explanation.

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From the Bible angels seem to be both inter-dimensional beings and also interstellar travelers who do visit earth.

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If radio signals from earth have been broadcasting 100 years. What is the chance of a star within 100 light years having a planet with a civilisation with the technology and the interest to be listening? Diddly squat.

There are undoubtedly millions of star and planets out there but they isolated from each other by the vastness of space and limited by the speed of light. This speed limit makes any form of communication take an extremely long time to reach across the void and it’s strength will diminish with distance. We get precious few photons arriving here from distant planets.

We are alone at looking up from the bottom of a relativistic well. If there are others out there they are similarly isolated. That is what physics tells us.

However, could there be parts of the universe where the stars are closer together and habitable planets are at least within hailing distance. Such that messages could be exchanged that do not take many times the lifespan of a life form to complete a round trip? Science does no favours for Sci-Fi writers.

I always thought Star Trek owed much the novels about the age of sail, the voyages of discovery and rivalry between the sea faring nations. Captain Cook with phasers and photon torpedoes.

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Extraterrestrials almost certainly have more interesting things to do than keep track of Earthlings and their bullshit.

Rumor has it that reality TV in the Alpha Centauri system is fabulously entertaining.

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Or it’s a big universe and signals take time.

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The human window of opportunity is only a few centuries, our time, in which we will be able to sent/read interstellar communications. Within a few light-centuries of us, what are the chances that other life is experiencing their time-window, now, too?

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Actually, the “most likely explanation” is that our very limited ability to surveil even the relatively nearby stars beyond a few dozen light years means that we could not detect a civilization at our current level of industrial development, and a more advanced civilization may tend toward even less obvious signs and signals that we could detect with our tools. For instance, SETI is busy monitoring radio frequency bands because that is what we can detect, but an advanced extraterrestrial civilization might use some other means of communication such as high frequency coherent gravitational waves or controlled meson emissions that we could not possibly detect. This is notwithstanding that in the billions of years that star systems have formed in our galaxy, the industrial society of humanity has existed for an almost infinitesimal period of time. The time and distance between potential civilizations is sufficient that there could be tens of thousands of civilizations throughout the galaxy that last for hundreds of millennia without any of them ever coming into contact with others. Assuming that there are no other civilizations in the galaxy is paramount to going to a hotel in Paris and judging French cuisine only by ordering room service.

Stranger

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WTF is wrong with all of you? Your brains have been addled from staying in quarantine to long???

The answer is obvious:
“I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords!!!”

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Radio is inefficient, broadcasting signals all over the place. Even now we’ve moved from microwave for long distance communication to fiber. How many people receive over the air TV signals anymore? Lots get cable, I get satellite which is directed to the earth. In another 50 years we might not have any broadcast TV at all.
I think SETI is hoping to find signals directed at others, which would most likely be radio. But I agree we’re not likely to find random signals out there.

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I question whether another civilization would even communicate by radio to other nascent civilizations. For a broadcast signal that doesn’t have the output of a small star the plausible range of communication would only be a few hundred light years at most, which might seem like a long distance until you consider the actual scale of the galaxy in which that volume is only 0.00018% of the volume and contains less than 0.00001% of the estimated 400 billion stars in the galaxy. Unless a nearby civilization were specifically trying to communicate with us, the odds that we would pick up any signal are marginal at best.

For communications over astronomical distances, using high frequency gravitational waves actually makes a lot of sense because they don’t attenuate with distance and aside from the occasional pair of colliding neutron stars or black holes, nothing could really interfere with them. Of course, producing high frequency gravitational waves would require some kind of fine control of large masses or spacial discontinuities as well as an extraordinary amount of power that is well beyond any foreseeable capability in our technology, but then, that’s kind of the point; an advanced civilization would probably have as much interest in communicating with us via radio as we would in using smoke signals and relay horns.

This still begs the question of why an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be interested in communicating with us any more than we are interested in communicating with ants. (Apologies to entomologists who actually study how ants communicate.) Most interstellar science fiction is built around an essential premise of Age of Sail era exploration; that you send ships to a new star, ‘colonize’ the worlds, and extract their resources for trade. The distances, transit times, and energies of interstellar travel using any conceivable propulsion technology make that unlikely unless the members of such a civilization have exceptionally long lives, low energy and resource demands, and an insatiable desire for exploration and expansion.

The more likely scenario is sending self replicating von Neumann-type probes to explore and signal back, and even that begs the question of an ultimate purpose for such a project on an expansive scale. By the time probes report back from even the local neighborhood, a society and its technologies have likely changed radically. Of course, some kind of superluminal propulsion or artificial wormhole technology could change all of that, but we have no particular reason to believe such capabilities are realizable even if there are solutions within general relativity that would theoretically permit them given the assumption of exotic negative energy matter or other ways of manipulating spacetime directly.

Stranger