I always do that, seems I’ll never stop that but I understand how it feels to be triggered by bad grammar. Guess I’m a hypocrite because normally I would of caught me self there.
I’ve seen this guys videos before I think. Will give it a watch now, I forget where/when I first came across this idea but I’m glad I’m not the only one who’ve thought of this.
Just to be contrary, I don’t think we are inevitably doomed, at least not unless you change your timescale. We have the potential to become a species (or a succession of species) that for all practical purposes is immortal, especially based on the timescales we normally think on. It’s possible we could go on (or successor species to us) for millions, even billions of years…or, even trillions perhaps. Once you are talking about those time scales, being ‘inevitably doomed’ takes on a totally different context. If our species ever gets to be a K1 civilization I’d say we will have all of the basic components to be immortal as a species. At K2 we’ll be there…at that point only the death of the universe in the big rip or big crunch would have the potential to take us out completely.
Sure, we might not make it to even K1. Could be some natural disaster takes us out before we can spread out into this solar system. Could be we do it to ourselves while we are still essentially trapped here on this single planet. But once we start to spread out and utilize even this one solar systems resources it’s pretty much a done deal…we will, as a species, live basically forever, for most definitions of that term.
Anyway, back to the gloom and doom. 
First, as pointed out, if there were a civilization just like ours 4 LY away, we probably couldn’t them, or them us. But the main thing I want to say is that technological societies might be extremely rare. The elephants and whales yes. But the dinos were around for 165 MY and don’t seem to have developed intelligence, so it is definitely not inevitable. To get to where we were, take an arboreal species that has a ball and socket joint on their front limbs (only primates can lift their arms above their shoulders) that allows them to brachiate, then leave the trees because the climate has changed and then adopt an upright posture, leaving idle hands. And we all know what happens with idle hands. Then we start to communicate, perhaps even with hands. And use fire. And eat meat, which gives us much free time, since meat, especially when cooked, is much more calorie rich. Pair idle hands with free time and you don’t know what can happen.
Too many contingencies for this to be at all probable.
Well, if you take the whole of human enterprise and project sixty million years into the future (were humans to go largely extinct in the next couple centuries), I am skeptical about whether you would find significant evidence of our intelligence.
But really, intellect is not a “goal” of natural selection. It is a weird side effect. I imagine a world could go through ten billion (G-type star on main sequence) years of habitability and never evolve intelligent critters, because intelligence is just not any kind of end, as it were.
We are an oddball fluke. There may not have been, may not be, may never yet be another intelligent species (that throws shit up into space) in this galaxy ever. Unless complex intelligence can be shown to be on the typical evolutionary path, there is no reason to expect it to happen with any regularity.
Despite all our rage, we are still just bats in a cave.
Serious answer to the OP: No.
It’s also “would have”
Daniel Kahneman, One of the co discoverers of Cognitive biases. Thinks that our biases are no big deal and just thinks people should be aware of them and try to work on them.
I personally think he stumbled onto the real reason behind the Fermi paradox. Any evolved species views the world through a mix of filters none of which show the world the way it actually is. So at some point our blind spots mixed with our endless curiosity lead to self inflicted genocide by (insert nukes, bioweapons, general AI, whatever floats your boat), Simply because evolved species are inherently incapable of seeing the world as it is, and making good predictions about said world.
While humans colonizing other planets might seem like a hope for the species (as Stephen Hawking suggested) I don’t think there’s much pof a chance we will even find another planet as hospitable to human life as Earth, let alone figure out how to get there.
We don’t need to find another planet or even colonize other planets to move off this one.
The only thing more inhospitable to human life on a marginal planet is open space.
I’m thinking its going to be easier to make Earth a sustainable enterprise than build a substitute from scratch.
Our ancestors were able to survive in inhospitable places using stone tools and fire. It’s a shame we don’t have any technology consummate to the challenge, but sadly we are all still in Africa and…
Wait a minute! :smack:
Your strategy would be fine except for the fact that it’s a pretty short term strategy for us if we stuck to it. Not just for us, either. If we stay on this rock and try and ‘make Earth a sustainable enterprise’ indefinitely we will be wiped out by a big rock or a super volcano or just the fact that the sun is slowly heating up and will, in the next 500 million years pretty much kill most higher order life in these parts. I agree, we should take care of the Earth, but turning our back on space seems both stupid and short sighted, especially since there are ways we could do it with technology just a few decades or maybe a century or two away, at most. Hell, we COULD do it with what we have if we really wanted too, though it would be difficult, dangerous and cost the world.
It depends what you mean by significant evidence.
It would actually be pretty clear that an industrial species lived here because there’d be a very weird layer of rock, world-wide. A very thin layer with traces of many materials with no apparent natural mechanism of production.
Well one thing more inhospitable than open space is planet earth in a few billion years time.
Perhaps sooner. Who knows if a gamma ray burst might destroy all the eggs in this particular basket?
When people are talking about humans needing to get off this planet they are talking about these factors, not implying it’s easy to do or that other places would be better now.
Absolutely. Well, that and access to resources that are so vast it’s hard to comprehend…and that just in our own solar system. It won’t be easy, but then human history seems to be all about us doing stuff the hard way…
There will still be weird stuff in orbit for our future aliens to take note of on that time frame as well, unless we get hit by the big rock because we were trying to make the Earth sustainable for the select few back to nature types. 
Or alternatively, they may have developed past the point that they would have any interest in interacting with a primitive species such as us (“They’re made of meat?”), and may communicate or travel by means utterly undetectable to us even if they were in relatively close proximity, even assuming that have evolved at approximately the same timeframe as we have instead of hundreds of millions of years before. We are in a fairly distant location in the middle of a fairly sparsely occupied area of the Orion arm, and the few hundred stars within a 100 ly sphere from Earth from which we could concievably detect non-directed signals comprise approximately 0.000000003% of the estimated 200 billion stars in our galaxy, and we’ve only had the capacity to detect any interstellar signals for less than a century. Assuming that other intelligence life with technological civilizations doesn’t exist is like going to Manhattan and ordering room service from your hotel and then deciding that all the food in New York city is terrible based upon that one sample.
There is often the assumption that alien technology will be developed like and operate along the same principles as human technology, which is reinforced by decades of science fiction which largely portrays aliens as bumpy-headed humanoids with monolithic cultures and odd behavioral patterns that mostly resemble human personality disorders. There is no reason to expect that an intelligent alien species, following a completely different evolutionary path, will look anything like human (much less be bipedal or have foreheads to mount bumps upon), or will use written or spoken language in a way we recognize, and is certainly isn’t necessary to have stereo vision or opposable thumbs. Indeed, it is likely an intelligence alien species might have concepts in fundamental langauge, social interaction, and even mathematics that are utterly incomprehensible to us. They might communicate by exchanging coded patterns of proteins (or whatever they use), could interact ‘socially’ by consuming pieces of one another, and might eschew integer mathematics for something that quantifies the world in terms of probability distributions with varying parameters. Their evolution may not use crude physical artifacts made of bone, wood, or stone, instead being biochemical in nature and producing tools and structures via enzymatic reactions. It is even possible (though difficult to even speculate about) that they would not have a central ‘brain’ as we know it, with cognitive processes carried out in a much more distributed network, and they might experience ‘life’ on a timescale very different from us, where years are like minutes to them and an individual lifetime is on the order of millenia, particularly if they’ve evolved on a relatively cold planet with slow chemical reactivity.
Dolphins and elephants, by the way, both use (and for dolphins, arguably ‘make’) tools. The many qualities that people have long insisted are uniquely human—our manipulative capability, our supposedly overly large brains, our capacity for grammar, our emotions and anticipation of future consequences—have turned out to be differences in degree but not integral qualities as other animals across many classes from aves to cephalopods have demonstrated substantial evidence of cognition and affect (“thinking” and “feeling”). The quality that makes Homo sapiens superior intellectually is the number of neurons jammed into our cerebral cortex which are dedicated to certain types of social interactions and language. And the reason we have this (which scales up from smaller primates very well; our brains are not ‘too large’ compared to the other great apes, but rather their brains are ‘too small’ for their body mass) appears to be that we had a diet more rich in accessible protein, and that we, or rather our predecessors, learned to cultivate fire and cook foods to extract more nutrients. This is, again, our particular path to our high (for Earth) level of intelligence, but we shouldn’t assume it to be the only one.
Given the commonality of the fundamental building blocks of CHONPS-based chemical life as we know it (traces of amino acids have been found in interplanetary and interstellar space, and are almost certainly common on Titan) and that no extraordinary or inexplicable chemical processes seem to underly biology, the law of large numbers tends to indicate that life should be quite common in environments with enough energy to support it and some liquid substrate to permit frequenty chemical action. We can’t really say anything statistically about the likelihood of intelligent life with some kind of technological industry since we only have our one example, but given how often life on Earth has independently developed significant levels of congitive abilities it would seem to be a solution that comes up in evolutionary chains repeatedly, and even if achieving human-like levels of sapience occurs only very infrequently, it is seemingly likely that it has occurred thousands or perhaps millions of times in our galaxy alone in the last few billion years of metals-rich Population I star systems. And we haven’t been anywhere beyond our own solar system (really, we’ve barely even explored the reaches of that) to look. Before declaring that there is no one else out there, therefore humanity is unique, let’s give it a few million years and put at least a little bit of effort into actually exploring someplace other than our own birthing room.
Stranger
I agree with everything you’ve said Stranger On A Train but one thing I would say is I feel the whole thing that we’ll be unable to communicate with ET is a meme too, and not one that I find all that plausible personally.
I think there’s a big difference between a species which may be intelligent in terms of how it interacts with its environment, and one that can build technology. The latter needs to have a generalized intelligence that can be applied to abstract problems, and a means of building on that knowledge. It’s a bit like the difference between a calculator and a programmable computer.
To a species that solved the many problems involved in travelling between star systems I have no doubt that however they communicate, figuring out that humans communicate through sounds and symbols, and decoding this structured data would be a piece of cake.
Of course no-one can know for sure, but I just want to put it out there that not everyone agrees with the notion that “We can’t communicate with dolphins…therefore how could we communicate with ETs?”
Any discussion about the difficulty or ease of communicating with an alien intelligence is necessarily speculative, but even if it is plausible to exchange basic concepts I find it implausible that it will be ‘a piece of cake’. We have difficulty communicating clearly even with humans from other cultures, and there is much more to communication than just the symbols and grammar of language; nearly every communication we have between adults relies significantly on an underlying common cultural context, from “How was the drive in this morning?” to “What do you think of Joe Exotic’s chances in the 2020 presidential election?” Even more fundamental communication relies to a large degree on how our brains are evolved to percieve the world and use language, which is based on a shared lineage of evolution with other mammals (and co-evolution with domesticated pets such as dogs), and even then we often have difficulty interpreting context and meaning despite the relatively simple conceptual ideas they can communicate. An advanced alien intelligence might well view us as we view dogs or ants; with such a limited perception of the world and ability to process ideas that it isn’t worth the effort to attempt a ‘conversation’ any more than you’d discuss Proust with a cocker spaniel. And even of there is a common area of discussion, having an interchange free of cultural reference and analogy is surprisingly difficult beyond very fundamental concepts, particularly if said aliens don’t have an innate notion of unique self or discrete counting.
And as you mentin dolphins, while we don’t really know how ‘smart’ they are or how conceptually complex their communication may be, we know for certain that at least some bottlenose dolphins refer to each other with unique collections of sounds, have unique ‘cultures’ within pods in terms of observed behavior, and appear to have at least some ability to communicate conceptually, as well as having an encephalization quotient (EQ) that is twice that of a chimpanzee and approaching that of a human (althouh EQ is now recognized as a flawed measure of intellectual capacity that may under or overrepresent intelligence), but researchers have made little progress over several decades in interpreting grammar or meaning. Some interpret this as indicating that the clicks, whistles, and squeaks that dolphins produce as not being structured, but that leaves the question of why those verbalizatiins are so complex compared to the far more simple verbalizations of apes, canids, and other highly social species of roughly comparable EQ. Most marine mammal beahvioral researchers believe that dolphins are saying ‘something’ to each other more abstract than, “Hi!”, “Wanna fuck?”, and “That clicksqueaktweettweet**squeal* is a real slob, isn’t he?”, but they have no idea what.
Stranger
The problem with this perception of the Universe is that our vision is so extremely limited at this time that we wouldn’t see them if they were right in front of us.
The Universe is big. Mind bogglingly big. There could be a thousand grand, space faring civilizations in this galaxy alone and we’d have no way to ‘see’ them unless one of their ships parked in orbit above our heads.
We got radio and then immediately started looking for similar radio signals from other stars. But as we’re seeing from our own history, we’re relying less and less on such things. They’d also be so weak at stellar distances that it would require much greater power levels intentionally beamed out into space for us to find them at any proper distance. We might be able to send micro-probes fast enough to visit Alpha Centauri within a couple of decades, but they’d be completely worthless as they would not be capable of directing terawatt radio signals back to us for us to be able to detect it.
We’re like the blind guy sitting in his living room claiming to have no evidence of neighbors.
Like you said, it’s highly speculative…we have no idea how they might communicate even primarily, let alone what additional ques they might use that add additional context. However:
As always, it’s possible that an alien civilization might just not care about any other species, but I don’t think this is a good comparison. For one thing, humans have actually devoted quite a bit of research into both dogs and ants, especially how ants actually communicate and achieve the things they do even with their very limited intelligence and scent-based communications. Regardless of how advanced a possible civilization is they are going to recognize that we are a technological civilization and that we do have a very sophisticated communications system, even if it’s not like their own. That in itself would be interesting to any species that is interested in anything outside of their own worldview…certainly humans would be interested in any alien species at all, let alone one that exhibited even rudimentary communications that were very primitive compared to our own…and even if we couldn’t figure out how to translate it or put in in a context we could understand. Even if alien life turns out to be very common, it’s doubtful that any civilization that was interested enough to move away from their home planet/system would have seen so many intelligent and technological alien civilizations that they would be that jaded.
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I think it is an absurd assumption that we’re going to find advanced civilizations through radio signals. Radio was developed in our technological infancy. Is it really reasonable to assume that an advanced civilization is going to be communicating through light years of space via radio signals when they take years and years and years to reach their destination?! Space may be full of communications that we do not as yet have the ability to receive. I liken it to someone on a hill sending out drumbeats and thinking no one is out there because he is not hearing drumbeats in return while, in reality, the air around him is teeming with communication that he has not yet developed the ability to receive.
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I submit the unsettling and, to some, even stunning proposition that we, Homo Sapiens, are not “it” in terms of being the final rendition in the development of man. Much like Australopithecus, Neanderthal, and Cro-magnon man, we may simply be another step in the evolution of what, down the road, will be a great enough species to advance successfully without destroying itself. We may just be another, albeit spectacular, dead end. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the sun and the earth have enough good years left in them to get the evolutionary job done. It may yet happen down the road but, with all the aggression, selfishness, and conflict associated with Homo Sapiens, I just can’t see us getting it done.
The problem with Human evolution is that we’ve filled all available ecological niches and there aren’t any places, other than space, where a new Human species could evolve in peace with the isolation necessary to diverge. That isn’t to say that we as a species won’t slowly change, but no subgroup is going to suddenly branch off and live side by side with us.