It’s not hard to communicate with an ant in a way it can comprehend. Just step on it.
The presumption that an advanced alien species could use space-bending magic technology to arrive on earth and then be unable to make any form of contact with us is absurd - if you can cross interstellar distances, you can drop large rocks on chicago. Any alien that is interested in making contact with the ants here can, at a minimum, tap on the glass.
On a similar note, the notion that an alien space rocket could plow into our atmosphere and accidentally evade our detection is similarly absurd. Humans pay quite a bit of attention to our surroundings, particularly the sort of surroundings that might get between us and our satellites. If aliens are on earth and going undetected, then it stands to reason that they are avoiding our detection on purpose. Which raises the question about what their motives are. (Something about farmers’ rectums?)
From a quick Google search: " There are about 10 billion galaxies in the observable universe. The number of stars in a galaxy varies, but assuming an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy means that there are about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s 1 billion trillion ) stars in the observable universe!"
Since the only star system we really know is our own, and since it has intelligent life, the odds that there is no intelligent life among the other billion trillion stars is so astronomically small that it is laughable. I must also boldly add that, considering the fact we were using spears and crossbows only a few hundred years ago, the odds must be pretty high that they are considerably more advanced than us.
does an ant comprehend it’s being stepped on? does it realize someone’s tapping on the glass? no. It reacts to something it doesn’t understand. That pretty much sums up much of our existence too.
Our understanding of our own solar system is still very limited (even our own physiology), let alone any off-planet life that may not even look like life as we understand it.
If we say that intelligent* life is more likely to arise than the number of stars within a hundred million or so light years, then where are they?
We can empirically see that it is less likely to develop than that.
So, we either have a very finely balanced probability, that life is just common enough that it is within 3 billion or so light years, but not within 300 million. If it is 3 billion light years away, then unless they are 3 billion years ahead of us, we wouldn’t see them yet. If they are within 300 million, that’s a short enough time that we should have seen them.
The more likely, IMHO, position is that life is very rare. One in a sextillion type of odds. With those odds, then chances of finding intelligent life in any particular patch of observable universe is very small.
So, anywhere that intelligent life arises, it is very unlikely to have any other intelligent life within its observable universe. Just like a lottery winner, it will not know other lottery winners.
There is also the fact that the universe is very young. We think of it as old, but that’s just because it is immense compared to our lifespans. But, star formation should continue for a few hundred billion years without tapering off by much, and red/white dwarfs will still be lighting the sky for a few trillion more. We aren’t even a percent of the way through the life of the universe. A more typical intelligent life would arise far in the future, but someone needs to be first.
*by intelligent, I do mean capable of developing space travel, one way or the other.
A human comprehends when it’s being stepped on, and a human also comprehends when the humans next to them are being stepped on. Suffice to say if you’re trying to argue that aliens couldn’t get humanity’s attention even if they caused the heads of every redheaded man to explode, you’re not being terribly convincing. Hell, even less drastic methods like causing a localized reversal of gravity or rain of frogs would probably get at least a few people’s attention, even if they didn’t immediately understand the cause.
And even if we don’t understand what we’re seeing, we can still see things. Unless you’re positing that the aliens aren’t even in our physical dimension, in which case why would they even come to a physical planet if they didn’t intend to interact with it in some way? And if they interact with the planet, even if all they did was something simple like spiriting away all the iron atoms or somesuch thing, we could notice it.
We can communicate effectively with ants. We understand their pheromone systems, and we are able to give them instructions through it.
An ant can’t imagine not being an ant. We can imagine not being a human. I think that there is a qualitative difference there that is not applicable in an analogy.
Then there is the idea that an aliens would have to be “advanced”. What does that even mean? Evolution is not too something. There is no goal, no timeline, no pathway or road that you can say that one civilization is ahead of the others on. In order for the “aliens are too advanced for us to comprehend their existence” to work, they’d not only have to have new physics that we do not know, but also prove wrong most of the physics that we do.
I think you might be taking the analogy too literally. What I’m tying to communicate is a capability gap. Humans can have a rudimentary form of communication with ants… but can we express emotion, art, science? Can we explain the theory of mind to an ant? Can they comprehend our existence in a way that allows them to reflect on it? No. There are hard limits on what can be communicated and comprehended.
Taking it further… what if we’re interstellar bacteria… could we ever figure that out? Can your gut bacteria understand the outside world? Our entire understanding of existence is based on what we can observe, experience, and consider. It’s a bit egotistical (from the standpoint of our species) to assume we can understand everything.
There are massive gaps in our understanding of physics, and we’ve measured things that don’t fit very well within our existing models. And for all we know our entire universe, including our physics, could be a fishbowl.
There’s the old joke:
A fish asks, “how’s the water?” The other fish replies, “what the hell is water?”
I disagree that I am taking it too literally, when I am specifically saying that it doesn’t fit at all. We are not ants, we have emergent capabilities and behaviors that ants do not and cannot have. We are not just scaled up.
Bacteria also cannot imagine not being bacteria.
The gaps are actually pretty small, very, very small, as they have to deal with the very small. We understand the universe very very well.
What things have we measured that don’t fit well within our existing models? Other than some discrepancies on a couple different ways of measuring the age of the universe being off by a tiny amount (which almost assuredly will come down to experimental error), most of the universe follows the laws that we have determined very well.
We predicted the Higgs and Top particles, and viola, there they were, once we had enough power to make them.
Exactly, because a fish cannot even imagine a world that was not made of water. We can. (they also cannot speak).
Now, if you are saying that this is a simulation, then that’s a whole different story.
That’s my point! What’s to limit another off-planet species from having emergent capabilities and behaviors that we do not and cannot have?
A lot of our understanding of physics hinges on the existence of dark matter comprising of 80%+ of the matter in the universe. We’ve only kind of measured the implication of its existence… and there are also some observations that don’t fit existing models. And again, this is the observable universe.
Yeah in the general ballpark anyway. If something were capable of creating our universe as a simulation, it’s possible we couldn’t ever communicate it… even if we continued to exist as a species for another few million years.
For utterly alien aliens to come to a meeting of the mind with humanity regarding emotion, art, and science would be tough. Fortunately, that’s not even close to what we’re talking about. We’re talking about them holding up a sign that says “Hello! We’re here! We’re taking your water now!” And then humanity looks up at that sign and can, with our limited insect intelligence, say, “Huh, that giant neon octagon covered with squiggles flashing in the sky doesn’t look at all like a cumulus cloud.” It’s not about complex communication, it’s about detecting them at all - and about whether an arriving civilization can force us to detect them.
Personally I think that aliens could send us a pretty clear message if they wanted to. For example, orbital weapon strikes send a clear message in any tongue - and one that’s hard to overlook, at that.
Nothing, but that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t see them.
We would see something that we are unable to understand, but we would still understand that there is something.
I suppose it is possible that there is a whole mirror universe of dark matter planets and beings that we would never be able to interact with. But then they wouldn’t really be in our observable universe.
The fact that you can ask that question means we can comprehend the idea. So, yes, we can absolutely figure that out. If we can perceive an alien, we can perceive our inferiority to it.
I’ve read that there’s about 40 billion habitable planets in the universe. While I feel pretty confident that some form of life exists on those other planets, I’m not so sure that advanced life exists. Looking at the path which led to us, there are a lot of critical points which had to work out just the right way. Everything from how our solar system formed to how external events affected the evolution of life are points at which things could have gone wrong and we wouldn’t be here. So with only 40B potential planets, it doesn’t seem like enough opportunities for advanced life to be all that common. The chance of all the required preconditions to happen seems pretty low, so multiplying that probability by 40B doesn’t seem like there would be many planets.
When they do universe simulations, how common is it for an Earth like planet to form? That is, a stable planet with lots of water and a moon to create tides? Our moon was formed from an impact with a huge object, we have Jupiter to clean the solar system from asteroids, and we have lots of water from when icy objects impacted the Earth. I know they run universe simulations all the time. How often does an Earth-like planet form in the simulations?
[quote=“Pavelb1, post:58, topic:916388, full:true”]
You cavemen couldn’t even fly 150 years ago*. 350 years ago you hadn’t even explored your planet yet. 4000 years ago you couldnt make a ****ing NAIL.
And you sit there and have the Space Balls to say “The speed of light can’t be broken.”[/quote]
I don’t know that anyone has ever done a universe simulation that would be able to answer that effectively.
Far too much granularity and starting conditions to try to emulate.
But, when you look around at the Earth and the solar system, it really does seem to be a pretty nice place, a pretty ideal place for intelligent life to rise up.
Just starting with Sol. If it was half the size, it would only give off about a tenth the energy. If it were 10% bigger, it would be at the end of its life by now.
You have the Earth. Just big enough to hold an atmosphere and magnetic field, but not so big that it has a hard time forming solid land. Also, if the Earth were bigger, then getting a rocket into space becomes much harder.
We also have the moon, which seems a pretty random chance, but also seems pretty necessary. It helps us to have tectonic action and tides.
Jupiter being our big brother and scooping up all the nasty rocks that would pose a threat to us is pretty useful too.
I do think that we will find simple single celled life or its remnants under nearly every rock we turn over as we start exploring in earnest.
More complex single celled life is probably much much rarer, and multicellular life I would be very surprised to see at all.
Intelligent life, I think is going to be so rare that we never find it outside of Earth, anywhere in the observable universe.
The issue there is that it is still quite possible that the chances of an advanced civilization dodging all of the Filters (and there are innumerable ones to be sure) would be an even more astronomical number than the ones you are bandying about, one which would utterly dwarf your estimate. You can’t simply toss a number out there, emphasize just how massive it is, and go QED and rest your case.
The Drake Equation would actually have, if we knew everything, hundreds if not thousands of factors. If just one is essentially equal to zero, so is the expected number of extant civilizations. If just two factors are very close to zero, when they multiply together the resulting figure would also be effectively equal to zero. [Now, it is true that you would, when constructing the perfect version of said formula, also have to conceptualize and build in alternate paths if one path goes to zero. Not arguing against that.]
And that’s before we calculate all of the stars that have now moved beyond our light horizon, and thus are forevermore unreachable even in principle. Detecting a civilization at a distance of 10 billion light years (as seen 10 b.y. ago, note)does little good when at the present moment it is gone forever from our reach.
The Earth is way bigger than it needs to be to hold an atmosphere. In fact it could hold one 100 times as dense. Venus is somewhat smaller than Earth, yet its atmosphere is 90 times greater pressure than Earth’s.
AFAIK, the moon isn’t required for tectonic action. You have a cite that says it is?
My understanding is that Jupiter is not especially protective of the inner planets. It may snatch up some rocks, but it also redirects rocks from the outer Solar System into the inner, thus setting up collisions that wouldn’t occur otherwise.
Well, one very good reason for that is, we really haven’t reached the point where we can detect much smaller earth type planets. The ones we’ve been detecting have been pretty big.