After all, all life on Earth was descended from a single cell. Maybe all *intelligent *life in the universe will descend from a single planet.
What’s to suppose? We are in the situation of not having discovered alien life right now, and have been ever since the possibly of life on other worlds was first conceived (i.e, at least since Giordano Bruno in the late 16th century). There is not going to be some future event when we suddenly and unexpectedly don’t find it, and have to react to that.
The problem with this is that every single discovery in the history of cosmology has shown us that we are not special.
At one time we thought that the Earth had a special place at the center of the cosmos. Bzzz! Wrong. It’s just one planet among many going around the Sun. Well, but at least our solar system is special, right? Wrong again! There are tons of them out there, we’re just one in a random corner of the galaxy. Well, but the galaxy is at least the whole cosmos, isn’t it? That’s special, I guess. Ha! No. *Billions *of galaxies, all over the place. We’re not special!
And it gets worse. All recent trends in cosmology seem to point towards the existence of a multiverse - or even multiple kinds of multiverses. Even the universe itself may not be special, just one in a litter.
So, if Earth somehow is the only planet to have life, or even the only planet to have life within any large area… well, it could be the case. Maybe that’s how things really work. It doesn’t have to mean anything. And it’s already looking a bit like that. But that would be weird. There’s not enough data to set off the Twilight Zone music yet, but the idea should make you go :dubious:.
The starting assumption at this point has to be: We’re not special. Every time we’ve thought we are, we’ve been wrong. As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it: That’s not modesty, that’s just track record.
Yeah that should be the starting assumption. However we don’t know at this time whether it is correct, and someone has to be first.
FTL travel is the main reason I think the Foundation model is most likely. We’ll just chug along at 55 mph for several thousand years until we find a habitable planet. Spaceships will all essentially be two mobile homes holding two families where the kids marry. When they outlive their parents, they detach and join two different mobile homes and repeat the pattern. Maybe the spaceship would be a condo with engines. If you want to bet on either FTL travel or human procreation, I would bet on the latter.
I don’t really buy the hypersleep idea. If it were true, if someone lived to be 60, they would actually look 40, which is just not true. I’m fairly sure we continue aging while we sleep.
Well said and Enrico Fermi would shake your hand if he was in the galactic vicinity.
However we humans live and think within a microscopic timescale. We have been beaming radio waves into the Universe for less than 150 years which is so small a slice of time it can’t be imagined.
The Universe is 13.6 billion years old. It is possible entire galactic civilisations have risen and gone before the Earth even formed.
The odds of us reaching interstellar capacity (which has just arrived) at the same time as another intelligent species are infinitesimally low. A mere 100,000 years ago passing aliens would have said “nothing to see here, move along”.
Or maybe they stopped by to pee in the ocean?
Or maybe there’s a “10 thousand light year club” and they bonked in a cave?
Yeah, this.
The only end to our search for extra-terrestrial life will come after our extinction, some other disaster that prevents us from looking any longer, or a massive societal shift so that nobody cares.
We don’t find any? We’ll keep looking. We find some? We’ll look harder for more.
Shaky logic there - I mean, if someone lived to 40 without sleeping, they’d probably look 60. Or more likely, dead.
True, but I really doubt someone would survive a 1000 year sleep. It’s far more likely that their progeny would make it than them.
Bobby Vinton proven correct?
It’s like not finding massive quantities of gold or uranium on the moon. Didn’t find it? Doesn’t mean it’s not there, we just stopped looking.
It may be that the formation of life is common, just not intelligent life. And not just intelligent, but able to develop technology. Dolphins are pretty intelligent creatures, but even if they were as smart as us, they’d have a difficult time developing any sort of technology. Evolution isn’t any guarantee of intelligent, techo-savvy life forming, just life adapted to its environment. It may be that our technology is just a one in many billion chance accidental offshoot of our evolving hands and learning to tinker with things.
So the universe could be full of planets teeming with one-celled organisms or with predator-prey relationships where creatures are only concerned with eating or avoiding being eaten. It would still be fascinating to discover, we just wouldn’t have much to talk with them about.
Hypersleep =/= sleep
We’re not just talking about giving people a really big glass of hot milk then setting their alarm clock to AD3014.
The concept of hypersleep is that we put the body in some sort of extended stasis, maybe a particularly deep hibernation state (where body temperature and heart rate are allowed to fall significantly). Or maybe even a cryogenic stasis, with the idea of it being a “sleep” is purely figurative.
Like turning lead into gold We’d stop looking.
Ah but how about dem cats mon? They’s crafty critters, they got us to give them chesseburgers cat-trees and laser-pointers. And they can eat dolphins. 
I don’t really get how we’d “stop looking”. We won’t stop doing astronomy. We won’t stop looking into the night sky. The OP’s probes are presumably not sent out with the specific goal in mind to seek out life, but to do science in general. Whether we ever travel to other stars or not is yet to be seen, but I think it’s a safe bet that searching for aliens won’t figure much into that decision. If we ever do meet E.T., I doubt that it’ll be because of SETI. I think we’re more likely to bump into them while we’re doing something else.
Or, more likely still, *they *will find us. (Cue “Jaws” theme.)-
We’ll never develop faster-than-light spacecrafts and we’ll never venture outside our own solar system. We’ll never find extraterrestrial life and they will never find us because the distances are FUCKING ENORMOUS.
But we will continue to look until we become extinct.
Never? … Never?
Really?
Yes. Never.