I think what @Sam_Stone is trying to say is that our civilisation would be very difficult to find if life-bearing worlds with complex biospheres are common. If we develop telescopes sensitive enough to detect planets with biospheres, and we then discover that there are millions or billions of them, we will need to examine each of those life-bearing worlds for signs of civilisation as well. If life-bearing worlds are common-place but civilisations are vanishingly rare, then we could be looking for a long time.
Consider this; we have had a complex land-based biosphere on this planet for at least three hundred million years, and an ocean-based biosphere for half a gigayear or more; but we have only had civilisation for a few thousand years, depending on your definition. A ratio of very approximately 1/100,000.
If we have to search through a hundred thousand life-bearing planets to find one civilisation, this will be a very challenging task.
Oh, sure, I agree. I think life is probably pretty common and may even exist in places we wouldn’t expect such as gas giants or under ice on frozen worlds. Radiation, thermal, and chemical energy could sustain life.
I would not be shocked to learn that life does or did at one point exist elsewhere in our own solar system.
But as you say, it does seem like intelligence is far from inevitable.
Tetrapods first came to land about 359 MYA. Dinosaurs showed up 252 MYA and died out (except the birds) 65 MYA.
Dinosaurs were around for 187 million years, and not around for 107+65=172 million years. Over half the time that vertebrate life has existed on land, it has been dinosaur. Had the impact that killed them never happened, Dinosauria could very well be the dominant group of terrestrial life form to this day, and may never have developed more intelligence than a parrot or crow. Admittedly these are clever animals, and maybe this is my simian bias showing, but I don’t think those lineages are on their way to space.
I always get a kick out this belief and I’ve seen it expressed often that an advanced civilization will be inherently wise and non-malevolent (if not altruistic and wonderful). And for those who actually believe this, the most advanced society in the 1930s and 1940s weren’t particularly benevolent.
This is hugely dependent on what a civilization evolves from and what traits remain or disappear. For example, if environmental circumstances on Earth had resulted in cats or spiders evolving into a dominant, intelligent, space-faring species, either one would have significantly different moral standards than we do.
I’m just referring to patterns in human history. The initial wave of explorers, your Christopher Columbuses, Lewis & Clark, etc, scout and map the new lands and report their findings to their patrons, who then decide on future endeavors. Their main motivations will be to see if such projects would be profitable. They’d take measures to make sure the pesky natives don’t get in their way, lest they wind up with a Croatoa/Lost Colony scenario.
Given that the time taken to reach our planet might be too long for a small group of explorers, and that they might not be able to survive or even leave, maybe the ETs would send an automated probe instead. Even if they could surpass the speed of light to get here, space is friggin’ VAST. It could still take too much time to justify the cost of exploring this far.
Now, assuming the ETs don’t want to resort to fighting, they’d still want to make sure their establishments are secure and environmental conditions are suitable for living in this faraway land. The natives (us) might not agree with their choice of location. Plus, some of our bad elements might try to steal their superior technology from them at the very least. Remember how cruel we humans can be, especially against the things we don’t understand?
Did Hyak offer an positive evidence that it was aliens or only negative evidence that it wasn’t something else. I suspect the latter since that is invariably how all of these arguments usually go. They invariably quote the stupidest quote that Sherlock Holmes ever gave.
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
The problem of course is that once you’ve eliminated the impossible there will never just be one explanation remaining. It’s the Gods in the gaps fallacy. One can always eliminate a number of falsifiable explanations and then claim therefor that it must be a particular non-falisfiable one. As Little_Nemo pointed out it could be dragons.
As to the OP here is a non-compressive list of the things that UFO’s could be if they aren’t alien space craft.
Wizards, Time travelers, Inter-dimensional travelers, Miracles, Angels, Secret government craft, Efreeti, Faeries, Dark Matter, Dark energy, a Glitch in the Matrix, Cryptids, Astral projections, Unknown atmospheric phenomena, Hallucinations, Lies, New physics, etc. etc.
Quite the opposite. Unethical and irrational species kill themselves off before expanding, especially as technological advances make it easier to kill lots of people quickly. There have been novels about almost everyone dying since Mary Shelley, but only after WW II did they involves us doing it to ourselves.
Expansionism in an alien species is not obviously immoral or irrational. I would argue the opposite - the moral imperative of life is to survive and expand. In fact, in a universe of competing expanding civilizations, choosing to stay home and not be expansionist is likely the immoral choice for the species, as it means it’ll likely be destroyed or just die out from an accident or a war.
More or less what Robert Heinlein said in his novel “Starship Troopers”; for which he’s been compared to a Nazi master race proponent advocating for lebensraum.
And 25 years or so, is what I often see about the history of recent military weapons and aircraft. It goes from testing of the prototypes to the actual new flying weapons revealed to the public and to the days when the weapons are declared obsolete.
I’m not talking about the ethics of expanding, I’m talking about the ethical state of a civilization that could expand. (Occupying planets with no inhabitants probably has no ethical problems, occupying, or even contacting, those with inhabitants does.)
Think of what the world would be like if we were an ethical species. The money spent on weapons could be spent on people and exploration. We could concentrate on generating energy that doesn’t screw up the planet. We could be on Mars and start diversifying, That we’re not doing that is not because it is ethically unacceptable, but that we’ve decided to put our resources into preparing to kill each other.
You are applying the ethics of a subset of humans to unknown alien races.
The idea that expansionism or ‘taking over’ other environments is immporal is not universally shared, even among humans. And in the animal kingdom, it’s the opposite. Life expands to fill every niche it can. Species will happily eradicate other species if it’s to their benefit.
I’m not even sure it’s a moral stance for humans. Especially if it is not universally shared. If we decide we will not expand, and our neighbors decide the opposite, they are more likely to win the genetic race.
Life has an imperative to survive, thrive, and expand. On Earth, the animal and plant kingdom are constantly in a struggle for survival and expansion. Life that is just content to sit back and exist is not going to be common, IMO. And if expansionist life exists at the same time, I would expect it to win. So byt now, all we should have left are expansionist civilizations, if expansion is possible and a net benefit to a civilizastion.
We can be certain, if nothing else, that said alien species got there by natural selection. Every species–technological or not–is around because they out-reproduced, out-murdered, out-expanded, etc. the competition. A little out-cooperated, too, for a few species–but only ever to increase the rate at which their own genes propagated.
If, by some fantastic circumstance, a species managed to somehow engineer these traits out of themselves, they’d be overwhelmed by any species that didn’t make such a fatal error. And the universe itself would kill them off eventually anyway. But it’s very unlikely, since it only takes one expansionist faction in the whole to outcompete the remainder.
The argument has been made before that dinosaurs never evolved in the way that mammals did subsequently. But this ignores the fact that dinosaurs lived in a climatalogically benign climate, with widespread global warmth, luxurious plant life and associated fauna, and an almost complete absence of polar ice caps and no recurring ice ages. They didn’t evolve much because they didn’t need to, not because they were dinosaurs. By the time advanced mammals came along, they faced climatic and resource challenges they had to adapt to.
There is never enough “full disclosure” for those that believe that the government is keeping secrets. If they assume that the government is lying and/or keeping secrets, then they will keep assuming such no matter what they are told or shown.
It’s sure as hell not a moral stance of humans. That’s my point, which I’m clearly not explaining well enough.
Morality or lack of morality by itself will not affect a race able to expand into space. It is not like an immoral one (let’s use that term for the moment) is going to be at a disadvantage in inventing technology. It is that the same expansionist drive that would cause them to expand to other inhabited planets will cause their nation states to expand to other ones, which leads to conflicts, which leads to destruction as their ability to destroy each other increases. I’m saying there is a filter, and kind of natural selection, that will filter the immoral races from making it to the point they can expand. Human morality has nothing to do with it.
Now, all bets would be off if a race still in its expansionist mode gets the technology enabling the expansion from elsewhere. That might be a reason that planets with pre star travel inhabitants would be quarantined by the more advanced races.
Or, as Kirk said, more or less, “what happens when they want a piece of our action?”
Dinosaurs were and remain an enormously diverse and successful clade. I definitely would not say that they ‘didn’t evolve much’ - they did. Just not towards intelligence.
And mammals were there that whole time, they just got outccompeted by dinosaurs. And not just because the dinos got there first; the early Triassic was dominated by proto-mammals.
And I wouldn’t say that the Mesozoic was nearly as benign as you seem to be painting it.
We only have the vaguest idea of how complex dinosaur brains were. Most were not very large. The closest point of comparison we have is to modern birds, which range from as mindless as a domestic turkey to as shrewd as crows and parrots.
Oddly enough though, mammals did not immediately jump to being large brained. Modern groups that are considered analogous to stem group mammals such as the monotremes, marsupials and xenarthra are notably small-brained. Early mammals apparently continued the long tradition in vertebrates of having the brain be not much more than a junction where the spinal cord, cranial nerves and neurologic glands meet. It’s interesting to speculate what caused natural selection to begin favoring larger brains in the Cenozoic, but apparently it wasn’t innate mammalian precocity.
In general principle, I don’t really disagree with anything you wrote there. Just to clarify, of course dinosaurs evolved during the nearly 200 million years of their existence. My statement that “they didn’t evolve much” was specifically on the subject of intelligence, though how much evolution there was in that direction has to remain speculative. There’s certainly no evidence for either the intelligence or the physical capacity to make and use tools, for example.
But as for the climate of the Mesozoic, obviously the earth’s climate is both regionally and temporally variable and there were undoubtedly some harsh times, along with a lot of tectonic activity. But the fact is that the era of the dinosaurs is relatively speaking the most stable such extended warm period in the earth’s history, and the only one where polar ice caps existed for only a very brief period in a span of nearly 200 million years. In the evolutionary process of natural selection, intelligence may not have been a big factor here.
I say all that just to underscore my belief that, given enough time, intelligence will evolve in any species, just the same way that I believe that, given enough time, life itself will form and evolve in any suitable biochemical environment.
As an aside of no scientific significance whatsoever, when my son was very young I got him a book on dinosaurs, which is of course a fascination of all kids. Near the end was an artist’s conception of what a non-avian dinosaur might look like today, after 65 million years of evolution. I’m so sorry that the book has been lost because that picture haunts me to this day, and neither internet searches nor suggestions by helpfully inclined posters have found the image. But it’s a dinosaur with a face and eyes that exude intelligence in a way that is strangely disturbing, like looking at an actual alien.
The reason that UFOs are not alien spacecraft is not because intelligent life hasn’t evolved on other planets throughout the galaxy and throughout the universe. It’s because the basic physics of space and time and relativistic limitations pretty much guarantee that UFOs are windshield reflections, weather balloons, radar anomalies, or any one of thousands of other things that have an astronomically higher probability. I use the word “astronomically” here intentionally, as it tends to imply “the kind of number that applies to the universe, and is entirely beyond human comprehension”). The inverse of that number – as in “astronomically improbable” – applies to the UFO phenomena as alien spacecraft.