While I could construct various explanations, the internet has done it already(and done it well), so I’ll re-use. I’ll try to make the poll options self explanatory, but the quoted material will be helpful(especially bold parts,mine), although ideally, you’ll want to jump to the linked article and read through it. It is an easy read, and a good review, if you have any interest in the topic.
I’m also including a poll option which the article seems to have skipped - There are other civilisations out there, but they’re all just too far away for us to be able to tell.
*While I expect almost everyone on the Dope would know it already, I don’t want to shirk OP duty.
Just as an additional note - all options(including “Other, elaborate in thread”) after the 3rd are Group 2, since Group 1 options are(I think) exhaustive. This is important because it will let us compare Group 1 and Group 2 votes.
The most obvious response, and the one that does not have an option is time - It is easy to say there are enough target stars to produce civilizations, but those targets spread over 10 Billion years leaves little opportunity for overlap
I think that option is covered in “Intelligent life is out there, but so far that we’re unable to perceive them”. I certainly had it in mind when I phrased the option. Some very far away planets may have developed advanced civilisation by now, but since we can only perceive them as they were millions of years ago, we don’t know what’s going on.
I think it is highly likely both that we are rare and that we are fucked. However, I think that there is another quite plausible scenario that you have not considered. Even if humans and human civilization manage to survive for a long time, I think it is highly likely that technological (and perhaps also scientific) progress will not continue at a significant pace for very much longer. After all, the last four centuries or so of rapid scientific and technological progress are very anomalous when compared to all the rest of human history, when such progress was usually slow to nonexistent, and when things quite often even went backwards. (And, in my opinion, the “master science”, physics, already shows strong signs of having run into the sands over the last 50 years or so.) Virtually everything that it is proposed that we might do to contact alien civilizations at large interstellar distances, depends on technological advances that might never come. If our current level of technology is fairly close to being as far as we are going to get, not because of specifically human limitations, but limitations on technological possibility itself, any alien civilizations that may exist will not have any better means of contacting us than we currently have of contacting them, which, realistically, is very little.
It is not just that “so far” we are unable to perceive them, very possibly we are never going to be able to, and, for similar reasons, they are never going to be able to perceive us.
I certainly don’t favor the “We’re Fucked” explanation, but I’m afraid I believe it.
Intelligent life probably self destructs more often than it accomplishes the energy budget needed for interstellar probes. We’ll (and by “we” I mean any intelligent life) destroy our own ecosystem, or engage in devastating war, or unleash runaway nanotech, or simply devote resources to feeding the billions, rather than exploration.
The distances are too great. A civilization would have to have a truly huge energy budget to do spaceflight. And we simply can’t be trusted with that kind of energy density. Some jackass is too likely to use it to crush his enemies and grab their resources.
We could put up orbiting colonies…and some pukewad terrorist will send it crashing back down on top of London.
Let us imagine you and a small band of survivors are the only humans left on earth, and you’re in a house in a random location on earth.
You are then told there is another small band, also in a random house somewhere on earth. How much time and effort would you expend trying to contact or find this other band before just giving up and moving on with your new life with the small band you’re with? What are the chances either of you would ever find the other? Even leaving messages at major landmarks, even using radio broadcasts?
Now throw in that you have no reason to believe there even is another band somewhere, I think we haven’t met them because it is almost pointless.
Intelligent life is out there, but so far that we’re unable to perceive them.
FTL anything is practically impossible, IMO. So until the Von-Neumann-Bracewell probes arrive in our (let’s face it) galactically-remote system, we’d have no ready way of communicating or perceiving them, the inverse-square law being what it is…
I think that life is probably common in the universe but intelligent life is not. I would love for there to be intelligent life out there but if I look at how long it took for intelligent life to appear on Earth I feel rather despondent. In the entire history of our planet only one species has been intelligent enough to actually look for life in the universe.
It also appears to me that there may be no major evolutionary benefit to intelligence. The dinosaurs were around for a few hundred million years and they never developed intelligence and apart from that pesky meteorite they seemed to do just fine.
If I were among the Higher Civilizations that are aware, I sure as hell wouldn’t want Earthlings knowing about us. I mean, shit, look at what we fools are doing to our planet and ourselves. Nothing but vermin. If I were one of them, I would have already placed my bet of 50 Drak Zoids that the foolish Earthlings go extinct within the next 235.23897 years.
Well, that is rather a trivial nitpick. You seem to be right that I misread it, but either way, that option certainly does not amount to what I said. What I am saying is that it is not only that we can’t perceive them now (as is clearly the case), but thatit may be impossible for us ever to reach attain a level of technology where we can (assuming they are out there - which I think is fairly likely). By the same token, they are unlikely ever to attain a technological level where they can perceive us or send any sort of clear signals to us.
Almost everyone who participates in these sort of discussions (and almost all science fiction, which is where the agenda mostly comes from) seems to assume that, barring some sort of civilization destroying catastrophe, scientific and technological progress is bound to continue indefinitely, and probably either at much the same rapid pace at which they have advanced in recent times, or at an accelerating one. This view comes from extrapolation from what has happened over the past four centuries or so. I am saying that there is no good reason to expect it to be true, and that taking a historical perspective a little wider than one confined to past handful of centuries strongly suggests that it is unlikely to be true.
I wish you would have made this multiple choice. I like many of them. But, if I’m forced to pick a favorite, being rare has to be it. I think people greatly overestimate the ease at which life can start. I also think that there is no natural pressure to evolve intelligent life. Evolution isn’t directed towards creating human level intelligence.
I do think it’s quite likely we’re first, and we may very well be fucked. I also think we would not find intelligent life by the means we are looking for it, and that they might be too far away, at least for our current technological level to detect.
I think the simulation theory is a neat idea, but I also think it is fundamentally meaningless. Being a simulation won’t change the reality of the universe from our perspective. I see it more as a matter of philosophy or even religion.
I don’t agree with this point - life started here as soon as it possibly could, given what the Hadean was like. If there’d been, say, a 2-billion year gap between the end of the Hadean and the first life, I think you’d be right. But there wasn’t, so I don’t think you are. Life popped up as soon as the conditions were right - I think this would be the case everywhere else, and the latest exoplanet research seems to indicate that conditions may be right all over the galaxy, at least.
This, I do agree with. But I think, if life is common, that supersedes this, just given the large numbers we’d be talking about.
I picked There’re predator civilizations, and intelligent life knows better than to advertise their location, but I’d prefer a combination of several options. There are many billions of stars that are millions of years older than the Sun, and many billions of planets that could sustain life. I think there are millions of species more developed than on Earth, some of which have mastered interstellar travel. Some of those species are looking to take over their ‘part’ of their galaxy but, fortunately, we’re no part of any of theirs. By the time we’ve managed to travel to other stars they’d have already cornered their part and our astronauts will be zapped if we get anywhere near them. It’ll be a bit like Star Trek but we will be the ‘monster’ in a dodgy outfit.
What the hell could these predators want? There is no way in hell humans or anything else on earth would be edible, the atmosphere could well be toxic, any resources on earth like water or metals would be easier to harvest in space rather than entering a gravity well with violent natives lobbying bombs at your mining robots.
About the only thing I can think of is the equivalent of bored drunken teenage vandals.
If it’s by their RF emissions, it could quite well be that civilisations only spend a shortish time emitting detectable RF.
We’re actually in the process of doing that ourselves - Digital RF is going to be hard to distinguish from noise at a distance - cable/fibre is replacing broadcast TV, etc.