Every time this subject comes up in conversation, it almost always seems to result in heated debate, and some people get extremely emotional about the matter. The three most logical explanations I can think are the following:
1). There’s nobody else out there, at least not at this time. We’re currently alone in the galaxy.
2). Interstellar space flight is physically impossible.
3). They’re out there, but they just haven’t found us yet. Space is a big place.
I need more and better possible explanations though. What could they be?
4). They’ve listened to some of our radio and T.V. broadcasts, and decided that they don’t want anything to do with us.
5). They have contacted us, but are using methods that we aren’t advanced enough to understand, or that we don’t recognize because we aren’t specifically listening for them.
Maybe we have been contacted, but most of us don’t realize it. Or there are no advanced aliens out there, which says nothing about alien life in general – the galaxy could be teeming with life, but if developing technology is a 1-in-a-trillion chance, then we might be the only ones within a few thousand light years right now who could hope to talk to anyone else.
From my relatively lay understanding of the science, I think the most plausible explanation is that evolving to the use of advanced technology might be incredibly rare, either because it’s ultimately maladaptive (they tend to nuke each other into oblivion pretty quickly) or because it’s just very rare for brains and tool use ability to advance together in the way that we did.
But this is based on speculation – without finding and studying a bunch of aliens, we really can’t know for sure.
Someone or something is killing civilizations – cosmic berserkers – and those few that survive are keeping their heads down and maintaining radio silence.
We’ll be contacted soon enough…and that’ll be the end of us!
For us to have been contacted, there would have to be a technologically advanced extraterrestrial species close enough to us in space-time to make communication feasible.
Watch Star Trek and learn about the prime directive. Consider its wisdom.
In short it is the same reason why we would rather not interfere with the natural habits of animals, or for that matter the few primitive human tribes that still exist.
Why would you want a better explanation when you’ve hit it right there?
Maybe it could be restated: Space is a very, very, very, very big place. Far bigger than you could ever be able to imagine. And travel and communication within that unimaginably big place is constrained by relativistic limits. It’s entirely possible that within the span of existence of humanity in any recognizable form as we know it, we will never encounter extraterrestrials. Yet their existence is essentially certain because their odds against it are inconceivable.
One might even posit that the astronomically unlikely odds of one civilization encountering another elsewhere in the universe is fortuitous or perhaps some essential corollary of the anthropic principle. Perhaps the only such civilizations that would likely meet would be those in the same stellar planetary system, which would happen fairly early on in their technological evolution.
Exactly. An encounter requires the confluence of four coordinates.
Space is really, really big. The bubble of our emissions are only at the 100 light year mark…in a galaxy over 100,000 light years. In addition, as our own civilization has gotten more advanced our emissions have actually decreased since they have become more focused and less broadcast. Also, those early broadcast radio transmissions tend to fall off after only a few light years, becoming more and more dispersed, so harder and harder to tease out from the background noise of the universe. Put all of that together and it’s no real wonder why we haven’t been contacted by exxtraterrestrials (unless we have with things like the Wow! interceptions)…the distances are just too large and they don’t know we are even here.
Or, based on the MIB documentary series, we DO know they are here but they are keeping that info from us because humans are ‘dumb, panicky dangerous animals’…
This is like asking why Jesus hasn’t returned yet.
The question assumes unproven facts. That Jesus existed, that he was the son of God, that he can reincarnate. No scientific evidence for any of this exists.
And there is no evidence, of any kind, that **ANY life exists **off the planet Earth. None at all. Beyond the absence of proof for any extraterrestrial life existing at all the question makes further assumptions, of complex life, of technological life, of an interest by this supposed life in exploration. A technological civilization could exist on a planet with permanent cloud cover and not even be aware of the galaxy beyond their world.
Why haven’t dolphins invented airplanes?
The whole Drake Equation is an exercise in unproven assumptions, compounded with multiple assumptions over and over. There is no scientific evidence behind any of it.
I stick with my opinion that we are the Elder Race, at least here in the Orion Spur of the Milky Way galaxy and will never, ever, even if we survive a million more years, find any other intelligence out there.
There’s an assumption in things like the Fermi Paradox that intelligent life has a desire to spend huge amounts of resources on interstellar colonization craft, go off and colonize other star systems, then repeat the process in each star system until they’ve filled up the entire galaxy. But we don’t see that happen with the only sample of intelligent life that we have - people in America could go repopulate ghost towns in the western US or just move to sparsely inhabited but life-supporting Alaska, but would much rather stick to existing cities with infrastructure and job opportunities. One possibility is simply that intelligent life doesn’t care about trying to colonize everywhere, and instead focuses much more on internal development, and when it does send ships outside they’re more of permanent habitats that move than colony ships, and while they eventually make other habitats they don’t focus on trying to sustain exponential growth.
My little monkey brain finds this pretty convincing. The only problem is that a monkey with a better brain than mine didn’t find it convincing and gave good reasons why.
Satetments #2, #3, and #4 are all unproven assumptions. The Fermi Paradox is another attempt to explain something in the absence of facts to support the theory.
