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While all life, ants or not, may be universally worthy of study, is it worth that much sacrifice? Also, if the ants talk, exchanging messages would make more sense for study.
More likely is the universe is massive, and the aliens have already visited. Millions or billions of years ago.
>We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. Not really the most convincing argument. There are professions that study ants. And I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants. Pretty sure aliens would still be interested in us even if we were as primi…
In the same way an ant might stumble across a human building or notice a human above the grass, you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology.
The hard fact is there are no shortcuts to interstellar travel, barring new physics. Any trip will consume vast amounts of energy and it will take decades if not centuries or longer. Advanced tech may reduce the expense to your civilization but the fact won't change. While all life, ants or not, may be universally worthy of study, is it worth that much sacrifice? Also, if the ants talk, exchanging messages would make…
Our understanding of physics changes constantly!
I'm writing a kids story (with my son, its quite fun to discuss the story and plan the laser fights) about an alien that is visiting earth to complete his Alien PhD - I am going to get some sarcastic jibe about backwaters and wasting years away from any decent fun etc. I think we might consider that level of interest lucky. :-)
This sounds like a very fun idea to do! May try it as well :)
:-)
All qualitative until it can’t avoid quantitative metrics like “many”
Of all the potential Fermi outcomes, I find the “uninterested aliens” to be the silliest. More likely is the universe is massive, and the aliens have already visited. Millions or billions of years ago.
>We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. Not really the most convincing argument. There are professions that study ants. And I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants. Pretty sure aliens would still be interested in us even if we were as primi…
The point is that we're one of (large number) of ant colonies and there's nothing particularly interesting about us vs. any other ant colony. Even if ETs study ants generally, there's nothing unique about us to give us a greater than 1/(large number) chance of being studied.
First, out of all the ant biomass, humans have only seen a very, very tiny amount. Ants are so numerous, and so ubiquitous, Google claims 10 billion billion. Yet this number seems incredibly low, for apparently (wikipedia) some ant colonies have 100s of millions of workers.
Regardless, as a human, can you imagine trying to visit each ant colony? How about if you lived just as long as an ant, or thereabouts? Say, a few years?
How about ant colonies which appear, die off? And how about the fact that ants have been around since the dinosaurs, and our modern civilisation has been around for a few hundred?
And how about if you are a researcher? Let's say you stand back, and watch the ants. Do the ants even notice? Especially the main colony?
Or are you looking at a few out of endless numbers? What do they report when they get back. Do you even need to be near the ant colony to watching them?
And after you've looked at 100 ant colonies, do you need to look at another 1000? Million? We keep discovering subtle branches of insects, so why would a.. I dunno, being comprised of energy, find different (after the first 1000) in a species with a bunch of meaty limbs?
In general we don't assume that of everyone. What we do assume is that at least some aliens would be interested, because we assume intellect comes with innate curiosity. In an advanced culture, even a small number of individuals exhibiting an interest would be enough to form a field of study, just as it is here on Earth. Asserting that nobody us studying is because we're uninteresting to every single alien creature i…