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Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

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31–40 of 231 posts

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#31
I thought Max Tegmark's commentary on why we haven't discovered extraterrestrial life yet was reasonable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GctnYAYcMhI

Basically he purposes that there is either a barrier somewhere before our point of biological progress or after; as he explains in the video, the desired reality is that we have already surpassed that barrier. He reasons that space travel is a simple engineering challenge compared to evolving intelligent life on the cosmological scale, so there's less reason to believe the barrier lies after our point of progress.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#32

Has anyone thought about this...astronauts release their waste into space. There's bacteria that gets frozen almost as soon as it leaves the ship/space station right? Couldn't it stay preserved until it lands on a distant planet that hasn't formed an atmosphere and be the seeds for life on infant planets? I'm no physicist (or scientist, period), but it's just a question that's been bugging me for a while.

Sort of like panspermia? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#33

If alien species limited themselves to entertainment for such a long time, then where are the broadcasts from other solar systems? On the other hand, recent studies apparently hint that things like electrical and gravitational constants may not be the same everywhere, so maybe they don't transmit their signals with light. One more thing is that the argument that the age of the universe combined with its propensity to…

One reason I've read about is that when you consider humanity we were only broadcasting radio communication for a sliver of our history before we started using buried cables as a way to facilitate communication. The theory is that other civilizations would figure out the same thing and there is a limited window of time to intercept their radio communication.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#34
I think we haven't met any Aliens because we're selfish, paranoid, violent, irrational, un-evolved monkeys with baseball caps and video games and nobody wants to make friends people who happily destroy their environment [and therefore themselves] because it's easier than cleaning up their mess. Our major societies are full of petty, self-serving, closed-minded assholes and i'm a perfect example of that.

The technology-enslavement theory is bunk because humans pretty much tend to self-correct over time. We start destroying the environment, somebody notices, we start pulling back on our rampant destruction enough to keep things operating. An epidemic of fat kids goes on, people start complaining, and schools begin the process of sort-of making their lunches healthier. If it got so bad that we almost destroy ourselves from too much internet use somebody would start complaining and we'd reign back on that too.

Probably the real reason we haven't met any is that they probably have agreements that they don't come down and show themselves to new planets until the new planet's peoples advance their space technology to an appropriate level; ours is still kind of dark-ages technology. Maybe after the military invests we can have a nice big boom in space travel.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#35
Half way through the article I was in a bit of agreement with the writer about how our need for immediate gratification is so easily satisfied by the virtual supplements we get everyday and how it weighs us down overall as a society of humans; but all of a sudden he moves to assumes that people who are classified as religious fundamentalists, for some reason, seem to have figured it all out! Clearly the author is contradicting himself here. It is very unlikely (I would say impossible, but there's always an outlier somewhere) that someone who happens to be a religious fundamentalist would also not have delusions of "fitness-faking". What a terrible end to an article that could have been such an awesome topic of discussion.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#36
post #16

The physicist David Deutsch makes the point that there is no real way to distinguish a consistent, convincing virtual reality from reality itself. Therefore, there is no real moral difference between richly populating such virtual worlds (once we can construct them--we can't quite, yet) and populating actual other planets. Nick Bostrom would say that even using the word "actual" is probably wrong, since we're likely…

Interesting point. Based on what the author of this post is saying I wonder if the average human were given the option to enter a virtual reality where they could set the parameters to whatever they want would people know the difference or even care to find out? If you could have any beautiful woman you want, a great body, and great financials who would want to leave that fantasy?

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#37
My theory is that we haven't met aliens yet because the aliens have been to earth sereptitiously, have taken some DNA samples, and have decided there's nothing to be gained from making contact with us. They've told everyone else in the universe that the planet is hostile and not particularly technologically developed. They have also noted that it is not a threat just as long as they don't get advanced space travel technology. The best way to keep them from getting advanced space travel technology is to not communicate with them and thus leave them to their own devices. Additionally, based on the alien's models of planetary development, they have come to the conclusion that our civilization will not develop decent space travel before it collapses due to natural resource depletion.

The universe is a big place. There are probably trillions of habitable planets. We're just not that special. Maybe one day, if we somehow become "worth it", they'll stop by.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#38
At some point in the article he states:

Evolution simply could never have anticipated...

Evolution, by definition, doesn't anticipate anything. It's disappointing to see a university professor writing on evolution who seemingly doesn't even understand the evolutionary process.

Re: Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens

#40
I think the most likely answer is either: a) Same reason we don't SMS other species on earth - we're first, and if anyone else catches up it'll be a long time from now

b) We can't begin to conceive of the sort of technological advances achieved by other lifeforms. The fermi paradox rests on probabilities accumulated over billions of years, but ignores how briefly human intelligence has existed - the written word is only a few thousand years old. If your species advances to the point of being able comprehend and control all of reality, is there much point in having endlessly bigger LCDs powered by your awesome discworld, built by your giant starfleet? Is our faith in the inevitability of endless growth and expansion not itself a sort of primitive cargo cult?

If the entire process of going from advanced social being with primitive tools and language to a post-physical singularity takes on average 50,000 years, the drake equation need changing

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