Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

We know/strongly suspect dolphins/whales/etc are intelligent. But we don't care enough about what they might have to say to really try to communicate them.

And we know gorillas are intelligent. We even know we can teach them to communicate on a simplistic level -- but we don't really do it. We just don't care to. Occasionally we take one from captivity, establish communication aaaand... leave it as a curiosity for some sub-set of under-funded researchers.

No-one's going into the jungle to liaise with the gorilla tribes, help them through their troubles, educate them, present them with technology, medicine, etc.

The best we've managed on either count, on a species-to-species level, is to start to try to raise their perceived value to a level greater than that of slight inconvenience. (To halt the wanton slaughter we were previously, casually and without much remorse, engaged in.)

So would aliens ever come to Earth to stock up their zoo or fill out an encyclopedic survey of the galaxy and its life? On-Earth experience suggests that part is near-guaranteed if they ever swing by.

Might they ever establish communication with a handful of such subjects, mostly to see if it could be done? Again on-Earth experience suggests that's also plausible-to-likely.

But would they ever establish "contact" as our culture defines it? On-Earth experience makes that look less likely than their visiting in the first place.

The only real hope we have for contact, is if the Aliens perceive themselves to be only marginally more advanced than ourselves [1]. But for that to be plausible starts to eat into the requirement/assumption that they be significantly more advanced than ourselves.

[1] more along the lines of Spaniard/Native American interactions, than human/gorilla.

I think it's guaranteed. Just think about if we got that technology.

If suddenly magically a ship capable of zipping around the galaxy appeared in NASA's hands, other than disassembling it and trying to replicate it, what would we use it for? Looking for other life and inhabitable planets.

No reason to think aliens wouldn't do the same. It's obvious, IMHO.

So just focusing on the galaxy, even if life arises on every planet where it is capable, it's not going to be common. The planets with life on them will be few and far between. And as I said, based on our evidence, not even all (or any necessarily) of those will have intelligent life.

Of all the implausible ideas in sci fi movies and books, the one which always rubbed me most wrong is not mentioned: How military encounters would play out. Consider:

Most naval battles in space are modeled after 2 dimensional naval war fare. Not only is space 3D, but there is no reason to suppose technology geared around combating vessels floating in water has any relevance to space combat.

However, the most important variable determining the outcome of first encounters with (quite possibly) hostile alien races has nothing to do with the military gear and tactics. It has to do with relative technology level. Greg Bear's "Anvil of the Stars" which looks at it from this angle and here are some notes I distilled:

In most sci fi movies and books, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought the most interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space:

1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim.

2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level.

3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low.

The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.