Why We'll Never Meet Aliens

I think there's at least some reason to be a little more optimistic. Aliens technologically capable of visiting us are likely to have progressed through much of the same social development we have, and more (assuming that the pattern that has held for our species is common, which seems reasonable). We are still doing terrible things to each other, but not as often as we used to; I think it's likely that aliens would be kinder than we are. Then again, it's also possible that they might accidentally harm us - even a gentle child can crush an ant without meaning to...

This is just a bunch of idle speculation.

We can't speculate on the motives of aliens at all. Look at how hard it is to discern the motives of other humans, and now tell me you're going to discern the motives of something biologically completely unlike us? You can't assume they're rational motives either. Why should aliens be incapable of something like religion, egotism, mass delusion, or hedonic desires?

As far as the feasibility of star travel: it's hard, but not impossible. The thing that makes it hard really isn't the propulsion problem. You can go to the stars using technology contemporary with the Beatles white album:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...

A thermonuclear Orion could achieve around 10% the speed of light... according to figures computed using 60s assumptions of vehicle mass. With very lightweight materials and more efficient thermonuclear charges higher fractions are certainly achievable. (Though the acceleration would be rough!)

What you can't do with 60s-70s tech is survive the trip. The biological, structural, psychological, and engineering robustness challenges outweigh the challenge of propelling yourself at meaningful fractions of the speed of light. But those are all things that will yield to incremental progress.

(BTW: the same is true for Mars. The Apollo rig could have, with very minor modifications, sent astronauts to Mars. They would have been dead when they got there. The life support tech to keep a human in a can alive that long did not exist. Propulsion isn't the hardest problem.)

The fact is that we simply don't know. We don't even know if there is other complex life in our galaxy, let alone what it might be capable of or what it might do.

This article assumes a lot:

* The aliens who possess the technological ability to reach Earth are the ones who built it and evolved alongside it. Who's to say they didn't take it by force?

* FTL is something that must be developed through technology. (i.e. discounting the possibility of naturally occurring wormholes)

* The aliens have no inherent desire for exploration

Yes, I've watched too much Sci-fi :)

This article is full of misconceptions. Let's address a few of the most egregious ones.

>there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers.

There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc). Very smart people have looked at the Drake equation and it yields a very wide range of values [1].

>Christopher Columbus first landing on North America (not a good event for native Americans)

The main reason Europeans were able to take over America was disease. The Aztec effort to kick out the Spanish was hampered by smallpox [2], and colonization of North America had to wait for over a century before the native population was sufficiently depleted by disease to stop offering resistance. [3] Needless to say, disease worked unintentionally and because both sides were the same species.

> So, screw it, all movie alien races invented artificial gravity.

Or, you know, maybe they built ships with rotating crew habitats that simulate gravity by centrifugal force. (I belive 2001 does a pretty good job of showing the concept.)

> If getting humans to another star system is a 100 on some "technology ability scale", we're a 2 which is not comparatively far ahead of say, poodles - who are probably at a 1.

First off, poodles are at a zero. Second, if 10% of world GDP was dedicated to building an interstellar, multi-generation ark, we pretty much have the technology to do it right now. The technological problem is to reduce the cost to the point where the political will to do it can be summoned (probably around 0.01% of GDP).

>Maybe they want to trade with us. Well, yeah, right. If you've gotten this far it's obvious we have no tech that would interest them.

[4]

>How many years before we have a brain interface to Google? You'd know everything.

We already have Google in our pockets. But instantly finding any quote by Darwin doesn't mean I understand the theory of evolution.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_values

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuitl%C3%A1huac

[3] See timeline in http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Since we haven't met aliens yet, and interstellar travel would take ridiculous amounts of time and energy, I don't think any of us alive will meet aliens. It's like saying none of us will experience an ice age. Even if they do happen regularly, it happens regularly on geologic time scales, so it isn't going to happen in your life span. There might be so many stars out there that aliens are bound to happen, but crossing stars takes so much time and energy it isn't going to happen often.