Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Life probably exists somewhere else.
That doesn’t mean they visit us in secret and there’s a conspiracy to hide it.
It’s two very different things
Also, life and intelligent life are two different things.
Doesn’t mean they don’t either. :)
I think it’s likely they do. There has been so many sightings through the years and so many stories that I believe no smoke without fire, so to speak.
It’s also what we would do. We (humans) would have similar strategy if we had similar technology to visit other planets.
the pentagon did release that footage back in 2020.
wont hold my breath until we actually get to know more about it, but something really appears to be going on.
I assume other life exists somewhere, because the universe is practically infinite in size, but I also assume that we will not meet them, because the universe is practically infinite in size.
Basically my thoughts. The speed of light, while the fastest thing we know, is as slow as smell on the scale of the universe. Any race of beings able to get here, check us out, and leave, would need technology that would break physics as we understand it. Not to say it’s impossible, but we’ve now firmly stepped into beliefs, rather than anything based on observable data. Also, the notion of a race being so advanced they can travel faster than light accidentally crashing on our planet is pretty silly to me.
I like the space travel explained in three body problem. Soldering about folding up dimensions.
GET THIS MAN HIS VOTES
I mean, we could potentially see them if they’re in any of the neighboring galaxies, and if they’re in ours they should have arrived and turned Earth into a colony long ago. Space is big, but time is long. Loud aliens would have to be truly rare indeed for this.
I don’t know, if this is worth arguing over. Depending on how far advanced you expect such a life form to be, obviously they might be capable of things that we currently consider impossible. But well, to illustrate what I mean:
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The next galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy. It is 2.5 million light years away. There could be life over there right now, but we wouldn’t know, until about 2.5 million years from now.
Compare that to the emergence of modern humans, which was 300,000 years ago. We didn’t start sending out radio waves until some generations ago.
None of this means that it’s not possible for life to have existed on some planet 2.5 million years ago, so we’d be seeing their radio waves right now, but even then, we might interpret them as background noise. -
The next star is Proxima Centauri. It is 4.24 light years away. So, we could see things from there in 4.24 years, which is pretty good, although still absolute hell of a delay for exchanging messages.
But for them to actually visit us, even if they go at 1% the speed of light, that would mean they’d need 424 years of travel time. With little sunlight or other energy sources on the way.
And 1% of the speed of light is an insane 10,800,000 km/h. Compare that to the fastest man-made object, the Parker Solar Probe, which is expected to go 720,000 km/h, when it closely passes by the Sun.
Basically, we can be extremely generous with these examples and still see practically insurmountable time frames.
Worm holes could theoretically exist. Maybe a sufficiently advanced race could defy physics as we know it. But if they can’t, that’s a pretty good explanation why they’re hiding.
Hey, I don’t know if we even have to argue, your math checks out. But, is 425 years really insurmountable? The first Earth-like planets could be billions of years older than ours. IIRC Fermi himself estimated 3 million to settle the whole galaxy.
The next galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy. It is 2.5 million light years away. There could be life over there right now, but we wouldn’t know, until about 2.5 million years from now.
Let’s go by light cones and local interval (clock time in one’s own reference frame), if we are going to argue. This shit can get so confusing if we try to define “now”, especially if a relativistically fast ship comes up.
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I am sure there are extraterrestrial life forms. It’s scientific consensus.
I do not think “the government” has proof and hides that from us.
The universe is big enough that life probably exists in other places. Anything advanced enough to reach us (an extraordinarily difficult feat) would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people, and people just want to believe in something fun to compensate for how boring modern life can be.
would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people
Never underestimate the stupidity of smart people/potential other sentient beings.
Also good to never underestimate human negativity bias, where the brain remembers bad things far more than it remembers positive things.
Look at air travel. We invented it over a century ago, and have made it safe enough that a single failure out of thousands of successful flights becomes newsworthy.
The statistical likelihood of stupid-yet-capable aliens happening to fuck up that badly is very small.
Absolutely! I mean primarily that just about any sentience that humans can conceive of is likely to experience some failure, even if down to just statistics. Even our dieties are fallible. So, it seems reasonable to expect that an intellectually superior sentience could make a mistake, leading to loss of craft to primitives like us. Then again, maybe I’m too dumb to conceive of a non-fault-prone intelligence.
Extraterrestrial life = yes. It’s a big universe and the chances of us being the only life in the entire universe is slim.
Aliens visiting us = no. For the same reason as above. It’s a big ass universe.
Governments being able to hide aliens from us = lol no. If aliens had the tech to travel a million light years to visit us, they’d have taken over the planet in an hour.
If aliens had the tech to travel a million light years to visit us, they’d have taken over the planet in an hour.
Lol Too long, 10 minutes?
TBF, it took 2 minutes for aliens to be worshiped as “eye in the sky” in 3bp
And that’s assuming they’re even interested in Earth. They’ll probably start by strip-mining Jupiter and/or building a Dyson swarm around the sun.
Anyone who thinks the government can hide anything is vastly overestimating their capabilities. They’re basically keystone cops with the demeanor of storm troopers. Play benny hill or imperial march over literally any declassified CIA document and at least one of them will fit.
existence of extraterrestrial life
Absolutely certain
and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Completely absurd.
The Fermi Paradox is only a paradox if you apply a ludicrously unjustified value to the last figure in the Drake equation.
Technological civilizations are very likely self-extinguishing simply because technological power grows faster than any evolved species capacity to apply that technology to the benefit of the species.
Only way out of that would be that bio life is just a bootstrap for machine life and machine life just isn’t that interested in interacting with biological life so we’ll never see or hear from it.
I think that we may simply be among the first civilisations to reach such a technologically advanced point. By the time a species gets tech that can destroy their civilisation, i reckon they would most likely have also made a broadcast of some sort, either through radio or light or whatever else.
Granted, there’s no real way to know any of this, us being the first is just what I reason is the most likely answer.
You have to account for the fact that, even if a civilization were to broadcast some sort of signal, it would take many millennia or eons for any signals to reach us. And even then, we would have to be advanced enough to be able to receive and interpret those signals at the same time they reach Earth.
There could very well be countless advanced civilizations whose signals just haven’t reached us yet, just as there may have been countless ones whose signals couldn’t be received or understood when they reached us, and they’ve died out or otherwise stopped transmitting before we could.
Keep in mind that the first radio broadcast on Earth was only 127 years ago. That means the farthest anyone could possibly detect any radio signal from earth is a mere 127 light years away.
Idk, this seems anthropocentric. Why would we be the first? I understand that there is some degree of truth to the universe being young, but that seems as likely as us being the only advanced life, which assumes that we are some special exception.
It seems more likely that other technologically advanced life may have gone intentionally dark (minimizing signals that may leave the solar system) for safety. It’s possible humans will do this some day, maybe after we detect alien life and determine it is dangerous. Or, they prioritized harmony and stewardship of their planet and stopped broadcasting (or never did) because that is incompatible with their life style.
I’m not saying we are the absolute first, as in there’s nobody else, I’m merely saying that we could be among the first civilisations ever to exist. To me, it seems a more plausible explanation than civs just going dark. As far as we know, there’s no way to take back a broadcast that has been travelling for centuries, so even if they no longer send anything, what they sent in the past should still be detectable, I think, unless it didn’t have enough time to travel here. In which case, the broadcast has been sent relatively recently (no more than a few millenia ago) or we are very far apart.
When you go to a party and you don’t see anyone else there, you don’t think “Everyone must be hiding”, you think “I must be first”, right?
Broadcast degrade, which wouldn’t mean much for already existing conqueror civilizations looking for anyone to invade, but does mean the signal isn’t entirely endless and we don’t broadcast with the strength to reach very far (what with our only needing to send them around our planet). Our historic signals may very well never make it to civilizations advanced enough to hear them just due to distance and the fact that space isn’t a perfect vacuum; signals degrade linearly as they are overwhelmed by the comparatively much more powerful background radiation. Digitally encoded signals like the ones we send now would be even harder to detect as the information would seem random.
Additionally, if we were to stop broadcasting then our broadcast would be effectively an expanding bubble with a ~130 light-year thick surface, so while it may reach a civilization and continue to reach them for 130 years, there is a chance it would reach them prior to technological advancement and it would pass by without detection. Of course in this case we assume that a new civilization would be hostile.
The party example doesn’t really work here because there is no start time to be on time or fashionably late/early to.
Fun conversation, this is the stuff I used to love reddit for 😊
All answers to the FP boil down to one of three Fs.
We’re first, we’re few, or we’re fucked.
you cant know that for sure from a sample size of 1.
sure, humans are doing it but thats all we can truly say.
I recognize that the universe is so vast that it’s likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that’s the extent of it.
I’ve seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don’t “believe” that they do.
Really, I don’t “believe” in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don’t even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It’s not a conscious choice or anything - it’s just appears that there’s a set of requirements that must be met before the position of “belief” is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of “believing” just isn’t triggered, and it’s not as if I can somehow force it, so that’s that.
As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it’s near certain that somebody would’ve blabbed something by now.
Beyond that though, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they’re that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don’t see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else’s interests. That’s our delusion - not theirs.
Statistically it is very unlikely that alien life doesn’t exist. It’s also extremely unlikely that we would ever find any unless we are entirely wrong about the nature of reality and physics.
The chances of extra terrestrial life to have visited earth is very, very small.
The chances of life to occur are small enough,
The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,
The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,
The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.
The universe is huge, there’s almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.
Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.
This is a valid reading of the Fermi paradox. But just for balance I’m going to devil’s advocate all over it.
The chances of life to occur are small enough,
Not known. At the moment the data set is one habitable planet = one occurrence of life, so the odds might be very high indeed, even approaching 1:1
The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,
They are smaller, but how much smaller is impossible to tell. What if extinction events are less frequent than they are here? What if 100% extinction events are as rare as they are here? What if intelligence is a natural point of evolution everywhere?
The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,
This one’s not true. The earth is relatively young at 4 billion years compared to 15 billion for the universe. A billion year headstart is completely plausible
The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.
Agreed that the earth’s position in the milky way is a bit of a galactic backwater. At 25000 light years from the centre, stars are more sparse here than they are at the centre. But our nearest star is 4ly away. We could have a probe there within half a century with our current technology if we wanted to. So I disagree on the “near impossible” part.
The universe is huge, there’s almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.
Can’t really argue with that. Until we see some evidence, ghosts and galactic visitors are in the ‘conspiracy nut’ bin. But it doesn’t mean life on other planets doesn’t exist. There are many theories why we wouldn’t have seen or met alien life if it does exist. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.
Hubble expansion isn’t a big factor at the galactic level. Galaxies are traveling away from other galaxies at relative speeds faster than light, but for stars within the galaxy, the scale is infinitely smaller and the expansion is so small it’s difficult to even measure.
There’s actually a fairly decent argument that life may have developed literally everywhere in space in the first few hundred million years of the universe, since yes it started insanely hot and compressed, but as it expanded there had to be a time period of up to a hundred million years or so, that everything outside of stars was at the proper temperature for water to be liquid. The end result being that you’ll find single cellular life existing literally anywhere it possibly can.
I have coined a theory I call “Galactic spring.” It’s that the emergence of intelligent life is a manifestation of and synchronized by some underlying phenomena - perhaps just the natural growth in informational complexity in a galaxy-wide entanglement network. Perhaps just a matter of sufficient amounts of the needed elements being available. The specific underlying mechanism isn’t that important, unless we have an understanding about the initial emergence of life to compare it to. But the theory is that there is a larger synchronizing factor.
Like spring, there are some species that may emerge early. But also like spring, the emergence of one heralds the emergence of others. Every other “the earth is the unique snowflake of the universe” theory has failed. We are simply emerging. The conditions are occurring that generate intelligent life, and there’s no strong reason to believe that our circumstance in that regard is unique.
Jeremy England proposed a while back that life is just an expression of entropy increase. Interestingly, if this could be verified (I don’t think it can) it would point to life being universally abundant.
That we’re not special is one of the
foundingfoundational principles of astrophysics, the Copernican Principle. It goes that we aren’t special, we don’t have a privileged viewpoint, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It does get applied in other fields of science in one form or another, since it’s more a way of thinking than a theory as such. Again, it’s not falsifiable but it does seem reasonable.Interesting, but i have to disagree with “and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction.”
Everywhere we look, we see asymmetry and variegation, along with instances of homogeneity and monoculture, as one thing wins out in a small domain.
So, yes, in some sense, same in all directions, but that “sameness” sure has a heck of a lot of play. And not being special, per se, doesn’t mean lack of uniqueness. Even cloned plants on the same shelf have differing viewpoints, though perhaps not “privileged”, unless one happens to be closer to a sunny window. But that happens.
I’ve also thought about life being an expression of entropy increase, but I can’t say I fully agree. There are aspects of that at play - somewhat more noticeable in thought and consciousness, and the efficiency of organizing thought - but I think that an assumption of universal entropy is just another local-phenomena-first issue. Although it applies in systems we isolate from the universe as a whole, the broad tendency for substance clumps (i.e., organization) and variegation is also universal.
I suppose that’s fair, since “looks the same in every direction” is a bit of an oversimplification. The principle is an assumption, rather, that we are not privileged observers, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It then follows that we should be very interested to understand why when it doesn’t.
I can’t agree with you that the assumption of universal entropy increase is at all unreasonable. The laws of thermodynamics appear to hold everywhere, therefore entropy must be increasing everywhere. England’s extrapolation to presume that life is an expression of this law might be tenuous, but the law is pretty much ironclad. That’s not to say that structure can’t arise; it clearly can because: hello. But the tendency of the universe as a closed system with a one directional arrow of time is heat death. That’s just a result of thermodynamics. Eventually.
What caused the initial imbalance, and what prevents it from happening again?
Nothing. It’s happening, and has always been. Anything that claims the universe as a whole is deteriorating is absolute bollocks, as it requires a creation myth, just as it postulates destruction.
If the universe is anything that we currently have theories for, the universe is a strange loop.
What caused the initial imbalance, and what prevents it from happening again?
Now you’re talking about some of the biggest unsolved problems in physics :)
I don’t know if it necessitates a creation myth, though. The big bang theory doesn’t imply a creator, but also doesn’t require a steady state.
What’s this about a strange loop? I don’t know if I’ve heard of this before.
I’m incredibly fascinated by the ghost comparison. Is the probability that ghosts are a real physical phenomenon higher or lower than the probability that aliens exist or have visited us? That’s an extremely interesting question, and I’m sure someone could do a statistical meta-analysis comparing the incidence of, say, UFO sightings with the incidence of paranormal experiences (if such an analysis doesn’t already exist). Both questions seem like the things that should be generally empirically falsifiable (and indeed, specific instances certainly are), but humanity’s curiosity about both has proven remarkably durable despite centuries of curiosity and myriad efforts to settle (negatively) both questions once and for all.
They’re both so near zero as to be hardly worth considering.
The thing to think about is the fact that, in either case, ghost or alien are in any way especially indicated by the evidence. People don’t see something strange and conclude aliens because they have good reason to believe from the evidence that something traveled vast distances across space, but rather they simply don’t have anything good to believe right now.
Having unusual evidence that doesn’t seem to point at the simple, mundane explanation isn’t the same as having evidence that does point at a supernatural or extraterrestrial explanation
I’m pretty much on board, though how much anyone can agree is a matter of relativity.
We know about the closest stars and the planets within them, and based off spectrometry, we’re confident the planets “close” to us haven’t had life, though they might be capable.
The chances of there being no mass extinction events in the millions of years following abiogenesis is arguably smaller than surviving the five or so we’ve had. Given everything we know about astrophysics, we owe the asteroids a few clean hits, we have been astronomically lucky, and that’s not even taking into consideration every other cause of mass extinction.
15 billion years is still considered early in the grand scheme of things, it’s likely that we are the early ones. A billion years head start is plausible, sure, but it’s certainly less plausible than our existence.
All of this is to say that life is rare enough without them being a stones throw away.
And this is all disregarding any possible intent behind a visit. Any being capable of space travel does not need our resources.
Unless they’re sex tourists, which would explain all the anal probing.
On second thought, I choose to believe.
Wouldnt have to do it faster, just first
Wait, what?
That’s like saying you don’t have to drive faster to win the race, you just have to cross the line first.
Maybe more like saying “you don’t have to be fastest to finish first if you get enough of a head start”?
Yupyup
I do I just wish they believed in me.
sigh
Can imagine the disillusionment aliens would feel having seen us from 10 light years away and constantly watching us as they approach until they get close enough for the data to be virtually current. I wouldnt wanna visit either. Probably be attacked on sight.
I believe there is extraterrestrial life, unless God exists. Then who knows?
I think UFOs have natural explainations, are mistakes or hoaxes, or are human technology.
I seriously doubt aliens have traveled here only to play peek-a-boo in the skies. I could sooner believe UFOs were interdimensional anomalies than aliens who traveled from another planet in the universe via space.
. I could sooner believe UFOs were interdimensional anomalies than aliens who traveled from another planet in the universe via space.
the gulf of space makes me think along these lines as well.
The potential existence of sentient life out there? Sure. Space is big.
Anything that’s ever interacted with us or is likely in a position to ever be able to do so? No. Space is big.
While I 100% believe that the universe is probably crawling with extraterrestrial life, I don’t think any of it has visited us here.
Any alien race who had the technology to travel across the galaxy would look at humanity the same way we look at an ant hill while we’re driving down the highway, we don’t even notice it.
Sure, there may be some alien scientists that want to study our planet the same way that our scientist want to study ants, but what are the chances they even know about us? And is there anything interesting enough about us to distinguish us from all the other ant hills?Is there other intelligent alien life in our Galaxy? Probably. Given how fast life formed on Earth, there must be millions of other life-bearing planets, and intelligence can’t be that rare, but it might be short-lived.
Are there UFO sightings? Yes, people do see unidentified flying objects. Some of them can be explained, some cannot.
Are the UFOs aliens? I don’t know, I’m a “curious agnostic” on the subject.
There’s a LOT of UFO sightings, and evidence from good observers, including US Navy aviators. The US Air Force continues not to cooperate, and officially denies any sightings exist. The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence, aside from Project Blue Book, is suspicious.
It’s technically plausible that someone within 50-ish light years of Earth could have heard our radio, sent a ship here, and use drones or manned ships to observe us without interacting. There could also be many other explanations.
We don’t know, and until the last couple years there was no effort to investigate.
The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence
That just makes me think the air force knows exactly what the UFO was because they were flying it.
With your last statemate that is not true there are records of the american government looking into this back into the sixties. Also researchers like Jacques Vallee have spent decades doing real investigation into the subject.
Governmental research. There was Project Blue Book, as I mentioned, which was inconclusive and then ended.
Inconclusive or a complete white wash like the recent AARO? And BTW those were both created by the DoD to investigate the DoD so idk what people where expecting. that’s only the public stuff we know about. according to multiple whistleblowers they have had programs looking into this for awhile including AATIP and UAPTF. Now I’m not saying these guys are telling the truth but one of them went in front of congress under oath and said this. Shouldn’t we look into it especially if tax payer money is being spent on this. Even when ignoring the alien part, this could be fraud on the highest level. And then there’s the whole aerial safety aspect
The probability that there are no aliens is very small, considering just how large the universe is. For the same reason we will probably not get to meet them though.
Yep. The universe is so vast that alien life most certainly exists, but simply due to the distance between them and us we’ll likely never detect it. The farther things are from us, the longer it takes for light to get to us. Something 100 light years away is just that, it takes a hundred years to get to us.
Humans have been around for an estimated 300,000 years, or 1.09575e+8 days. Here are a few things that would not have been believed possible by 99.9% of the population, including the most rational and logical thinkers, only 150 years ago (54,787 days).
- Microchips
- Nuclear weapons, and usable, controllable nuclear fusion/fission in general
- The Internet
- Electric cars
- Jet propulsion
- Smartphones
- Most fields of modern chemistry
- Most fields of physics
- etc.
Technological advancements happen at breakneck speed. One mans “you can’t break the speed of light” is another mans “you can’t fly, humans don’t have wings!”
But scientific advancements happen that change our perspective. It’s likely we’ll never break the light barrier, if it’s as solid as our understanding makes it seem. It’s less likely we’ll never find a way to sidestep that barrier by manipulating other forces. Let’s say we find a way to create a gravity well that encompasses a craft. The person in the craft doesn’t actually feel like they’re falling at infinite-G, they just happen to get from one place to another incredibly fast, passing through various states of matter unperturbed on their way. To us, it looks like they broke the speed of light. In reality, they weren’t actually “moving” in the way we think of movement, thereby not needing to break the speed of light.
These advancements happen all the time. If you brought a group of the top scientists from the 1850s to be here with us today, they would have have absolutely no idea what was going on and they would believe they’d gone insane. So many paradigm shifts have happened over the last 150 years that it would be impossible to make sense of it in their (remaining) lifetimes.
I don’t know if we’re being visited. If we are then it’s not likely they’re being of another race that came here in a ship. More likely they would be mechanical or biomechanical in nature, some sort of von Neumann probes self-creating and self-spreading reconnaissance craft for an ancient (dead?) race. Or maybe they tapped into another force we don’t even have a name or vague idea about yet, maybe a driving force behind consciousness.
But regardless, UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) is a legitimate field of study and I look forward to seeing it grow.
