Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Does Our Solar System Travel or Is It Stationary?: 9 Answers
Does Our Solar System Travel or Is It Stationary?: 9 Answers
Does Our Solar System Travel or Is It Stationary?: 9 Answers
Re-Ask
Follow23
Comment
Share8
Downvote
Silamparasan Gopal
Edit Bio Make Anonymous
9 Answers
There are a couple of answers to that because we are a moving body within a moving
body within a moving body.
If you look towards the constellation Hercules, below Vega is a spot called the Solar
apex. Our sun is moving in that direction at about 16.5 km/s within the local
neighborhood of stars.
But the Milky Way is also moving. It is moving in the direction we look when looking
at the constellation Hydra, at about 600 km/s.
In about 4 billion years, the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy.
Mathematically, the proof is in Kepler and Newton's equations. If the sun and other
stars were not revolving around the galaxy, they would have to be condensing into a
smaller and smaller galaxy as gravity did its job. Observation of Doppler shifting can
illustrate which is happening.
30,269 views 699 upvotes Written 20 Aug, 2013 Asked to answer by Ashish Gupta
Upvote699Downvote
Comments16+
Share5
Thus with no centre to reference, it is logical to conclude that we are not moving.
Ultimately we measure every objects velocity with respect to ourselves. For all
intensive purposes, we are stationary and everything else is moving.
923 views 1 upvote Written 4 Apr
Upvote1Downvote
Comment1
Share
Silamparasan Gopal
Edit Bio Make Anonymous
100+ Answers
Fortunately I have found a video that breaks down the Fermi Paradox into its
component concepts in simple, four-color splendor. If you like it support the
creators. It took them 200 hours to create it.
When you are done with this video, you will understand the basic premise for why
we suspect the Universe is quiet. Some of these ideas are positively terrifying to
conceive of.
The empty dead universe concept is even more terrifying to conceive of. An entire
universe with no life in it but us. And we are poised on the edge of nuclear war,
climate change, asteroid strike, plague, and run away capitalism. The universe may
be more screwed than it knows if its depending on US to fill it with new life.
The Drake Equation, as it has become known, was first presented by Drake in
1961 and identifies specific factors thought to play a role in the development of such
civilizations.
yet? Do they live in computers? Were they wiped out by an ancient super intelligence? Or
are we just to primitive to understand their motives? Whatever the answer is, it is
incredibly important for our own future.
REFERENCES:
Wikipedia: Fermi paradox
SETI Institute: The Drake Equation
Kurzgesagt Information Design
VIDEOS:
Kurz Gesagt - In a Nutshell: The Fermi Paradox video
Drake Equation Video: Published on Aug 9, 2013 - Animation explaining famous
Drake Equation with the voice of COSMOS editor Wilson da Silva.
The classic Fermi paradox makes for very interesting analysis. There are some very
compelling theories on why we haven't been visited by or been made aware of other
intelligent life forms out there if there are potentially over a 100 billion Earth-like
planets out there.
To understand these theories, there are certain concepts and theories one needs to be
familiar with. This is a longish answer, but bear with me while I get to it.
Types of Intelligent Civlizations
The first thing we need to understand is the Kardashev Scale. The Kardashev scale
measures the technological advancement of a civilization based on the amount of energy
it has at its disposal. There are three types of civilizations: Type 1, where a civilization is
technologically capable of using all the energy sources on its planet (Carl Sagan puts us
at 0.7, Michio Kaku says we might become Type 1 in about 200 years); Type 2, a
civilization with enough technology to harness energy from its system's host star; and
Type 3, a civilization capable of harnessing the power of its galaxy and thereby colonizing
the galaxy. All these Types are used broadly while talking about colonization in space
and the ability to terraform and mine other planets.
"The Unthinking Depths are the innermost zone, surrounding thegalactic core
(of the Milky Way). In it, only minimal forms of intelligence, biological or
otherwise, are possible. This means that any ship straying into the Depths will be
stranded, effectively permanently. Even if the crew did not die immediately--and
some forms of life native to "higher" Zones would likely do so--they would be
rendered incapable of even human intelligence, leaving them unable to operate their
ship in any meaningful way.
Surrounding the Depths is the Slow Zone. The Earth (called "Old Earth") is
located in this Zone, and humanity is said to have originated there, although Earth
plays no significant role in the story. Biological intelligence is possible in "the
Slowness", but not true, sentient, artificial intelligence. Faster-than-light
travel may not be initiated in the Slow Zone, i.e., one may "jump" into
the Slow Zone, but not back out. All ships which find themselves in the
Slow Zone are restricted to sub-light speeds. Faster-than-light
communicationis impossible into or out of the Slow Zone. As the
boundaries of the Zones are unknown and subject to change, accidental entry to the
Slow Zone is a major interstellar navigational hazard at the "Bottom" of the Beyond.
Starships which operate near the Beyond/Slow Zone border often have an
auxiliary Bussard ramjet drive, so that, if they accidentally stray into the Slow Zone
thus disabling any FTL (faster than light) drive, they will at least have a backup
(sub-light) drive to push them back 'up' to the Beyond. Such ships also tend to
include "coldsleep" equipment, as it is likely that any such return will still take many
subjective lifetimes for most species.
The next outermost layer is the Beyond, within which artificial intelligence,
faster-than-light travel and faster-than-light communication, and antigravity are
possible. A few human civilizations exist in the Beyond, all descended from a single
ethnic Norwegian group which managed to travel from the Slow Zone to the Beyond
(presumably at sub-light speeds) and thence spread using FTL travel. The original
settlement of this group is known as Nyjora; other human settlements in the Beyond
include Straumli Realm and Sjandra Kei. In the Beyond, FTL travel is accomplished
by making many small "jumps" across intervening space, and the efficiency of
the drive increases the farther a ship travels from the galactic core. This
reflects increases in both drive efficiency and the ship's automation's
increased capacity as one moves outward, enabling the computation of
longer and longer jumps. The Beyond is not a homogeneous zone -- many
references are made to, e.g., the 'High Beyond' or the 'Bottom of the Beyond',
depending on distance to the galactic core. These terms seem to refer to differences
in the Zone itself, not just relative distance from the Core, but there are no obvious
Zone boundaries within the Beyond the way there are between the Slow Zone and
the Beyond, or between the Beyond and the Transcend. Whereas a ship that crosses
from the Beyond to the Slow Zone or vice versa will experience a dramatic change in
its capabilities, a ship in the Beyond which moves farther from the Core will
experience a gradual increase in efficiency (assuming it has the technology to make
use of it) until another major shift at the boundary to the Transcend. The Beyond is
populated by a very large number of interstellar and intergalactic civilizations which
are linked by a faster-than-light communication network, "the Net," sometimes
cynically called the "Net of a Million Lies". The Net does connect with the
Transcend, on the off-chance that one of the "Powers" that live there deigns to
communicate, but has no connections with the Slow Zone, as FTL communication is
impossible into or out of that Zone. In the novel, the Net is depicted as working
much like the Usenet network in the early 1990s, with transcripts of messages
containing header and footer information as one would find in such forums.
The outermost layer, containing the galactic halo, is the Transcend, within
which incomprehensible, superintelligent beings dwell. When a "Beyonder"
civilization reaches the point of technological singularity, it is said to "Transcend,"
becoming a "Power." Such Powers always seem to relocate to the Transcend,
seemingly necessarily, where they become engaged in affairs which remain entirely
mysterious to those that remain in the Beyond."
So simply put, if our earth is in the slow zone, beings from other stars
which are in other zones where faster than light travel is possible don't
dare come to visit us because they would then be stuck in a zone where
faster than the speed of light travel is impossible and they couldn't live
long enough to get back to zones where their faster than light drives would
work and thus be able to return from where they came. In other words we are
isolated from other higher intelligence societies because we can't get to them with our
speed of light limits and they don't dare come into our zone because they wouldn't be
able to get back to where their faster than light drives successfully function. Same goes
for electronic communications so they (higher zone inhabitants) cannot communicate
with us and we can't with them because of the same limits speed of light limits of the
"slow zone".
In Vernor Vinge's sequel to "A Fire Upon the Deep". . . . "A Deepness In the Sky", events
are set in motion which disturbs the stability of those Zone boundaries and they become
very unstable, shifting millions of miles in seconds, randomly, so that faster than light
ships near the border of the slow zone were at risk of being marooned if the boundary of
the slow zone shifts outward enough to put a such a ship in the slow zone and make their
faster than light engines unusable (and taking more than a lifetime to get back out of the
slow zone using sub-speed-of-light technology). Both of these SF novels are well worth
the read!
If Moore's law continues for another 60 years and Moravic's estimation of the
computational resources required for human brain simulation hold up, then by 2080 a
1000 USD desktop computer will be able to simulate 6 billion human minds in real time.
http://www.singularity.com/chart...
Kurzweil estimates this threshold to be passed by 2050, but I am being very conservative
and saying 2080; although the recent data points suggest we may achieve this by 2040.
If an alien civilization could simulate a whole human scale human civilization in real
time on a 1000 USD CPU, it is unlikely that they would have any interest in
communicating with us. Especially if round trip communication time was several
centuries.
Other civilizations either lack the resource and technology necessary for communication,
or if they had the technology they would be as interested in communicating with us as we
are interested in communicating with ants.
Assuming intelligent life like our own is out there and can get here, there's the problem
of communication. There's no point in announcing their existence far and wide as
popular imagination expects. There must be some contact protocol.
Aliens must study us to understand how our minds and societies work. They must
develop some types of intermediaries that can translate from one civilization to another.
The popular abduction stories fit this idea. Intermediaries could be made by breeding
humans with more familiar life forms, like the big eyed grays. There could be layers of
intermediaries. Some may be mostly human, live among humans, not know they're
hybrids. Some may know. Some may live among the aliens.
UFO folklore aside, the translation problems are significant. Aliens would need special
purpose built minds to do it thoroughly. There are some comparisons to current machine
translation between human languages that I think are misleading. This translation relies
on different cultures thinking about the same topics in a similar way and generating
volumes of text where the main difference is language. Aliens wouldn't have this luxury,
which makes the idea of intermediary populations more plausible.
We have the same problem with animals - When can humans have inter-species
dialogue with dolphins? While we can establish basic communication with apes and
dolphins, it's not very useful. Similarly, aliens could establish basic communication with
Robert Walker, Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of
Tune Smit...
Robert has 50+ answers in Extraterrestrial Life.
Many ETs are non technological. Like parrots or elephants, or dogs just not
physically easily capable of making complex things however much they want to. Or
live in sub surface oceans like Europa - if they live in the sea that also makes them
likely to be non technological e.g. can't use fire easily. And may not know that the
rest of the universe exists. Such an ET could even live in our solar system. We could
have ETIs in the subsurface oceans of Europa, Ganymede, Titan and Encladus and if
they were non technological we'd have no idea at all that they exist, and they
wouldn't know that we exist. Given how many more icy moons there are than
habitable planets in our solar system - these may well be the most common types of
ETI in the galaxy.
2.
The ones that are technological are either short sighted in which case they destroy
themselves early on or at least their technology and don't remain technological for
long. Or if long sighted - then they think carefully before colonizing the galaxy.
Reason is - that if you colonize the galaxy - what are your colonies going to turn into?
What creatures or machines will your descendants ten or a hundred generations
down the line unleash onto the galaxy?
Especially bearing in mind that amongst billions of colonies separated by light speed
barriers - some may "de-evolve" biologically or socially. May become beings of only
baby like levels of understanding for instance, but with machines giving them
enormous powers. Others may develop obscure ideas and aims that are baffling to
everyone else, strange social or antisocial objectives, or may make huge
technological or biological blunders. Which with galaxy shaping power, e.g. to
unleash self replicating technology could literally trash the galaxy.
I think that a cautious ETI would give that considcrable thought and probably
wouldn't start to colonize the galaxy until they had worked it through to their
satisfaction.
3.
By the time they have the capability to colonize - and also have developed to the
point where socially they are able to colonize a galaxy without trashing it - confident
that it will be in safe hands in their descendants even ten or a hundred or even a
million generations away (and with long lives they may still be alive to see their
hundred times removed grandchildren) - then they may have very different ideas
about it than we do.
Would they even want to colonize? If they do, maybe their technology is so advanced
that we can hardly recognize it as technology at all? Maybe what they use is so unlike
what we currently call technology that it is more like magic for us? Probably they
wouldn't swarm through the galaxy and fill every single planet and star system with
their species, as humans surely would at our present stage of social development.
Maybe they feel no hurry to fill the galaxy, if at all, and maybe the nearest colony is a
thousand light years away (still very close on galactic scale). And maybe many ETIs
simply don't want to colonize at all. But are rather - a bit like the ETs in ET the
movie - they explore, visit places, sometimes take samples back with them - but leave
things as they are. Our galaxy could be filled with millions of explorers like that, and
if they aren't bent on colonizing it and filling it with their species, the chance that
any will encounter Earth in the near future is probably tiny. Maybe our last visit, if
we had one at all, was a hundred million years ago, and maybe due another visit
some time in the next hundred million years. And if they do visit, then we'd only
notice them if they wanted us to.
And - I totally don't believe at all in crashing ETI spaceships. Their technology has to
be millions of years old, otherwise astonishing coincidence that they arise just at the
same time as us. Their spacecraft wouldn't crash. And for that matter, they would be
very unlike...
(more)
Upvote34 Downvote
Comments5+
Share56
I think this is a pretty cool question. An unfortunately pessimistic view of the world in
the article, but overall a cool question.
So why haven't we met aliens?
we have but the government is covering it up (for their own benefit or for our
protection)
we're more advanced than they are and we have to find them
The "they don't exist" option is actually the most though provoking in my opinion.
Because the next natural question is why not?
Is it because there is some filter early in the progression of intelligent life that
wipes it out? Basically is it nearly impossible for life to evolve beyond some lower,
less evolved life (unicellular life, bacteria, small organisms)? This would actually be
great for us because this would mean that humanity and Earth have already
managed to make it through this filter. So let's hope we find lots of places with
microbial life at the least.
James Earl Adams III, Bachelor of Science in biology, pathology analyst and laboratory
technician.
Here is a near exhaustive list of the possibilities. The reality of the situation may be any
one or any combination of these.
"Preposterous!" You object, "There are innumerable planets, and so many billions of
years have passed. The odds that life has had more than one genesis are so large -- you
might even say astronomically large."
Yes, but if there is only a finite number of planets then the probability of life having a
second genesis will still be less than 1.0. Furthermore, modern biochemistry hasn't even
the dumbest clue how hard it is for life to get started or how hard it is for it to survive
once it has. So if we assume that it is astronomically unlikely for life to begin or to
survive, this balances out the astronomically large number of opportunities for it to
have.
We may be the only ones here.
There is the notion of the Great Filter. Perhaps life is abundant but rarely advances
beyond a certain stage. This could be due to that stage being particularly hard to evolve
beyond or due to the likelihood of a mass extinction happening in the time it would take
to evolve beyond that stage.
Perhaps it's very rare to evolve beyond unicellular life or to develop much intelligence or
to sustain a space faring society. If getting beyond these stages was not hard enough,
there are many existential threats that could wipe life out at any stage of development:
geothermal cataclysms, celestial impact, green house effects, star death, gamma ray
bursts, nuclear or biological warfare.
Space is very large, so maybe the aliens that exist have not had enough time to see us.
Our radio waves have traversed a couple hundred light years. It will be another 120,000
years before they have reached all of the milky way -- nevermind other galaxies. So
unless aliens are either very near to us or using telescopes so powerful that they can see
early hominids in detail, they will have no way to know of our existence.
Perhaps they are very near to us and have seen evidence of our existence, but have found
faster-than-light travel to be an intractable problem. If this is the case, it would still take
them hundreds of years to get to us depending on how far they are and how long their
embarkation was after our first broadcast. If they are very near to us in technological
advancement, they may not even have the means of getting here.
There are many reasons why this might be the case. Their culture, politics or behavioral
dispositions may inform this decision, but it's most likely that they are so far beyond us
technologically as to leave little incentive for them to bother with us as we have nothing
to offer them. People frequently underestimate how high the technological ceiling sits.
See my answer and commentary on this possibility.
Ants are no strangers to our kitchen counters; they may know the layout and nuances
better than we do. However, they probably don't attribute the stoneware to the design of
higher agents such as ourselves. Like the eclipses we cast and our smelly earthquakes,
they may not be able to distinguish the workings of man from nature itself.
So mayn't we be similarly blind? Who's to say that we could recognize alien intelligence
and technology if we saw it? At the very least, their probes may have drifted unnoticed
under our noses. At the very most, their workings may be infused into our very reality -if they are especially advanced.
91,813 views 2,651 upvotes Written 31 May Asked to answer by Tanvi Jain
Upvote2.6k Downvote
Comments40+
Share25
Zachary Demko
Here is my list of reasons, in order of increasing likelihood, according to my personal
opinion. I hope I am wrong.
1) Life is just really unlikely, and we happen to be the only ones out there.
2) Life is relatively common, but intelligent life is not.
3) The Star Trek principle: aliens are all over, but they all agree not to contact us until we
invent warp drive.
4) Alien civilizations are relatively common, but the amount of energy it takes to travel or
even to contact neighboring civilizations is prohibitive, and worm holes / warp drive /
teleportation is not possible in this universe.
5) Intelligence life is inherently self-limiting, and does not stay in existence long enough
to contact other civilizations. Let me explain my hypothesis a bit better.
Part I: Think about evolution when new ecological niches open up, species with a
broad distribution of traits are favored to fill that niche, as they can adapt quickly. As a
species beings to acquire intelligence, those groups who are more diverse will adapt and
evolve more quickly, leading the species in the direction of intelligence. Thus any
species that acquires intelligence will necessarily be fast adapting, and therefore have a
wide diversity of traits.
Part II: As the species becomes more intelligent, each member gains more and more
power to effect change, and that includes destructive power. Think about humans fifty
millennia ago, a determined human could pick up a rock and kill another human or two
before getting clobbered by the rest. One millennium ago, a determined human could
pick up a sword and kill maybe a dozen people. Fifty years ago, a determined human
could pick up a gun and kill several dozen people. Now, using bombs, chemicals, viruses,
etc. an intelligent but determined person could kill hundreds of people. As technology
advances, the ability for one lunatic to kill others will increase, and the increase will be
exponential. In a hundred years, individual humans may have pocket nukes, be able to
engineer horribly destructive viruses in his/her basement, etc. Its only a matter of time
until individual humans will have the power to eliminate the entire species.
And given the diversity of humans, and mental states, we are guaranteed that eventually,
the right set of traits will occur in the same human psychosis + genius + ample
technology, that one will wipe out the entire species. And this pattern is inherent to the
evolution of intelligent life, then it may be the case that no species can advance
sufficiently to effect interstellar travel before they extinguish themselves.
This is a very interesting question, because if you follow a few reasonably logical steps,
they imply that the universe should be suffused with intelligent life.
Consider:
There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy (and roughly another 100 billion
galaxies outside ours). We already know through astronomical observation that our
sun isnt that remarkable, and planets are also common. So even if only 1 in a
million solar systems evolve intelligent life, there should be 100,000 such systems in
our galaxy.
The universe is about 13 billion years old. Suppose life requires heavy elements to
evolve. There should be plenty such elements after the first generation of stars (say,
8 billion years ago). So many of these civilizations should be over a billion years old.
If we extrapolate our own technological progress, we should be able to build robot
spacecraft capable of replicating themselves with matter they find while they
explore. So our civilization will be a sphere expanding at some fraction of the speed
of light. Even though interstellar distances are long, the timescales were talking
about are even longer. The galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. Even
conventional rockets would cross this space in a few hundred million years.
All intelligent civilizations blow themselves up at some point. We just cant adapt
our tooth and claw evolutionary programming to high tech capabilities.
Were living in a simulation, and there are no aliens in this simulation.
Aliens are all around us, but theyve chosen not to reveal themselves (aka the zoo
hypothesis).
Personally, I think one of the three possibilities above is more likely than they havent
found us or were the only ones out here.
For the sake of a thought experiment, let's assume there is one or more technologically
advanced spacefaring civilisation capable of interstellar travel at near-luminal speeds in
our "backyard" (they don't have to have the same lifespans as us, right? so spending 10
terrestrial years in space may not be a big deal for them).
If the Solar System is located within a neutral zone or "terra (?) nullius" where none of
the spacefaring civilisations is supposed to go, the answer is clear: coming here means
asking for trouble, and the humanity has nothing to do with it. For comparison, imagine
If someone advanced indeed exists in our backyard, they must be wise enough to set up
Peter Flom, Independent statistical consultant for researchers in social, medical and
beh...
The best theory, I think, is that space is too big and the speed of light really is a limit.
Others:
There are no aliens
There are aliens, but they are not capable of space flight
There are aliens who are capable of space flight, but aren't interested in us.
There are aliens who are capable of faster than light space flight, but they have us on a
watch list and if we don't get civilized before we get FTL flight, they will exterminate us
There are aliens with FTL flight but they are so different from us that they don't even
regard us as life. Or, perhaps, they regard us as life but not anything interesting.
Share1
Fermi paradox
The theories are many. My favorite is the simplest. Space is really big and travel takes too
long. It could easily be that the universe is packed full of isolated species that never
manage to visit each other (possibly because they are too busy bombing themselves to
little pieces.)
5,612 views 44 upvotes Written 26 Nov, 2014 Asked to answer by Ivy Lee
Upvote44 Downvote
Comments2
Share
Ankit Jain
One theory argued by Steven Pinker (or may be Richards Dawkins, I can't recollect) in
one of the books is very insightful and eye opening. The whole idea that there must be
aliens out there in the space who must be colonizing space and seeking to meet other
intelligent life forms assumes that intelligent life is a natural extension of life. That's not
true.
Intelligent life is far, far less probable than life itself. Intelligent life forms wanting to
colonize space in turn is far less probable than mere existence of intelligent life.
Evolution doesn't systematically work towards making ever wiser intelligent life forms; it
just makes life forms more suited to survival in their immediate habitat.
Consider the history of earth. Life has existed on earth for close to 4 billion years. The
primate order containing species with higher intelligence (monkeys, gorillas,
chimpanzees, humans etc) have existed for only 50 million years or about 1% of age of
life on earth. The modern human beings have only existed for about 200,000 years.
That's 0.005% of age of life on earth. Even the most intelligent life form has spent most
of its time in wilderness with comolex civilization appearing only about 5,000 years ago.
That's 0.0001% of age of life on earth. And even the idea that humans must colonize
space (let alone executing it) is less than 200 years old or 0.0000005% of age of life.
Now, there are an immense number of failures points in that story. If 65 million years
ago that fateful meteorite had not struck the earth, giant dinosaurs would have been
roaming on earth still and primates wouldn't have had the opportunity to evolve at all.
And 65 million years ago life was just as vibrant and rich on the planet as it is today; they
were not missing us on the planet.
The whole idea that nature must have worked hard to evolve intelligent beings like us
and that we are the culmination of evolution is terribly conceited and parochial. Even if
there is life somewhere else in the universe, there is close to zero chance that it will
include intelligent life form. And even if it did, there is close to zero chance that it will
coincide in time with us.
A staple of nearly all science fiction is that the speed of light is just a technical
inconvenience; some day, sooner or later, we'll figure out how to beat it.
The laws of physics, however, strongly suggest that it is absolute and immutable--woven
into the fabric of the universe on such a fundamental level that nothing and nobody will
ever travel or send information faster than light, period, no exceptions. If this is true,
that alone would go far toward explaining why we haven't been visited by aliens. The
universe is a big place and it takes a long, long, long time to get around in it, no matter
how advanced your technology.
That doesn't mean we can't ever be aware that aliens exist. We might, for example,
observe their radio signals, or see examples of huge macroscale engineering projects like
Dyson spheres.
The question of why we haven't observed incidental evidence of alien sapience is called
the Fermi paradox. The three solutions proposed thus far are "we're first," "we're rare,"
or "we're fucked." We're first means that we are the first sapient, language and metatoolusing organisms to have arisen in the Milky Way. This might be because life is less
common than we think, or (more likely) life is common but sapient life is not. "We're
rare" is that there is other sapient life, but sapient life is so incredibly uncommon that it
tends not to overlap--that is, entire sapient civilizations might have flourished and then
faded during the age of the dinosaurs. "We're fucked" is the idea that sapient, language
and metatool-using organisms don't last long.
I've written about the Fermi paradox here:
Musings on being fucked: Christian millennialism and the Fermi paradox
Eric Scher
Originally Answered: Why haven't we met any aliens?
You should consider something that everyone knows is possible but nobody thinks
about.
This is a long story. Settle in.
First, some background:
People think that Universe is old, but it's not. The Era of Stars, that period of time in
which stars and planets exist and therefor life, is thought to be about 100 Trillion years.
Our universe is, according to the best current estimates I can find, about 13.75 Billion
years old. That's about 1.3 ten-thousandths of our total lifespan, making our universe
insanely young. In human terms, if we assume an average human lifespan of 75 years,
we're so young (less than 4 days) that our poop doesn't even stink yet.
Most Stars can't make anything higher on the periodic table than iron. Why? Because
what holds a star in balance is that the inward pressure of gravity is balanced by the
outward pressure of nuclear fusion energy. Why does Nuclear fusion produce energy?
Because usually, when you mash two atoms together to make a new, heavier atom, there
are parts left over. That's the energy that makes an H-Bomb work and keeps a Star
going. But when you make iron, there aren't any parts left over. No leftovers = no
energy. That's a bit of an oversimplification, Has anyobut it's basically true. Unless you
have a really heavy Star and it collapses with enough force to "bounce", which not only
creates heavier elements, it pukes them out into the universe where they become part of
new stars.
How much of these heavier elements a Star has is called it's "Metallicity" and long story
short, complex life like ours requires a whole bunch of these heavier elements.
So, the Universe forms, then spends time developing enough metallicity to create
complex life. This happens faster the closer you are to the galactic core, but the galactic
core is a bad neighborhood, with all kinds of bad things happening that can kill you. So,
too far in and you get cooked by a nearby pulsar or something. Too far out and there
isn't enough metallicity. So there is a ring, actually more of a donut, in every galaxy like
ours, in which complex life can evolve. Plus, there is a similar donut shaped habitable
zone in each solar system in which the temperature is right for liquid water.
OK, so you have a planet that is in your solar system's habitable zone, and your Sun is in
the Galactic habitable zone.
So now you have life. But wait... most life here on Earth and likely out in the universe as
well, is simple one cell organisms. You know, slime mold.
It takes a long time from THAT point until you evolve intelligent organism that can
manipulate tools, which is fancy way of saying that they figured out how to bang the
rocks together properly. It took a couple of billion years.
All of this is a VERY long and roundabout way of saying that it takes a long damn time
for life to even evolve to the point where it COULD create a technological civilization.
Which brings me to my point...
How do we know that WE aren't the "Ancients", that are such a common plot device in
science fiction?
Maybe we haven't seen aliens because so far we're the only ones who have reached this
point?
Thomas Jolly, Astronautical Engr., Electrical Engineer, Game and Puzzle Designer
likely be millions of years apart from us technologically. A universe like Star Trek seems
very unlikely where most species are at the same level. With few exceptions (Q) every
race seems within hundreds of years of each other. Maybe interstellar trade could
accomplish that.
Anyway my point is there are so many reasons that we can understand, just think of how
many might be beyond our understanding.
I do think it is an interesting line of thinking and I particularly like reading scifi that
explores this topic. David Brin has some good ones.
Edit: another one I like. Think of the time scale of evolution. Maybe they came by
millions of years ago and setup a monitoring station. We have only recently achieved
intelligence (by our standards at least) so maybe the signal went out and they will get
around to visiting in some thousands of years. Or maybe the sensor is waiting to detect
some level of technology - nuclear, warp drive, teleportation, anti gravity, etc before
notifying the owners.
565 views 5 upvotes Written 28 Dec, 2014 Asked to answer by Ivy Lee
Upvote5 Downvote
Comment
Share
James G Smith
Originally Answered: Why haven't we met any aliens?
I would like to call my theory the "We are the spark" theory, as opposed to the obvious
but less romantic alternative. I suggest that our galaxy is like a pile of oily rags in a
garage. If left undisturbed over a sufficient period of time, the chances of spontaneous
combustion is fairly high. However, once combustion has begun, the chances of the
spontaneous spark happening somewhere else in the pile before the flame of the first
spark consumes the whole pile is, um, remote. I think that to a technological society, as
soon as they can get themselves off their starting planet, the galaxy starts to look like a
whole lot of natural resources. We, I hope, are the first spark. If we can avoid
catastrophe for the next fifty to one hundred years ( and I see no reason to be pessimistic
about this) I think we will be fairly safe.
The observations which support this theory include the fact that single-celled life
appeared on Earth almost as soon as it was physically possible, but multi-celled life did
not appear until billions of years after that. What is the half-life, if that is an appropriate
term, of that step? Then there are the various evolutionary steps needed to get to an
intelligent land animal? For the sake of argument I will assume that intelligent sea
creatures are unlikely to become technological. How long were there large land animals
running around on earth without any of them evolving into intelligent tech users. The
dinosaurs apparently had their chance but didn't get there before time ran out. The
point is, I believe the "half-life" of producing a technological society is very long relative
to the time it takes for a newly produced technological society to consume the galaxy.
As for reasons to believe the time to consume the galaxy will be relatively short (one
hundred million years or less), I point to the works of K. Eric Drexler and Ray Kurzweil,
i.e., nano tech and the singularity, for the technical means, and to the entreprenurial
spirit of Western, and now more and more Eastern culture, for the motivation.
Upvote7 Downvote
Comment1
Share
1.
2.
Aliens do exist, but they have not yet evolved the ability to communicate.
3.
None are located close enough to Earth to engage in communications with us.
4.
5.
They are trying to communicated with us, but we aren't technologically advanced
with us to detect their method of communication.
6.
7.
8.
They are waiting for us to become more advanced before communicating with us.
9.
10.
As you probably know, if you flip a coin often enough, you will get heads ninety times in
a row. So why hasn't this happened to you yet? Why hasn't this happened to anyone, ever
(as far as we know)? Because we're so young as a species. The odds of it happening in our
brief flicker of Evolutionary history are astronomically stacked against us. If everyone
starts flipping coins and the human race survives long enough, eventually someone will
throw ninety heads, but it would be foolish or hubristic to think it's going to happen to
you or even in your lifetime.
The universe is almost 14-billion years old. Humans have only seriously been searching
for aliens since 1977 (when SETI started), so compare 35 years to 14-billion years! Even
if you expect aliens to contact us without us having to listen for them, compare 14 billion
years with 200,000 years (Homo Sapiens Sapiens first appeared about 200,000 years
ago).
If each one of these dots represents a billion years, the universe is this old:
..............
Now, imagine that last dot blown way up:
.............[**********]
That closeup view shows that the dot is made out of ten asterisks, each one equal to 100
million years. And if we blow up just one of those asterisks...
*********['''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''']
... we find that it's made up of a hundred tick-marks, each equal to a million years. And if
we blow up the tick mark...
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
'''''''''''''[##########]
... we find it's made up of ten pound-signs, each equal to 100,000 years.
Two of those (# #) is the entire history of human kind. (And if you only count likely alien
contact from the beginning of SETI, you have to chop one of those pound signs into tiny
bits and focus on just one bit.)
And, remember, the universe (even the galaxy) is a big place.
If the Earth is this:
o
And the moon is this
.
And the moon is this far away from the Earth
o.
How far away do you think the Sun is? (The sun is this: *)
A. o . ----------> *
B. o . --------------------------> *
C. o . ---------------------------------------------------> *
D. o . ----------------------------------------------------------------> *
E. None of the above.
The correct answer is E. The Sun is 92,935,700 miles from the Earth. My screen
resolution is about 2,000 pixels wide, so to simulate the distance between the Earth and
the Sun (and aliens will be much further away than that), I'd have to place several
screens next to each other, with the Earth on the first screen and the Sun on the last one.
(Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, is 2.47927106 10^13 miles away.)
Aliens and humans finding each other is a needle-in-a-haystack project. And we've only
been had a teeny, tiny amount of time to do it.
Hoping it will happen in your lifetime is natural. Expecting it to happen in your lifetime
is a confusion at best and hubristic at worst.
The oldest man-made electromagnetic signals left Earth a bit more than 100 years ago
with the invention of radio. Those signals, the only way we have of announcing our
existence, have now crossed .001% of the galaxy. The other 99.999% of the galaxy has
NO IDEA that we exist. We are just 1 of hundreds of billions of planets and there is no
reason for a civilization outside that 100 light year bubble to pay any more attention to
us than to any of those gadzillion other planets.
But it gets worse. For a civilization to have come calling, they can't be any more than 50
light years away (50 years for our oldest signals to reach them, 50 more for them to
travel here at the speed of light. Assuming they could do that, and that they dropped
everything to plan the trip the moment they detected our earliest transmissions).
Realistically, for us to have had visitors, they would have to live within just a few light
years of earth. Not impossible, but vanishingly unlikely.
because the latter again assumes that all civilizations are incapable of coping with the
pressures of technological advancement.
I realize people may not like this answer, but the way I see it, if intelligent life really is
cosmically rare, that just challenges our scientists and engineers more than ever to
devise the most creative means to find it.
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been
aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed
out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting
on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in
G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be
if one were all alone ..."
I don't know but I feel more excited and scared that there are smarter beings out there
unknown to us than just empty dark space.
visited by them in the future. We could be surrounded by aliens right now. It's just that
we might not even know about their presence. We don't have any knowledge about their
powers, technology, motives etc.
2. No visits, but close monitoring: It's possible that we are being closely monitored
by extraterrestrials, and we're not aware of that. They might not want to 'visit' us, but
instead monitor us, in order to learn more about us without causing a panic among
Earthians. Imagine a situation wherein the world knows, as a matter of fact, about the
existence of aliens on Earth. Imagine the level of curiosity, panic, unnecessary tension,
chaos, and the fights between Governments that will follow.
3. The size factor: This Universe is gigantic. We cannot possibly imagine its extent and
magnificence. The Earth is only like a mote of dust. What if I told you to go and visit a
carbon atom? How would you even do that? Huge planets could probably be home to
extremely huge life forms.
4. We're just stupid little creatures for them: Aliens wouldn't be interested in us
at all because we're so unsophisticated for them - like ants. Do we even bother to worry
about ants? They don't influence our lives in any significant way, and we don't usually
bother about whether or not we should make ants aware of our presence.
5. Search for extraterrestrial "intelligence": We usually think of aliens as
creatures more advanced than us. We are not interested in those extraterrestrials who
are less advanced, right? Then why would they be? The extraterrestrials who we are
expecting to be interested in us, might actually be searching for more advanced
extraterrestrials themselves.
6. They could be invisible: For those who believe in ghosts, angels, spirits - They
could all be extraterrestrials, you know? Who just visit Earth sometimes.
To be able to communicate with an alien life forms, you must be at most (and I'm
guessing from homo sapiens evolution here) 100,000 years apart in terms of civilization
and technological advancement. A civilization a million years older won't bother to
explain themselves to us as much as we won't bother to explain ourselves to a colony of
ants. In the perspective of 14 billion years old universe, two civilizations only 100,000
years apart are almost a "twin". They must evolve during a terrifyingly precise time and
evolve in an extraordinarily similar speed. What is the probability of such coincidence to
happen? My guess, really really small.
Bob Singer, NASA Project Manager and Space Enthusiast for over 50 years
Originally Answered: What are the ten most plausible reasons explaining why we haven't interacted
with aliens yet?
Share
David Plumpton
Originally Answered: Why haven't we met any aliens?
Why does nobody choose the obvious boring answer? Interstellar travel is really hard. It
takes enormous energy and large amounts of time. It's likely just too hard, even for very
advanced civilizations. Even if it can be achieved it throws the cost/benefit ratio too far
out of whack.
Fred Straub
Originally Answered: Why haven't we met any aliens?
Let's go with some givens... there are enough suns out there with enough planets out
there that some have to be enough like ours that life must exist. If even a tiny fraction of
a fraction of them produce intelligent life then somewhere out there exists life that can
travel through space. However, interstellar space travel would likely cost much of a
planet's GDP. If travelling through space takes enormous time and resources are you
going to go in a direction that you KNOW someone is or in a direction you don't know
someone is? Since we haven't managed to contact another civilization by any means at
all the answer is simple. We haven't met aliens yet because it's too damned expensive to
flit around the universe to "seek out new civilizations and boldly go where no man has
gone before."
Until we invite someone they ain't comin'. And we don't know how to send invitations.
The likelihood of being discovered by accident is infinitesimal.
Upvote4 Downvote
Comment
Share
1,121 views 3 upvotes Written 3 Dec, 2014 Asked to answer by Ivy Lee
Upvote3 Downvote
Comment
Share
Brett Andrew
Originally Answered: Why haven't we met any aliens?
I think the most likely answer is that serious intelligence is a biological rarity (it took
billions of years for it to arise on Earth as far as we know), and there are a variety of
potential filters that ensure that space-faring and/or radio-using civilizations are very
few and far between. For example,
1.
2.
Suppose your species is land-dwelling. That's no guarantee that they'll ever form
settled communities with advancing technology. Look at humanity - anatomically
modern humans lived as hunter-gatherer groups for hundreds of thousands of years
before the rise of agriculture.
3.
Even assuming that your civilization does develop sedentary communities with
technological advance, there's no guarantee that they won't move towards some sort
of "steady-state", static civilization before the rise of space travel and radio.
4.
For a species that gets past those filters, there's still the "would they want to?"
question. Humanity, for example, has the technological potential to expand beyond
Earth in a major way, but there's no will to do it, so the technology lies mostly in the
bounds of speculation.
What time and technological advancement does one civilization requires to work at
multiverse level?
May be they do not need spaceships to travel, they have developed the technology to
travel and communicate, simply by creating a thought or by the their process of thinking,
the speed of thoughts doesn't have any limit. Speed of light appears to be very small
when compared to the speed of thought.
They do not need a base on the moon for that to happen.
They do not need radio-waves or electro magnetic waves to communicate, they simply
communicate with help of their advanced minds, which is so powerful that they could
control lesser beings easily.
I think this could be the reason why they do not openly declare their
existence as it could create panic and hysteria amongst the masses.
We earthlings do not value life. When we do, these extra-terrestrials would share with us
everything they know.
Scott Hathaway
Originally Answered: Why haven't we met any aliens?
Share
334 views 2 upvotes Written 27 Dec, 2014 Asked to answer by Ivy Lee
Upvote2 Downvote
Comment
Share
I saw a quantum physics documentary and can give a woefully simplified version of one
of its theories:
It said that if, in the future, we could develop a simulation that was indistinguishable
from our reality - which it theorised was highly probable, then it was almost a certainty
that this is a simulation.
I have worked in the games industry for many years and all I can say is that if this is
indeed a simulation and there are no aliens then somewhere (somewhen??) there is a
game designer who really should lose her or his job!
It's a fascinating question. I favour the rather depressing theory that civilisations tend to
wipe themselves out shortly after developing the means to do so. After all, we as a species
have possessed this ability for less than a century, and nuclear annihilation has been a
more or less omnipresent threat since then. One human lifetime. It's nothing in
cosmological scales.
But that's just one of many plausible theories. Simulation would certainly explain a lot.
The human ant farm? I don't know. The search is a worthwhile pursuit though.
*edit* a number of years of searching later, I'm leaning mostly to the Fermi Paradox
now.