Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
I refuse to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, even though for most humans that bar is pretty low.
When I finally “die” I’ll no doubt get kicked back out into the real world and have to plug in another quarter.
You will never die. You will watch everyone else die out over the next million or so years, and then you will be alone until you figure out how to create new people.
…story of my life.
Story of all our lives, unfortunately
So it would seem.
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.
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.
All the whistleblowers have testified under oath and were demonstrably employed by the aforementioned organizations. Further disregard would be arrogance. However, it’s less about “aliens” and more about additional forms of non-human intelligence. Essentially, we are facing a new paradigm in physics. This is a positive development.
The whistleblowers are around in an amount and level of story consistency that makes me think they are grifters.
Roughly estimating, there are about 500 employees from CIA subprograms making such claims. They do so under oath and without significant financial gain. If their employer were to contradict or refute their claims, they could be prosecuted criminally in the US. This is a different quality than before, where witnesses had no connection to government agencies.
Is there a list somewhere? I’ve only heard about a handful, and according to Wikipedia the CIA only employs 21,575, so that would be quite a lot.
If their employer were to contradict or refute their claims, they could be prosecuted criminally in the US.
The CIA famously doesn’t confirm or deny very much.
I don’t know about a complete list. You also have three sources. First, David Grusch mentions 80 additional witnesses. Then there’s Dr. Steven Greer, who mentions 300 to 500 witnesses in his videos. And then there’s the “To the Stars Academy,” which is said to be purely a CIA affair. I can’t imagine that in the USA you can accuse the CIA of crimes and come from the same place. So, I consider such witnesses to be of higher value. But of course, always with caution. Once CIA, always CIA. So, targeted disinformation is also possible. But the topic has already changed. No more green men, but “there’s something.” Also, how the media in the US report. Once a UFO landing in Las Vegas. Then that in the Mal in Florida. Quite interesting.
Claimed witnesses mean nothing, and I have 3,000 that will back that up. /s
Three sources. That’s what I was thinking, and their stories don’t much up or hold constant very well. It doesn’t matter what their clearance was, anybody can like dirty money (like from a book deal or appearance where they say what enthusiasts want to hear). That’s actually where most spies come from, and so why the CIA exists in the first place.
One can perceive many things stereotypically. However, I don’t think all UFO witnesses are bought or trying to sell books. Many just want to share their story, and in the past, they were often stigmatized and marginalized. However, that’s becoming less and less common.
I mean, I’ve personally seen a UFO more than once. I have no idea what they were - especially the one during a thunderstorm - but I’m pretty sure they were human, just based on who normally builds things like that.
I never had a little green man visit me, and to my knowledge most the cases of that read a lot like someone’s sleep disturbance or episode. The remainder are few enough I do go to lying. If one landed in a crowd in Arizona, I’d give it to you, aliens are here, but they just haven’t.
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.
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.
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I lean towards no, which is a minority scientific position. The Fermi paradox is strong evidence against technological aliens, and of all the evolutionary history we have immediate abiogenesis is the most weakly supported. It happened early, but there’s still a 10% chance of a thing randomly happening in the first 10% of geological history (to oversimplify the math).
If it’s not that, it’s eukariogenesis, but that seems a bit more inevitable given how cooperative bacteria can already be. The development of technology seems inevitable once a thing by chance becomes smart and dexterous enough, and every other step along the way has happened more than once. Earth-like planets are still thought to be abundant.
Edit: Oh, and no to any conspiracy. It would be really hard to hide obvious alien life, and there’s no real motive for all world governments to unanimously do so. And conspiracies don’t exist, because we’re too disorganised to keep a huge secret for long.
Yes, the sophon is causing all the shenanigans happening on earth rn but it decided to ramp up its game.
I definitely believe that aliens exist, but I very much doubt that they have any interest in contacting us. I find that lot of the discussions around aliens fail to take into account the sheer vastness of the Universe.
- Universe has been around for close to 14 billion years
- Milky Way in its current form has been around for about 8~9 billion years
- Life on Earth appears around 4280 million years ago
- Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago.
- Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago
- Writing is invented around 5500 years ago
Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.
So, after millions of years of life on Earth nothing interesting happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.
Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise.
Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.
So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small! The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.
I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space because we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in space.
Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be what we consider to be geological scales.
For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.
I really can’t imagine that advanced civilizations would have much they could learn from us. We might be a curiosity at best to them, but it’s more likely that they would give as much consideration to us as we do to an ant when we pass it by.
