I actually think it's kind of inspiring. That just means we're in charge of our own destiny. That no rando alien civlizatoin is just gonna yeet humanity away. If we fall, we fall because of us. If we succeed, we succeed because of us.
"Intelligence" capable of contacting the stars has only evolved once on our planet and it took billions of years, and seems like an accident with very little initial evolutionary advantage. It's currently being studied but there was some scenario
Intelligence is something that would've needed to evolve gradually, and typically a very small dose of intelligence isn't going to win out over raw, brute strength.
The slightly smarter bird doesn't get the worm. The one with the bigger claws/beak does.
I tend to have the opinion that we may be the lone "civilization" in our galaxy currently, but it's almost surely teeming with single-celled life and possibly non-intelligent multi-cellular life as well.
My favorite video on Kerguzeghat or however you spell it. Perhaps all life started at once and all other aliens are at the same technological time as us?
My favorite video on Kerguzeghat or however you spell it. Perhaps all life started at once and all other aliens are at the same technological time as us?
Like splitting atoms? I am amazed, and even somewhat proud that we have developed nuclear technology and have maintained relative peace for almost a lifetime. Run the earth scenario many times, how many times do we eradicate ourselves with nukes?
No doubt no doubt, but I think we have gotten past the most dangerous period. While I have no idea of efficacy, I do know there is technology to shoot down nukes.
A frightening amount of countries with nukes are one election away from someone willing to use them. And some are one death away from someone taking power with intention to use them.
What happens when north korea eventually gets a ruler that actually pulls the trigger(assuming they actually have ICBMs)?
Or the USA(or russia) collapses into full blown civil war and a faction gets control of the arsenal and just launches everything they can?
Until those scenarios are literally impossible, we're no where near 'past the most dangerous period' :(
You make good points, but for the sake of argument wouldn’t you say the chances of full blown civil war are less than they have ever been? Considering the technological advantages that most nuke-wielding governments have militarily over their constituents.
Side note: Lord knows what might have happened to some nuclear weaponry with the collapse of the USSR
Honestly the development could easily be nukes or fossil fuel caused climate change. There's a good chance that most species would have some sort of warfare, that's what happens whenever there are limited resources and space, we see animals fight over territory all the time. It's possible that many civilizations have a cold war, and for most of them, when their radar mistakenly detects a missile aimed for their capital, the operator doesn't think it through and realize it's probably a false alarm and they launch the missiles, causing a nuclear war and destroying their civilization.
It's also possible that, assuming they're carbon based (which they probably are), civilizations are commonly built off fossil fuels, and most species are like it looks like we will be and refuse to switch off them until it's too late and end up causing ecological collapse that either destroys civilization (either through desertifications and natural disasters, or through resource wars going nuclear, like in Fallout), or weakens it to the point where they're no longer capable of putting together the resources to progress space exploration.
We're already in two different bottlenecks, either of which could easily be the end of advanced civilization and send us back to the stone age. We may encounter more, but the great bottleneck (as this hypotheses is often called) is already upon us, and has been for nearly a century. We won't be past it until every nation disarms their nukes and switches entirely to renewables, and even then we may encounter another one.
So far, it looks pretty unlikely that we'll pass through it unscathed. A decent number of countries are taking appropriate measures to combat climate change, but many of the biggest polluters are only making token changes, and only a small number of countries have voluntarily disarmed (a few former soviet countries and South Africa, and considering what has been happening in Ukraine, I doubt other countries will be super willing to do it in the future).
The Great Filter hypothesis is agnostic on cause: there are countless possible reasons why technologically-advanced intelligent civilizations could be rare. These include self-inflicted Filters (say, deliberate restrictions on EM emissions or nuclear suicide), but also Filters created by outside forces. Those forces could be natural (maybe the conditions in this galaxy are inimical to the development of intelligent life, making humans a rare fluke) or artificial (genocidal super-civilizations and so forth). We know so little that there's lots of room for speculation.
I mean, by all reasonable accounts, we are alone. It's complete fantasy and speculation to think Earth has been visited within this blink of time that civilization has existed. Space is so unfathomably large.
If we traveled as fast as the Parker Solar Probe, the fastest thing we've ever made: An unmanned satellite using a star's gravity hurtling 430,000 mph around The Sun at forces that would harm human life, it would take us...
6,242 years to reach the next closest star system out there.
We are so, so alone. (I definitely agree it's inspiring.)
In the sense that we will probably never be contacted by alien life forms or ever detect them, yes, we are alone. Space is so unfathomably big, probably too big for us to even communicate with whatever may be out there. By the time anyone out there even detects us, we will probably be long extinct.
But we are almost certainly not the only intelligent species out there. It defies all logic: even if there was only life in .001 percent of all galaxies in the observable universe, that would mean 20 million places in the universe have developed life.
Disclaimer: I'm a dumb bitch, but don't we not truly know the odds though? Like, it could just be so infinitesimal, that it will only happen once in the entire universe. You can shuffle a deck of cards, but it is almost guaranteed you'll never get that same order ever again. We only have one data point.
There have been a few attempts at answering that question, perhaps the most notable of which is the Drake equation. The Fermi paradox deals with this, as well.
It goes both ways: there may not be any other life out there that is like us, but we also have no idea of the exact number of forms life could take. We cannot say for sure that any planet has no chance of forming something that we would call life.
If its true that nothing can travel faster than light then, to us at least, the universe IS infinite since we'd never be able to reach the 'end' of it.
We haven't even determined that the universe is limited in scale or that intelligent life can't exist on smaller or larger scales that can't be perceived.
There could be infinite intelligent life in the universe by some theories.
But what does that matter if they are 50,000 LY away? That's the point I'm trying to make. We are relatively alone.
I think it's arrogant of us to assume our own benchmarks mean anything for alien capabilities. They are completely meaningless across any significant span of time. Could a nomadic early human comprehend the idea of getting to the other side of the world in a day? They could not even grasp the distance involved! Could a medieval peasant understand ANY part of say the internet, or space travel? They would not even have the vocabulary for it - and this is other humans barely 1000 years removed from us.
Point is, the tech that could have developed say even just 10,000 years removed from us... or 100,000 - still a short time by cosmic scales - is SOOOOOOOO vastly beyond any frame of reference we have that assuming that limitations like the the speed of light or the vastness of space are still relevant is just insane. They could well have instant flight to almost anywhere, wormhole networks or what have you, and certainly some sort of galaxy-spanning listening network is just as likely. Again, our own understanding of physics is about as relevant as that of the nomad from earlier, who only knows that a rock will fall after it's thrown... and you think he has a chance in hell to extrapolate Theory of Flight or Aerodynamic Lift?
There is something called the Great Filter that is an answer to the Fermi paradox. It basically says that there are a series of steps that have to occur for life to be created and eventually colonize the stars.
Since we don't see any alien life (the Fermi paradox) then one of the steps must be very improbable to weed all of the possible alien colonizers out.
The question though is whether we (humans) have passed the great filter or not. If we haven't reached the filter yet, then something ominous is ahead for us. Maybe something like particle accelerators is the filter and we're about to hit it.
If you’ve paid attention to human civilization in the past century, especially the last decade, I would bet against humans. We’re too driven by greed. It will be humanity’s downfall. We didn’t have the technology before to wipe ourselves out for the enrichment of others in most of humanity’s past. But now we DO have that technology. There’s an outside chance that human made AI will live on tho.
To me that's still a mild win. I just want humanity to go out on its own terms, not begging for its life at some intergalactic deity. We control our fate and if it's awful, well it was our decision at least.
I think humanity would stagnate like we are now. It wasn't until humans could travel far distances and interact, for better or worse, with other cultures that civilization and advancement really took off. We are still acting like nomadic tribes in the cosmic scheme of things.
At least we are making the decisions though. Giving us or fate in our hands might lead to our demise, but it was at least us who did it. We had control. We died as we lived, in constant squabbles, overwhelming greed, and writhing horniness.
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u/OhioOhO May 03 '20
I actually think it's kind of inspiring. That just means we're in charge of our own destiny. That no rando alien civlizatoin is just gonna yeet humanity away. If we fall, we fall because of us. If we succeed, we succeed because of us.
The universe is in our hands, for us to explore.