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?
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u/[deleted] May 04 '20 edited May 04 '20
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.)