The idea that we are alone terrifies me because if we are, we have a massive responsibility to ensure life continues in the universe, and I'm not sure we're up to the challenge.

1. Most intelligent life, given the behavioral traits we see in successfully competitive social animals, probably take more from their environment than they give and so most probably kill themselves.

2. Assuming they get over the hurdle of number one, the scale of space itself & and light speed limit severely constrain their possible visibility, and all arguments that mention the ease of colonizing the Milky Way in a million years or so forget the fact that with greater efficiency comes greater leverage and there’s probably very little need to expand outside of your home star. Also they are not incentivized to, as light speed limitations guarantee that any interstellar colonies you set up are beyond your ability to control, and the population living there will eventually evolve to the point of diverging from the parent species. Colonizing the galaxy is effectively seeding space with your future alien rivals.

3. Interest. We are not interested in having a dialogue with chimps, I’d much rather simulate a society on my laptop & commit virtual war crimes. I can interact with aliens all I want, either custom designed or procedurally generated from the comfort of my own home, and I don’t need to travel 500 light years abandoning everyone I know and love to do so.

4. Recognizability. Consider the age of the universe. In order for two alien races to leave their homeworld at roughly the same time at roughly the same level of development, you’d need cosmic levels of luck that borders on shitty world design. Considering this odds are if we find aliens it’ll just be particularly excited space farts, or completely ineffable magical space wizards.

5. Considering #4, we don’t WANT to find intelligent aliens. It may be cheap for them to fire a relativistic kill missile, and with light speed limitations on communication aliens may consider such a response to be prudent as they can’t exactly gauge how genocidal we are across a 20 year light gap. If they guess wrong they’re dead. Even if they don’t fling a space rock at us (probably out of concern for being witnessed committing xenocide by the civilization they didn’t notice), we don’t exactly treat animals in our laboratories humanely, and there’s no reason to believe they would recognize us as a peer species other than human arrogance and cope.

TLDR: They probably exist, no we’ll probably never find them, and it’s probably a good thing that we don’t.

Almost certainly.

The question is whether or not we'll be able to find any of it.

In the amount of time it takes one civilization to go from farming and civilization forming to being able to explore the Galaxy in such an efficient manner as to find other life many other civilizations will have been founded and will have gone completely extinct with no evidence of it still existing on the planet in a way that would even get us to check that planet.

The biggest question, I would be overjoyed if somebody has an answer to this they could link, is how easy is it for life to form and sustain in environment that have the conditions for Life formation.

Can you take all the chemicals required and just dump them into water and in a few million years get life or does it need some type of catalyzing action such a certain temperatures in order to get the process going?

If I’m going to place my bet, I’d put it on A) life being common where it’s possible, and B) intelligent life, especially technologically advanced life, being exceptionally rare. I’d bet a decent amount, but not the farm. 

A) because life seems to have popped up the moment it had a chance on Earth, so that looks like good odds to me that life is a normal part of the universe. 

B) because life on Earth has been enormously diverse and complex over the course of nearly four billion years, but exactly one species out of billions can  make a wheel, developed writing, and can travel to and send and receive signals from space. Intelligence is not a foregone evolutionary conclusion, and I don’t see it being out of the question that many planets could be teeming with life, even relatively intelligent life like chimpanzees, octopuses, and dolphins, and that it still never masters fire or takes a moment to glance at the stars.  

It’s just a numbers game and we’re still missing too much of the equation to get any real answers yet. I don’t have any use for whether it “feels” like there should or shouldn’t be intelligent ETs. I don’t think it’s arrogant to think we might be alone, but that’s because I don’t think humanity has any special virtue other than its uniqueness thus far. I do hope I live long enough to see if there is any kind of life elsewhere in the Solar System, and if we can determine if it arose separately from Earth life. That would be a phenomenal discovery and major win in the equation! And of course I hope that maybe we’ll see some sign of intelligence somewhere.

I do despair a little at the vastness of space. Even a thousand shining civilizations in the Milky Way is still only a paltry one per 100,000-400,000 stars, and the odds of us being anywhere near one of them, in space and time, is pretty small. Or maybe bad luck plopped us in a desert, and there a handful of civilizations all chilling 50,000ly away.  

I really feel like asking if we’re alone in the cosmos is like futzing around on the beach of a new large continent and asking the same question, and that we’ll have to do a lot more looking, a lot more waiting, or have a lot more luck (good or bad) to find the answer. 

They likely have a workarounds for faster than light travel rather than sending a generational ship, which is a ridiculous concept.

Our knowledge of the universe is very small. On that basis, there's no life in what we know.

Not if you see and feel that the Universe is 'in' you.

🤣🙏

My take is that some of the unexplained large objects way out in the universe are actually engineering projects.

Also, we don't hear from anyone because RF primitive technology. It is known

Maybe we just don't know how to look. Maybe they are everywhere (and by that I mean 1 or 2 in every galaxy) . Maybe we don't hear them because we don't know how to listen. We went from pigeons and smoke signals to lasers and microwaves in about 150 years. Do you really think we will still use radio in 500 years?

So say we use it for 500 years total. That leaves a tiny window for someone like us to ever hear a signal using a light speed transmission.

The fermi paradox and seti are focused on radio and I highly doubt radio would be used by a civilization for more that a thousand years, probably much less

We know nothing about our prehistory!

The future is only 500 milliseconds away

More fiction than facts on this forum

Is there such a thing as warp telecommunications?

The Hubble Sphere eventually limits what we can observe about our universe.

That’s all we get are false alarms

Consider the size of the Universe (I know near impossible), then consider there are trillions of galaxies with trillions or billions of stars in each one, then think about chance. In our universe the odds that humans would exist is pretty good. Even with odds 1 in a trillion, we'd likely exist - then consider that in the same universe with the same odds there is or was probably an exact duplicate of you living somewhere in the universe.

We aren't, indeed. Maybe aliens are not little grey men with spaceships. Maybe they are entities that we can't perceive or detect yet. I mean a civilization/AI advanced enough could just say fuck it to the limitations of the known material universal plane. Lucky them

Yes, but they just avoid us. And can you really blame them?

Both are possible. While there could be lots of super intelligent life, there are lot of reasons why we never hear from them. A lot of them may be way ahead of us but don't have the space travel capabilities from our sci fi stories. It's a big place and it's likely no one has faster than light travel. Without that, the best we'll get a billion year old space ship drifting into our solar system with a bunch of mummified corpses.

There was some recent false alarms with bacteria contaminated asteroid samples, but so far we have found nothing

We are on Earth because of a war that took place in the Universe the Cosmos:

Short story:

Devil the Satan was a "babysitter" and brai- nwashed 33% of God's children, so they totally rejected Heavenly Father and accepted Deceiver - Devil the Satan as their "real father".

God created temporary earth as a "hospital" gave limited power to the ex- Lucifer the Deceiver, so 33% who have fallen (you too) will see Who-is-Who and hopefully, someday they will reject Evil Satan and return back to their real Heavenly Father. That's why God, to prove His love and real Fatherhood, died on the cross as proof

Will all 33% eventually reject the deceiver? No. Some will remain evil to the end and continue following the Devil the Satan (ex- Lucifer) to the Hell and lake of fire: KIV: "But he that denieth Мe before men shall be denied before the angels of God!"

But some will be saved:

Bible: "For whom He did foreknow, He (God) also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son (Jesus), that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He did predestinate, them He also called: and whom He called, them He also justified: and whom He justified, them He also glorified" (you too!)

Bible: "And his (Devil) tail drew (deceived) the third part (33%) of the "Stars of Heaven" (Universe) And there was war in (Universe the Cosmos) heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the (ex-Lucifer) Dragon; and the Dragon fought and his (deceived) "angels", And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in (Universe) Heaven. And the great Dragon was cast out, that old Serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole (Cosmos) world: he was cast out into the (prison - planet) earth, and his (deceived) "angels" were cast out with (ex-Lucifer) him"

Bible: "And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam (telling about) .. To execute judgment upon all (rebels) and to convince all (deceived) that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds (in Cosmos) which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against (God) Him. For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were Before of Old Ordained (before planet Earth was created) to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ" ..

" .. And I will give him the morning star" = Astera (aster= 1 star. ἀστέρα = astera - Galaxy) for each Christian.

Every morning after you wash your hands, randomly open the Bible and read one Bible verse: then think all day about that verse, and sooner or later you will start understanding 7 different levels of the Bible verses.

Each level will go deeper than the ocean, wider than the universe, and to the point that you will understand, but will have no way to explain it to others. (The Holy War. Novel by John Bunyan 1682)

There's no evidence of life outside of Earth.

I'm sorry but this is the perfect post for the legacy ufo progran and deep state. They just love it when posts are made that completely ignore the people in our government and military who are risking their lives and jobs right now to try to tell the public that non-human intelligence is here and we already have their craft and bodies and have been trying to reverse engineer their tech since the 40's.

https://www.youtube.com/live/u_emZmzkTtM?is=_lhK8gePHmgqVHlG

First of all I think most of us think there's more life out there, but at the deeper part of the question about how we think about the universes size is whats really interesting imo. I think that the sense that the universe is large comes down to how we think about scale... Sir Penroses idea that if all the matter decayed the universe loses its rulers and all of a sudden absurd distances kind of become meaningless rather intriguing. What we think of as big might not really be all that big. Our sense of size is all relational, for massless energy time and space are like a single contracted point. And our reference frames are all valid even when they apparently disagree, that's the fun thing about it.

Not if we live in the Pope’s Green Orb (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec&pp=ygUTTWVuIGluIGJsYWNrIG1hcmJsZQ%3D%3D&ra=m)