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We live on an entire life filled planet. We are not alone.
I kinda hope we are in some ways, mainly because I’d hate to inflict us on others.
Is it really something to be worried about?
Scifi aside, inter-stellar space travel seems to be basically almost non-viable.
I think we can find solace in the idea that space is so unimaginably gigantic that the distance between us and anything else like us is way too vast for any vehicle to traverse in any “reasonable” time.
I personally think it’s practically impossible for there to not be something else intelligent out there, I just don’t think they’re even remotely close enough to ever even detect us or us detect them.
To be fair, the universe is also so old as to allow quite a bit of it to have reached us by now even limited to “unreasonable” timeframes.
In every bit of fiction with “hostile” aliens, the aliens were quite blatantly a stand-in for humanity itself. Most of them focus on one or two specific negative human traits or aspects, but their motivations are almost always very human.
Not alone, but I’m of the opinion that we are very “early” in the lifespan of the universe. There’s a very decent chance we’re among the first to develop to this point or beyond. This by itself could be a possible explanation for the fermi paradox; we can’t see other civilisations yet because they’re roughly at our own level and still lack the abilities to communicate or travel these distances, just like us.
You think so? Earth and the Sun are only about 5 billion years old, or 1/3 the age of the universe. Life is estimated to have appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago.
Under the law of averages, life could have independently developed and reached comparable maturity to Earth at least two other, non-concurrent times. We’re third generation at best.
That’s still comparatively early in the grand scheme of things. I kind of like the idea of us being among the first, but not first.
I think when you consider the rate of advancement of any technological species, “roughly the same level as us” basically implies that they got started at exactly the same time. Even an extra thousand years of technological advancement would put them far ahead of us. A million years would put them unimaginably far ahead.
On a cosmic scale, that’s nothing. That’s a tight window and given the like 8 billion years that planets with the required elements have had to form, I would doubt that no other species had a chance to surpass us.
Alone as in the only life across the entire universe ? Absolutely not.
Alone as in the only intelligent life form across the universe?
A lot more plausible but still unlikely.Excluding a mass cataclysm (nuclear war, a hyper destructive pathogen), I think we’ll find evidence of extra-terrestrial life (if not life itself) in our own solar system in the next ~100 years.
I would think somewhere out in the universe there is (was?) intelligent life.
We’ve only confirmed exoplanets in the last ~40 years and the information we have is minimal (and biased towards gas giant type planets).
There has to be intelligent life somewhere in the universe.
I’d say no shot!
I’m certain there is intelligent life in the universe, but I’m also nearly certain that we will never interact with it.
Yes. But, much like us, the true “great filter” will turn out to be greed in one way or another.
I don’t think we, as a species, are ever leaving the solar system. And I don’t believe any other intelligent species would either. Exploration is high and noble, but the people who pay for it always expect a return on their investment. Finding the new world was about power, wealth and resources for those footing the bill. The exploration of the Arctic was a search for faster access to markets on the opposite side of the world.
There’s no profit in doing something “just because it’s there”.
My belief is that we’ll get into the solar system. We’ll harvest its resources. And that’s where we’ll stop. When we think about the size of the solar system, the resources available to us will effectively be infinite. One species would never use them all up before the sun expands and goes nova. It’s impossible.
So what is the return on investment to go to another star system? What’s the return on investment to making all that effort?
I think we’re in a universe that is filled with single-system species that just stay in their neighbourhood.
Are we the Ferengi?
I think this was covered in some old school scifi, maybe Asimov or Clark? I vaguely remember one of their (non-mainline?) novels speculating that civilizations that didn’t eventually attempt interstellar travel enter a terminal decline of some sort (on a multi-thousand year scale post industrialization). I really wish I remembered who wrote this.
And if we we are able to harvest resources on system-level scale, we will most definitely attempt to send probes to the nearest systems (which are not all that far).
I think the book you are referring to should be Isaac Asimov’s End of eternity. Oh boy what I would like to give to be able to read it again for the first time.
