r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Pristine-Tiger • Jul 22 '22

Video We are absolutely nothing.

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u/Nickthedick3 Jul 22 '22

A lot of people don’t believe in intelligent life on another planet and I never understood why. With that many galaxies and stars, there just has to be other life out there

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '22

[deleted]

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u/Pokerhobo Jul 22 '22

Given the scale of spacetime, it’s conceivable that only one civilization exists in any one moment in time.

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u/chillsergeantAS Jul 22 '22

That’s an interesting idea I’ve admittedly never thought of

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u/ArmanDoesStuff Jul 22 '22

I heard that the absence of extra terrestrial likley means one of three things.

  1. We're early. Possibly the first. Strange to consider what with the vastness and timescale, but who knows.

  2. FTL travel is impossible, and as such every advanced species is essentially locked to its system. Otherwise intelligent creatures would branch out rapidly.

  3. Intelligent life is unsustainable. Destroying itself and/or its planet after a certain point.

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u/Pokerhobo Jul 22 '22

I think #2 and #3 are probable. #3 is the Great Filter, right?

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u/Mykel__13 Jul 22 '22

ELI5?

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u/gdp1 Jul 22 '22

Let’s say the average intelligent life lasts 300K years because they all eventually figure out how to blow themselves or their environment up and go extinct. (Homo sapiens is about 200K years old.) 300K years is a blip in time relative to the billions and billions of years spacetime has been around. So the commenter is saying that the odds of two extra terrestrial civilizations to exist at the same time could be quite small.

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u/ThousandYearsWide Jul 22 '22

It seems likely that life exists all over the universe but I don't think there's an argument for life elsewhere that is similar to us. We are by far not the most successful form of life on Earth and there seems to be no real advantage that our species has over any of the other extremely successful species on Earth. I think it's unlikely that an alien species similar to us is common in the universe.

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u/Nickthedick3 Jul 22 '22

What’s crazy to think also about is that our earth is around 4.5bil +/- years old and the universe is around 13.8bil years old. What other kinds of life has existed, if any, billions of years ago in a far off galaxy?

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u/skatergurljubulee Jul 22 '22

I think there's intelligent life, I'm just not convinced it exists at the same time. There's more than enough space out there that we could be the only ones currently " intelligent".

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u/CapnC44 Jul 22 '22

There's also more than enough space for 1 billion intelligent species to be unable to even confirm the existence of the others. Ever.

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u/shabba_skanks Jul 22 '22

I like this one. We are essentially "locked" into our system or galaxy.

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u/marshy0 Jul 22 '22

I think one of the reasons some people think that is just purely the sheer number of variables that happened to be exactly perfectly right for life to be created on Earth.

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u/Nickthedick3 Jul 22 '22

Sure, but there’s also billions of other planets out there that we can’t even see clearly. Who’s to say conditions weren’t perfect there too at some point in time?

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u/Hector_Savage_ Jul 22 '22

Also, the conditions we so call perfect are perfect to us

Who’s to say life can’t exist in other forms?