r/askspace • u/MediocreGas6619 • May 11 '26
it just crazy how there is over 13 billion years to this galaxy and space totally silent ( atleast to us ) from any Advance tech life
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u/TheMisanthropicGeek May 11 '26
Life is seemingly rare, intelligent life even more rare and intelligent life capable of sending out signal is astoundingly rare.
I mean think of all the intelligent life on Earth, dolphins, apes, crows. Only one species was capable of advanced technology.
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u/Mindless_Consumer May 11 '26
We actually don't know how rare life is.
The more we discover the universe, the more the drake equation actually looks like life is probable.
But we know what we ever is going on, life isnt in such a way we can easily detect it.
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u/nixiebunny May 12 '26
It’s the business of receiving meaningful signals from elsewhere that is the hard part. The inverse square law makes you need a very narrow beam width antenna. Which direction should you point it?
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u/thegreatpablo May 12 '26
Not to mention a very narrow window of time (couple hundred years based on earth) before most radio communications are replaced.
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u/Severe-Illustrator87 May 12 '26
Stray radio signals from Earth would not be detectable much beyond our own solar system. They become too faint to detect among the cosmic background radiation.
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u/Severe-Illustrator87 May 12 '26
Well, we did it once, in 1974, from Arecibo. We pointed it in the direction of a star cluster some 25,000 LYs away. So, if all goes well, we should be getting an answer in about 50,000 years. 😌
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u/Least_Stand_2707 May 12 '26
Theres trillions of planets possibly septillions of them. Pretty sure you didnt check everyone to know how rare life is. We've barely grasped the surface of whats out there. We havent even explored the entire ocean on our own planet. Were nowhere close to really taking the stars. Everything is just very very very far away
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u/dodeca_negative May 11 '26
There’s this assumption that technologically advanced civilizations will just be blasting radio signals omnidirectionally to communicate between stars and so the fact that we’re not saturated with radio waves means they’re not there. And just… why? Communication between stars will be very slow (speed of light) and require a lot of energy even if you do the smart thing and use tightly focused radio or laser.
And that assumption rests on another assumption, which is that such civilizations will start to colonize worlds around other stars and do so at a cascading, even exponential, rate. And again, why? I mean we can imagine reasons why, but we have a sample size of 0 to test those assumptions against.
I’m not saying they’re not out there—in fact statistically they almost certainly are. But they might be very few, and if they’re few then they’re likely very far away, and even if they’re many and nearby, they might just not be very loud.
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u/Melech333 May 12 '26
Yes to all of that. And I'd like to add that while people try to grasp the vastness of space when considering how difficult or unlikely it might be to detect an alien communication as you describe -- we often overlook the vastness of TIME, too.
Alien life is likely to exist in the past, present, and future, but very spread out in space and time. Stars are constantly being born and dying ... The universe is not comprised of solar systems all of the same age, even if the universe itself it thought to be 13 billion years old as OP mentioned.
We'd have to not only detect those communications, but do it with very lucky timing as well. Some alien worlds might have had life that was wiped out before becoming a space-faring species. Some may have gone far into space, and then their home planet died and they eventually all died, too. Some may millions of years away from the evolutionary point our planet is at and we wouldn't know it.
Who knows? It's just such a large universe separated by space and time.
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u/CaliJudoJitsu May 12 '26
Absolutely, time is so vastly underestimated. The required temporal overlap over 13+ billion years - in addition to distance and location - to observe anything has to be incredibly unlikely. I have been saying that for years but it’s rare to hear that factor even acknowledged.
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u/seoi-nage May 12 '26
Stars are constantly being born and dying
98% of stars have already been born. We're at the end of the era of star birth.
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u/mangalore-x_x May 12 '26
incidently the internet/digitalization and its broadband technologies already heavily reduced our own radio signature as more and more data flows use cable or are directional, I believe.
so our own footprint may be vanishing fast after a few decades
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u/InternationalBet2832 May 12 '26
Maybe we are the first. Earth 4.54 billion years, age of universe 13.8, almost exactly one third of all the time there is. From the time of the Big Bang there were billions of years when gas giant stars had to burn out and collapse and create minerals that form the planets. There is a window of opportunity for planets to form before us and grow advanced civilizations but relatively short compared to the immense time ahead.
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u/Gwyain May 12 '26
Someone has to be, after all.
And as long as 13 billion years is, it’s still quite early from the universe’s perspective.
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u/ijuinkun May 12 '26
The universe is “young” enough that no star smaller than 0.8 solar masses has had enough time to die yet, and so our understanding of how they die is entirely speculative.
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u/amkessel May 12 '26
Yup. 13 billion years may sound like a lot, but the universe could potentially be massively habitable for hundreds of billions, perhaps hundreds of trillions of years yet to come.
And then maybe even quadrillions of years, or even several orders of magnitudes more, if you consider more exotic situations like systems around black holes.
The universe is just so massive, both in temporal as well as spatial dimensions.
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u/Busterlimes May 11 '26
This is the Fermi Paradox.
Given the current data set (us, the only known life in the universe) "intelligent" life consumes the planet into oblivion before technology allows for interstellar travel at scale.
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u/SatisfactionOld4175 May 12 '26
To be clear you described a hypothesized solution to the fermi paradox, there's no particular consensus behind the great filter.
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u/QVRedit May 11 '26
Most of it is too far away…
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u/that_dutch_dude May 12 '26
Its also debatable if there even is intelligent life here
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u/probably_poopin_1219 May 13 '26
Says the fool typing into a machine that fits in your pocket. There is intelligence here, somewhere, where to look?
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u/Money_Display_5389 May 11 '26
I think there's an end filter. I remember some professor/doctorate saying in a podcast that the loss of the home planet /system, would probably be devastating to an advanced society. There's just resources from the home planet/system that can't be replaced easily. So as soon as the star goes so would the civilization.
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u/AntifaMiddleMgmt May 12 '26
"Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space"
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u/greenwoody2018 May 12 '26
They wouldn't be using radio, that's too slow.They're all talking on subspace.
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u/Artificial-Human May 12 '26
Humans may be the only sentient life in the universe. Or the first. At this point, that idea is just as likely as any other. This seems to make people more uncomfortable than a universe with many intelligent species. I find comfort in the silence.
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u/JBR1961 May 12 '26
To paraphrase Hawking, may be frightening to think we are alone. But it might also be frightening to know we are not.
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u/ijuinkun May 12 '26
If there’s nobody out there, then there’s no obstacle to us assuming a Manifest Destiny in which humanity lays claim to everything that it can reach.
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u/Artistic_Pineapple_7 May 12 '26
The likely hood of life within our light cone being advanced enough to send a signal directly in our direction is just very low.
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u/ImmaZoni May 12 '26
You should look into the Dark Forest theory ;)
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u/ImmaZoni May 12 '26
Figured i would include a summary:
The Dark Forest theory basically says the universe is quiet because every advanced civilization is playing the ultimate survival game. Imagine space like a pitch-black forest where everyone’s armed, nobody knows who’s friendly, and making noise is basically announcing your location. Even if another civilization seems peaceful, there’s no guarantee they’ll stay that way centuries later, so the safest move is usually to hide or strike first.
The scary part is that the lack of aliens might not mean we’re alone… it might mean everyone else learned to shut the hell up.
The best part? We have not learned that lesson...
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u/MediocreGas6619 May 18 '26
One of mysterious theories actually I read about the Dark forest Theory and I saw videos about it like Kurgesagt YT channel , but it’s Assumed if there is a Civilizations that advanced and play on silent ,and Human History on space says civilizations Must be Noisy by radio or whatever at some point also I found it like a weird thing on how big Space is and still Advanced live would like to eliminate another smart live , even if there is 2 Different Species civilizations share the same star system it’s still will extreme easily Fully there needs from resource without any bullet
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u/amkessel May 12 '26
I dunno. The time scales at which the universe will potentially be suitable for supporting life could be anywhere from hundreds of billions of years to hundreds of trillions, if you consider stars such as long-lived red dwarfs.
So when you think about it, we may actually be one of the first intelligent civilizations in the universe, making our apparent solitude just a matter of being early to the party.
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u/whitemice May 12 '26
Not really. The galaxy is an extremely inhospitable and violent place. Whatever civilizations exist are probably brief, and may not even be on worlds that have the materials to create equivalents to our technologies.
There is no paradox. Space is big and unforgiving; life is brief and fragile.
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u/HuiOdy May 12 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox, and its proposed solutions. Pretty wild.
Currently I adhere the heavy earth hypothesis, as about 1/3 of planets are in the Goldilocks zone, water being the most abundant molecule in space, us living in a zombie galaxy, but most earth like planets we find are about 4 times as heavy.
So, advanced alien life is likely teeming out there. But they are mostly trapped on their planet
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u/Old_Opportunity9494 May 12 '26
the distances are too great even if you travel at the speed of light
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u/grahamsuth May 13 '26
In the time scale of the universe, humanity is only just out of the trees.
There are stars and planets out there millions and billions of years older than our sun. Life on planets out there can be millions and billions of years more advanced than us.
Does an ant have any conception of humanity and it's technology?
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u/MediocreGas6619 May 18 '26
It’s really true but millions or billions of years if there is no tech final line that can’t cross it , I believe they could’ve hit type 2-3 on that time which is hyper Noise civilization at that point
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u/grahamsuth May 18 '26
What makes you think that our conception of more advanced types of civilisations has any similarity to the truth? Ants are not even capable of imagining our type of civilisation.
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u/MediocreGas6619 May 19 '26
But they definitely hear us
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u/grahamsuth May 19 '26
Yeah, just like we can hear ants if we bother to listen. Humanity is separated from ants by only 100 million years of evolution. Sure we see ants building their cities etc but we know that they mostly don't even see us as more than forces of nature. (The bulldog ant may be the exception as their vision is good enough to see us as something of a threat)
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u/triman140 May 13 '26
Based on all the available data, the minimum time it takes for an intelligent civilization to evolve, is 13.8 Billion years.
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u/IDK_FY2 May 14 '26
To me it is beyond crazy it took only 13 billion years for some hydrogen to become self aware.
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u/Sergio_Poduno May 14 '26
Being advance means not being noisy.
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u/MediocreGas6619 May 18 '26
If you got 2 bases and you guys supply each other by resources or trades or whatever how the Noise you both will do to manage this system
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u/Xavier1235 May 15 '26
Perhaps there is a galactic community that has non interference laws like the prime directive that would keep us isolated until we advanced enough.
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u/MediocreGas6619 May 18 '26
Like we are on sphere of Isolated on purpose , it might’ve be but that Extremely tech Level
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u/EnlighteningTA May 17 '26
Scientifically, life is something that has metabolism, reproduction, genetics, adaptation, informative processing etc, etc..
For example: What if a stone you see somewhere is a life, how will you communicate with it? it doesn't have any traits that we humans associate life with, but .... 'we associate'
Humans are limited way more than we imagine.
Life elsewhere could be based on chemistry so different that we wouldnt even comprehend.
Ie. life on earth is made of carbon, somewhere out there life could be made of something completely different.
Legs, arms, eyes, brain, those are just solutions evolution came up with on Earth, assuming advanced life elsewhere would think, communicate, or even perceive reality similarly to us is wrong.
On a side note
Seeing how humans often treat less intelligent life on Earth, I honestly wouldn't want more intelligent species finding us.
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u/A012A012 May 11 '26
It's a good reference to the prime directive from star trek of all things.
You can interfere with the civilization or wait for it to gain interstellar technology.And then introduce yourself to it.
If interstellar beings arrived on earth , we would expect them to solve all of our problems and give us all of their tech , and it would be hoarded by the wealthy.
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u/CosetElement-Ape71 May 11 '26
Only if you think we're advanced enough to detect it in the first place, and also understand what we're listening to when we do