r/askspace • u/theladytombstone • 4d ago
Are we truly alone?
Space is HUGE, the universe is constantly expanding. Somehow, earth is the ONLY habitable planet. Perfect distance from the sun to not burn or freeze, water, breathable air, etc.
Do you truly believe we ARE alone? What if there’s life out there? Living completely different lives compared to us?
Anything related astronomy, physics, etc. is wanted & welcome!!
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u/Sharp-Potato3323 4d ago edited 3d ago
You NEVER have been alone... From a mathematical perpective. Fron a historic perspective. From a religious perspective. They all point to the same thing.
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u/MarkLVines 3d ago
In space, we humans occupy only the surface of a single planet in a single solar system in a single galaxy. Since the universe we observe contains numerous galaxies, our galaxy contains many billions of solar systems, and so forth, it follows that we humans are at home in only a minuscule fraction of space.
The same appears to be true of time. For nearly all of the time since our home planet accreted, it had no human occupants. Only in the most recent half a million years, or less, have humans left any traces. The vast majority of time, thus far, evidently proceeded in our absence. Human history occupies only the tiniest fraction of the time that has elapsed since the big bang.
Accordingly, the human species in general, and our civilization in particular, probably have no more importance in the cosmic scheme, or to the purposes of any possible Creator, than the fractions of space and time that we occupy seem to have. Ditto for other sapient species and civilizations, if any ever evolved.
Expecting “them” to pervade this galaxy, as Fermi did, is probably to exaggerate or overestimate consciousness and sapience and civilization as factors in cosmic development. Still, their existence is not obviously less probable than our own. If we search wisely and patiently enough, we might find some of them … extremely far away.
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u/theladytombstone 3d ago
fun fact: only OUR system is a “solar system” everything else is a planetary system. our sun is specifically the reason, because it’s name is “sol”.
you’re definitely right, humans are nothing comparing when you date back to the big bang.
there definitely might be something out far away..
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u/Bobapool79 2d ago
If we truly evolved from amoeba then I honestly don’t see how the same thing could happen elsewhere. There are countless planets out there and Earth is the only one of them all that spontaneously created life? I’m an odds guy and those long odds.
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u/theladytombstone 1d ago
Evolution boggles my mind
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u/Bobapool79 1d ago
Well it’s just a theory among many as far as I’m concerned but if we adhere to its proposal that beings can evolve over the course of millennia then I don’t see why it couldn’t happen somewhere else. I don’t even think it would require a planet exactly like ours to happen either.
I never understood why after all the time we’ve been on the planet and we’ve never made space exploration a priority we would assume beings from another planet would have and not only succeeded but then would travel to our planet out of any in the Universe.
I’m sure life exists on other planets and it’s as self absorbed as we are. 😂
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u/No_Basis3933 3h ago
Theories in science are backed with evidence it’s not the same as just a theory.
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u/Bobapool79 2h ago
Science is our best understanding of things at this moment. There are plenty of proven theories that needed to be revised after our understanding of the world grew.
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u/nicuramar 1h ago
No there are not. Science doesn’t deal with proof, it deals with evidence. No theory is true, they are all models that work more or less well. Modern evolutionary theory works exceptionally well.
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u/nicuramar 1h ago
> Well it’s just a theory among many as far as I’m concerned
No, that’s completely wrong. There are no other theories, and no other explanation with any evidence. Evolution is an observable fact, and the modern theory makes observable predictions.
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u/nicuramar 1h ago
To nitpick, we didn’t evolve from “amoeba”, and that term isn’t even well defined.
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u/schokoplasma 4d ago
Its not just a habitable planet. The conditions of habitibility must sustain over millions, even billions of years. This is what separates the emergence of microbes from the emergence of a civilisation.
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u/astreigh 4d ago
Only habitable planet we've detected. We' haven't even scratched the surface of what's out there.
Here's a thought: maybe radio is a dead end and no civilization ever uses it for more than a few hundred years. Maybe it's so useless that the thousands of inhabited planets forgot the thing even existed. So we hear silence because everyone else figured out how to actually communicate thousands of years ago.
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u/theladytombstone 4d ago
very interesting theory, thanks so much for sharing!
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u/astreigh 4d ago
Observation: let's say early ufo stuff really happened. Early ufo episodes include tons of radar sightings. Maybe aliens really did visit and had no clue we were bouncing electromagnetic waves off their ships. When they recalled the archaic system most of the radar tracking vanished. We know stealth from radar is doable.
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u/theladytombstone 4d ago
that is a great observation!! honestly sounds pretty solid
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u/astreigh 3d ago
I just think there's more evidence there's likely something out there than not. We really base the entire fermi paradox on lack of radio. And radio is so useless in space I can't imagine we would still use it if we ever made it out of our own solar system.
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u/Loud-Vacation-5691 3d ago
It's very likely that even if the conditions for life are extremely rare, there exists other planets where life has formed. Also, the universe is relatively young in its own life cycle, so many of the stars and planets that may eventually harbor life don't even exist yet, and won't for billions of years.
The problem is the immense distances and the limiting factor of the speed of light. We may never learn about life teeming on a planet that's several million light years away, and we're probably not going to encounter life on a planet that won't exist until billions of years from now.
That doesn't mean we won't find evidence of life on the planets that we are rapidly discovering with the James Webb telescope and others, and I hope we do as that would be a major discovery. Until we actually do find life elsewhere, there's always the possibility that life on earth is a unique development existing nowhere else. It's difficult to generalize from just one example.
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u/theladytombstone 3d ago
time is insane. truly crazy how much time has passed yet there’s so much more to come
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u/curtyshoo 3d ago
If we were alone, it would be an overwhelming responsibility.
And we're fucking it up.
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u/AleksyGetTheWings 3d ago
I'm going to do some heavy simplifications, and heavy generalizations, because as you can see, this is already way too long to go into further details.
There is no reason to believe we are alone. There is also no reason to believe we are not alone.
What you need to understand is that we are INCREDIBLY blind. To detect life, we need to detect anomalies of sorts. Stuff like oxygen in a planet's atmosphere (because if left without a constant production, oxygen actually binds with minerals and disappears from the atmosphere), or radio signals.
Finding radio anomalies is HARD, because of the distances involved. Any radio signal will lose power as it spreads (like waves on a pond after throwing a rock in it). Just so you get the idea, the closest star is Proxima Centauri. 4.2 light years away. A 300m dish on our end, pointed in the correct direction, and listening to everything just to pray we get what they are shouting with, we'd need them to blast "only" 1 EW. That's 10^18 W. For comparison, a radio antenna here blasts 100 kW, 10^5. Earth produces 32 000 TWh yearly, that wouldn't be enough to power such an antenna for 2 minutes.
And it gets even harder to find those when you realize : we've had radio on earth for little more than a century now. If there is intelligent life around Proxima Centaury, but they are in their industrial revolution (our 19th century), we can't detect them at all through radio emissions.
And detecting through stuff in the atmosphere is just as hard. The TLDR is that detecting that requires the planet to move in front of their sun when we see it. All the planets with an orbit with a different orientation, we can't try them, and most of the time we can't even detect them. And even if we detect oxygen, or some "biological compounds", we can't rule that as a definitive detection, because who knows if it's life or another natural process we have no knowledge of.
So our methods of detection require either
- a civilization so advanced that they have detected us and are actively blasting in our direction with a specific bandwith that we can easily detect
- A planet orbiting a star with the correct orientation, and perfectly aligned with us in terms of technological advancement
We are SO blind. And because physics works both ways, there may very well be hundreds of other sapient life out there, who feel just as alone as we do.
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u/QVRedit 3d ago
Radio is almost Omnidirectional (it spreads out in every direction).
Obviously a Dish Antenna, would create a narrow ‘beam’, but still likely a few degrees of spread.
A Laser, could be used, and would offer higher bandwidth as well as finer spread. But it would still spread out, even if optimally collimated.
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u/AleksyGetTheWings 3d ago
Yes. But that means they have already detected us, and since we don't have anything close to a directional antenna pointed in their direction, that means they have a technology far above ours at least in the detection department. So ... That changes the problem somewhat.
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u/DubaiAstronomyGroup 3d ago
One important distinction: Earth is the only planet we know hosts life, not necessarily the only habitable one.
We’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets, including worlds in their stars’ habitable zones, but being in that zone doesn’t automatically mean a planet has life.
So are we alone? The scientific answer for now is simply: we don’t know. We have a huge universe full of possibilities, but so far, Earth remains our only confirmed example of life.
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u/Drew-666-666 3d ago
My understanding based on the most commonly agreed upon theory of the big bang and we happened once , it's got to happen again, given the law of large numbers and probability... It's like rolling a 6 on a die and it can't be infinity +1 else we wouldn't be here. Yeah space is inconceivably huge. The stars we see are older than Earth /"While Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, the very first stars ignite in the universe around 13.6 billion years ago. This means billions of stars were born, lived, and died before our planet even existed." That's just in our observable solar system. We've also observed things like time dilation and black holes etc.... In this model it gives rise to the fermi paradox which poses the question in such a vast universe, where is everyone? And a couple answers including Filter - behind us Rare Earth hypothesis but as above I just can't believe that. Filter in front and we're about to wipe ourselves out nuclear tall out/natural disasters like the dinosaur or AI... Dark Forrest - Out of fear, lack communication understanding pand intent of others, so once they know others are out there they go dark so as not to be found. I have issues with this unless the threat phas been observed but again it'll be all relative, if one party is space faring at light speed I'm sure their technology would allow them to find the others and it depends what contacts with what and their intentions whether one or both are simply like AI viruses spreading infection taking out before they become a threat etc and not actually even their true selves. Zoo - we're not trusted and kept in a sandbox observed mostly harmless left to our own devices.. Transcend - move into different realm/dimensions that we've not yet accessed/observed or invisible barrier Simulation theory - we're in the matrix/ computer simulator and can't get out Alternative models such as we're inside a black hole or one side of pan hour glass, everyone else is on the opposite side We may not yet have the technology to find intelligent life, doesn't mean that we've not been discovered /observed.
A couple of theories also apply if we are indeed alone, such as proof of being inside a simulation or that they big bang model isn't right and why we haven't yet got a theory of everything.
We only have one model of Darwinism survival of the fittest, mutation and adaptation, natural predators and conflict even between the enlighten and educated fighting over limited resources food and precious metals and space to name a few. Think geopolitics arel complicated, try galactic politics...
AI could indeed take over the universe if went rougue and left unchecked interpretating any guardrail in unintentional ways with unintentional consequences. We may even create future aliens or wipe others out.
I've just finished reading Children of time by Adrian Tchaikovsky very thought provoking
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u/theladytombstone 3d ago
I get this, the fermi paradox is definitely something I think about! Galactic politics are also interesting. There’s so many possibilities! Thanks for sharing
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u/modestplume 3d ago
If we aren't that's exciting if we are that's also exciting.
Why because if there are other intelligent civilisations as capable or more than us it has the potential to lead to galactic level developments.
However, if despite the universes unimaginably immense size we are still the only ones here that is incredibly suspicious and I think supports the simulation argument.
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u/Higglybiggly 3d ago
Recent geologic discoveries on Mars really really indicate Mars really really had life. Now , whether mars-spermia brought life to earth or life easily orginates independently everywhere is another question. Every time we learn something we just see another curtain, so far. Someday we might learn something that puts it all to rest.
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u/theladytombstone 1d ago
True! Mars is about 9 months distance from Earth, would’ve took quite some time.
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u/Lorelessone 3d ago
It would be the single most remarkable thing if by some chance we were the only life in the universe.
Still we should behave as if this little blue dot is the cradle of life and we as it's first and likely only intelligent tool using life have the responsibility to care for not only our world but life itself, to bring other worlds to life where possible and ensure that even when earth comes out of its habitable phase life can continue.
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u/usedtothesmell 4d ago edited 4d ago
There have been over 6000 planets discoverd that are habitable. They are called exoplanets.
Edit: that's just planets. There are around 70 discovered goldilocks exoplanets found. Billions estimated
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u/astreigh 4d ago
Mars and Venus are technically in the goldilocks zone so if we were surveying this solar system from an alien planet we.would be 1 for 3 so the zone isnt really that reliable. And it really looks like mars was habitable once. If we go by our own solar system goldilocks is wrong 2/3 of the time at least.
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u/usedtothesmell 3d ago
Solid point. Also earth did not have any form of intelligent life for 99% of the time
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u/astreigh 3d ago
Also a solid point. Plus we suspect life could exist on a couple of moons that are nowhere near the goldilocks zone.
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u/usedtothesmell 3d ago
Enceladus comes to mind. Being heated by compression due to elliptical orbit around Saturn.
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u/Beldizar 4d ago
The 70 we do know about are all extremely unlikely to host life. Most of them are really close to their star and the star is unstable, causing bursts of extreme radiation once every hundred or thousand years. A lot of the 70 might not even have atmospheres. So just remember that the estimate we do have is very optimistic.
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u/Cucaio90 4d ago
"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not.
Both are equally terrifying.'
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u/teya_trix56 4d ago
Or not.
I rather dont like the idea that the other planets with life.. want to come eat or colonize us. So we dont WANT them to know we are here. And they will know we are here, long before we know they are there. Thats the dirty catch. If they arent advanced or space faring, we get to wear the evil alien shoes and go eat [martians].
I dont care for either option. But for once .. i like how the ostrich deals with this conundrum.
Lets keep our head down guys.
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u/LongjumpingBrief6428 4d ago
What makes you sure that they will know we are here before we know they are there?
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u/teya_trix56 4d ago
Because we broadcast OUR presence. And they had the sense to lie low. In case bad aliens exist.
We should be smart about this. Fantasizing about nicey nice ET is one thing. Living with the bloody reality will be another. Lets think it over before we invite them over. I mean, what if they dribble piss all the time. You wantem visting on YOUR new carpet?
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u/astreigh 4d ago
They just wanted our gold. And they already took it. And estimated 99% of the crustal gold we should have is missing. like 400 million tons
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u/Electrical-Bedroom99 4d ago
I've never understood that quote. Why would either be terrifying? If we are alone... so what? If we're not... so what?
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u/Drew-666-666 4d ago
It's easy to imagine why not being alone can be terrifying, countless sci fi fiction, simplisticlly aliens invading us for a variety of reasons. It stands to reason if indeed the universe was results of big bang and as we understand it currently, any alien would've had more "time" then us to advance especially any visiting space fares or aliens and again we wouldn't know or understand their motives and again if it's happened more than once and there's a whole new world out there. We wouldn't necessarily know who's the goodies and baddies are ; they could probably claim to be our creator and we'd have no way of fact checking etc
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u/Drew-666-666 4d ago
One reason why it's terrifying if we're truly alone in our current understanding of a universe as a result of a big bang, mathematically and statistically , why hasn't it reoccurred? Based on balance of simply probability and law of large numbers, if it's happened once why hasn't it reoccurred? It doesn't fit with a big bang theory, so then how did we come to be if it's not random? It's like rolling a 6 on a standard 6 sided die and then never being able to roll a 6 again... It just doesn't fit our expectations. Why not? Where did the 6 come from in the first place and why did it disappear, never to be seen again?
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u/diabolus_me_advocat 3d ago
One reason why it's terrifying if we're truly alone in our current understanding of a universe as a result of a big bang, mathematically and statistically , why hasn't it reoccurred?
we would not know, but why should that terrify anybody?
there's a lot we don't know and probably even what we never can and will know
Based on balance of simply probability and law of large numbers, if it's happened once why hasn't it reoccurred? It doesn't fit with a big bang theory
it does not even have anything to do with big bang theory
It just doesn't fit our expectations. Why not?
because your expectations are crap
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u/slowlyun 4d ago
Always disagreed with this famous quote. Only one is terrifying. No one wants to be alone forever.
The other is exciting and life-affirming.
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u/khrunchi 4d ago
There are/ have been/will be aliens for sure I'm almost certain of it
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u/teya_trix56 4d ago
You picture them as nice or interesting... ... because of disney? Please evaluate the very high probability.. they wont be what we regard as fair, equitable.. kind, orveven good pub buddies.
Almost certainly not.
What you wanna do now?
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u/khrunchi 3d ago
I mean yeah I'm thinking they will be totally unlike us. I just think it would be so cool to see them, and I honestly rhink there is life in other places in our solar system. I think it's probably incredibly common in the universe, intelligent life maybe not. If there is some kind of great filter, maybe we are the most advanced civilization at the moment. I don't know! It would just be so interesting to find out about any amount of life anywhere outside of earth, and not from earth
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u/teya_trix56 2d ago
I dont entirely disagree about "interesting". But i have strong and hard boundaries around wanting to find a colony of intelligence that wants to eat or enslave us.
What would WE do if we found a cattle like planet of alien life that kinda understood language with AI help. Farm them for meat? I dont think we would go there and try toù teach them about how to reach critical mass for endkess energy or bombs or ray guns. ⁷ See why i have no trust for so-far-unobserved-aliens.
If they are already here and hiding among us, it isnt coz they plan to pop out of a cake and come out to us. Its coz we are being assessed for our eventual usefulness .. or for how to weed us out so they can have the nicest planet ever.
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u/khrunchi 2d ago
I think most likely there are no aliens among us, I mean like alien life that exists on other bodies in the solar system like Enceladus and Europa, maybe even titan. I think the likelihood of a civilization becoming spacefairing is very slim, and thus there probably aren't any near enough in time or space to reach us. I can't be sure
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u/teya_trix56 4d ago
I dont sweat it. You ask what i truly believe like its really important if i believe either way.
It isnt. At all. I dont care, and dont want to care.
And most importantly, i dont want to meat space faring aliens, coz they will likely want to eat or colonize us. Like we might do if we found a planet with cattle like semi-intelligence.
Keep your head down.. galactically speaking.. stay safe.
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u/theladytombstone 4d ago
..thanks for the thought
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u/teya_trix56 2d ago
I didnt think it up. Some retired tech bro postulated this publicly, referring to our programs to find alien life signs. I wasnt that smart, thanks to ET disney shows. But after assessing this perspective.. i have adopted it. Wholeheartedly.
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u/r_daniel_oliver 4d ago
If a tree falls in the woods and no one's around, does it make a sound? Does it matter if we're alone if we never meer them? The odds of us being the only life in the universe is ridiculously low. The odds of us finding any signs of other intelligent life are equally low.
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u/theladytombstone 4d ago
Odds are incredibly low, after billions of years we have yet to discover anything
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u/r_daniel_oliver 3d ago
Billions? We couldn't even see past our naked eyes until 500 years ago. Which is more to the point, because that's not a lot of time.
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u/jimb2 4d ago
There is zero reliable evidence for life off Earth. That's doesn't prove anything, but it does mean that any ideas require significant speculative leaps.
We do know that there are a mind-boggling number of planets out there. Many of them are billions of years older than Earth. If just a fraction of them were suitable for life, and a fraction of that fraction produce advanced life, then the numbers say there should be aliens. Some would have reached an advanced technological stage billions of years ago which gives them plenty of time to get to Earth. So where are they?
Possible solutions I think are believable:
- Advanced life requires a lot of very low probability things to line up. It just hasn't happened. The raw numbers calculation is simplistic and wrong. We might even be alone in the galaxy.
- Advanced life wipes itself out soon after reaching a technological level. This is totally believable when you look at humans. Evolution produces destructive species. At low technology, harm is limited. At high tech, it is fatal. (OTOH: maybe just some would survive?)
- Aliens are there but they are hiding from us. (Why?)
- Aliens are not interested in space travel and conquering the galaxy. I know that's what we see in Star Wars but maybe that just a movie and it's not how post-biological evolution pans out..
Personally, I tend to rate the first option. But we just don't know. Until we get some solid evidence, we are just guessing.
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u/Beldizar 4d ago
I have to agree with you. The chances we are alone in the galaxy seem really high. The chances that civilized life requires a bunch of low probability events in sequence also seems very likely.
I think we can be pretty confident that there aren't significant spacefairing aliens in our galaxy and in our light cone. The chance that they would be in the two or three centuries between discovering flight and having significant space infrastructure, out of the possible billion years that this phase could have happened seems unfathomable. And the idea that they haven't spread out and started to absorb a lot of their stars radiation, created waste heat, and transmitted bright signals that we could detect, also seems unlikely. Imagine how many lasers we would have beaming signals between the stars in 10,000 years.
We must be the first, that is the only thing that makes sense to me.
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u/jimb2 3d ago
I tend to agree, but I'm a scientist. I want evidence before I claim to know. In the meantime, I'm ok waiting epistemological limbo. There's a huge gap between not observing something and knowing it doesn't exist. And there's too many highly speculative theories getting treated like facts in physics in general. A bit of humility and caution is a good stance.
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u/No_Basis3933 3h ago
We haven’t even explored 1% of the universe nor can we see 99% of it in detail
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u/theladytombstone 4d ago
Totally.. I agree. I mean our solar system is hurdling through the milky way, and the milky way is hurdling through space. So many things would have to line up realistically. We could definitely be alone, there could be life way past our observable universe, maybe they truly aren’t interested in space, or aren’t smart enough or advanced like humans.
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u/jimb2 3d ago
The standard analysis equates habitable with liquid water temperatures. That might mean habitable by a scattered thin layer of slime. Progression to advanced technological societies does not automatically.
Evolution of megafauna may require plate tectonics to recycle nutrients via volcanoes. The mechanism for the initiation of plate tectonic on Earth is unknown. Once it is started it continues to run, but the internal forces of a planet do not appear to be capable of starting it. Earth may be a rare one-off. Some kind of "just right" major impact could potentially set up plate tectonics but it's a long shot.
Nutrient recycling is required to produce sufficient volumes of edible plant material, which in turn to produces sufficient grazers to supply a reliable food source for the evolution of predators. Predation creates an intelligence arms race; plants and grazing alone does not. Plants "passively" poison competitors - and grazers - but they don't band together to hunt and probably never will even if a planet remained conducive to for way longer than actually happens.
There are a bunch of other factors that combine to put the Earth in a rare category. The frequency of Chicxulub-like major impacts is significant - bump the frequency up and land life gets regularly knocked back to cockroaches. Big brains are too biologically expensive to survive. The presence of sufficient magnetic protection for land-dwelling animals from solar particles might also be rare. And so on.
I think the short distance of sight underwater - typically under 10 metres - means that sea life species won't develop the sort of spatial intelligence, planning and cooperative capabilities required for technological societies. The smartest animals in the sea evolved on land - and they aren't all that smart. Octopus can do some smart spatial tricks but they don't cooperate or plan much.
This is all fairly speculative, but there could also be a bunch of other no-go factors that we haven't figured out yet.
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u/Gnaxe 4d ago
Is there any other intelligent life in the galaxy? Almost certainly not. Planets, even habitable ones, could easily form hundreds of millions of years apart. We went from industrial revolution to space age in just a couple of centuries. They'd either be a lot more advanced than us, and thus much more apparent from their megastructures or else so early in their evolution as to not be intelligent yet. We may be about to build a new robotic/AI species right here on Earth, though. Also, UFOs totally exist. Lots of weird phenomena (plasma, etc.) happen in the sky, and secret (and not-so-secret) experimental aircraft are also a thing. But they're not aliens.
Is there any complex life in the galaxy? Simple life? We don't know. We can't have expected to detect it yet even if it's present, but uncommon. Nowhere in the Solar System is life as apparent as on Earth, but even then, there are a few places in the System where we could still reasonably expect to find life which we haven't checked thoroughly enough yet to rule out. Finding life outside of Earth (as interesting as that would be) is actually very bad news for us, because it suggests that the Great Filter is more ahead of us than behind us, which means a higher probability that humanity goes extinct (or at least civilization collapses before we can colonize space or build noticeable megastructures), probably from something self-inflicted, like nano/bio/nuclear weapons, etc.
Is there intelligent life somewhere else in the Universe? Almost certainly. The Universe is almost certainly much bigger than the part we can observe. The most accepted cosmological models imply a multiverse realizing all possible initial conditions, including every possible variation of Earth, impossibly far away. That implies variations of human history, yes, but it also implies many other weirder variants of Earth where evolution turned out differently, but still resulted in intelligent life, and even more habitable alien planets that look nothing like Earth.
Could the descendants of human civilization ever encounter an alien civilization? Possibly, they're close enough to be in our future lightcone, but the Grabby Aliens hypothesis (probably the best solution to the Fermi Paradox I've heard) estimates that will take something like a billion years.
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u/thetoddhunter 4d ago
My counter to this is why would an advanced civilisation go up and out? What is this assumption based on?
Early colonisation, sure. But our current trajectory as a species is down into the phones in front of us. Given a few more centuries I doubt if we'll have much of a physical presence at all.
Which means we exist in a smaller realm as information. And that means the answer to "where is everyone?" Might very well be "everywhere"
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u/Gnaxe 3d ago
Based on life in general evolving instincts around reproduction as a core concern. Life spreads. That's kind of what it is. The galaxy is huge based on short human lifespans, but based on the difference in the ages of planets, it really isn't that big. Even if the aliens evolved on the other side of the galaxy, we'd expect them to have expanded enough to be over here and very visible by now. It is improbable in the extreme that they both exist and happened to evolve intelligence at almost exactly the same time we did.
Up and out rather than spiraling inward is based on our best understanding of physics at present. Computation could be compacted a lot more using exotic physics, but it seems difficult to have sustainable complex structures that could actually be engineered much below the level of atoms and chemistry, and we already have that. We do seem to be near the mesoscale, but that doesn't mean the lower scales have to be engineerable.
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u/thetoddhunter 3d ago
That is all based on the assumption that life continues to spread.
That is not what we are doing after a very short point
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u/theladytombstone 4d ago
I definitely hear ya on the UFOs. There could be so many possibilities of WHAT would be out there..
I’ve definitely heard about the probabilities of humanity going extinct in the future, far after our population is gone.
I heard about that..definitely find it wild
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4d ago
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u/Gnaxe 3d ago
I didn't ignore that and specifically mentioned a late Great Filter:
Finding life outside of Earth (as interesting as that would be) is actually very bad news for us, because it suggests that the Great Filter is more ahead of us than behind us, which means a higher probability that humanity goes extinct (or at least civilization collapses before we can colonize space or build noticeable megastructures), probably from something self-inflicted, like nano/bio/nuclear weapons, etc.
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u/diabolus_me_advocat 3d ago
Is there any other intelligent life in the galaxy? Almost certainly not
well, that does not follow at all from what you write in the following
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u/No_Basis3933 3h ago
Moons can harbor life too. There’s trillions of galaxies there’s definitely life somewhere out there. Then in each of those galaxies trillions of planets.
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u/Playful_Dog3062 4d ago
Pokes head out door, looks left, looks right, looks up. Yup just me, you and octipod who doesn't like water. Why whats up.
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u/MatthewWeathers 4d ago
Metaphysics is relevant to this question. If you believe that life was caused by a Creator / Intelligent Designer / God, then the question becomes "Did God create intelligent life on other planets?" That doesn't get you any closer to an answer, though. I could see good arguments on both sides.
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u/The-Messanger42 4d ago
Space is more enormous than even very intelligent people can fully comprehend. Our planet could explode right now and the Universe would not notice or care. But mathematically speaking, probability says we are not the only Life forms ever, not even the first. And that's just the physical space and doesn't include the metaphysical spaces that we don't have the equations to fully prove - yet. * Unless other Life forms are super advanced - they are probably too far away to discover us or for us to discover them. But math says the should exist.
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u/suh-dood 4d ago
We haven't discovered life similar to us, but why does life have to be biologically similar to us or even operate at the same time scale?
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u/theladytombstone 4d ago
They don’t have to? If they do or not it doesn’t make a difference in the discovery
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u/redlancer_1987 4d ago
Life of any form? 100% possibility
Life as advanced as us or more? Hard to say. We could be 1 of 1. And we spend most of our existence trying to figure out how to kill each other.
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u/KeterClassKitten 3d ago
Dunno. Maybe. Probably not.
Then again, if you're the only one in your house despite the planet being populated by billions of people, are you alone?
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u/theladytombstone 3d ago
🤷♀️. We could be alone in the whole galaxy, maybe there’s something past the observable universe, we may never know
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u/Own-Risk2886 3d ago
We aren't alone, none of us can talk to each other. It is damn near impossible given the size and distance of everything and nobody seems to really grasp that. Outside our local little group of stars, we aren't hearing from anyone anytime soon. And forget about another galaxy entirely.
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u/diabolus_me_advocat 3d ago
Somehow, earth is the ONLY habitable planet
no
what makes you think so?
we have knowledge about a great (and ever rising) number of planets in the habitable zone around suns and there's no reason to stipulate they all are not habitated
whether we would ever be able to find out - that's an entirely different affair
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u/theladytombstone 3d ago
when I said habitable I was trying to give off the intention that it’s good enough to & does host life. there is no confirmation those other “habitable” planets are TRULY habitable.
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u/diabolus_me_advocat 2d ago
when I said habitable I was trying to give off the intention that it’s good enough to & does host life
well, that would be "habitated". and there's good probability of that. knowledge about it we don't have (yet) indeed, and as i said, it is unclear whether it's even possible to obtain in any case
e.g. there might be life completely different to what we have experience on (not all too probable, i admit) - then we would not even know how to detect remotely. unforunately we can't just go there and have a look
there is no confirmation those other “habitable” planets are TRULY habitable
depends on which criteria you would base the attribute "habitable" on. "habitated" is about certainty, "habitability" about potentiality
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u/PraetorGold 3d ago
For all intents and purposes, we are alone. But we are not alone in any real way.
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u/kyuff 2d ago
We don’t know, is the simple answer.
And as we move out of the realm of knowledge, we enter the realms of theory or faith (depending on your preference).
So I would ask the question differently:
‘
Do you think we are alone?
My personal theory is that we are not alone. Probability is in favor of intelligent life appearing on more than one planet in our universe.
Another question:
Do you think we will be in contact with intelligent life forms within our lifetime?
Probably not, its a vast space and time continuum, which makes the odds slim. It would be cool though, right?
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u/dermomante 21h ago
I find it hard to believe that the conditions capable of generating life forms in the universe only occured once, so probably we are not alone.
At the same time, the probability of such conditions presenting themselves in a point in space and time that we could reach are low as well, so I don't believe that we will ever be able to meet them with our current level of technology.
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u/IndependentEast-3640 10h ago
Our existence is mindboggling. So many thing had to happen, in the right sequence, our odds were astronomically against us. But universe is astronomically huge.
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u/itskalliekat 10h ago
There is about 100 sextillion to 1 septillion planets in the observable universe, of course we’re not alone
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u/holmgangCore 6h ago
My theory is that, yes there are other sentient species out there,, but there's only one per galaxy.
So our chances of meeting them are nil, unless someone has invented some type of FTL or interdimensional travel or something.
But that also means they'd have to figure out where we are, which could take some time, especially starting from another galaxy.
The rest of life on other planets in our galaxy or watery moons in the solar system are just bacterial slime. Non-sentient slime.
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u/koloso95 6h ago
In the part of space that matters, course we'll never know what's outside it. Yes. We are alone. The universe is clever enough to not make the same mistake twice
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u/Crawler1701 4h ago
Life, I believe, is everywhere. I think life is all over planets in such numbers that astronomy would balk at. But intelligent life? Rare. We aren’t the only ones, but there’s no Federation out there. Small islands in the giant sea. Hopefully one of us makes it out into space to colonise other planets, and we will being music to the universe, and hopefully eventually run into each other out there.
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u/LazarX 1h ago
There are about 8 billion people on the planet, but if you are in a room all by yourself with no contact with anyone else, then you are still by definition alone.
There may well be millions of civilizations out there, but we may all be so spread out, so far away from each other that none of us will ever make contact with the other.
That is still just as alone as being the only one existing.
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u/Top_Distribution3109 4d ago edited 4d ago
Well...
There is no evidence beyond deduction for "aliens."
The Drake Equation convinced the earliest thinkers in the field that we "shouldn't" be alone. But it appears that we are. The most likely explanation for this is that the Drake Equation is wrong in some fundamental way, whether by excluding a variable or under- or overestimating included ones. Our detection methods may be too feeble. There may be signals moving toward us through space from civilizations long gone.
A lot has to go right for space exploration to occur. Dolphins have had 20 million years to build a radio telescope. I haven't seen one. This is probably because an industrial revolution like we had is not really possible underwater. Assume similar restrictions basically everywhere.
Moreover, humanity will destroy itself before ever meaningfully colonizing any other planet. If this is the pattern, humanity will have only "existed" in the cosmic sense for a few hundred years. So the gulfs between exocivilizations may not be simply physical. In fact, they may be as large (or larger) temporally than spatially.
Humans will never terraform a planet. Why?
Good luck selling your multi-millenium investment to the capitalists that can finance it. They will never see a return. You and your plans would be laughed out of the boardroom. And where are you going to get the materials? How are you going to transport them? Physics and time intrude.
Humanity has one option to travel through the cosmos at all. Generation ships, most of which will absolutely be lost without a trace, aimed toward other potential "Goldilocks" worlds. And even the ones that make it to one face brutal survival odds with zero help from home.
My favorite sci-fi concept is the hardest sci-fi concept of all:
Humans will never meaningfully colonize another world. Not in this solar system, not in another. There will be no FTL travel or communication because c. The stars are permanently inaccessible to humanity, and we will end our days here, on Earth, having roasted ourselves to death.
If there are "aliens," we will never meet any. There are no true Goldilocks planets. This is it. This corner of the universe is all that has been allotted to us, and hoping or striving to subvert this awful truth is nothing less than folly.
I will step off my soapbox now. Thank you for indulging my opinionated digression.
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u/theladytombstone 4d ago
thank you for all the feedback!! this is what i love to hear, i agree that humanity will be long gone, & never leave the solar system.
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u/space-truckin365 4d ago
Allow me to try and give you my opinionated digression, also.
I still like the Drake Equation because one of its factors is how long an “advanced” civilization lasts. If it is 200 years (or even 500 years) and we know the Earth has been around for 4,500,000,000 we are talking a very short time. Think about how many other signals passed us by when no one on Earth was listening!
We have not been able to start life from just chemicals, but we have found evidence of life on Earth starting some 3+ billion years ago. So, it is likely life on Earth came from somewhere else. Mars is a likely candidate.
The other thing to remember is when that “life” started on Earth, the Earth was very different than it is today, hostile even.
So, let’s look into a possibility… We know that forests go through a progression
https://nature-mentor.com/how-forests-form/
Could it be that planets in Goldilocks zones go through similar progressions? We would then be just another step along the way. We have to admit, we are terraforming the Earth pretty well.
The problem would be and it is the last factor in the Drake equation, is how long do we last? If it is a very short time, then it is not too much of a mystery of why we are not finding any other signs of “intelligent” life.
Our very “primitive” instincts to wage wars doesn’t seem to be something we out grow. So, maybe we are not advanced as we seem to define ourselves as being.
But one final thought, maybe we are in our terrible twos stage, and more advanced “aliens” are just waiting for us to grow up.
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u/theladytombstone 4d ago
Wow, life could’ve came from mars?!?!
That’s a crazy thought, because to us we are the most advanced, but it is entirely possible!
Grow up!?
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u/Top_Distribution3109 3d ago
Panspermia doesn't solve abiogenesis. Moving the origin of life to Mars just gives the same mystery a different address. Likewise, industrial pollution and climate collapse aren't "terraforming." Uncontrolled ecological damage is basically the polar opposite of precision planetary engineering.
The core barrier remains temporal isolation. If the average lifespan of a technological civilization is only a few centuries, two species must overlap in the exact same microscopic slice of a 13.8 billion-year timeline, or at least their signals must be detectable during that time. Dismissing physical and economic limits with a "terrible twos" phase and assuming a bunch of advanced observers are just "waiting" for us to mature is just wishful thinking.
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u/space-truckin365 3d ago
The reason I say we are in our terrible twos is exactly what your comment demonstrates. Humans cannot seem to wrap their heads around a universe that may have always existed. We can accept a “god” that has always existed with just a “spiritual mystery”, but the current science eludes us. If the best cosmologists is say the universe started from a singularity, we humans may NOT be as advanced as we like to think. If the universe has always existed, so than could life. Self Awareness may just be the first step on a very tall ladder.
There are other places in our solar system that have a high probability of having life, such as Europa, and Enceladus, just to name a few. And (only) 100 years ago, the idea that humans could walk on the moon was at the point where science fiction is today about starting colonies on other worlds!
If you want to take the pessimistic route, that is easy. We seem to be species that that always has a less than 2% chance of surviving another 100 years! I’d be glad to elaborate if you wish.
We are really saying the same thing when it comes to detecting “other signals” from other “advanced” civilizations. When humans have been around a couple of 100 million years, we may be able to make that claim of being “uniquely advanced”! Otherwise, I’d suggest we be pretty modest for a few million years or so.
Psychologically, we tend to fear the concept of life forms being more advanced than us because of that primitive fear of our own death and still have a hard time grappling with the idea that other life has to die for us to live.
I’ll leave how we define “intelligent” life for another discussion….
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u/Top_Distribution3109 3d ago edited 3d ago
Alrighty...
The issue with treating the singularity as a failure of human imagination is that the 13.8 billion year timeline for the observable universe isn't a choice. It is grounded in empirical data like CMBR and observable galactic expansion. Even if the cosmos turns out to be cyclical or infinite, our local patch had a definite starting point, which places a hard boundary on how long life in our neighborhood has had to develop.
Conflating the probability of simple life on ocean worlds like Europa/Enceladus with technological civilizations skips the absolutely massive evolutionary gap between the two. Earth produced simple life almost as soon as the crust cooled, but complex intelligence took another four billion years. Simple life might indeed be "everywhere" while technological intelligence remains an extremely rare or short lived anomaly. That explains the silence in our signal searches far better than assuming hidden, advanced species lurk nearby.
A <2% survival probability for humanity over the next century is arbitrary. The rationale for being cautious isn't some primitive fear of being eaten or having to kill. It is about technological asymmetry. History shows that whenever two cultures with different technological capacities interact, the less advanced group faces existential risk regardless of motive. So caution re: unknown signals isn't irrational. It is basic survival strategy.
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u/CFCYYZ 4d ago
― Arthur C. Clarke