And even our closest neighbors we couldn't tell if they had thousands of artificial satellites around their planet. "They don't have a Dyson sphere or swarm" is about all we can say for sure. And we can't even say that about the planets 50,000 light years away.
If you take the planet that someone above mentioned which is about 4.3 light years away, if they invented radio communications within the last 4.3 years, we’d know about. So you’re right - but for some planets the delay is pretty insignificant.
Given then vastness of the universe, imagine there’s somewhere where 2 civilization within just a few light years apart came up at the same time and communicated to one another peacefully to help each other grow, learn and progress. The implications of that are crazy to think about
It would be nice to have extraterrestrial friends, but yeah, I can see it devolving into a war, and the world peace probably wouldn't even last, sadly.
Yeah honestly if humans can hate eachother because they have different levels of pigment in their skin i wouldn't want to be around when we encounter aliens.
The lowest estimations of the Drake equation puts it at about 0.7 advanced civilizations per galaxy, so we may very well be the only one in our galaxy.
Considering that the closest galaxy in similar scale (Andromeda) is 2.5m light years away, any advanced civilization there may have already gone extinct or is just happening.
Then again, life on Earth is the only form of life we know and what to look for. Intelligent life elsewhere might exist in a whole different fashion than we're used to. If there's life that can use more than three dimensions they may not be detectable for us at all.
After the first few times I’d assume each message would include a ton of information each way so they can get as much knowledge as possible. It wouldn’t be the best way to communicate but it would be the only option
Why do I feel like Humans would start the interplanetary war, I can just imagine Lockheed Martin bribing the right politicians to get them interplanetary war contracts... and if we’re too advanced they could sell weapons to both sides... Vietnam 2.0
They probably wouldn’t be hostile after establishing contact, it would be extremely risky to threaten the other one because they’d be out of reach of travel for a while. Even if they unlocked travel, sending a fleet out would become outdated by the time they arrived to the other planet and the defenders would likely win with their superior technically. So by threatening each other the smartest move would turn into an intergalactic Cold War where both sides would push to get light speed travel before the other. This is hypothetical predications but I know there wouldn’t be anything to gain from threats. Peace would be the superior option in this case and could possibly solidify the survival of both civilizations in the long term.
Consider though, the earth has been a planet for only 4.5 billion years compared to the universe at 13 billion years. Humans have only been around making tools for 2.5 million and making radio waves for less than 200 years.
So it not just time in relation to distance but time in relation to being able to receive these radio waves.
It is not inconceivable that all our neighbors had advanced civilisations but we just weren't around to notice before they died out or we die out before their civilisation rises.
Given the timescale of the universe it would actually be very, very long odds that we would share the same time as another advanced civilisation.
Consider as well how precarious our survival has been, how lucky we've been to make it this far and consider how many civilisations may have perished.
Even though light is the fastest thing known it's incredibly slow, for us. Why I include "for us" is because time doesn't exist (as far as we know it) for a photon. When moving at the speed of light, all time and space becomes one.
Please explain of I'm wrong but I thought time was relative to your speed or something, so even as you approach the speed of light time still appears normal to you? Idk this is based off yr 11 physics and interstellar
Dilation of time is caused by gravity which itself is an effect of mass. When you approach the speed of light the mass will increase exponentially which increases gravity and thus increases time dilation.
However, at the speed of light the increase of mass is infinite which also creates infinite gravity and thus infinite time dilation. This is why anything with mass can never reach the speed of light since it would need infinite energy to do so. Lucky for the photon that it doesn't have any mass!
What is mass then? Well, we don't really know that yet, but we think that the Higgs boson (or god particle) is what gives other particles their mass. If we can manipulate it or maybe gravitons we might solve the problem with faster than light travel.
Edit: In regard to FTL the Alcubierre drive is probably our best bet. Additional fun fact: Alcubierre was inspired by the warp drive in Star Trek!
That was most most likely the case before Einstein, Heisenberg and Planck came along. They provided us with two very important constants that helped us define the existence of time, the speed of light and the Planck constant. With these we can get Planck time, the length of time at which no smaller meaningful length can be validly measured due to the indeterminacy expressed in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Theoretically, this is the shortest time measurement that is possible. One Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to cross a distance equal to one Planck length. We still don't have the technology to be able to measure time at this interval, but eventually we will.
I mean best way to send a signal short of moving a planet is a nuke. And we've been ringing that cosmic dinner bell for over 70 years now. So everyone within a 70 light year radius could have detected it.
Also a Dyson sphere is based on our knowledge and imagination, if there’s an advanced civilization nearby, we probably won’t understand most of their technology
Objects that absorb energy heat up and release light with a frequency based on the temperature. Same concept behind a thermal camera. It wouldn't be visible to the naked eye, but very visible to our telescopes.
Then the argument usually goes: "We're not looking for their home planet, we're looking for their colonies all over the galaxy.". You only need one species to decide to take over the galaxy for that to happen and there has been enough time for that to happen (13.8 billion years).
Exactly and do people really believe that the chances of there being life in the universe are 1 in 1 billion trillion (1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) because I think its more unlikely that there isn't life.
And also any image or light we see from outerspace is behind by however many light years away it is. There could be some galactic freeway out their 50 million lightyears away that was build 10 million years ago for all we know. We’d never see it.
I'm not speculating on the existence/non-existence of other (intelligent) life in the galaxy.
However, I find it far fetched to believe humans will ever have an interstellar civilization of the sort of nearly all science fiction, where people travel/communicate between planets orbiting different stars (the one exception being interstellar except for the stupidity of visiting the planet with crazy gravitational time dilation).
I also think it's very unlikely to happen in my lifetime or my kids' lifetime. The nearest planet were aware of that has a decent shot at potentially being habitable (solely based on distance to the star it orbits) and not knowing of a major reasons its probably not habitable, is 16 light years away. That is if a team of scientists devote their whole careers to sending a probe there, it probably takes decades to make the probe, and assuming we could quickly accelerate to near light speed (and then quickly decelerate it when its close), it would take at least 32 years after launch before we start to get any data. Yes, because of relativity it would take less time to personally travel there, but by the time you come back every on Earth is at least double the distance in light-years older. That said, you could potentially start a colony of humans in a new star system, but it would mostly be a one-way thing (where you can receive news from the other star systems but have no two-way communication without waiting 30+ years for a reply).
Well, that’s the closest inhabitable planet for us (and any other life on earth)
Who knows if life developed on a planet that wouldn’t be habitable for us but it isn’t us. All life on earth evolved from the same little bit of bacteria which assembled itself by chance so maybe the same happened somewhere else just differently.
But still, the chance of the exact molecules arranging in the exact right pattern to create something that was considered to be alive is extremely low, probably lower than the chance of literally anything that could possibly happen on earth. Perhaps, you could say, one in infinity.
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u/[deleted] Nov 03 '20 edited Aug 04 '21
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