I've been fretting more and more about the Fermi Paradox

[mainer]

Basically: there must be alien life in the universe, so where is everyone?
One explanation: they’ve all annihilated themselves. With advancing knowledge comes nuclear capability. Are advanced civilizations capable of resisting the temptation to use those weapons or is it inevitable they all destroy themselves?

All it takes is a single Putin, who would rather destroy the world than accept defeat.

Sorry to share my gloom, but I fear all the goodness within humanity seems unable to counteract the evil that also resides in us. I look at Ukraine and the rise of Trump and his MAGATS and I am just grateful I lived in a time before the annihilation.

[Stuart G]

1. No....Aliens have not ..."annihilated themselves"..They have been here, taken a look, and concluded:

that these ..."Humans are much too dangerous to have contact with"....

. ........."Just look at their history...see what they have done too themselves!!..Why deal with these fools?"

.That is it, and that is all..!!! .
..................and if these aliens have the intelligence to exceed the speed of light to get here,

..................then they also have the intelligence to stay away from ....humans!

[LastDemocratInSC]

14. In other words, the Orion Arm of the Milky Way

that's our home and that we think is so beautiful above at night is considered by others to be a cosmic back alley populated by seedy, ne'er do well creatures.

Based on my experience they are right about that half of the time.

[Cuthbert Allgood]

2. How close do you think they would have to be for them to know about us

and/or them to know about us? Is there any reason they would have to be more advanced than us? If they are very advanced, why would they want anything to do with us. Plus add in Hawkings consideration that we don't want aliens to come here because they will likely just use the plant for resources if they did.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. I'll Add This

If a superluminal capable species came TOWARD earth, I'd expect them to be able to "park" a half million miles out, bend the light from behind them to the front, making themselves invisible, and have their anthropologists study our comparatively primitive culture at a safe distance.
The notion that they would need low altitude excursion in shuttles makes no sense to me.
I do disagree with Hawking's assessment, though.
It would be more efficient to tap resources from nebulae than to deal with atmospheric & gravitational effects of a planet sized object.
And, there'd be zero interference or, if they had such a thing, moral dilemmas.
Simpler to get those resources elsewhere in space.

[Beetwasher.]

12. If They are So Advanced, They Would Have Machines That Would do all The Work

They wouldn't need to personally come anywhere near us and we'd never know we were under observation.

[ProfessorGAC]

15. We Agree Completely

We would never know. They could learn massive amounts about us from a half light year away. If something super interesting comes up, they move in a a light day.
We've been transmitting high power broadcasts for over 90 years.
In a year, they'd know more 20th century history than most humans!

[Crunchy Frog]

40. Or they've mastered nanotechnology

and they're observing us from a small collection of dust in the Oort Cloud.

[Dial H For Hero]

24. I recall reading that we could detect the electromagnetic emissions of the Earth out to about 100

light years or so. That's about 0.0005% of the Milky Way galaxy. Let's presume that over the coming centuries such technology advances by a factor of 100. Because of the square cube law, we would now be able to detect such a source out to around one thousand light years. Which, to put it in perspective, is roughly 0.5% of the volume of the Milky Way.

There could by hundreds of advanced civilizations in our galaxy alone, but unless one of that just happens to be next door (relatively speaking), we won't know if for hundreds to thousands of years. At least.

[Stuart G]

46. Here is the answer about "Aliens" Yes, they exist and they have been here, they are avoiding us....

and here is the reason why.....................please read the rest..............Why are they avoiding us?
In our galaxy there are hundreds of thousands of planets beside ours. If you think our star is the ..........

....only one with planets............I think you are wrong....There are millions of stars in our galaxy..Is that correct?


And if one in a hundred stars had planets, there would be millions of planets out there............So, again one in 50 have
life, and of those thousands of planets that have life. Some would have.."intelligent life"....Who knows who/what that would
be............or how many have "intelligent life".............OK...here is the answer.............

So if you think we are the ....Only Intelligent Life among thousands of planets with "intelligent life..............

.....Well I think you are wrong...One more point...could some of those thousands of planets with "intelligent life["
.................be more advanced than us...by say....just 500 years............just 500 years...

Imagine if you can, talking to someone in the 1500s and telling that person what life would be like in 2020.
...........Just 500 years later? Who in the 1500s. would believe how we live now?

So...Here is the point:....If some alien intelligent race planet has advanced just 500 years ahead of us, can you imagine
those beings coming to earth and taking a look at us, and saying..."No communications with these beings, they are
much too dangerous and violent to know that we exist. & we need to warn others to stay away from the planet known as "Earth"

You get the picture?...Ain't complicated is it? Do we, human beings, have a history of trying "destroy ourselves?

..............Case closed, the Aliens have been here, taken a look, said...No Thanks" to the beings on planet Earth.
...They also said, "The humans are much too violent, we will come back in one hundred years and take another look and maybe those beings have improved and become more.."peaceful"

[GaYellowDawg]

47. So many assumptions, so little evidence.

Here are some of the problems with your post:

1. You have no way of defining the frequency with which life actually occurs and under which conditions.
2. You have no way of defining the frequency with which life reaches a state of intelligence.
3. You have no way of discerning the motivations of an alien intelligence.
4. You have zero concrete evidence of alien intelligences observing or visiting us.
5. You have no way of discerning how alien intelligences would judge us.

In other words, you have no actual idea whether life exists outside of this planet, no evidence of intelligent life, whether other forms of intelligent life are even possible, no evidence to suggest that any putative alien intelligence has visited, and no means of discerning their moral code (or if they even have one). Basically, you don’t know 💩. This is where I usually refer to a house of cards, but you haven’t even drawn from the deck.

Case closed? You never had a case to begin with.

[alphafemale]

3. Does it really matter?

How many toddlers are you willing to watch raped in fear that Putin is going to do the that THAT.

[Delphinus]

31. Absolutely great question.

[iemanja]

4. The universe is enormous

Chances are any extraterrestrial life would make it this way. Your conclusion that they've all annihilated themselves doesn't make sense.

[mainer]

6. Not my conclusion. It was one of Fermi's theories

Basically it postulates that greed and power dooms every civilization once they advance to civilization-dooming weapons.

[PJMcK]

23. But Fermi had a sample of only one civilization

There is no way to know how aliens behave. None.

In fact, it's a bit hubristic to assume that alien life would be just like humans is a stretch.

[A HERETIC I AM]

45. Perhaps a bipedal humanoid form is a favored one for evolution....

particularly if the life is carbon based like this planet.

If any advanced species is going to build spacecraft, it will have to have something resembling hands with an opposable digit of some sort.

Maybe a being like Homo Sapiens isn't all that rare.

[2naSalit]

5. I wonder...

If it's alien life, why would we assume that it has any traits that we might recognize? They may not be in physical form, for instance.

So why would they have to have destroyed themselves just because we haven't seen them yet?

Maybe they know all about us and don't want anything to do with us.

[mainer]

8. Sometimes I don't want anything to do with us

I’d rather live in a world run by dogs.

[OAITW r.2.0]

7. Will we recognize non-carbon based life forms as intelligent entities?

[mainer]

10. That doesn't mean they won't destroy themselves

Evolution favors survival of the fittest, whether carbon based or not. The weak die out. Maybe the survival-based struggle for power and dominance predetermines our penchant to destroy our rivals— and thus ourselves.

[OAITW r.2.0]

13. Well said.

I suppose "fittest" is open to interpretation. Survival might require intelligence over physical prowess.

[TxGuitar]

61. well, survival of the organism most able

to adapt to its environment rather than the fittest or strongest.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

11. I suspect there just is no such thing as a warp drive. Space is vast. . . . nt

[Kaleva]

16. As the Universe is expanding, we can only and will only ever see a part of it.

The observable Universe is itself huge, about 90 billion light years in diameter. There may be millions of advanced civilizations out there right now but it could take millions or even billions of years yet before we detect signals confirming their existence.

[dweller]

17. I'm a Calvinist

✌🏻

[area51]

22. +1 n/t

[WestMichRad]

41. + another

nt

[lpbk2713]

18. Maybe they are still around.

It could be they have a higher level of intelligence and they know better than
to resolve their differences without using violence. And maybe they are wise
enough to not let thoughtless members of their society destroy their planet.

[mainer]

19. Arghh! Everyone is missing my point

It’s not about if aliens are here or whether they’re capable of reaching us or anything about the physics of space travel. It’s about whether evolution predisposes all civilizations, ours included, to be doomed to self-annihilation. And if we’ve now reached that horrible point.

[anarch]

21. I have reason to suspect that this planet has been visited

by intelligent life from elsewhere, just not widely acknowledged by our culture (and any evidence of such being ridiculed and rejected by most people)...if that's the case, that gives me hope in general that not all species wipe themselves out before being able to explore the galaxy.

That doesn't really help with our particular case, especially with this current situation, but it does make me think we're probably being very self-centered and unrealistic to think that alien life would necessarily resemble us or want to interact with us. Look at all the recent Navy UAP videos; those things are going to the ocean, they're probably hanging out with the octopuses and dolphins and such, and don't want anything to do with us violent apes.

[Kaleva]

25. Until we make contact or discover remnants of alien civilizations, we'll never know

the answer to your question.

[Irish_Dem]

30. Mainer: Survival goes to the most aggressive and greedy of a species?

Which means at some point everyone kills each other, destroys the planet and all civilization?

If this is true, earth has probably played out the end game many times before now. And had to start all over.

[mainer]

32. Only now do we have the means to destroy all

Past civilizations had spears, then arrows, then guns. We’ve had nuclear capability for less than a century and so far have managed to keep ourselves in check.

Now comes Putin.

[Irish_Dem]

33. I meant we may have reached this level before on this planet.

And blown it all up.

Who knows how many times we have done this to ourselves?

Evolution keeps driving us to the same conclusion.

[greenjar_01]

44. Every generation invents its own endtimes nonsense

It's wild to be out here pretending like you have some universe-level perspective when you barely have a perspective beyond the last ten years.

[mainer]

51. Fermi pondered this in the 1950s

It’s been pondered by SETI scientists. Why do you tell me it’s my generational nonsense, as if I’m an idiot who just came up with it?

[Ohio Joe]

49. Everything dies

Have we reached that point? I don't think so at all.

[struggle4progress]

20. Lots may be out there, but at very low density, so prohibitively expensive to find

[Dial H For Hero]

26. Even were an alien civilization comparable to our own to exist only a thousand light years away

(next door neighbors by galactic standards) we wouldn't be able to detect them.

[PJMcK]

27. The science of space is informative

Astrophysicists have shown that the universe is basically the same every where we look. The distant stars and galaxies are made up of the same elements that we know. If the chemistry is the same, it's likely that conditions on some planets will provide an opportunity for life to begin.

Not only are the elements the same throughout space, it appears that the physics are the same as we've learned. The ability to traverse the impossibly great distances of space would be a leap of knowledge that is far beyond our own technology, obviously. The ideas that have been proposed are worthy but far-fetched attempts, at least for now.

If I were religious, I'd find the enormous distances of space to be an important part of a creator's experiments in creating life. Each galactic Petri dish would be too far away from the others to cross pollinate and ruin each individual experiment.

Another idea is that given the really long history of the universe, perhaps interstellar civilizations don't exist at the same time so they haven't interacted.

My own belief is that the universe is teeming with life, most of which isn't what we call "intelligent." If there are species that are advanced enough to have interstellar transportation, they probably wouldn't be too interested in a civilization that burns fossil fuels.

All that I"m sure of is that we only have this planet to live on. We need to take better care of our home.

[WestMichRad]

39. Good comments!

For emphasis, take the enormous size of just our own galaxy, more than 105,000 light years across and containing 400 billion stars and probably many more planets than that. And there at least 200 billion galaxies (per consensus several years ago) in a universe that spans billions of light years.

In our lifetimes we can only observe a small sample in time of what has happened out there. Easy to miss something because we weren't looking at the right time.

And you're right, other galaxies are so far away that they effectively are completely isolated from us. At least, with our current knowledge of physics.

It seems inconceivable that conditions favoring the right chemical soup to generate life can occur nowhere else but here. I agree that the universe is likely to be teeming with life.

Communicating with an alien is nontrivial, though, when we have no knowledge of even what we're trying to communicate with. Think of proven communications like porpoises using sonar, or trees using mycorrhizal fungi to communicate with other trees in a forest. Fungi appear able to communicate with electrical pulses. Deep ocean fish can communicate with light.

We have no idea what we're trying to communicate with! They could easily be using something other than radio for communication, something that we can't detect from this distance.

It could be a long time before we confirm life elsewhere. We need to take better care of our own home!

[keithbvadu2]

28. 2 space aliens looking down on earth.

2 space aliens looking down on earth.
I see the dominant life form has developed space weapons.
Does this mean they are an emerging intelligence?
I don't think so. They have them aimed at themselves.

[usonian]

29. It's a test.

The compassionate survive.

[Xoan]

34. I've long wondered if time travel ...

told them we didn't make it.

[Spider Jerusalem]

35. Equally likely that they annihiliated themselves through self-induced climate catastrophe

we're still on track for that, it's just going slower than a nuclear war would.

On edit, see here: https://thebulletin.org/2019/07/did-climate-change-destroy-the-aliens/

[brooklynite]

36. "so where is everyone? " How about: billions of miles away?

Yes, statistically there must be life elsewhere in the universe. But people don't think about gig really distant other life-supporting planets would have to be.

The closest, Alpha Centauri is four Light Years away. Assuming civilizations haven't found a way to achieve faster than light travel, that's an immense distance to cover. Assuming they knew that WE existed. Assuming Alpha Centauri doesn't have a space-faring civilization, you're adding huge amounts of distance and travel time to other prospective sites.

None of this says anything about their ability to maintain an active civilization.

[The Revolution]

59. von Neumann probes

Traveling at 0.1c could cover the entire galaxy in well under 1 million years. Over billions of years there is enough time for this to have occurred thousands of times.

The distances are vast, but so is time.

[Xolodno]

37. There is a planet where they think it rains diamonds.

So, with that info, its going to be very diverse out there.

Is there life out there? Has to be. I'm religious, but I'm with Giordano Bruno when he says "your God is too small", the level of consciousness and intelligence to birth this and even other universes into being is beyond our comprehension. But with that said, its also entirely possible:

1. None of it has evolved to our level and we are really the most dominant species as of now. Remember, we've been around for over a hundred thousand years....but only in the last six thousand (as far as we know) we have developed to the level of technology we are at.

2. We are just in part of the galaxy that hasn't seen much action.

3. They do know about us, but, its like the Star Trek prime directive, they have to wait to see if we evolve to be community members of the galaxy.

4. They've evolved so far, they no longer exist in three dimensions. Hence we can't "see" them.

And what if we are aliens? Its not lost on me that humans can vanish from this planet and everything will not only carry on, but even better.

Yeah, I'm sure none of that helped.

[Crunchy Frog]

38. I disagree with the underlying premise of the Fermi Paradox.

The real question that they're asking is not "where is everyone?" but "why aren't they here?"

And with the universe as vast as it is, why would they be here? And even if they were here, why would we expect it to be in a form which we could detect, presuming that their technology is millions or billions of years more advanced than our own?

In other words, I think the question is excessively anthropocentric.

I doubt that humans will actually be wiped out, even if Putin decides to do his worst. If we are wiped out, the tardigrades will inherit the Earth, and will hopefully do better than we have.

[Retired Engineer Bob]

42. I thought this is an interesting background on the discussion

https://www.planetary.org/articles/fermi-paradox-drake-equation

[greenjar_01]

43. Yeesh

[eShirl]

48. They're spread out over the vast distances of space,

all looking up and wondering the same thing.

[Amishman]

50. My brother-in-law has a strange take - the Fermi Paradox helps him believe in God

He says that not only given the fact that no one seems to be out there, but given the delays caused by the speed of light, it increasingly looks like no other civilizations have ever been out there.

He sees God in this contradiction, that the universe was created for us to explore. He sees this as meaning that the 'plan' for humanity is unbelievably long and vast, and that we are at the very beginning of it.

He probably reads too much sci-fi, but there is a certain appeal to it.

[mainer]

52. That's why discovery of aliens would shake Christianity's foundations

I did research at NASA some years ago, and there was quiet chatter about the danger of religious terrorism should NASA ever make such an announcement.

[LiberatedUSA]

53. Have you considered we aren't alone in the grand scheme of time?

The universe is so old and we don’t know if civilizations naturally always go extinct due to all sorts of factors. Even a civilization that lasted for 500,000 years would be long dead to us. So maybe we (civilizations) pop up at different times.

Or maybe the signals they have left for us to find are not possible for us to detect yet.

Or maybe a civilization did get very advanced and we and our universe are like an ant hill. We need to stay in our sandbox or they make themselves known.

Or we could be a simulation.

Or they aren’t interested. Maybe they got tech enough to heal everything and live long, but don’t care to venture out.

[machoneman]

54. Best hope they never come here. "It's a cook book"!

[SmallFry]

55. One thing that would do us all well when thinking about this topic.

Leave human arrogance behind.

So many people think of potential alien life from a human centric perspective. There is zero reason for that scientifically or logically.

[Earth-shine]

56. I recently saw an interview with Brian Cox, who is a well-known British astronomer.

He thinks intelligent life could be as rare as one per galaxy at any given time.

Very depressing!

Of all things, it was Joe Rogan interviewing Cox. He had two eps with Cox. Rogan asked good questions and was generally utterly fascinated by what Cox had to say.

[JHB]

57. There's one possibility that never comes up in these discussions

Someone has to be first. Just maybe, it happens to be us. Not because we're special, that's just how it shook out.

[Johnny2X2X]

58. The vastness of not only space, but also of time are hard to grasp

Not only in the earth remote, but our civilization has only existed for a blink of an eye cosmology wise.

Maybe 100s of millions of distant civilizations existed in the past or will exist in the future. But we have to hit the jackpot on looking at the right place and also the right time. It's entirely possible that we'll encounter planets that had huge populations of intelligent life a billion years ago, but that there is absolutely no trace of it now.

[Retrograde]

62. And we've only been using radio waves for a very short time

H. sapiens has been around for 100,000 years, give or take a few millennia. We like to think we're pretty smart, managing to inhabit a wide range of climates and environments. But some societies, such as the ancient Australians, managed to make a good living for themselves and develop complex cultures and arts without some of the trappings we think of as "civilization". Even Europeans, whom a lot of people point to as being an "advanced" culture, didn't start figuring out the basics of chemistry and electricity until the 1800s. And understanding of nuclear physics and the ability to launch stuff into space is even later.

So IMHO it's quite possible that there are many forms of intelligent life out there but for what ever reason they're happily living their lives for whatever reasons with technologies that we'd consider primitive, and that we won't find unless we can get probes a whole lot closer.

[Johnny2X2X]

63. Good point

And when thinking of modern humans, it's a mistake to think the European Colonialists were the most technologically advanced, they weren't. What they were technologically advanced in was weapons, and the use of gun powder. Other cultures had more advanced medicine, sanitation, infrastructure, etc, but Europeans developed better ways to kill people and thus took over the world no matter how much more advanced the societies they took over were.

If we ever do get contacted/visited, I think it's unlikely to be organic life forms. Life outside out galaxy could take on many forms, but more likely, any civilization would probably make artificial duplicates (androids) of them self to travel the cosmos. I do not think the human body is fit for deep space travel and won't ever be. I think we'll sooner be able to download a person's consciousness into an artificial life form before we overcome the barriers that space travel offer to the human body. Or maybe AIs will explore the cosmos for us.

[The Revolution]

60. I would recommend Stephen Webb's book

"If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life"

This is an excellent and very readable book on the topic.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/3319132350/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1649697713&sr=8-3

My personal thoughts on this are that the jump to multicellular life might be the great filter. Life appeared on earth very early, but for billions (!) of years, it was only single cell life. Maybe that jump never happens on other planets. For the few that do, the jump to intelligent life may also be rare (again, humans are relatively recent arrivals; if an asteroid hadn't come along, maybe non-intelligent dinosaurs would still be dominant). And when intelligent life does arrive, they eventually develop Twitter and Facebook, and that's the end of the line