The Aliens are Silent because They're Dead

I'm convinced that we are cloaked, in captivity and "protected" by aliens...and it's a good thing too because who knows to what type of creatures we might be sending those signals to.

Dead aliens lol, well I guess it makes sense if you've never heard of the prime directive.

a reply to: gortex

They're not silent. There have been hundreds of thousands if not millions of sightings and contacts over the ages.

Astrobiologists dedicate their lives to the study of something they don't believe even exists?

Yawn.

If our dumbasses managed to get this far, then whose to say, the only argument is about the rarity or the abundance of what could be.

Thinking that we might be the only intelligent life, is like religion saying chosen by God, and that never goes well. It like that one quote I read from one other members motto.

"Whats scarier, the fact that we are alone, or the fact that we are not alone, both are equal.

Besides, all the radio signals playing all those terrible songs, rap videos, and big booty bitches probably scared them off, maybe their elder probably had a vision of Mars Attacks, and foresaw there own revelations.

originally posted by: neformore
There could be a single advanced civilisation in each galaxy and the universe would still be teeming with life.

True, but on any meaningful scale, one advanced civilization per galaxy would be a sparse distribution, and would mean that advanced life is rare -- which is what this paper says.

Sure -- billions of galaxies could mean billions of advanced civilizations when looking at it on a "the entire known universe" scale if we follow the arbitrary "one civilization in each galaxy" idea (and that is completely arbitrary for the purposes of this discussion)...

...But then again, "one civilization among 100 Billion stars in a galaxy" sounds quite sparse and lonely when looking at it on a galactic scale.


For example, if we say the galaxy is loaded with 500 billion Earths, and each Earth had 2 people on it, then you could say the galaxy was teeming with a trillion people. However, on any given earth, it is unlikely that the two lone inhabitants would even know the other existed, let alone ever meet each other.

originally posted by: Xtrozero
I guess the big question is even if there were 1000s of advance alien races what is it that we should hear? It is suggested that the time line for an advance race to spew the Galaxy with electronic waves is a very short window of a few 100 years before they surpass the need to use omni type air waves. If this is the case then it would be luck of the draw that we happen to hear another race within this golden zone of their advancement.

Our signals are dwindling too so who knows. Even with us they are not that far away yet to really give another race a chance to hear them. In the picture below the dot shows us just how far 200 light years is to us and I don't think we are even that far yet. The funny part is if we do hear anything it could be a million years from the past.

Just to be clear, the dot is 200 ly, not the square. Just wanted to clarify for those that may have read your post incorrectly.

Imho, we need to be asking the right questions. The question should not be, "Is there intelligent life somewhere else in the cosmos?" As hypotheses such as this one concern themselves with, the questions need to be:

"If there is intelligent life in the cosmos:

• Do they exist near enough to us for us to ever notice, and for them to notice us?
  
• Did they already go extinct, and if not, are they advanced enough to be capable of being noticed by us - or noticing us - but not so advanced as to completely ignore us as we might an ant while crossing the road?
  
• Do they have a sort of "prime directive" mandating that they avoid contact with primitive species? (Which, if they have truly mastered interstellar travel on the scales necessary to reach us, we certainly are compared to them)
  
• Do they exist at the SAME TIME as us (as other posters have pointed out) e.g. did they already die out before we evolved intelligence/are they yet to exist/etc.?
  
• Are they socially, culturally, and cognitively enough like us that they would even want to expand beyond a certain sphere of exploration, assuming they're capable of it in the first place? E.g. perhaps they exist, achieved self-sustainability and redundancy in multiple star systems sufficient to perpetuate their species and then... stopped. Never exploring beyond that point. Intelligence doesn't automatically mean pioneering, exploratory drive like we have.
  
• Are they close enough to our galactic neighborhood for ANY of this to even be anything more than a moot point? E.g. if they're on the other side of the galaxy then beyond them being so advanced we could scarcely comprehend them, they likely aren't going to be showing up at our doorstep, and...
  
• Are they any more advanced than us at all? If they aren't, then they could be relatively close to us in cosmic terms, and still not know we're here, just as we have yet to find them."
  

So is it possible if they existed they're already dead, or that successful advancement to intelligence and technology capable of interstellar travel is rare? Absolutely. And in a galaxy this size, that could mean we'll be waiting a long, long time. If we ever find anyone. It really is possible our paths will simply never cross in the time we have as a species (which may not be unlimited.)

Peace.

All I can think is...nah. Sorry guys. Just 'cause we are so tiny and technologically limited that we haven't detected said "extraterrestrial intelligent life" doesn't mean they are dead.

Seriously. That's like guys in the old days saying bacteria didn't exist because we couldn't see them...

My two cents.

- AB

a reply to: gortex

"You can't handle the truth!"

a reply to: donktheclown

Whew! Glad I checked before blabbing to them!

originally posted by: Soylent Green Is People

For example, if we say the galaxy is loaded with 500 billion Earths, and each Earth had 2 people on it, then you could say the galaxy was teeming with a trillion people. However, on any given earth, it is unlikely that the two lone inhabitants would even know the other existed, let alone ever meet each other.

We are looking at all this wrong. We can say that life is throughout our galaxy pretty much anytime the conditions for life are met. We know that earth has tried to destroy life here only to see it come back in abundance a number of times, and as example, all life on earth today has shared ancestry from about 1.6 billion years ago after one of those events.

The problem is when we start adding discriminators to what kind of life it would be. We could say life in general and we would be right, but what if I said life that must be a flying purple hippo with 6 legs and 3 eyes weighting 5000 pounds. I have reduced the chances of that type of life greatly by just dictating the discriminators. This is the same with saying advanced, intelligent, able to build, able to travel, able to think in the abstract..and so on. Earth may have produced one species out of a trillion in the last 4.5 billion years that might fit this one day, so even here on earth we can say advance intelligent life has been extremely rare.

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: gortex

Enrico Fermi helped bring to fruition the most destructive weapon on the planet. He is become death, destroyer of worlds.

I hardly accredit his philosophy of life.

As far as extraterrestrial life, how you think life got here?

We are extraterrestrials.

EH? Let's assume you are correct and life arrived at planet Earth and "seeded" it. Where did the THAT life come from? At some point you have to come to a starting point from lifeless goo to life. In which case why not here.

I suspect (only an opinion) that life is a common "attribute" of the universe, not a rarity, and will start up wherever there is a source of energy.

originally posted by: yorkshirelad

EH? Let's assume you are correct and life arrived at planet Earth and "seeded" it. Where did the THAT life come from? At some point you have to come to a starting point from lifeless goo to life. In which case why not here.

I suspect (only an opinion) that life is a common "attribute" of the universe, not a rarity, and will start up wherever there is a source of energy.

Everyone knows the Chicken came first..Duh...

a reply to: gortex

Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9 percent are now extinct. Many of them perished in five cataclysmic events. According to a recent poll, seven out of ten biologists think we are currently in the throes of a sixth mass extinction.
Evolution: Extinction: A Modern Mass Extinction? - PBS
www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/statement_03.html

It wouldn't be a bad guess that the same statistic holds universally, if not even worse.. as Earth seems to have gotten a fairly good roll of the dice in terms of the goldilocks zone, the tempering influence of a large moon.. etc.

And even so, we are the ONLY species of the surviving 0.1 % that is technological... and nothing says we won't go extinct.

Life may have existed on most temperate planets.. but long term, sustained complex life that wishes to travel the universe? that's like rolling a "six" a thousand times in a row.. it does happen... but such life may be a million
galaxies away, if it exists at all.... and if I were them, if I stumbled upon us, I'd stay far, far away..
and if they are xenophobes, it might be the moral thing to do to exterminate us, for the sake of
other, kinder, gentler life in the Universe, if any.

Kev

a reply to: Xtrozero

Life being brought or coming here is just my opinion. Whats a "spark of life"? Is there some evidence of this in any science book or test tube experiment or is this just contrived for lack of a better explanation. Because personally, its easier for me to believe life was brought here than it just 'materialized'. From my perspective there isn't much difference between that and what religious folk propose.

Poof…

originally posted by: Kandinsky
a reply to: gortex

Nice one Gortex

I've only skimmed it after going straight to references.* At first it looks like a rephrasing of already vintage arguments and then it begins to take a slightly different shape. It's one more facet on the hypothesis that we are alone out here. It's disheartening on one hand and actually exciting on the other because it suggests we could be the only sentient creatures for many, many light years.

In the far future, we may be able to find evidence for biogenic isotopic anomalies on the initially wet rocky planets around most stars. Since life does not persist for long in the Gaian bottleneck model, it predicts a universe filled with isotopic or microscopic fossils from the kind of life that can evolve in * 1 billion years, not the fossils of larger multicellular eukaryotes or anything else that would take several billion years to evolve.

PDF link (P17)

Some points are already familiar. It's not only intuitive, it's inevitable that most examples of life will be very basic and is also predicted by evolution.

All this dicking about fighting with the neighbours looks ridiculous against the background of star fields and, potentially, uninhabited galaxies.

* I collect papers on this subject

It begs the question though, where is Stephen Hawking coming from? I think he is beyond Gaian bottlenecks because it's the past, I see things different too, maybe we are the genies that escaped out of the bottle, and just like genies we are deceptive....even to ourselves at times, and most likely because we don't know enough..yet or if ever, but ever is a long time of which we have no concept simply because everything we know, so far...is finite, yet infinity awaits.

a reply to: schuyler

They all became death, the destroyer of Worlds. I know Oppenheimer said it, he's the most arrogant of the lot.

Has less to do with Einstein. He didn't invent the bomb, he convinced the US government to do that in case the germans did.

Whatever, these guys invented the whole bomb, power plant, waste, radioactive meltdown and threat of nuclear annihilation thing we have today.

Piss on all of their graves…

a reply to: intrptr

Buuuut ... wouldn't it have had to materialize somewhere? Meaning assuming panspermia, Sometime, somewhere, some life had to have spontaneously generated... the "life came here from elsewhere in space or dimensions" just puts off that weird fact a few steps.

Any-hoo.. .my prediction is we will be surprised (concerning other life and our state of being.) Anyone wanna take bets I'm wrong?

a reply to: yorkshirelad

EH? Let's assume you are correct and life arrived at planet Earth and "seeded" it. Where did the THAT life come from? At some point you have to come to a starting point from lifeless goo to life. In which case why not here.

Because you think that the Universe is finite and it began, too. When in reality it has always been there, goes on forever and has an infinite amount of time for life to develop and spread pretty much everywhere.

Think outside the 3D box.

a reply to: Baddogma

Buuuut … wouldn't it have had to materialize somewhere?

Its always been there. Thats what infinity means… always.

originally posted by: MarioOnTheFly
a reply to: intrptr

Enrico Fermi helped bring to fruition the most destructive weapon on the planet. He is become death, destroyer of worlds.

Pardon my french...i think it's cr**. The wonderful thing is…nobody cares what I think and vice versa

The thousands of weapons poised to ruin this little blue dot care even less about all life.