The Pentagon acknowledged a program has been running at least 2007 to 2012 investigating military and other reports of events in an attempt to determine the source of the technology or disturbance as it could be a threat to the country from foreign power or nature. This space is to discuss and debate information released or new reports to poke holes in theories and stay as skeptical as possible as well as being OK to think we don't have all the answers. Please keep this to as much fact as possible in the report and state when you start to speculate. Let's all be respectful of everyone and talk about what we don't know!
While I enjoy exploring the civilization levels, I think it a fallacy that they are prerequisites for space exploration.
I know current calculations dictate enormous amounts of energy to create a warp bubble. But do we really need the capability of harnessing our solar systems energy to credibly achieve that? What if they are other ways of harnessing the energy? What if some discovery lessens the energy requirement? What if harnessing the solar system's energy is not enough? What if we harness only a quarter of said energy but are able to store it such that we gather the full amount over time?
And as sad as it may be to admit, we are just uninteresting to a civilization so advanced.
I can also imagine that once WE do create FTL we may spend centuries not too far from home. Or stay in our galaxy or even a small fraction of it. We have to get into the 1000's of c to get anywhere significant in our galaxy in a reasonable amount of time.
And we still have to worry about food and water for even a day long trip let alone weeks or months.
Seth wrote:Well, so far as we’ve been able to tell, one of the rarest things in the universe seems to be organic matter. And we just happen to be teeming with it!
Honest question since I’m no expert. Are we able to detect that beyond our observable space? How are we determining that?
We can analyze the light reflected from exoplanets and look for things like elevated levels of oxygen or methane. Of course, those are only indicative of carbon-based, oxygen-processing life like that of Earth, which isn’t a guarantee with alien life. A planet could just naturally have elevated levels of those chemicals for other reasons, as well.
TheGameguru wrote:Seth wrote:Well, so far as we’ve been able to tell, one of the rarest things in the universe seems to be organic matter. And we just happen to be teeming with it!
Honest question since I’m no expert. Are we able to detect that beyond our observable space? How are we determining that?
We can analyze the light reflected from exoplanets and look for things like elevated levels of oxygen or methane. Of course, those are only indicative of carbon-based, oxygen-processing life like that of Earth, which isn’t a guarantee with alien life. A planet could just naturally have elevated levels of those chemicals for other reasons, as well.
And to clarify, these are just organic molecules. We haven’t found any trace of living self assembled organic matter anywhere else in the universe.
ruhk wrote:TheGameguru wrote:Seth wrote:Well, so far as we’ve been able to tell, one of the rarest things in the universe seems to be organic matter. And we just happen to be teeming with it!
Honest question since I’m no expert. Are we able to detect that beyond our observable space? How are we determining that?
We can analyze the light reflected from exoplanets and look for things like elevated levels of oxygen or methane. Of course, those are only indicative of carbon-based, oxygen-processing life like that of Earth, which isn’t a guarantee with alien life. A planet could just naturally have elevated levels of those chemicals for other reasons, as well.
And to clarify, these are just organic molecules. We haven’t found any trace of living self assembled organic matter anywhere else in the universe.
yes, but keep in mind that we can really only look for signs of life familiar to us, and there is no guarantee that life needs to follow the same path that it followed here. For all we know, “living self-assembled organic matter” for another planet could be silicon-based and exhaling cyanide. We could look at a planet like that through our spectroscopes and not recognize it as being life-bearing because we wouldn’t recognize that as signs of life.
While I enjoy exploring the civilization levels, I think it a fallacy that they are prerequisites for space exploration.
I know current calculations dictate enormous amounts of energy to create a warp bubble. But do we really need the capability of harnessing our solar systems energy to credibly achieve that? What if they are other ways of harnessing the energy? What if some discovery lessens the energy requirement? What if harnessing the solar system's energy is not enough? What if we harness only a quarter of said energy but are able to store it such that we gather the full amount over time?And as sad as it may be to admit, we are just uninteresting to a civilization so advanced.
I can also imagine that once WE do create FTL we may spend centuries not too far from home. Or stay in our galaxy or even a small fraction of it. We have to get into the 1000's of c to get anywhere significant in our galaxy in a reasonable amount of time.
And we still have to worry about food and water for even a day long trip let alone weeks or months.
I think it’s kinda cool that the backwater hypothesis is so popular on this forum. It certainly is attractive when trying to explain the Fermi paradox. it’s pretty easy to grasp allegorically: the majority of citizens on coruscant may not have heard of tatooine, after all. And it has real world analogues as well: humans tend not to explore the places that are a pita to get to or don’t have resources or other things of value. Maybe we’re just a pain to get to.
(But even the Hutts found tatooine. If the universe is full of ancient civilizations f*cking around, it seems a tall order that they didn’t see some algae on earth and leave a probe or two to say hi when the best species on the planet started walking the plains of Africa and trumpeting out their emotions with their elephant trunks.)
I agree that the civilization levels - a hypothetical idea - may not correlate to interstellar or intergalactic tech, but still, they’re a useful placeholder for these discussions. Either way, we have no evidence they exist, and there are practical reasons why they may not exist.
Hawking and some of his contemporaries have already theorized ways of breaking the cosmic speed limit using wormholes and black holes. Personally I think it’s doubtful that, given a billion more years, humans wouldn’t be able to solve issues like biological matter in space or bending the fabric of spacetime or figuring out practical applications and technologies for manipulating quantum particles. A billion years ago, we couldn’t see, hear, or taste, because our ancestors at that time were single celled critters.
Another thing to consider is that if the stuff we call dark matter ends up being real, there’s a LOT more dark matter than there is regular matter, and we have no way of interacting with it. Maybe the aliens are made of dark matter and we’re the weirdos they’re trying to find. (Or maybe dark matter is just a correction for our incorrect models and doesn’t exist.)
I think it’s kinda cool that the backwater hypothesis is so popular on this forum. It certainly is attractive when trying to explain the Fermi paradox. it’s pretty easy to grasp allegorically: the majority of citizens on coruscant may not have heard of tatooine, after all. And it has real world analogues as well: humans tend not to explore the places that are a pita to get to or don’t have resources or other things of value. Maybe we’re just a pain to get to.
(But even the Hutts found tatooine. If the universe is full of ancient civilizations f*cking around, it seems a tall order that they didn’t see some algae on earth and leave a probe or two to say hi when the best species on the planet started walking the plains of Africa and trumpeting out their emotions with their elephant trunks.)
You know how big the galaxy is, right? If you flew straight out of our solar system in a random direction you would probably exit the galaxy without ever passing through or even approaching another solar system. It’s not that we are pain in the ass to get to, everywhere in the galaxy is a pain in the ass to get to. Even if we could fold space and travel instantly to any point in the galaxy, the last stars would fizzle out and die long before we would be able to explore even a tiny fraction of the entire galaxy. There could be dozens of active, spacefaring civilizations in the galaxy right now but unless they arose right next to each other they could all zip around for thousands of years without any of them ever meeting.
Sure, but I would say that the vastness of space is balanced by the vastness of time and the power of technology. we’ve done a lot of exploring in, what, 50 years? As big as the galaxy is, as big as *the universe* is, there’s a lot you can imagine with infinite technology and a billion years. Like, assume we don’t hit the Great Filter and die off: in a billion years humans won’t even look anything like we look like now. Heck we don’t look like humans from a scant million years ago, let alone a thousand million. I don’t think it’s crazy to theorize there may be quadrillions of human descendants who have mastered immortality and transcended the limits of organic matter, the speed of light, and a host of other things in a billion years. (And if we could do it then others should’ve been able to do it before us.)
And a billion is just shorthand. Like I said before, these ancient civilizations have hypothetically had a 4-20 *billion year* technological head start. And not one peep from anyone. No space trash floating through the asteroid belt. No errant beams of waves that even bear a resemblance to organized communication. (Well. There’s one example.) And you can theorize that maybe aliens don’t use any type of electromagnetic waves to communicate but that nixes radio, light, gamma, X rays..a lot of waves!
I know that all this can be theorized away with “space is big” or “nobody cares about our arm of the Milky Way,” for sure, but those are all currently faith based explanations just like “there’s nobody else out there” is a faith based explanation.
I’m just saying, I think it’s weird we haven’t seen a molecule of evidence that we’re not alone. If life is common or inevitable, why haven’t we found a single fossil of a single living thing on Mars? And if life isn’t common or inevitable, what’s stopping it?
I know that all this can be theorized away with “space is big” or “nobody cares about our arm of the Milky Way,” for sure, but those are all currently faith based explanations just like “there’s nobody else out there” is a faith based explanation.
Explaining things based on our current understandings of science and biology is “faith-based?”
Seth wrote:I know that all this can be theorized away with “space is big” or “nobody cares about our arm of the Milky Way,” for sure, but those are all currently faith based explanations just like “there’s nobody else out there” is a faith based explanation.
I’m just saying, I think it’s weird we haven’t seen a molecule of evidence that we’re not alone. If life is common or inevitable, why haven’t we found a single fossil of a single living thing on Mars? And if life isn’t common or inevitable, what’s stopping it?
Explaining things based on our current understandings of science and biology is “faith-based?”
Yes. The backwater hypothesis only conforms to our current understandings of science and biology, which is why it’s faith based. It is akin to an ant assuming it is the apex of its domain a scant ten generations before we build a superhighway on its nest….except on a much, much greater timescale.
That’s definitely a take.
It’s a pretty popular one, believe it or not. I think a lot of people who participate in these hypotheticals forget that all we know for sure is there’s no evidence of any life outside of earth. Everything beyond that is speculative. Is it likely we’re just living in a lonely spot? Is it likely that there’s a Starfleet out there doing a Prime Directive on us? Is it likely we’re the only ones to make it to the internal combustion engine? All of these are equally likely and all of them require faith if you believe them.
A single microbe on Mars would fundamentally change the conversation so drastically it would change our species forever, and yet! We continue to wait.
I honestly have no idea what you’re arguing anymore because I was taking the position that aliens probably haven’t visited us, probably never will, and we will probably never have any evidence for alien life either way because the universe is too vast and too old, and I thought you were arguing against that, but now you’re agreeing with me?
I honestly have no idea what you’re arguing anymore because I was taking the position that aliens probably haven’t visited us, probably never will, and we will probably never have any evidence for alien life either way because the universe is too vast and too old, and I thought you were arguing against that, but now you’re agreeing with me?
My personal, faith based belief? I think we’re probably the only intelligent life in the universe. On a practical level, this is functionally the same as the backwater hypothesis in that both hypotheses are currently untestable and result in the same dearth of evidence.
I believe the Great Filter is a thing, and I don’t think it’s a specific barrier: I think there’s a Filter that stops the vast majority of simple singke celled life from evolving to multicellular life, and I think there’s another Filter regarding how much damage a planet can take supporting a species attempting to leave it. I think we’re super close to that last one, and I don’t think it’s possible for a civilization to overcome it. Otherwise we’d’ve seen them by now.
Again though, if you sub out “extraterrestrials” for “ghosts,” or “God,” or “the fae,” this conversation doesn’t change much. It’s all about speculation.
I think a more popular question on why the galaxy should not be so empty is just the time scale. With scifi technology it seems more probable that a civilization would send robotic probes out to explore vice exploring themselves. Maybe even a step further to seed colony planets. With billions of years of head start time you think there would be some indication of that type of propagation around.
You nailed it, karmajay. If aliens have been sh*tting out civilized garbage since before our sun achieved fusion, where’s all the garbage?
Another thing to think about is that the backwater hypothesis is an essentially Theist argument. “Aliens exist but we can’t ever observe them” also works for invisible dragons living in your garage.
You nailed it, karmajay. If aliens have been sh*tting out civilized garbage since before our sun achieved fusion, where’s all the garbage?
This argument boils down to sitting in your closet in Michigan and saying "there's no kangaroo bones in here. Where are all the kangaroos??"
The universe could be awash in alien garbage. We just not capable of perceiving it because it's so damn far away.
You keep brushing off the backwater hypothesis, but it's the only game in town. The universe is so big that our tiny monkey brains can't grapple with it.
Never mind the fact that a star a billion light years away it's effectively a billion years in the past as far as we're concerned. Just cos we see no Dyson spheres in the billion-year old light that's reaching our telescopes doesn't rule out the possibility of a galactic civilization sitting there right now (albeit that "now" is a wishy washy concept on these kind of scales, which again leads back to the "it's so big our intuitions break down.")
Statistically though it’s far more likely there are thousands of planets with life on them in the universe than this planet being the only source of life in the universe.
Statistically though it’s far more likely there are thousands of planets with life on them in the universe than this planet being the only source of life in the universe.
citation needed.
We don't understand how life originated on this planet enough to speculate on how likely it is or isn't elsewhere. Could be a one in a bajillion cosmic fluke, could be common as carbon.
Seth wrote:You nailed it, karmajay. If aliens have been sh*tting out civilized garbage since before our sun achieved fusion, where’s all the garbage?
This argument boils down to sitting in your closet in Michigan and saying "there's no kangaroo bones in here. Where are all the kangaroos??"
The universe could be awash in alien garbage. We just not capable of perceiving it because it's so damn far away.
You keep brushing off the backwater hypothesis, but it's the only game in town. The universe is so big that our tiny monkey brains can't grapple with it.
Never mind the fact that a star a billion light years away it's effectively a billion years in the past as far as we're concerned. Just cos we see no Dyson spheres in the billion-year old light that's reaching our telescopes doesn't rule out the possibility of a galactic civilization sitting there right now (albeit that "now" is a wishy washy concept on these kind of scales, which again leads back to the "it's so big our intuitions break down.")
Respectfully, I think you’re the one not understanding the lengths of time we’re talking about here. You don’t think kangaroos could migrate from Australia to Michigan in four billion years? Australia and Michigan won’t even exist tectonically in four billion years.
The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across; our television signals will have been able to criss cross this galaxy twenty thousand times in four billion years. Why aren’t we picking up a molecule of some ancient civilization’s Three Stooges?
I think I’ve demonstrated pretty clearly that the backwater hypothesis isn’t the only hypothetical game in town, even among those who assume extraterrestrials exist.
Seth wrote:You nailed it, karmajay. If aliens have been sh*tting out civilized garbage since before our sun achieved fusion, where’s all the garbage?
This argument boils down to sitting in your closet in Michigan and saying "there's no kangaroo bones in here. Where are all the kangaroos??"
The universe could be awash in alien garbage. We just not capable of perceiving it because it's so damn far away.
You keep brushing off the backwater hypothesis, but it's the only game in town. The universe is so big that our tiny monkey brains can't grapple with it.
Never mind the fact that a star a billion light years away it's effectively a billion years in the past as far as we're concerned. Just cos we see no Dyson spheres in the billion-year old light that's reaching our telescopes doesn't rule out the possibility of a galactic civilization sitting there right now (albeit that "now" is a wishy washy concept on these kind of scales, which again leads back to the "it's so big our intuitions break down.")
First, I absolutely believe there is other life out there somewhere. It is just silly to think we are it in such a large space.
As far as these discussions though, maybe we break down the universe into a smaller subsection. We don't need to put all of our examples on the other side of the universe. The Milky Way is "only" 100, 000 light years wide with some stars/section as old as the universe itself. Now, any civilizations in our galaxy that has had billions of years to do stuff would seem to give us a better chance to observe said stuff. There is discussion to be had about closer space - the "universe is too big" definitely doesn't have to the the only focal point.
edit:sethhowsered
The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across; our television signals will have been able to criss cross this galaxy twenty thousand times in four billion years.
100k light years across is (times pi r squared) 31 billion square light years. And that doesn't even account for the height of the galaxy. So its only area not volume.
So after 4 billion years, we could cover 1/8th of the galaxy (or is it more since its light years squared?) allowing only for area. And then considering all of time, it would only cover 3/8ths or 7/16ths of just our own galaxy.
Also don't forget our solar system is towards the edge of the galaxy. If we were closer to the center, our odds of coming across junk or random signals would be greater.
Respectfully, I think you’re the one not understanding the lengths of time we’re talking about here. You don’t think kangaroos could migrate from Australia to Michigan in four billion years? Australia and Michigan won’t even exist tectonically in four billion years.
Nope, in fact the lengths of time we're talking about here is another point in favor of not being able to find aliens. For the purposes of this conversation, time and space are interchangeable. An alien civ from a billion years ago is just as invisible to us as one a billion light years away. The universe isn't a permanent ledger. Entropy exists. An alien civ that died a billion years ago isn't going to leave pristine artifacts for us to find now. Those artifacts will have been bombarded by radiation, dust, and the occasional space rock moving at vast speeds. After billions of years of that, those artifacts are just going to be more dust.
The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across; our television signals will have been able to criss cross this galaxy twenty thousand times in four billion years. Why aren’t we picking up a molecule of some ancient civilization’s Three Stooges?
1: Because signal strength attenuates over distance (R-cubed law says hi). Signals from half a galaxy away will be lost in cosmic noise by the time they reach us.
2: Because you're assuming we know where to look and what to look for. What are the characteristics of this alien signal? RF frequencies? Microwave? X-ray? Gravitational waves? Dark energy? How is the data encoded? i.e. would we even realize that a signal we capture contains data? Is it a constant repeating signal or single bursts?
3: Because we've only been looking for 100 years at best, and most of that time was with low grade equipment and little-to-no compute to decipher any signal. And most of that "looking" was the opposite of circumspect - it was very brief glimpses of tiny portions of the sky for tiny portions of time. 24/7 whole-sky monitoring is very much in it's infancy.
The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across; our television signals will have been able to criss cross this galaxy twenty thousand times in four billion years. Why aren’t we picking up a molecule of some ancient civilization’s Three Stooges?
Maybe we are, but we wouldn't be able to differentiate it from other background radiation. The farther a signal goes, the more it degrades (via the inverse square law).
1: Because signal strength attenuates over distance (R-cubed law says hi). Signals from half a galaxy away will be lost in cosmic noise by the time they reach us.
Yes, that.
As a terrible analogy, it's like firing particles out of a shotgun - the closer you are to the blast, the more particles you're going to detect (because they're hitting you). As you get farther and farther away, less and less of those particles are going to hit you, because they're spreading farther and farther apart. If you happen to also be in a place where every so often you get hit with a random particle in a random direction (background radiation), as you get far enough away you're going to be unable to distinguish between particles that hit you because someone fired a shotgun and particles that just happened to be flying around anyway.
So we might very well BE receiving molecules of some other civilization's Three Stooges. We just have no possible way to figure out that that's what they are.
Yep all of these are pretty good reasons why the backwater hypothesis is popular here, and these only cover sublightspeed tales. I get why people believe that there are aliens out there we haven’t, can’t, or aren’t permitted to observe. I don’t want to yuck ya’lls yum, after all.
It’s just not convincing enough for me, any more than it is when Theists make their case.
I guess we will find out in another 4.5 billion years when Andromeda collides with the Milky Way!
There are roughly 2 x 10^11 galaxies in the universe.
Claiming that not a single one other than ours has ever harbored life is very much akin to a theist position too.
I was thinking that too. Even if you take the "bajillion" to one odds of life existing, we'd have thousands of planets in our own galaxy with life.
Or perhaps it is better to phrase it, how much would a bajillion have to be in order for there to only be one planet in the galaxy with life?
There are roughly 2 x 10^11 galaxies in the universe.
Claiming that not a single one other than ours has ever harbored life is very much akin to a theist position too.
Yep! It 100% is. Everything beyond “we have no evidence of extraterrestrial life and I’m not sure what that infers” requires faith, including “aliens don’t exist.”
I was thinking that too. Even if you take the "bajillion" to one odds of life existing, we'd have thousands of planets in our own galaxy with life.
Or perhaps it is better to phrase it, how much would a bajillion have to be in order for there to only be one planet in the galaxy with life?
These are the two dials we’re turning. With if abiogenesis has a 1 in [infinity minus 1] chance of occurring?
You can twist the two dials of “number of Goldilocks planets” and “odds of abiogenesis” to support any spectrum of theories.
The continual comparison to theist arguments comes off as more than a little unkind, especially since your own argument is no different, so you're just as guilty as the people youre trying to chide with it. I think it's safe to say that no one here is basing their religious beliefs around the things they're saying, so trying to compare it to one is an odd choice. People are just offering suggestions and possible explanations.
As for why we aren't seeing remnants of ancient civilzations: The scale thing still does as good a job explaining why we aren't detecting their signals as it explains why they haven't detected ours. In the same way that blue circle from the image I posted earlier represents how far from Earth our signals have gone, we need to be within their own blue circle to detect their signals. And their blue circle could be a blue donut instead, either due to switching to sending signals some way we can't detect (pretty likely if FTL is possible, because they'd use some sort of FTL communication rather than continue to rely on signals limited to the speed of light) or their civilization dying out. It's entirely possible that their signals already washed over Earth hundreds of millions of years ago and we simply missed our chance to detect them.
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