Why haven't aliens got in contact with us yet?

Olgar Shiverstone said:

It may be that the real interstellar intelligence test is being able to make contact with another star system. We haven't passed the test yet. Maybe FTL is possible but you have to be really clever to figure it out.

This seems to be a common sci-fi trope -- like humans in Star Trek weren't worth noticing until they figure out warp drive.

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I remember reading a SciFi story in which it was the opposite; FTL travel was trivially simple and we had somehow missed it. Earth was invaded by an interstellar empire who used muzzle loaders and got the shock of their lives when they landed.

Ryujin said:

I remember reading a SciFi story in which it was the opposite; FTL travel was trivially simple and we had somehow missed it. Earth was invaded by an interstellar empire who used muzzle loaders and got the shock of their lives when they landed.

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I remember that story - but not the title - too.

Space aliens land on earth and point Thirty Years' War-era muskets at the Desert Storm-era US Army. Earth easily copied the Star Drive (which could have been invented by Sir Isaac Newton and his era's technology, had he (or somebody) just thought to try a critical experiment) and conquered every spacefaring alien culture within reach, then expanded a bit more, then broke up into multiple squabbling governments. Fast forward a hundred years. A new space alien race has been discovered, but they seem to have followed "the road less travelled" - they have the Star Drive and internal combustion engines ... and the main characters of the story get to figure out WHAT ELSE they invented, and how dangerous they might really be.

To the main point of the thread:

We haven't discovered any space aliens yet, for similar reasons why Polynesians in their small boats and no maps did not discover NW American fisher-folk in their small boats and no maps, on the vast Pacific Ocean.

IF there are even space aliens to discover. (the Rare Earth hypothesis looks really good, based on the nearby exoplanets we have found to date)

And if we are looking in the right place(s). With the right tools.

Eltab said:

I remember that story - but not the title - too.

Space aliens land on earth and point Thirty Years' War-era muskets at the Desert Storm-era US Army. Earth easily copied the Star Drive (which could have been invented by Sir Isaac Newton and his era's technology, had he (or somebody) just thought to try a critical experiment) and conquered every spacefaring alien culture within reach, then expanded a bit more, then broke up into multiple squabbling governments. Fast forward a hundred years. A new space alien race has been discovered, but they seem to have followed "the road less travelled" - they have the Star Drive and internal combustion engines ... and the main characters of the story get to figure out WHAT ELSE they invented, and how dangerous they might really be.

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I didn't remember the title either. You almost had the title and what you said helped me remember enough to search for it. It's "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove, named for the poem by Frost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story)

Eltab said:

To the main point of the thread:

We haven't discovered any space aliens yet, for similar reasons why Polynesians in their small boats and no maps did not discover NW American fisher-folk in their small boats and no maps, on the vast Pacific Ocean.

IF there are even space aliens to discover. (the Rare Earth hypothesis looks really good, based on the nearby exoplanets we have found to date)

And if we are looking in the right place(s). With the right tools.

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You hint at something hinted at earlier in the thread:

Considering that West Asians and Polynesians did in fact disperse their DNA into the Americas, and how all twilight memories lingered in said cultures and are all but lost tales to us now; the similar is more plausible in the greater scope of life being dispersed into our galaxy than multiple interstellar species existing at the same time; evolving to a point of contact with one another.
The seed, if it were, of what would become humanity.
Our own evolution tracing back to roots as rodent sized creatures that look nothing like us and more like meercats, the missing links, the mutations the led to us becoming us encoded in our DNA suggests the possibility.

But that is just a humans wishful thinking; grand designs. A possibility for our galaxy, and as suggested with the fungi corollary...only a hint, a nearly unseen spec in the wider lens of galactic possibilities.

Begging again the question, what is life?

Radaceus said:

You hint at something hinted at earlier in the thread:

Considering that West Asians and Polynesians did in fact disperse their DNA into the Americas, and how all twilight memories lingered in said cultures and are all but lost tales to us now; the similar is more plausible in the greater scope of life being dispersed into our galaxy than multiple interstellar species existing at the same time; evolving to a point of contact with one another.
The seed, if it were, of what would become humanity.
Our own evolution tracing back to roots as rodent sized creatures that look nothing like us and more like meercats, the missing links, the mutations the led to us becoming us encoded in our DNA suggests the possibility.

But that is just a humans wishful thinking; grand designs. A possibility for our galaxy, and as suggested with the fungi corollary...only a hint, a nearly unseen spec in the wider lens of galactic possibilities.

Begging again the question, what is life?

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Baby don't hurt me.

Oh, sorry, that's "love."

This takes us back into the ravings of von Daniken and his prophet Tsoukalos. Did the Engineers birth us for weapons testing? Are we the degenerate leavings of some Kryptonian outpost? Maybe in the beginnings of the beginnings some stellar seed started the process? Or maybe the petri dish just randomly mixed up chemicals a few billion times, until life was accidentally created?


I'll go with the petri dish model. Try it enough times, in enough places, and you get life elsewhere without the need of an extra terrestrial "progenitor." That means, by virtue of how many star systems there are out there, life almost certainly exists on other planets. Different life. Life that likely doesn't think a whole lot like we do and may have no desire to know of anything outside of itself.

Ryujin said:

Baby don't hurt me.

Oh, sorry, that's "love."

This takes us back into the ravings of von Daniken and his prophet Tsoukalos. Did the Engineers birth us for weapons testing? Are we the degenerate leavings of some Kryptonian outpost? Maybe in the beginnings of the beginnings some stellar seed started the process? Or maybe the petri dish just randomly mixed up chemicals a few billion times, until life was accidentally created?


I'll go with the petri dish model. Try it enough times, in enough places, and you get life elsewhere without the need of an extra terrestrial "progenitor." That means, by virtue of how many star systems there are out there, life almost certainly exists on other planets. Different life. Life that likely doesn't think a whole lot like we do and may have no desire to know of anything outside of itself.

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Haha!
I am certainly inferring the latter and not the former!

Petris dish with cometary impact catalyst is where I was leaning, not some creator race of Von Daniken design

Eltab said:

IF there are even space aliens to discover. (the Rare Earth hypothesis looks really good, based on the nearby exoplanets we have found to date)

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Not really. We mainly find gas giants because they're easy to spot. Small rocky planets like ours are harder to see. Therefore the vast majority of planets we've detected so far have been the ones we're currently capable of seeing.

To actually answer the question as it seems to have been intended to be answered:

*) Civilization is destructive, not creative, with a form most akin to an explosion that feeds on free energy (fossil fuels, biodiversity, environment stability) and will eventually exhaust the available energy and go extinct.

*) Interstellar travel is not possible. No mechanism or organism can survive the crossing due to fundamental physical limits. Inevitably, but in short cosmological time, we will be destroyed by any number of possible catastrophes.

*) Civilization is extraordinarily rare -- less than 1 star faring civilization per 5 billion years and 200 billion stars -- working from the number of stars in our galaxy and giving an lead time for development. Numbers are very approximate.

*) A "Great Filter" is killing nascent star faring civilizations. Variations of the Great Filter: Elder civilizations which don't like noisy neighbors. Cosmic catastrophes. Horrors in a sub-dimension waiting for us to pierce the veil which will give them free reign to enter our realm. (For a great read, "A Colder War" by Charles Stross, is a chilling answer to the paradox. See http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm, which has the full text of the novelette online. One of my favorite stories.)

*) A civilization capable of interstellar travel is also susceptible to a singularity, removing the civilization from the physical world as we are aware of it. (Take your pick: Transcending our physical reality; Mapping to a finer structure of reality; Tunneling to an alternative universe or dimension.)

*) Wait, what do you mean, we don't have evidence of aliens?

*) Or: Putting "Aliens Amoung Us" (something I just made up) next to "Ghost Hunters" is a brilliant misinformation campaign. Folks simultaneously believe but don't take seriously the invasion which has already co-opted our civilization and enslaved us.

*) Kindof the most boring: Alien life is out there, we just haven't looked quite hard enough yet.

Thx!
TomB

So I was watching some episodes of StarTalk on NEtflix this weekend.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson interviewed George Takei.

The topic of Fermi's paradox, getting to other stars, even the suitability of humanity for being worthy of getting out there came up.

Here's what I heard:
a) Tyson is a really smart dude
b) he's an optimist
c) he thinks we can come up with the ideas/energy/matter we'll need eventually to get to another planet
d) we as a species are a culmination of all of our evolution and traits that got us this far, which is farther than any other species (we have rockets and art, beavers just have dams). We'd still be eating bananas and humping each other like those peace loving bonobos (or whatever they're called) if we weren't wired to strive for more.
e) any other species that might get as far, likely has gone through just as much
f) that means we are worthy to reach the stars. Not because of some papal blessing, but because we are intrinsically not unworthy. We are more than just our wars. And if you look, just as much, if not more technological innovation is driven outside of war, rather than by war.