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

[MechaPilot]

The basic answer is an inversion of the question. Not, where is all of the alien intelligent life, but rather, what are we misunderstanding that we expect something (alien intelligent life) that to all indications just isn't there. One way to answer that is to take the Drake equation and see how to make the product very low. Since the Drake equation is presented as a multiplication of independent values, that can be further used to frame the question as a choice of terms of the equation as the most likely to be very small.

Thx!
TomB

My personal belief is that the smallest multiplier in the Drake equation is the longevity factor. Whether through natural disasters or self-extermination, it seems likely to me that many intelligent forms of life will die out before contacting any others. We just barely avoided nuclear and biological annihilation before our space program even reached beyond our own moon. Our first contact with an alien culture could very well be finding the radioactive ruin of their civilization with an automated probe.

 

[Tonguez]

What a sad fate for the universe if this is true, heaven forbid we ever leap off this rock in our current condition...we parasites.

My answer is not going to be very uplifting.
Assuming that aliens exist, and that said aliens are capable of contacting us, I think they don't because we're a god-awful mess. Aliens probably think of our planet the way most of our planet thinks of the middle east, or of African and South American nations who have difficulties with rebels.

Why do we presume that intelligent aliens will be any better than that?

theres an Twilight Zone episode that tells of an Alein Race that appears to the UN and reveals that they created humanity and are disgusted how things have turned out, they give humanity a year (or something) to sort things out. Humans immediately get together and work hard to eliminate war, disarm the nuclear threat and achieve global peace.
The aliens then return, humans present their peace accord and the aliens show their scorn stating something like "no!We created humanity to be our weapon, a force of destruction - this need for peace is a flaw, you have failed!"

ie why can't Aliens be bigger s than we are?

 

[Radaceus]

Touching on the Fermi paradox,

what if our solar system in the outer rim of the galaxy is just in the unknown, in our own existance we have only come into contact with other peoples around the globe recently ( yes this also arguable, but in our known history, its in the last 500 years). What if we are the Aboriginals of that last continent yet to be colonized?

What if there is a golden mean to determine sentient life, that once irradiated cosmic goo becomes lodged into the primal clay of a young planetary system the clock of existence begins. Add into the mix all the variables for a young galaxy, collisions, novas, and etc, that set back the growth rate of an intelligent species ( read: nuked into the stone ages and global extinction events); interfering with the perfect parameters of a species evolving to interstellar colonization. Also add into he mix, as noted above, how difficult it would be for our species to travel for a million years across the galaxy (as suggested by Fermi) with our current means. Homo Sapiens, young on the scene, are only now at a pivotal moment between self-annihilation and preservation of the species , the most likely pretense of our planet hopping will be to escape our own destruction, as a last ditch effort. This last point, superimposed onto the parameters, infers: how many species of intelligent life can evolve past the warlike nature inherent in the advance of technology in order to work as a whole to become an interstellar race.

And all of this aside, back to what TomB mentioned: are we capable of understanding alien intelligence? When we only recently have come to understand other intelligences on par to our own in our own biosphere!

 

[Radaceus]

Why do we presume that intelligent aliens will be any better than that?


theres an Twilight Zone episode that tells of an Alein Race that appears to the UN and reveals that they created humanity and are disgusted how things have turned out, they give humanity a year (or something) to sort things out. Humans immediately get together and work hard to eliminate war, disarm the nuclear threat and achieve global peace.
The aliens then return, humans present their peace accord and the aliens show their scorn stating something like "no!We created humanity to be our weapon, a force of destruction - this need for peace is a flaw, you have failed!"


ie why can't Aliens be bigger s than we are?

Fair point,

And we do not, I simply state that we are parasites, implying if humanity set off into the unknown with our current mindset it the cycle will continue. And perhaps this could be the case, the human condition, war is in our DNA...and between global extinction events and our nature for destruction we have worked ourselves into an endgame position

 

[MechaPilot]

Why do we presume that intelligent aliens will be any better than that?

theres an Twilight Zone episode that tells of an Alein Race that appears to the UN and reveals that they created humanity and are disgusted how things have turned out, they give humanity a year (or something) to sort things out. Humans immediately get together and work hard to eliminate war, disarm the nuclear threat and achieve global peace.
The aliens then return, humans present their peace accord and the aliens show their scorn stating something like "no!We created humanity to be our weapon, a force of destruction - this need for peace is a flaw, you have failed!"

ie why can't Aliens be bigger s than we are?

The potential certainly exists for them to be so. However, I find it likely that if they are like that, then they will not be that way toward their own kind. Surviving the ability to create weapons that can destroy one's entire planet, especially long enough to develop interstellar flight (or at least interstellar communication) requires a level of cooperation or unity that would probably preclude the kind of in-fighting we have on Earth.

However, they could easily be just as bloodthirsty as we are, only they would be searching for different planets to dominate and conquer instead of going after their neighbors on their own planet.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Truly intelligent civilizations ignore the galactic equivalent of baby talk.

 

[Umbran]

Assuming that aliens exist, and that said aliens are capable of contacting us, I think they don't because we're a god-awful mess.

That shouldn't be an issue - they'd also have been god-awful messes. Our being a mess is a pretty direct result of evolution - all creatures are engaged in competition for resources. All our formation of tribes, our "us vs them" attitudes, comes from this at the root. Every species that comes to high technological advancement will be able to look back at their past and see their... ugly teenage years, so to speak.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Every time these discussions come up, people bring up the idea that we're not "worthy" of being talked to by other aliens.

It might be something I could have believed once, too. But now I think that's bullsh*t.
The thing to understand is that we're a product of evolution. The reason we are the way we are is because it allowed our continued survival. That means both our good and our bad is part of what made us successful. At least for now. Evolution is not a success guarantee. The fittest survive, but what is "fit" can, did, does and will change based on many factors.
Maybe be all blow ourselves up or destroy our ecosystem because we were too selfish or too stupid to see how we'd hurt us. Maybe we die out from a random asteroid collision. But we have removed neither the altruists nor the egoistical sociopaths out of our genepool, and there is probably a reason for it - there are times where these traits can help humanity survive (even if it comes at a great individual cost.)

But most likely every intelligent species will have gone through a development like this, and quite possibly no species can actually go beyond that, because there is always a chance that maybe the species wasn't smart enough to forsee a critical threat or critical resource shortage, but the egoist secured a bit more for himself than he deserved, killing a bunch of others, but allowing others to survive. Just like other traits that might be considered negative can sometimes turn into positives.
It's difficult to say if there ever is a stage in technological and biological development were such a scenario could not possibly happen. The trick is tempering the "negative traits" sufficiently to avoid it becoming a problem when it shouldn't.



Anyway, I think the reason why aliens haven't yet talked to us is mostly for bleak reasons. Which are that Star Trek and Star Wars and Star Gate and Doctor Who will always be the realm of science fiction. We won't find ways to travel faster than light, we won't travel through time, we won't create worm holes.

All these will simply prove physically impossible. That means that this ridiculous gigantic universe we have observed so far will be mostly out of reach for any human being - and also any alien being. We probably won't even get very close to the speed of light so that relativistic effects could become helpful for long-distance travel.
So we would be stuck with century long travels to even get to the nearest star systems - and building a starship that can actually go the distance without running out of fuel or spare parts and without the ecosystem breaking down keeping the astronauts or colonists aboard alive will be so hard that it quite possibly can't be done.

And every alien will have the same problem. The best we either look in the right direction and detect a communication attempt by another alien, or that another alien is looking in our direction and detects our communication attempts. It might take centuries to actually get meaningful signals across.

Even if our galaxy has thousands or millions of planets that can sustain some form of life and over time most of these develop a civilization that doesn't die in a cosmic blink of an eye, the problem is that the mere attempt at communication will already be difficult - the hope of traveling there is non-existent.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Let me mess up my hair like one of those plastic trolls (History Channel reference to Ancient Aliens) and say I think they have been here and are still here but try and keep away from us. Every now and then they have made themselves know, working with governments that have turned around and misused technology, mostly for war. This scares them and they are basically saying why did we not follow the Prime Directive!

The other problem is Space Time; to meet these other intelligent races you have to be at the right place at the right time, the size of the galaxy and the amount of time to get anywhere, means it is high odds that you would be finding each other at a common intelligential point of reference.

 

[Umbran]

There are so many possibilities. For example:

Note that our technology rests on a base of fossil fuels. We may be able to wean ourselves back off fossil fuels and maintain technology, but I don't think there was a path for us to our current technology and beyond *without* ever using fossil fuels - you probably can't plausibly jump from using wood straight to using solar and nuclear power. There are too many materials (like steel) you can't make at industrial scale with the energy output available in plant matter -which is limited by solar radiation, which is limited by being at a distance from your star where water will remain liquid on the surface of the planet. So, without the fossil fuels, you might be limited to the equivalent of wood-burning steam tech, at best.

So, if the conditions for making abundant fossil fuels are rare, then that's going to cut down on the intelligent species available to see.