Do you believe we are alone in the universe?

The universe is far, far, far too big and ancient a place to reasonably rule out life elsewhere. Even if the galaxy is currently lacking intelligent life other than our own (and I'm not convinced it is - our expectations of what intelligent life should be doing with itself is, obviously, prejudiced toward our own ideals), I don't think it was nor will be. I'm also much more optimistic about FTL.

 

[jonesy]

I hear that this space thing is large, or something. Like there's multiple places to go to. More than three, at least.

And we've been here for a couple of hundred thousand years now, and we've only been to the one rock that's already married to ours.

For longer than I've been alive there's been talk of getting to that rust coloured place over yonder. Still nothing.

And the radio and television stuff that we've been broadcasting out there, they've reached something like 0.05% of our own galaxy. If that. There's this thing called the inverse square law which suggests that we might not even have enough broadcasting power to reach any significant distance.

On top of all the incredible vastness the farthest reaches of space expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. So even in an infinite amount of time an infinite human species would not be able to explore everything.

FTL is the magic acronym which could flip things around. Perhaps. Depending on how F it would be, if it were possible. Lots of if's. Very much space. So many places.

 

[Umbran]

the vast majority of the intelligent life that's out there will be completely incomprehensible to us;

People say that, but I'm not sure it has a good basis. If it has a physical form, and can master technology of the form that can cross interstellar distances, that implies a vast array of experiences similar to our own. Shared experiences are the basis for communication.

Our fiction is loaded with cases where communication is difficult or impossible, and if we manage to communicate, that's distinctly not the interesting part of the story, so it gets glossed over. But, these are fictions, which by nature focuses challenges, because challenges are interesting, and create drama, which sells books.

 

[Morrus]

Yeah. We can comprehend a lot of stuff. We’re cavemen who went from rubbing two sticks together to figuring out that black holes exist, all by ourselves! We’re really quite clever. I’m sure we can comprehend the existence of an alien race just fine, and vice versa, and we’ll figure out how to talk.

 

[Aeson]

I hate to think other mes could be roaming the universe. One me is more than enough.

If all is relative. As we travel 4 light years away, if we were to travel faster than light or even near light speed, we would be different from those we left behind. Would we be a representative of what humans are at that point or what humans once were?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I hate to think other mes could be roaming the universe. One me is more than enough.

If all is relative. As we travel 4 light years away, if we were to travel faster than light or even near light speed, we would be different from those we left behind. Would we be a representative of what humans are at that point or what humans once were?

There’s a short story- whose name escapes me at the moment- that I think was done by Larry Niven. If not him, then one of the other great old ones.* In it, as humanity is spreading through the galaxy over a great deal of time, they finally encounter an alien species. The two races start trying to communicate, and when they succeed?

...they find that they’re each just the other side of humanity’s space empire, and they’ve completed the circle.






* not the Great Old Ones, just one of the writers from the dawn of sci-fi

 

[trappedslider]

A good movie about the communication problem is Arrive, it's also slightly confusing until you get to the end. At least it was for me.

 

[Umbran]

A good movie about the communication problem is Arrive, it's also slightly confusing until you get to the end. At least it was for me.

Well, no, Arrival is not a good movie about the communication problem, insofar as it basis its communication problem in ...

[sblock]...exotic, highly speculative physics. The whole, "learn their language and you can then see through time," isn't a good example of the basic communication problem. This communication problem is, in effect, "learn to use magic".[/sblock]

 

[Orius]

I don't think we have enough data to even come close to answering this question yet.

 

[Kramodlog]

It isn't just about where are aliens, but also about when intelligent life evolved. The universe is billions of years old. Intelligent life might have existeded somewhere in the universe before dinosaures walked on Terra and it might happen again after the human race is extinct.

We might be alone in the universe right now (might), but de might not be the only intelligent the universe knows.

 

[TrippyHippy]

"Belief" is a difficult term to use. There isn't any evidence we have currently, to prove the existance of extra-terrestial life, but we have a lot of limitations both in terms of our own physical perception and also in terms of the means, technologically, to investigate further.

The universe is vast, and the argument goes that it would be improbable that there isn't intelligent life somewhere else in it, but people sometimes forget just how improbable intelligent life is, with a similar level of self awareness and existance as we do, on Earth itself. Most species on Earth aren't like humanity, and haven't evolved the same cognitive ability as humanity has - the odds of humanity existing on Earth alone are billions to one.

The other factor is that the same limitations that stop us from exploring the universe are the same factors that suggest it is also physically difficult for other species to visit here. The universe is so vast that actually transversing it is well nigh impossible. Following on, if our own limitations are on a perceptual level - ie we just lack the awareness to sense extra-terrestial things around us, as in some scifi literature - then the question arises as to whether we will ever be able to perceive them anyway. Something would have to dramatically change in our current technological and perceptual paradigm, in order for us to encounter intelligent extra terrestial life.