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.

 

[TheZigZagist]

Clearly, the question is already wrong. There's no "we". I'm the only real being in existence. Everything else is just fabrications of my mind.

A fellow solipsist I see. How ironic. lol

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

A fellow solipsist...

If true, both must be wrong!

 

[TheZigZagist]

I rather like the analogy of examining a teaspoon of ocean water to conclude whether or not life exists in an ocean. Pair that with our linear experience of the flow of time and it gets even dicier. Has life existed elsewhere? Does it now? Will it ever? Sentience is also a factor that evolution (on this planet at least) rarely sources forth, and it's benefit to an ecosystem is argueably still very much in question.

 

[TheZigZagist]

If true, both must be wrong!

Um, that's why it's ironic. ‍

 

[Shasarak]

The bold is a bit presumptuous. The universe is mind boggling big. Even if they were 100,000 years ahead of us and spent every waking moment of that 100,000 years investigating every star in their galaxy, they wouldn't even finish that task in that 100,000 years, let alone every star in every galaxy in the universe, which is what you are claiming can be done in a mere 1000 more years than us. And that's assuming that we're only 1000 years away from faster than light travel. And you are assuming that they even want to travel and find new races.

I saw an interesting statistic that it would only take around 1 million years for a self replicating space ship with an average travel speed of 0.1 c to spread from one side of the Milky Way to the other.

With the galactic time frame you dont even need to have FTL travel.

 

[D1Tremere]

All humans descend from Australopithecus. Note, there are several species of Genus Australopithecus, and our Genus Homo descends from one of them, via the species Homo habilis.

It isn't as straight forward as that unfortunately. We are not even sure h. habilis should be considered the first homo in reality.

"Opinions differ as to whether the species A. aethiopicus, A. boisei, and A. robustus should be included within the genus Australopithecus, and no current consensus exists as to whether they should be placed in a distinct genus, Paranthropus, which is suggested to have developed from the ancestral Australopithecus line."

Not to mention the Ardipithecus Genus. The debates between lumpers and splitters will never end. And again, that may be upended with new discoveries due to the lack of deep archaeological work in central Africa for so long. We have always understood Homo evolution from the perspective of the east of the lake, but that may well be because the interior has been so difficult to get good archaeology from.

 

[Hussar]

I think there's another issue that people tend to forget. At least, it hasn't really been brought up.

Ok, let's posit another intelligent race. Let's also posit that it's close enough to our neck of the galaxy that contact would actually be feasible. Sorry, even if they have some sort of FTL communication system, we don't, so, we're limited to light speed here. And, so far, we've been transmitting for less than a hundred years. The odds that a technological species capable of talking to us, also being near enough to us spatially and ALSO concurrent to our time frame is unbelievably small. If we're off by even a couple of hundred thousand years, an mere eyeblink of time when we're talking about the millions or billions of years available, we won't ever meet.

To me, this is the answer to Fermi's paradox. It's not so much that we never see aliens, it's that the odds of an intelligent, technologically advanced species being in our neighbourhood, RIGHT NOW, are so vanishingly small that of course we're not seeing anything.

So long as the Speed of Light holds up, there will be no alien visitations. Million year projects are cool for SF and all, but, again, the odds of a species being able to see that far ahead are virtually impossible. Heck, we're bad enough at looking ten years down the line. It's why things like terraforming Mars will continue to be a pipe dream. There's just no way that our society will ever commit to a project that will take centuries to complete.

 

[Maxperson]

I saw an interesting statistic that it would only take around 1 million years for a self replicating space ship with an average travel speed of 0.1 c to spread from one side of the Milky Way to the other.

With the galactic time frame you dont even need to have FTL travel.

The galaxy is around 200,000 light years from end to end. At 0.1 it would take 2 million years just to cross the galaxy, let alone visit every planet in the entire place.

 

[Ratskinner]

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.

I'll go you one better. I actually don't think the hominid-animal or "rubber forehead" aliens are all that unrealistic (at least in a broad sense of vaguely humanoid). (Although I would expect to see some other forms as well.)

I mean, yes, there are a lot of evolutionary steps that get from chemically active hotspring slime to our humanoid lifeform...but! Each of those steps broke the way it did for good reasons (even if we don't know or understand them all), and I don't see any reason to suspect that those reasons wouldn't hold on another world similar enough to earth to produce aliens we would expect to be able to engage in technological shenanigans like ours.

OTOH, barring something weird like a precursor species seeding worlds with early human ancestors...the idea that any of these two species could mate and produce hybrids just flies in the face of reason and biology. (Sorry Behlanna, Spock, Jothi, and heaven knows who else.)

 

[Yaarel]

I hope humans today understand how disruptive technological acceleration is.

It is pointless to use the current technology that we are familiar with today, to talk about hypothetical alien species that can be thousands, millions, or billions of years more advanced than us.

Many scientists (including the prominent Kurzweil at MIT) predict that a home computer will be about as intelligent as a human in roughly year 2025. (Just seven years away.) Computers that are more intelligent than us, will be creating their own computers, whose technology we are literally not intelligent enough to be able to understand, in roughly year 2045. The equivalent of a home computer is expected to be more intelligent than the entire human species put together. We humans will either artificially ‘upgrade’ our own brains via implants or genetic engineering, or else be left behind − uncomprehending and noncontributing to the ongoing discourse.

This curve of technological acceleration relates to Moores Law but extends to other technologies as well. The current technologies, including the processing power of supercomputers, are still on track and continue to plot out according this predictive curve.



More than technology being more powerful, the intelligent species oneself will be vastly, vastly, more intelligent.

Unless, we humans are the first.