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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 6863966" data-attributes="member: 710">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.</blockquote>

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