Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
As other people have said we cannot for of they do our do not exist.
That said thinking about how big the universe is, my personal opinion is they have to exist.
As for governments covering them up… highly unlikely. They can’t even cover up their dirty laundry, let alone aliens
There’s one more thing to consider: when we think of aliens, we constantly think of those blue human-like creatures based on carbon life forms.
Most likely, alien life will be formed entirely differently: maybe it will be silicon-based, maybe something else, or a planetary mind, or something we can’t even imagine.
And no, we didn’t contact them yet and are unlikely to in many, many lifetimes.
While i do think life exists elsewhere in the universe, I think the chances of extraterrestrial biological entities coming to our planet is exceedingly unlikely. Space is just too big, and there isn’t any hard evidence that faster-than-light travel is even possible.
Although, the universe isn’t just big – it’s old. There could be some ancient civilization from an ancient planet that became uninhabitable long ago. If they were technologically advanced enough to escape their solar system before things went tits-up AND were able to live multiple generations fully in space AND they just so happened to set out in our direction, I guess it’s possible that they found us. Even then, i would expect any UFOs or whatever would merely be probes, not the actual biological entities themselves.
Yes. I see no logical reason why life didn’t form somewhere else.
I believe there is extraterrestrial life, unless God exists. Then who knows?
I think UFOs have natural explainations, are mistakes or hoaxes, or are human technology.
I seriously doubt aliens have traveled here only to play peek-a-boo in the skies. I could sooner believe UFOs were interdimensional anomalies than aliens who traveled from another planet in the universe via space.
The chances of extra terrestrial life to have visited earth is very, very small.
The chances of life to occur are small enough,
The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,
The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,
The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.
The universe is huge, there’s almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.
Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.
Wouldnt have to do it faster, just first
Wait, what?
That’s like saying you don’t have to drive faster to win the race, you just have to cross the line first.
Maybe more like saying “you don’t have to be fastest to finish first if you get enough of a head start”?
This is a valid reading of the Fermi paradox. But just for balance I’m going to devil’s advocate all over it.
The chances of life to occur are small enough,
Not known. At the moment the data set is one habitable planet = one occurrence of life, so the odds might be very high indeed, even approaching 1:1
The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,
They are smaller, but how much smaller is impossible to tell. What if extinction events are less frequent than they are here? What if 100% extinction events are as rare as they are here? What if intelligence is a natural point of evolution everywhere?
The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,
This one’s not true. The earth is relatively young at 4 billion years compared to 15 billion for the universe. A billion year headstart is completely plausible
The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.
Agreed that the earth’s position in the milky way is a bit of a galactic backwater. At 25000 light years from the centre, stars are more sparse here than they are at the centre. But our nearest star is 4ly away. We could have a probe there within half a century with our current technology if we wanted to. So I disagree on the “near impossible” part.
The universe is huge, there’s almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.
Can’t really argue with that. Until we see some evidence, ghosts and galactic visitors are in the ‘conspiracy nut’ bin. But it doesn’t mean life on other planets doesn’t exist. There are many theories why we wouldn’t have seen or met alien life if it does exist. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.
Hubble expansion isn’t a big factor at the galactic level. Galaxies are traveling away from other galaxies at relative speeds faster than light, but for stars within the galaxy, the scale is infinitely smaller and the expansion is so small it’s difficult to even measure.
I’m incredibly fascinated by the ghost comparison. Is the probability that ghosts are a real physical phenomenon higher or lower than the probability that aliens exist or have visited us? That’s an extremely interesting question, and I’m sure someone could do a statistical meta-analysis comparing the incidence of, say, UFO sightings with the incidence of paranormal experiences (if such an analysis doesn’t already exist). Both questions seem like the things that should be generally empirically falsifiable (and indeed, specific instances certainly are), but humanity’s curiosity about both has proven remarkably durable despite centuries of curiosity and myriad efforts to settle (negatively) both questions once and for all.
They’re both so near zero as to be hardly worth considering.
The thing to think about is the fact that, in either case, ghost or alien are in any way especially indicated by the evidence. People don’t see something strange and conclude aliens because they have good reason to believe from the evidence that something traveled vast distances across space, but rather they simply don’t have anything good to believe right now.
Having unusual evidence that doesn’t seem to point at the simple, mundane explanation isn’t the same as having evidence that does point at a supernatural or extraterrestrial explanation
There’s actually a fairly decent argument that life may have developed literally everywhere in space in the first few hundred million years of the universe, since yes it started insanely hot and compressed, but as it expanded there had to be a time period of up to a hundred million years or so, that everything outside of stars was at the proper temperature for water to be liquid. The end result being that you’ll find single cellular life existing literally anywhere it possibly can.
I have coined a theory I call “Galactic spring.” It’s that the emergence of intelligent life is a manifestation of and synchronized by some underlying phenomena - perhaps just the natural growth in informational complexity in a galaxy-wide entanglement network. Perhaps just a matter of sufficient amounts of the needed elements being available. The specific underlying mechanism isn’t that important, unless we have an understanding about the initial emergence of life to compare it to. But the theory is that there is a larger synchronizing factor.
Like spring, there are some species that may emerge early. But also like spring, the emergence of one heralds the emergence of others. Every other “the earth is the unique snowflake of the universe” theory has failed. We are simply emerging. The conditions are occurring that generate intelligent life, and there’s no strong reason to believe that our circumstance in that regard is unique.
Jeremy England proposed a while back that life is just an expression of entropy increase. Interestingly, if this could be verified (I don’t think it can) it would point to life being universally abundant.
That we’re not special is one of the founding principles of astrophysics, the Copernican Principle. It goes that we aren’t special, we don’t have a privileged viewpoint, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It does get applied in other fields of science in one form or another, since it’s more a way of thinking than a theory as such. Again, it’s not falsifiable but it does seem reasonable.
Interesting, but i have to disagree with “and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction.”
Everywhere we look, we see asymmetry and variegation, along with instances of homogeneity and monoculture, as one thing wins out in a small domain.
So, yes, in some sense, same in all directions, but that “sameness” sure has a heck of a lot of play. And not being special, per se, doesn’t mean lack of uniqueness. Even cloned plants on the same shelf have differing viewpoints, though perhaps not “privileged”, unless one happens to be closer to a sunny window. But that happens.
I’ve also thought about life being an expression of entropy increase, but I can’t say I fully agree. There are aspects of that at play - somewhat more noticeable in thought and consciousness, and the efficiency of organizing thought - but I think that an assumption of universal entropy is just another local-phenomena-first issue. Although it applies in systems we isolate from the universe as a whole, the broad tendency for substance clumps (i.e., organization) and variegation is also universal.
I suppose that’s fair, since “looks the same in every direction” is a bit of an oversimplification. The principle is an assumption, rather, that we are not privileged observers, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It then follows that we should be very interested to understand why when it doesn’t.
I can’t agree with you that the assumption of universal entropy increase is at all unreasonable. The laws of thermodynamics appear to hold everywhere, therefore entropy must be increasing everywhere. England’s extrapolation to presume that life is an expression of this law might be tenuous, but the law is pretty much ironclad. That’s not to say that structure can’t arise; it clearly can because: hello. But the tendency of the universe as a closed system with a one directional arrow of time is heat death. That’s just a result of thermodynamics. Eventually.
What caused the initial imbalance, and what prevents it from happening again?
Nothing. It’s happening, and has always been. Anything that claims the universe as a whole is deteriorating is absolute bollocks, as it requires a creation myth, just as it postulates destruction.
If the universe is anything that we currently have theories for, the universe is a strange loop.
What caused the initial imbalance, and what prevents it from happening again?
Now you’re talking about some of the biggest unsolved problems in physics :)
I don’t know if it necessitates a creation myth, though. The big bang theory doesn’t imply a creator, but also doesn’t require a steady state.
What’s this about a strange loop? I don’t know if I’ve heard of this before.
I’m pretty much on board, though how much anyone can agree is a matter of relativity.
We know about the closest stars and the planets within them, and based off spectrometry, we’re confident the planets “close” to us haven’t had life, though they might be capable.
The chances of there being no mass extinction events in the millions of years following abiogenesis is arguably smaller than surviving the five or so we’ve had. Given everything we know about astrophysics, we owe the asteroids a few clean hits, we have been astronomically lucky, and that’s not even taking into consideration every other cause of mass extinction.
15 billion years is still considered early in the grand scheme of things, it’s likely that we are the early ones. A billion years head start is plausible, sure, but it’s certainly less plausible than our existence.
All of this is to say that life is rare enough without them being a stones throw away.
And this is all disregarding any possible intent behind a visit. Any being capable of space travel does not need our resources.
Unless they’re sex tourists, which would explain all the anal probing.
On second thought, I choose to believe.
Yes, and I think, potentially, that it could be so advanced that we don’t have the ability to recognize some or all of them.
I lean towards no, which is a minority scientific position. The Fermi paradox is strong evidence against technological aliens, and of all the evolutionary history we have immediate abiogenesis is the most weakly supported. It happened early, but there’s still a 10% chance of a thing randomly happening in the first 10% of geological history (to oversimplify the math).
If it’s not that, it’s eukariogenesis, but that seems a bit more inevitable given how cooperative bacteria can already be. The development of technology seems inevitable once a thing by chance becomes smart and dexterous enough, and every other step along the way has happened more than once. Earth-like planets are still thought to be abundant.
Edit: Oh, and no to any conspiracy. It would be really hard to hide obvious alien life, and there’s no real motive for all world governments to unanimously do so. And conspiracies don’t exist, because we’re too disorganised to keep a huge secret for long.
I expect that many other planets have life. I suspect that interstellar travel is not the only means of traveling between planets.
I am not at all convinced that foreign intelligences do visit, but I do consider it a very real possibility. If I were to somehow know they were here and nothing more, then I would feel confident that their visitation is being concealed.
It’s a wonderful topic, but I’m not particularly interested in beliefs related to it. I am much more interested in the possibilities.
I’m dubious of faster than life travel being for reasons beyond our understanding of physics. If there were a reasonable way to do so 1 race anywhere in the galaxy could have colonized the entire galaxy or at least a substantial portion thereof in only a few million years. If it is possible it seems to suggest that life is so rare that there are very few forms of higher intelligent life in the galaxy at any given time and probably relatively few ever.
There are plenty of alternative explanations.
For a few examples:
- In such a huge universe, even if FTL travel is possible, why should we expect Earth to be a common destination?
- It is possible that only species who do not wish to colonize the galaxy will avoid the Great Filter and acquire the technology needed to colonize it.
- Not all space-faring races must be highly populous, while less populous species will encounter less of the issues that would cause a population to collapse before becoming space-faring.
- We could be colonized without recognizing it.
- Colonization itself could be inherently unsustainable.
There is also no reason to limit the discussion to a galaxy. If we assume that an FTL civilization will colonize (in a way that we would recognize), then they could come from any galaxy. Given the expanse of the universe, if such a behavior is common enough that it would stand a chance of succeeding, then it should probably exist already. And yet we do not appear to be colonized. Which is more likely: That FTL intelligences must colonize, or that we are all alone in the universe? Axiomatic reasoning reveals that the latter is statistically much less likely than the former. So it is less likely to successfully explain why we appear to be uncolonized.
At this point, I’m beginning to think the gulf of space is too much to bridge, and if it were possible, they wouldn’t bother hiding / being sneaky / probing whatever.
I do I just wish they believed in me.
sigh
Can imagine the disillusionment aliens would feel having seen us from 10 light years away and constantly watching us as they approach until they get close enough for the data to be virtually current. I wouldnt wanna visit either. Probably be attacked on sight.
I’m open to the idea of life outside of Earth, but I’m sceptical that governments can keep them secret when they can’t keep sex scandals, drug use or financial crimes by leaders secret.
I definitely believe that aliens exist, but I very much doubt that they have any interest in contacting us. I find that lot of the discussions around aliens fail to take into account the sheer vastness of the Universe.
- Universe has been around for close to 14 billion years
- Milky Way in its current form has been around for about 8~9 billion years
- Life on Earth appears around 4280 million years ago
- Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago.
- Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago
- Writing is invented around 5500 years ago
Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.
So, after millions of years of life on Earth nothing interesting happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.
Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise.
Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.
So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small! The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.
I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space because we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in space.
Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be what we consider to be geological scales.
For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.
I really can’t imagine that advanced civilizations would have much they could learn from us. We might be a curiosity at best to them, but it’s more likely that they would give as much consideration to us as we do to an ant when we pass it by.
It’s possible they’re out there but it doesn’t change my life at all one bit. My take-away is that hopefully I live long enough to get to see them for myself if they’re out there, out of sheer curiosity for how intelligence could evolve from unknown circumstances.
Duh. Have you not seen the mountains of high definition video of the alien craft buzzing around our atmosphere?
Nobody demands this level of evidence for the asteroid belt. They tell us there’s an asteroid belt, we just believe it. No problem. Big ring of rocks.
But there’s hundreds of high definition videos every day of people’s cell phones recording machines floating in the sky, literal news stories of these things, pilots, government officials, scientists all talking about them, FLIR, radar, visual, etc data and we’re all like “Nah bro it’s a spontaneous conspiracy of strangers to perpetuate a hoax across multiple continents, centuries, and walks of life”
The reason is simple: we’re in denial because it’s absolutely terrifying.
Why do these tens of thousands of people participate in the Alien Hoax Conspiracy? Why, for attention of course.
Please don’t understand me wrong. I am saying the claim that aliens are a “hoax” implies the largest and most well-coordinated conspiracy ever theorized to exist. If there is a conspiracy to perpetuate the alien hoax, it dwarfs every other conspiracy many orders of magnitude over.
Yes there’s fucking aliens. Each and every one of us has seen more evidence for aliens than we’ve seen of the existence of Osama Bin Laden, the Harlem Globetrotters, or spear fishing.
“Oh all those spear fishing videos are all CGI”
Yeah whatever bro. All those vast networks of people just cranking out CGI footage of aliens on a daily basis. You know, for the lulz. Gimme a break.
Duh. Have you not seen the mountains of high definition video of the alien craft buzzing around our atmosphere?
A single example please. Since that’s a drop in the ocean of the amount you’ve stated exists, only half points will be awarded if there’s a chance someone could have altered or faked it, or it’s not definitely alien, and could be natural or a secret human technology instead.
I’m not afraid if they are here. They should stop dicking with cows and say hello. Clearly they don’t want us dead, so they seem nice enough.
The Phoenix Lights. This isn’t hi-def video, because that didn’t really exist commonly, but it was witnessed by literally tens of thousands of people (whoever was out at the time, and it was during a pretty busy period).
But of course, there will be handwaving and ‘disproofs’ or things like ‘but we can’t trust nineties people to see.’ Fact is, it is seen by everyone, news channels do pieces on it, and then… …meh. Too big to comprehend, and I’ve got work tomorrow.
So, half point. Definitely not fake, but don’t look much like aliens, as opposed to angels, spirits, a Chinese or American research program, natural plasma objects or something else entirely we haven’t even thought of.
They’re UFOs, with an emphasis on U.
The really interesting part, though, is that it demonstrates the ability of the populous to see something with immense implications - then just shrug it off, forget, and get back to the ‘normal’ things.
That is interesting. The human capability for apathy is astounding. I was just talking about this in another thread on idiot-proofing things.
Fair.
Well, minus ‘A Chinese or American research program’. The ability for the US or China to keep an active, capable project like that a secret for over two decades is incredibly unlikely. More unlikely than anything else postulated.
…but still, definitely unknown.
I can’t tell if you’re being satirical or serious
I guess you’d have to come to your own conclusions about the logic instead of reading my intentions.
I actually agree with parts of your underlying idea, but your tone is so awful that you’re convincing people to disagree with you.
You could be like : “I believe in cats because of cat videos.”
But instead you’re like : “What are you? Some kinda ducking idiot? You never seen a cat video? You scared of cats bro?! Small minded population can’t accept cats!”
Surely you understand tone? I hope you are only like this on the internet.
Do you understand tone? Do you comprehend that there’s more to my message than “I think aliens exist”?
Yes. Like I said I agree with a lot of your points. My examples are intentionally oversimplified to avoid diluting the idea I want to demonstrate.
I hope you understand that I’m trying to help you communicate more effectively, because i think that what you are communicating is valid.
Not everything is an argument. It’s important to understand when people are helping you, or you end up attacking allies. We are likely on the same side.
You’re helping me with the goal you assume I have.
It’s condescending because instead of inferring my communication goals from my message, you assume the message is poorly crafted because it doesn’t effectively reach that goal.
I was hoping to lead you do this realization indirectly, but I’ll just come out and say it: my goal with that comment was to express my feelings. Do you feel that you know how I feel about this topic, having read my comment?
That’s why I asked whether you understand what tone is. You seem to think tone is a lubricant that makes manipulating others’ opinions go easier. I disagree. I think tone is an expression of emotion.
Ask yourself honestly. Did you get a good sense of how I feel about this, from reading my comment? If you did, then I succeeded in my communications goal.
Since we’re doing unsolicited advice, I’d say take it easy on the assumptions of others’ incompetence when you’re encountering them for the first time.
Bullshit.
Says the man named after protomolecule tech
Was supposed to be the cosmic phenomenon, but sure, why not.
