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Whenever I contemplate this, I always return to the notion of concurrence. Any sentient alien life we'd hope to encounter alive will need to exist at the same (

Whenever I contemplate this, I always return to the notion of concurrence. Any sentient alien life we'd hope to encounter alive will need to exist at the same (relative) time that we do. The Earth is 4.5 Billion years old. Man has existed as 'man' for about 5 million years. That's 0.1% of the age of Earth. If alien species evolved in a similar manner, but 0.1% faster or slower, we'd miss them by millions of years.

grishka 6y ago
And their perception of time itself might be different too.
- awwaiid 6y ago
  Maybe creatures from planets with higher gravity think faster to deal with the accelerated thrown-object calculations.
cortesoft 6y ago
As long as the older species survives, they would eventually coexist.
kumarvvr 6y ago
Proof of aliens need not be actual living specimens. Left over artifacts from their civilizations are just as exciting a find. Personally, I feel the thought that we are alone in this universe is a wee bit arrogant. The universe is so big and existed for so long, we have to assume that sentient life existed in the past, perhaps exists now and will definitely exist in the future. Hopefully, we find at least artifacts that prove alien life, just because the minds of humans expand a bit more, because imagine how shocking it is to religions around the world if existence of aliens is confirmed.
- Causality1 6y ago
  Universe no, our galaxy, probably. A species that doesn't colonize beyond their homeworld will sooner or later be wiped out by natural phenomena if not their own mistakes. A species that colonizes will fill the galaxy in a few million years unless it just decides to stop. If anything like us existed in the milky way it's almost certainly dead now. If there's something alive it will be almost incomprehensibly different than us.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    > A species that colonizes will fill the galaxy in a few million years unless it just decides to stop. I think this may be making some weird assumptions about motivation. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that travel at 5% of the speed of light is practical. Would you be signing up to go colonise a planet around Alpha Centauri? What would be the motivation opportunity such colonisation? Who would pay for it? If interstellar travel turns out to be permanently slow, difficult, and expensive, then that may cast doubt on the idea that anyone who theoretically can spread out all over the place given a hundred million years actually will.
    - guerrilla 6y ago
      I think it was implied that the motivation would be a lack of resources here. Space and water to start with probably.
      - drewrv 6y ago
        I suspect solving those problems within a solar system will almost always be easier than traveling to other systems. Then again maybe travel to neighboring systems is easier in a denser neighborhood.
      - rsynnott 6y ago
        If you have the energy technology to build enough starships to put a dent in your population, you probably don’t have to worry too much about space or water unless you have runaway population growth.
    - drewrv 6y ago
      It’s interesting to me that in these conversations, some people think it’s inevitable that intelligent life will want to colonize other systems (or die trying) while others think it’s impractical. But I think both of these opinions come from human-centric reasoning. A species that could hibernate may be able to control hibernation through technology, so a ten year journey wouldn’t be as complicated for them. Other species on earth simply don’t have the curiosity to explore the way humans do. Speculation about alien intelligence is interesting to me, but I imagine it’s a lot weirder than we think. Especially around topics adjacent to intelligence, like curiosity, motivation, and cultural values.
- rendall 6y ago
  Our Universe may support life for at least a trillion years. If so, our existence a mere 14 billion years after its creation is so improbable that we may well be the first
  - UShouldBWorking 6y ago
    Your comment is burried below dozens more optimistic views that life "should" exist and evolve intelligence, but I like your take. We are so wildly improbable that most of us can't even fathom it. That our minds exist at all is so impossibly unlikely that by all accounts we should not exist. For most I think that we are hear seems to indicate some inevitably but I like that we are an anomaly, we shouldn't exist, the we die.
  - drewrv 6y ago
    I do think this idea answers the Fermi paradox. We are here early in the universe’s life. Especially considering it was mostly just hydrogen and helium for the first few billion years.
- disconcision 6y ago
  i hear this argument constantly, but i've never been able to understand it. you say the universe is big and has existed for a long time, but compared to what? if i say the universe is small and new, how would you counter that? i don't mean to come across as aggressive, but if there's any arrogance on this issue, i'd suspect it lies in thinking we have enough information to come to any meaningful position on the issue. the most convincing meta-analysis i've seen, which considers the probability distributions implied by the error bars in our current best estimates of the relevant parameters (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf), suggests a 39–85% chance we are alone in the observable universe. i'm less impressed by those particular numbers than by the attempt to rigorously quantify our ignorance on the issue, where some component values span fifty orders of magnitude. while the universe may indeed be big, i'm not sure it's broader than the sheer span of our ignorance.
  - bitcurious 6y ago
    > i hear this argument constantly, but i've never been able to understand it. you say the universe is big and has existed for a long time, but compared to what? I think compared to how long it took for somewhat intelligent life to evolve on Earth, from the point of first life. Assuming* a comparable evolutionary cadence, the question then becomes - how often does life begin? *This I assume because the cadence of living things on Earth is at the very least tied to the day/night cycles, winter/summer seasons, and lunar tides, none of which are especially unique.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > i hear this argument constantly, but i've never been able to understand it. you say the universe is big and has existed for a long time, but compared to what? if i say the universe is small and new, how would you counter that? i don't mean to come across as aggressive, but if there's any arrogance on this issue, i'd suspect it lies in thinking we have enough information to come to any meaningful position on the issue. Basically, the universe is so ludicrously huge and so ludicrously old that it is as close to statistically impossible as one can imagine that human beings are the only things ever to evolve in such circumstances as to be sapient. Note that the paper you have linked uses the term "detectable civilization", which is significant limitation due to our current level of technology, the age of the universe, and the propagation speed of light. It wasn't that long ago that we couldn't even detect extra-solar planets. There is of course an argument to be made for us being "alone" in the universe in the sense that sapience is rare enough that pretty much all species, including ourselves, will die out before ever meeting another sapience, but the idea that in all the unimaginable vastness of the universe we are the only ones?
- irrational 6y ago
  I don’t know how shocking to religions it would be. Surely it would be to some. But if I remember correctly the Catholic Church had some positive statement about alien life. And I know of another christian sect for whom it is a tenant that the universe is full of planets that have been populated by God. Then of course you have scientiology that has some... interesting takes on this issue. And, I don’t think religions like Buddhism would look askance at alien life.
  - nn3 6y ago
    Religions are usually quite adaptable, otherwise they don't survive very long. For example Christianity was originally a doomsday religion that expected the second coming any generation, but it eventually outgrew that too.
    - scotty79 6y ago
      A lot of Christians today fully expect second comming of Christ during their lifetime. In part it's still a doomsday cult.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  I don’t think it would be necessarily that big a deal from a religious point of view; the issue has been addressed by various theologians.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Even still, artifacts don't last forever. The vast majority of the things our civilization has built would be destroyed or rendered unrecognizable within a few centuries of being abandoned. Even things specifically designed to stand the test of time are unlikely to last more than a few orders of magnitude longer than the civilization that produced them.
  - kumarvvr 6y ago
    True, But those are old tech. How many years would it take for the Burj Khalifa or the Eieffel Tower to ruined to such an extent?
    - jjk166 6y ago
      Steel structures actually are much shorter lived. Without active maintenance, odds are neither tower would last a century. Generally the more advanced a technology is, the more fragile it is, and the more reliant on other advanced technology to maintain it. If you want something that lasts a long time, you're best bet is to stick to something simple like solid granite, though even if your artifact remains mostly intact, it's useless if it gets buried under sediment or weathered to the point that it's unrecognizable as an artificial construct.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  Personally, I feel the thought that we are alone in this universe is a wee bit arrogant An insult repeated to the point of cliche in this context which I suspect isn't normally personally meant, but nevertheless seems to deny the counter-arguer the abilities of imagination and wonder, and also presumes ("arrogantly"?) they haven't considered the known numbers first before coming to their conclusion that either there is little hope of communication or we don't know enough to decide.
garmaine 6y ago
If it was any faster, we’d not have evolved because they’d have taken over the entire galaxy.
crazydoggers 6y ago
Author and professor Timothy Ferris explained this well in the PBS documentary Life Beyond Earth with a Christmas tree light analogy. Ultimately it comes down to how long other civilizations last for and are willing to communicate. If a civilization either kills itself off or turns inward (cyberspace life, no radio outward communication) then the chances of concurrence decrease significantly. https://youtu.be/Y_4roppaq7s?t=1h37m45s https://youtu.be/Y_4roppaq7s?t=1h37m45s
sytelus 6y ago
This would be true if we were the first or near first advanced species. But we cannot be because there far many more older stars and planets. If you believe that advanced life forms will revolve in 3B yrs given hospitable planet then there had probably been many many such opportunities before Earth in Milky Way. At this point then we should expect to hear other civilizations screaming all over.
analog31 6y ago
Indeed, within those 5 million years, we've produced coherent electromagnetic signals for just a bit over 100 years, and will probably go dark again before another 100 years elapse. Already, most of our electromagnetic information bandwidth is confined to fiber optic cables. Like a primitive Dyson sphere. Our remaining free space communications are increasingly designed to be virtually indistinguishable from noise. Perhaps the evolving spectroscopic signature of our atmosphere will provide a durable signpost. The earth terraformed itself well before intelligent beings ever evolved, and maybe an astute and patient observer might have been able to guess that we were on our way towards intelligent life at some point.
hyperpallium2 6y ago
Backtrapolating the rate of increase of complexity of life over time suggests "intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe". https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381 https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381
scotty79 6y ago
For me the timeframe for life doesn't sound that relaxed. Getting to complex cells took 2 billion years. And getting to where we are now another 2 billion years. All that time conditions were fairly stable. Given that life might need some elements created in supernova explosions mixed into other solar systems, and that we had just 13 billion years since the beginning, when you add some randomness, schedule starts to look tight for me. We might be one of the first civilisations in our neighborhood. I'm not saying that I believe that's the case but that's entirely possible.

grishka 6y ago

And their perception of time itself might be different too.

awwaiid 6y ago
Maybe creatures from planets with higher gravity think faster to deal with the accelerated thrown-object calculations.

cortesoft 6y ago

As long as the older species survives, they would eventually coexist.

kumarvvr 6y ago

Proof of aliens need not be actual living specimens. Left over artifacts from their civilizations are just as exciting a find. Personally, I feel the thought that we are alone in this universe is a wee bit arrogant. The universe is so big and existed for so long, we have to assume that sentient life existed in the past, perhaps exists now and will definitely exist in the future. Hopefully, we find at least artifacts that prove alien life, just because the minds of humans expand a bit more, because imagine how shocking it is to religions around the world if existence of aliens is confirmed.

Causality1 6y ago
Universe no, our galaxy, probably. A species that doesn't colonize beyond their homeworld will sooner or later be wiped out by natural phenomena if not their own mistakes. A species that colonizes will fill the galaxy in a few million years unless it just decides to stop. If anything like us existed in the milky way it's almost certainly dead now. If there's something alive it will be almost incomprehensibly different than us.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > A species that colonizes will fill the galaxy in a few million years unless it just decides to stop. I think this may be making some weird assumptions about motivation. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that travel at 5% of the speed of light is practical. Would you be signing up to go colonise a planet around Alpha Centauri? What would be the motivation opportunity such colonisation? Who would pay for it? If interstellar travel turns out to be permanently slow, difficult, and expensive, then that may cast doubt on the idea that anyone who theoretically can spread out all over the place given a hundred million years actually will.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    I think it was implied that the motivation would be a lack of resources here. Space and water to start with probably.
    - drewrv 6y ago
      I suspect solving those problems within a solar system will almost always be easier than traveling to other systems. Then again maybe travel to neighboring systems is easier in a denser neighborhood.
    - rsynnott 6y ago
      If you have the energy technology to build enough starships to put a dent in your population, you probably don’t have to worry too much about space or water unless you have runaway population growth.
  - drewrv 6y ago
    It’s interesting to me that in these conversations, some people think it’s inevitable that intelligent life will want to colonize other systems (or die trying) while others think it’s impractical. But I think both of these opinions come from human-centric reasoning. A species that could hibernate may be able to control hibernation through technology, so a ten year journey wouldn’t be as complicated for them. Other species on earth simply don’t have the curiosity to explore the way humans do. Speculation about alien intelligence is interesting to me, but I imagine it’s a lot weirder than we think. Especially around topics adjacent to intelligence, like curiosity, motivation, and cultural values.
rendall 6y ago
Our Universe may support life for at least a trillion years. If so, our existence a mere 14 billion years after its creation is so improbable that we may well be the first
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  Your comment is burried below dozens more optimistic views that life "should" exist and evolve intelligence, but I like your take. We are so wildly improbable that most of us can't even fathom it. That our minds exist at all is so impossibly unlikely that by all accounts we should not exist. For most I think that we are hear seems to indicate some inevitably but I like that we are an anomaly, we shouldn't exist, the we die.
- drewrv 6y ago
  I do think this idea answers the Fermi paradox. We are here early in the universe’s life. Especially considering it was mostly just hydrogen and helium for the first few billion years.
disconcision 6y ago
i hear this argument constantly, but i've never been able to understand it. you say the universe is big and has existed for a long time, but compared to what? if i say the universe is small and new, how would you counter that? i don't mean to come across as aggressive, but if there's any arrogance on this issue, i'd suspect it lies in thinking we have enough information to come to any meaningful position on the issue. the most convincing meta-analysis i've seen, which considers the probability distributions implied by the error bars in our current best estimates of the relevant parameters (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf), suggests a 39–85% chance we are alone in the observable universe. i'm less impressed by those particular numbers than by the attempt to rigorously quantify our ignorance on the issue, where some component values span fifty orders of magnitude. while the universe may indeed be big, i'm not sure it's broader than the sheer span of our ignorance.
- bitcurious 6y ago
  > i hear this argument constantly, but i've never been able to understand it. you say the universe is big and has existed for a long time, but compared to what? I think compared to how long it took for somewhat intelligent life to evolve on Earth, from the point of first life. Assuming* a comparable evolutionary cadence, the question then becomes - how often does life begin? *This I assume because the cadence of living things on Earth is at the very least tied to the day/night cycles, winter/summer seasons, and lunar tides, none of which are especially unique.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > i hear this argument constantly, but i've never been able to understand it. you say the universe is big and has existed for a long time, but compared to what? if i say the universe is small and new, how would you counter that? i don't mean to come across as aggressive, but if there's any arrogance on this issue, i'd suspect it lies in thinking we have enough information to come to any meaningful position on the issue. Basically, the universe is so ludicrously huge and so ludicrously old that it is as close to statistically impossible as one can imagine that human beings are the only things ever to evolve in such circumstances as to be sapient. Note that the paper you have linked uses the term "detectable civilization", which is significant limitation due to our current level of technology, the age of the universe, and the propagation speed of light. It wasn't that long ago that we couldn't even detect extra-solar planets. There is of course an argument to be made for us being "alone" in the universe in the sense that sapience is rare enough that pretty much all species, including ourselves, will die out before ever meeting another sapience, but the idea that in all the unimaginable vastness of the universe we are the only ones?
irrational 6y ago
I don’t know how shocking to religions it would be. Surely it would be to some. But if I remember correctly the Catholic Church had some positive statement about alien life. And I know of another christian sect for whom it is a tenant that the universe is full of planets that have been populated by God. Then of course you have scientiology that has some... interesting takes on this issue. And, I don’t think religions like Buddhism would look askance at alien life.
- nn3 6y ago
  Religions are usually quite adaptable, otherwise they don't survive very long. For example Christianity was originally a doomsday religion that expected the second coming any generation, but it eventually outgrew that too.
  - scotty79 6y ago
    A lot of Christians today fully expect second comming of Christ during their lifetime. In part it's still a doomsday cult.
rsynnott 6y ago
I don’t think it would be necessarily that big a deal from a religious point of view; the issue has been addressed by various theologians.
jjk166 6y ago
Even still, artifacts don't last forever. The vast majority of the things our civilization has built would be destroyed or rendered unrecognizable within a few centuries of being abandoned. Even things specifically designed to stand the test of time are unlikely to last more than a few orders of magnitude longer than the civilization that produced them.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  True, But those are old tech. How many years would it take for the Burj Khalifa or the Eieffel Tower to ruined to such an extent?
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Steel structures actually are much shorter lived. Without active maintenance, odds are neither tower would last a century. Generally the more advanced a technology is, the more fragile it is, and the more reliant on other advanced technology to maintain it. If you want something that lasts a long time, you're best bet is to stick to something simple like solid granite, though even if your artifact remains mostly intact, it's useless if it gets buried under sediment or weathered to the point that it's unrecognizable as an artificial construct.
mellosouls 6y ago
Personally, I feel the thought that we are alone in this universe is a wee bit arrogant An insult repeated to the point of cliche in this context which I suspect isn't normally personally meant, but nevertheless seems to deny the counter-arguer the abilities of imagination and wonder, and also presumes ("arrogantly"?) they haven't considered the known numbers first before coming to their conclusion that either there is little hope of communication or we don't know enough to decide.

garmaine 6y ago

If it was any faster, we’d not have evolved because they’d have taken over the entire galaxy.

crazydoggers 6y ago

Author and professor Timothy Ferris explained this well in the PBS documentary Life Beyond Earth with a Christmas tree light analogy. Ultimately it comes down to how long other civilizations last for and are willing to communicate. If a civilization either kills itself off or turns inward (cyberspace life, no radio outward communication) then the chances of concurrence decrease significantly. https://youtu.be/Y_4roppaq7s?t=1h37m45s https://youtu.be/Y_4roppaq7s?t=1h37m45s

sytelus 6y ago

This would be true if we were the first or near first advanced species. But we cannot be because there far many more older stars and planets. If you believe that advanced life forms will revolve in 3B yrs given hospitable planet then there had probably been many many such opportunities before Earth in Milky Way. At this point then we should expect to hear other civilizations screaming all over.

analog31 6y ago

Indeed, within those 5 million years, we've produced coherent electromagnetic signals for just a bit over 100 years, and will probably go dark again before another 100 years elapse. Already, most of our electromagnetic information bandwidth is confined to fiber optic cables. Like a primitive Dyson sphere. Our remaining free space communications are increasingly designed to be virtually indistinguishable from noise. Perhaps the evolving spectroscopic signature of our atmosphere will provide a durable signpost. The earth terraformed itself well before intelligent beings ever evolved, and maybe an astute and patient observer might have been able to guess that we were on our way towards intelligent life at some point.

hyperpallium2 6y ago

Backtrapolating the rate of increase of complexity of life over time suggests "intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe". https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381 https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381

scotty79 6y ago

For me the timeframe for life doesn't sound that relaxed. Getting to complex cells took 2 billion years. And getting to where we are now another 2 billion years. All that time conditions were fairly stable. Given that life might need some elements created in supernova explosions mixed into other solar systems, and that we had just 13 billion years since the beginning, when you add some randomness, schedule starts to look tight for me. We might be one of the first civilisations in our neighborhood. I'm not saying that I believe that's the case but that's entirely possible.