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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

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.
  - Causality1 6y ago
    Whether they want to or not is irrelevant. I'm only concerned with whether or not they do. My point is that for a civilization to have an unlimited lifespan it either has to exist in multiple star systems or progress beyond the need for a star system at all. A single planet is just too vulnerable. Nuclear war, biological war, grey goo, supervolcano, gamma ray burst, ecological collapse. To exist for billions of years on one planet requires that a species be dynamic enough to create hyper-advanced science but so peaceful it doesn't kill itself with it while being so incredibly culturally stable that doesn't change for eons. I don't buy it. Living on one planet is a death sentence in probably much less than a billion years.
    - jjk166 6y ago
      Multiple is not the same as all. Once a civilization colonizes a handful of solar systems, it is essentially impervious to any disaster. Further expansion produces diminishing returns. There is no resource which can justify the cost of interstellar travel, and any civilization capable of making technology on that scale will have to be social enough that a latency of years to centuries in communication with the civilization's core would be a major disincentive. Even if there were a brief exploration phase when everything was new and uncharted, there would be no reason to maintain all those colonies indefinitely. A civilization inhabiting a dozen star systems all within a few lightyears of eachother would not be significantly more detectable than a single planet civilization.
      - Causality1 6y ago
        That's a lot of assumptions you're making. For example, some undiscovered resource could be that valuable. Perhaps the species has a slow enough physical metabolism and mental process that interstellar travel times are only mildly inconvenient.
        jjk166 6y ago
        It is easier to synthesize any substance from scratch than it is to transport it between even the nearest star systems. The only way such a resource could exist is if our entire understanding of physics is way off. Earth gives us a wide range of organisms with different lifespans and metabolic rates. There are not that many species that live longer than us, and extremely few that live significantly longer than us. Even if something lived 100 times longer than us, only a very small portion of the galaxy would be traversible within a lifetime, and there is still no reason to go more than a few lightyears.
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.

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.
- Causality1 6y ago
  Whether they want to or not is irrelevant. I'm only concerned with whether or not they do. My point is that for a civilization to have an unlimited lifespan it either has to exist in multiple star systems or progress beyond the need for a star system at all. A single planet is just too vulnerable. Nuclear war, biological war, grey goo, supervolcano, gamma ray burst, ecological collapse. To exist for billions of years on one planet requires that a species be dynamic enough to create hyper-advanced science but so peaceful it doesn't kill itself with it while being so incredibly culturally stable that doesn't change for eons. I don't buy it. Living on one planet is a death sentence in probably much less than a billion years.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Multiple is not the same as all. Once a civilization colonizes a handful of solar systems, it is essentially impervious to any disaster. Further expansion produces diminishing returns. There is no resource which can justify the cost of interstellar travel, and any civilization capable of making technology on that scale will have to be social enough that a latency of years to centuries in communication with the civilization's core would be a major disincentive. Even if there were a brief exploration phase when everything was new and uncharted, there would be no reason to maintain all those colonies indefinitely. A civilization inhabiting a dozen star systems all within a few lightyears of eachother would not be significantly more detectable than a single planet civilization.
    - Causality1 6y ago
      That's a lot of assumptions you're making. For example, some undiscovered resource could be that valuable. Perhaps the species has a slow enough physical metabolism and mental process that interstellar travel times are only mildly inconvenient.
      - jjk166 6y ago
        It is easier to synthesize any substance from scratch than it is to transport it between even the nearest star systems. The only way such a resource could exist is if our entire understanding of physics is way off. Earth gives us a wide range of organisms with different lifespans and metabolic rates. There are not that many species that live longer than us, and extremely few that live significantly longer than us. Even if something lived 100 times longer than us, only a very small portion of the galaxy would be traversible within a lifetime, and there is still no reason to go more than a few lightyears.

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.