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Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

• nend 6y ago
  >We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. Not really the most convincing argument. There are professions that study ants. And I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants. Pretty sure aliens would still be interested in us even if we were as primitive as ants.
  • hans1729 6y ago
    Ants are interesting because of the complex behavioral systems emerging from their comparatively simple biological systems, reminiscent of the game of life. Seeing the insane complexity of the human condition (look at the amount of scientific disciplines we come up with) and thinking "nay, this won't be interesting to a higher mind" feels awfully dismissive. sure, depending on the leap of sophistication we may appear like... rocks, I guess? But I can't even begin to conceptualize to what in comparison we'd appear like rocks. Anything of that complexity probably is multiple magnitudes beyond our comprehension anyway, and therefore not really part of the discussion
    • PartiallyTyped 6y ago
      To be fair to rocks, we also study them ...
      • guerrilla 6y ago
        Is astrogeology (as etymologically oxymoronic as that is) already a subject?
        • Denvercoder9 6y ago
          That's basically what asteroid science is. It's such a big field that we're even sending probes to collect rocks.
        • kridsdale1 6y ago
          Maybe aliens will be interested in Earth for Astrogastronomy.
          • liotier 6y ago
            Sorry, no - only the consumption of cultivated humans is allowed.
            • madia_leva 6y ago
              How would you know that you are being cultivated?
          • jrd259 6y ago
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man
    • op03 6y ago
      Recently I had a bunch of snails appear out of nowhere all over the garden. And I spent a whole lot of time, trying to figure out what they were feeding on, cuz some were getting really big. The whole thing was quite fascinating...like how the hell were they producing these huge ass shells without tearing all the plants apart? So I call a good buddy over (PhD in bio something or the other) thinking he would be as fascinated. And guess what...he shows up and all he wanted to do was cook them. So much for higher minds. (we didn't btw)
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • joshspankit 6y ago
        “Listen: I’m fascinated 23 hours a day. When I go over to a buddy’s house I just wanna eat things. Yaknow?”
      • 7thaccount 6y ago
        How did you know they were edible? I mean, I know people eat snails in certain parts, but how did you know these were safe?
        • evilsetg 6y ago
          That is what you have the bio something PhD for :-)
        • Archelaos 6y ago
          In Germany I only ever eat helix pomatia[1]. Nowadays, they are under nature protection. Only the consumption of cultivated snails is allowed. They are related to mussels and taste similar. I can especially recommend snail cream soup. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_pomatia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_pomatia
          • randycupertino 6y ago
            I used to think I loved escargot but it turns out I actually just loved them as a delivery vessel for garlic, butter and cheese.
    • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      I seriously doubt the human condition seems complex to a species that went through this stage a billion years ago. Or even a million years ago. If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals. So the horizon of interest where an encounter would be fascinating and worth the time and effort but not devastatingly disruptive to either side is probably only a few millennia. But let's call it +/- 10k years, to be generous. Compare with the age of the universe, or even of the galaxy. It's really not a big proportion of the available time.
      • soufron 6y ago
        "If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals." That's only your opinion, and it's most probably wrong. These guys were capable of feats you can only dream of. And you could be very surprised at their level of sophistication, which might appear higher than us on many levels - if not on all levels.
        • OnlyMortal 6y ago
          Quite. It’s an insult to our ancestors to dismiss their ability to use their technology. The ruins we find around the world from previous civilisations tell us they were very smart.
      • at-fates-hands 6y ago
        > There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals. Generally speaking, about once a year, archeologists find something that completely challenges their theories on human evolution. https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-2019.html https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-... Just the amount of engineering the Egyptians did is enough to warrant our continued fascination with their culture, some 5,000 years later.
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Do the ants in your example know they're being studied? When the European powers explored the pacific they wrote off a lot of islands as being devoid of anything useful. Now a few hundred years later these islands, mostly untouched by humans, are a gold mine for various niches of biology. Human presence is still infrequent enough that the seagulls don't seem to notice.
  • teekert 6y ago
    Indeed, Ants do some pretty fascinating stuff, TIL we have stuff like "Ant colony optimization algorithms" [0]. Even if we are as the aliens were 2 millions years ago, there must be something of interest in what we do? I mean, we'd be interested in life 2 billion years ago. I find it more likely that they just don't want to interfere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...
    • bluGill 6y ago
      Perhaps, but I think it is far more likely they can't overcome the limits of the speed of light to do any useful observing. They can't cross the distance to observe us, even robots take so long to arrive that their star dies before it gets here (not to mention our star was still forming when they sent the probe out...) They cannot observe us directly, light just doesn't have that resolution at the distance. They can't observe our radio waves because our radio waves are only 100 light years out, not to mention the signal strength fades with distance.
      • sliken 6y ago
        Quite a few stars and usable solar systems started out 1 billion years ahead of ours. The sun is relatively late to the game. If a race was curious it could well seed the galaxy with small, smart probes, that could watch for certain signs life, record, and report back to the galaxy wide cloud, sure speed of light means that takes a long time. Sure that may take 50k years for light speed communications to reach a central location, but it would collect whatever was of interest. Might even just be a few 100 bytes of info along the lines of somewhat evolved bipedal warm blooded beings with a basic grasp of electronics, quantum, chemistry, and atomic sciences. Haven't transitions to artificial life forms, and unlikely to succeed because of short sighted environmental policies that are systemically causing a extinction event by destroying the food chain and decreasing fertility world wide. Check back in 10,000 years and see if they surprise us.
  • ballenf 6y ago
    The point is that we're one of (large number) of ant colonies and there's nothing particularly interesting about us vs. any other ant colony. Even if ETs study ants generally, there's nothing unique about us to give us a greater than 1/(large number) chance of being studied.
    • yoz-y 6y ago
      Last time a new mammal was discovered here it was international news. If an alien civilisation has trillions of trillions individuals, there must be quite a bit of them interested in any possible niche. This assumes that an interstellar species would be naturally curious.
      • rbanffy 6y ago
        There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it. Assuming a human-like mind, that alone is enough to reduce the interest in alien life as something mundane.
        • ryanmercer 6y ago
          >There are, literally, millions of planets that can sustain life as we know it. There are probably x amount of planets that can sustain life as we know it. We haven't even verified the existence of millions of planets. https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail.html https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail... shows only 4331 confirmed exoplanets, of those we've visited 0 and are still largely guessing as to their atmospheres, weather, temperatures, seismic activity, etc. Not to mention some we've found in the "goldilocks" zone are likely regularly sterilized due to the conditions of their orbit and their stars.
        • alisonkisk 6y ago
          There are literally millions of species on Earth, and each one has a scientist interested in it.
    • Caprinicus 6y ago
  • s_dev 6y ago
    >There are professions that study ants. Not only that we've incorporated armies of scientists in to the public realm to advise on such envoirnmental/biodiversity policy issues. It's possible an Interstate Freeway project may not happen because an bunch of endangered ants live along its planned route.
    • addicted 6y ago
      This makes me think that one possible reason we havent observed any alien life is that similar to how we may avoid any sort of development or encroachment in an area containing an endangered species, we may have been marked off as too fragile to interact. And humans are an incredibly fragile species from the perspective of a space faring civilization. If a meteor hits our planet, we are basically done. And even if that doesn't happen, we can only acquire raw materials and energy from our own planet, so we may basically just tap out all our resources before we learn to acquire it from somewhere else. And then there is the fact that we love blowing each other up, which may not be a common trait amongst intelligent species.
    • throwaway2245 6y ago
      > an bunch of endangered ants As best as I can tell, there are no ant species on any endangered list, so this is a hyperbolic point. (In general, we don't even study ant species enough to know whether they are endangered)
      • s_dev 6y ago
        Theres a few species classified as endangered ants on the IUCN Red List. However didn't aliens crush humanity to make space for a Intergalactic Super Highway in Hithchikers Guide to the Galaxy? We aren't even endangered according to those ruling fictional aliens who epitomise the "not interested in humanity" aspect.
  • donatj 6y ago
    Let’s say though it took several generations to travel to the ants, would we bother?
    • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      I think so. Not that long ago, humans spread across the world, first organically, then intentionally. We're at the infancy of spaceflight at the moment, the equivalent of putting food and water in a raft to go to the next island over. We'll see humans on Mars in our lifetime, like the previous generation saw humans on the moon. Assuming the development and interest in spaceflight continues, we'll be seeing generation ships departing for the next solar system within the next 500 or so years (rough armchair prediction based on nothing at all). Of course, we have some massive problems to solve first, like biology, self-sustenance in deep space, cultural, financial, etc. Anyway, my theory that we haven't seen other species yet is that space is vast and science fiction tech for light speed and beyond does not exist. If you have technology that can reach 1% of light speed, it'll take 10 million years to fly across just our galaxy. Humans evolved somewhere within that bracket. Even if the technology is there, you're seeing not just generations but entire species develop in the timescales of traveling the milky way.
  • kypro 6y ago
    It's also not true that the only time ants come into contact with humans is when they're being observed. Even if aliens were uninterested in us, it wouldn't necessarily mean we'd expect not to see any signs of alien life. In the same way an ant might stumble across a human building or notice a human above the grass, you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology.
    • rbanffy 6y ago
      I wouldn't expect any given alien culture to be easily detectable and/or willing to make large scale objects we could detect. I would, however, expect at least one such civilization would develop within our detection range. As our range increases, both in distance and in breadth, chances should get increasingly better.
    • ryanmercer 6y ago
      >you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology. There's a big problem though, I've written about it here https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2014/11/30/this-just-in-you-dont-matter https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2014/11/30/this-jus... Basically time + the vastness of space = an insanely low probability that any two intelligent civilizations would overlap within a detectible sphere, especially with our current level of technology. If we assume 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets exist in 100 billion galaxies and that 1 in 100 of those host single cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those host multi-cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those have animal life, that 1 in 10 of those has sentient tool-building species you then have 10 trillion planets with tool-building species. If we assume an even distribution that's 100 tool-building species per galaxy spread out over 12-13 billion years. Oof. Even if you make far more generous assumptions, and that 1 in 2 planets has single cellular life and that 1 in 2 of those have tool-building life. That gives you an average of 25,000 tool-building worlds per galaxy, something like a 1 in 20 million change any star in our galaxy has a tool-building civilization. If you remove the first billion years of the galaxy you get 12.21-12.51 billion years. Again if we assume an even distribution and assume 140,000 light-years in diameter for a galaxy, that gives you something like 1 tool building civilization per 600,000 square light-years spread out over 12 billion years. :( :( :(
  • philliphaydon 6y ago
    I subscribe to Ant Canada on YouTube. Fascinating stuff. https://youtube.com/user/AntsCanada https://youtube.com/user/AntsCanada
  • DeusExMachina 6y ago
    And, after that, the article proceeds listing all the reasons why our sun, planet, and species might be very different from what you might find in other parts of the universe. Which is actually what would make us more interesting, not less.
  • xwdv 6y ago
    Even if we study ants, that doesn’t mean aliens will be able to secure enough funding to launch an expedition across the gulf of space to study humans up close. Telescopes and radio waves may be the most they could invest in.
  • throwaway2245 6y ago
    > I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants From Wikipedia for "ant": "More than 12,500 of an estimated total of 22,000 species have been classified." From our human perspective, we are interested in ants. Everybody has seen ants. Everybody is curious about ants. From an ant perspective, humans scarcely exist. There are 10,000 ant species that don't have a relationship with humans sufficient to deserve classification, let alone a name. (I also want to wonder aloud why extra-terrestrials would be more interested in humans than in ants)
    • ruined 6y ago
      and not only this, even among classified species, most colonies will never interact directly with a human. when ants do come into contact with things we have made, they do not comprehend it. and when they interact with us directly, even in a mode where we are identifiable to them as an entity, they can't identify much about us beyond the practical facts that we are dangerous or perhaps edible.
      • patcon 6y ago
        And further, to the extent that we might say "a lot of ants experience people now", it's perhaps more a function of us being way overextended beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of our system. In a world where humans somehow kept themselves from risking their own existence through limitless growth (which I'm assuming wiser intelligences would navigate better), the vast majority of ants colonies would never have any human take notice of them through their whole existence.
        • mcbits 6y ago
          Even as we expand our presence and every random ant has a better and better chance of encountering some kind of evidence of human existence, it still has to know how to evaluate what it's seeing. An ant finds a peanut. Being a smart ant, it recognizes that something is strange about this peanut. It appears to be roasted. After thinking for a while, it develops a theory to explain how lightning can ignite fires capable of roasting peanuts. Simple and obvious explanation in hand, no further inquiry or speculation about the existence of "advanced peanut roasting technology" is needed. I mean, why would supposedly advanced creatures intentionally reduce the nutritional quality of the peanut by roasting it, anyway? Yes, definitely lightning.
  • simonh 6y ago
    It's hard to be sure what a 10 or 100 million year old civilisation might still find interesting. I certainly wouldn't think a few hundred years of industrialisation, and a few decades of the information technology age gives us any real idea.
    • behnamoh 6y ago
      This. Plus, who says those ETs are of biological form anyway? Even we are thinking about AI doing most of the work, transhumanism and uploading our minds to machines, and finally, integrating with technology. Why think that a 10 million year old civilization still has flesh bodies, needs, and curiosities? Another comment also mentioned that ETs don't necessarily share the same interests and thought process as we do, and I agree. For an insanely sophisticated civilization, mental representations and the abstract concepts they can think about are just unimaginable for us.
      • inDigiNeous 6y ago
        This. The assumption that these ETs would appear in the same form as us, or even in the same dimension, shows us how limited our thinking is. If a lifeform has gone through let's say million times the evolving that we have, wouldn't their consciousness and expression of life have developed probably into something alltogether different. Maybe even something that we cannot see or hear with just our physical senses or instruments. There are many theories about this if you read on the subject, people being in contact with different species, but explaining that they came from between dimensions from example.
  • rixrax 6y ago
    I also casually deploy diatomaceous earth and other methods to exterminate ants when I come across them in or around the house. I’m glad the wandering aliens have not yet decided to use this strategy. Especially if they would find earth a desirable location for some colonial purposes.
  • me_me_me 6y ago
    There are also people that pour liquid metal into ant colony to cast its internal structure. It doesn't end well for ants.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • px43 6y ago
    Maybe there's a much more interesting colony of ants nearby and we're just boring?
  • nkrisc 6y ago
    If there are aliens as advanced compared to us as we are to ants, that would imply to me that life is actually fairly abundant in the universe. However just as not every anthill gets studied by entomologists, perhaps there are simply too many planets with life for a galaxy-traversing civilization to study.
  • devilduck 6y ago
    It's more interesting to me that it seems like many egos can not accept the idea that maybe they aren't that interesting after all.
  • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    it is sort of funny that the argument for lack of intellectual curiosity in aliens is being made in Scientific American.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • BlueTie 6y ago
    A better version of that argument might be: "if ants evolved to have higher than human intellect and technology - would they be interested in studying us humans?" I think the answer is far less clear in that scenario.
    • alisonkisk 6y ago
      Why wouldn't they?
      • BlueTie 6y ago
        It's possible they would, possible they wouldn't. The point is that if you project things about human intelligence i.e. "but humans like ants so why wouldn't the reverse be true? "or "most humans don't pay attention to ants so why would aliens care?"on to other types of intelligence, you're making a big assumption. A superintelligent ant colony with an "of ant" intellect is going to be so alien to our kind of intellect that the goals are just impossible to compare. Probably same for aliens unless there are many humanoid ones for some reason.
  • jjk166 6y ago
    You look at ants, you don't look at every ant. It would be absurd to conclude the absence of entomologists just because most individual ants go unobserved.
  • lhorie 6y ago
    I also think the argument isn't put forward in the best logical way, but for a different reason: another potential reason why aliens might not choose to come to visit us is that they physically can't: imagine a lifeform whose chemistry is based on liquid methane instead of water. They'd literally vaporize in Earth's atmosphere! They could also operate on a completely different timescale. For example, shrews' metabolism is way faster than ours. Sequoias are way slower. There's no reason an alien should perceive time on the same scale we do.
  • vuciv1 6y ago
    I find this point weak because we literally study ants and sell ant colonies for interested parties
  • harryf 6y ago
    We like to assume they are many orders of magnitude more intelligent than us. But it might be that the human brain represents the optimum size and capability possible for a living organism to sustain, based on requirements for energy consumption and evolutionary competitiveness. We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans. Assuming the laws of Physics do not vary throughout the universe and that evolution, if "run more than once" will eventually lead to similar outcomes, that could mean aliens capable of space travel are not significantly more intelligent than us, they've just had longer to develop technology. And given their apparent tendency to crash their spaceships while visiting earth, you might have a reasonable case for "alien idiots"...
    • alisonkisk 6y ago
      Evolution has been a mostly unimportant part of human development since at least 2 centuries ago. An intelligent species engineers itself, not evolves itself.
    • theli0nheart 6y ago
      > We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans. Where are you getting this data? Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal), Neanderthal brains were similar to those of modern humans: > The braincases of Neanderthal men and women averaged about 1,600 cm3 (98 cu in) and 1,300 cm3 (79 cu in) respectively, which is within the range of the values for modern humans.
  • carusooneliner 6y ago
    Avi Loeb's technical work is commendable but I'm left wondering if some of the reasoning in this article counts for thoughtful contemplation. >"We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path." Is it helpful to ascribe human-like motives to an alien species? Projecting our thought patterns on an alien species will not get us anywhere. There could be numerous reasons or no reason in particular why an alien lifeform might visit us: they are cataloging lifeforms, they are interested in 'ants' like EO Wilson, they might want to harvest resources on our planet, etc. > "But better yet, we could get in touch with Proxima b and entice the locals to visit and share a water-based drink with us." There's humor mixed in this statement, so I'm not sure if Avi Loeb is being entirely serious. I take the opposite stand of "don't broadcast our presence to aliens". It's common sense that if you're out in the wild, you don't draw attention to yourself.
  • mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    We have studied (exactly) 0.00000000000001% of the total ant population. Also, no ant ever has understood he is being studied (which is the more interesting point). We would experience superior beings as "natural experience" and be totally oblivious to them.
  • jkingsbery 6y ago
    Agreed. Taking the "ant" argument to it's logical conclusion and based on https://xkcd.com/1610/ https://xkcd.com/1610/, there very well might be some alien who is part of a very advanced society and struggling in grad school, and that alien's advisor (unhelpfully) is suggesting how cool it is that we earthlings manage to do what we're able to do despite how primitive we are.
  • grahamburger 6y ago
    I think the argument is that while ants are indeed interesting to us as a subject, not every single anthill gets our attention. There are probably lots of anytime anthills in out of the way places that have never had human interaction.
    • psadri 6y ago
      Maybe not humans, but they probably do get visits from other insects and animals.
      • volkk 6y ago
        an interesting point which begs the question of what is a threshold of intelligence required to lose interest in a species. and if intelligence isn't the only parameter, what are the others? predation is an obvious one, curiosity comes with a form of intelligence, what else is there?
        • psadri 6y ago
          I think a sense of curiosity is a pre-requisite or perhaps co-emergent with technological advancement. They also need to be advanced enough to be send an interstellar probe or ship to visit other disntant planets.
  • bostonsre 6y ago
    I think the important part of that statement is "examine _every_ ant". I don't think our ant professors have the bandwidth to investigate every ant hill on earth. We could very well be one of millions or billions of inhabited planets. Also if there are millions or billions of inhabited planets, then chances are a large proportion would have more advanced inhabitants than us. I would guess that just like here on earth, scientists would gravitate more towards investigating the more advanced species with very few interested in ants like us.
  • Dumblydorr 6y ago
    Even more common than those who study ants? Exterminators, ant eaters, and kids who stomp on ants for fun. I don't like our chances...
  • devoutsalsa 6y ago
    Look how excited scientists get when they discover organic compounds in a comet or something that looks like microorganisms in a Mars rock. I'm pretty sure aliens would be interested in studying why I drink Diet Coke instead of water & what consuming 4L a day does to me. Maybe I should also be wondering what it does to me...
  • thotsBgone 6y ago
    But what percentage of ants find themselves the subject of human curiosity? We look at a few ants, but not most of them. Maybe it's the same with aliens. We're just another mound of monkeys; nothing they haven't seen before.
  • drbojingle 6y ago
    Do you think the ants notice it much?
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    Would you visit every single anthill? What if an advanced alien civilization just doesn't care after passing by thousands or millions of primitive civilizations?
• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  I'm writing a kids story (with my son, its quite fun to discuss the story and plan the laser fights) about an alien that is visiting earth to complete his Alien PhD - I am going to get some sarcastic jibe about backwaters and wasting years away from any decent fun etc. I think we might consider that level of interest lucky. :-)
  • teekert 6y ago
    This sounds like a very fun idea to do! May try it as well :)
    • lifeisstillgood 6y ago
      If you do drop me a DM - having "fun" fighting conversion to pdf etc - the plan is eventually to self publish and then actually have a book in our hands written by "us" :-)
  • bluGill 6y ago
    With the speed of light being as slow as it is, that Alien must be very long lived to consider such a trip. The PhD should start observing the dinosaurs and for lack of enough data continue on to humans.
    • bbarnett 6y ago
      The presumption that "today we know precisely how the universe works, and therefore, all stories must follow this mindset", is odd here. Would you insist that Newtonian physics was the Only Way to Think of Things, prior to Einsteinian? Why, then, do you presume this will remain static forever? And therefore, suggest that a story should follow this logic?
      • bluGill 6y ago
        While it is possible relativity is wrong, anything that replaces it must fit all the observations we have about the universe that we currently use to prove relativity. That leaves very little room for the replacement for relativity to be different. Newtonian physics is a special case of relativity when you keep relative speeds slow. We don't know how quantum mechanics fits in. There is a known hole in current physics. However the size of the hole is small.
• fidla 6y ago
  I've enjoyed Avi Loeb interviews on Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan. He has a refreshing perspective
• crazydoggers 6y ago
  > Fermi’s paradox is pretentious in that it assumes we humans have some sort of cosmic significance. I don’t at all think this is the issue with Fermi’s paradox. I think sentience is an interesting enough phenomenon that others with sentience will be interested. As soon as you understand the mind of the other, there’s a basic interest in meeting other minds. The real issue is simply the vastness of time and space, and perhaps an underestimation of the difficulties involved in bridging those. Especially economic costs of space travel. And it’s kind of like the point made in this clip about the silliness of Fermi’s paradox... it’s like assuming if no lobster shows up to your dinner party, lobsters don’t exist. https://youtu.be/TK0vmOCHiDs https://youtu.be/TK0vmOCHiDs
• Udo 6y ago
  In general we don't assume that of everyone. What we do assume is that at least some aliens would be interested, because we assume intellect comes with innate curiosity. In an advanced culture, even a small number of individuals exhibiting an interest would be enough to form a field of study, just as it is here on Earth. Asserting that nobody us studying is because we're uninteresting to every single alien creature is a baffling statement, given the odds. The odds are far greater in my opinion that we're alone or at least functionally alone, even though I must admit I hate the notion. We also don't assume everyone builds megastructures or emits huge technosignatures, but it throws us off that apparently nobody does.
  • bluGill 6y ago
    I would assume curiosity is a requirement for an advanced civilization. You can be a cow eating grass on the plains avoiding the tiger trying to catch you by instinct alone, and it might work. However one of the early steps to advanced civilizations is figuring out if there is a better way - maybe you avoid the tiger better, maybe you store up grass for winter, but curiosity is at the root of advanced civilization.
  • bluetomcat 6y ago
    > We also don't assume everyone builds megastructures or emits huge technosignatures Popular culture skews our expectations towards two-legged creatures flying on saucers, roughly our size, but forms of intelligent life can manifest in radically different ways at micro and macro levels. Perhaps, what looks like a sand particle to us might be a complex microorganism, in a complex interconnected self-regulating network, with no physical artifacts of "civilisation". Those microorganisms would also be able to form "mega-structures" by mutating the environment around them, just not at the pace and scale we are accustomed to.
    • Udo 6y ago
      Unless every single civilization out there is made up of inert sand particles, that's not a solution for why we don't see anyone. You're right of course that we tend to assume somewhat similar properties to ourselves, because that's what we know, and we tend to assume that we're at least in some ways "normal" - or at least not unique. > with no physical artifacts of "civilisation" I would not be surprised if there are quite a few intelligent organisms out there that are not tool users. Earth itself has a few, as well. These would potentially make great candidates for a visit, if we could detect their biome from afar. > just not at the pace and scale we are accustomed to I don't disagree that these are probably out there. But that's not the same as asserting that every single culture besides our own is on a completely different and imperceptible scale than us. We'd expect at least some organisms to build tools that we can detect, that is unless we're one of the first civilizations in the universe. Another solution would be that FTL travel is possible and/or thermodynamics can be at least partially circumvented, but even if such techology existed, it would have to be ubiquitous in order to explain why we don't see anyone.
• 3395810 6y ago
  I assume that any culture that is capable of developing interstellar flight will have a high degree of curiosity. We humans study even the most "mundane" life forms on our planet and try to study the rest of the universe outside of our planet. That is why I think extraterrestrials would want to make contact with us. > We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. However, there are people who do study ants. I think Roadside Picnic is a good novel but not indicative of how extraterrestrials who are capable of visiting Earth would actually behave.
  • ojosilva 6y ago
    Interstellar flight alone is not of interest. OTOH, it would allow earthlings to become visitors. Commerce. If we use our experience as a basis here, this is the #1 interest that would lure alien explorers to this neck of the woods. Commerce is what got us to cross the Atlantic: looking for routes, buyers, suppliers, riches and land. All science-first approach ("they should come to study us") is so 20th century utopism. But without really being sure what matters to aliens the most, commerce, tourism or science, makes it hard to lure them. We sent Voyager with curiosity in mind: songs, poems, language samples, pictures... But we could have sent instead a list/sample of our prime minerals, water supplies, preferred payment methods and our "1-800 number" for contact. Scientists can be so un-enterpreneurial sometimes! Now, what then could get their attention and provoke a visit? Become a menace. Without really being sure what matters to aliens makes it tough to envision a way to get them really interested on the 3rd rock enough to launch a mission or send signals. So the most effective (and reckless...) is to become a menace, or at least a nuisance, to them. Fiction has played around with that idea, nuclear capability being the trigger that got them to notice or outraged enough to wipe us out... Let's say we develop a gravitational wave cannon capable of making Sirius shoot over as a billiard ball into Procyon. Oh, now that would get their attention!
    • 3395810 6y ago
      Earth isn't really unique in terms of resources. It wouldn't really make sense to travel to another solar system just to get resource that you could obtain in your own. Even if they lack something in their own solar system, they could get it from other uninhabited solar systems without needing to trade locals. Ideas are what could be valuable in trade. If it is them visiting us rather than the other way around odds are they have more advanced technology than us so that isn't something they would need to trade. Our culture, what we sent on Voyaer, seems like it would be of the most interest to them. They might have entirely different senses than us (lacking sight, seeing different frequnecies, hearing different frequencies) that would make our "culture" something that wouldn't be enjoyed directly by them. Really as I see it, scientific interest is the one thing that would make them want to contact us.
• pre 6y ago
  Fermi's paradox says nothing about how likely aliens are to visit earth. It notes that we can't see any sign of them when we look into the sky. Perhaps the humans don't care about the ants, but the ants damn well can see signs of human activity.
  • notahacker 6y ago
    Would an intelligent ant species living on an uninhabited island identify global warming and driftwood as conclusive evidence of the existence of a higher intelligence causing it?
    • pre 6y ago
      If they have telescopes then the trails from star-link satellites would probably give it away. The ants in the article were in driveways though.
• Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  > Fermi’s paradox is pretentious in that it assumes we humans have some sort of cosmic significance. No, it assumes that of all the incalculable advanced civilizations it hypothesizes to exist, at least some would be interested, not all, not the majority, not a significant number, but at least one in a million.
  • vidarh 6y ago
    It doesn't even assume that. There are a whole lot of scenarios where we'd still assume we'd spot signs of aliens even if they're all totally disinterested in us.
    • bluGill 6y ago
      The universe is too big for that. Civilizations just 150 light years away could not spot us by any means we can even imagine.
  • tlb 6y ago
    But if alien life is common, a reasonably likely outcome is that one species gains dominance and eliminates all other potential threats in the galaxy. In that case, we wouldn't see visitors if just that one species was incurious.
• grenoire 6y ago
  Obligatory "They're Made out of Meat": https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... A brilliant sci-fi short story about not necessarily how we're uninteresting, but instead a bit too interesting.
  • itronitron 6y ago
    Or maybe alien civilizations stopped visiting Earth after the dinosaurs got wiped out because their convenient big body small brain meat supply got wiped out. Would be interesting to find out if the same aliens seeded multiple systems with dinosaurs.
• imglorp 6y ago
  The hard fact is there are no shortcuts to interstellar travel, barring new physics. Any trip will consume vast amounts of energy and it will take decades if not centuries or longer. Advanced tech may reduce the expense to your civilization but the fact won't change. While all life, ants or not, may be universally worthy of study, is it worth that much sacrifice? Also, if the ants talk, exchanging messages would make more sense for study.
  • cnity 6y ago
    > barring new physics Our understanding of physics changes constantly!
    • bbarnett 6y ago
      Indeed. So many seem to exude the concept that "today we know precisely how the universe works". Would one insist that Newtonian physics was the Only Way to Think of Things, prior to Einsteinian? While the speed of light may remain a barrier, it may not. Presuming the ability to be reached by a society which likely possesses scientific knowledge beyond ours, is to be a Roman, and presume the sun travels around the Earth, that the 4 aethers exist, and become angered otherwise.
      • simiones 6y ago
        The problem with this train of thought is that it fails to account for the observations so far. We know that the amount of energy required to accelerate an object increases as its speed approaches the speed of light. We have observed this effect. New physics will never contradict this - they may just put it in a new light, or perhaps discover a new dimension. But they will not invalidate the measurements we have so far. Note that the observations done in Newton's time were never proved wrong - we just discovered that with better measurement precision and in different regimes of speed, they turn out to have additional small terms. It is perfectly possible that we'll discover additional extremely weak forces and effects, and they may completely contradict our interpretations of the physical theories we've discovered, but they are unlikely to prove that the facts (measurements themselves) we know now are wrong, at least in the regimes we've noticed them.
• cwhiz 6y ago
  Of all the potential Fermi outcomes, I find the “uninterested aliens” to be the silliest. More likely is the universe is massive, and the aliens have already visited. Millions or billions of years ago.
  • raverbashing 6y ago
    Yes. Or don't need to visit "in person" to see what's going on (or visited in the past thousands of years and has seen "enough" for now).
• sys_64738 6y ago
  In the movies it usually doesn't end well for us. Maybe we stay below the radar for now.
• DaniloDias 6y ago
  This is a great example of a doc built on weasel word arguments. All qualitative until it can’t avoid quantitative metrics like “many”
• gmuslera 6y ago
  Assuming how a different species, with different biology and a far more advanced technology than us, should think is naive. There is another approach for it. Or what we know about the universe is basically true (and we can't travel faster than ligth, nor do something that, I don't know, turns all our galaxy into 2D or triggering the big rip) or if we keep advancing we could do something that threatens something that is very far away. In the latter case close enough civilizations may worry about what we do, and be in a dark forest universe (ok, here I'm assuming how they should think here too). But for that to have any meaning we should be in an universe where the speed of light is not the ultimate limit in any meaningful way, and so far we know, we don't.
• sandworm101 6y ago
  Is there a single animal on planet earth that doesn't get the occasional visit from an interested human? From deep sea squid to albatross, someone eventually arrives for a chat. There must be the extraterrestrial equivalent of Attenborough out there somewhere.
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Oh there must be, but that's assuming they have means of actually finding and reaching us. At the moment, the only thing I can imagine that would be like that would be a deep space probe that has been traveling for thousands of years, moving so fast it can't actually slow down and make contact. What if Oumuamua was one of those, or the melted slag remains of that? We'll never know.
• cortic 6y ago
  >The silence implied by Fermi's paradox (“Where is everybody?”) may mean that we are not the most attention-worthy cookies in the jar. I've always thought of Fermi's paradox as ultimately a math problem, assuming a conservative amount of time between a civilization in one star system colonizing a neighboring star system, over billions of years every star system in the galaxy should be colonized by now. The fact that we are not getting signals from the considerable number of stars that are within a reasonable distance is concerning. It does point to a great filter that we are not seeing or understanding. Or at least an enormous misconception about our universe.
  • bluGill 6y ago
    I just assume that space is filled with enough junk that you cannot actually get between stars without getting hit by random chance and destroyed.
  • drichel 6y ago
    We might as well be among the first ones. I find the idea quite fascinating, it kind of puts the Earth back into the center and makes us special in a way.
    • cortic 6y ago
      If we are the first, then its likely the 'great filter' is behind us. And it means we will never find life that isn't related to us.
      • drichel 6y ago
        I can't quite follow how the "early bloomers" theory would imply either of those two conclusions. What I meant is the concept that our galaxy is young and the conditions just became right for ingelligent life to form, and here we are.
        • cortic 6y ago
          I've never heard of any theories that earth like conditions are new or unique, in fact half of all stars like ours are over 9 billion years old. And the universe has almost stopped making new stars. If you believe it takes, on average 9 billion years X 100 billion star systems to create 1 civilization, then you believe in some kind of 'filter' that stops life almost completely. A filter that we have passed to be the first. And by the time any other life statistically emerges we will have colonized the galaxy many times over.
• f430 6y ago
  It's accepted in some scientific circles that ETs are transdimensional or have mastered the ability to project, materialize to cover the vast distances. It's impossible to become an intergalatic type 2 civilization using physics in the 3D. Much like the fish in the koi pond can only move on a 2D plane, they wouldn't find us any more or less interesting. To us it looks like they are moving super fast (tic tac video via USN) or teleporting (common UFO sighting characteristic) but all they are doing is exploiting the dimensions beyond the 3D. I follow the stoned ape theory in that fungi, one of the oldest compound on earth, specifically the psilocybe variety that has a unique chemical formulation that can't be found anywhere else on earth except recently similar chemistry was discovered on the Venus atmosphere (as proof of life) as a form of "self replication" software that increases visual acuity, formation of concepts and language in those that ingest it. Psilocybin is the only 4-phosphorylated indole on this planet. I'm thinking they might check on the apes that consumed their biological software and see how far they progressed with the same amusement (?) or banality that one would express towards fish tank. Perhaps they like to show off their technology like dangling a carrot in front of us. "You are getting close yet still far, keep going, and one day you can be just like us!"
• drclau 6y ago
  What bothers me quite a bit, both in more-or-less scientific conversations and in Science Fiction, is that we virtually always assume a human-like psychology for aliens, and we judge what they may want or not based on our thinking. Even when we think about potentially highly advanced aliens, we still assume they'll have a psychology similar to ours, and they'll just be more advanced technologically (ie. the aliens and ants analogy). Eventually, I did find some cases in Science Fiction, and one in particular stands out as far as I am concerned: the alien entity named Rorschach and the smaller entities named Scramblers, in Firefall, by Peter Watts. If you are a (Hard) SF fan, you must read this one. Another case I would mention off the top of my head would be the Formics, in Scott Orson's Card "Ender's Game" and sequels, but I think the whole idea was left mostly unexplored. If you have other examples, please do mention them!
  • chii 6y ago
    The "Three Body Problem" trilogy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel) ) makes an argument for why the behaviour of an intelligent species is going to mimic humans (or more accurately, humans' behaviour converge towards a universal set of behaviour - one of survival of the fittest). I don't want to spoil the books so i won't discuss any further, but worth a think about if you have read the books.
    • drclau 6y ago
      Thanks, I had it on my list. I will pick it up sooner, then.
    • patcon 6y ago
      I've only read book 1, but I'm inclined to believe this as well. This video provides a neat complexity science view of intelligence: https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_... I'm intrigued that it points toward a "curiosity" at the heart of all intelligences, that we will recognize.
    • kyriakos 6y ago
• NamTaf 6y ago
  I'm increasingly of the completely unresearched, lay- and baseless opinion that the great filter explanation has a fair bit of merit. Not so much from the idea that civilisations create their own destruction before they get off their rocks because of a technological race condition, but rather that intelligence as we see it is a knife-edge balancing act, and humankind is near to the maxima of ability as a result of intelligence. If humans were a little less intelligent or a little less social, I don't think we'd have seen nearly the same the scientific advancement we have achieved. We'd either be unable to come up with the advancements, or too tribal to come together to benefit from collaboration. This would have a knock-on effect and I don't think we would've ended up in a situation where we're capable of rocketing out of our gravity well. Conversely, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a hypothetical creature with more intelligence than us found itself too burdened by its intelligence - by way of wrestling with the philosophical challenges of existence - and ended up wiping itself out. Alternatively, I could easily believe that the biological foundations of what produces intellect quickly end up producing side-effects that inhibit achieving outcomes. For example, we all-too-often see incredibly bright people struggle with depression, etc. due to their intellect. It feels like intellect itself might lead to additional struggles that are self-defeating. Moreover, neurodevelopmental conditions such as ASD seem to correlate to some degree with intelligence, with more extreme cases quickly become limiting. It sort of seems like intellect itself could become too overwhelming and quickly begin to put a handbrake on a species' development. Additionally, human brains are incredibly expensive. We use about 20% of our total energy intake to power them. These days that's easy to handle, but a super-brain with even a bit higher energy requirement might quickly cause a species to struggle to find enough energy in its early era, before it's had a chance to really develop all of that scientific advancement that leads the surplus of to modern food production. I mean, I am pretty much entirely talking out of my arse here and have no formal or informal education by which to really lend any credence to this hypothesis. Additionally, I totally realise that evolutionary pressures would tend towards these outcomes over time. However, evolution isn't exactly a precision tool, and so it would not surprise me that among many rolls of the 'intelligent life' dice, many burn themselves out due to not striking that balance well enough. I'd love to hear from anyone who has a more informed take on this.
• duopixel 6y ago
  > When weighing the risks involved in interactions with less-developed cultures such as ours, these advanced civilizations may choose to refrain from contact. I think establishing communication with a more advanced civilization would be deeply disrupting to our culture. We would ascribe their cultural practices to their advancement, and get a bunch of people doing "alien cargo culting". Imagine they were strict vegetarians, or peaceful and kind meat eaters for that matter. It would completely disrupt our own evolution by injecting foreign memes into our culture. You can also reverse the situation and suppose we are able to visit an alien planet where we find a rudimentary civilization which has customs that appear exotic to us. What would the experts recommend? The cynic would say we would go at war with them to take over their planet, but being realistic it is much more advantageous to study them without interfering. I think the evolution of conscious life in different conditions than our own planet must be of tremendous interest to other conscious life.
  • zionic 6y ago
    The aliens could also have morals we find repulsive, for example how would society react to aliens that said hitler was right etc etc?
    • whatshisface 6y ago
      We can feel pretty safe that they would not say that, because if they liked Hitler, they would be invading, not chatting about history.
    • drummer 6y ago
      Read the book "Hitler's Table Talk" by Trevor Roper.
  • ardy42 6y ago
    > Imagine they were strict vegetarians, or peaceful and kind meat eaters for that matter. It would completely disrupt our own evolution by injecting foreign memes into our culture. Or imagine they were psychopathic sadists, like the Affront in that Ian Banks novel.
  • 6y ago
• gwbas1c 6y ago
  > Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us? Because it makes good sci-fi! But in all seriousness, we have so little tangible evidence of extraterrestrial life that there's no way to answer this question. It always comes down to opinion and speculation.
• sleepysysadmin 6y ago
  In my scifi book(s), the only reason aliens have to come to earth than say any other planet is to party. There's no reason to dominate or steal our resources. Go to any other system and you have infinite amounts of resources. In fact most star systems will have planets with life but not necessarily intelligent life. So fundamentally it's just tourism. They come to Earth to drink beer and have fun. Though tourism is very rare because we have been so violent to previous tourists at roswell. Obviously there are antagonists who do want to destroy humanity but generally speaking its about tourism.
• GistNoesis 6y ago
  It's all about computation. The computer running universe-simulations needs to be able to run fast. Regularities can be integrated quickly. Life not so much. Life can make computers which can ask computations which can't be reduced. Therefore as soon as a big enough computer is built somewhere in the universe, the whole simulation-time starts crawling to an halt because the inner computer use all the resources, and future times in the universe where there are many of those computers never get to be materialized. Alternatively, solutions using time-travel allows to run simulations of longer simulation-time, by introducing a time-coherence force which prevent such computer (aka biological-numerical instabilities) to ever emerge.
  • behnamoh 6y ago
    It's a very interesting point that I hadn't noticed before. Of course, this relies on assuming (believing?) the universe is a giant simulation run on a computer with limited resources. I did not get your last sentence though. Could you elaborate?
    • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      I dig the universe-is-a-simulation theory, given how we live in an era where our own computation power and simulation accuracy has only continued to increase for the past 70-odd years. Which is a tiny amount of time on a galactic scale. I wish suspended animation and the like was a thing, I'm super curious about the future and development of humans. I can imagine that within a thousand years, assuming we don't hit a cataclysmic event that wipes everything out, I could no longer understand anything that's going on anymore. (I mean I'm starting to struggle with the younger generations' stuff already... is this it? :o ).
    • GistNoesis 6y ago
      Rules of the universe appear to us relatively simple. But the question of numerical stability is not solved specially for later times. In physics it is natural to start from an initial state and integrate through time, starting from initial time and evolving by time-stepping. Physics helps but this doesn't prevent the emergence of numerical instabilities like a big-computer being built. So if you were running a universe simulation, when a life form start to emerge and starts building a big computer you can "erase" them from existence by approximating them away. When your simulation starts crawling to an halt, you modify locally the current phases at the time of the modification so that the alien go extinct, and you propagate backwards in time towards the origin of the universe, to find the initial parameters of the simulation that when inputted make the alien never be a problem in the first place while not modifying too much the rest of the universe at current time. From the perspective of a being inside the universe, the only thing we could observe by such a parameter search on the spaces of possible universe, are being amazed at how some constants of the universe seem to be fine-tuned.
• rindalir 6y ago
  Maybe it's not a technological problem or a sheer-numbers problem of why we haven't been "visited". Maybe, after billions of years, aliens have gotten so weary and emotionally drained from watching primitive species (some with potential) torture and kill one another into extinction, and now they just are not even looking. "Call us if you grow up".
• adamisom 6y ago
  It only takes one. If you assume that the real hurdle is there being any aliens, such that many advanced alien species are almost as likely to exist as one, then indeed the majority may not want to study us 'ants'... but it only takes one. A similar argument applies to many other things, like nuclear weapons, or any other future superweapons. It also applies to worries around AGI or artificial general intelligence. The majority of research facilities may sign on to and implement very good ethics around releasing the software, or halting it if X happens. But it only takes one.
• hartator 6y ago
  Yes, it’s exactly why we should be septic regarding ufo sightings and such. If aliens are so advanced, we are probably no different than ants for them. Why they should care about us? Why they should protect themselves to be seen?
  • whitepaint 6y ago
    > Why they should care about us? Why they should protect themselves to be seen? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
    • hartator 6y ago
      > Right to self-isolation Nothing wrong with that but no alien has asked us that question as far as I know.
  • stabbles 6y ago
    We study ants too... Go to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways, and be wise
    • hartator 6y ago
      99.99% of ant colonies are not been studied. And for 0.01% we do study, we don't care of them seeing us. > Consider her ways, and be wise There is no philosophy to extract from ant society. Pretty dystopian, totalitarian, and despotic.
      • siltpotato 6y ago
        Ants work exclusively for the common good of the colony. That's my kind of dystopia.
• marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I've always loved the thing about solar eclipses and auroras: in order to see an aurora during an eclipse, the moon has to be the exact same size as the sun (when viewed from the planet). Earth has this (for a while at least - the moon is slowly moving away from us), and it makes us special. So if you want to find aliens, look during a solar eclipse. It's a rare phenomenon and if there are alien tourists, they'll want to see it.
  • dimitrios1 6y ago
    What makes you think it is a rare phenomenon to them, or that they have the same conceptualizations of "needs and wants" as we do? What if they view these events the same way we view watching paint dry or grass grow? Just as we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize animals and other species, we must also not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing alien species until there's an actual encounter and we get to 'know' them, once again, assuming their concept of 'knowing' even remotely resembles ours. For as far as we know, they've observed us, and have long moved on, finding us entirely uninteresting, which seems to be the one explanation we love to overlook, but given we are humans with big egos, love to make ourselves out to be more important than we actually are.
    • dstick 6y ago
      Yeah if you park your UFO at the right angle, or even better, keep it flying at the right speed and place you can have a perpetual solar eclipse. Pretty mundane stuff when you aren’t planet bound.
    • mindcrime 6y ago
      or that they have the same conceptualizations of "needs and wants" as we do? Availability heuristic. We are the only example of "human level or greater" intelligent life we know of, so we assign "human like" needs and wants to these hypothesized aliens because it's all we have. I think the key thing is just to remember that this is just a heuristic and not to be overly rigid about it. Your point, IMO, absolutely stands that there is no particular reason to assume that "aliens" must be similar to us in this regard.
• waheoo 6y ago
  Because we assume our instinctual tendency to explore is what makes us so dominant. More of the same old anthropomorphizing I guess.
• scj 6y ago
  Scientists thinking like scientists! I'd presume an advanced culture that can traverse the galaxy has many resources. Like humanity, I'd assume that with abundance, entertainment would be prioritized. We might be nothing more than a new source of fashion and novelty to them! They may like Rock & Roll, our food, our clothing, or even pogs. We might even be boring to them for the moment, but they're hoping for a future payoff. Or they could just look at us as a future source of diversity in their society. The different methods of creating sentient beings might be of great importance to a post-biological society (maybe there's charm in our resource inefficiency). Determining the motivations of a post-singularity society is a difficult task. It's fun because it forces you to think beyond your current means. But I wouldn't consider it a productive endeavor.
  • newsbinator 6y ago
    It's possible they can simulate many trillions of species realistically, so they wouldn't need to examine us individually. Many of the other trillion would have interesting music or interesting pog slammers. Their machine learning might pick up on it and surface it for them to review. It's possible we are one of those trillion species being simulated, and our pogs are currently being scrutinized.
  • hhjj 6y ago
    It also could be as entertaining as watching paint dry for them.
  • pasquinelli 6y ago
    i think the reason people assume aliens would want to visit us is because they are vaguely aware of human history, which is characterized by more advanced societies, driven by a need to expand, subjugating or destroying less advanced societies. the very idea that aliens might exist and that they might be more advanced than us leads directly to the question, "would they do us like, say, europe did the americas?"
  • RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
    Rather presupposes that alien life is similar enough to humanity for culture and art to be more-or-less mutually intelligible. Would extraterrestrials who communicate with pheremones, or touch, or don't communicate at all (ala "Blindsight") have any concept of music? If they can "hear", does their sensory range overlap ours? Is it compatible with our notion of musical scales? Does whatever passes for a nervous system operate at a similar timescale to ours? Food and clothing seem like more of a stretch- even within earth's biosphere many substances humans can eat are poisonous to other animals, and vice versa. Vast differences in bodyplan would almost certainly make our clothing useless to an alien race, and the materials we use could easily be incompatible with their biology. Even if aliens were substantially similar psychologically, minor changes in biology could result in completely different societies. What would our world look like with humans who reproduced asexually, or in triads? Where we produce our own food via photosynthesis or symbiosis? Where we didn't sleep, or different populations hibernated in their own cycles? Overall I'm inclined to believe that cultural exchange with an intelligent extraterrestrial species would be harder and less productive than cultural exchange with parrots.
• albanread 6y ago
  I think we would want to visit them; and that's the reason we hope they might like to visit us. And we hope there is some easy shortcut through space; that we might figure out in the next few centuries; so we can visit people while we are still human and still have this motivation.
• deleted 6y ago
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• breck 6y ago
  One thing that worries me if you look at history. Given that someone is willing to leave their entire family and life to embark on a long quest to an unknown land, while many do it for love to get help or knowledge or resources to bring back home to their people, others are doing it because they are looking for a place where they can get away with hate. Even if an alien civilization were 99% peaceful and good, what is the probability that the members of that civilization who would want to venture out, leave their families behind, and come meet us are the good ones or the ones in the other 1%?
• hehehaha 6y ago
  I am certain there are many more planets inhabited by carbon based intelligence similar to ours. In fact, I believe they look very similar to homo sapiens and that they too are in search of extraterrestrials. Based on rough math we are nowhere near making contacts but I get goosebumps just thinking about the very first contact.
• karteum 6y ago
  There are also aspects that should be considered in my opinion 1°/ individual intelligence and technological innovation is not necessary an ultimate achivement that enables competitive advantage : human beings may be individually smart (compared to some other species) yet the collective intelligence of humanity is rather poor (which translates to the unability to solve collective problems such as sustainable management of our finite natural resources (e.g. oil) or of the consequences of our activity (e.g. biodiversity fall and climate change)). I suspect humanity will experience in a few decades a major regression (if not extinction) which could be interpreted as natural selection because of lack of collective intelligence. The same could also happen to other civilizations and maybe technological innovation the way we see it today is not necessary a ultimate achievement ! 2°/ even if some other intelligent species would exist, maybe they would not have the same need to communicate, the same need or will to travel, the same need or will to innovate, etc. 3°/ even if some civilizations could be infinitely smart both individually and collectively and have enough genius to implement all engineering allowed by the laws of physics and have the will to implement it, maybe the laws of physics together with the nature/amount of natural resources on a typical planet do not enable such intergalactic space travels ! Sure, we were able to fly to the moon and we can make 5nm transistors while our ancestors would never have believed it could be done and it might make us dream that "everything is possible because genius and engineering have no limits", yet I would still be careful and such claims sounds more like religious faith than science. People need to understand the enormous distances we are talking about here and we need to remain humble that maybe it is and will remain forever an obstacle :)
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > even if some other intelligent species would exist, maybe they would not have the same need to communicate, the same need or will to travel, the same need or will to innovate, etc. I think this is unlikely. It seems to me that some amount of curiosity would be a prerequisite for being able to make discoveries that lead to technological progress. Although I suppose it is possible such progress could be made through some kind of evolutionary mechanism as opposed to individual intellect.
    • 6y ago
• jp57 6y ago
  > Fermi’s paradox is pretentious in that it assumes we humans have some sort of cosmic significance. Our significance as a species is actually irrelevant to the question of why we might or might not be visited. Even if we turn out to be somehow extraordinary, the aliens would have to visit first before they could know that.
  • drichel 6y ago
    Imagine aliens of the future for whom the Fermi paradox does not arise, because the galaxy is teeming with what used to be human.
• karaterobot 6y ago
  I disagree with the author's statement that the Fermi paradox is "pretentious" because it assumes we have cosmic significance. I think a better word for that is "presumptuous", but pedantry aside, I don't believe the Fermi paradox ever says anything about what aliens think of humans. It asks why there isn't more evidence of aliens anywhere we've ever looked, not about why aliens haven't come to ask us for our wisdom on philosophical matters. It's not asking why they haven't contacted us, it's asking why we can't see them, or any evidence of them. In other words, it's about the statistical likelihood of seeing evidence that should be commonplace, given the age of the universe. He brings up the point that we might be too primitive to even notice them. Fair enough, but you could just as easily say that it's "pretentious" to say elves don't exist, because we might just be too primitive and narrow-minded to see that there is evidence of them everywhere. We have to start somewhere, and we're doing our best. The Fermi paradox may have a built in assumption that aliens affect their world through technology, and even that they are scientifically advanced and curious enough to send probes or ships out to explore. An attack on that point would be fair. It's possible that the answer to the paradox is that humans are extremely rare in having developed any level of technology, science, or curiosity. But, that seems more pretentious to me than the alternative.
  • mxcrossb 6y ago
    I would also like to add that Fermi’s paradox doesn’t assume humans are interesting, it just assumed probes are cheap. If probes can easily and cheaply be made to cover the galaxy (and we know that this is possible even without major breakthroughs), aliens don’t need to be excited about us to visit the neighborhood.
    • jjk166 6y ago
      If aliens sent a probe to earth 1 million years ago, we'd have no way of knowing. Even if such a probe weren't destroyed or buried over that immense time span, it could be anywhere and we would have no way of knowing what to look for. Even if we were probed just a few centuries ago we'd likely be unaware - it would be quite serendipitous for an alien civilization to just happen to launch a probe such that it arrives within decades of us becoming capable of global monitoring. It's not enough to probe every planet in the galaxy, they would have to repeatedly probe every planet in the galaxy every few centuries for us to expect to find such a probe. For how many millenia would you keep sending probes to the same backwater before you knew all you needed to know?
• jonnypotty 6y ago
  We went to visit the whales. We did not try and find out who their leader was, learn their language or attempt to introduce ourselves before habitually invading their environment and studying them. our problem with thinking about et is that we don't actually think seriously, we just start imagining star trek.
• cvaidya1986 6y ago
  Why do we assume we can detect extra terrestrials
• mdip 6y ago
  > Why Do We Assume Extraterrestrials Might Want to Visit Us? I'm not trying to be sarcastic, though it'll be hard to write this without the tone seeming that way, but the question alone has a pretty simple set of answers and their own problems: (1) Our only way to study how an *intelligent* extraterrestrial would behave would be to study the behavior of other intelligent[0] beings. Our data set consists of one species. Enough of this species wants to visit an extraterrestrial civilization, and given no other examples, we assume it's probably the same. (2) Related to (1), we have exactly zero evidence of the existence of *any* extraterrestrial life, let alone life that understands that they live on "something in space", that there is other life on a planet orbiting a sun amongst an infinite number of stars, etc. Maybe I'm not the article's target audience, but this is so far down the list of questions that need to be answered at this point that I had a hard time being motivated to read the whole thing. The first, and a more interesting question is: "Is there any life, intelligent or otherwise, outside of this planet?[1]" If we found, say, that samples from Mars or some other planet/asteroid had a diversity of different bacteria/single-celled organisms, etc, it would increase the probability that there is intelligent life out there "somewhere". If everything comes back empty, there's probably better things to focus research energy on. [0] The title is missing that important piece. If they are unaware that life could exist they won't be all that interested in visiting. The mattresses (from the planet "where mattresses are grown") likely haven't pondered any of the big questions of life, the universe and... everything. [1] Tricky problem: you sent something up from a planet teaming with all kinds of bacteria/life; I've read about how they sanitize/handle things but it still amazes me that they can say with any confidence that there was no cross-contamination, but IANARS.
• kgin 6y ago
  If you assume that there is a civilization that has gone to the trouble of developing interstellar transportation, I think you can assume they value the differences between different parts of the universe. Considering that inhabited planets or even solar systems seem to be much more rare than uninhabited ones, I don't think it's unreasonable to think these difference-interested beings would want to stop by to at least map out an inhabited planet.
• theodric 6y ago
  Because we're the most interesting people we've ever met. End of story.
• dqpb 6y ago
  Well, let’s unpack this: Let x = Extraterrestrials Let y = want to visit us x might y = x might y or x might not y True = True or False Boolean logic suggests this statement is indeed True.
• xpuente 6y ago
  "Chemical" based intelligence/life is only the bootstrap to "electron" based intelligence/life. Most likely we might be unable to understand that until ourselves cross that line. They will wait for it.
  • spideymans 6y ago
    This seems so... obvious, that I'm surprised this potential isn't talked about more. Our own species probably isn't all that far away from generating some variety of machine consciousness. I'd say give it a few hundred years at most. Heck, this begs the question of why the hell would an intelligent alien species even send their meat bags into space, when they can just upload their consciousness into a machine and have it do their bidding, without any of the limitations of biological systems.
    • xpuente 6y ago
      >it a few hundred years at most. We will not wait for that long. When the fundamental "piece" comes out, all our current knowledge in neuroscience will fall into place very quickly.
• tsdlts 6y ago
  Perhaps a super intelligent civilization would not put up with the limitations of our physical reality and instead upload their collective consciousness into an artificial one. This has the added benefit in that they are no longer dependent on natural resource extraction to expand their population at least beyond the energy requirements to sustain their giant consciousness server. I'm sure I can't be the only one to have thought of this but I'm not well read on the subject. Why go through pain and suffering and various zero sum games when you could open up the possibilities to the infinite?
• irrational 6y ago
  Why do we assume extraterrestrials can visit us? As far as we know there is no way to travel even close to the speed of light, much less faster. It simply takes too long to get anywhere.
• jdlyga 6y ago
  Well, if we saw extraterrestrials we'd probably want to visit too. Or at least observe them. Prime directive.
• 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
  The most depressing thought I had recently was that there aren't any extraterrestrials with the capability of space flight. Pretty sure they exist, but just imagine if we're the most advanced ones? Kind of embarrassing/sad. Can you imagine traveling to another planet? The aliens gaze at us expecting some technological geniuses, and who walks out but Frank Dunce in his MAGA hat and "I'm with stupid" t-shirt?
• jkingsbery 6y ago
  I have no way to verify the author's claim, but it strikes me as likely self-refuting to argue that life seems so rare because actually it's super common.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• thelazydogsback 6y ago
  Our species is at the most interesting point (now + coming few generations) in its evolution I'd think (creation of WMDs, genetic engineering, effecting plant-scale changes, artificial intelligence/life, spacefaring, etc.) - a tipping point that makes us most "interesting" at the moment -- so if there's a civilization that's been around for millions (if not billions) of years, I'd expect that they are here now, and that they are in a form (tiny, distributed, etc.) that isn't recognizable to us unless they decided to manifest in a specific form. I'd wager that if we are not the lone civ in the galaxy, that this is probably the case.
• jamesmishra 6y ago
  I think multicellular life on Earth has likely created complex molecules and other interesting matter that doesn't exist anywhere else in the galaxy. I imagine an alien race would be interested in discovering what is out there--but they may not recognize human life as being any more intelligent than a grove of trees.
  • cwkoss 6y ago
    I would expect highly advanced civilizations would have nanotechnology that makes complex chemical synthesis fairly trivial.
    • jamesmishra 6y ago
      Sure, but they still wouldn't even be able to imagine some of the things that they could find in a glass of milk. Presumably a spacefaring civilization would be limited by discovery, not production.
• johannes1234321 6y ago
  The question is, I guess, whether we are the first species they find inhabiting a planet in some form of intelligent life, or whether we are Species 5618. Species 5618 is interesting to few experts only.
• blackrock 6y ago
  Because. We fear they’re going to probe us.
• kwdc 6y ago
  When a species finally figures out how to create a suitable container to put on the top of a pile of explosives in order to travel I think they are worth further investigation. That and our current ability to create nuclear weapons and then (mostly) not use them. For now at least. This skill hasn't been mastered yet. But we're still young. Worth taking a look at.
• stereoabuse 6y ago
  This author has also proposed that the solar system has already been visited: "‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization."[0] The rest of the paper covers the possibility that the ‘Oumuamua object was sent unintentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.11490.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.11490.pdf