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I'm betting on #2. We only have our own planet to look at, but if we could somehow rank all of the species on the planet according to intelligence, just jumping

• rendall 4y ago
  It's nice that someone else gets #2. I often get bogged down with people refuting the notion by pointing out that we are not cave fish and are nothing like cave fish. That we have evolved to perceive everything that can possibly threaten us and that includes aliens.
  • adrianN 4y ago
    Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. Our current physics also doesn't seem to be _so_ wrong that it allows much room for technological societies to hide from our instruments.
    • indymike 4y ago
      > Thanks to technology we can perceive many things that we have no evolutionary reason to be able to perceive. We might be able to perceive, but that doesn't mean we understand what we see. Every time I engage with medicine, I learn how little humanity actually knows, despite all the technology. We still don't understand what causes many diseases, or how to heal many wounds. How would we find completely alien life when we can't even find the cause of a disease that plagues 23% of the adult population?
      • adrianN 4y ago
        The same way we find the disease: by the effects the aliens have on their surroundings.
        • indymike 4y ago
          You are missing the point, in our arrogance to believe we understand things, we do not really understand them. The drive to understand more is powerful, and has lead to huge advances, but we still have a long way to go.
          • adrianN 4y ago
            I agree that we still have a very long way to go. I disagree that the areas of the universe that are still mysterious to us are likely to be hiding places for aliens.
      • ceejayoz 4y ago
        > We still don't understand what causes many diseases, or how to heal many wounds. Right, but we still know the diseases and wounds exist.
        • Supermancho 4y ago
          Sometimes, you have to wait until you're dead or dying to know they exist. I'm not convinced that humans have mastered perception after mastering writing 5 thousand years ago.
      • ben_w 4y ago
        You're partially right, but missing something important. Where you're correct: Aliens that are only found on planets would be almost impossible to spot, and even if we look at them and see the consequences of their existence on their atmosphere we may interpret that as non biological in origin. What you're missing: However, if they are expansionist and can build space habitats and automation of the sort we have reason to believe is possible, the question is "why are there visible stars? Why are they not all already surrounded in Dyson swarms?" which is hard to miss regardless of underlying chemistry or biology.
    • Loquebantur 4y ago
      Wrong isn't the same as incomplete and we have a weird tendency to overlook things, we find then "obvious" afterwards. Things we do not easily perceive are such that are too fast, too small, too high energy generally and, most importantly, too unexpected. Further, you can hide in plain sight: you only have to look "unbelievable" (for example), so society will not transmit the information of your sighting. You can hide where (nearly) no one is looking as well: deep under the ocean, far below the surface, high in the sky, etc. Most likely, this isn't exhaustive. Places we don't know about are perfect for hiding ,-)
    • bioemerl 4y ago
      Yeah, we are at the point that we are getting data on black holes colliding millions of light years away from us based on the deviation of a Lazer across miles over the width of a few atoms. To suggest the universe is full of life and we simply can't see it? I don't buy it. I think it's more likely that the signals just aren't there, because they are... Not hidden, but are too weak and crossing too grand a distance to be detected.
    • colordrops 4y ago
      There are plenty of things that we are aware of that are currently impenetrable by our instruments, such as the inside of black holes or the past. And who knows what we aren't aware of. Is there any reason to believe that physics is a complete description of reality? Or even a significant slice? It could be just describing a very tiny human centric slice of all that exists.
      • db48x 4y ago
        Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 95% of the Universe (the rest is all the normal matter and energy in all of the galaxies put together). Our understanding of physics is both very complete, and contains large unknowns. You might imagine that there are a lot of aliens hiding in the Dark Matter, but as far as we can tell Dark Matter particles pass right through each other, as well as normal matter. They cannot clump together to make stars or planets or life forms the way normal matter can. Thus all aliens would be made of normal matter like us.
        • colordrops 4y ago
          > Our understanding of physics is both very complete Citation please.
          • db48x 4y ago
            I’m sure I could find some, but I haven’t bothered. We know that our current understanding of physics is incomplete (various niggling little problems with the Standard Model, the whole Dark Matter question etc), but these are surprisingly small problems. We only know about these problems because of the extreme sensitivity of our instruments. The new physics that will eventually fill these gaps will answer fascinating questions, but won’t change anything about our understanding of life. For example, petaquarks were first observed in the early 2000’s, and the Large Hadron Collider provided additional evidence for their existence. But they’re so unstable that they can never stick around long enough to participate in any life processes, so as far as our understanding of aliens goes they are irrelevant. Maybe they exist naturally inside the cores of neutron stars, but that’s not really a very habitable environment. Similarly, however we resolve the apparent paradoxes in our understanding of gravity and quantum mechanics won’t matter at all to the study of life. Gravity is so weak that it is essentially irrelevant in any sort of chemical system, even when quantum mechanics is necessary to understand the fine details.
    • ben_w 4y ago
      > Our current physics also doesn't seem to be _so_ wrong that it allows much room for technological societies to hide from our instruments. Perhaps. An idea I first heard from my brother a decade or two ago was that the Dark Energy expansion of the universe might be the waste product of all the aliens who figured out some way to trick the laws of physics into giving them free energy. (Obviously that's more of a sci-fi plot device than science at this point, take it with the due level of seriousness).
      • cpeterso 4y ago
        That's pretty much the plot of Isaac Asimov's novel "The Gods Themselves". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves
        • ben_w 4y ago
          He probably read it, though that novel predates the discovery of Dark Energy.
  • indymike 4y ago
    > we have evolved to perceive everything that can possibly threaten us and that includes aliens This argument is comical because it contains two components that are exactly the sort of thing that blunts perception: arrogance and absolutes.
    • still_grokking 4y ago
      Nothing new here. People always thought they already know "everything that's important" and "only a few details are missing". We, as a species, are quite arrogant and entitled to our perceived "large knowledge". That's why real progress is so slow even "things are obvious"—at least afterwards.
  • 300bps 4y ago
    I understand #2. I hope you understand the people refuting it. Humans haven’t evolved additional perception, we created it. We evolved to see electromagnetic radiation in the “visible light” spectrum but we created tools to see every other part of it. We’ve even created tools to accelerate matter to just under the speed of light, smashed atoms together and then detected the particles created from the collision. We’ve explored our entire world, launched telescopes into space, sent probes outside of the solar system and so much more. Can we see everything? Not even close. But our vision today is incomparably far compared to even just 150 years ago. Cave fish today see as well as cave fish 100,000 years ago.
    • Loquebantur 4y ago
      Only, having the possibility to use such sensors isn't the same as actually using them. Most advanced sensors are exceedingly rare and consequently locally far too restricted to be useful in this context. Social hurdles apply. The most comprehensive sensor network on earth belongs to the US military. In spite of being provided extraorinary amounts of taxpayers' money for this, the resulting data isn't shared for common interests like science at all.
    • hoseja 4y ago
      We barely see neutrinos, we don't even know what dark-matter and -energy are, we can't reconcile micro and macro physics, we've lived for an eyeblink, we really don't have much clue.
      • 300bps 4y ago
        That's why I wrote, "Can we see everything? Not even close." But the cave fish comparison is not accurate.
      • colordrops 4y ago
        Not referring to 300bps, as they seem to get it, but unfortunately many of the most unimaginative people limited by dogma also seem to be the most confident and condescending.
    • 4y ago
  • adamsmith143 4y ago
    I think the problem is that 2 relies on kind of woowoo logic. Where exactly do these aliens exist in this scenario? WE can't perceive everything directly but with LIGO we're pretty close to being able to measure most phenomena that exist in the Universe. Is there a mirror universe they exist in because even if not directly we should be able to detect their influence on Solar Systems, Stars, Black Holes, etc.
    • gitfan86 4y ago
      Are you familiar with quantum gravity? If humans are so advanced in our technology and understanding of physics why can't we explain gravity at the quantum level? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity#Problem_of_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity#Problem_of_tim... And if we don't understand something as basic as gravity, how can we possibly say that we can detect everything in the universe?
      • still_grokking 4y ago
        Actually we even don't understand time. Therefore space-time. Therefore the "stage" on which everything happens. Also we don't understand mater fully. So we don't understand "the thing" that happens on said stage. At the fundamental level we know shit. There's still plenty to figure out. Funny enough most of the fundamental things… By finding out about those fundamental things it's quite possible that we discover completely unexpected aspects of our universe. Not long ago we even didn't have the slightest clue how our sun works. A phenomenon that is central to our existence since inception. We should be really more humble in what we assume to know about how the things around us work.
    • trefoiled 4y ago
      How do you know that we're able to measure most phenomena that exist in the universe?
  • BurningFrog 4y ago
    Even if there is plenty of life in some form we cannot perceive, I think the problem remains: Why isn't there more "cave fish" out there? The universe we do perceive is ultra gigantic, and seemingly empty.
    • colordrops 4y ago
      The pool of water the cave fish lives in may seem incomprehensibly gigantic to its tiny, lonely brain.
• oneoff786 4y ago
  > Or as I like to quip, somewhere in the middle of the ocean there's an island. On that island is an ant hill, and there's an ant at the top of it wondering: Where are all of the other ants? That’s not a very good analogy though. The ants’ answer would be “maybe across the ocean”. And since the ants lack any tech to check or be checked by other ants that would be the end of it. It’s not naivety. If there were other ants not visible to the island, they would be fundamentally underdiscoverable.
  • darkerside 4y ago
    I'm sure they'd furiously be sensing the air for pheromones sent over a long distance
    • oneoff786 4y ago
      Doesn’t matter. This is like asking where the other 21st century humans are in the universe. Ants are co-existing with beings beyond their reach. They effectively have alien contact for the purpose of this analogy. The absence of other ants is just because ants are not tech savvy.
• frozenwind 4y ago
  I'm highly suspicious of the fact that other life forms in the universe necessarily resemble our own, although I tend to think about some things that seem to be universal like the the laws of physics and organic matter. I'm not yet very convinced that the whole organic machinery revolving around RNA/DNA is universal, although I have a very deep feeling it is... In any case, "The Caloris Network" is a reference example for me when attempting to think about how different alien lifeforms might be. Is intelligence necessarily organic matter based? Maybe not. Maybe somewhere in the universe a spontaneous self-replicating turing machine appeared. Maybe there is life on the event horizon of a black hole, or maybe a hot type of intelligence lives inside a star. I think we can make all kinds of wild assumptions.
  • hoseja 4y ago
    Why? DNA/RNA is a very specific self-replicating machinery good for carbon-abundant places with liquid hydrogen oxide. It's like living in an old apartment and concluding natural gas fire from the stovetop is the universal form of fire, or something. Most aliens are probably tangled magnetothermohydrodynamic plasmas in star atmospheres or something.
• qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/emov2p/technology_implies_belligerence_peter_watts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/emov2p/technol...
  • jvanderbot 4y ago
    "technology implies belligerence" I completely agree.
• willhslade 4y ago
  Alternatively, given that the majority of the planet is water and we kind of can't really imagine a biology without it, the universe could be full of fish planets.
  • PaulHoule 4y ago
    It is just the majority of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water. If you go outside the frost line most of the mass of many bodies is water. A generic outer solar system body (Europa, Ganymede, maybe even Pluto) has underground oceans. Inner solar system bodies have Goldilocks problems. Part of the Fermi paradox resolution may be that most life arises or will arise outside the frost line and those people will look at inner solar system bodies and assume out of hand that they are uninhabitable. If there were grabby aliens of that sort (or even our sort) the real prize in our solar system would be worlds that have a good combination of ice and rock like maybe Ceres, Pluto, etc. To an interstellar species which runs on D-D fusion, it’s a fairly certain bet that you can find some ice world which can be disassembled and turned into a ‘small ringworld’ with a larger habitable area that a planet like Earth which might turn out to not be habitable at all.
• leot 4y ago
  I don't know why this hasn't come up yet, but watts per bit has fallen precipitously over the last 150 years, which means it's pretty unlikely we'd see any stray radio signals from other planets unless we managed to catch them exactly during their very brief 1-2 century inefficient stage. And even if we're not in a "dark forest", keeping quiet is generally good social hygiene and tends to correlate with maturity. Which may be a side-effect of #2.
• wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  >If such a thing happened, the history of massively-different cultures interacting on Earth is not a positive one. Given the sheer size of the universe, and the absolutely massive costs of interstellar travel, I have no idea why any alien civilization capable of visiting us would have hostile intent. Life is rare. Elements, even the rarest, are exceedingly common. The thought that an advanced alien civilization would cross thousands of light years of distance to subjugate or destroy some naked apes is hilarious to me.
  • swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
    We've discovered super-earths orbiting around 11.8% of stars. These planets are 1-3x the size of the Earth (easier to detect), although we can only speculate to their elemental composition. We still don't know how many Earth-sized planets are out there, but they appear common [0]. A highly advanced technological society could even fuse hydrogen to synthesize the lighter elements in our periodic table. Imagine the sheer volume of hydrogen readily available in a single nebula (many stars worth). If a civilization could climb enormous gravity wells, Jupiter itself has 318 times the mass of the Earth, ready for space mining. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/exo20101028.html https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/exo20101028.ht...
  • vhold 4y ago
    The most likely reason would be to neutralize us before we can become a threat far far in the future. Subjugation could come in subtler forms, like in the book The Three Body problem where the aliens halt human scientific progress by stealthily interfering with science.
    • wing-_-nuts 4y ago
      I've only made it part way through that series, but I also thought the premise there is silly. If you're a civilization capable of travelling hundreds or thousands of lightyears, you are, by definition a space native species whose natural habitat is the ships you build. Why spend such extraordinary amounts of time and energy when you could simply deconstruct a few lifeless rocks in your solar system? The universe is completely abundant with every element you could ever need, and life is so rare and precious.
• dbingham 4y ago
  > I find it interesting that so many humans assume that since we can chat with one another, aliens somehow are supposed to show up and chat with us. It's all about us. If such a thing happened, the history of massively-different cultures interacting on Earth is not a positive one. We do have terrestrial aliens here on Earth and we are trying to chat with them. Dolphins, Gorillas, Chimps, Bonobos, Crows, Killer Whales... there is evidence for all of these species having varying degrees of language, culture, problem solving capabilities. Some of them, like Dolphins, sure seem damned close to our own capabilities with likely fully formed languages. We've been trying to decipher their language for 50 years with almost no success. With many of these species we've figured out pretty rudimentary and simplistic communication modes, but they clearly have much more complex communication structures among themselves and we've come nowhere close to deciphering them. That alone tells you how difficult it's going to be to learn to talk with extraterrestrial aliens. Even our near cousins, we struggle to communicate with. If we're examining our behavior as an analogy for the ET's however, it would suggest that either no one's around, or those who are around are so advanced that they don't think we're worth the effort to communicate with. Because we're definitely trying to communicate with the species we're aware of that we think have language. Of course, many of the species on that list were only added relatively recently (Crows, for example).
  • qez 4y ago
    > Some of them, like Dolphins, sure seem damned close to our own capabilities with likely fully formed languages ... Because we're definitely trying to communicate with the species we're aware of that we think have language. This is highly doubtful. Crows don't have language anything like humans. Dolphins are a more likely candidate. I want to believe it, but I can't.
    • dbingham 4y ago
      And this right here is why it's taken us so long to figure out that we even have terrestrial aliens with cultures and languages. If you're not willing to believe it's possible, then you can't even begin to devise ways to determine if it's real. > "We have hardly begun to decipher the language of the raven. Its dictionary so far contains but a few 'words'. Perhaps our analysis has been too coarse-grained to catch the meanings. Our research has been something like that of aliens from outer space who make sonograms of human vocalizations under different situations - eating, playing, loving, fighting, etc. Certain differences noted in frequency, intonation, and loudness are correlated with feelings and emotions. But human sounds convey much more, and perhaps ravens' do, too." > Our challenge is to put ourselves in the place of those "aliens from outer space" and solve the immensely difficult problem of how to communicate with another intelligent species. http://np.crows.net/language.html http://np.crows.net/language.html Consider this: Crows pass knowledge down the generations. There have been studies done on crows where researchers go out and bully them. Then they observe the crows to see if they remember who bullied them. They do remember. And so do their children, and the children of their children. They clearly have a means of pretty abstract communication, because in remembering, they differentiate different people. They have a way of telling their kids "See that human? Yeah, that one. He's an asshole." > Recent studies have proven that the crow can remember the faces of other birds and even humans. They can differentiate between those who have been kind to them and those who have caused them stress. Crows will even pass this information on to other generations. https://birdfact.com/articles/do-crows-remember-faces https://birdfact.com/articles/do-crows-remember-faces With Dolphins the existence of a language is even clearer. In this Nova Science episode they show clear evidence of a language. They have taught the dolphins to create a new trick (something they haven't done before and haven't been taught to do by humans). They've also taught them to do tricks together. Then they put them together - "together", "create". And they did it, they came up with a new trick and they did the exact same trick together. That absolutely requires language akin to humans. Relevant section starts at around 8 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwhoLlu8D_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwhoLlu8D_g The evidence is there, we just have to be willing to put aside our own egos and see it.
• joshuahedlund 4y ago
  #2 is not satisfying. The ant might not perceive humans but if the ant is not "special" then the ant should perceive tons of other life forms equivalent to its own level, across the islands that it can observe. Resolving the Fermi paradox by appealing to hypothetical aliens who are too high for us to perceive just feels like "aliens-of-the-gaps". The number of species on Earth with human intelligence (and quantity of such individuals) is orders of magnitude less than the number with ant intelligence. Aliens more advanced than us should similarly be that much less common than us. If humanity is not special, other aliens who are more equivalent to us are still missing.