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It seems equally likely to me that conditions in the Universe just weren't amenable to life until relatively recently. Radio waves take time to travel; there c

It seems equally likely to me that conditions in the Universe just weren't amenable to life until relatively recently. Radio waves take time to travel; there could be many civilisations out there whose signals haven't had time to reach us. If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation to evolve in our immediate vicinity.

pols45 1y ago
Not really. Microbes have been around for a long time. And there are more of them today than there are stars in the sky. No intelligence required. Plus they change so fast that what Life looked like yday can look totally different tomorrow. As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with each other and group size increases. The philosophers have talked about the bugs for a long time (see Plato's chariot, Hobbes passion vs reason, Freuds id-ego-superego, Kahnemann's system 1 vs system 2, Haidt's Elephant Rider). The mind needs stories to handle the bugs. And there is no dearth of stories on Earth to keep the 3 inch chimp brain occupied forever.
- thomassmith65 1y ago
  If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation or civilisation of radio-wave-emitting bugs to evolve in our immediate vicinity. :)
  - nandomrumber 1y ago
    Neutrino sources outside of stars / stellar-like objects would be a dead giveaway of either unexplained physics or nuclear fusion / fission technology, and much harder / impossible to hide than EM tech. We should look for those.
- OgsyedIE 1y ago
  All of the evidence we have suggests that the mitochondria-archaea endosymbiosis event that created the eukaryotes has happened only once in our entire history. If there were no eukaryotes, there'd likely be no way of getting past the energy per gene ceiling that constrains the other two domains of life.
- ahazred8ta 1y ago
  "The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ... In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee." ― Terry Pratchett
vikingerik 1y ago
This isn't likely. The Milky Way is 100k light years in diameter. That's tiny relative to the age of life. Animals comparable to humans in complexity have existed for something like 250 million years on Earth, and could have on planets of stars that formed billions of years before our sun. The possible timespan for signal-emitting life to have developed is many multiples of the timespan that signals take to cross the galaxy. It's far more likely that signal-emitting life is so rare (or short-lived) so that they are separated by distances where their signals weaken to undetectability, than that we are the one fantastically lucky star to be the first among a hundred billion. Star Trek showing all the rival civilizations exploring the galaxy at the same time makes no sense at all. It's far more likely that civilizations would arise separated by time of millions or billions of years, than that they would all be concentrated within a few centuries. (Trek does hint strongly that the explanation is panspermia, that life was seeded everywhere at the same time to account for the time-concentrated development.) What we don't know is what makes signal-emitting civilizations cease to do so. But (if we aren't the fantastically unlikely first one) either something must, or they're so far apart that signals can't be detected between them.
- thomassmith65 1y ago
  The radius of the observable universe is 45.7 billion light-years. The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. Primates evolved only six million years ago. So let's be charitable and say it took only 13 billion years for a lifeform capable of transmitting radio waves to evolve. Unless I'm missing something, if we're listening for ETs, we would only have visibility into a sphere with a radius around 1/45th the radius of what is out there? My point is, if the Universe is such that it takes a minimum of, say, 10 billion years for planetary conditions to make evolution possible and evolution to wind up at intelligent life, then there could be hundreds or thousands of civilisations out there, at this very moment, whose earliest signals won't reach us for millions of years.
  - vikingerik 1y ago
    Primates evolved six million years ago here. There are plenty of stars billions of years older than our sun (and still sufficiently enriched with heavy elements from prior stellar generations) where they could have, so that their signals would have reached us by now. The past light cone is everything you see in the sky. Even a million light-years from neighboring galaxies is small compared to the time scale of possibilities on the order of multiple billions of years.
Madmallard 1y ago
Isn’t it likely that radio waves beyond a certain distance will just become indistinguishable from background noise? They’re travelling hundreds of thousands if not more light years
- toast0 1y ago
  Radio waves beyond a certain level of sophistication may not be very obvioualy artificial either. AM vs FM vs QAM vs ??? Add spread spectrum and maybe more efficient radiator patterns / beam forming. I suspect we won't be emitting much that would be likely detectable after the end of this century, so maybe a 200 year window. I asusume other radio capable life would perform similarly. If that's the case, chances are slim that their 200 years of detectable emissions overlap our ability to detect the detectable.
CheeseFromLidl 1y ago
From our 1 datapoint set I’m leaning towards the “earth is an aberration” theory. This was a dinosaur planet. There was a reset some time ago that cleared the path for mammals. It’s unlikely that this timing is common.
- Qem 1y ago
  It was recently proposed the hypothesis we suceeded at developing intelligence while dinosaurs failed because humans evolved under the lowest levels of atmospheric CO2 in the entire history of Earth, allowing brain upscaling, at least until we botched it in the last 2 centuries. See https://www.qeios.com/read/IKNUZU https://www.qeios.com/read/IKNUZU
lm28469 1y ago
> It seems equally likely to me that conditions in the Universe just weren't amenable to life until relatively recently. It's at least 4b years old on earth, that's not "relatively recently" We've been technologically capable for less than 200 years, that's nothing in the grand scheme of things. We could have just missed them by a few millions years and we would have no ideas at all. There might be 10 ancient Egypt tier civilisations out there right now that might develop radio tech by the time we're extinct or back to low tech.

pols45 1y ago

Not really. Microbes have been around for a long time. And there are more of them today than there are stars in the sky. No intelligence required. Plus they change so fast that what Life looked like yday can look totally different tomorrow. As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with each other and group size increases. The philosophers have talked about the bugs for a long time (see Plato's chariot, Hobbes passion vs reason, Freuds id-ego-superego, Kahnemann's system 1 vs system 2, Haidt's Elephant Rider). The mind needs stories to handle the bugs. And there is no dearth of stories on Earth to keep the 3 inch chimp brain occupied forever.

thomassmith65 1y ago
If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation or civilisation of radio-wave-emitting bugs to evolve in our immediate vicinity. :)
- nandomrumber 1y ago
  Neutrino sources outside of stars / stellar-like objects would be a dead giveaway of either unexplained physics or nuclear fusion / fission technology, and much harder / impossible to hide than EM tech. We should look for those.
OgsyedIE 1y ago
All of the evidence we have suggests that the mitochondria-archaea endosymbiosis event that created the eukaryotes has happened only once in our entire history. If there were no eukaryotes, there'd likely be no way of getting past the energy per gene ceiling that constrains the other two domains of life.
ahazred8ta 1y ago
"The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ... In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee." ― Terry Pratchett

vikingerik 1y ago

This isn't likely. The Milky Way is 100k light years in diameter. That's tiny relative to the age of life. Animals comparable to humans in complexity have existed for something like 250 million years on Earth, and could have on planets of stars that formed billions of years before our sun. The possible timespan for signal-emitting life to have developed is many multiples of the timespan that signals take to cross the galaxy. It's far more likely that signal-emitting life is so rare (or short-lived) so that they are separated by distances where their signals weaken to undetectability, than that we are the one fantastically lucky star to be the first among a hundred billion. Star Trek showing all the rival civilizations exploring the galaxy at the same time makes no sense at all. It's far more likely that civilizations would arise separated by time of millions or billions of years, than that they would all be concentrated within a few centuries. (Trek does hint strongly that the explanation is panspermia, that life was seeded everywhere at the same time to account for the time-concentrated development.) What we don't know is what makes signal-emitting civilizations cease to do so. But (if we aren't the fantastically unlikely first one) either something must, or they're so far apart that signals can't be detected between them.

thomassmith65 1y ago
The radius of the observable universe is 45.7 billion light-years. The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. Primates evolved only six million years ago. So let's be charitable and say it took only 13 billion years for a lifeform capable of transmitting radio waves to evolve. Unless I'm missing something, if we're listening for ETs, we would only have visibility into a sphere with a radius around 1/45th the radius of what is out there? My point is, if the Universe is such that it takes a minimum of, say, 10 billion years for planetary conditions to make evolution possible and evolution to wind up at intelligent life, then there could be hundreds or thousands of civilisations out there, at this very moment, whose earliest signals won't reach us for millions of years.
- vikingerik 1y ago
  Primates evolved six million years ago here. There are plenty of stars billions of years older than our sun (and still sufficiently enriched with heavy elements from prior stellar generations) where they could have, so that their signals would have reached us by now. The past light cone is everything you see in the sky. Even a million light-years from neighboring galaxies is small compared to the time scale of possibilities on the order of multiple billions of years.

Madmallard 1y ago

Isn’t it likely that radio waves beyond a certain distance will just become indistinguishable from background noise? They’re travelling hundreds of thousands if not more light years

toast0 1y ago
Radio waves beyond a certain level of sophistication may not be very obvioualy artificial either. AM vs FM vs QAM vs ??? Add spread spectrum and maybe more efficient radiator patterns / beam forming. I suspect we won't be emitting much that would be likely detectable after the end of this century, so maybe a 200 year window. I asusume other radio capable life would perform similarly. If that's the case, chances are slim that their 200 years of detectable emissions overlap our ability to detect the detectable.

CheeseFromLidl 1y ago

From our 1 datapoint set I’m leaning towards the “earth is an aberration” theory. This was a dinosaur planet. There was a reset some time ago that cleared the path for mammals. It’s unlikely that this timing is common.

Qem 1y ago
It was recently proposed the hypothesis we suceeded at developing intelligence while dinosaurs failed because humans evolved under the lowest levels of atmospheric CO2 in the entire history of Earth, allowing brain upscaling, at least until we botched it in the last 2 centuries. See https://www.qeios.com/read/IKNUZU https://www.qeios.com/read/IKNUZU

lm28469 1y ago

> It seems equally likely to me that conditions in the Universe just weren't amenable to life until relatively recently. It's at least 4b years old on earth, that's not "relatively recently" We've been technologically capable for less than 200 years, that's nothing in the grand scheme of things. We could have just missed them by a few millions years and we would have no ideas at all. There might be 10 ancient Egypt tier civilisations out there right now that might develop radio tech by the time we're extinct or back to low tech.