No aliens because civilizations die off before advancing to explore the stars

Also, why are we assuming that other more advanced lifeforms want to get in touch with us earthlings at all?

If they have superior tech that enables them to avoid detection, they may prefer to keep it that way.

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That is the working theory. Most civilizations destroy themselves or their environment and thus themselves. So catching their radio waves would literally be catching the needle when someone threw an entire haystack at you.

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What would our earth look like to the extraterrestrial radio astromer.

Right now we are able to detect distant planets around Distant stars.
If an alien points their telescopes at our Earth won’t be detect and noisy place?
All radio signals above 30 MHz will continue traveling out into space
If they look at our planet directly won’t they see a bunch of varying noise which doesn’t meet any regular patterns thus maybe created by an intelligence being?

Would we see the same thing looking at Distant planets

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You’re assuming here that the aliens are using exactly the same tech as us :slight_smile:

The key word is infinite.

That’s part of the Fermi paradox.

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Oh, okay. Cool! I learnt something :alien:

Not if they’re distant… they’d see a quiet planet as they’d see our past.

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It still doesn’t make sense because with an infinite number of civilisations it’s impossible for none of them to want to make contact. If contact is possible within their lifespan

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I honestly think most people wouldn’t be able to handle/comprehend another “intelligent” lifeform. Even if the government knew they would never tell us lol.

Edit to add: just thought of how Americans would start identifying as whatever the aliens call themselves and problem offend them :joy:

Given our difficulties so far communicating with dolphins and chimpanzees and elephants, yeah, that does seem likely.

A couple of recent pieces about alien civilizations: first is Vox, from yesterday, with this paragraph summing it up:

It could be we’re all alone in the universe, which leads to certain mind-breaking implications — one of which is perhaps humanity has a moral duty to preserve civilization because it exists nowhere else in the vast expanse of space. Or it could be that we do have cosmic neighbors, but that those neighbors haven’t reached out because they face difficult challenges — challenges that could be waiting for us in our own future and that could inform how we act today.

Personally I don’t really get that first point. I don’t think whether or not other civilizations exist has much bearing on the worth of our own civilization.

Some interesting points too in this one about the theoretical Great Filter and the possibility that, who knows, perhaps it’s not nuclear war or self-annihilation and instead a biological hurdle we already got through. The article mentions the formation of bacteria; in the past few years I’ve developed the impression that the formation of eukaryotic cells was actually the big step, and that bacteria got going pretty easily.

Second article from Bad Astronomy emphasizing the paradox side of the Fermi paradox, about a recent study going into how surprisingly quickly a civilization not much more advanced than ours could expand across the galaxy. There’s neat stuff that I hadn’t thought about before on how the stars do after all move and that changes who could have visited what when. Our neighbors who died out ten million years ago didn’t visit us ten million years ago because at they time they weren’t our neighbors.

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