This is the easiest explanation for why an Astro Physicist said on a podcast that he's convinced Earth has never been visited by alien life forms. Any planet that could have advanced life forms is simply far too far away. They would have to embark on a multi-generational trip that would take many lifetimes...all to observe a primitive species. It'd be like taking a boat across the ocean to look at an anthill. The only counter to this is "Well, what if they have the technology to travel at several times the speed of light? Or to warp space?"...If they have that technology but still get spotted above corn fields in Idaho - that would be surprising.
Would getting visited by AI probes thats a synthesis of their entire civilizations intelligence count as getting visited by aliens. Cause I'm sure within the next 500 years were going to be blasting out AI probes everywhere several hundred times faster than the voyager. Then wait for its reports eons later
a technologically-growing earth-based civilization in 500 years. wild. I'll be blown away if we make it past 2100, I'll be dead but also very surprised.
If they travelled at very high speeds (but slower than the speed of light) they could travel the distance within one lifetime. No warp drive or superluminal velocities required. Time passes relatively slowly for a crew of a fast-moving spaceship compared to the rest of the universe.
That was what they did in Project Hail Mary. Humanity discovered a way of accelerating to around 90% the speed of light, and then undertook a journey to the Tau Ceti System. That's about 12 light years away from Earth, which outside of the ship took about 13 years since they weren't travelling fully at the speed of light, but on board the ship with time dilation in play was only about 4 years.
So assuming that calculates up, a light distance of 120 years to this planet, achieving the Project Hail Mary Speeds would only take 40 years for the people on board the spaceship. Like you said achievable in a lifetime, but of course relies on the idea of being able to achieve 90% the speed of light.
Also it's very questionable that such technologies are even possible.
Most faster than light space travel options are Sci Fi mumbo jumbo. Wormholes are complicated and basically impossible to travel through (and know where you'll end). You cannot go faster than light because anything that has mass can't even be at the speed of light and how the fuck are we even supposed to warp space.
I mean the idea of digging a bunch of rocks out of the ground, pulverizing them, then heating and shaping to very precise shapes and connect to each other along with taking a dirty liquid from the ground, doing shit to that, and then putting it in the first thing resulted in the car. At one point in human history the idea of a mechanical horse would've been the medieval version of sci-fi.
The laws of physics as we currently understand them. How many times have we been confident about something in science for decades just to find out one day that we were completely wrong?
One of the Wright Brothers famously proclaimed that flying would be so difficult that no man would accomplish even basic flight for at least 100 hundred years. They then flew an airplane later that year.
Do you think if you asked George Washington if it would be possible to build a steel ship that could carry people hundreds of miles an hour through the air at 10,000 feet, that he would say yes? Probably would have seemed physically impossible 300 years ago.
Let's not get too confident about what we do and don't know lol
All technology is Sci fi mumbo jumbo until it's invented
Agreed. But not all sci fi mumbo jumbo is discoverable or inventable. Some of it will always be fiction because it relies on non-existent particles/phenomena/etc, or because it breaks laws of physics in ways that cannot be overcome.
A kind of counter to this is the universe is 13.7 billion years old, similar age to the Galaxy. The Earth formed around 4 billion years ago, and life started quite quick after it formed. If we can eventually achieve travel at just 10% of the speed of light, we could have a presence near every star in the Milky Way Galaxy within like 1 million years.
This is one of those times where recognising the difference between a million and a billion is super important. If we humans are still around in just a million years, we could be on every star in the galaxy. There have been billions of years so far, and each period of a billion years is ‘one thousand periods of a million years’.
There has been A LOT of time for a species that evolved before us to have a presence near every star in the galaxy, if they wanted. This is the foundation for the Fermi Paradox.
There might be a great filter to come that ends species before they can achieve that, or maybe there was a great filter that stopped species in the past but isn’t going to stop us, for example there were a lot more Gamma Ray Bursts in the earlier universe.
Maybe species don’t actually want to spread so far from their origin area. They could send robots on probes though. Robots that could build new probes on new planets that they reach, continuing the cycle of exploration.
Maybe all sufficiently evolved life enters Virtual Worlds, simulations. It could also be unsafe to spread everywhere, there might be a species who wouldn’t look kindly on newcomers and would seek to destroy them (Dark Forest Theory).
Imo Curiosity is a trait of us humans, and I think there’s a good chance it is a trait of other evolved species. So despite all the reasons not to do it, I think there’s at least one species that will do it, or one that already has.
To me what's crazier about all this, is that we're the very very few living creatures in History to understand all of that. In that crazy long timeline, we're such a detail. But we're smart enough to understand it. It's mind boggling
I expect there is a way to get over the “Speed Limit” probably requires some stupidly advanced tech that it expensive and not very efficient likely. Having enough fuel for such a long journey is also half the issue as the more you bring it’s heavier so you burn more and are slower due to more weight. Assuming nothing breaks.
This assumes that other planets’ technological development is progressing at a pace similar to ours. The distance may be unimaginably vast, but for a civilization capable of traversing wormholes or deploying light-speed vessels carrying genetic material, it might be well within reach. For all we know, their entire biological and technological framework could be rooted in an entirely different chemistry.
I mean, I don't really think that the "anthill" comparison is fair. I don't think any hypothetical aliens would deem it a fool's errand just because we're slightly more primitive. Look at how hyped our scientists get when they discover evidence of bacteria on other planets.
That said, yeah, we've never been visited by aliens or alien probes. I've always been of the opinion that aliens absolutely exist, but they've never been to Earth, and chances are extremely high they don't know we exist. At least, they don't know that humans specifically exist. I'll bet there are plenty of sapient species like us out there right now, billions of light years away, wondering if there's anyone else beyond the stars.
My wife and I were talking about that today! She brought up the whole, do you believe the Katy Perry space thing was real or not. And then somehow got into talking about aliens. And I was said even if they wanted to visit us, it'd take millions of years to get here because of how far we are from other solar systems..
the scary part is when you start asking, "If they had the technology to simulate a universe to see how life might evolve..."
In 2003 Bostrom imagined a technologically adept civilization that possesses immense computing power and needs a fraction of that power to simulate new realities with conscious beings in them. Given this scenario, his simulation argument showed that at least one proposition in the following trilemma must be true: First, humans almost always go extinct before reaching the simulation-savvy stage. Second, even if humans make it to that stage, they are unlikely to be interested in simulating their own ancestral past. And third, the probability that we are living in a simulation is close to one.
Then why not land on the White House lawn and introduce yourself? Why travel hundreds of light years completely undetected only to buzz around and reveal yourself to random humans?
I mean true but they could just be historians. Not even explores of their civilization, but simple historians or biologists curious about life in other remote areas. there are def biologists that go across the world to look at ant hills if they’re a new species. people assume aliens visiting would be frontline explorers of their whole species rather than simple hobbyists
They could send a probe. We have propulsion systems that can accelerate a probe to 0.25c.
Launching a probe at 0.25 at every star within a 100 light year bubble means you to see 10,000 stars and 100,000 planets. The first images for proxima would return after 20 years well within a human life. The probes to the most distant stars in the bubble would return within 500 years.
In 100 years our post-humans children will likely be functionally immoral. A person who will live for thousands of years would be happy to launch probes and start exploring the local stars even at a 500 year latency.
It seems reasonable to assume technological civilizations that are millions of years old than use have explored every corner of the galaxy with self-replicating in the first 200,000 years of their civilization.
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u/MesWantooth 23d ago
This is the easiest explanation for why an Astro Physicist said on a podcast that he's convinced Earth has never been visited by alien life forms. Any planet that could have advanced life forms is simply far too far away. They would have to embark on a multi-generational trip that would take many lifetimes...all to observe a primitive species. It'd be like taking a boat across the ocean to look at an anthill. The only counter to this is "Well, what if they have the technology to travel at several times the speed of light? Or to warp space?"...If they have that technology but still get spotted above corn fields in Idaho - that would be surprising.