Like, we’re destroying the one place we know is a sure bet on where we can prosper if we keep it healthy, but instead the world’s richest man is trying to expand to other planets while this one’s ability to sustain life is in jeopardy. IMO that makes us potentially a very stupid species compared to a species that doesn’t really care about meeting other aliens because they value the life on their own planet far more than we do.
maybe the real treasures are the natural resources we destroy along the way!
The issue isn’t just flying saucers not landing in downtown Manhattan, the problem is the universe has been silent so far for us. A universal tendency towards planetary protection doesn’t explain why we don’t see a cosmos awash in artificial electromagnetic signals. Everything we find seems to have a natural explanation. If life really was as common as it should be, we would see it broadcasting out into the dark like we are. The universe is old, big and filled with the stuff life needs. Life SHOULD exist, the fact that we haven’t found any real evidence of it yet is bizarre. Some fundamental part of how we understand the universe is wrong.
That just indicates nobody is beaming an uncompressed signal directly at use. Something not on a tight beam directed at us would disperse and get lost in the noise. A compressed data stream would be indistinguishable from noise if since we don’t know the compression algorithm and with any kind of interference at all there wouldn’t be any way to distinguish it from noise.
Getting a radio signal basically requires there to be an alien race that knows we’re here and wants to talk to us.
Yupp could be a whole species of beings out there with their own space programs trying to send and recievesignals but they’re left in the dark just like us, forever out of reach and drifting further from each other.
We may be receiving weak signals all the time that come across as noise, but receiving a message is a different story with specific motivations and efforts behind it.
The universe is old
Actually it’s very young, like a baby young compared to what it could be
Life SHOULD exist
That’s a very bold statement without any evidence to it
the fact that we haven’t found any real evidence of it yet is bizarre
You could call it bizarre if you had some data where there should be a lot of evidence. We don’t have that data, just fantasies.
Some fundamental part of how we understand the universe is wrong.
Likely most of it. Or even our “understanding” as a concept is not there yet. I mean our “understanding” was meant to find food, prey, etc. And we were pretty bad at that.
Maybe. But this would still only filter some.
The great filter to me is a vast mix of filters. Some never leave their planets because they are oceanic only and forever, some because the gravity is too high to ever escape, some because they die out, others due to no genetic intrinsic motivation to expand at all, etc. There can by myriad possible filters all applying at the same time
The rare earth theory is the most boring but most likely explanation. Though it shouldn’t be as it’s kinda nice to be given a rare and unique opportunity, we shouldn’t squander it.
The latest estimates put habitable planets around one in five stars
Yes but once you compound other variables probability turns out actually quite low overall especially since we discover more and more civilization ending dangers as we probe. However I also feel like we ignore civilization accelerating shortcuts we have not found as well. So with n sample of 1 it’s really hard to make your mind on rare earth.
I agree it’s impossible to be sure with a sample of one. But I think “we’re not special” is a good assumption to make, and it leads to some interesting possibilities.
The “great filter” is simply basic physics and chemistry, the Periodic Table of the Elements, the fundamental forces and engineering limits.
We’re not going there, they’re not coming here.
I think the universe being the same wall to wall means life is probably very common, and will follow pretty much the same rules and limits as here. We’re not special, neither are they.
I continue to read sci-fi under the lens that it represents our racial (as in human race) tendency to fear the other and enjoying war and destruction despite screaming that we’ve evolved beyond that. We’re a bunch of tribal war-like destructive plains apes with computers and guns.
Star Trek isn’t real, there will be no warp drives, transporters, Dyson spheres, Ringworlds, Space Elevators, or even just a basic flush toilet on the Moon.
Forget it. Build something worth living for here cuz out there is a deadly radiation-blasted nothing with nothing in it.
Warp drive is still possible with our current understanding, Fusion is right around the corner (at least if we look at the entire human existence) and while most mega structures are fictional, a Dyson swarm is fairly easy to do and completely possible.
Humanity could still go very far till physics and chemistry are the real limiters, but human greed will wipe us out first.
Thanks for the laugh!
100% agree that we should focus on fixing down here, but very bold of you to assume Fermi, Konopinski, Teller and York, as well as all of the other minds who’ve wrestled with this question have all overlooked basic physics, chemistry and engineering.
Yes, they must have. Space Nuttery is a religion for nerds. There is no future in space. The end.
Username does NOT check out
Did space hurt you, somehow?
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Because the galaxy is fucking huge and signals attenuate
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The galaxy isn’t a vacuum it has tons of shit and lots of background radiation.
I agree with you, but you fail to account for the absolutely insane people on earth who do dangerous and unpleasant things out of sheer boredom.
Maybe you and I won’t go to space, but Stockton Rush’s reincarnation will be living on mars in a fiberglass dome covered in their own shit. Given we make it past the global warming filter first.
We should die out on this planet.
There is a handful of people with the money to get to Mars who can go die somewhere else
That would solve the Fermi paradox too. Smart species stayed on their home planet, dumb ones tried to leave it. While trying, they ruined their best chance of survival. While in space, they found out that survival out there is nearly impossible without a planet. That’s why we don’t hear from them.
“We need to spread to the stars to ensure the survival of our species.”
Why? Why does our species need to survive? Why would anyone care about that? I don’t think anyone really does. People just want to do cool stuff, as entertainment. To alleviate boredom. That’s it.
No one reading this will “go to the stars”. It’s unlikely more than a handful will visit Mars in your lifetime. Why anyone would want to go to Mars is beyond me, it’s extremely inhospitable to humans. There’s nothing there.
We thought, after going to the moon we’d continue on in that vain, and have space hotels by 2001. It didn’t happen, don’t think anything will be different this time.
Stop thinking we can trash this planet, “but it’s okay because we’ll find a different one.” That’s not going to happen. It’s far, far more likely we’re going to kill ourselves off long before we can get anywhere close to doing that. That’s the reality.
I get the hype about traveling to and living on Mars/Luna/Space Stations, I think. It’s that most people are not dedicated to understanding it, they just see cool scifi/scifantasy settings. Star Trek finding neat planets everywhere and some hot women, Star Wars being full of cooperative lifeforms and beautiful high tech worlds, Guardians of the Galaxy slinging through another rainbow nebula with a killer Playlist, and Stargate bringing us to beautiful British Columbian pine forests every week. Even stellar dramas and tragedies all follow the one successful main character(s) that survives, thrives, and entertains us even in the worst of situations. Interstellar, The Martian, Ad Astra, Mission to Mars, The Red Planet, Space Cowboys, Total Recall, Project Hail Mary, and Gravity come to mind.
The key thing, to me, is that all of this feels like someone else already made the situation survivable and the person can always return home. Mars is “right there” in solar system terms. And so often, even when a dire earthly situation is what triggered the movie events in the first place, they tend to be solved by time the protagonist returns. There’s no ultimate feeling of loss. It all works out. And I think that’s the extent of thought by the gen pop when it comes to space travel. It’s survivable and earth is always fixable, because SomeoneElse^TM made it work.
I play a game called Elite: Dangerous. I’m currently 20,000 lightyears from home. It’s lonely and empty. For reference, I could make it to a large colony (Colonia, for the 3 ED players) in about 2 hours of game play and make it back to Earth in probably 8. But I don’t do that because I want to scan and search each system I jump to, looking for valuable plant life and valuable planets to scan. 90% of the time there’s nothing of value. Thats a lot of time looking into an empty bag. And even when I do find something, it’s often a long flight to the POI. I generally enjoy it for being a calm game out “in the black”, but I absolutely get space madness like Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Ad Astra. I keep looking and keep finding nothing. The irony there being one of the movie’s “extrasolar planets” was just a normal picture of enceladus, a local moon. The game has many planets that look similar. Nothing! Nothing here! Nothing there!
We are not representative of the common understanding of stellar travel. It looks cool, but you and I know nothing about it will be cool from a living experience. All that’s cool is knowing the first people out will provide a ton of feedback to improve the next trip. The next trip, performed by someone else, as the trips will be one-way death sentences for quite some time to come.
I agree with most points except not wanting the human race to survive.
I very much want the human race to survive but to do it in a way that isn’t destructive to our planet. Which IS possible.
I think the great filter is more likely a hyper individualistic mindset that creates a “well I lived so why do I care if other lives after me?” Mindset.
You’re line of thinking mixed with access to nuclear weapons destroys us all. And that’s very likely what will end up happening.
We should all want humans to survive as long as possible BUT be working towards a way that we can do that without being destructive.
Ultimately though yes the end is certain as they say. Heat death of universe and all that (if that’s even what happens, no physicist I know of has been consciously there when its happened and able to report back)
But yes. All life animals, plants, humans and otherwise should be kept alive it really is our duty as intelligent beings to facilitate that.
good ending
Notice how there is only one species that thinks of doing things like, sending shuttles into space.
Even if there is life, how likely do you think it would be for the exact type of intelligence that humans have, to emerge?
They then have to have more luck, and not die out. And we have no species to compare ourselves to, except the now extinct hominids, who are our cousins anyway.
On top of that, they died off.
Now how likely is it for a planet to even have that?
We’re talking about nearly infinite planets, but also an infinite timeline, so while life, even life very similar to ours is likely among those numbers, that it exists at the same time as us and close enough to make contact is just very unlikely unless they are technologically advanced way beyond us and have overcome those factors, in which case they surely could make contact, but seeing the apex predators of this planet behave the way we do, they’d likely feel like we’re too far below their intelligence and keep their distance, especially with the fucking morons we keep making rich and famous while calling them “leaders”.
nearly infinite
lol come on now. There’s finite and infinite. There’s no such thing as “nearly infinite”.
There is when the finite number is so large that it’s almost irrelevant that it’s a finite number. “An incomprehensible large number”, better?
Meanwhile I believe time is actually infinite in the sense that I believe the big bang was part of a cycle of entropy and then concentration that has happened and will happen forever. It’s just a belief though, and about as spiritual as I get.
This seems backwards to me, since the latest variant of what we call Humans is the only species on this planet, that - to the best of my knowledge - ever attempted (a) leaving it and (b) destroying their own habitable climate (along with that of a large portion of all other species) on the planet.
in my humble opinion (a) Is the marvel of international science collaboration, probably one of the highest achievements of this species, (b) on the other hand is fueled by greed and incompetence in equal quantities and according to Hanlons razor, we shouldn’t equate this to malice, even though it comes very easily to members of our species.
a) is true, but b) is not true. There have been mass extinction events in the past that have been caused by a new species evolving. Things got pretty crazy when tree bark came onto the scene. Or maybe the opposite of crazy because a lot of things died off.
Say hello to my little friend, the bacteria! And a loooong line of his cousins, reaching the rabbits and beyond.
Yeah, at least normally resources are depleted by the number of organisms, not the greed of a few examples, but this is not a new thing.
that makes us potentially a very stupid species
No thanks. Why blame humanity for the crimes of one person?
If you’re upset that humanity doesn’t punish this person, it’s because we’re trapped in a system of violent control. It’s not because people are stupid, it’s because we fear for our lives. Nobody wants to be murdered, locked in a box, etc. We’re not going to end this system by calling ourselves stupid. That just further serves our masters.
Maybe that’s a filter? Any civilisation that lets itself get trapped in a system of violent control under fear of death gets wiped out by the worst of itself?
Where did the world’s richest person get his money? What is money?
Why blame humanity for the crimes of one person?
It’s not one person that needs to be held to account, dis-empowered, guillotined, reformed and stripped of their ill-gotten gains. It’s an entire class of billionaire oligarchs, cabal of political/global elites and exploitative corporations.
Honesty we should just sell the moon to private equity
It’s free real-estate.
It would be worth it if Elon Musk would move there.
They not like us.
no. idk what makes you think that it would be an “either or” situation.
Evolve or die
