# Researchers Say The Aliens Are Silent Because They Are Extinct



## ae1905 (Jun 7, 2014)

Binge Thinker said:


> So basically the absence of evidence _*is*_ the evidence of absence?
> 
> I don't buy it. This just sounds like laziness. 'Probably' is not 'definitely'.



they don't rule out the possibilty there is intelligent life on other planets....they're just trying to explain why we haven't detected any such signs yet--viz, *most *life that emerges never evolves to an advanced stage

https://theconversation.com/rip-e-t-alien-life-on-most-exoplanets-dies-young-60243


----------



## ae1905 (Jun 7, 2014)

Miss Bingley said:


> And here I thought it was because like, when we look at other planets, right, we're actually looking at them in the past because light takes so long to travel across the universe, and I thought aliens would be looking at an old Earth, filled with dinosaurs and cro magnons or whatever, and thought we wouldn't be worth communicating with.
> 
> I could totally be off, most of my astronomy knowledge comes from COSMOS and the Blue Dot thing by Sagan.


you're right that light travels at a finite speed so if an alien on another planet happened to look at the earth, it would see it as it was at some earlier time...but the nearest star is "only" about 4 light-years away (the distance light travels in 4 years) and there are several stars within 20 light-years...so if intelligent life existed in one of those stellar systems, they could recieve the signals we have been sending out the last few decades, and vice versa...but we haven't detected anything so there doesn't appear to be any intelligent life in our neighborhood (anyone who's been following the us presidential elections will hardly be surprised by this conclusion)

however, this doesn't stop us from searching farther out into space and looking for signs in more distant stars (who knows, there may be better candidates there, too)...since there is no reason to think life evolved elsewhere at the same time as it did here, it's entirely possible it evolved sooner in which case peering into their past would be like peering into our present


----------



## aef8234 (Feb 18, 2012)

Quick question.
How ARE they testing for intelligent life? The only thing I can think of is using some sort of wave based thing, and considering the sheer amount of frequencies, that's a bit of a desperate and assumptive move.


----------



## Sava Saevus (Feb 14, 2015)

aef8234 said:


> Quick question.
> How ARE they testing for intelligent life? The only thing I can think of is using some sort of wave based thing, and considering the sheer amount of frequencies, that's a bit of a desperate and assumptive move.


Good thing those tests never happen on this planet. That's be a bit of a let down when they all come back as failures.


----------



## Lakigigar (Jan 4, 2016)

people think this is all logical and easy, but i think they underestimate and undervalue the long distances between celestial objects and the vastness of the galaxies. Even if aliens were there, it would be very unlikely that they would make contact with us (while we are still not evolved enough). Also, it's maybe better to not hear anything about it, because there is also a likelihood about violent other species in the universe. Just like the Spanish people did with the native Americans. But we are in this simulation: the Indians. Peaceful civilizations don't want to interfere in our still violent and primitive society. I think they think we are disgusting and that they give us the time to evolve to a similar level like them. 

Communication is also way harder than you think it would be. It would take hundreds, thousands or millions of years for each word travelling into space and going back in time. This is not a way where you can communicate on a normal way (if it takes thousands of years to send a message in a universal language that we and the aliens could understand?). Also we have different technology than they probably would have. It's like calling each other with a walkie-talkie in 2016 while we use smartphones.

The only place where we could likely find alien life is in our solar system. I wouldn't be surprised if there would be fossilized micro-organismes on Mars (or even still living in the ice) or on some moons in our solar system like Titan and Europa. Telescopes could also find some sources (gas composition, methane, ...) made from micro-organisms on exoplanets. We always see it megalomane, but try to learn to walk before you run.


----------



## Theories (Mar 24, 2016)

To say that aliens do not exist simply because they do not communicate with us is ignorant at best.

I understand it is _one_ scenario, but not the scenario I would choose.

And just because they have not made contact with _you_ (in general) does not mean they have not made contact.

An intelligent being would understand that roughly the whole of humanity on this planet would be up in arms were aliens to make themselves known publicly, so to avoid mass extermination because they are intelligent, and so passive, (AND because you know they can) they choose to avoid or be very selective about who to let be aware of their presence, if anyone at all.

That's how I would do it anyways.


----------



## ae1905 (Jun 7, 2014)

aef8234 said:


> Quick question.
> How ARE they testing for intelligent life? The only thing I can think of is using some sort of wave based thing, and considering the sheer amount of frequencies, that's a bit of a desperate and assumptive move.



they scan the radio spectrum for signals, much like you turn the radio dial to scan for stations



http://www.seti.org/faq#obs3 said:


> *What is the SETI Institute?*
> 
> The SETI Institute is a non-profit corporation that serves as an institutional home for research and educational projects relating to the study of life in the universe. The Institute conducts research in a number of fields including astronomy and planetary sciences, chemical evolution, the origin of life, biological and cultural evolution.
> 
> ...


----------



## ae1905 (Jun 7, 2014)

Schrodinger Slacker said:


> Good thing those tests never happen on this planet. That's be a bit of a let down when they all come back as failures.


the signals they have detected have all been from earth...and, yes, they count as "failures"


----------



## IDontThinkSo (Aug 24, 2011)

Hostiles aliens can't visit us, for the same reason as we can't visit inferior civilizations with hostile intentions. 

Even if we could travel quite far with some hostile intentions at the beginning, the less technologically advanced communications we detect, the slower it travelled, the more ancient it is, the more advanced the aliens will be when we visit them. Unless the planets are very close, we can't visit civilizations which are technologically inferior or equal to us.. until we become smart enough to overcome that issue. This (becoming a civilization of galactic influence) can't be the work of a few exceptional minds within a species of moronic assholes, it's always the work of an entire civilization, so there's a max gap between min and max intellectual health requirements. The whole level of wisdom needs to rise up, a lot. You can be sure that all intelligent species share a list of global issues to solve in a certain order before being the one which monitors everything in a galaxy. And our moral issues are far easier to understand than traveling million times faster than the speed of change.


----------



## Aladdin Sane (May 10, 2016)

How is it surprising to anybody that we have not across aliens? The universe is supposed to be infinite, or at least larger than our minds can imagine, so how is it a matter of suspicison that we, less than a speck of dust compared to everything else out there in the universe, haven't met aliens that might live light years / unimaginable distances away from us? You'd need to be mentally challenged to wonder why we haven't met aliens yet. In an infinite universe - of which we can only observe a negligible amount - this is to be expected.


----------



## Kitaraah (May 13, 2016)

poor aliens


----------



## Dustanddawnzone (Jul 13, 2014)

This article actually reminds me of an idea I had. The part where Venus and other exoplanets may be habitable at one point but go through a series of feedback loops which cause the planet to become uninhabitable while life on Earth have enough opposed feedback loops (such as photosynthetic organisms releasing carbon dioxide which is then taken up in respiration of many organisms) that the Earth's habitability has been preserved. 
I never thought of applying it to the Fermi Paradox, though.


----------



## Felipe (Feb 25, 2016)

There could be microscopic aliens.


----------



## ae1905 (Jun 7, 2014)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/o...aliens.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&_r=3


----------



## Catwalk (Aug 12, 2015)

Indeed.

Around 2100 CE; I suspect - we will likely have discovered [small] + micro-organisms [in moons / astroids] et al - ETL (via) this Solar System™ -- re ''intelligent,'' (i.e., human level or higher) life - it is highly unlikely. Indeed, given the age of the Milky Way + estimated amount(s) of ''Earth-like,'' planet(s) compared to the_ exceeding_ time it took to establish _technoscientific _''civilizations,'' .. for us apes.

Any developed _non_-extinct species of [high-functioning] ETI like us - would have either _developed_ enough to ''migrate,'' + move through [Instellar travel] many year(s) ago - in which our terrestrial gear [low-functioning] will be unlikely to have the power to even detect. 

*Or* they migrated from _biotic_ --> à la *abiotic*, (&) thus, to _nano-substrates _thousands of years ago (&) thus, any ''existing,'' civilization(s) in which us primates would be sufficient advanced enough to even 'detect,' would be _indistinguishable_ from nature.


----------



## Sporadic Aura (Sep 13, 2009)

They're silent for the same reason that humans don't attempt to have meaningful communication with insects.


----------



## knife (Jul 10, 2013)

ae1905 said:


> https://science.slashdot.org/story/...m_campaign=Feed:+Slashdot/slashdot+(Slashdot)
> 
> 
> HughPickens.com writes: _The Conversation reports that according to research by Dr. Charles Lineweaver and Dr. Aditya Chopra, a plausible solution to Fermi's paradox is near universal early extinction of life on exoplanets, which they have named the Gaian Bottleneck. "The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens," says Chopra. "The mystery of why we haven't yet found signs of aliens may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surfaces." According to the researchers, most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable. About four billion years ago, Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox. Even if wet rocky Earth-like planets are in the "Goldilocks Zone" of their host stars, it seems that runaway freezing or heating may be their default fate. Large impactors and huge variation in the amounts of water and greenhouse gases can also induce positive feedback cycles that push planets away from habitable conditions. The difference on Earth may be that as soon as life became widespread on our planet, the earliest metabolisms began to modulate the greenhouse gas composition of the atmosphere. "The emergence of life's ability to regulate initially non-biological feedback mechanisms could be the most significant factor responsible for life's persistence on Earth, conclude Lineweaver and Chopra. "Even if life does emerge on a planet, it rarely evolves quickly enough to regulate greenhouse gases, and thereby keep surface temperatures compatible with liquid water and habitability."_


Let's break this down for a moment. To begin with, our knowledge of exoplanets is infinitesimally small, and we still only have three terrestrial planets to analyze in depth.

On one of them, it's not clear life ever evolved at all. On the second, we know that life evolved because we've found fossils of it ... but we also can't be sure whether or not it's still there, because we haven't tried to drill down and find it. Furthermore, even if we _did_ find life there, we can't be at all sure we didn't introduce it ourselves. It's only on the third planet where we know life exists and is rife.

This is, needless to say, not the best data set to be working with.

We do know, though, that the Moon has a moderating effect on Earth's axial tilt; we can also hypothesize that such a setup is rare. (While our planet-finding methods _are_ getting better, we're still not at the point where we can tease out the fine details of most exosystems.) But it is not at all clear whether this moderating effect is crucial for life _at all_ or just _complex_ life. And there are systems we can construct, such as co-orbiting planets, or moons within a gas giant's own Goldilocks zone, that either have similar characteristics to the Earth-Moon system or have substitute characteristics that achieve the same moderating effect.

There's also the matter of tectonics. Because our data is so flimsy, we have no idea whether simple life can survive in a lid tectonic system. If it can, that can pretty much throw this hypothesis out the window.

What about waterworlds? It could well be that life _always_ exists on waterworlds, because the processes that maintain it -- thermal vents and such -- require a tectonic system of _some_ kind, but would be independent of tectonic type (i.e. both plate and lid tectonics, as far as we know, are equally viable at maintaining an ocean). It would not be dependent on axial tilt (again, because it's at the _bottom of the ocean_, where sunlight and changes thereof hardly matter), and it would have abundant water (the whole world's made of it). Europa is an excellent test case for this; it's just fantastically expensive to design a (sterile!) probe that can get there _and_ down to the bottom of the Europan ocean.

And finally, we have to consider the difference between life as such, complex life and _intelligent_ life; remember, only intelligent life can evolve the ability to communicate with us. It's actually quite likely that complex life is quite common where conditions allow for it, but intelligent life is what is truly rare.

One thing I will note, however: If life isn't as tenacious as it seems to be on Earth, that probably means many more opportunities for Earthling terraformers in the distant future. It's much easier (and more ethical!) to go terraform a barren rock instead of someplace with its own bizarre alien biology and ecology.


----------



## He's a Superhero! (May 1, 2013)

Just because someone is a scientist, doesn't mean their opinion is the right one. Sometimes they can have some crazy ideas.


----------



## Stockholmaren (May 25, 2016)

Minx said:


> Indeed.
> 
> Around 2100 CE; I suspect - we will likely have discovered [small] + micro-organisms [in moons / astroids] et al - ETL (via) this Solar System™ -- re ''intelligent,'' (i.e., human level or higher) life - it is highly unlikely. Indeed, given the age of the Milky Way + estimated amount(s) of ''Earth-like,'' planet(s) compared to the_ exceeding_ time it took to establish _technoscientific _''civilizations,'' .. for us apes.
> 
> ...


Minx, have you ever had this thought about yourself: If the average person on earth had everything your personality had to offer. Let's say from the beginning of the **** sapiens. We would've mapped the Milky way about...20 000 years ago? That's a mild statement. Maybe this even is an insult to your intelligence.

Just imagine an average Minx compared to an Einstein Minx... Bruh...


----------



## nevermore (Oct 1, 2010)

Minx said:


> *Or* they migrated from _biotic_ --> à la *abiotic*, (&) thus, to _nano-substrates _thousands of years ago (&) thus, any ''existing,'' civilization(s) in which us primates would be sufficient advanced enough to even 'detect,' would be _indistinguishable_ from nature.


This is interesting...have you ever heard of the "rewilding" theory by Karl Schroeder? Reminds me a little of his ideas.


----------

