Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Life probably exists somewhere else.
That doesn’t mean they visit us in secret and there’s a conspiracy to hide it.
It’s two very different things
Doesn’t mean they don’t either. :)
I think it’s likely they do. There has been so many sightings through the years and so many stories that I believe no smoke without fire, so to speak.
It’s also what we would do. We (humans) would have similar strategy if we had similar technology to visit other planets.
I assume other life exists somewhere, because the universe is practically infinite in size, but I also assume that we will not meet them, because the universe is practically infinite in size.
Basically my thoughts. The speed of light, while the fastest thing we know, is as slow as smell on the scale of the universe. Any race of beings able to get here, check us out, and leave, would need technology that would break physics as we understand it. Not to say it’s impossible, but we’ve now firmly stepped into beliefs, rather than anything based on observable data. Also, the notion of a race being so advanced they can travel faster than light accidentally crashing on our planet is pretty silly to me.
I mean, we could potentially see them if they’re in any of the neighboring galaxies, and if they’re in ours they should have arrived and turned Earth into a colony long ago. Space is big, but time is long. Loud aliens would have to be truly rare indeed for this.
I don’t know, if this is worth arguing over. Depending on how far advanced you expect such a life form to be, obviously they might be capable of things that we currently consider impossible. But well, to illustrate what I mean:
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The next galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy. It is 2.5 million light years away. There could be life over there right now, but we wouldn’t know, until about 2.5 million years from now.
Compare that to the emergence of modern humans, which was 300,000 years ago. We didn’t start sending out radio waves until some generations ago.
None of this means that it’s not possible for life to have existed on some planet 2.5 million years ago, so we’d be seeing their radio waves right now, but even then, we might interpret them as background noise. -
The next star is Proxima Centauri. It is 4.24 light years away. So, we could see things from there in 4.24 years, which is pretty good, although still absolute hell of a delay for exchanging messages.
But for them to actually visit us, even if they go at 1% the speed of light, that would mean they’d need 424 years of travel time. With little sunlight or other energy sources on the way.
And 1% of the speed of light is an insane 10,800,000 km/h. Compare that to the fastest man-made object, the Parker Solar Probe, which is expected to go 720,000 km/h, when it closely passes by the Sun.
Basically, we can be extremely generous with these examples and still see practically insurmountable time frames.
Worm holes could theoretically exist. Maybe a sufficiently advanced race could defy physics as we know it. But if they can’t, that’s a pretty good explanation why they’re hiding.
Hey, I don’t know if we even have to argue, your math checks out. But, is 425 years really insurmountable? The first Earth-like planets could be billions of years older than ours. IIRC Fermi himself estimated 3 million to settle the whole galaxy.
The next galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy. It is 2.5 million light years away. There could be life over there right now, but we wouldn’t know, until about 2.5 million years from now.
Let’s go by light cones and local interval (clock time in one’s own reference frame), if we are going to argue. This shit can get so confusing if we try to define “now”, especially if a relativistically fast ship comes up.
I am sure there are extraterrestrial life forms. It’s scientific consensus.
I do not think “the government” has proof and hides that from us.
The universe is big enough that life probably exists in other places. Anything advanced enough to reach us (an extraordinarily difficult feat) would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people, and people just want to believe in something fun to compensate for how boring modern life can be.
would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people
Never underestimate the stupidity of smart people/potential other sentient beings.
Also good to never underestimate human negativity bias, where the brain remembers bad things far more than it remembers positive things.
Look at air travel. We invented it over a century ago, and have made it safe enough that a single failure out of thousands of successful flights becomes newsworthy.
The statistical likelihood of stupid-yet-capable aliens happening to fuck up that badly is very small.
Absolutely! I mean primarily that just about any sentience that humans can conceive of is likely to experience some failure, even if down to just statistics. Even our dieties are fallible. So, it seems reasonable to expect that an intellectually superior sentience could make a mistake, leading to loss of craft to primitives like us. Then again, maybe I’m too dumb to conceive of a non-fault-prone intelligence.
Extraterrestrial life = yes. It’s a big universe and the chances of us being the only life in the entire universe is slim.
Aliens visiting us = no. For the same reason as above. It’s a big ass universe.
Governments being able to hide aliens from us = lol no. If aliens had the tech to travel a million light years to visit us, they’d have taken over the planet in an hour.
Anyone who thinks the government can hide anything is vastly overestimating their capabilities. They’re basically keystone cops with the demeanor of storm troopers. Play benny hill or imperial march over literally any declassified CIA document and at least one of them will fit.
If aliens had the tech to travel a million light years to visit us, they’d have taken over the planet in an hour.
Lol Too long, 10 minutes?
TBF, it took 2 minutes for aliens to be worshiped as “eye in the sky” in 3bp
