Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
I definitely believe that aliens exist, but I very much doubt that they have any interest in contacting us. I find that lot of the discussions around aliens fail to take into account the sheer vastness of the Universe.
- Universe has been around for close to 14 billion years
- Milky Way in its current form has been around for about 8~9 billion years
- Life on Earth appears around 4280 million years ago
- Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago.
- Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago
- Writing is invented around 5500 years ago
Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.
So, after millions of years of life on Earth nothing interesting happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.
Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise.
Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.
So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small! The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.
I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space because we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in space.
Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be what we consider to be geological scales.
For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.
I really can’t imagine that advanced civilizations would have much they could learn from us. We might be a curiosity at best to them, but it’s more likely that they would give as much consideration to us as we do to an ant when we pass it by.
I lean towards no, which is a minority scientific position. The Fermi paradox is strong evidence against technological aliens, and of all the evolutionary history we have immediate abiogenesis is the most weakly supported. It happened early, but there’s still a 10% chance of a thing randomly happening in the first 10% of geological history (to oversimplify the math).
If it’s not that, it’s eukariogenesis, but that seems a bit more inevitable given how cooperative bacteria can already be. The development of technology seems inevitable once a thing by chance becomes smart and dexterous enough, and every other step along the way has happened more than once. Earth-like planets are still thought to be abundant.
Edit: Oh, and no to any conspiracy. It would be really hard to hide obvious alien life, and there’s no real motive for all world governments to unanimously do so. And conspiracies don’t exist, because we’re too disorganised to keep a huge secret for long.
Duh. Have you not seen the mountains of high definition video of the alien craft buzzing around our atmosphere?
Nobody demands this level of evidence for the asteroid belt. They tell us there’s an asteroid belt, we just believe it. No problem. Big ring of rocks.
But there’s hundreds of high definition videos every day of people’s cell phones recording machines floating in the sky, literal news stories of these things, pilots, government officials, scientists all talking about them, FLIR, radar, visual, etc data and we’re all like “Nah bro it’s a spontaneous conspiracy of strangers to perpetuate a hoax across multiple continents, centuries, and walks of life”
The reason is simple: we’re in denial because it’s absolutely terrifying.
Why do these tens of thousands of people participate in the Alien Hoax Conspiracy? Why, for attention of course.
Please don’t understand me wrong. I am saying the claim that aliens are a “hoax” implies the largest and most well-coordinated conspiracy ever theorized to exist. If there is a conspiracy to perpetuate the alien hoax, it dwarfs every other conspiracy many orders of magnitude over.
Yes there’s fucking aliens. Each and every one of us has seen more evidence for aliens than we’ve seen of the existence of Osama Bin Laden, the Harlem Globetrotters, or spear fishing.
“Oh all those spear fishing videos are all CGI”
Yeah whatever bro. All those vast networks of people just cranking out CGI footage of aliens on a daily basis. You know, for the lulz. Gimme a break.
Duh. Have you not seen the mountains of high definition video of the alien craft buzzing around our atmosphere?
A single example please. Since that’s a drop in the ocean of the amount you’ve stated exists, only half points will be awarded if there’s a chance someone could have altered or faked it, or it’s not definitely alien, and could be natural or a secret human technology instead.
I’m not afraid if they are here. They should stop dicking with cows and say hello. Clearly they don’t want us dead, so they seem nice enough.
The Phoenix Lights. This isn’t hi-def video, because that didn’t really exist commonly, but it was witnessed by literally tens of thousands of people (whoever was out at the time, and it was during a pretty busy period).
But of course, there will be handwaving and ‘disproofs’ or things like ‘but we can’t trust nineties people to see.’ Fact is, it is seen by everyone, news channels do pieces on it, and then… …meh. Too big to comprehend, and I’ve got work tomorrow.
So, half point. Definitely not fake, but don’t look much like aliens, as opposed to angels, spirits, a Chinese or American research program, natural plasma objects or something else entirely we haven’t even thought of.
They’re UFOs, with an emphasis on U.
I actually agree with parts of your underlying idea, but your tone is so awful that you’re convincing people to disagree with you.
You could be like : “I believe in cats because of cat videos.”
But instead you’re like : “What are you? Some kinda ducking idiot? You never seen a cat video? You scared of cats bro?! Small minded population can’t accept cats!”
Surely you understand tone? I hope you are only like this on the internet.
Do you understand tone? Do you comprehend that there’s more to my message than “I think aliens exist”?
Yes. Like I said I agree with a lot of your points. My examples are intentionally oversimplified to avoid diluting the idea I want to demonstrate.
I hope you understand that I’m trying to help you communicate more effectively, because i think that what you are communicating is valid.
Not everything is an argument. It’s important to understand when people are helping you, or you end up attacking allies. We are likely on the same side.
Depending on your interpretation of the Drake equation, they are either impossible or inevitable.
Ah, the ol’ Drake Equation, providing useful input since 1961
I propose a more elegant equation called the Fifty Cent Equation:
p(A) = x
If x equals 0, then there’s no aliens. If x equals 1, there are definitely aliens. If x is between 0 and 1, non-inclusive, then maybe there’s aliens.
It’s math yo. I’m helping with math.
I do, but I don’t believe we’ve ever been visited by them or will ever be visited by them.
