Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
As others have stated, the existence of extra-terrestrial life seems a near certainty. We know that intelligent life can evolve in the universe (QED: we exist) and given the vastness of the observable universe it seems highly probable that it’s happened more than once. Limiting ourselves to just the Milky Way galaxy, again given the size and number of stars, it seems reasonably likely that there is other intelligent life here.
Have they been to Earth? This one strikes me as less likely. The universe is big, just mind bogglingly big. Even an infinitesimally small part of it, like the Milky Way galaxy is still insanely big. And as best as our current understanding of physics provides, we cannot exceed the speed of light. And even trying to approach that speed is fraught with all kinds of problems. At any significant fraction of the speed of light, bumping into tiny bits of space dust can cause real problems for spaceships (think: nuclear weapon level energies released). Even sub-atomic particles cause problems, as they will be the same as high energy radiation at those speeds. Even if those issues can be handled, there is the problem of reaction mass to get ships up to and decelerate from those speeds. Even electric ion engines need some sort of reaction mass to push against, and that has to be carried. This then runs us face first into the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. For every extra bit of reaction mass you carry, you need even more reaction mass to get everything up to speed. Eventually, you’re trying to carry so much mass that the whole thing just gets unfeasible. As a related tanget this XKCD What-If gets into a lot of the same issues.
So ya, I doubt that ET has been to Earth, simply because crossing the gulf of intergalactic space would require an investment of resources which is so insanely big that no sane species would bother. And then there is the whole issue of time. Sure, at a sufficient speed and thanks to Lorentz Contraction you can actually cross the Milky Way galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, in your own frame of reference. IIRC, it’s something like a single year assuming 1g acceleration half way there and a similar deceleration after the half-way point (can’t be arsed to look it up. You, dear reader, have fun with that). However, to the observer sitting on Earth, it takes much, much longer. So long that the folks sending you off will be dead, decayed, fossilized and those fossils long degraded by the time you get there. When you get back, your home planet may well not exist anymore and and thing resembling your home society will have long been lost to the sands of time. Again, no sane species is going to make such an investment of resources for what is effectively no return.
But wait, what if aliens have some magic technology which lets them bypass the limitations on the speed of light? Ok well, if little green Gandalf can cast a teleport spell on Frodo the tentacled alien, then yes he can toss his thing in whatever crack he wants. But, absent any evidence to show that such magic is possible, then it’s not really worth consideration.
So, does “the government” have some secret knowledge about aliens? I highly doubt it. Mostly, because I doubt such exists. But, also consider the difficulty of maintaining such a secret for decades with possibly thousands of people knowing. One of the things you learn about, when you get a US FedGov Clearance, is the concept of “Need to Know”. One of the things the US Government learned during the Vietnam War was the fact that the more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to leak. If you have a ton of time and insomnia, I highly recommend reading up on Purple Dragon. Secrets leak, all the time. Yet somehow there has been a massive conspiracy around aliens visiting Earth. Oh and that conspiracy would need to extend beyond just the US Government to include other, hostile, governments. But, the only evidence we have is blury videos and crackpots. Ya, bullshit.
So ya, ET is likely “out there”, the math makes it pretty likely. At the same time, physics makes it really, really, really hard for him to get here. And no international conspiracy would be able to hide such events over decades.
I recognize that the universe is so vast that it's likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that's the extent of it.
I've seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don't "believe" that they do.
Really, I don't "believe" in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don't even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It's not a conscious choice or anything - it's just appears that there's a set of requirements that must be met before the position of "belief" is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of "believing" just isn't triggered, and it's not as if I can somehow force it, so that's that.
As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it's near certain that somebody would've blabbed something by now.
Beyond that though, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they're that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don't see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else's interests. That's our delusion - not theirs.
Statistically it is very unlikely that alien life doesn’t exist. It’s also extremely unlikely that we would ever find any unless we are entirely wrong about the nature of reality and physics.
I am certain that intelligent life in the universe is realively common, but that there is no real way to break or even bend the laws of physics to allow for FTL meaning that the chance of one ever enountering another is basically zero unless there are more than one species of intelligent life in a single star system.
I just read that as “Do you believe in Asians?” and at first I wondered whether that was racist, then I went like “Nooo, Asians, go!! I believe in you!! You can do it!!”
I do! Perhaps alien life could even be hiding in plain sight on Earth, and someday we will discover a virus or a bacteria that looks nothing like anything else on Earth and could’ve hitched a ride on a meteorite!
Tardigrades are animals, as confirmed by genetic analysis, and morphologically resemble what we think of as everyday animals even more closely than, say, Cnidaria (jellyfish, corals, hydras, etc.)
I believe in the boundless depths of the self. Beyond that I’m not sure.
Understanding why and how we’re even conscious entities, assuming I believe you guys even exist, is the question that still needs to be answered regardless of aliens becoming known to us.
Yep. The universe is so vast that alien life most certainly exists, but simply due to the distance between them and us we’ll likely never detect it. The farther things are from us, the longer it takes for light to get to us. Something 100 light years away is just that, it takes a hundred years to get to us.
Humans have been around for an estimated 300,000 years, or 1.09575e+8 days. Here are a few things that would not have been believed possible by 99.9% of the population, including the most rational and logical thinkers, only 150 years ago (54,787 days).
Microchips
Nuclear weapons, and usable, controllable nuclear fusion/fission in general
The Internet
Electric cars
Jet propulsion
Smartphones
Most fields of modern chemistry
Most fields of physics
etc.
Technological advancements happen at breakneck speed. One mans “you can’t break the speed of light” is another mans “you can’t fly, humans don’t have wings!”
But scientific advancements happen that change our perspective. It’s likely we’ll never break the light barrier, if it’s as solid as our understanding makes it seem. It’s less likely we’ll never find a way to sidestep that barrier by manipulating other forces. Let’s say we find a way to create a gravity well that encompasses a craft. The person in the craft doesn’t actually feel like they’re falling at infinite-G, they just happen to get from one place to another incredibly fast, passing through various states of matter unperturbed on their way. To us, it looks like they broke the speed of light. In reality, they weren’t actually “moving” in the way we think of movement, thereby not needing to break the speed of light.
These advancements happen all the time. If you brought a group of the top scientists from the 1850s to be here with us today, they would have have absolutely no idea what was going on and they would believe they’d gone insane. So many paradigm shifts have happened over the last 150 years that it would be impossible to make sense of it in their (remaining) lifetimes.
I don’t know if we’re being visited. If we are then it’s not likely they’re being of another race that came here in a ship. More likely they would be mechanical or biomechanical in nature, some sort of von Neumann probes self-creating and self-spreading reconnaissance craft for an ancient (dead?) race. Or maybe they tapped into another force we don’t even have a name or vague idea about yet, maybe a driving force behind consciousness.
But regardless, UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) is a legitimate field of study and I look forward to seeing it grow.
Extraterrestrial life definitely exists, the sheer odds of it not existing make that a certainty.
However, I have absolutely zero belief that said life has ever visited this world or been covered up by government conspiracy.
If aliens really were as common as all the "alien abduction" stories present them to be, there's no way that the best evidence out there would match the level of big foot believers - and any government conspiracy would've absolutely been exposed Snowden style by now.
The solution to the Fermi paradox could be a number of things: the "dark forest" theory, they're simply too young and too distant for any indication of their existence to have reached us yet, they have no want to interact with us, etc.... But it's almost certainly not because of a government conspiracy.
But I think we fundamentally do not understand what it is to be conscious. I don’t think we know what is and is not conscious. I think we’re limited by our brains and our dimensionality. I think there’s a lot more right under our noses.
I don’t think governments are concealing anything but I think once we explore and learn where to look, we’ll find microbial life is everywhere. Maybe underground on Mars and near deep sea vents on Europa or the clouds of Venus.
I also think multicellular life and technological societies are rare, temporary, and fleeting. So, we won’t be finding them. Earth is special in that it had 1,000 conditions that allows us to exist for a brief window. But we’re cavalier about climate change when it could cause ocean acidification and end a good chunk of humanity.
and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Completely absurd.
The Fermi Paradox is only a paradox if you apply a ludicrously unjustified value to the last figure in the Drake equation.
Technological civilizations are very likely self-extinguishing simply because technological power grows faster than any evolved species capacity to apply that technology to the benefit of the species.
Only way out of that would be that bio life is just a bootstrap for machine life and machine life just isn’t that interested in interacting with biological life so we’ll never see or hear from it.
I think that we may simply be among the first civilisations to reach such a technologically advanced point. By the time a species gets tech that can destroy their civilisation, i reckon they would most likely have also made a broadcast of some sort, either through radio or light or whatever else.
Granted, there’s no real way to know any of this, us being the first is just what I reason is the most likely answer.
You have to account for the fact that, even if a civilization were to broadcast some sort of signal, it would take many millennia or eons for any signals to reach us. And even then, we would have to be advanced enough to be able to receive and interpret those signals at the same time they reach Earth.
There could very well be countless advanced civilizations whose signals just haven’t reached us yet, just as there may have been countless ones whose signals couldn’t be received or understood when they reached us, and they’ve died out or otherwise stopped transmitting before we could.
Keep in mind that the first radio broadcast on Earth was only 127 years ago. That means the farthest anyone could possibly detect any radio signal from earth is a mere 127 light years away.
Idk, this seems anthropocentric. Why would we be the first? I understand that there is some degree of truth to the universe being young, but that seems as likely as us being the only advanced life, which assumes that we are some special exception.
It seems more likely that other technologically advanced life may have gone intentionally dark (minimizing signals that may leave the solar system) for safety. It’s possible humans will do this some day, maybe after we detect alien life and determine it is dangerous. Or, they prioritized harmony and stewardship of their planet and stopped broadcasting (or never did) because that is incompatible with their life style.
I’m not saying we are the absolute first, as in there’s nobody else, I’m merely saying that we could be among the first civilisations ever to exist. To me, it seems a more plausible explanation than civs just going dark. As far as we know, there’s no way to take back a broadcast that has been travelling for centuries, so even if they no longer send anything, what they sent in the past should still be detectable, I think, unless it didn’t have enough time to travel here. In which case, the broadcast has been sent relatively recently (no more than a few millenia ago) or we are very far apart.
When you go to a party and you don’t see anyone else there, you don’t think “Everyone must be hiding”, you think “I must be first”, right?
Broadcast degrade, which wouldn’t mean much for already existing conqueror civilizations looking for anyone to invade, but does mean the signal isn’t entirely endless and we don’t broadcast with the strength to reach very far (what with our only needing to send them around our planet). Our historic signals may very well never make it to civilizations advanced enough to hear them just due to distance and the fact that space isn’t a perfect vacuum; signals degrade linearly as they are overwhelmed by the comparatively much more powerful background radiation. Digitally encoded signals like the ones we send now would be even harder to detect as the information would seem random.
Additionally, if we were to stop broadcasting then our broadcast would be effectively an expanding bubble with a ~130 light-year thick surface, so while it may reach a civilization and continue to reach them for 130 years, there is a chance it would reach them prior to technological advancement and it would pass by without detection. Of course in this case we assume that a new civilization would be hostile.
The party example doesn’t really work here because there is no start time to be on time or fashionably late/early to.
Fun conversation, this is the stuff I used to love reddit for 😊
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