Why Aren't The Aliens Here Already?

NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/05/27/409670639/why-arent-the-aliens-here-...

So what's your preferred reason why not?

1. Distance.

2. They are ALIEN. Who the hell knows what they're thinking?

1. They are smarter than we are.
2. They have been observing us and want nothing to do with us. (Can you blame them?)
3. We are actually in a zoo. No one gets into a cage with wild animals.
4. They are waiting for us to grow up.
5. Their technology is about equal to ours; we can't reach them yet either.
7. We are the most advanced creatures in the cosmos; most other lifeforms are still in the primordial slime phase.
7. They died out eons ago.

8. Who says they aren't here already? :)

13 distance
42 time differential - they died out ages ago or haven't been born yet
69 Of all the worlds in all the solar systems in all the galaxies they haven't yet walked into ours
111 who needs to expand beyond this ocean vent anyway, look after it properly and it will suit you for eons

Essentially Drake's assumptions aren't necessarily valid. And if you instead posit: an energy use upper limit, don't allow any form of FTL or even close to approaching L, make life very rare to start with
etc

then you end up with very low chances of us ever seeing them.

We're not as tasty as some would have them believe ... and the SMELL! Sheesh!

>6 BTRIPP: So To Serve Man had it wrong?

While I certainly, from the mathematics of the argument, assume that there are vastly numerous Alien Civilizations OUT THERE, I think the whole "UFO enthusiast" thrust that we're constantly being "visited" is pretty much shot down by the near-ubiquity of smart phones. Back in the day, when one was out camping, or driving through the desert, or whatever, and saw some flying object that one could not identify ... the odds of there being a high-quality camera at hand were reasonably slim, so coming back and telling folks what you saw (or showing blurry shots from a 110 Instamatic) was pretty much par for the course. However, in recent years, "nearly everybody" has a multi-megapixel camera stuffed in their pants ... which will allow for hundreds of shots to be taken, in relatively fast succession. The fact (OK, I'm assuming this is a fact because *I* have not seen them on the Internet) that there aren't BAZILLIONS of "strange craft" pictures all over the web and social media leads me to make the logical connection that there aren't any "OMG, What's THAT?" things flying around to end up on Instagram.

Take, for a counter example, that recent-ish meteor hit in Russia ... its descent was captured on dozens of dash cams, security cameras, etc. ... enough so that they were able to take all that footage and make a very precise track of the path it took. UFOs? We're still seeing one-camera, one-source, weak-provenance images and films ... even when supposedly recording events over major population centers.

As much as I appreciate the "story" ... in all its multifaceted permutations ... I suspect that the lack of a flood of images/video speaks to there not being any UFOs in our environment.

>7 Taphophile13: ... yeah, the Kanamits were just trying to boost cookbook sales!

1. Distance.

Yeah, but, as discussed in the article, at 1/10 light speed they'd already be everywhere in the galaxy. We're talking about billions of years.

2. They are ALIEN. Who the hell knows what they're thinking?

Yeah, but all you need is one thinking "Hey, let's see what's out there!" or "Hey, let's conquer something!" and they're on our doorstep leaving obelisks and taking out gum trees in a blink of time. Unless—and this is a good counter-theory—there's some powerful and ubiquitous alien force that "found us" and is now protecting us, and/or keeping off other aliens in order to fatten us up!

Or God, Lola. God keeps off aliens too. ;)

>8 BTRIPP:

Randall Munroe agrees.

>6 BTRIPP: >7 Taphophile13:

Charles Stross disagrees.

>3 Taphophile13:

Your #3 and #7 are my favorite proposed explanations. Much more attractive than thinking that we're just a few years away from being eliminated, as potential future hazards.

One of the questions that I've been idly puzzling over recently is kind of a corollary to the Fermi Paradox. If we haven't seen aliens because an organic being is too fragile and has a lifespan too short to make interstellar travel possible, then where are the AI's? If artificial intelligence is possible, then it should have a much better chance of crossing the vastness of interstellar space than any organic species. It's easy to imagine an AI having a lifespan long enough to allow even the slowest interstellar travel.

Right. Why not "Christmas machines" at least—self-replicating machines. Design a robot that goes out and, when it finds asteroids and rocky planets, makes more of itself. The galaxy is chock full within a fraction of cosmic time.

Some one has to be first...

How can we say that we are earthlings? We could be descendants of abandand aliens from the outer space.... and the rescue teams are on the way?? The original and true earthlings were extinct long past in the history.

.... I am just saying it...

"The universe is vast, containing myriads of stars, many of them not unlike our Sun. Many of these stars are likely to have planets circling around them. A fair fraction of these planets will have liquid water on their surface and a gaseous atmosphere. The energy pouring down from a star will cause the synthesis of organic compounds, turning the ocean into a thin, warm soup. These chemicals will join each other to produce a self-reproducing system. The simplest living things will multiply, evolve by natural selection and become more complicated till eventually active, thinking creatures will emerge. Civilization, science, and technology will follow. Then, yearning for fresh worlds, they will travel to neighboring planets, and later to planets of nearby stars. Eventually they should spread out all over the Galaxy. These highly exceptional and talented people could hardly overlook such a beautiful place as our Earth.

"And so," Fermi came to his overwhelming question, "if all this has been happening, they should have arrived here by now -- so where are they? "
It was Leo Szilard, a man with an impish sense of humor, who supplied the perfect reply to the Fermi Paradox: "They are among us," he said, "but they call themselves 'Hungarians'."

(György Marx (2000). A Marslakók Érkezése (Arrival of the Martians). )

Here are my thoughts on the Fermi paradox. Nothing original here. Just regurgitating. I am unable to choose between them.

1. We are invisible to them. We have been producing radio waves for less than 100 years and that will soon stop. To be detected, aliens would have to be less than 100 light years from us and checking for radio signals from our solar system. We now use digital communications via satellite. Very soon we will stop spilling radio waves out into space. Unless they visit our solar system (why would they?) or have some kind of telescopic technology we cannot imagine, they will never know that we are here.

2. There is a universal filter. No civilisation can exist long enough to develop the technology for intergalactic travel. They are wiped out by asteroids/comets/etc, or wipe out themselves.

3. Intelligent life is extremely rare. On Earth, the dinosaurs lived for millions of years and did not develop enough intelligence to make simple tools. If they had not been destroyed they most likely would still be here and still dumb. The extinction event was not total (how lucky was that!) so small mammals survived and evolved.

One of the things I remember from the science fiction book Learning the World is that the aliens could see that something nasty was coming their way by the way that the stars were turning green. As I recall, this was because the star systems were getting filled with habitats with enough plant life visible that the stars' output was filtered.

Let me just add that I don't recommend that you read the book to check my memory: that was about the only interesting thing in the book.

Interesting, but it would matter how many earth like planets there were, it wouldn't make a star's light turn green.

>19 al.vick: IIRC, the stars were greening because they were being progressively surrounded by Dyson swarms with green vegetation showing through glass walls. The total surface area exposed was much larger than a single planet could display.

Ahh. I see. I guess that would work.

A method being used to actually look for "Dyson Sphere" type civilizations.
http://www.space.com/30581-advanced-alien-civilizations-search-finds-nothing.htm...

Quote: "Earlier this year, a team of astronomers led by Jason Wright, of Pennsylvania State University, studied 100,000 galaxies that NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft could best observe, searching for signs of a Type III civilization capable of harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy. Such a civilization would have to be extremely advanced, capable of colonizing multiple stars within a galaxy and using the energy of all of them. Following the laws of thermodynamics, energy harnessed from this kind of technology could not be destroyed but should be radiated away in infrared wavelengths, similar to the way a computer radiates heat."

"Nuther discussion same topic:
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/the-dyson-sphere-and-the-search-for-alien-lif...

Quote:"So as previously mentioned, if we detected a Dyson sphere, the star would be radiating light in a blackbody spectrum that’s captured by the Dyson sphere, and released back out in the far infrared around 10 microns in wavelength at a distance of 1 AU (the average distance from the Sun to the Earth). The blackbody temperature for the region would be about 100 to 600 Kelvin for a full or partial Dyson sphere."

::edit:: Aha, just read >21 al.vick: 's resume - works on the Hubble team. Reminds me of the time I started explaining scuba diving to someone I just met after a wind surfing session - found out I was "explaining" scuba diving to a navy seal ;-)

The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/15/the-strange-star-th...

Cool, but probably nothing. And the lack of others is worth noting.

I don't know the answer, but I have SETI on my computer working hard to find extraterrestrial life! I have been doing this for more than 15 years now.

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu

k4k

"Patience is a Virtue"

I guess we would have to define what you mean by alien?

I'm not sure we would know how to detect intelligence that was not 3 dimensional. Or intelligence that wasn't made of matter. Or intelligence that wasn't based off of water and proteins.

I think we have a very limited, hollywood based understanding of what other life forms would look like...

1. Too expensive. The NPR article's formula (post #1) for how long it would take to colonize the universe doesn't consider colonization as an investment. Even if a civilization is very advanced, the investment would be huge and the payoff probably not in the lifetime of the investors (depending on type of alien!). So, I think that colonization would go much slower than predicted and tend to be intermittent (like the US space program). Also, I would think that instead of colonizing everywhere, a really advanced civilization might try to develop fast communication channels before sending its citizens. We earthlings are beginning to get good at observing distant planets and galaxies, and at searching for signals (SETI), but perhaps there are methods for fast two-way communication that we have yet to discover, and so we don't realize that we are being called.

And then of course, once the two-way communication has been discovered... and once we realize we're being called. How many generations on Earth would it take to declassify the information?

RIP E.T. – Alien life on most exoplanets dies young
https://slashdot.org/story/16/06/08/027258
https://theconversation.com/rip-e-t-alien-life-on-most-exoplanets-dies-young-602...

Basically, the argument is that the Fermi paradox is solved by the volatility of atmospheres. The question is not "how many habitable planets are there?" but "how many, and for how long?" Taking our solar system as an example, there are three potentially habitable planets, but Venus and Mars both lost their atmospheric clemency, in different ways. As they put it "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."

I find this a pretty persuasive line. That said, the Fermi paradox can take some big hits in terms of the number of civilizations--just a few super-civilizations could get everywhere in a relatively small amount of time, if the wanted too.

An interesting theory on why life won't persist on a lot of potentially habitable planets. But it appears to be a qualitative argument, so, as Tim said, the number of successful life-supporting planets could still be very large.

The example they use of of Venus, Earth and Mars for planets in the “habitable zone” also raises a question for me. They say that Venus and Mars were potentially habitable, but consistent with their “bottleneck” hypothesis, these 2 planets lost the ability to support life billions of years ago. Couldn't it also be that their definition of the “habitable zone” is too optimistic? Is it a coincidence that Venus and Mars are on the ends of the “habitable zone” and Earth is somewhere near the middle? Maybe the “habitable zone” for the Sun is a band that only includes Earth, and not Venus or Mars. Possibly, this narrower band might be very “stable”, unlike their wider zone. The number of life-friendly planets (for a given star) would be smaller, but there would be no reason to expect their “bottleneck” problem, and an event, like an asteroid impact or volcanic eruption, would only be a temporary setback. And that would still leave the question: why don't advanced Aliens find us interesting?

Over the life of a star the habitable star the zone moves outward so there is a time limit. There doesn't seem to be a good theory as to why some planets have plate tectonics and some don't which seems critical to the development of life.

Since this discussion seems to straddle both the Fermi Paradox question and the extraterrestrial life issue, it seems relevant to cite this: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opinion/sunday/yes-there-have-been-aliens.html...

Adam Frank, a physicist - full disclosure, I've hung out and talked with him as he's a friend of a friend -- writing in the New York Times, reformulates the Drake Equation, arguing that the resulting numbers overwhelmingly support the existence of other technical civilizations during the history of the universe.

Stephen Baxter in one of his Xeelee books ne) (I forget which .uses Bayesian analysis to prove that technological civilizations are short lived. I must admit it didn't follow the argument and find some of the assumptions suspect.

>31 stellarexplorer: I read that NYT article recently & found it interesting and near the same time, after an online search, read the article below from Space.com which was published a few years ago. The article mentions the incredible long "lifespan" {trillions of years} of red dwarf stars and that recently it is believed their radiation is conductive to life.

>28 timspalding: & others, Earth has gone through some mass extinctions/conversions also with asteroids and little oxygen to a lot of oxygen.

And only appropriate in the vaguest sense is the article This Is the Only Way to Solve the Three-Body Problem by Rhett Allain at Wired Magazine. I mention it because it has some neat "GlowScript trinkets" that you guys might like and that I evidently can't steal to post here. It has code that you can alter which powers a graphic representing orbiting bodies. Personally I think it is powered by magic as I have no concept of how it works. ;-)

https://trinket.io/glowscript/b1b0427f4c

This whole topic has been interesting me more and more, so I just bought and audiobooked Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction. Great stuff.

New in 2023: The Edge of Reality: two scientists evaluate what we know of the UFO phenomenon, plus 2022's Extraterrestrial: the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth, from a Harvard astronomer, Avi Loeb.

From the mostly free website UnknownCountry that examines evidence of materials and constructs not previously seen on Earth:

Regarding the magnesium/zinc/bismuth sample allegedly from a crashed UFO:

I remember that Linda Moulton-Howe sold her sample to TTSA (‘To The Stars’ Academy). I looked up the analysis that was done by them on the material.

https://tothestars.media/blogs/press-and-news/material-of-interest-magnesium-zin...

While we still don’t know (or understand) how the materials are bonded together in layers, this is what stood out to me:

*Theoretical analysis shows that the material acts as a waveguide for terahertz (THz) frequencies
*Those wavelengths normally would not propagate through this geometry

Looking into THz frequencies, kind of blew me away, and has me wondering about that aspect of the material more than anything else. The possible applications for THz are amazing, everywhere from wireless communication to medicine! I hope that someone explores this further in relation to the material, because it may be the key to what it is and how it is used by “them”.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-truth-about-terahertz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/introduction-to-terahertz/

This material was compiled, analyzed and reported by UnknownCountry member CosmicLibrarian. Thank you, Cosmic.