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 refuse to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, even though for most humans that bar is pretty low.
When I finally “die” I’ll no doubt get kicked back out into the real world and have to plug in another quarter.
You will never die. You will watch everyone else die out over the next million or so years, and then you will be alone until you figure out how to create new people.
…story of my life.
Story of all our lives, unfortunately
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.
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.
I’m agnostic. If you find the statistical probability argument for the existence of aliens salient, then by the same token you should believe that our reality is a simulation. In which case, the existence of aliens once again becomes questionable; the statistical probabilities of an infinite simulated universe are outside the realm of our current knowledge.
I don’t follow how possible aliens = simulation. And what’s the basis for what we experience being defined as simulation or not? Are we in a computer, or everything is a hallucination?
Sorry, I suppose people haven’t heard of the “Simulation hypothesis” in philosophy.
Nick Bostrom argued that, statistically, it is more likely that we live in a simulation than not. Assume that an advanced civilization could build a machine with enormous computing power, sufficient to simulate a human mind and a universe “around” it. It follows that the number of such simulated minds/universes could be near infinite. So the probability of our actually being in a simulated universe dwarfs the probability that our reality is not a simulation.
OK I think I follow now. If one believes the possibility of aliens based on probability, then they should also consider the possibility that the universe is a simulation?
Yes, this is the idea. Although, as another noted, you can argue back and forth on whether Bostrom’s argument holds.
I think that presumes simulating a universe and/or consciousness is even possible. We have no clue either way if it can be done, but we have evidence life exists, at least on Earth, so it is possible for life to exist somewhere else too. I believe aliens are more likely than us living in a simulation
Well I suppose it depends on your views of consciousness. Some would argue that our consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon grounded on the electrical impulses of our neurons. Personally, I’m convinced that the phenomenon need not be physical. It should be possible, with enough computing power, to model the same interactions. But I admit that if you reject this possibility, then the simulation hypothesis loses credence.
Bostrom’s theory relies on life being real too. If I could rephrase it, his theory is:
1 if humans can simulate a human mind in the future, they will 2 they will probably simulate their ancestors (us) 3 they will probably do it trillions and trillions of times 4 this means that out of trillions of consciousnesses, some are real humans and some are simulations 5 we are either one of the few billion actual living minds or one of the trillions of simulated minds and math says it’s the latter because trillions is more. (He never says trillions, just unspecific words like “countless”)
I think Bostrom is genius but I’ve never found this argument very interesting.
While I 100% believe that the universe is probably crawling with extraterrestrial life, I don’t think any of it has visited us here.
Any alien race who had the technology to travel across the galaxy would look at humanity the same way we look at an ant hill while we’re driving down the highway, we don’t even notice it.
Sure, there may be some alien scientists that want to study our planet the same way that our scientist want to study ants, but what are the chances they even know about us? And is there anything interesting enough about us to distinguish us from all the other ant hills?i think space is too big for aliens to detect, traverse and find us… but thats just going by all known science/reality.
its most likely humans are lying/ignorant with regards to all of the alien-based conspiracies.
existence of extraterrestrial life
Absolutely certain
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.
All answers to the FP boil down to one of three Fs.
We’re first, we’re few, or we’re fucked.
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?
The universe is very very big. Unimaginably so. But we have absolutely no idea of how probable the appearance of life is, so we have no idea how probable is it for life to exist elsewhere. So my answer for the first question is: I don’t know.
And for the second question, my answer is: haha.
I kinda don’t think there are little gray men
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.
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.
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.
Of course Aliens is real, I didn’t imagine the movie.
Extraterrestrial life on Earth, and government coverups? Zero evidence.
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!!”
Is this you?
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!
Google water bears.
There is absolutely other life somewhere. None of it has reached or contacted us, though
