An old question and theories to: Our we alone in this Universe? (Earth, stars)
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Getting more into the astronomy hobby has me thinking about this probably several times a day. Thousands of planets have been discovered in the last few decades, although astronomers tell us there are probably billions. Many are in the "habitable zone."
In such a large and diverse set of solar systems, it seems impossible that humans could be the only intelligent life. Especially when you look at a picture of size of the Universe.
I know there are many theories, but is the simplest one the fact that intelligent life might get extinct/destroy itself before it can reach or contact other intelligent life? I mean, we have gone from hunting/gathering to horse carriages to tech/elec to walking on the moon, launching rovers on other planets, launching satellites, and even a probe to get close to our Sun. If the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, some other life may have enough time to technologically advance like we have or maybe even more?
I feel like intelligent life may only exist a "few" at a time because they become extinct before developing the technology to find other life. Perhaps it is impossible to travel the great distance that the Universe has become? Not so sure about that.
Then there's a new theory that Earth is actually an early bloomer in the Universe's history; therefore, other intelligent life is developing at the same rate we are and are also not technologically advance to travel far enough to find other life just like us.
I'm definitely glad we have things like huge radio telescopes and TESS and the new James Webb Telescope to show us even more. Gotta get some new info in this life!
In the last Observable Universe picture, the red dot is the Virgo Supercluster! Insane!
What else did I miss? Too me, these are rationalizations for the fact we haven't been able to find any. Maybe there is another reason we haven't found intelligent aliens:
Occam's Razor Principle: there isn't any.
It's like a Powerball lottery on a larger scale. For each drawing, there is only one winning combination. Sometimes this winning combination can come up more than once and a few winners can share the prize. Other times there is no winning combination for that drawing at all. No matter how much a ticket holder hopes and dreams that he or she would win, it's not likely gonna happen.
Now for some science about communicating with intelligent aliens (assuming they exist), my favorite scientists at Cool Worlds Lab came up with some very cool and practical ways to make contact.
It would be really interesting to discover life elsewhere, intelligent life especially. My thinking on this though, counter to most it seems, is that it’s probably unlikely we’ll discover intelligent life. The reason I say that is we have just one extant example, ourselves. We view intelligence as the pinnacle of evolution. Does that really make sense though as seen from any other perspective besides our own?
There are countless organisms that get along just fine without anything approaching our level of intelligence. As measured by biomass, we are not the most successful organisms on this planet. Nor are we the most successful measured by numbers of individuals. The fact is, intelligence is just one more interesting evolutionary adaptation which helped an otherwise unremarkable animal. We think it’s special because we have it and others don’t. If uniqueness determines value, it’s right up there with a retractile claw or prehensile tail or venom injecting fang.
The other thing is that over millions of years of evolution, millions of species, literally trillions of organisms, intelligence apparently happened once, with us. That doesn’t seem like very good odds, even on a cosmic scale, especially when intelligence is viewed as just one more interesting survival adaptation rather than the ultimate end of evolutionary development.
What else did I miss? Too me, these are rationalizations for the fact we haven't been able to find any. Maybe there is another reason we haven't found intelligent aliens:
Occam's Razor Principle: there isn't any.
It's like a Powerball lottery on a larger scale. For each drawing, there is only one winning combination. Sometimes this winning combination can come up more than once and a few winners can share the prize. Other times there is no winning combination for that drawing at all. No matter how much a ticket holder hopes and dreams that he or she would win, it's not likely gonna happen.
Now for some science about communicating with intelligent aliens (assuming they exist), my favorite scientists at Cool Worlds Lab came up with some very cool and practical ways to make contact.
These so called 'aliens' are right here with us on this planet and have been for 1000s of years.
There is a movie called 'Midnight special'... I think this movie best describes where these aliens originate from.
You are also neglecting to consider that we have indeed found them...but the public is just not privy to these secrets right now. The experts of the 50s and 60s didnt think the general public could handle this kind of information, so they thought it best to suppress it and keep it from us. There are NUMEROUS declassified govt docs that refer to this topic too.
Even the Whitehouse had its airspace intruded by unknown craft in 1952, that had capabilities that were beyond any aircraft at the time...there are ALOT of documents about this particular incident as well.
Could be that our civilization is the first in the nearby universe to reach the technological level necessary needed to communicate with others.
Human signals have been radiating into space for about 80 years now. There has yet to be the time passage needed to reach another civilization. The speed of light is not infinite, so the bubble of radio signals is not that wide, relatively speaking. If our signals have been detected and recognized for what they are, mostly accidental communication rather like a conversation heard in a crowded room, there may not have been enough time to reply.
We as a species may have to cross a technological threshold unbeknownst to us before two way communication can commence ... IF signals have been detected AND understood. People do not try to communicate with termites say even though termites build homes, alter the environment in which they live, communicate with each other, expand their territory as they can. Termites are very primitive and it may not be possible to decode what they communicate to each other, let alone talk back to them and make them understand that we share the universe with them. We've noticed termites, but how do we explain landing on the Moon to termites? Termites have yet to reach a level needed to communicate with us.
Could be that our civilization is the first in the nearby universe to reach the technological level necessary needed to communicate with others.
Human signals have been radiating into space for about 80 years now. There has yet to be the time passage needed to reach another civilization. The speed of light is not infinite, so the bubble of radio signals is not that wide, relatively speaking. If our signals have been detected and recognized for what they are, mostly accidental communication rather like a conversation heard in a crowded room, there may not have been enough time to reply.
We as a species may have to cross a technological threshold unbeknownst to us before two way communication can commence ... IF signals have been detected AND understood. People do not try to communicate with termites say even though termites build homes, alter the environment in which they live, communicate with each other, expand their territory as they can. Termites are very primitive and it may not be possible to decode what they communicate to each other, let alone talk back to them and make them understand that we share the universe with them. We've noticed termites, but how do we explain landing on the Moon to termites? Termites have yet to reach a level needed to communicate with us.
Right, termites are simply not able to comprehend such things, as landing on the moon or other human activities, its likely this is how we are in relation to an extraterrestrial race...we do not have the capacity to comprehend.
I once heard a good analogy that is similar...if you think about fish that live underwater, their entire world is that body of water, they have no idea of the complex world that exists above the water, even when a fish is taken out of the water and shown the human world and all that is in it, its not able to understand what its seeing.
In such a large and diverse set of solar systems, it seems impossible that humans could be the only intelligent life. Especially when you look at a picture of size of the Universe.
Not really.
Q: What are the odds?
A: We have no idea.
Let us just deal with the Milky Way. How many stars are there in our galaxy? Estimates seem to range from 100 billion to 500 billion. Let's split the difference and call it 300,000,000,000. Now, what are the odds that intelligent life (let's define intelligent as that life that has achieved the ability to send and receive messages - ie, radio astronomy-capable) exists around any given star, on average?
Or, to put it numerically, are the odds greater than or less than roughly 0.00000000000333*? Again, the answer that we simply do not know. If those are the odds, that means that we should expect, on average, to find one radio astronomy-capable civilization in the galaxy at any random point in time. There could be zero (in theory - because we exist, we know that the number is at least one). Or there could be two, maybe three, possibly four, and so forth, with increasingly longer odds for each hypothetical such civilization added.
*0.00000000000333 being, of course, the approximate inverse of three hundred billion.
Maybe the odds are less than that. Maybe they're one-in-three-trillion, in which case the Milky Way has really bucked the odds in having us, like a lottery winner. Or maybe the odds are one-in-thirty-billion, in which case we can expect that there are around ten civilizations in the Milky Way that have advanced as far as we have, and we are just one of those ten.
So which is it? Equal to 1/300,000,000,000th? Less than? Greater than?
We.
Have.
No.
Idea.
We have no idea because we have only one positive data point: Earth. We can extrapolate nothing from that single positive. Beyond that, all we can say is that they must be rare enough - or limited somehow in their ability to radiate out from their point of origin - that they're not filling the galaxy. But how rare? Again, we have no idea.
And that's the conundrum that a lot of people dislike. People want answers, and when the data doesn't provide them, most people just make up an answer that makes them happy.
Let us just deal with the Milky Way. How many stars are there in our galaxy? Estimates seem to range from 100 billion to 500 billion. Let's split the difference and call it 300,000,000,000. Now, what are the odds that intelligent life (let's define intelligent as that life that has achieved the ability to send and receive messages - ie, radio astronomy-capable) exists around any given star, on average?
Or, to put it numerically, are the odds greater than or less than roughly 0.00000000000333*? Again, the answer that we simply do not know. If those are the odds, that means that we should expect, on average, to find one radio astronomy-capable civilization in the galaxy at any random point in time. There could be zero (in theory - because we exist, we know that the number is at least one). Or there could be two, maybe three, possibly four, and so forth, with increasingly longer odds for each hypothetical such civilization added.
*0.00000000000333 being, of course, the approximate inverse of three hundred billion.
Maybe the odds are less than that. Maybe they're one-in-three-trillion, in which case the Milky Way has really bucked the odds in having us, like a lottery winner. Or maybe the odds are one-in-thirty-billion, in which case we can expect that there are around ten civilizations in the Milky Way that have advanced as far as we have, and we are just one of those ten.
So which is it? Equal to 1/300,000,000,000th? Less than? Greater than?
We.
Have.
No.
Idea.
We have no idea because we have only one positive data point: Earth. We can extrapolate nothing from that single positive. Beyond that, all we can say is that they must be rare enough - or limited somehow in their ability to radiate out from their point of origin - that they're not filling the galaxy. But how rare? Again, we have no idea.
And that's the conundrum that a lot of people dislike. People want answers, and when the data doesn't provide them, most people just make up an answer that makes them happy.
Great post! Could not have said it better myself and there's really nothing to add to it except that I agree. I'm starting to wonder if you watched the same video as me or maybe you are the guy in the video, or just an intelligent person Up until last night, when I had insomnia and went on a binge watching videos about the cosmos, I believed the same as the OP when they stated "In such a large and diverse set of solar systems, it seems impossible that humans could be the only intelligent life. Especially when you look at a picture of size of the Universe."
There's a big equation we use to estimate the number of intelligent civilization or even life itself in the universe but the probability of life on Earth-like planets is a total unknown to us (starts at 19:30) Even if we are eventually able to reliably estimate the number of Earth-like planets in any given space, the one big unknown is the probability of life developing on an Earth-like planet. Like the OP I just assumed the sheer vastness of the universe would make it likely to have other life. But as you said, we really have no idea what this probability is, at least until we find other life out there to have another data point. It was a really fascinating video to me, explaining in layman's terms the reasoning why we just don't know how likely life is in the universe.
Why do people continue to ask questions that we cannot - and likely won't any time soon - be answered?
None of us have crystal balls, magic insight, God-knowledge, etc.
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Up until last night, when I had insomnia and went on a binge watching videos about the cosmos, I believed the same as the OP when they stated "In such a large and diverse set of solar systems, it seems impossible that humans could be the only intelligent life. Especially when you look at a picture of size of the Universe."
