And not only would something have to be alive there, they would have to have be intelligent and have formed civilization that is currently using radio technology, AND be at a point where they are actively listening at the point in which the signal arrives there, assuming we can send a signal strong enough to be received at all at that distance, which may be doubtful unless we put in a lot of effort as a species to send a super-signal to a distant star.
For reference, Earth has had life for somewhere between 3.5 to 4 billion years. Our entire species has lived for around a million years at most, and out of that time we only figured out electromagnetism in the last couple centuries, and only started actively using radio in the last century.
A hundred years out of ~4,000,000,000 is microscopically small. If another species developed their technology a century or two before or after us we have no way to know if they would possibly notice or recieve a radio signal, but it’s far more likely if the planet had intelligent life that it would have developed some number of millions of years before or after us. We don’t even know if other intelligent beings would use radio.
I’m sure there are or have been plenty of sapient beings emerging in the galaxy but they could have had entire, multi-million year epic stories play out and rise to glorious intergalactic heights with grand stellar-empires, and then either collapse in a million-year war or evolve past material consciousness, and still have been just a pinpoint in the timeline somewhere between the extinction of our dinosaurs and like, the evolution of early whales.
To say we are ships passing in the night would be a vast understatement of the problem.
This is the main reason I’ve never taken the Fermi paradox seriously. I know it’s only supposed to be a thought experiment, but way too many casual readers interpret it as some kind of scientific theory.
There’s no paradox at all when you consider how unlikely it is that another civilization reached the same or similar technology level as us in the exact same microscopically thin slice of time that we’ve had radio. And that’s even ignoring all the problems with detecting an alien radio signal in the first place.
I always found it arrogant to presume aliens would want anything to do with us. If life exists on one other planet, then life will exist fucking everywhere and we wouldn’t be special, it’s not like life will have evolved on specifically two planets only.
If the rare earth hypothesis is true, which I personally think it is because of how many coincidences it took to make Earth habitable, then I do think they would be interested.
I mean we’d be very interested if we found another Earth-like planet with a civilization on it, so why wouldn’t aliens? Presumably any species capable of that discovery would at least have a need to pursue new knowledge, otherwise they would not be able to advance scientifically.
It’s not about humans being special at all, rather the opposite. Intelligent life is likely to share at least some things in common with us. For example it’s possible that they’re also violent assholes like we are, and destroyed their own planet, so now they a need one and we fit the bill.
If the rare earth hypothesis is false, then things simultaneously become more and less interesting. More interesting in that there’s suddenly a whole galaxy of life-rich planets to explore, less interesting in that there would be nothing rare about an Earth-like planet and aliens may be less interested in us.
But even then, I feel that someone’s going to be interested. We have millions of species on this planet and that doesn’t stop people from looking for new species.
I’m being semi-facetious of course, I just always found it a bit funny to assume that life either only exists on Earth or on Earth and then like a few other planets. Presumably if life exists anywhere beyond Earth it would be safe to assume that life would be everywhere and not uncommon at all, for reasons of panspermia and because it would indicate life is an inevitable chemical process that would naturally spring up around the Universe.
I’d say that the two extremes- life being unique to Earth, and life being ubiquitous in the Universe, are both more reasonable positions than life being unique only to Earth and just a few other places.
I am a strong proponent of life being ubiquitous, because the Universe doesn’t do “one off” phenomena, and as per my previous argument, if it’s in more places than here, it’s going to be everywhere. That’s only my intuition, of course, we can’t meaningfully say scientifically which is the case without more data either way.
But to address the original argument- if we would say that life is indeed everywhere, then that would seriously diminish the interest of any would-be advanced alien civilization because they’d likely have seen it before. Interesting, sure, but not world-shattering, or even important enough to warrant direct communication, just like finding a new species of orchid deep in an Amazonian jungle would be interesting to botanists and maybe be photographed and put in a magazine but not even make the faintest blip on the radar of the corpus of scientific discovery as a whole.
I don’t think we have the technology or will have the technology any time soon to send a focused enough powerful enough radio signal over 150 light years. As radio is subject to the inverse square law, the amount of power you’d need is gigantic. Like black hole swallowing a bunch of stars levels of energy. Iirc anything over 25 light years is pretty much a no-go for radio as the detectors get ridiculous and the signal to noise ratio makes it indistinguishable from background levels.
We could start sending radio waves there and if something happens to be alive there, the response wouldn’t arrive until 300 years from now. 🫠
And not only would something have to be alive there, they would have to have be intelligent and have formed civilization that is currently using radio technology, AND be at a point where they are actively listening at the point in which the signal arrives there, assuming we can send a signal strong enough to be received at all at that distance, which may be doubtful unless we put in a lot of effort as a species to send a super-signal to a distant star.
For reference, Earth has had life for somewhere between 3.5 to 4 billion years. Our entire species has lived for around a million years at most, and out of that time we only figured out electromagnetism in the last couple centuries, and only started actively using radio in the last century.
A hundred years out of ~4,000,000,000 is microscopically small. If another species developed their technology a century or two before or after us we have no way to know if they would possibly notice or recieve a radio signal, but it’s far more likely if the planet had intelligent life that it would have developed some number of millions of years before or after us. We don’t even know if other intelligent beings would use radio.
I’m sure there are or have been plenty of sapient beings emerging in the galaxy but they could have had entire, multi-million year epic stories play out and rise to glorious intergalactic heights with grand stellar-empires, and then either collapse in a million-year war or evolve past material consciousness, and still have been just a pinpoint in the timeline somewhere between the extinction of our dinosaurs and like, the evolution of early whales.
To say we are ships passing in the night would be a vast understatement of the problem.
We should also better be lucky they’re not gonna be like those Krikkit robots from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
This is the main reason I’ve never taken the Fermi paradox seriously. I know it’s only supposed to be a thought experiment, but way too many casual readers interpret it as some kind of scientific theory.
There’s no paradox at all when you consider how unlikely it is that another civilization reached the same or similar technology level as us in the exact same microscopically thin slice of time that we’ve had radio. And that’s even ignoring all the problems with detecting an alien radio signal in the first place.
I always found it arrogant to presume aliens would want anything to do with us. If life exists on one other planet, then life will exist fucking everywhere and we wouldn’t be special, it’s not like life will have evolved on specifically two planets only.
If the rare earth hypothesis is true, which I personally think it is because of how many coincidences it took to make Earth habitable, then I do think they would be interested.
I mean we’d be very interested if we found another Earth-like planet with a civilization on it, so why wouldn’t aliens? Presumably any species capable of that discovery would at least have a need to pursue new knowledge, otherwise they would not be able to advance scientifically.
It’s not about humans being special at all, rather the opposite. Intelligent life is likely to share at least some things in common with us. For example it’s possible that they’re also violent assholes like we are, and destroyed their own planet, so now they a need one and we fit the bill.
If the rare earth hypothesis is false, then things simultaneously become more and less interesting. More interesting in that there’s suddenly a whole galaxy of life-rich planets to explore, less interesting in that there would be nothing rare about an Earth-like planet and aliens may be less interested in us.
But even then, I feel that someone’s going to be interested. We have millions of species on this planet and that doesn’t stop people from looking for new species.
I’m being semi-facetious of course, I just always found it a bit funny to assume that life either only exists on Earth or on Earth and then like a few other planets. Presumably if life exists anywhere beyond Earth it would be safe to assume that life would be everywhere and not uncommon at all, for reasons of panspermia and because it would indicate life is an inevitable chemical process that would naturally spring up around the Universe.
I’d say that the two extremes- life being unique to Earth, and life being ubiquitous in the Universe, are both more reasonable positions than life being unique only to Earth and just a few other places.
I am a strong proponent of life being ubiquitous, because the Universe doesn’t do “one off” phenomena, and as per my previous argument, if it’s in more places than here, it’s going to be everywhere. That’s only my intuition, of course, we can’t meaningfully say scientifically which is the case without more data either way.
But to address the original argument- if we would say that life is indeed everywhere, then that would seriously diminish the interest of any would-be advanced alien civilization because they’d likely have seen it before. Interesting, sure, but not world-shattering, or even important enough to warrant direct communication, just like finding a new species of orchid deep in an Amazonian jungle would be interesting to botanists and maybe be photographed and put in a magazine but not even make the faintest blip on the radar of the corpus of scientific discovery as a whole.
I don’t think we have the technology or will have the technology any time soon to send a focused enough powerful enough radio signal over 150 light years. As radio is subject to the inverse square law, the amount of power you’d need is gigantic. Like black hole swallowing a bunch of stars levels of energy. Iirc anything over 25 light years is pretty much a no-go for radio as the detectors get ridiculous and the signal to noise ratio makes it indistinguishable from background levels.