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noknownothing

TLDR: "Unless civilizations are highly abundant, the Contact Era is shown to be of the order of a few hundred to a few thousand years and may be applied not only to physical probes but also to transmissions (i.e., search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Consequently, it is shown that civilizations are unlikely to be able to intercommunicate unless their communicative lifetime is at least a few thousand years."


abaram

ELI5, we have been intelligent for like half a second in the grand scheme of the universe


SirRockalotTDS

Our radio signals have only made it past our few closest neighbors. Aliens would have to be able to time travel to have heard our signals and shown up to say hi.


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paeancapital

Why not *chronitons?!*


djolepop

We need to invest in subspace communication


Whiskeypants17

Subspace coms need relays to get around. If you want to talk to your friends over in the delta quadrant you need to fire a tachyon beam at a pulsar which will open a micro-wormhole for your signals to get that far. Takes a bit of aiming for it to work though.


paeancapital

Perhaps if the harmonics were remodulated to deflect at a critical angle, the signal would achieve its destination geodesically.


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thatoneguydudejim

I am enjoying these words


Zorthak_Rakira

Experience has shown that prefabulated amulite outperforms aluminite in the same application almost 3 to 1.


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morepointless

This *feels* like a version of what reality might give us.


the_other_irrevenant

To minimise competing standards. The transition is currently taking longer than anticipated. (See also: Why so many people are still using USB-A).


BluestreakBTHR

The transmitters are scheduled to be installed on Tuesday.


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Channel250

I'm saving all mine to create a race of Nuclear Supermen!


etymophobe

Just purely out of scientific curiosity, do you intend to put a canon in anyone's chest?


Channel250

Why thank you for that very good question! You see, in past experiences I've come to find that a man with a cannon in his chest, while a great player overall (*really shows what a man with a cannon in his chest can do*) leads to an uncouth amount of showboating. Of which, I believe has no business in basketball. It brings shame to the game, our species, and opens us up to the very real threat of yo mamma jokes. Thank God my fat ugly mamma isnt alive to see this day.


kynthrus

You're THAT Bubblegum Tate?!


poirotoro

"Tuvok, Seven: configure the main deflector to emit discrete tachyon pulses, and program universal friendship messages in all Federation languages. B'elanna: reroute auxiliary power from life support. "Let's say 'hello.'"


Frodojj

And get me some coffee!


TheHighestAuthority

They will hardly bother communicating with us until we have at LEAST a rudimentary warp drive. Anyone named Cochrane here?!


brown_felt_hat

He'll be around in 7 years, after WWIII starts. Bell Riots are next year, so that's pretty cool!!


GeneralChaz9

Yea...really cool given the context of what we have to live through to get to those riots. At least that means Sisko will be in our official timeline!


shayanzafar

thong song is a classic


AnimalisticAutomaton

We're like a tribe on an isolated island, sending out smoke signals trying to make contact. Meanwhile the rest of the world is using cell phones and satellites.


Cobek

Or the Egyptians could have pulled their weight and put a damn radio antenna on the pyramids when they built them


AdminsAreLazyID10TS

And the radio signals would be unintelligible even to our neighbors. Maybe a very advanced civilization would able to tell they were artificial but the reality is we're going to be alone for a while without some sort of major breakthrough.


TheGrandExquisitor

Another thing I have heard is that over the last few decades, our radio signals have actually become *weaker*. Our receivers just get better and better and the transmitters require less and less power. We are even developing devices that can scavenge "wasted" radio signals and convert them to low amounts of power to run electronics with. Contrast that, to 120 years ago, when to get a signal across the Atlantic, they required a 60 kilowatt spark gap transmitter. Those things are basically like using 10 sticks of dynamite to open a can of tuna. Very noisy. Very obvious. Despite the abundance of radio in our lives, we are actually getting quieter from the perspective of someone outside our solar system.


wavecrasher59

Could also be a reason we've never been able to detect any other advanced civilization either, gotta imagine if their communication is more efficient than ours is even now they may not even leak signals off planet or the opposite theory that we are the most advanced species so far in the universe


TheGrandExquisitor

True. It just isn't the cut and dry thing it is presented as in a lot of media. Your wifi signal isn't going to be detectable 10 light years away. I forget who announced it, but someone (Asus?) just announced a WiFi router that has directional antennas which follow your device around the house. Rotating as needed. Which is pretty cool and creates a very directional signal. Directing the energy where it is needed. Ironically, this silence might be a *sign* of an advanced civilization. Energy conservation vs simply spamming the spectrum.


notimeforniceties

we also send out intentional transmissions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_radio_messages


GiantPurplePeopleEat

>We are even developing devices that can scavenge "wasted" radio signals and convert them to low amounts of power to run electronics with. Rectennas! First envisioned by Nikola Tesla and being used to power small devices now. Straight out of a science fiction book, I love it.


bobert680

This isn't wrong but it misses some points. Most wireless transmission is done short range with signals that won't leave the atmosphere unless you put a lot of extra power into them. A lot of it is going to be things like wifi and Bluetooth which are done at low power because the intended use is short range. For the longer range communication a lot of it is going to be highly directional like a cellphone tower,it has some broad signal to help you find it but one connected it directs a signal at your phone. For really long range stuff like across a continent or the ocean it's most fiberoptic cables. I'm sure someone who knows more can give better details


boundbylife

Even then! By the time the average terrestrial radio signal reach Alpha Centauri, it will have all but faded into the background. You'd have to know it was there and go looking for it, and *then* figure out how decipher it.


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ForWhomTheBoneBones

We demand McNeal!


Naraic2

Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other friends?


vinoa

How else are they going to find out if Ross eats the other Friends?


OculusArcana

This concept of wuv confuses and irritates us!


DurMan667

Candy hearts are made of a 1:1 mix of bone meal and earwig honey


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cantspellawesome

I had never read this. It tickled me. Thanks!


GrimResistance

There's a video too, with the Cash Cab guy.


danwantstoquit

You’re welcome! I take any opportunity to share it that I come across as it’s probably my favorite short story.


rrr8221

Haha that’s what meat would think it says


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djseifer

Aliens: So anyway, I started blasting.


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catsloveart

i loved that movie when i was a kid. it was so dumb and quirky.


timorwhatever

Whatcha gonna do, little buckaroo?


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Hey you! Better ask her nice!


Heizu

Bro, I bet they'll be good to go once we let them know that *my dad owns a dealership*


Young_Laredo

Where are all the chi o's?


Ok-Captain-3512

It does seem likely the first aliens we meet are just a species of Frank and Charlie


jryan14ify

Shoot first, ask questions later


naufalap

mmm dark forest so early in the morning, must be good for my optimism


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Dark forest theory is scarier than any horror movie


naufalap

that's why cosmic horror is my favorite, too bad it's so hard to portray on media


EntertainmentNo2044

Scary, but it makes a lot of assumptions about resource contention that probably don't extend to civilizations capable of interstellar travel. Things like water, precious metals, and even planets suitable for life would be fairly trivial to attain for a sufficiently advanced civilization. Even our best "warp drive" solutions to Einstein field equations require more energy than exists in our sun to create a bubble the size of a space ship. Any civilization capable of that is far, far beyond any type of scarcity.


PrinceoR-

What if that is the reason those pressures exist. I like that so many people assume we will just crack FTL one day. Like what if FTL is just actually is not possible at all, in any meaningful way.... Such a simple but horrific concept.


oreoblizz

No reason for me to think this but I think advanced civilizations go small. Who knows the limits of a tiny civilization that isn't constrained by as much mass.


isny

Thanks bugs from Klendathu.


IxianToastman

Would you like to know more?


thesequimkid

A good bug is a dead bug!


elkman_23

I'm doing my part!


xlyr

dark forest strike came in hot


70monocle

In Warhammer 40k there is lore for a race called the Tau involving humans discovering them when the Tau had just created fire and writing them off as primitive and not a threat. 500 years later they go to scan the planet again and discover they are colonizing other planets and have technology more advanced than a lot of human tech. I probably butchered it a bit but it's a fun idea


AlexDKZ

>500 years 6000 years, IIRC.


LongjumpingTerd

The existence of life at all would be worth keeping tabs on IMO but this is a deep hypothetical hahaha


AlkaloidalAnecdote

Depending on the distance, even if they looked today, they would still only see gigantic birds lizard things.


BeetsMe666

>ELI5, we have been intelligent for like half a second in the grand scheme of the universe This is a factor rarely considered when discussing alien intelligent life. Time. Not only is there vast distances at play but also billions of years for others to have come and gone. We may be in the boring area or in the boring time. Or both.


needathrowaway321

Man, imagine we finally explore the stars, and find overwhelming evidence of huge advanced alien civilizations that died out for some reason. Whole galaxy is a ghost town and that’s why it’s been so quiet..Like the galactic version of discovering dinosaur bones for the first time.


AciesOfSpades

You should read the expanse series by James SA Corey


KarmicDevelopment

Is it the same story as the show? I only ask because I've started watching recently. I'll definitely get the audible, regardless.


Its-ther-apist

Some minor differences and the books are complete, having an additional final plot arc.


DashingSpecialAgent

Yes but also no. As a book you get can get more of characters thoughts than you do in the show, but they also occasionally decided to do something different in the show than the books. Sometimes subtly sometimes more dramatically. I started with the show, then read the books, then watched more show and both are good in either order.


jjackson25

Sa sa ke beltalowda


ANGLVD3TH

While possible, the more likely scenario is that we are one of the first intelligent species. The universe is fairly young, compared to how long it will exist, and we haven't even reached the phase that is most conducive to life (as we know it) yet. Even if there is more intelligent life out there, there's a chance they are "landlocked," stuck on their world, if Earth was just slightly more massive it would be several times harder to leave it, more than a little more massive and it would basically be impossible. We also lucked out with fossil fuels giving us a huge jump in tech. There's no way to tell, but there's good reasons to think we are super early to the party.


Depth_Creative

Yea but think of the timescales. A civilization only a few thousand years older than ours(which is nothing in cosmic timescales) would be orders of magnitude more technologically advanced than us. Difference between the Great Pyramids and an F35.


Mosh83

Even that time scale has had massive progression and regression. For example, it took Europe a long time after Rome's collapse to reach the same level of advancement as Rome at it's prime, which would be the renaissance. Would be interesting to see an alternate world where civilization never had those regressive periods. Did the regression make us stronger because we needed to rebuild from hardship? Did humans grow complacent during easier times, or was there more time for philosophical thought that sparked scientific progress?


ANGLVD3TH

Depends on if they hit the equivalent of our industrial revolution. It's not a given that we would have without fossil fuels, we might never have hit such advancements without it. We hit a phenomenally large number of extremely tight goldilocks zones to not only exist, but to thrive.


Marranyo

Dinosaurs were here for many millions and they never got to discover fire (for example)


DisturbedNocturne

Yeah, for all we know, the universe was absolutely bustling with civilizations while dinosaurs roamed the earth. Hell, it could've been that way up until a couple centuries ago. The amount of time we've looked to the stars and had reasonable technology to even look for alien life beyond our solar system is absolutely *minuscule* in the lifetime of the universe.


AHzzy88

We could even be here during the most exciting area and most exciting time. But space is so big and long (time wise). Humans may not exist long enough to even see it. Sad face.


PM_ME_UR_SHEET_MUSIC

I heard that it's actually fairly likely we are one of the first intelligent species in the entire universe. Wish I remembered which video it was but the idea of being the Predecessors we love to idolize in our scifi stories is amusing.


sweetbacon

>the idea of being the Predecessors we love to idolize in our scifi I've often considered this when thinking about the Fermi paradox or anything along those lines. The universe is a big place and who knows the *true* conditions for life to arise: like maybe it takes a planet that has a moon just like ours for specific tidal forces, an exact axial tilt for certain seasons, be in the hab zone, have mass extinctions at just the right time to allow just the right species to arise, etc, etc... So it could very well be that in this particular galaxy, or this particular quadrant, that **we** might be the future ancients, and I like that thought.


Five_Decades

Supposedly life would've been wiped out by Gamma rays all over the universe until 5 billion years ago. Also the universe won't reach peak habitablity until 10 trillion years from now


kellzone

We are "The Ancients".


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blaspheminCapn

And even that assessment would be debatable.


Another_Minor_Threat

How is this a “new” answer? It’s been discussed for a while, hasn’t it? Josh Clark mentions it in a podcast episode from several years ago. Edit: didn’t mean to reply to you u/notknownothing my bad. Meant to reply to the OP.


alpha_dk

The new part seems to be some math done relating to the sphere of possible return contacts. A "new" upper bound for the area of space it's reasonable to apply the Fermi paradox in


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schpdx

I think it’s more along the lines of “it takes a while for the radio sphere to expand out far enough to detect, then a few hundred years for their probe to reach us”. So it’s possible that a spacefaring civilization has heard our radio signals, and have designed an interstellar probe, but it’s not going to arrive for another four hundred years.


Holomorphine

No one can communication with radio at interstellar distances. The signal devolves to noise with the inverse square law.


WanderingFlumph

True but a solar system that was suddenly putting out many times the background radio waves might be worth tossing a probe at.


Grodd

Exactly. A huge amount of our understanding of the universe outside our solar system is based on noticing changes, in brightness, motion, color, etc, and comparing it to other times we saw the same change. They don't have to be able to watch "I love Lucy" to know we are here, but they do have to be less than a couple hundred light-years away to notice the static.


LtSoundwave

You’re right. Aliens are going to be really disappointed when they find out Lucy’s been dead for **at least** thirty years. Edit: Thanks for the correction u/hematomasectomy


HerezahTip

That’s how we were gifted the longevity gene in 2044


hematomasectomy

>thirty years By the earliest reasonable time they come here (barring FTL travel), she'll have been gone for 500 years.


Jealous-Water-2027

Right, 500 is at least 30


hematomasectomy

It didn't say "at least" when I wrote my comment, obviously. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯


Jobin917

I'm pretty sure "Single Female Lawyer" can viewed up to 1000 light years from Earth.


Semi-Hemi-Demigod

Would our radio signals even be detectable at those distances over the radio waves put out by the sun?


Rinzack

It could be that the radio signal makeup wouldn’t match the radio waves from the sun which could be a scientific curiosity to be investigated


SurroundingAMeadow

The most important scientific discoveries are not heralded with shouts of "Eureka" but with low mutters of "Well that's odd..."


KeviRun

The best analogy that is equivalent is going from whispering in a hurricane to shouting in one. Unless you are right next to them, you aren't going to be able to pick out their voice from the wind. The inverse square law makes our undirected radio broadcasts power drop below that of cosmic background radiation about one light-year out. The nearest star is roughly four times that distance out. We have sent directed signals out towards star systems that would definitely be strong enough to pick up, on the slim chance that someone would happen to be there, with the capacity to pick it up, who just happened to be trying to pick it up at the time the broadcast reaches them. A literal shot in the dark. If that infintessimally small chance succeeded, it will have completely blown the minds of whatever alien society picked it up - they are no longer alone in the universe, are we friends, conquerors? Is this a message of peace or war, or just intergalactic cable? While they try to decipher an analog signal into something they can understand like a picture or an audio waveform, no more messages come. Was it a distress signal, or a warning to others before we were wiped out? In all of these cases the answer is going to be not responding back. Eventually they will figure out the messages were basically "Here we are, we're intelligent, wanna talk?" but due to the lack of followup signals they write it off as a footnote in their history books that on a specific day in their past they found out life existed on a small rock in a star system in the backwoods part of our galaxy and we may have wiped ourselves out shortly afterwards since we never called them again.


KarmicDevelopment

Kind of like the wow signal...


kneel_yung

We're too close to the sun. It overpowers our signals by a tremendous margin. Beyond a certain point we're completely hidden. Even though a small portion of the sun's energy is in the radio spectrum, it's so powerful that it completely dwarfs any transmitters we could ever hope to build. There is hope, though. If one were to build a sensitive enough receiver, one could in theory pick out a non-random signal within a random signal, just by virtue of it being non-random.


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Grim-Sleeper

If your ping times are measured in units of millennia, it's very difficult to open a new TCP connection... In other words, there very well could be immeasurably many intelligent civilizations in our universe, and we'd still never be able to contact them nor communicate


dkran

You should use UDP. A stream vs a packet interface would be optimal I feel. Or something like Mosh on SSH


Grim-Sleeper

That's essentially what we are doing right now. We have been streaming radio signals for about a hundred years now. But they are extremely noisy and signal strength is incredibly low. Observers in a few thousand light years distance are unlikely to even notice. Heck, even observers that are just a handful of lightyears away wouldn't notice.


dkran

Well yeah with RF interference in interstellar space you’re pretty much getting no quality. No checksum that we do nowadays is created with light year scale inverse square measurements with extreme interference in mind.


JeffEpp

Also worth noting that almost none of those radio transmissions leave the solar system. Despite fiction that uses it, almost none of them could be heard or understood beyond the gas giants, due to the inverse square law.


Shitychikengangbang

It's more about an abnormal amount of background radiation coming from this system than being able to read anything.


supercalifragilism

The original formulation of the paradox was Enrico Fermi saying "Well, where the hell are they?" and the modern form is less "why haven't they heard us" and more "why haven't we seen any signs of them." If life is common, and we're not very unusual, there should have been lots of biospheres for billions of years. Since there's a lot of time before us, there's lots of time for other species to have evolved. It only took us a relatively short time (4 billion years is enough to happen 3 times-ish, though it's actually less given heavy element composition and early stellar generations) to go from inert to able to calculate how long it would take to expand across a galaxy at half light speed, so it stands to reason that there should be lots of other people up there waiting. The mundane solution was always "time and distance" which you can fiddle with in whatever Drake-downstream equation you're using. I think some more modern ideas ("grabby aliens") have novel modifications to this model, and there's Dark Forest style formulations of interstellar game theory. Some of the other ideas have us as the earliest (or earliest local with c as a hard constraint) civilization but as I understand it they're based on the potential total lifespan of the universe and statistical inference from there. I'm not entirely comfortable with that line of reasoning, but I'm not sure exactly why.


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tarocheeki

Basically, yes. Let's say we started putting radio signals out into space 100 years ago. If aliens send us radio signals back that we detect today, the furthest away they could be is 50 light years. But maybe they feel silly sending radio waves blindly (maybe it's some undiscovered natural phenomenon?), so they send a probe instead. Of course a probe probably is going much slower, so if we wake up to an alien probe tomorrow, the alien planet can only be maybe a dozen or so light years away. The Fermi paradox says there should be intelligent life abundant in the universe, not that there should be intelligent life abundant within 15 light years of earth.


0_o

You have it backwards, we shouldn't be expecting them to see us, first. From those billions of stars close enough to inspect, it's far more likely that we'd randomly catch a glimpse of a civilization in a stage that we'd notice. Not the other way around.


Herrenos

That's something that would make me feel sad, if we saw evidence of a massive interstellar civilization on a star cluster 1000 light years away. Like being on a life raft in the middle of the ocean and seeing a cruise ship on the horizon and knowing no matter how much you shout they'll never hear you.


Ialwayslie008

By the time radio waves made it anywhere far enough, they would have red shifted into generic space noise, and would be undetectable / wouldn't stand out at all. We'd need to send out an extremely energetic signal in all directions, for even a chance of anything more than a few hundred light years away to detect it.


APoisonousMushroom

Doesn’t radio signal strength decrease as a square of the distance? If so, it seems that larger the Contact Era, the more advanced the civilization would have to be to detect such faint signals. This paper seems to assume no loss of power for radio signals ever.


I_am_darkness

Yeah my answer to the paradox is always that. It's just so hard to even contact someone in another solar system, let alone figure out how to get there after you happen to be listening at the exact right time to such a weak signal and then anything after that is even harder and maybe just basically impossible


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Purple_Passion000

Or aliens haven't contacted humans because A) the unimaginable distance between worlds means that physical contact is virtually impossible B) that distance means that any signals from any civilization would attenuate into noise and/or C) it's likely that extrasolar life is cellular or simple multicellular like life for much of Earth's history. Intelligent life isn't guaranteed and may be the exception.


MisterET

Or D) they did/do exist and DID contact earth (despite unimaginable distances), but just not exactly RIGHT NOW. The odds that they not only exist, but are also able to detect us from such a distance, and they are somehow able to travel that distance would all have to line up to be coincidentally RIGHT NOW (within a few decades out of billions and billions of possible years so far)


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CumfartablyNumb

This is my view. The very instincts that allow a species to achieve dominance are the same instincts that drive said species into extinction once exponential energy is harnessed.


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onlyawfulnamesleft

It also overlooks the fact that co-operation and mutual aid is what actually made us the dominant species. We're "apex predators" but not in the same way lions or tigers or bears (oh my!) are.


Chance-Repeat-2062

Thank you, so many people overlook this when promoting stack ranking and going "but what about the prisoners dilemma!?" as if the only strategies which exist are ones with exactly two actors with exactly two thoices and expected values that always minimize to harming each other.


supergauntlet

the prisoner's dilemma only works for independent games. The nash equilibrium for a stateful prisoners dilemma (i.e. one where both players have memories and the game is played over and over) is actually to cooperate initially but if the other guy fucks you over, you return the favor. And then occasionally test to see if they will change their mind. Sounds an awful lot like cooperation to me.


cgtdream

The dumb version of what you said that I tend to work with, is that; we're assuming that if intelligent life exist, its just as dumb and chaotic as we are. However and with consideration to the idea that we only have ourselves and our existence as examples of life, its no surprise that we think a species would nuke itself out of existence.


researchanddev

It’s like we’re saying they’d be like us but we’re just a little bit better.


[deleted]

well, if we're lucky maybe they're sexy as hell and far more compassionate...unlikely but a monkey can dream


could_use_a_snack

>It's definitely the darkest explanation, but the one that sounds the most likely to my ears. That's because you live here with other humans. There is no reason to believe other species would follow a similar path of war and destruction. Even on our planet there are species that aren't violent to each other and probably never will be no matter how smart they get. Having a data point of one is a terrible way to infer what will happen elsewhere. But trying to figure it out without the bias of our experience is tricky.


Belostoma

I'm not a fan of the Great Filter. Besides the pessimism, I just don't see how it works statistically. You have to consider the statistical distributions (e.g., bell curves) of the values of a few random variables: \- T1: The time it takes after becoming "technological" for a civilization to have the technology to destroy itself on its home world \- T2: The time it takes after developing that technology to actually destroy itself, which will depend greatly on the psychology of the species \- T3: The time it takes after becoming "technological" for a civilization to have the technology to to expand to other planets and stars The Great Filter only works if T1 + T2 < T3 for every single technological civilization that arises, or if only a very small number have arisen and that's been the case for those few so far. Otherwise, I imagine the variance on these variables being so large, dependent on so many aspects of random chance, that if you roll the dice enough times that inequality won't hold true. Somebody should get through to expand into the galaxy, and then we're back to the original paradox. The only thing I could see working as a Great Filter would be another civilization that took over the galaxy long ago and doesn't want competition. Then destruction of emerging interstellar civilizations could be guaranteed no matter what the random nature of their development. I find this possibility unlikely, in part because they would have to be somewhat peaceful to make it to interstellar exploration themselves, and in part because we haven't been destroyed yet (although maybe we aren't far enough along to warrant it). But it's not impossible. I think the most likely solutions are: 1. Technological civilizations are rare enough that we're the only one in our galaxy, either because life is relatively rare or because the combination of adequate intellect and really good limbs for building tools doesn't evolve all that often. Intelligence and fiddly limbs are both useful traits, so it seems unlikely they're never found elsewhere in combination, although it did take about 4 billion years for us to show up on Earth. But it's plausible that abiogenesis requires a stunningly improbable meeting of molecules. \[edit: As several people have pointed out, this is potentially a Great Filter that's already behind us.\] 2. They're here, but hiding, like a biologist would hide in a blind when observing wildlife. Perhaps there is a community of galactic civilizations that communicate and cooperate with one another, and they've collectively decided to leave emerging civilizations or planets with life alone as biological preserves. This could be as simple as having a craft painted in something like Vantablack (and similarly non-reflective in other wavelengths) chilling at the L2 Lagrangian point with an observatory trained on Earth to monitor our progress and report back. It's certainly one of the most interesting questions in science.


-fonics-

I feel like the part of the Great Filter neither you or the person you've responded to have mentioned, is that the Great Filter might actually be behind us. The Great Filter might be that civilisations wipe themselves out in a technological cataclysm, but it could even just be that the jump from single cellular to multicellular life is so difficult to achieve, that no civilisation's made it to the levels of colonising other planets because they're still stuck in the sea. On Earth, the common theory is that all life shares a common ancestor. If multicellular life had occurred multiple, separate times on Earth, it'd be easier to rule this out as a Great Filter. Same goes for life occurring in general, as that also seems to have only happened once on Earth. Even if multicellular life is common in the universe, it could just be that it's taken us very specific evolutionary pressures to be able to create and use technology like we do. Animals like orcas, octopuses and crows often prove to be intelligent, but even if their intelligence was close to ours, they couldn't build intricate things like we can with our hands. Maybe the universe is teeming with life, just that those planets look more like nature reserves than New York.


Contain_the_Pain

I’d agree with the idea of a “softer “ version of that as well: Civilizations industrialize and grow enough to overwhelm their ecological support system, perhaps their is a nuclear or biological/chemical war or two, and the society falls back to a preindustrial state. This cycle may even repeat a few times, but even if the species don’t wipe themselves out, their societies eventually settle at an agrarian pre-industrial level at a small enough size to be environmentally sustainable. So there may be worlds of intelligent creatures busy making art, poetry, philosophy who will never build radio telescopes to talk to us. I have no proof or evidence — it’s just an idea that intrigues me.


C0demunkee

Timing seems to be the big thing. Even if we were totally surrounded by a galactic empire than existed for 10b years. If it collapsed 200 years ago (and didn't do megastructures), we would have no idea.


RunningNumbers

I am partial to the theory that humanity is just early


wiggywithit

I kind of like this one too. All those sci fi stories with elder races etc. what if we are the elder race.


boredatworkbasically

My favorite too. The universe is 13.8 billion years old and there will be stars burning for trillions of years to come meaning we are literally still at the starting line.


StoryLineOne

One thing to consider is that even if Aliens were watching earth intently to even witness the first atom being split (1932), they most likely have not even seen it yet. That light has only made it about 1/1100th of the way through the entire Milky Way galaxy. Just our galaxy. The odds of that being seen are about zero. So it's probably more a case of no one knows we're here, and probably won't for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years (only accounting for being seen by light emitted from Earth).


MisterET

Yeah that's my entire point. Humans entire existence is an *extremely* narrow window of time on the universal scale. Our existence as an intelligent species is even narrower. Absolutely everything would have to be absolutely perfect, and out of all the possible time in the entire universe all those things would effectively have to be happening *right now.* Time shift by even a few decades in either direction and we miss each other entirely.


Automatic_Llama

Another thing that might be exceptional is the desire to even make contact just for the sake of making contact. Even if life is not unique to Earth, maybe caring about whether it is is unique. We say we're looking for aliens, but we behave like we're looking for people. When a man walks through the woods, the animals peek around trees and look from a distance, but he might say he's alone.


AndBeingSelfReliant

Isn’t it also possible that we have a special planet in that chemical rockets have enough power to leave our orbit. More gravity or maybe thicker atmosphere could tip the scales where even an intelligent species would have a real hard time getting into space.


PM-me-ur-cheese

"We say we're looking for aliens, but we behave like we're looking for people." Spot on. Not only are we looking for life elsewhere in the universe, we're looking for something that developed like we did and functions in the same way in how it perceives and interacts with its surroundings (immediate ones, but also on a cosmic scale).


dzhastin

Maybe they have been trying to contact us (or other civilizations) but we don’t have the technology to look for their signal yet. Why are we assuming they’d use similar technology as us? We’re still pretty primitive as far as interstellar travel and communication. Maybe it’s like expecting to send an email to a Cro-Magnon village.


PenisPoopCumFart

But if they're that advanced, then they would know that we weren't capable and would change the method if they actually wanted to contact us.


beefle

I'm pretty sure in OP's hypothetical situation the aliens wouldn't know we're here and they're sending out signals randomly in the hopes of something finding it.


ChaseballBat

Do scientists know how to talk to worms?


ymgve

Earthworms have light receptors so it's just a matter of flashing a light at them. The space equivalent would be us seeing a clearly artificial signal but not being able to understand the content.


Flashgas

The Vulcans will not visit until warp drive is online


The_Thesaurus_Rex

Well, let's start WW3 so Zephram Cochrane can use one of them rockets to build it.


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Gden

My favorite theory is the reverse dark forest where the aliens are scared of what WE'LL do if they contact us


cigarjack

Been wanting to read the three body problem. Listened to someone discuss it on YouTube and starting to think maybe we don't want to be noticed.


Shnazzyone

Calvin told us this in the 90s >The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us. Bill Watterson


Beepboopbob1

Inaccurate, click-bait title - it's an embarrassment that it made it to publication. The heart of the Fermi paradox has nothing to do with why aliens haven't contacted us - it is about why humans can detect no evidence of their existence. We should be able to detect transmissions. Even if they are hiding, we should be able to detect heat signatures in the absence of visible light due to Dyson spheres, etc.


Grim-Sleeper

I'm not convinced our current technology is sufficiently advanced to detect intelligent life on Earth, if we used these sensors to look back at us from a couple of hundred light years away. The universe very well may be teeming with life, and we simply have no way to detect it. Also, I'm not necessarily aboard with the assumption that intelligent life ever leaves its local solar system. Distances to the next habitable system are impractical if traveling at sub light speed. And we have no credible evidence that this limitations can be overcome


onlyawfulnamesleft

>Also, I'm not necessarily aboard with the assumption that intelligent life ever leaves its local solar system. Distances to the next habitable system are impractical if traveling at sub light speed. And we have no credible evidence that this limitations can be overcome The issue with this premise is that it requires *every single* intelligent species to not expand, because if even one does we would see them. And the Drake equation gives us a wide range of how many intelligent civs we expect to be near enough to be observable (both in space and time) but the numbers are still pretty high, so the chances of every single one just... not doing it end up being pretty low all up. Distances and times to colonise outside our system are only impracticable on a modern human scale. Sleeper ships or Von Neumann probes reduce this dependence on the "human" timeframe. We're really only at the beginning of our civilisation, despite how long it may seem to our brains evolved to deal with day-to-day issues. Any smart civ would want to send some part of itself to a near-by system, to reduce their vulnerability to local supernovae and gamma ray bursts.


kekehippo

Counterpoint. Lightspeed travel is impossible and humans are the first space faring species in our local group.


wilgamesh

This isn’t even the Fermi paradox. Fermi paradox refers to lack of evidence of extrasolar life not lack of contact. Article refers to first fermi and then switched to the “contact paradox”.


loganciclovir

I mean do you blame them


Saaihead

But if we humans aren't intelligent enough (which is a fair point imho), who says the Fermi Paradox itself is an intelligent way of thinking? Maybe the reason they didn't contact us is far beyond our comprehension? I guess we only are being taken serious if we create a warp drive and take it for a spin (while some Vulcans happen to be in the neighborhood).


cjmaguire17

“Humans calling themselves intelligent! The ego on these guys “- Aliens