Not really the most convincing argument. There are professions that study ants. And I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants.
Pretty sure aliens would still be interested in us even if we were as primitive as ants.
Seeing the insane complexity of the human condition (look at the amount of scientific disciplines we come up with) and thinking "nay, this won't be interesting to a higher mind" feels awfully dismissive.
sure, depending on the leap of sophistication we may appear like... rocks, I guess? But I can't even begin to conceptualize to what in comparison we'd appear like rocks. Anything of that complexity probably is multiple magnitudes beyond our comprehension anyway, and therefore not really part of the discussion
Or even a million years ago.
If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals.
So the horizon of interest where an encounter would be fascinating and worth the time and effort but not devastatingly disruptive to either side is probably only a few millennia.
But let's call it +/- 10k years, to be generous.
Compare with the age of the universe, or even of the galaxy. It's really not a big proportion of the available time.
That's only your opinion, and it's most probably wrong. These guys were capable of feats you can only dream of. And you could be very surprised at their level of sophistication, which might appear higher than us on many levels - if not on all levels.
The ruins we find around the world from previous civilisations tell us they were very smart.
Generally speaking, about once a year, archeologists find something that completely challenges their theories on human evolution.
https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-...
Just the amount of engineering the Egyptians did is enough to warrant our continued fascination with their culture, some 5,000 years later.
Even if ETs study ants generally, there's nothing unique about us to give us a greater than 1/(large number) chance of being studied.
If an alien civilisation has trillions of trillions individuals, there must be quite a bit of them interested in any possible niche. This assumes that an interstellar species would be naturally curious.
There are probably x amount of planets that can sustain life as we know it. We haven't even verified the existence of millions of planets.
https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail... shows only 4331 confirmed exoplanets, of those we've visited 0 and are still largely guessing as to their atmospheres, weather, temperatures, seismic activity, etc. Not to mention some we've found in the "goldilocks" zone are likely regularly sterilized due to the conditions of their orbit and their stars.
Imagine now that we had never seen an ant, had a totally different biological origin to the ants, and had no idea why they did what they do because we had no cultural conception of them as an entity.
We’d only be more interested in ants.
[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm...
We can prod and research ant hills all we want. But all ants will ever see are some unexpected occurrences - maybe a very unusual scent which they can't place, or some food which wasn't there earlier, or an unexpected plague of ant death - which they will forget almost instantly.
It will never occur to ant-kind that they're even being studied, because ants have no concept of what "being studied" means.
There is nothing at all in the ant (hill) mind capable of understanding that a creature like a human might exist, never mind how to communicate with it.
So we can do what we like, and we will remain not just invisible, but unthinkable - forever.
Still, as a society, we have a number of dedicated individuals that do study celestial movements and would try and prevent a sudden asteroid impact, and we all do remain vaguely aware of what's going on up there. So I'm not certain how much I agree with the fact that ants cannot understand us. Sure we can't sit down and have tea with an ant and talk about the weather, but if the moon was a gigantic dragon that just moved really slowly in a mostly predictable manner then how we interact with it might not be particularly distinguishable from how we interact with it when it's just a chunk of rock.
A good parallel to think of here is probably Discworld, I might suggest reading The Light Fantastic if you never had to get a bit of a sense of how we might interact with celestially sized lifeforms and just how one-sided that relationship could potentially be.
First, out of all the ant biomass, humans have only seen a very, very tiny amount. Ants are so numerous, and so ubiquitous, Google claims 10 billion billion. Yet this number seems incredibly low, for apparently (wikipedia) some ant colonies have 100s of millions of workers.
Regardless, as a human, can you imagine trying to visit each ant colony? How about if you lived just as long as an ant, or thereabouts? Say, a few years?
How about ant colonies which appear, die off? And how about the fact that ants have been around since the dinosaurs, and our modern civilisation has been around for a few hundred?
And how about if you are a researcher? Let's say you stand back, and watch the ants. Do the ants even notice? Especially the main colony?
Or are you looking at a few out of endless numbers? What do they report when they get back. Do you even need to be near the ant colony to watching them?
And after you've looked at 100 ant colonies, do you need to look at another 1000? Million? We keep discovering subtle branches of insects, so why would a.. I dunno, being comprised of energy, find different (after the first 1000) in a species with a bunch of meaty limbs?
On the bright side, their version of "Ancient Aliens" is probably a lot more factual and based in reality.
The other consideration is visiting other stars may be possible and extremely expensive. Colonizing at say 0.001c is possible, but very slow and likely requires generation ships. Hardly worth it so your descendent can visit some primitive culture who might not be around when they get there.
I'd hope not. 'Interesting' ant colonies sometimes get molten aluminium poured down them to make a cast of the nest.
we may not study all ant colonies on the planet, but we certainly check all islands, and if there are ants, we will at least check if those ants are the same as other ants we have already seen.
From Wikipedia for "ant": "More than 12,500 of an estimated total of 22,000 species have been classified."
From our human perspective, we are interested in ants. Everybody has seen ants. Everybody is curious about ants.
From an ant perspective, humans scarcely exist. There are 10,000 ant species that don't have a relationship with humans sufficient to deserve classification, let alone a name.
(I also want to wonder aloud why extra-terrestrials would be more interested in humans than in ants)
In a world where humans somehow kept themselves from risking their own existence through limitless growth (which I'm assuming wiser intelligences would navigate better), the vast majority of ants colonies would never have any human take notice of them through their whole existence.
It is amazing that Fermi, Einstein, et al were able to predict what they did without readily available modern computing hardware and search engines.
Some things are out of the realm of our perception.
I expect we'll continue studying ant species with the goal of studying all of them we can (assuming we don't wipe ourselves out or ant species out before we have a chance to).
Similarly I also expect we (or an advanced alien species) would attempt to study as many other alien species as they can as well, and wouldn't stop simply because they don't want to.
We've studied 12,500 out of an estimated 22,000 so far. It's not like we've stopped and said "ok we're good, no need to study other ant species."
Of course! That's my point.
Back to the alien analogy: if we believe that human-like life is as common across the universe as ants are on earth, then more-advanced aliens might well be philosophically interested in studying us, but not have yet bothered to reach us.
They might be busy "contacting" their local human-ish specieses who they see everywhere, all the time, and not think it is important to spend time contacting similar planet #12358 on the list, that's a bit further out of the way, and could take them a million years of dedicated effort.
Another comment also mentioned that ETs don't necessarily share the same interests and thought process as we do, and I agree. For an insanely sophisticated civilization, mental representations and the abstract concepts they can think about are just unimaginable for us.
If a lifeform has gone through let's say million times the evolving that we have, wouldn't their consciousness and expression of life have developed probably into something alltogether different.
Maybe even something that we cannot see or hear with just our physical senses or instruments. There are many theories about this if you read on the subject, people being in contact with different species, but explaining that they came from between dimensions from example.
They also need to be advanced enough to be send an interstellar probe or ship to visit other disntant planets.
When the European powers explored the pacific they wrote off a lot of islands as being devoid of anything useful. Now a few hundred years later these islands, mostly untouched by humans, are a gold mine for various niches of biology. Human presence is still infrequent enough that the seagulls don't seem to notice.
Not only that we've incorporated armies of scientists in to the public realm to advise on such envoirnmental/biodiversity policy issues. It's possible an Interstate Freeway project may not happen because an bunch of endangered ants live along its planned route.
And humans are an incredibly fragile species from the perspective of a space faring civilization. If a meteor hits our planet, we are basically done. And even if that doesn't happen, we can only acquire raw materials and energy from our own planet, so we may basically just tap out all our resources before we learn to acquire it from somewhere else.
And then there is the fact that we love blowing each other up, which may not be a common trait amongst intelligent species.
As best as I can tell, there are no ant species on any endangered list, so this is a hyperbolic point.
(In general, we don't even study ant species enough to know whether they are endangered)
However didn't aliens crush humanity to make space for a Intergalactic Super Highway in Hithchikers Guide to the Galaxy? We aren't even endangered according to those ruling fictional aliens who epitomise the "not interested in humanity" aspect.
In the same way an ant might stumble across a human building or notice a human above the grass, you would think if life was so prevalent in our galaxy that there would be some sign of their technology.
I would, however, expect at least one such civilization would develop within our detection range. As our range increases, both in distance and in breadth, chances should get increasingly better.
There's a big problem though, I've written about it here https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2014/11/30/this-jus...
Basically time + the vastness of space = an insanely low probability that any two intelligent civilizations would overlap within a detectible sphere, especially with our current level of technology.
If we assume 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets exist in 100 billion galaxies and that 1 in 100 of those host single cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those host multi-cellular life, that 1 in 1000 of those have animal life, that 1 in 10 of those has sentient tool-building species you then have 10 trillion planets with tool-building species.
If we assume an even distribution that's 100 tool-building species per galaxy spread out over 12-13 billion years.
Oof.
Even if you make far more generous assumptions, and that 1 in 2 planets has single cellular life and that 1 in 2 of those have tool-building life. That gives you an average of 25,000 tool-building worlds per galaxy, something like a 1 in 20 million change any star in our galaxy has a tool-building civilization.
If you remove the first billion years of the galaxy you get 12.21-12.51 billion years.
Again if we assume an even distribution and assume 140,000 light-years in diameter for a galaxy, that gives you something like 1 tool building civilization per 600,000 square light-years spread out over 12 billion years.
:( :( :(
It would be absurd to conclude the absence of entomologists just because most individual ants go unobserved.
We'll see humans on Mars in our lifetime, like the previous generation saw humans on the moon. Assuming the development and interest in spaceflight continues, we'll be seeing generation ships departing for the next solar system within the next 500 or so years (rough armchair prediction based on nothing at all). Of course, we have some massive problems to solve first, like biology, self-sustenance in deep space, cultural, financial, etc.
Anyway, my theory that we haven't seen other species yet is that space is vast and science fiction tech for light speed and beyond does not exist. If you have technology that can reach 1% of light speed, it'll take 10 million years to fly across just our galaxy. Humans evolved somewhere within that bracket. Even if the technology is there, you're seeing not just generations but entire species develop in the timescales of traveling the milky way.
It doesn't end well for ants.
Even if we are as the aliens were 2 millions years ago, there must be something of interest in what we do? I mean, we'd be interested in life 2 billion years ago. I find it more likely that they just don't want to interfere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...
They cannot observe us directly, light just doesn't have that resolution at the distance. They can't observe our radio waves because our radio waves are only 100 light years out, not to mention the signal strength fades with distance.
Might even just be a few 100 bytes of info along the lines of somewhat evolved bipedal warm blooded beings with a basic grasp of electronics, quantum, chemistry, and atomic sciences. Haven't transitions to artificial life forms, and unlikely to succeed because of short sighted environmental policies that are systemically causing a extinction event by destroying the food chain and decreasing fertility world wide. Check back in 10,000 years and see if they surprise us.
>"We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path." Is it helpful to ascribe human-like motives to an alien species? Projecting our thought patterns on an alien species will not get us anywhere. There could be numerous reasons or no reason in particular why an alien lifeform might visit us: they are cataloging lifeforms, they are interested in 'ants' like EO Wilson, they might want to harvest resources on our planet, etc.
> "But better yet, we could get in touch with Proxima b and entice the locals to visit and share a water-based drink with us." There's humor mixed in this statement, so I'm not sure if Avi Loeb is being entirely serious. I take the opposite stand of "don't broadcast our presence to aliens". It's common sense that if you're out in the wild, you don't draw attention to yourself.
We know that Neanderthals may have had bigger brains, and may have been pushed to extinction by homo sapiens. A bigger brain will require more food and take longer to develop, potentially putting Neanderthals at an evolutionary disadvantage to humans.
Assuming the laws of Physics do not vary throughout the universe and that evolution, if "run more than once" will eventually lead to similar outcomes, that could mean aliens capable of space travel are not significantly more intelligent than us, they've just had longer to develop technology.
And given their apparent tendency to crash their spaceships while visiting earth, you might have a reasonable case for "alien idiots"...
Where are you getting this data?
Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal), Neanderthal brains were similar to those of modern humans:
> The braincases of Neanderthal men and women averaged about 1,600 cm3 (98 cu in) and 1,300 cm3 (79 cu in) respectively, which is within the range of the values for modern humans.
Which is actually what would make us more interesting, not less.
I think the answer is far less clear in that scenario.
A superintelligent ant colony with an "of ant" intellect is going to be so alien to our kind of intellect that the goals are just impossible to compare. Probably same for aliens unless there are many humanoid ones for some reason.
They could also operate on a completely different timescale. For example, shrews' metabolism is way faster than ours. Sequoias are way slower. There's no reason an alien should perceive time on the same scale we do.