The tantalizing, lonely search for alien life
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Also I'm on the side that we are likely the only life active in the universe. As it is said by many scholars life should be common. If life is common. If indeed it is possible for life to spread across space it should overrun the galaxies by now. Even at sub-light speeds. However it clearly has not. The in the face obvious conclusion is that these speculative theories are wrong and life is not actually common and life does not spread easily. I'm not sure why so many other people are dedicated to believing the opposite of this with no actual evidence beyond theory.
Yeah dark forest theory. Yeah forerunner theory. I've heard them. Maybe...
I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that life naturally comes to the conclusion that it doesn't make sense to try to extend beyond its gravity well, or have a quiet death by trying "too hard," expending the resources available trying to propagate beyond.
Take that universe.
Then there's consciousness. What even is it? Who knows.
There is Wolfram's principle of computational equivalence, which implies that we wouldn't even know life if we were looking right at it if it didn't evolve with us.
And beyond that, do you think a beetle on a leaf knows you're looking down at it, does it recognize that you have a face, is it even capable of comprehending your motivations or knowing you have them at all? When an ant is walking on your arm, do you think it knows it's on a living creature and not a wall? Can you tell me what bacteria are floating in front of your eyes right now and their natures?
That's a thought experiment to drive home a point: we could be surrounded in the universe by agents, consciousnesses, life, big and small, up to all kinds of things interesting and uninteresting, we could even look right at them and still have no idea what we are seeing or that they're even there.
In the end I come back to where you are, but from a different angle. I don't think we will find life because I don't think it even matters to us, because we won't even be able to recognize or comprehend it if we did see it. It could be everywhere or it could not be there at all and I don't think we could ever hope to tell the difference.
As for this,
> In the end I come back to where you are, but from a different angle. I don't think we will find life because I don't think it even matters to us, because we won't even be able to recognize or comprehend it if we did see it. It could be everywhere or it could not be there at all and I don't think we could ever hope to tell the difference.
I kind of agree with you. A lot of the 'alien' stories I read about seem to have stories eerily similary to movies and books that preceded it. For example, some on reddit are convinced that aliens want to save us from climate change. The unanswered question is why would aliens care? or nuclear proliferation? Again... that's the plot of a movie.
If we were near Alpha Centauri, would we be able to detect life on Earth? Would a SETI scan of Earth detect our radio waves or other signatures of life?
Microbial life is probably not too uncommon, almost certainly present in our own solar system beyond Earth (and then the big question - does it always originate on its planet, or is cross planetary contamination a thing?)
Complex life that can build tools to send itself to orbit is probably a whole deal less common, but we’re not the only ones nor the first ones in the universe.
It’s just that the scales (time, distance, energy) involved are so wild that the odds of any 2 forms of life encountering each other is practically 0.
Well, if cross contamination between planets is a thing, the most likely way for 2 such complex life forms to interact would be for them to have developed in parallel in the same solar system, and then one discovering the other.
Our perception of alien life may be profoundly constrained by the human lens through which we examine the cosmos.
We must acknowledge that all our scientific knowledge, including our conception of life, is a product of human cognition. This cognition has evolved under Earth's specific conditions, thereby deeply influencing our understanding of what life is. We've come to associate life with cells, DNA, and carbon-based compounds, simply because these are the frameworks we're most familiar with.
Yet, life elsewhere in the universe may defy these constructs. It could hinge on principles entirely alien to our comprehension, making it "life" in the truest sense of the word. Consequently, our current definitions might fail to recognize or comprehend such forms of existence.
This brings us to the philosophical and cognitive underpinnings of this idea. It echoes solipsistic notions, where only one's mind is certain to exist, and the brain-in-a-vat theory, which asserts our inability to differentiate between real experiences and those simulated by our brains. These philosophies question the authenticity of our perceived reality and force us to reconsider our mental models.
Such introspection is crucial when we think about potential alien life. For instance, we associate green vegetation with life because of Earth-based chlorophyll. But should we find green plants on another planet, can we instinctively conclude that they indicate life as we know it? Probably not, as such assumptions hinge on our Earth-centric model of life.
To overcome this limitation, we might need to redefine life in a more universal context. We may have to accept that some entities might exist beyond our grasp of understanding and should develop novel tools that seek not only life as we know it, but any form of organized complexity that could denote a radically different kind of life.
Such a perspective fundamentally changes the narrative of our search for alien life. It indicates a need to drastically reshape our understanding to truly appreciate the universe's potential diversity and complexity. It's a humbling reminder of how much we don't know, as well as a hopeful prompt of the extraordinary discoveries that could await us.
> plenty of other experts suggest that life elsewhere might be so different, so fundamentally alien, as to be unrecognizable to us as life. Surprisingly, a pretty big question amongst scientists searching for life on other planets is what life even means. Would we know it when we saw it?
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> We may have to accept that some entities might exist beyond our grasp of understanding and should develop novel tools that seek not only life as we know it, but any form of organized complexity that could denote a radically different kind of life.
Maybe at some point, but right now we haven't even scrathed the surface in the search, and with limited resources it makes sense to start first by looking for earth-like life, and eventually expand the search for weirder things.
> Such a perspective fundamentally changes the narrative of our search for alien life.
I don't really find that to be the case. If anything, the weird life narrative might be overemphasized in the popsci/scifi communities.
This is a cop-out. It might make for a good episode (or a bad one) of Star Trek, but in the real world, life's going to be made out of particles. Likely even out of atoms/molecules.
It will be recognizable, in that it is self-sustaining... it creates itself. It will, for lack of a better term, "do things".
The chemistry might be weird (hell, we almost expect that). The effects might be subtle (at minimum, we imagine we'll need microscopes, but it gets more difficult from there).
But none of these things are incomprehensible. "Incomprehensible" is probably nearly non-overlapping with "life", if not outright incompatible.
> But should we find green plants on another planet, can we instinctively conclude that they indicate life as we know it? Probably not, as such assumptions hinge on our Earth-centric model of life.
This is incoherent. I don't even know how to parse it.
"We found photosynthetic organisms on another planet, but are they life?"
Like, seriously? Are you saying that plants aren't really alive here on Earth, or that plants are only alive if on Earth? If I take a potted plant to Mars, "is it really life as we know it"?
> We may have to accept that some entities might exist beyond our grasp of understanding and should develop novel tools that seek not only life as we know it,
I think that some people learn to think like this because their mouth-breathing public school system teachers gave them B+s for this bullshit in 7th grade. It's bizarrely bad. Have you never listened to yourself?
> Such a perspective fundamentally changes the narrative of our search for alien life.
Yes. It hobbles the search in any number of ways. Entire generations of children grow up thinking this poorly. Influencers and politicians start thinking such is somehow clever or insightful, and money/effort is wasted on it.
To assume that things must look significantly similar to how they've looked before, ignores that we can be in the dark about what constitutes life in the same way we've been in the past.
> This is incoherent. I don't even know how to parse it.
I can parse what he said easily. People used to look at the sun and think it was actual fire, because they only had fire on earth to compare it to. You might see something on another planet that looks like a plant so you assume it has the same biological characteristics as a plant, but that's just an assumption.
Imagine an ant sitting on your arm. Do you believe it's cognizant and aware of your existence? Now imagine humanity being the ant to a higher intelligence.
Aliens might be very different from us, but surely there's some dumbed down way we could recognize/conceptualize them. There might be some cases of extremely enigmatic alien species, but I think that would be rather rare, and the majority would be quite recognizable (physical body, metabolism, reproduction).
For example if there's life that exists across 7 spatial dimensions instead of 3, how would we parse it? I'm not asking as a gotcha question, if you have a legit answer I'm very curious.
Not really. We have many plants that aren't green even here.
If we find an alien plant, we'll consider it alive because it's a plant. That assessment already implies life.
Even if life takes other shapes on the planets we can reach, we will find it because of the structures and organisation it generates. So far we've found nothing but basic chemistry.
Its not paywalled.
Our perception of alien life may be profoundly constrained by the human lens through which we examine the cosmos.
Here's the subtitle:
Scientists disagree about what life on other planets even means. Would we know it when we saw it?
It may be possible to identify biosignatures on other planets, like looking for evidence of atmospheric gasses far from ordinary chemical equilibrium (like how microbes emit methane here on Earth), or unusual spectra, like spotting the signature of chlorophyll absorption.
Also I really hope to god we are alone, if we are not then it seems far more likely we are in some kind of zoo or are going to be boxed out from advancement.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/senators-move-require-relea...
I mean, the recent Ezra Klein podcast with the journalist that is "researching" these phenomena and oral accounts is quite telling of the state of things.
Could you please expand on this?
https://thedebrief.org/the-uap-disclosure-act-of-2023-what-w...
There will be a public congressional hearing on this aired within the next two weeks.
TBH it sounds to me like wishful thinking that those files will contain evidence of alien intelligence.
Detecting alien "techno signatures" should imagine industrialization in support of compute and nothing more. A lot of the stuff we currently manufacture and need would go away if we didn't have to support metabolisms, agriculture, and the long-distance transportation of bodies.
A miniscule blip on the geological time scale. I'd imagine an AGI with a billion years to test the limits of physics would be greater than any god.
But sure, I don't see any reason why any search for meaningful contact should be limited to biological forms, other than practical issues around budget and our own imaginations. Why limit it to biology + compute? That still seems anthropocentric to me. I'm sure theoretical physicists who take the occasional snort of DMT would have some wild ideas about other options :)
Edit: formatting.
And then there's the Alien xenomorph, whom we do get to see. Oh yes, sir-ee.
I think there's some step that's very rare - either bones, or more likely evolving on a planet with wood. It's an easy building material that is also a fuel, and abundant. If we had to make due with rocks when we were just kind of smart apes, we wouldn't have gotten very far.
Instead of a reasonable position given a lack of physical evidence, it will look like a gross mistrust of a mass quantity of qualified eyewitness testimony
I'm just physically incapable of the superhuman levels of narcissism that are required to think that if intelligent aliens were aware of us that they'd spend the effort to bother to come here.
Either that effort is itself measured at godlike superhuman levels, or it's effortless for them (or any point along that spectrum). As if becomes less effort for them, we become less interesting. As it becomes more effort.
There isn't even any happy medium for this. If there is some middle ground that would have them visit other civilizations... then why ours? Someone's closer to them. Someone looks like they might be worth meeting. We're the ugly guy on Galactic Tindr, and by virtue of their ability to do interstellar travel, they're the hot 9.8s. They're not going to swipe right on us, they'll pick someone else.
Maybe some flying saucer stopped by because it was along the way and they like doing quick surveys... but we've been more or less the same level of interesting for the last 4 billion years. That it just happened during the 20th century instead of 400 million years ago seems improbable.
Superhumanly narcissistic.
What if we're the new kid on the interstellar space-travel block? What if we have more water than any of them have ever seen on one planet in their lives, and they want to start trading? What if one of their species is dying out and needs genetic input from us to make longer-lasting hybrids (this was one claim from all the butt-probing abduction reports)? What if our music (if it turns out that music is a universally appreciable phenomenon by any intelligent species with sound detection/"ears") is actually the most popular in the universe right now and they actually owe us a tremendous amount of galactic currency from "borrowing" our recordings, and just want to settle up? What if we are actually headed towards a worse climate catastrophe than we think, and they are desperate to warn us? What if they feel an intellectual kinship with us but are frustrated by our lack of accepting them, but can't land on the White House lawn without risking incurring an immediate armed counterattack because (as it may turn out), "being deeply initially afraid of aliens" (xenophobia) is a fundamental fact of the universe and the only way to acclimatize us is AVOIDING leaving hard physical evidence behind (which would be too shocking/abrupt a worldview shift) and instead doing systematic desensitization of this xenophobia by using an increasingly frequent pattern of "indirect evidence" (which by the way, looks a heck of a lot like what's actually going on)? (by the way, this is a real thing we're already aware of in human psychology- systematic desensitization is the only known way to cure phobias) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization
The point is, you have no fucking idea what the reason(s) might be, dude. Or how interesting we'd be to others, or why.
An appealing story. Like, you could write a science fiction novel or show or something.
But such narratives don't really mean much except for their appeal to evolved monkeys. So if we live in a galaxy full of rubber-forehead aliens, that works just fine. They're keeping secret so as to not violate the prime directive!
There's no way to game this. Humans aren't interesting in any way, shape, or form. Dreaming up ways that I'm wrong doesn't make me wrong, it just means you're dreaming up new stories.
If I'm wrong, then I get to maybe read something interesting in a few years.
If you're wrong, then you're emotionally devastated because your super-narcissism just isn't being satisfied.
> and they want to start trading?
Trading what? Are our atoms better than their atoms? The universe doesn't work like that. There's nothing to trade. It costs thousands of dollars to lift a kilo to orbit... what do you think a kilo of Earth's finest Colombian coffee costs to send 15 light years away? And does it even taste the same after making the journey? All those weird volatiles and organic molecules do weird things after decades of storage, no matter how cold. After getting zapped with radiation on the trip.
If they wanted to trade data, maybe... but why come? Long distance calls are cheaper than the Intergalactic Uber Data thing. And it's a big maybe. None of our data is interesting, though maybe they won't know that until they've seen it I guess. Again, long distance not delivery.
> What if we are actually headed towards a worse climate catastrophe than we think, and they are desperate to warn us?
I'd expect more of a 4chan "lulz" response. But either way, that's a little expensive. When's the last time you saw someone broken down at the side of the road and spent $90 trillion to help them?
> What if they feel an intellectual kinship with us
Evolutionary pressures caused their minds to develop in such a way that they feel intellectual kinships with gibbering alien horrors they've never met before, from the other side of the universe?
> and the only way to acclimatize us is AVOIDING leaving
I've seen better plots in porn videos.
> The point is, you have no fucking idea
I do have a fucking idea. Quite a few of them. All you have is a want though. You want this to be true.
Surely you have noticed how much established science fiction has become science fact, no? The whole point of science fiction is to future-speculate. I don't think "similarity to science fiction" is a counterargument to anything. Rockets to space existed in science fiction long before they were reality, etc.
> Humans aren't interesting in any way, shape, or form
LOL. Says you? Are you the authority on how interesting 8 billion people are, or not? I have to give you credit for being an incredibly stubborn nihilist, though, but I'm afraid to declare that WE ARE interesting. Not just to us, but to any intelligence. Quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur.
> it just means you're dreaming up new stories
That's just the thing, though. So are you. It's just that your stories are pessimism, and mine are optimism.
> If you're wrong, then you're emotionally devastated because your super-narcissism just isn't being satisfied
Nope. Hilarious take, though. I have no attachment to any outcome.
> Trading what? Are our atoms better than their atoms?
Perhaps digital art? Regarding atoms, doesn't it expend a tremendous amount of energy to synthesize water from 2 hydrogens and an oxygen? And wouldn't it also require a tremendous amount of energy to separate them again?
> It costs thousands of dollars to lift a kilo to orbit
One, money makes no sense in this context. Two, I'm sure that both our future tech, and whatever alien tech might exist, would drastically lower the cost of that. Three, we're potentially talking about very physical and possibly very large ships (featureless, soundless, and with incredible performance characteristics) already routinely moving themselves in and out of our orbit- I doubt a few thousand gallons of water would be a significant impediment.
> None of our data is interesting
Art. Art may be interesting. Music and art and perhaps poetry/literature. Beyond that, you're correct.
> When's the last time you saw someone broken down at the side of the road and spent $90 trillion to help them?
One, again, money is irrelevant here. Two, you have a point, but perhaps they are evolved empathetic intelligences; we're SUPPOSED to try to help people stuck on the side of the road. The fact that hardly anyone does so, is on US. What if it's not the norm, and we're just the assholes?
> Evolutionary pressures caused their minds to develop in such a way that they feel intellectual kinships with gibbering alien horrors they've never met before, from the other side of the universe?
LOL. Fair enough. But come on, it would be fascinating for us, at least; and again, you seem to think that we would harbor zero interest for anyone else, but I've noticed something about development: Every 2 steps forward lead to 1 step back (think: no one will ever not stare at a phone anymore while waiting for anything), and maybe we have a unique enough situation (which will "go away" in due time) to be interesting to others. Put it this way, do you not think it would be interesting to travel back 200 years in time and have dinner with a family? Or to simply have dinner with a family in another country, even (or especially) one much less technologically-developed?
> I've seen better plots in porn videos.
Nevertheless, having extensively considered other ways of going about this, it makes the most sense to me.
> You want this to be true.
You seem to want it not to be, though?
I had an old German relative who had apparently never traveled outside rural Bavaria once ask me, "can you see the moon from the United States?" This conversation smacks of that. You: "WHY would you be so narcissistic as to PRESUME that the MOON of all things could be visible from THERE?!?!" lol. (The "planet" in this case, of course, is "conscious intellect.")
Or are you going to offer up more sarcasm and/or ridicule? That in an of itself is problematic, by the way. The refusal to treat this subject honestly and in good faith by so many is deeply unscientific.
With just 500 intelligent known civilizations, the frequency across time of each one achieving interstellar space travel for the first time is likely incredibly rare. Like, I'd figure every few hundred to few thousand years, assuming they're spread out in space and time a bit. That would make us VERY interesting, indeed... because on galactic timescales, I think we're quite close to that
humans have been on earth for a short time. having technology for even shorter time.
life is like a flash. it comes and goes. part of the cycle.
I don't see any paradox in the Fermi paradox, though. The universe is just a very big place. Estimates currently seem to place the number of galaxies in the observable universe roughly within the same order of magnitude as stars in the Milky Way. Most of these are far enough away that we only see them as they were billions of years ago. Organic life can only develop in second-generation stars, because carbon and oxygen won't exist until then, not to mention all of the elements making up rock necessary to form terrestrial planets. So the chances of seeing organic life that far away is close to nil.
So that leaves other galaxies in the local supercluster, but life detectable from a distance would still have needed to develop tens to hundreds of millions of years earlier than us to be detectable now. Certainly not impossible, but constrained, and even if they colonized their own galaxy, if that's a different galaxy, that doesn't mean we'd see it.
So what about the Milky Way itself? Well, what if organic life that develops intelligence, civilization, and technology is simply rare enough that you maybe get one or two per galaxy. That would still be incredibly common across the entire universe, but low enough density to be entirely reasonable that you'd be very likely to never see it. Why would it be that rare? I think we underestimate a bit how lucky we got. Many systems similar to ours have a hot Jupiter, which makes it impossible for the inner planets because they effectively experience a permanent late heavy bombardment. On the other hand, the fact we had a late heavy bombardment at all may be a reason we have as much water as we have, but we needed Saturn to be in the position it is in to stop and reverse the inflow of Jupiter's orbit to eventually calm things down.
Then we got life, but for a very long time, it only progressed in the direction of the red queen race of the dinosaurs becoming ever bigger and stronger and more heavily armored. In some cases, also more intelligent, but it's unlikely the competitive constraints they faced would ever have allowed for a dinosaur civilization to emerge. Some paleontologists have speculated Troodon may have had a chance, but it's hard to say. I think we can say with some confidence that live birth and maternal nursing played a large role in the development of strong social behaviors and persistent communities seen in mammals but largely not seen in other animals. How likely was this specific adaptation to occur? Is it inevitable that it occurs first in smaller, nocturnal, underground creatures that raise their young in dens with minimal resource requirements? If so, then you also need something like a K-Pg extinction event that eliminates the brutes but leaves behind the little guys living underground to come out and take over.
All in all, maybe this is the case, maybe this isn't, but all it takes is a few tiny adjustments to parameters to the Drake equation and you get a very low density of life, but as long as that density isn't zero, the universe overall would still have lots of life, but nonetheless lots of life we're very unlikely to ever see. We don't even know the actual bounds of the universe. Outside of past light cone, it may be twice what we can see, it may be hundreds of billions of times what we can see, it may be infinite. Space and worlds we will never see no matter how long we exist and what technology we develop, but even if it's only one civilization per 14 billion year light cone, that may still be a very large or even infinite number.