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Comment by iraqmtpizza | Hacker News Reader

All evidence says that humans stand alone in the galaxy.

Everything else is cope.

That’s like looking only in the drawer, and saying, there is no evidence here that a cat lives in this house. When in fact the cat is just upstairs.

There are electromagnetic waves reaching the earth from this galaxy which were emitted anywhere from 80,000 years ago to an instant ago, and everywhen in between. Practically all alien races among the hundreds of billions of solar systems would have to have been electromagnetically silent for a minimum of 80 thousand years for us not to see them.

If you include other galaxies, then they would've had to have been silent since the beginning of time.

Also, non-living matter spontaneously forms into living matter by no known mechanism.

If you're going to believe something religiously, make it something less trivial than muh aliens.

Not silent, just not broadcasting.

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No, I imagine them doing exactly the same thing we are: using more and more efficient methods of communication as we develop them. Compressing and encoding data, focusing our transmissions where they need to be instead of blasting at max power in all directions, using the most effective form of transmission for the purpose whether it’s laser, microwaves, specific wavelengths of radio, or hard line connections for planet side comms. Signals decay very rapidly over distance so unless you have a very good reason to build a gigantic transmitter capable of reaching beyond a few light years in all directions you’re not going to just accidentally wind up communicating with a random star 100ly away.

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You should really look into the limits of radio astronomy, it’s not as easy as you seem to think.

You should really look into basic probability calculation LOL. If you have to come up with like nine different copes like "alien population in Milky Way is low" AND "aliens are relatively low technology with no Dyson spheres and limited terraforming" AND "aliens by mere chance don't exist within this arm of the Milky Way (except for us)" AND "zero aliens which do exist have tried deliberately signalling to the rest of the galaxy despite humans having done this nearly continuously since they developed the means" AND AND AND

Like just throw in the towel bro. You're adding epicycles on top of epicycles when the answer is right in front of you. You're just too stubborn to admit you were wrong.

Who are you responding to? I gave one reason and it’s called the inverse square law. The distances we’re talking about are unimaginably huge so the chances of any signal reaching us is practically zero unless it’s close by (within a few hundred light years) and intentionally directed at us with sufficient power.

Just not broadcasting powerfully enough to be detected by our current technology… which can only detect very powerful broadcasts very close to us.

You might enjoy this creepypasta of yore...

https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Radio_Silence

I don't think we are alone. We are just separated by enormous amount of distance, and inter-solar system travel isn't feasible.

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