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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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Today I Learned
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Part of the reason is the inverse square law, which essentially means that the further away you get from the source of the signal, the weaker the signal gets. So in order to get a signal from a distant planet to Earth, it has to be incredibly high-powered.
My personal theory about the Fermi paradox either that a civilization around our level of technology just doesn't happen to exist within a reasonable distance of us at the same time as us or we just haven't been looking long enough.
The galaxy is around 13 billion years old.
The solar system is around 5 billion years old.
Homo Sapiens have only been around for about 300,000 years.
Our ability to scan the skies with a radiotelescope has only been for a little over 100 years.
The Wow! signal was detected 40 years ago.
If there is a technologically advanced civilization within a reasonable distance, have we really been looking long enough to find out?
Also, say we did detect one. Our ability to respond limits us to a very long response time. Then another to get back an acknowledgment.
I've casually mused that the slow roll of disclosure (tdb if that is what we are seeing) that began in 2017 might be because we finally heard back "Earth sounds nice, looking forward to having you for dinner, I mean having dinner WITH you. Sincerely, Zorblax".
This is part of the reason that I think that if (and that's a BIG "if") the government is by some chance in contact with aliens, the president probably isn't in the loop.
Let's imagine Bill Clinton started a conversation with a civilization based around proxima centauri (the nearest star to the sun) the day he took office. Assuming no FTL travel/communication, they're a bit over 4 light years away, that means it takes 4+ years for our message to reach them, and the same amount of time for us to receive their reply, Bill is out of office by the time we get a reply, so their message reaches W probably right around 9/11, then the next reply we get is a year or so into Obama's presidency, then about halfway through Trump's term they probably just received his message, and depending on how this next election turns out either Biden will get their reply in about 2027 or Trump will be the first president who could have had a full back-and-forth with another planet since ~~Grover Cleveland~~ EDIT: FDR (forgot about his wonky terms) (which is a scary through.) That's a hell of a way to have a conversation.
That timeline of course gets shorter if we're dealing with aliens based out of our solar system or somewhere in interstellar space, or potentially much longer if they're somewhere much further away than the nearest star to us.
If the government is in contact with aliens, I think it would have to be in the hands of some career military types or unelected bureaucrats whose careers can last decades and they have more opportunities to pick and groom their successors.
I have often considered this. It does seem like the kind of thing you'd only read people into if absolutely necessary.
We know Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are into the phenomenon.
Presumably, if Bill was "briefed" he would have told them something by now.
The Obamas are actively working on a Betty and Barney Hill documentary. Presumably they are interested.
All of these people asked about it.
But why tell them anything at all?
I feel like presidents would be seen to need to maintain a distance from this unless there was a need for them to make a decision or announcement and lying through omission is ok in the intelligence community, it seems.
If there is any truth to rumours that people have literally been killed to keep this a secret it would be a bigger scandal than Iran/Contra, etc. No need to air that laundry if they don't have to. If they have imperfect knowledge of the phenomenon, no need to admit that and show weakness or create fear.
And so on. I think if we thought some vehicle might show up in a very public way, they would read a president in and prep them to address the public and other world leaders.
I was being facetious. The fermi paradox is more robust than a wow signal. It stipule in those billions of year, you just need 1 civilization to emerge, and it would have already conquered the whole galaxy by now. I like that explanation from a Kurzgesaht video I posted way back ( https://lemmy.world/post/6602851 ) : Life just couldnt develop earlier (because it needed billions of year to evolve), and we are one of the first advanced civilization
I suspect even with billion of civilization, the vastness of space make any wow signal miss us most of the time.
Unless that civilization has no impetus to do so, or finds it too challenging.
We don't even know if humans can successfully reproduce on another planet, let alone in space.
Being able to grow exponentially and the existence of robust interstellar complex life are not co-requirements. Very slow expansion is wholly possible and would make contact rare and low frequency while still allowing a lot of civilizations.
This is one of the "solution" of Fermi paradox indeed. then why all civilization would do that?
Bc its somehow fundamental to physics?
Along with this, if even one civilization had built von Neumann probes (which we are literally generations away from being able to do, conservatively) we should have seen them by now.
My belief has always been that if the phenomenon is "real", it's likely this.
We have only a single advanced civilization to use as a comparison point for the strength or our telescopes, and that's ourselves. From my understanding of it, the most powerful broadcast we've made out is 15-20MW for an over the horizon radar system, and that only ran for 40 years or so. I don't have an exact answer, but my understanding is that even for our largest radio telescope, 20 megawatts at a distance of 100 lightyears would be below the noise floor.
Nuclear tests are slightly more visible than that, but only occur periodically, so you'd have to have a telescope facing the right way by coincidence. Basically, if there's an Earth-like civilization 200 lightyears away, I think we would be entirely blind to it, and that's over a tiny distance in the scheme of things.
The farthest known exoplanet is 27,710 lightyears away, and was discovered by the transit method - but this was made possible because the planet is very big (bigger and heavier than Jupiter), and orbits quite close to its star (with a 43 hour orbit). To be detectable at that range, a signal has to be stronger than some stars are bright.
Earth also has more evidence for being rarer; not many rocky planets in the habitable zone around a g-type star discovered. If that is the case, the rare or early arguments would hold.