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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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The size & age of the universe pretty much tells us that it's never an alien.
I disagree. If things went the way we think they should have gone humanity shouldn't even exist. Billions of years ago some alien race should have mined out this entire solar system.
The fact that we are here and we have no solid evidence of aliens shows that something is very wrong with our understanding. Distances mean nothing when you have billions of years even without magical FTL travel.
Put some basic numbers to it. The oldest piece of metal (shapes by humans) we have found is about 7,000 years. I am going to make it worse and assume that there is metal we didn't find 10k years ago. With nuclear propulsion ship the nearest star is reachable. Let's assume it takes us with travel time 5,000 years to do this. Humanity goes from copper to two star systems in 15k years.
Now earth is going to be lazy and wait another 15k years before doing this feat again. Our new colony needs to grow so I am going to give them 15k years as well. We got a pace now. The star systems we have will double every 15k years.
Let's round down assuming some colonies fail and it makes the numbers easier. In 150k years humanity has 1k star systems. As a point of reference that is about the time difference between us and the first homo sapiens sapiens. In 300k years we have hit a million. At 450k years a billion. About 550k years, depending on how many stars there are in the galaxy, every star is now populated. 1/1000th of the time required from the Cambrian explosion until now.
From our understanding life was possible in our galaxy many billions of years ago. On average stars have 1.2 planets. There are about 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy. Of those about .2% are candidates for life. Based on our solar system there is about a 20% chance of life given the right conditions. From our dataset of 1 it takes 4 billion years to get sentient tool making social animals. Low end estimates of the number of aliens like us number in the thousands AT THIS MOMENT.
Again. We should not exist. Something is very wrong with our models. I am positive we will find the answer one day and I am betting it is going to break a whole bunch of theories.
I'm not doubting that something is out there.
It's just the MASSIVE amount of where and when that something exists makes it incredibly unlikely that something just happens to be right next to us at the same time that we exist.
There might be "people" out there with near-light speed travel that could possibly reach us. But when did they exist? We won't be seeing them if they lived and died out a billion years ago.
Space (crazy huge) times Time (crazy huge) is just an incomprehensibly big number. What are the chances that aliens are visiting a planet at the exact moment that the planet just so happens to be full of crazy people that claim to see aliens and make movies of aliens and seem obsessed with aliens?
How does this compare to the distance from my house down the street to the chemist's?
Peanuts
not hella far, but i still wouldn't want to walk it
I'm not sure why aliens that are going around the galaxy taking resources from various systems would exploit the resources of a system with life on it when there are probably trillions of exploitable systems that have no life.
I also am not sure why aliens who have technology so advanced they can achieve practical interstellar travel would need to mine entire solar systems for resources.
Because growth eats everything. Even if your economy only grew at .1% per year that would still mean a doubling every 720 years. For our 15k doubling species that would be a bit over 20x. About a million fold increase.
Secondly we don't see evidence that they did mine out uninhabited systems. There are over 5,000 exoplanets found that are terrible candidates for life. Yet they are there. Not used.
Third our system alone. Life would have been fine without Saturn. Even if our aliens are nice they still could have snagged that and not really impacted us.
I get why you feel this way but that’s not really how stats works.
Ok can you please point to the part that I was factually wrong about? I did take the time and energy to use real numbers and the probabilities that people in this field use.
The numbers aren’t the issue. You can’t say “something happened that was very unlikely therefore the number saying it’s unlikely was wrong.”
Ok so it is likely? You know exactly what I said.
No but to be blunt it has little to no bearing on the discussion to decide if it is or isn’t likely. Whether it’s likely or not is immaterial unless you’re gambling or building policy/making decisions around it. It doesn’t impact the results.
Thinking about this discussion some more, and I would like to share an example with you.
If I roll a D100 there is a 1% chance it’ll land on any given number. What I want it to land on, such as a 100, does not change the likelihood. Yet we have this natural inclination to see 100 as “impossible on the first try,” but not say, 34. Because 34 is not a number we generally care about when rolling a D100. We usually want a 100, we usually don’t want a 1. But they’re as likely as anything else and our feelings on the issue, as well as the result, will never change the fact that it’s 1% every single time for every single result, so each result is equally “special.” This goes for a coin flip, a D100, or a D1000000000. Every result is equally likely and special. We had an insanely unlikely chance of being here, but stats says “whelp it can happen so shrug.”
Right so you aren't telling me stuff I don't know here. Sorry to be blunt. I been dealing with atheist-theist arguments about the Fine tuning problem for years at this point. I know about survivor bias, I know about the misassignment of probability.
I gave you actual numbers. Based on what we know life like us should have predated us by billions of years. We have the first few terms of the equation solved. Number of stars, number of planets, number of liquid water zone planets, and we have a dataset that gives a hint at the odds of life starting. As I also pointed out any kinda barrier you throw up (passed sentient stage) gets crushed by the amount of time we are discussing.
So something is very wrong. Maybe planet formation happened much later than we think (no evidence for this), maybe the two star systems identified with Goldilocks zone planets were black swan events (given the data size of over 5,000 very unlikely), maybe life just about never gets going.
I am leaning towards the life formation stage being hard based on the data we are not seeing from Europa.
That’s fine, I feel you. I’m not sure I’m onboard with your takeaway but ultimately we’re just approaching this and coming away with different takes. Have a good one!
The chances of winning a lottery is astronomically low, yet there is a winner every week.
Yes which is my point. There should have been a winner and there wasn't.
We are. We are the winner. The chances of someone winning the cosmic lottery is astronomically low. The chances that there is another winner nearby is (astronomically low)^2^.
Right so as I pointed out the distances don't really matter all that much. A galaxy infestation of sentients doesn't require FTL. A nuclear propelled ship could bring the nearest star systems within range in under a century. Additionally we are at the edge of the solar system which means it would be slightly harder for us than it would be on average for sentient life forms.
The 15k doubling time I gave includes travel time. We can make the numbers worse if you would like. Make it a 45k doubling time and it takes 1.5 million years. About 3 orders of magnitude more time than is needed. You would need a double time of roughly half a million years to break it. Which would mean that earth sends out a colony ship once every 50x the duration of human civilization. The first one goes out in say 2030 the next one goes out in 500,002,030, the third 1million 2030 AD.
You vastly underestimate the distances and the timescale. And as far as we can tell, you overestimate the chances of life emerging. Right now it looks like our situation is extremely freaky, and we were very lucky to get it. And the chances that there is another civilization of this type nearby (and a million light years is nothing compared to the size of observable universe, so even on non-relativistic speeds million or two years is a very small timeframe and milion or two light years is a very small distance) is extremely slow. So yes, we were very lucky, we won the lottery, go us.
Ok. Would you kindly revise my numbers based on what the true situation is?
I would like to point out that my 20% comes from the literature on the topic and the dataset that we have right now. What is the true number?
I am not sure the issue is clear here but I’ll put it another way.
If I roll a D100 and get a number - any number - there was a 1% chance I’d get that number. Whether that number has value to me, such as rolling a 100 for a good outcome or a 1 for a terrible one, is immaterial. Every single outcome is 1% likely to happen.
Should I discount the 1% chance outcome just because i got the exact outcome I did or didn’t want?
I think the problem might be sociological. It may be impossible for a very large interstellar civilization to be stable let alone expand beyond a certain point.
More and more people are talking about Earth's population declining. The demographics curve may not be an exponential increase as civilization develops, but the planetary population may decrease as technology and wealth improves.
Aging populations may not have the resources to spend on interstellar travel, regardless of their relative wealth.
And these tendencies may be universal. The galaxy may be full of old, aging and slowly dying advanced civilizations and have few upstarts such as ours.
Sure and you know what? Three generations ago what you just said would be nonsense. The typical fertility rate of an American women prior to 1955 was 5!
Culture is fast. Demographics can spin on a dime. One decade everyone has kids and the next no one has them. All it takes is for a single culture on earth to push for growth and you get growth. We have about 190 countries. Pretend only one figures out the way to keep their population above replacement levels indefinitely. Given enough time what will happen to the other 189? Adapt or die. In order to stop growth you have to stop it fully. Even if there are alien species thst collectively decided to point a gun at their reproductive organs and butcher anyone who decides to make a better life for themselves, it still wouldn't explain what we see.
As I said, at any given moment there should be thousands and that has been true for Billions with a B years. Go ahead and play with the numbers. Make 99.9% of them act like pandas. That .1% will still Dyson sphere up everything.
Our models are wrong. Some step(s) in the process is/are basically impossible.
Well, your models are wrong. In both examples, you assume exponential growth will continue forever. Resource limits are a thing in the real world, as evidenced by every population in history (humans or animals).
I assumed linear growth and I assumed a frankly absurdly low growth rate. Under this model earth is only sending out a colony ship once every 15,000 years. Does that seem likely? We made 6 trips to the moon and about 50 years later are now planning more. Is there a single thing you can mention that humanity would only bother doing once every 15k years?
What is far far more likely is waves of ships, pauses of a century or less, more waves of ships...
Additionally I didn't assume forever. I assumed a malthusian growth pattern where by aliens keep growing until nothing is left.
Yeah, you assumed no catastrophic failures. On long timelines there are going to be world or civilization ending events.
There are so many species that were wiped out through their actions or just naturally. That's the point of the Drake equation; the sky should be full of other civilizations, but it isn't.
The common answer is that there may be a "great filter", some event that all advanced species encounter. Maybe it's ahead of us, or maybe it's behind us. It could be something simple like "walking upright is rare" or it could be some powerful weapon everyone discovers.