Let alone recognize another savage on a different continent who might be doing the same experiment.
Space(time) is absolutely, mind-boggling massive. Everyone knows it's big but it hard to comprehend how big and why there could be many alien civilizations out there capable of broadcasting or detecting but never intersect in any way because the detection windows of any 2 civilizations don't line up.
The Milky Way alone is ~150000-200000 light years across. Humans have been civilized for only some tens of thousands of years, and capable of sending and receiving signals for a mere century. Imagine that even at the speed of light the entire history of civilized life on Earth might come and go many times before something reaches us, or before the probe comes back.
There's no Earth-bound or common sense analogy that can convey this kind of vastness and emptiness.
[0]https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/gravstat....
That's giving humans a lot of credit. Civility has been regressing. I would be embarrassed for another civilization to find us now. Sure, we may have more technology and scientific understanding, but how we treat one another needs another world than civil.
The notion that we'd all be roughly at the same level of advancement is statistically impossible pop-sci-fi fantasy.
In my opinion, it's unlikely that they are even organic individuals anymore. Even the separate alien "entities" might have a process of merging once they achieve a certain advancement.
We are like fungus to them.
Maybe the fungi think that about us? They've been around longer than we have and take up more of the planet.
Just like a goldfish in your apartment. To you, you are alone, goldfish don't count as company. And to the goldfish, it is alone, as humans don't count as whatever a goldfish thinks a friend is.
What new discoveries, specifically?
Those stars that are currently between 50 and 70 light years away will be experiencing our "golden age of television" about now.
Perhaps it would be useful to have a SETI project that focused on EM emissions to see if any of them have started transmitting. It would be hilarious if the first reception from an alien civilization was "Who shot JR?"
We should point our receivers at all of these locations and listen for signal.
Yeah leave the "might" be my problem
https://web.archive.org/web/20201023131014/https://www.lives...
Cosmic strings and magnetic monopoles coming together as the "DNA" of this theorized exotic life form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNK5oahmw3I&ab_channel=PBSSp...
Of course, its possible this is completely wrong, perhaps the Earth was completely unlucky, or perhaps there have been many abiogenesis events and they have just failed for whatever reasons.
We just discovered new salivary glands in human heads. Organs. Not microscopic ones. They are in our actual heads that we are walking around with and we just found out about it like a week ago.
So, forgive me if I am a little skeptical of our ability to find hard-to-find things. Some stuff is... hard to find.
My personal opinion is that life under early Earthlike conditions was/is almost a guarantee. There is compelling evidence that life already existed in and survived the Late Heavy Bombardment- that's very early in our planet's history. If it was truly a rare event that sparked things off, I would expect it to have occurred much later in the planet's history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment#Geologi...
Still, until we find such life, the default assumption should be that it doesn't exist, and so that abiogenesis is an extremely unlikely even, even on Earth.
Of course, until we manage to reproduce abiogenesis or find other examples of life, we won't know for sure. But I would say the theory with the least amount of assumptions right now is that life only appeared once in Earth's history or at least in one single relatively small place.
So at the very least, we can say that the conditions for the apparition of life and the conditions for the proliferation of life seem to be quite different.
Also, given the amount of isolated biomes on earth, if abiogenesis had ever been a common occurrence, i think we should expect for there to still exist some survivors of those other events.
So, one theory is that once life shows up it tends to suppress protolife.
If it is hard for life to show up, then it is arguably very suspicious that it apparently did so so soon (in geological time) after conditions were suitable for it.
An advanced alien civilization might see us not as threatening per se but rather as a potential problem they have to manage somehow and not just ignore.
This makes it sound like the planet is hanging out on skid row with a belt wrapped around its arm getting ready to shoot up.
I prefer planets in the habitable zone. Less crime in that part of the solar system.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh...
in less than a century we went from heavier than air flight, to satellites, moon landings, mars probes, et al. and now we're talking seriously about terraforming mars and becoming interplanetary? it could turn out to be ~150 years from the invention of the lightbulb to people on mars.. insane.
another century or two of progress and that spacefaring civilisation, and their tech, will look nothing like 99.9% of the speculation. and may even look nothing like us lol.
so given the amount of time it takes for a ball of dirt to churn out meat computers, and how long it takes them to start making neil armstrong figurines. it would be reasonable to assume that all the other aliens are a few years ahead or behind us.
it is not easy to picture the kind of mind bending spaceships they might have because, for example, for us they are still being thought of as spaceships.
ex. you have to really think about what the internet is to not take the logical route and say that it's just copper, fancy glass and radio-waves.. it's actually extremely weird and magical. we have loads of stuff that is incomprehensible to our ancestors, and it's just going to keep going.
of course in this hypothetical universe, i assume that time creates consciousness and benevolence. which may not be the reality. but if it's true, and that advanced civilisations exist all around us and are enormous, magical realms of impossibility, then we will never see them because they are incomprehensible to us, and to them we are a curious entity which share some similarities to their own history – if that's even something that they still posses.
No other intelligent species has a word for "war".
The aliens have us in quarantine.
The Martians evacuated as soon as they realized that Percival Lowell could see them.
An no, settling Mars won’t help. If someone / something can launch an interstellar attack it can certainly attack more than one planet and moon.
I also have a less charitable theory: intelligent life just doesn’t exist. A thousand years from now we will have met dozens of sentient species, but the search for intelligent life continues :P
Universe is huge. Wars on earth are waged over scares resources. If we are capable of reaching aliens would we really be incentivized to fight them while there are so many resources available elsewhere?
I'm wondering how well we've nailed-down just what life is and how well we grok it's origination process. Cursory reading suggests we're still working from educated theory.
I’m trying to imagine why that is but cannot.
Imagine you're holding a penny directly in front of your eyes, between you and the sun. It can do a pretty good job of blocking the sun for you, because it's so close, but no one else is impacted.
Now move that penny a few hundred feet up. Now it's almost imperceptible, but far more people (technology permitting) are capable of spotting it.
Even the first line is messed up...
> Those 1,004 star systems are in a direct line of sight to our planet...
It's SPACE. Every star within 1000 light years is in a direct line of sight to every other star.
> Every star within 1000 light years is in a direct line of sight to every other star.
There could be space crap in between. - Of course I just realized something obvious. Along our PotE lies most of our solar system debris. Shouldn't that be obstructing alien views?
Excepting highly tilted orbits or unusually clean solar systems, how are we seeing exoplanets at all? Is there a sweet spot, just a bit above the plane, where observable solar occlusion still occurs?
The article puts this in a confusing way, imho.
Much like the kerfluffle about phosphine on Venus, there are some compounds you just wouldn't expect from strictly geologic processes. Molecular oxygen comes to mind, but also some complicated shortish life time compounds would imply industry maybe. If we had /really/ good sensors we might even be able to spot the isotopic differences, it's been awhile since I've looked into the capacity for spectroscopy, but since the masses are different, the vibrational modes should be different, resulting in different spectra. We could conceivably spot if weird isotope distributions were in their environment, if it differed wildly enough from their suns make up you might be able to make the case that weird non-geologic nuclear reactions were taking place.
The reason the astronomy community is excited about the James Web Space Telescope is that it can do a few of these investigations.
(a) to the best of everyone’s knowledge it is impossible to hide your heat signature in space, let alone hide the shadow of a planet blocking the light of its star (metamaterial cloaks are far too frequency-specific)
(b) the biosignatures we’re looking for right now are anything out of chemical equilibrium, so a planet-dwelling civilisation would only hide from us if they wiped out their surface and ocean ecosystems at the very least
