Alien Existence

Have none of you people watched the Men in Black documentary series? If so go look them up and you will learn.

This thread needs Manc33

Always an interestng question!

As someone up thread said, The Drake Equation uses some knowns and some assumptions and comes up with (in one documentary I saw) a figure of around 10,000 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. I beleive the "Fermi Paradox" then goes on to ask "so where are they all?"

I've heard a couple of things that seem to make sense to me on this.

Firstly that there could be any number of intelligent beings in the galaxy (universe if you want to "go big") and that they all make advances toward visiting other planets and civilisations. Look at humankind for example: we have got people and stuff off of this planet and into space and continue to make advances into sending ever more sophisticated equipment into space but we have only ever got one vehicle, Voyager 1 (pretty basic by todays' standards), out of our own solar system. In galactic terms that is so short a distance to be insignificant . . . although it did tell us quite a lot about our solar system whilst travelling across it.

However, we continue to move forward, It's just that by the time we get anywhere close to the tech to move at the speeds necessary, we will be extinct as a species. This extinction obviously prevents us and any other civilisation from visiting others.

The second idea is that, should an alien civilisation be advanced enough to somehow have got the tech to travel the speeds and distances necessary to visit other alien civilisations, they would probably have seen hundreds and hundreds of them.

Why would they pay any particular attention to us? We would be a primitive and uninteresting life form by comparison.

The analogy is drawn whereby when you're a kid you walk into the garden, lift a slab and are fascinated by the ant colony beneath it. Poking around, seeing what they do, learning perhaps. But, as time goes on and you're in middle age, you know all about ants, lifting a slab in the garden and seeing ants beneath it is of no particular interest . . . you just crack on with your day.

pblakeney said:

laurentian said:

Why would they pay any particular attention to us? We would be a primitive and uninteresting life form by comparison.

The analogy is drawn whereby when you're a kid you walk into the garden, lift a slab and are fascinated by the ant colony beneath it. Poking around, seeing what they do, learning perhaps. But, as time goes on and you're in middle age, you know all about ants, lifting a slab in the garden and seeing ants beneath it is of no particular interest . . . you just crack on with your day.

You think scientists have stopped studying life on this planet?
Hmmmm. 🤔

. . . good point but scientists on this planet are not advanced or intelligent enough to have developed the tech to hop between galaxies at will. Perhaps if they ever do, they may have discovered "all there is to know" about life here (and elsewhere for that matter). It was an analogy and one used to try to explain a point of view I had heard.

pblakeney said:

laurentian said:

pblakeney said:

laurentian said:

Why would they pay any particular attention to us? We would be a primitive and uninteresting life form by comparison.

The analogy is drawn whereby when you're a kid you walk into the garden, lift a slab and are fascinated by the ant colony beneath it. Poking around, seeing what they do, learning perhaps. But, as time goes on and you're in middle age, you know all about ants, lifting a slab in the garden and seeing ants beneath it is of no particular interest . . . you just crack on with your day.

You think scientists have stopped studying life on this planet?
Hmmmm. 🤔

. . . good point but scientists on this planet are not advanced or intelligent enough to have developed the tech to hop between galaxies at will. Perhaps if they ever do, they may have discovered "all there is to know" about life here (and elsewhere for that matter). It was an analogy and one used to try to explain a point of view I had heard.

Point being for that analogy is that they study lower forms of life.
Just like advanced beings would do with us. Not necessarily interfere, but study.

Sorry, I see what you mean . . . what such an advanced civilisation could learn from studying us I'm not sure though! . . . I guess it would be ideal if the learning could be the other way round!

It's like us marvelling at chimps throwing shiit at each other. To a supreme being, that's basically us making 2km journeys to pick up milk, using fossil fuels.