There are around 30 billion planets in our galaxy , and there are...

EdgeCase

Unless we've overlooked something closer to home. I think we are more likely to find maybe some kind of microbial or simple life in the solar system. Jupiter's moons look like they have potential.

If that happens it would prove life isn't unique to earth, even if it's just low temperature pond scum.

JupiterKid

The idea that we are the most intelligent species of life in the cosmos is IMO an incredibly arrogant and ignorant one.

We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the true nature and diversity of other solar systems in our galactic vicinity let alone the entirety of the universe.

BeerWolf

When we kill for the most inane of reasons I believe that is cause enough to factually say that there's more intelligent life out there. They're just avoiding us. And that's smart of them.

Franz Von Peppercorn

Larbre34 wrote: »

A little too much Star Trek methinks.

Lets say for the sake of argument, 1,000,000 advanced civilisations in the Universe sent out probes to search for fellow civilisations on other worlds. You suggest they should be all over the shop...

Voyager 2 departed Earth the same month Elvis died, August 1977. It has just recently left the solar system. Travelling at an average speed of 55,000 km/h (Shane Ross would not be happy) or over 45 times the speed of sound, that took over 41 long, cold, quiet years.

Now, to quote from the wiki on our Galaxy, the Milky Way. If that 41 year journey was scaled to the size of a quarter dollar coin (50c coin in euros roughly), the Galaxy would be the size of the continental United States across. Or about 185 million times as big. 200,000 light years... And there are between 10 and 20 billion galaxies...

To refer back to our 1,000,000 friendlies across the Universe. All those dudes could launch probes much faster and more sensitive than Voyager 2, every day of the year until they got bored and still the odds of them encountering each other, or an inhabited planet, are infinitesimally small.

I was sticking to the galaxy.

But really every day for billions of years? 1,000,000 probes? Even without factoring in a von neumann device, that’s probably enough to get everywhere

Let’s take your though experiment. Imagine a long lived snail that moves the diameter of a quarter(about an inch) every day for a relatively short 1 billion years; 365 inches a year, and therefore 365,000,000,000 inches in 1 billion years. That’s 5760732 miles. The longest distance between any two places in the contiguous US is 2901 miles. The snail could traverse and back about a thousand times.

The thing most people should realise is that if there’s nothing special about the earth, and the time to produce a technological civilisation on the earth is average most civilisations should be much older than us. Billions of years older in many cases. The sun is fairly young.

The denominator (number of stars) is big but the numerator is big. (Time * number of civilisations).

However the probes i was talking about are Von Neumann probes. These are imagined probes that are discovery devices that can self replicate on each solar system, producing a replica that then explores another solar system (as the original also continues) then by the magic of exponential growth the universe can be traversed in 1 - 10 million years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft

https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-self-replicating-spacecraft-could-take-over-the-gal-1463732482

Franz Von Peppercorn

BeerWolf wrote: »

When we kill for the most inane of reasons I believe that is cause enough to factually say that there's more intelligent life out there. They're just avoiding us. And that's smart of them.

We’re probably averagely violent. Any aliens who could get here would be able to wipe us out anyway.

filbert the fox

If Aliens landed here would it be reported?

I'm sure that the populations who consider the Bible a strong basis for their religion would be a bit baffled as there was no mention in that best seller of habitable worlds other than Earth.

Who's to say what might ensue. The least one could anticipate would be revolutions, wars, strife...... business as usual then.

Someone Who Knows would say that it was FAKE NEWS anyway.

What's the obsession with other beings - we can't even go to a football match and tolerate simple colour difference.:rolleyes:

EdgeCase

I find that notion that there's some grand conspiracy covering up aliens the most hilarious bit.

If astronomers at say the SETI institute or similar spotted alien signals or actual aliens they would be shouting about it. It would be achieving their life long ambition and would ensure they're funded too.

It would also be impossible and very unlikely that anyone could get every space scientist, every civil servant, every space agency to all participate in this grand and utterly pointless conspiracy.

If someone found evidence of intelligent life trying to contact us it would be getting huge coverage.

Franz Von Peppercorn

EdgeCase wrote: »

I find that notion that there's some grand conspiracy covering up aliens the most hilarious bit.

If astronomers at say the SETI institute or similar spotted alien signals or actual aliens they would be shouting about it. It would be achieving their life long ambition and would ensure they're funded too.

It would also be impossible and very unlikely that anyone could get every space scientist, every civil servant, every space agency to all participate in this grand and utterly pointless conspiracy.

If someone found evidence of intelligent life trying to contact us it would be getting huge coverage.

Yes, of course it couldn't be hidden.

(unless there is a conspiracy!)

Raheem Euro

Larbre34 wrote: »

All those dudes could launch probes much faster and more sensitive than Voyager 2, every day of the year until they got bored

Like several previous posters talking about this you don't actually know what a Von Neumann Probe is. Your whole post shows this but just take the point above.
The idea isn't to send out lots of voyager probes. "We'll send twenty every month. Surely with a bit of luck we'll find something"! You're sending one probe, it's self replicating, it spreads outwards multiplying exponentially. It's not supposed to and it doesn't need to achieve it's goals in one lifetime. It begins a chain of events which will lead to millions, billions of clones of itself spreading ever onwards and outwards. Like a pathogen infecting every tissue of the body from an initial tiny infection. It's not moving at multiples of the speed of sound but at significant fractions of the speed of light. To get caught up in it's speed is missing the point though - it's the inevitable, creeping, unstoppable expansion that will only end at the edges of the Milky Way.

EdgeCase

You start out with a nice friendly Von Neumann Probe and end up coming back a few decades later to discover it's morphed into the Borg.

Melodeon

EdgeCase wrote: »

You start out with a nice friendly Von Neumann Probe and end up coming back a few decades later to discover it's morphed into the Borg.

I await the return of our V'GER overlord!

BeerWolf

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

We’re probably averagely violent. Any aliens who could get here would be able to wipe us out anyway.

Obviously, with their common alien flu!

Blazer

gozunda wrote: »

Before answering - read this....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Yeah from guys back in the 1950’s. I'm not dismissing them but we have far more powerful telescopes now, we've achieve space flight and yet we still haven't travelled further than the moon after nearly 60 years of space flights.
If you really how to know how big the universe is watch the below video.
When you realise how small where we live and how small the milky way galaxy is it would be a miracle if we even meet one species in the next 1000 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7NzjCmUf0

Bigbagofcans

893bet wrote: »

If the aliens come

1) where will we house them?
2) how long do they need to be here before they can claim the children’s allowance?

Would they be classed as an ethnic minority?

EdgeCase

Well, we don't know how common life is. So we have no way of even calculating that likelihood. There isn't sufficient data to conclude anything.

Franz Von Peppercorn

Blazer wrote: »

Yeah from guys back in the 1950’s. I'm not dismissing them but we have far more powerful telescopes now,

Telescopes don't really affect the reasoning on the Fermi paradox. Except it proves that we still haven't seen anything.

Laois_Man

Are we even the most intelligent species on our own planet?

eviltimeban

badabing106 wrote: »

Does anybody else ever look up at the sky and see that vast dark sky with twinkling stars and think...how unimportant and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things..

That must be some dank herb, man

Carlingford Locked

Zooming in and out on this is pretty mind blowing as it gives you some perspective of the size of things

www.scaleofuniverse.com

crustyjuggler

It would be very grim to think that humans are the most intelligent .

runawaybishop

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

I already said it would take a million years. Out of the billions available to other civilisations.

They would be everywhere. Every solar system. Every planet. And if the Drake equation is correct there would be many civilisations doing this

And that follows that 1) we can see them and 2) we are looking in the right places at 3) the right time?

There could have been a swarm of probes or aliens riding away over the planet a mere 2k years ago and we wouldn't have a clue.

We somehow have managed to go from 100 years ago learning to fly, to going to space 50 years later to someone being pretty sure about the galaxy 50 years after that. We haven't even mapped our own planet like.

AudreyHepburn

badabing106 wrote: »

... over 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe

Do you think it's more likely or less likely that this planet has the most intelligent species in the cosmos


Does anybody else ever look up at the sky and see that vast dark sky with twinkling stars and think...how unimportant and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things..

The most intelligent beings - hard to say.

But I certainly don’t believe we’re the only inhabited planet in the universe - it’s simply too vast for that to be the case. There has to be life on other planets.

What form that life might take is anyone’s guess.

Fourier

Carlingford Locked wrote: »

Zooming in and out on this is pretty mind blowing as it gives you some perspective of the size of things

www.scaleofuniverse.com

That's a class site!

Just to say I'd take everything beneath the Phospholipid in size with a grain of salt. Things get a bit strange beyond that point and it's hard to say to what extent the stuff is a valid picture.

EdgeCase

crustyjuggler wrote: »

It would be very grim to think that humans are the most intelligent .

Can you imagine: Aliens show up, the Americans jump in and claim to run the place and they say "take me to your leader" and the aliens meet Donald Trump.

If it were the Borg they would just move swiftly onwards deciding nothing to assimilate here.

pleas advice

Laois_Man wrote: »

Are we even the most intelligent species on our own planet?

on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

dellas1979

Does evolution = intelligence?

I think about things like this a lot.

I am not curious if there is something out there. Am curious what is out there.

i.e., human type ejits like ourselves, grand. Not even curious. A big nasty xenomorph who'd eat me, curious.

Capt'n Midnight

Back in the middle ages it took lifetimes to build cathedrals. There are similar examples worldwide of extended projects.

It would take us 50,000 years to get to the nearest star with existing technology. ( less because it gets closer in the meantime) So an upper limit of 13,000 years per light year distance. The Milky Way is 105,700 light years across so 1.37 Billion years to colonise the Galaxy.


But we could do way better than that.
We could get probes there in 50 years if we really, really tried.
So planets could be terraformed by the time we got there. In fact part of the terraforming could be to send out further probes.

If we develop hypersleep or artificial wombs then we could travel way faster due to lower mass. Or if we could figure out how to go back to eggs for a while. Or if we send out cephalopods or corvids that use eggs.

Or if we develop new technology, even being able to predict a coronal mass ejection and using it to boost escape velocity.

If we can do it , so could they.

Ipso

I like the HP Lovevraft idea of cosmic insignificance.
Any human interaction with ETs would probably be like that in Arthur C Clarke’s Rendevous with Rama.

Larbre34

Raheem Euro wrote: »

Like several previous posters talking about this you don't actually know what a Von Neumann Probe is. Your whole post shows this but just take the point above.

I'm well aware of what the theoretical device known as the Von Neumann Probe (VNP) is. Its a massive red herring. Its more a philosophical than a technical theory, with as many wild assumptions as the Drake Equation so to make it an irrelevance.

Carl Sagan described the VNP as basically not thought out. If such a probe were to keep self-replicating, effectively beyond the control of its original creator, it would eventually spread to occupy all available space, destroying both the potential subjects of the search as well as the creator themselves. Sagan summed it up, no one intelligent enough to create a Von Neumann Probe would ever build it. Throw that bone to the philosophers.

In my example, I'm extrapolating with physics that at least humanity has some grip on.

Franz Von Peppercorn

Larbre34 wrote: »

I'm well aware of what the theoretical device known as the Von Neumann Probe (VNP) is. Its a massive red herring. Its more a philosophical than a technical theory, with as many wild assumptions as the Drake Equation so to make it an irrelevance.

Carl Sagan described the VNP as basically not thought out. If such a probe were to keep self-replicating, effectively beyond the control of its original creator, it would eventually spread to occupy all available space, destroying both the potential subjects of the search as well as the creator themselves. Sagan summed it up, no one intelligent enough to create a Von Neumann Probe would ever build it. Throw that bone to the philosophers.

Firstly I doubt you did know about van neumann probes as you certainly didn’t understand the argument when I first mentioned it. You clearly thought colonisation of the galaxy was impossible. And when you do respond you respond with the Sagan counter argument which is in the wiki link I posted.

This Sagan rebuttal is pretty weak. If there are millions of other aliens why wouldn’t some of them be “stupid” enough to create the probes. And no individual alien probe would keep replicating for ever, there's a simple fail safe of not entering a system you’ve already colonised. It’s only with multiple intelligent alients creating multiple different probes unaware of each other that Sagan’s counter argument makes sense - but this argument means these aliens should be aware of each other though we are not aware of them.

In my example, I'm extrapolating with physics that at least humanity has some grip on.

There’s nothing theoretically impossible about van neumann probes. Many Aliens older than us are older than us (if they are plentiful) than the earth’s age. In the time it took life to evolve from single cells to complex forms, these aliens have been evolving technologies - which is much faster than evolution.

Unless you think that we are the only technological species, or that we’ve reached peak technology and no aliens could ever surpass us, or that we are the smartest in the galaxy (all of which you rejected) then there should be aliens out there smarter than us who are ahead of us by billions of years in technology. They won’t be able to break the laws of physics (no faster than light travel) but they can should certainly be able to build Von Neumann probes.

So, as fermi said, where are they.