Is big a good argument for inevitability? Size? I don't think so.

Surely, but even if there were 1 trillion civilizations in the universe who are at least Kardeshev 1( so that they can be detected meaningful ways), that means roughly 1 civilization per Galaxy.

Yes, of course.

lol I mean… not pro ufo or anything weird but everytime I come close to conceptualizing it’s so huge… I mean there has to be at least 1 other… but even so… forever out of reach in time and space so practically alone anyways just by the sheer size and distance that also makes it probable…

what would it mean if we made contact with another alien civilization and it was human. seeded? crops?

im wondering if we're like an odd mushroom that sprouts out of the side of a tree in a forest and lives its brief life and then winks out. and then a different one appears on another tree somewhere out in the forest.

Bro aliens are here. If you dont know it is only because you havent looked deeply into it

The idea that we are alone terrifies me because if we are, we have a massive responsibility to ensure life continues in the universe, and I'm not sure we're up to the challenge.

1. Most intelligent life, given the behavioral traits we see in successfully competitive social animals, probably take more from their environment than they give and so most probably kill themselves.

2. Assuming they get over the hurdle of number one, the scale of space itself & and light speed limit severely constrain their possible visibility, and all arguments that mention the ease of colonizing the Milky Way in a million years or so forget the fact that with greater efficiency comes greater leverage and there’s probably very little need to expand outside of your home star. Also they are not incentivized to, as light speed limitations guarantee that any interstellar colonies you set up are beyond your ability to control, and the population living there will eventually evolve to the point of diverging from the parent species. Colonizing the galaxy is effectively seeding space with your future alien rivals.

3. Interest. We are not interested in having a dialogue with chimps, I’d much rather simulate a society on my laptop & commit virtual war crimes. I can interact with aliens all I want, either custom designed or procedurally generated from the comfort of my own home, and I don’t need to travel 500 light years abandoning everyone I know and love to do so.

4. Recognizability. Consider the age of the universe. In order for two alien races to leave their homeworld at roughly the same time at roughly the same level of development, you’d need cosmic levels of luck that borders on shitty world design. Considering this odds are if we find aliens it’ll just be particularly excited space farts, or completely ineffable magical space wizards.

5. Considering #4, we don’t WANT to find intelligent aliens. It may be cheap for them to fire a relativistic kill missile, and with light speed limitations on communication aliens may consider such a response to be prudent as they can’t exactly gauge how genocidal we are across a 20 year light gap. If they guess wrong they’re dead. Even if they don’t fling a space rock at us (probably out of concern for being witnessed committing xenocide by the civilization they didn’t notice), we don’t exactly treat animals in our laboratories humanely, and there’s no reason to believe they would recognize us as a peer species other than human arrogance and cope.

TLDR: They probably exist, no we’ll probably never find them, and it’s probably a good thing that we don’t.

Almost certainly.

The question is whether or not we'll be able to find any of it.

In the amount of time it takes one civilization to go from farming and civilization forming to being able to explore the Galaxy in such an efficient manner as to find other life many other civilizations will have been founded and will have gone completely extinct with no evidence of it still existing on the planet in a way that would even get us to check that planet.

The biggest question, I would be overjoyed if somebody has an answer to this they could link, is how easy is it for life to form and sustain in environment that have the conditions for Life formation.

Can you take all the chemicals required and just dump them into water and in a few million years get life or does it need some type of catalyzing action such a certain temperatures in order to get the process going?

If I’m going to place my bet, I’d put it on A) life being common where it’s possible, and B) intelligent life, especially technologically advanced life, being exceptionally rare. I’d bet a decent amount, but not the farm. 

A) because life seems to have popped up the moment it had a chance on Earth, so that looks like good odds to me that life is a normal part of the universe. 

B) because life on Earth has been enormously diverse and complex over the course of nearly four billion years, but exactly one species out of billions can  make a wheel, developed writing, and can travel to and send and receive signals from space. Intelligence is not a foregone evolutionary conclusion, and I don’t see it being out of the question that many planets could be teeming with life, even relatively intelligent life like chimpanzees, octopuses, and dolphins, and that it still never masters fire or takes a moment to glance at the stars.  

It’s just a numbers game and we’re still missing too much of the equation to get any real answers yet. I don’t have any use for whether it “feels” like there should or shouldn’t be intelligent ETs. I don’t think it’s arrogant to think we might be alone, but that’s because I don’t think humanity has any special virtue other than its uniqueness thus far. I do hope I live long enough to see if there is any kind of life elsewhere in the Solar System, and if we can determine if it arose separately from Earth life. That would be a phenomenal discovery and major win in the equation! And of course I hope that maybe we’ll see some sign of intelligence somewhere.

I do despair a little at the vastness of space. Even a thousand shining civilizations in the Milky Way is still only a paltry one per 100,000-400,000 stars, and the odds of us being anywhere near one of them, in space and time, is pretty small. Or maybe bad luck plopped us in a desert, and there a handful of civilizations all chilling 50,000ly away.  

I really feel like asking if we’re alone in the cosmos is like futzing around on the beach of a new large continent and asking the same question, and that we’ll have to do a lot more looking, a lot more waiting, or have a lot more luck (good or bad) to find the answer. 

They likely have a workarounds for faster than light travel rather than sending a generational ship, which is a ridiculous concept.

Our knowledge of the universe is very small. On that basis, there's no life in what we know.

Not if you see and feel that the Universe is 'in' you.

🤣🙏

My take is that some of the unexplained large objects way out in the universe are actually engineering projects.

Also, we don't hear from anyone because RF primitive technology. It is known

Maybe we just don't know how to look. Maybe they are everywhere (and by that I mean 1 or 2 in every galaxy) . Maybe we don't hear them because we don't know how to listen. We went from pigeons and smoke signals to lasers and microwaves in about 150 years. Do you really think we will still use radio in 500 years?

So say we use it for 500 years total. That leaves a tiny window for someone like us to ever hear a signal using a light speed transmission.

The fermi paradox and seti are focused on radio and I highly doubt radio would be used by a civilization for more that a thousand years, probably much less

We know nothing about our prehistory!

The future is only 500 milliseconds away

More fiction than facts on this forum

Is there such a thing as warp telecommunications?

The Hubble Sphere eventually limits what we can observe about our universe.

That’s all we get are false alarms

Consider the size of the Universe (I know near impossible), then consider there are trillions of galaxies with trillions or billions of stars in each one, then think about chance. In our universe the odds that humans would exist is pretty good. Even with odds 1 in a trillion, we'd likely exist - then consider that in the same universe with the same odds there is or was probably an exact duplicate of you living somewhere in the universe.

We aren't, indeed. Maybe aliens are not little grey men with spaceships. Maybe they are entities that we can't perceive or detect yet. I mean a civilization/AI advanced enough could just say fuck it to the limitations of the known material universal plane. Lucky them

Yes, but they just avoid us. And can you really blame them?