Poll Where are all the aliens? Are they hiding?

So, in our galaxy, billions upon billions of stars, and in this Universe, Billions upon Billions of galaxy's.. So, even it its a numbers game, that less than 1% of planets have intelligent life, statistically, there should be millions of species out there. Maybe, possibly.

Where are they?
1.Dark Forest Hypothesis:
All the aliens are hiding.. No going out, no transmissions going out, all quite as to not attract other aliens or Ai that might be hostile. Now I've read a few books on this premise, and we get hosed most of the time. Peter F Hamilton's Salvation series is a good one, another was that an ancient species built "Nets" around budding solar systems to let them get to a certain point to where they could defend themselves.

2. The Great Filter:
Intelligent Life is HARD to come by.. All the ups and downs it took for US to get here, almost never happen, that there is a Wall that is hit. Maybe there is life, but none intelligent to be space fairing, or Want to be space fairing, I'm sure there will be intelligent life out there that don't give a rat's anus about the stars, and just stay at home. Maybe most take themselves out by use of War, disease, etc. before getting out there.

3. Communications:
Communications are out there, but we can't see or hear it, like say, everyone uses Sub Space, but we can't as of yet hear it. Things like that. Or they hear us, and just don't care since we're ants to them.

4. Were looking in the wrong place:
Were on a rocky world, but maybe life exists on worlds with oceans under Ice like Europa, Miles and miles thick and may not know of space. So evolution of Oxygen breathing land based life maybe the exception.

5. We are competently alone ( for now):
That we are the lone exception in the whole universe, number say that's not it, but hey, maybe. Maybe we are those "Ancients" that others in billions of years will talk about, or we are Late, and civilizations have risen and fallen for eons, and are gone, and we are late to the party.

6. They are already here:
There here, around, but John Q. Public doesn't know that they exist.

Summed up better in the Tube video

 

6 is pretty much the premise of the MIB franchise.

 

Yeah.. according to someome at NASA it is highly likely that advanced civilisations like us (BWAHAHAHAHAHHA!!) will have destroyed themselves already, you know, like we are doing.. whoohoo..

 

I suspect alien intelligence capable of spaceflight is so exceedingly rare in the universe we will never communicate with it. We may finds signs of it, in fact I'm not sure e haven't found signs of it, but that's different from a nice chitchat.

 

Out there and wondering where all the aliens are.

 

Personally, I like to believe that, yes, there is life out there in the Cosmos... Its just that they are so incredibly, mind blowing far far away. If some race or species does manage to develop FTL, they'd view us as nothing more than petulant children...

 

The odds are heavily in favour of life, and even intelligent life happening elsewhere.

Deep time is unimaginable. Civilization the blink of an eye. What are the chances that two or more will develop at the same time, even if they were reachably close ?

 

I mostly think we are possibly on one of the very earliest worlds, maybe even the first in our galaxy to manage a spacefaring civilization. Anyone much more advanced than us would have been moving objects around to their liking, and we haven't seen any sign of that, and by now we probably would have. We're it.

 

I think that alien life is prevalent throughout the galaxy and that we have been visited by non-terrestrial races. I have always considered the notion that we are "alone" or that we are never going to contact other races to be something that I am vehemently opposed to.

 

I think there probably is life out there, but between the vast distances between star systems and the limits of the theory of relativity, it may be impossible for different intelligent species to interact with each other in real time. Plus, we're operating on the assumption that life in the universe would be as interested in us as we are in them. We might find traces of human-level intelligence somewhere in the universe one day, but that might be a very long way off.

 

All of the above?

 

In my opinion, there is 99% possibility that we are alone in our interstellar neighborhood, in a distance, let say: 100 light years from Earth, to all directions.

I give 1% possibility that there is an extra-terrestrial civilization in our interstellar neighborhood, and 0.1% possibility that this is a technological advanced civilization.
Inside that 0.1% possibility, there is perhaps a 90% possibility that those people are fully aware that there is no practical point in sending electromagnetic signals to the cosmos, hoping for a reply from someone after 100-200 years (sending + receiving time).
Also, inside that 0.1% possibility, there is perhaps an 8-9% possibility that those people are afraid and not really interested in calling some stranger alien monsters into their planet, so they prefer instead to remain careful and silent.

So that leave us with a possibility of 0.001% or even less, to get some response from someone. Even in this case we would have to wait some more decades.

 

Maybe they're out there, but they can't get to us. Einstein's theories show that attaining light speed is physically impossible. The Trek-verse acts on the presumption that those rules can be bent... but what if they can't? If we and the nearest other intelligent species were thousands of light years apart, we would need sleeper ships or intergenerational ships that could run for millenia.

 

Maybe they just aren’t interested in us. Humans overrate their importance on pretty much every subject.

 

Communicating with someone you don't know is extremelly dangerous. Imagine that a alien race like Borg existed and we invited them to Earth, by sending them signals from our planet... We must be naives...

 

Maybe they find us too primitive to bother with, like in "Glory Lane" by Alan Dean Foster. Even the Neanderthals have surpassed us.

Or... Star Trek itself provides a potential answer, in the TNG episode "First Contact". Until a species develops warp, it gets left alone. How Earth's Native Americans fared in the 18th and 19th Centuries provides an ample rationale.

 

I don't think we will have FTL---so my guess is that aliens will have to deal with the same laws of physics we do--so if we have been visited, their visists won't be saucers from a disco---but aerobraking craft.

That is why the great daylight fireball of 1972 still astounds me---it reminds me far more of the Stardust backshell re-entry than Peekskill, Chelyabinsk, etc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Great_Daylight_Fireball

Part of me still half-thinks it is a Bracewell....I have never seen anything travel that fast and that far without breaking up.....Crappy Super-8...but no chance of it being a fake.


The footage looks unremarkable----but you have to understand that footage damn well went near horizon to horizon.

Funny
https://m.jpost.com/science/article-749330
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/...hysical-evidence-of-technological-aliens.html

 

I dunno which of these answers fit my response, but I think that

A) Yes, Aliens Exist. Probably even some are on our exact level, many below our level, and many higher than us;
B) However they are so distant and travel and communications so slow and fragile that
C) We'll never really know unless they or we go looking for each other for a long, long time,
and D) since the laws of the universe cannot be broken, eventually technological societies either fall to ennui, die out, reach a state they're comfortable with, are in a cycle of collapse and growth, et al - that does not noticeably change their local galaxy, for no civilization apparently can.

Even if you had 600, 6000 active systems out of the billions in this galaxy right now, what's the average distance between them? Thousands of lightyears, hundreds? How many of them could or want to go blazing off to the stars, when even a system or two could keep a civ comfortable for eons.

I think a lot of the thought processes around aliens are frankly outdated. There is no drive nor need to make a dyson swarm, or expand across the galaxy, there's no FTL so any trip, even for a very curious and daring race, would always take concentrated resources and efforts and funnel them to their local neighborhoods and stars of note; radio waves break down due to interference and loss of power to worthless noise past a light year or two and laser radio would sparingly be shot out whatever which way and even that decays, does it not?

We are stuck with the mindset that science can go on forever, that the demand to shape the universe will go on at least past a point where a species could change it in a noticeable away, but I think that thinking is mirred too much in the progress optimism of the 19th century and then the reaction to anomalous growth in the 20th, and when we cool down by the late 21st-22nd we'll see a shift in thinking that posits a more insular and constrained universe.

If we're 'closer' to the end of practical application of the sciences than not - say, if profitable contained technological fusion is not possible, or the limits on computing come up, or graphene can't be mass produced, or nanotubes, then that also limits a species in a way that rules out megaprojects that need wonderous amounts of energy and fantastical materials.

Like it'll be nice if they're out there, but ultimately changes little to anything back here. There's so much space and time for everybody, there would be little to no chance of hostile contact, competition, hostilities, and everyone is so far that even communications would be nigh impossible. I bet that if Humanity does go out to the stars in a burst of activity, if the tech gets us there and which I do support - I mean, I'm a trekkie, after all, and it's arguably good for us if we do expand a bit and colonize and terraform and spread the gaian bioshere around - say within the local bubble, we might find some pond scum and we might find a relic or two floating about but little else.

 

Due to the statistical probability alone, I am 100% certain that we are not the only life in the universe. However, what form that other life takes, its level of sapience, ability to think abstractly, how advanced it is technologically, and when in time it appears and disappears is impossible for us to say at the moment.

 

I wonder whether the curious disappearance of many stars is due to aliens:



...and of course, there is Tabby's star (KIC 8462852):



...and another (HD139139) that exhibits unexplained transits:



...and one that might have been used as a dumping ground for transuranic elements (Przybylski’s Star):



...and possibly signs of a cluster of stars that might be associated with megastructures:



Of course, all of these observations might have explanations that don't require aliens.

While disappearing stars might or might not be explainable by alien megastructures, that so many have disappeared from our view so suddenly is strange. I'd be interested in knowing if any traces are still visible in the infrared - something that Freeman Dyson originally suggested. However, I doubt that time will be made available for the JWST to investigate this. In any case, there are ways of also disguising the IR signature.