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Why Haven't Aliens Contacted Us Yet? (Fermi Paradox)

Am I mistaken...didn't Hawking say a while back that meeting advanced aliens would be a bad thing and that we shouldn't be looking for them?

Now, he's backing a newly-formed search for extraterrestrials:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33598535

Prof Stephen Hawking backs venture to listen for aliens
Prof Stephen Hawking has launched a new effort to answer the question of whether there is life elsewhere in space.

I'm confused.
 
I thought Aliens had found us, erm I must be wrong then. To them (the aliens) we must look and act like bunch of primitive savages so there avoiding the come around and have a cuppa invitation. Besides, there not going to arrive in a vehicle thats got nice wheels for some local gorillas to steal. There going to arrive in something that if stolen would cause worldwide panic and probably a war.
 
I thought Aliens had found us, erm I must be wrong then. To them (the aliens) we must look and act like bunch of primitive savages so there avoiding the come around and have a cuppa invitation. Besides, there not going to arrive in a vehicle thats got nice wheels for some local gorillas to steal. There going to arrive in something that if stolen would cause worldwide panic and probably a war.
That's how I see it too.
We're too violent, too primitive, and we have nothing to say that they haven't heard already.
Maybe they tune into our telly broadcasts from time to time, so they can have a good laugh.
 
That's how I see it too.
We're too violent, too primitive, and we have nothing to say that they haven't heard already.
Maybe they tune into our telly broadcasts from time to time, so they can have a good laugh.

I had a wind-up one of those. Got it at a Ingoldmells Market when I was a wee nipper. Played with it about three times and then got bored with it.
 
Worth a fortune now.
 
That may force me into a visit back to my mums house then. Her loft needs cleaning out too :) and all my old starwars stuff is there.

Hawking gets on my nerves at times. Hes seems to stand for anything thats science etc and appears to be THE leading light on such subjects. I think he ( and others ) prevent other great (younger) minds from making new discoveries in their own style - you have to study science in this way or your discovery wont be acknowledged.
 
GeorgeP said:
Hawking gets on my nerves at times. Hes seems to stand for anything thats science etc and appears to be THE leading light on such subjects..

Sadly, that is spot-on. I believe he is due enormous respect, but not the level of guilt-driven veneration that he is subjected to. And yes, he (reportedly) had previously said (allegedly) that meeting aliens could be A Bad Thing for humanity. The quasi-religion that is mainstream science currently has rather too many celebrities, in a league entirely different from previous examples of the breed.

I really don't concur with this assumption that we'd be creamed by any/all advanced alien civilisation. This doesn't automatically follow, other than in Hollywood 'B' movies. If we found them, would wipe them out? So why would they?
 
If we found em we would do everything they wanted...just to obtain one of their ray-guns and a spare disc shaped object.
 
Perhaps Hawking sees this as an early warning system. Once we know where the aliens are, we can kill them before they can kill us.
 
Sadly, that is spot-on. I believe he is due enormous respect, but not the level of guilt-driven veneration that he is subjected to. And yes, he (reportedly) had previously said (allegedly) that meeting aliens could be A Bad Thing for humanity. The quasi-religion that is mainstream science currently has rather too many celebrities, in a league entirely different from previous examples of the breed.

I really don't concur with this assumption that we'd be creamed by any/all advanced alien civilisation. This doesn't automatically follow, other than in Hollywood 'B' movies. If we found them, would wipe them out? So why would they?

I don't think the genocidal fixation of science fantasy was a B-movie invention; it was present in the haunting opening paragraphs of War of the Worlds. Welles is said to have had in mind the virtual annihilation of native Tasmanians, when it was turned into a penal colony. Dystopias abound in the alembic of science fiction and it would take a leap of faith to expect nicer things to descend from above in reality. :(
 
The quasi-religion that is mainstream science currently has rather too many celebrities, in a league entirely different from previous examples of the breed.
Gotta take issue with that sweeping statement! Einstein was an even bigger superstar in his day. He got the Nobel prize for Physics in 1921, and he was even invited to become President of Israel in 1952.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Hawking has many honours and prizes, but no Nobel Prize (yet!). AFAIK he's not been invited to be a president of any country either.

Then again, Einstein never had Hawking's medical problems.

But I'm quite happy for such knowledgable people to be 'celebrities', as opposed to some brainless f*ckwits from a realityTV show.
 
Yes, I'd much rather we celebrated smart people, rather than 'slebs'.
 
Too many science celebrities? If I asked people at my work tommorow to name 5 living scientists, I doubt many of them could.
 
The fact that after decades of exploring Mars, we haven't even turned up a tiny scrap of lichen suggests that the "Goldilocks zone" in any solar system is very narrow and that life out there in the universe is exceedingly rare.
 
It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe - and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit.

Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven't had enough time to look.

Article continues Using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen, proposed that a single civilisation might build eight intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for life. Once on their way each probe would send out eight more mini-probes, which would head for the nearest stars and look for habitable planets.

Mr Bjork confined the probes to search only solar systems in what is called the 'galactic habitable zone' of the Milky Way, where solar systems are close enough to the centre to have the right elements necessary to form rocky, life-sustaining planets, but are far enough out to avoid being struck by asteroids, seared by stars or frazzled by bursts of radiation.

He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - Nasa's current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second - it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy. His study is reported in New Scientist today.

Like humans, alien civilisations could shorten the time to find extra-terrestrials by picking up television and radio broadcasts that might leak from colonised planets. 'Even then, unless they can develop an exotic form of transport that gets them across the galaxy in two weeks it's still going to take millions of years to find us,' said Mr Bjork. 'There are so many stars in the galaxy that probably life could exist elsewhere, but will we ever get in contact with them? Not in our lifetime,' he added.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article ... 05,00.html

That is assuming that the technology is in some way similar to ours. They if they are there could have far more advanced technology than we could even consider possible to obtain.
They could be monitoring us in the same way we monitor animals on the planet we live on. We could see the occasional sighting be it a ufo or strange looking creature but because we think our level of technology is the prime example we miss the obvious fact that they are here.
It's just the same principle as an animal seeing our hidden cameras they may see it but not know it's importance or its purpose.
 
Mr Bjork ... found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - Nasa's current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second - it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy. His study is reported in New Scientist today.
My god, that idea was debunked years ago. Bjork assumes that there is only one ship. If (like Frank Tipler) you assume that each mission can replicate itself on arrival at the destination system, the entire galaxy can be explored in 10 million years.
 
That is assuming that the technology is in some way similar to ours. They if they are there could have far more advanced technology than we could even consider possible to obtain.
They could be monitoring us in the same way we monitor animals on the planet we live on. We could see the occasional sighting be it a ufo or strange looking creature but because we think our level of technology is the prime example we miss the obvious fact that they are here.
It's just the same principle as an animal seeing our hidden cameras they may see it but not know it's importance or its purpose.


I'm looking at one of the cats and he's looking back at me...
 
I've often thought that if aliens ever did or had found us, then they'd be unlikely to let their presence be known. I don't really buy this hostile alien idea, or the parallels to our dodgy treatment of less militarily advanced cultures. Which I'd say were largely based on avarice and commercial gain.

Firstly, by the time the aliens had the wherewithal to build a machine capable of reaching us and taking anything back in a time scale that in any way practical, they'd be so sophisticated as to not need anything we could possibly have to take. Except possibly lava bread.

Secondly, I do believe that by the time they'd have reached anything like that level of sophistication, they'd likely to pretty highly morally developed too.

I think probably if aliens were here they'd study us discreetly, the way we study nature. Otherwise the only glimpse they'd have of humanity would either be running away or standing there mouth open pointing upward.
 
I've often thought that if aliens ever did or had found us, then they'd be unlikely to let their presence be known. I don't really buy this hostile alien idea, or the parallels to our dodgy treatment of less militarily advanced cultures. Which I'd say were largely based on avarice and commercial gain.

Firstly, by the time the aliens had the wherewithal to build a machine capable of reaching us and taking anything back in a time scale that in any way practical, they'd be so sophisticated as to not need anything we could possibly have to take. Except possibly lava bread.

Secondly, I do believe that by the time they'd have reached anything like that level of sophistication, they'd likely to pretty highly morally developed too.

I think probably if aliens were here they'd study us discreetly, the way we study nature. Otherwise the only glimpse they'd have of humanity would either be running away or standing there mouth open pointing upward.
I'm generally with you on that.
However, there are a range of possibilities which I've come up with (I may have posted a list like this before):

(a) They may not be openly hostile, but also not actually benevolent.
(b) They may be psychopathic and enjoy toying with us - performing experiments, killing us, hunting for pleasure, extracting dopamines for their massive drug industry, taking body parts for whatever reason (trophies, food, science). Perhaps they do it for entertainment (Big Brother style).
(c) There may be elements on this planet that they need. Where did all our gold go? It's not in Fort Knox any more. ;)
(d) Maybe this far from home they don't have enough robots. We would be useful slave labour.
(e) They're alien. Their sense of morality may differ from ours. We already have people on this planet with a different moral compass - so we can't assume their thinking processes are like ours.
(f) They may be using us as pawns in an interstellar chess game without us knowing. Perhaps there are some races out there who care about us, and others who just see us as food. We're caught in the middle. Perhaps they try to subtly influence us by beaming thoughts into our heads (think God and the Devil in a battle for our hearts and minds).
 
Nuclear apocalypse or nanotech invasions could reveal alien life

There are billions of potentially habitable planets out there, so why haven’t we seen signs of life beyond the solar system? Perhaps because the aliens have all destroyed themselves. A new analysis of various apocalyptic scenarios suggests that we may be able to detect distant worlds where life has been wiped out by nuclear war or nanotechnology run amok.

The disparity between the vast potential for alien life and our lack of extraterrestrial contact is known as the Fermi paradox, after physicist Enrico Fermi, who asked why we appeared to be alone. It might be that microbes evolve on many worlds, but intelligent life is rare, or that most civilisations choose not to communicate and even actively hide from the rest of the universe.

A third possibility is that civilisations don’t stick around very long – blink, and you’ll miss them, at least on galactic timescales. “If that’s correct, there should be some signs of dead alien civilisations all over the place,” says Duncan Forgan of the University of St Andrews, UK.

Some aliens will be wiped out by “natural” causes – a massive asteroid impact, or their star going supernova – but these could also happen on worlds with no intelligent life, so these kinds of signatures won’t reveal ET. Instead, Forgan and his colleagues have catalogued various technological ways to end the world. “We thought quite hard about the ways that we could snuff ourselves out,” he says.

Apocalypse then
Global nuclear war would be hard to notice from a distance, they say. Aliens would have to simultaneously deploy nuclear weapons a billion times more powerful than Earth’s entire stockpile for us to see the gamma-ray burst from the explosion, and even then it is so brief that we’re unlikely to be looking at the right time. The subsequent fallout and nuclear winter would turn the planet’s atmosphere hazy, which we could detect, but some planets are very cloudy anyway so this wouldn’t be a definitive sign of alien apocalypse. ...

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...gn=twitter&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2015-GLOBAL-twitter
 
Here's one possible reason that aliens haven't come here yet (always assuming they haven't): they can't be arsed.
It's all very well talking about building interstellar probes that can replicate and all that; but that would be quite expensive, and after all, we're not going to do it, so why should anyone else?
Sorry for that rather dogmatic statement, but consider: in 1969 NASA had plans for manned Moon bases, a manned flight to Mars in 1985(!) and other dramatic ideas, none of which have come to pass because it turns out that the US taxpayer couldn't be arsed. Since then there have been many wonderful unmanned missions (like the recent flyby of Pluto) but as these exciting 'voyage of discovery' missions give way to more detailed science missions the public are likely to lose interest and demand that their tax money not be spent on these things any more.
I've loved space exploration all my life, but I've come to realise that most people just don't share this interest. So if ET's are even a teeny bit like us, then I'm driven to this concusion: there could be loads of alien civilisations out there, but they don't come here because...they just can't be arsed. Maybe Celebrity Tentacle Tangling is on TV tonight and that's more interesting than exploring the universe.
Sorry to be negative!
 
Sadly the human desire for exploration seems to have been rather exaggerated. Most of the voyages of discovery was motivated by the need for resources and often the crews were criminals, who had chosen service over going to prison. So the idea that the aliens will just stay at home and enjoy the creature comforts is quite likely.
 
Sadly the human desire for exploration seems to have been rather exaggerated. Most of the voyages of discovery was motivated by the need for resources and often the crews were criminals, who had chosen service over going to prison. So the idea that the aliens will just stay at home and enjoy the creature comforts is quite likely.
So, our first contact with alien beings could be with a crew of criminals with little to lose inclined to mutiny at the slightest opportunity? There's a movie plot in there somewhere.
 
I rather think that any civilization that has FTL technology can probably manage to avoid being spotted when they get here.
 
I rather think that any civilization that has FTL technology can probably manage to avoid being spotted when they get here.
Apart from the ones that insist on haring about in saucers over cities in broad daylight, or at night with lights flashing all over the place. Those ones seem to lack understanding of the intricacies of stealth.
 
Apart from the ones that insist on haring about in saucers over cities in broad daylight, or at night with lights flashing all over the place. Those ones seem to lack understanding of the intricacies of stealth.
Those are the young boy racers.
 
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