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

I think we may possibly have been contacted by aliens/beings already, but we've been looking in the wrong place. We should be concentrating on innerspace not outerspace:

"Users of the psychedelic drug DMT have told scientists what it's like to encounter otherworldly beings during trips. The authors of a study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology learned their experiences are comparable to those of people who claim they have been abducted by aliens."

"They concluded that encounters with entities triggered by DMT "have many similarities to non-drug entity encounter experiences such as those described in religious, alien abduction, and near-death contexts."

"Among the most vivid, intriguing, memorable, and sometimes disconcerting experiences that people report after taking a high dose of inhaled or intravenous DMT are those of encountering seemingly autonomous entities or beings," the authors wrote. So they set out to discover more about these "apparently not infrequent" experiences."

https://www.newsweek.com/taking-dmt...d-people-who-claim-have-been-abducted-1504750
 
The much-maligned Graham Hancock's book Supernatural is very interesting on that subject and more.
 
I read the other day about NASA using a laser to send data on very long distances, it was all rather complicated however it stated that the laser needed a target at that made it a difficult experiment because of the movement of the earth etc, however the experiment was judged a success and promises to speed up communications between space probes and earth

Which got me to thinking that perhaps Aliens are using lasers, they would need something to receive the laser, how about a pyramid?

Just a thought
 
Supposedly not due to our atmosphere but I have long since given up
having total confidence in what we are told.
 
RaM said:
Supposedly not due to our atmosphere but I have long since given up
having total confidence in what we are told.
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Who knows? Maybe they're responsible for Spontaneous Human Combustion - freak hit by an incredibly high energy particle (or alien death ray - take your pick).
 
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Paul_Exeter said:
Another kick in the b*ll*cks for Fermi:

"Some scientists suspect that amino acids were transported to Earth by meteorites. A team has now found that an amino acid called carbamic acid forms at extreme cold temperatures, suggesting that it may have been created on clumps of ice in deep space"

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...for-life-may-have-formed-on-interstellar-ice/
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I've often thought, without any scientific basis, that life originated in the colder parts of space/solar systems since reading about all the organic molecules found on Kuiper Belt objects. I think it may speed up or get going when it is transported to warmer environments in the inner system; the most likely being oceans under ice layers as on Ganymede and Europa. Earth may have acquired life during the "iceball" stage and managed to retain its ocean owing to the moon and tectonic activity.

If the latter is the case then life on worlds with surface oceans may be a rarity - certainly on surface oceans that last more than a few millions of years. If therefore, the majority of worlds with life are in oceans "buried" under surface ice then technological civilisation will be difficult, it may take quite a while for the aliens to even realise that the rest of the universe even exists.

Hence, lots of life, very few technologicsl civilisations, Fermi paradox solved! :pipe:

Do I win a prize? :)
 
The likelihood that intelligent life usually evolves on worlds which are 'sealed' off from the rest of the universe is a very real possibility, and certainly may contribute to the Fermi Paradox. As well as life inside oceans covered in a thick layer of ice, life might evolve on a superterrestrial world covered in hundreds of kilometres of liquid water, or in a gas giant; both of these options would have high escape velocities and it would be impossible for a species to escape to orbit using chemical rockets alone.

It is possible that most or all of the species which ever explore the galaxy are those which evolved on a planet with similar conditions to Earth, and so far we really haven't found many of those. Don't be fooled when an astronomer says 'earth-like'; like so many other things, the astronomer's definition of earth-like is very different to most people's. So far I don't think they've found one planet out of thousands where a human could stand in their shirt-sleeves for very long.
 
eburacum said:
The likelihood that intelligent life usually evolves on worlds which are 'sealed' off from the rest of the universe is a very real possibility, and certainly may contribute to the Fermi Paradox. As well as life inside oceans covered in a thick layer of ice, life might evolve on a superterrestrial world covered in hundreds of kilometres of liquid water, or in a gas giant; both of these options would have high escape velocities and it would be impossible for a species to escape to orbit using chemical rockets alone.

It is possible that most or all of the species which ever explore the galaxy are those which evolved on a planet with similar conditions to Earth, and so far we really haven't found many of those. Don't be fooled when an astronomer says 'earth-like'; like so many other things, the astronomer's definition of earth-like is very different to most people's. So far I don't think they've found one planet out of thousands where a human could stand in their shirt-sleeves for very long.
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I get where you are coming from, but at the moment, and until we can detect biospheres, opinion is divided:

"A new study from researchers at Washington State University, announced on October 5, 2020, makes the case that there may well be planets out there that have conditions even more favorable for life than our own. Out of the over 4,000 currently known exoplanets, the researchers also narrowed those down to 24 candidate superhabitable planets that could be even better suited to life than Earth."

https://earthsky.org/space/superhabitable-exoplanets-better-suited-for-life-than-earth/
 
From that link;
According to the study, such planets would be older, a little larger, slightly warmer and possibly wetter than Earth. It also helps if they orbit stars older than the sun, with longer lifespans. Our sun’s lifetime is estimated to be 10 billion years, and it took about 4 billion of those years before any complex life evolved on Earth. But some other stars can live much longer, giving life more time to evolve.
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Superhabitable worlds are larger than Earth, with more water, deeper oceans, and larger escape velocities. They are called superhabitable because they retain water for many billions, or tens of billions, of years, so may develop and retain life for much longer.

These worlds may support civilisations at the bottom of their seas, but with little or no no dry land they are unlikely to support technological civilisations with metalworking, rocketry and an interstellar empire. Sure, an underwater civilisation may be beautiful, but it would probably consist of little more than very complex whalesong.
 
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eburacum said:
From that link;

Superhabitable worlds are larger than Earth, with more water, deeper oceans, and larger escape velocities. They are called superhabitable because they retain water for many billions, or tens of billions, of years, so may develop and retain life for much longer.

These worlds may support civilisations at the bottom of their seas, but with little or no no dry land they are unlikely to support technological civilisations with metalworking, rocketry and an interstellar empire. Sure, an underwater civilisation may be beautiful, but it would probably consist of little more than very complex whalesong.
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I am now imagining some alien cuttlefish forging tools at a hydrothermal vent... probably to clobber the slightly-different alien cuttlefish from over the ridge who sing funny.
 
SimonBurchell said:
I am now imagining some alien cuttlefish forging tools at a hydrothermal vent... probably to clobber the slightly-different alien cuttlefish from over the ridge who sing funny.
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Reminds me of this image I made a few years ago, which depicts an alien underwater civilisation on a water planet. They use song to communicate, gather electric fish analogs (sparkworms) to produce electricity, and have a thriving chemical industry producing gases and other resources which they use in their economy and for general buoyancy.
 
Thinking of Clarke's dictum that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and Sagan's idea (In "Contact"?) that a coded message was built into the digits of Pi; could it be that our entire reality is an alien construct?

What we perceive as the laws of nature may be engineered by an alien civilisation. Maybe they just apply to within one light year of the sun but are engineered so that we see them as applying across the universe.

We could therefore be in a, nursery, laboratory, prison or something too alien for us to imagine. Or maybe these engineered laws just keep us from interacting with anything else for whatever reason. "Reality" could be gradually opened up to us as new discoveries are allowed to be made. Radio astronomy, dark matter, etc. as a way of easing us into what really exists.
 
Tunn11 said:
Thinking of Clarke's dictum that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and Sagan's idea (In "Contact"?) that a coded message was built into the digits of Pi; could it be that our entire reality is an alien construct?

What we perceive as the laws of nature may be engineered by an alien civilisation. Maybe they just apply to within one light year of the sun but are engineered so that we see them as applying across the universe.

We could therefore be in a, nursery, laboratory, prison or something too alien for us to imagine. Or maybe these engineered laws just keep us from interacting with anything else for whatever reason. "Reality" could be gradually opened up to us as new discoveries are allowed to be made. Radio astronomy, dark matter, etc. as a way of easing us into what really exists.
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Some very good points, it also depends upon how we envision an alien mostly it's either good or bad i.e they are there to rescue us or destroy have none of the human instincts, I think the danger in the paradox is thinking that an alien civilization would be based on human wants and needs, some may never even leave their planet but may be very advanced

The nightmare situation would be an advanced alien race who are more or less human, that could spell big trouble for us
 
Do we even understand what alien life might be like?

"An Existential Problem in the Search for Alien Life​

We don’t really know what life is in the first place."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science...life-existentialism-scientific-theory/676238/

"Entropy Could Be The Secret to Alien Worlds Being Habitable"​


https://www.sciencealert.com/entropy-could-be-the-secret-to-alien-worlds-being-habitable


...and why we might be late to the party:

"How many tragedies of alien civilizations have we missed over the 13.8 billion years that elapsed since the Big Bang? Life must have been lost in many places before humans came onto the cosmic scene."
https://thedebrief.org/all-habitable-worlds-come-to-an-end/
 
"How many tragedies of alien civilizations have we missed over the 13.8 billion years that elapsed since the Big Bang? Life must have been lost in many places before humans came onto the cosmic scene."
https://thedebrief.org/all-habitable-worlds-come-to-an-end/
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Avi Loeb again, and he is probably right that there are a lot of dead civilisations out there. Perhaps many more than living ones.
But how far away is the closest dead civilisation, and could any of the detritus drift into our solar system? Loeb has suggested that 'Omuamua was a relic of an ancient empire, and that we might find alien scrap metal in the rare interstellar meteorites. Perhaps he is right.

But a galaxy full of dead civilisations is not a particularly encouraging prospect.
 
I'm ignorant of any scientific theories behind this but is there any reason why aliens would also have/have had civilisations? Aren't we viewing that prospect through a human prism?
 
Steven said:
I'm ignorant of any scientific theories behind this but is there any reason why aliens would also have/have had civilisations? Aren't we viewing that prospect through a human prism?
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No reason, I think but part of the Drake equation deals with this.

fi - Planets that develop intelligent life (But define that!)

fc - The fraction that develop a technology detectable from space

(fl - Being those that actually develop life and L being how long on average the civilisations last)

On the basis that unless those criteria are fulfilled we won't know about them.

Since it was written we have got better at detecting possible planets and signs of life or even pollution from civilisations, but until we get interstellar travel our chances of detecting non technical civilisations or those with unrecognisable technolgy are remote. Trouble is that although we have better answers for some of Drake's factors, (how common are planets, for instance) others are still essentially guesswork.

Of course we are still guessing at what constitutes technolgy - if you live on a remote island looking for a civilisation using smoke signals you won't find a civilisation using radio.
 
An alien civilisation might be entirely different to a human civilisation, and may be unrecognisable to humans. Perhaps most alien civilisations are more like a vast and complex concert of whalesong, or a termite hive, or a forest of trees connected by fungal mycorrhiza.

But if the aliens are capable of building spacecraft and travelling to other stars, they would need to have some way to develop and improve technology. Maybe termites could build a starship, or fungi could grow one, but they would both require some sort of technological infrastructure and progress that should be recognisable as such.
 
Thank you. :)

Maybe I should've realised that co-operation is arguably the essence of civilisation.
 
eburacum said:
An alien civilisation might be entirely different to a human civilisation, and may be unrecognisable to humans. Perhaps most alien civilisations are more like a vast and complex concert of whalesong, or a termite hive, or a forest of trees connected by fungal mycorrhiza.

But if the aliens are capable of building spacecraft and travelling to other stars, they would need to have some way to develop and improve technology. Maybe termites could build a starship, or fungi could grow one, but they would both require some sort of technological infrastructure and progress that should be recognisable as such.
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Who knows, perhaps there is a pattern for life forms that spreads throughout the universe so they could be human but not as we know it (as said by someone famous ) humans are quite well adapted for life on earth sure there are some tweaks that wouldn't have gone a miss but it works quite well, and if we are to believe that humans are the only life form on this planet that has reason and intelligence essentially free will why would this life form not be repeated

I can't prove this but the universe is so vast that there are probably millions upon millions of human type civilizations throughout the universe, that would just be not even the head of pin in terms of the potential out there, perhaps there are cavillations' at our stage who are sat there wondering the same thing, but knowing humans it's best to keep us apart
 
Robbrent said:
Who knows, perhaps there is a pattern for life forms that spreads throughout the universe so they could be human but not as we know it (as said by someone famous ) humans are quite well adapted for life on earth sure there are some tweaks that wouldn't have gone a miss but it works quite well, and if we are to believe that humans are the only life form on this planet that has reason and intelligence essentially free will why would this life form not be repeated

I can't prove this but the universe is so vast that there are probably millions upon millions of human type civilizations throughout the universe, that would just be not even the head of pin in terms of the potential out there, perhaps there are cavillations' at our stage who are sat there wondering the same thing, but knowing humans it's best to keep us apart
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Not sure, bipedalism seems to be a success on Earth for large animals who only have four limbs - but different bipedalism Therapod dinosaurs with a horizontal spine, Kangaroos who bounce, birds/pterosaurs who developed wings. I believe that once a trait has been lost, it's gone forever; so while having six limbs may be beneficial to us (centaurs) we will neve re evolve them. We may be able to adapt other features to mimic them but that isn't the same

Octopodes have eight limbs, etc. etc. Insects have six but AFAIK have never developed bipedalism. Evolution may have gone in another direction looking at the fossils in the burgess shale or the Ediacarian biota. That is just looking at forms that arose on Earth!

Panspermia may point to a common origin but where life goes from there seems pretty random. Not to say that beings that look like us aren't possible, parallel evolution etc. and maybe that would attract aliens who looked like us to visit.

We also tend to view ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution, which we aren't.

Perhaps aliens have the ability to alter their bodies to suit alien environments and therefore to look like us while exploring Earth.

But , unfortunately it's all speculation until we find some :)
 
Retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet who also directed NOAA and also retired from that organization swears that humanoids and UAPs have been on earth for a long time.

Tim also says their agenda is unclear but these beings are among us.
 
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