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

The "period of time" bit is particularly relevant to the latest news items I posted above. One of the new assumptions (or relaxation of assumption) involved in this recent study was considering that a sufficiently advanced civilization might be stable enough to wait literally ages (as in millions of years) so as to allow interstellar movements to reduce the distances they'd need to travel. All the stars and star systems are moving relative to each other - some at higher speeds than our own Sol.

You do know that it appears all the galaxies are moving away from each other at an increasing velocity ?

So your ET will have even further to travel, not less.

INT21.
 
You do know that it appears all the galaxies are moving away from each other at an increasing velocity ? So your ET will have even further to travel, not less.

Of course, but ... I don't think anyone's seriously contemplating intergalactic travel just yet ...
 
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Sure. Why not? If you were part of a galactic civilization, gently nudging people out of parochial savagery and a scarcity driven economy is just neighborly, but then, I am a better neighbor than most, I suppose.

Agreed. If, as seems likely, life sufficiently advanced to be space-faring, is vanishingly rare in the universe, I could not imagine an alien race turning down the rare opportunity to introduce a neighbour into the exclusive galactic milieu club.
 
Sure. Why not? If you were part of a galactic civilization, gently nudging people out of parochial savagery and a scarcity driven economy is just neighborly ...
Agreed. If, as seems likely, life sufficiently advanced to be space-faring, is vanishingly rare in the universe, I could not imagine an alien race turning down the rare opportunity to introduce a neighbour into the exclusive galactic milieu club.

Sorry, but ... I can't help but see this as yet another projection of our human predilections onto a presumably alien species. It smacks of the same paternalistic expansionist / colonialist attitude we in the more developed world have been frantically glossing and burnishing for a century for the sake of retrospective justification.

The phrase "little green folks' burden" comes to mind ...
 
Sure. Why not? If you were part of a galactic civilization, gently nudging people out of parochial savagery and a scarcity driven economy is just neighborly, but then, I am a better neighbor than most, I suppose.
The aliens may be completely cold-hearted and not have feelings such as altruism. They might be Ferengi.
 
One of the new assumptions (or relaxation of assumption) involved in this recent study was considering that a sufficiently advanced civilization might be stable enough to wait literally ages (as in millions of years) so as to allow interstellar movements to reduce the distances they'd need to travel. All the stars and star systems are moving relative to each other - some at higher speeds than our own Sol.
This isn't a particularly useful phenomenon when considering the distance between stars in the local stellar environment. Although proper motion will bring a few stars closer to our Sun over the next few thousand years, it will take others further away - and the average distance between stars remains the same over time. So at best it could help us colonise half-a-dozen stars at most.

But proper motion on a very long timescale would have a different, and very significant effect. The Galaxy gets mixed-up over time, like someone stirring cream into coffee. If we imagine our galaxy split up into three galactic empires, with clearly-defined borders and equal amounts of territory, the effect of proper motion would be to blur the borders between those empires. After a hundred million years or so the borders would be so blurred as to be meaningless. Of course this only affects empires that persist for a very long time- but it would require a different attitude towards territory.
 
This isn't a particularly useful phenomenon when considering the distance between stars in the local stellar environment. Although proper motion will bring a few stars closer to our Sun over the next few thousand years, it will take others further away - and the average distance between stars remains the same over time. So at best it could help us colonise half-a-dozen stars at most. ...

Right ... The study was focused on other / alien spacefaring civilizations exploiting proper motion as an explanation for why they haven't shown up here rather than any rationale for our seeking to do the same.
 
Could be, of course, that they simply don't exist. At least not in the traveling from galaxy to galaxy form.

However, if there are other dimensions, and they have some nifty dimension-hoping system.......

INT21.
 
Sorry, but ... I can't help but see this as yet another projection of our human predilections onto a presumably alien species. It smacks of the same paternalistic expansionist / colonialist attitude we in the more developed world have been frantically glossing and burnishing for a century for the sake of retrospective justification.
The phrase "little green folks' burden" comes to mind ...

Take up the Little Green Man's burden — / Send forth the best ye clone — / Go bind your bots to exile / To tag and drop them home; / To wait in heavy gravity, / On flustered girls gone wild — / Your new-probed, sullen rednecks, / Half-Sheeple and half-child.

Take up the LGM's burden — / To crash on open plains, / Vivisected by technicians — / The tale of secret things. / Alien skies ye shall not enter, / Hidden bases ye shall not tread, / They enter 51 while living, / And leave on microscope slides, quite dead.

Take up the LGM's burden — / And reap its old reward: / The blame of those ye butt probe, / The hate of those ye raygun — / The cry of hosts ye humour / (Ah, slowly!) toward the light: — / "Why brought it us to Andromeda, / It's f***ing Bingo night?"
 
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Or how about the temporal disconnect?

We believe the universe to be something like 14 billion years old.

Humankind has only been around for a trivial eye-blink of maybe a million years.
And we've only been space-faring for an utterly insignificant 50 years or so.

In the extremely unlikely event that there is another civilisation of sapient beings, as opposed to microbes or scraps of lichen, within a few light-years of us, the chances of them being technologically compatible or recognisable to us - and that means within a few decades of our level of advancement, is surely as close to zero as makes little difference?

Let's face it. Sci-fi like StarTrek (or even Alien) may be great fun, but it's never going to become reality.
 
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Or how about the temporal disconnect?

We believe the universe to be something like 14 billion years old.

Humankind has only been around for a trivial eye-blink of maybe a million years.
And we've only been space-faring for an utterly insignificant 50 years or so.

In the extremely unlikely event that there is another civilisation of sentient beings, as opposed to microbes or scraps of lichen, within a few light-years of us, the chances of them being technologically compatible or recognisable to us - and that means within a few decades of our level of advancement, is surely as close to zero as makes little difference?

Let's face it. Sci-fi like StarTrek (or even Alien) may be great fun, but it's never going to become reality.

They'll turn out to be sentient cats.

kzin.jpg
 
They'll turn out to be sentient cats.

View attachment 20025

Most animals are sentient!
My cat is definitely sentient and even understands many words in English (Including the command "conservatory" which I just told her and she appreciates it's time to head to the back of the house and go to sleep).

Sapient, on the other hand, is debatable,
 
Consider the science...
Anyone else ever wondered that what we envisage as theoretically possible, often becomes a reality?

Relatively, it's not that long since our ancestors wondered, say...

- imagine there was a device which enabled you to talk with someone distant

- imagine if that person was on the other side of the world

- imagine you could not only talk to them, you could see them as well

- imagine if you could watch events as they happened, from all over the world...

...and so on...

Anyway, have to go now, that's a message on my mobile from a friend who's canoeing up the Amazon and sent his latest video... :p
 
So... how many, 'stars' are there in the universe...?

This would seem to be a reasonable estimate, from a 2017, 'space. com' article:

https://www.space.com/26078-how-many-stars-are-there.html

An extract informs:

"Kornreich used a very rough estimate of 10 trillion galaxies in the universe. Multiplying that by the Milky Way's estimated 100 billion stars results in a large number indeed:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, or a "1" with 24 zeros after it (1 septillion in the American numbering system; 1 quadrillion in the European system). Kornreich emphasized that number is likely a gross underestimation, as more detailed looks at the universe will show even more galaxies".

That's a a lot of stars, n'est-ce pa's?

How many of them might have orbiting planets, capable of supporting life?

If we say, only .001%...

I duly enquired of Google Assistant and the answer was 100 billion...

Hmmm......
 
Or how about the temporal disconnect?

We believe the universe to be something like 14 billion years old.

Humankind has only been around for a trivial eye-blink of maybe a million years.
And we've only been space-faring for an utterly insignificant 50 years or so.

In the extremely unlikely event that there is another civilisation of sapient beings, as opposed to microbes or scraps of lichen, within a few light-years of us, the chances of them being technologically compatible or recognisable to us - and that means within a few decades of our level of advancement, is surely as close to zero as makes little difference?

Let's face it. Sci-fi like StarTrek (or even Alien) may be great fun, but it's never going to become reality.

But isn't the point that an elder species should have left such a huge mark that we've should have been able to pick it up with our primitive tools?
 
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