I have always believed that aliens are out there. It's virtually impossible that they aren't, given the size of this universe. But I never really believed they would bother with us. I recently saw someone do the math on this, don't remember who. May have been DeGrasse Tyson or someone, doesn't matter who. It goes like this.
Our world has existed for 4,500,000,000 years. Advanced primates have existed for about 1,000,000, and "advanced" is only a relative term.
Civilization has existed for around 10,000 years out of 4,500,000,000. That's a very short window.
Now look into the scope of the universe. We are one star out of somewhere between 100-400 BILLION stars in the galaxy. I said galaxy, not universe. There are possibly billions of galaxies as well. We're getting up into quintillions of possible planets now.
Of which we are ONE (1).
Now look at the scale of the universe. It takes light itself 8 minutes to get just from our sun to our planet. It takes it several hours to get to our outer planets. It takes 4+ years to get to our closes neighboring star. The galactic center is 100,000 years away.
So, if we were to travel at the speed of light (a limit which we have no way to come anywhere close to), we would still have to travel for TEN TIMES the length of recorded history before we reach even the center of our own galaxy.
Put another way, it would take another spacefaring civilization that amount of time to travel to the center of their galaxy, and that assumes no stops along the way.
Now imagine that we have magical future technology that allows aliens to travel instantaneously, removing travel time. Imagine they have tech that allows them to pop out of "warp" and then just push a button to scan all the planets in a system for civilization. Imagine that also has no travel time and only takes 10 seconds to do. Imagine that the aliens then only analyze that data for another 50 seconds before moving on.
If we assume that the aliens are scanning a new star system once every minute, and we assume the lower estimate on star count at 100 billion for our galaxy, it takes them 190,258 years to fully scan the Milky Way.
190 thousand years.
Now, obviously they aren't going to send out just one ship. Let's say they send out 1,000 ships and none of them ever scan the same star. Now we're cut down to 190 years of exploration.
That sounds more reasonable, right?
Until you remember that's just the Milky Way.
And then you have to think back to the amount of time we have existed on this planet.
For aliens to have found us, we have to assume not only that our civilizations exist at the same time, that instantaneous travel and scanning are possible, that their ships are doing so non-stop for centuries, and finally...that they didn't already scan our planet 20,000 years ago and log it as having no intelligent life.
The aliens are out there. Or they were. Or they will be. Or maybe we're the aliens. It doesn't matter, though. The odds of their existence approach certainty.
The odds that we will ever encounter them are literally astronomically low.
Well the big question is how many societies fail after 10000 years because of Democrats?
Now throw in the Marxist aliens and their blm protests. How many of them manage to escape the death spiral following these groups cause.
If history repeats than we may be pretty damn sure alien civilizations will have some of the same struggles we have and potentially self destruction is the way of civilizations
I like to think that all civs eventually have to make a choice between freedom and safety. Basically you either become the the idealistic and adventurous Federation or the safety-in-numbers Borg. Sometimes, the civs get destroyed in the final confrontation between the paradigms.
Hey fellow astro geek...really nice analysis, but it's full of questionable assumptions. (Also Neil Tyson is a tool.)
One big one is that you're assuming that the alien civ would remain a constant size. But a civ that had practical interstellar travel would begin expanding exponentially. I read a calculation once that said given FTL, a civilization would only take only 10,000 years to totally colonize a galaxy.
Another big assumption is the limited temporal recognition window. Who says they'd only scan or visit once? What if outposts managed sections of the galaxy like a forest service? What if the dinosaurs were interesting enough to set up an automated monitoring station?
It's the other way around, in fact. Life is so impossibly hard to generate that every quark in the universe could be dedicated to the computational resources required to acquire life from non-life and it still wouldn't be anywhere close to producing the most simple living organism by the heat death of the universe.
Galactic Center is roughly 30,000 LY from earth btw. Otherwise I tend to agree with your point.
Lets imagine that we are the space faring species and we happen upon a primitive "by our space faring civilization standards" society. And lets assume our main reason to go to the stars is expansion and resource acquisition. (I can't think of any more besides exploration that comes with both anyway)
If we went to the occupied planet the local population would invariable put up some kind of fight. Even if we look past the moral failings we would invaraibly have at wiping the natives out, it would obviously cost some amount of resources to deal with. Why expend those resources when you can just go to next star over that doesn't have a native population that would fight back?
Resource acquisition is 2 fold problem. 1st problem is exact same as above but heck even without figure that into account gravity itself just stat4es it's easier to get resources out of Oort cloud or asteroid belt then off a planet that has extra gravity that you would need to expend fuel to escape. Simple economics says that if you have 2 gold bars, one you can pick up by hand the other you need to have huge machines to reach, picking the one up by hand is more cost effective.
Aliens probably all around us, it's just not worth their time to interact with us. Sure you hear stories about people getting abducted every now and then. Us as humans also go tip cows every now and then. Same thing, just some punk alien playing with the primitives.
It's like encountering other human societies. Every time we interact with them, one of two things happen.
Either 1) we offer them a better way and they do their stupid savage bullshit and eventually we have to shoot them, and then history vilifies us for all time, or 2) we leave them to remain savages, and they build a mythology about how all of their savage idiot problems are our fault, and they do their stupid savage bullshit, but now our own population won't just let us shoot them, and we're locked into a eternity with the middle east as our fucking problem, somehow.
So even beyond the Resource problem, they're (we're, in the case of any other space nation meeting us,) idiotic savages who just aren't worth the effort.
Fun fact: when the first Euro explorers first starting checking out African states, they found that several tribes were eating each other. Sir Richard Burton (not the actor) an Englishman scholar & explorer who could speak 25 languages, was the first European to enter Muslim city in Harar In Africa without being executed.
They were absolute savages back then. Seems not much has changed today...
This. First Contact is something that should terrify us. A civilization capable of practical interstellar travel is as far beyond us as our current civilization is beyond chimps using sticks as tools. Historically, such contacts never end well for the more primitive society.
I have always believed that aliens are out there. It's virtually impossible that they aren't, given the size of this universe. But I never really believed they would bother with us. I recently saw someone do the math on this, don't remember who. May have been DeGrasse Tyson or someone, doesn't matter who. It goes like this.
Our world has existed for 4,500,000,000 years. Advanced primates have existed for about 1,000,000, and "advanced" is only a relative term.
Civilization has existed for around 10,000 years out of 4,500,000,000. That's a very short window.
Now look into the scope of the universe. We are one star out of somewhere between 100-400 BILLION stars in the galaxy. I said galaxy, not universe. There are possibly billions of galaxies as well. We're getting up into quintillions of possible planets now.
Of which we are ONE (1).
Now look at the scale of the universe. It takes light itself 8 minutes to get just from our sun to our planet. It takes it several hours to get to our outer planets. It takes 4+ years to get to our closes neighboring star. The galactic center is 100,000 years away.
So, if we were to travel at the speed of light (a limit which we have no way to come anywhere close to), we would still have to travel for TEN TIMES the length of recorded history before we reach even the center of our own galaxy.
Put another way, it would take another spacefaring civilization that amount of time to travel to the center of their galaxy, and that assumes no stops along the way.
Now imagine that we have magical future technology that allows aliens to travel instantaneously, removing travel time. Imagine they have tech that allows them to pop out of "warp" and then just push a button to scan all the planets in a system for civilization. Imagine that also has no travel time and only takes 10 seconds to do. Imagine that the aliens then only analyze that data for another 50 seconds before moving on.
If we assume that the aliens are scanning a new star system once every minute, and we assume the lower estimate on star count at 100 billion for our galaxy, it takes them 190,258 years to fully scan the Milky Way.
190 thousand years.
Now, obviously they aren't going to send out just one ship. Let's say they send out 1,000 ships and none of them ever scan the same star. Now we're cut down to 190 years of exploration.
That sounds more reasonable, right?
Until you remember that's just the Milky Way.
And then you have to think back to the amount of time we have existed on this planet.
For aliens to have found us, we have to assume not only that our civilizations exist at the same time, that instantaneous travel and scanning are possible, that their ships are doing so non-stop for centuries, and finally...that they didn't already scan our planet 20,000 years ago and log it as having no intelligent life.
The aliens are out there. Or they were. Or they will be. Or maybe we're the aliens. It doesn't matter, though. The odds of their existence approach certainty.
The odds that we will ever encounter them are literally astronomically low.
Well the big question is how many societies fail after 10000 years because of Democrats?
Now throw in the Marxist aliens and their blm protests. How many of them manage to escape the death spiral following these groups cause.
If history repeats than we may be pretty damn sure alien civilizations will have some of the same struggles we have and potentially self destruction is the way of civilizations
I like to think that all civs eventually have to make a choice between freedom and safety. Basically you either become the the idealistic and adventurous Federation or the safety-in-numbers Borg. Sometimes, the civs get destroyed in the final confrontation between the paradigms.
Hey fellow astro geek...really nice analysis, but it's full of questionable assumptions. (Also Neil Tyson is a tool.)
One big one is that you're assuming that the alien civ would remain a constant size. But a civ that had practical interstellar travel would begin expanding exponentially. I read a calculation once that said given FTL, a civilization would only take only 10,000 years to totally colonize a galaxy.
Another big assumption is the limited temporal recognition window. Who says they'd only scan or visit once? What if outposts managed sections of the galaxy like a forest service? What if the dinosaurs were interesting enough to set up an automated monitoring station?
It's a mathematical demonstration of odds, man, not a concrete analysis.
The point is that the odds of encountering an alien race is not even a rounding error in the calculation, not that it's completely impossible.
As someone else pointed out, life spontaneously generating is essentially mathematically impossible, yet here we are.
I only bring this up because people get caught up in absurdly low order probabilities and ignore the far more likely answer.
It's the other way around, in fact. Life is so impossibly hard to generate that every quark in the universe could be dedicated to the computational resources required to acquire life from non-life and it still wouldn't be anywhere close to producing the most simple living organism by the heat death of the universe.
And yet here we are.
Correct. Which lends credence to the idea that we were placed here.
Galactic Center is roughly 30,000 LY from earth btw. Otherwise I tend to agree with your point.
Lets imagine that we are the space faring species and we happen upon a primitive "by our space faring civilization standards" society. And lets assume our main reason to go to the stars is expansion and resource acquisition. (I can't think of any more besides exploration that comes with both anyway)
If we went to the occupied planet the local population would invariable put up some kind of fight. Even if we look past the moral failings we would invaraibly have at wiping the natives out, it would obviously cost some amount of resources to deal with. Why expend those resources when you can just go to next star over that doesn't have a native population that would fight back?
Resource acquisition is 2 fold problem. 1st problem is exact same as above but heck even without figure that into account gravity itself just stat4es it's easier to get resources out of Oort cloud or asteroid belt then off a planet that has extra gravity that you would need to expend fuel to escape. Simple economics says that if you have 2 gold bars, one you can pick up by hand the other you need to have huge machines to reach, picking the one up by hand is more cost effective.
Aliens probably all around us, it's just not worth their time to interact with us. Sure you hear stories about people getting abducted every now and then. Us as humans also go tip cows every now and then. Same thing, just some punk alien playing with the primitives.
It's like encountering other human societies. Every time we interact with them, one of two things happen.
Either 1) we offer them a better way and they do their stupid savage bullshit and eventually we have to shoot them, and then history vilifies us for all time, or 2) we leave them to remain savages, and they build a mythology about how all of their savage idiot problems are our fault, and they do their stupid savage bullshit, but now our own population won't just let us shoot them, and we're locked into a eternity with the middle east as our fucking problem, somehow.
So even beyond the Resource problem, they're (we're, in the case of any other space nation meeting us,) idiotic savages who just aren't worth the effort.
Fun fact: when the first Euro explorers first starting checking out African states, they found that several tribes were eating each other. Sir Richard Burton (not the actor) an Englishman scholar & explorer who could speak 25 languages, was the first European to enter Muslim city in Harar In Africa without being executed.
They were absolute savages back then. Seems not much has changed today...
/thread
If they have that sophisticated of tech, we’ll either never know they’re there, or be dead before we know what happened.
This. First Contact is something that should terrify us. A civilization capable of practical interstellar travel is as far beyond us as our current civilization is beyond chimps using sticks as tools. Historically, such contacts never end well for the more primitive society.