Life probably exists somewhere else.
That doesn't mean they visit us in secret and there's a conspiracy to hide it.
It's two very different things
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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Also, life and intelligent life are two different things.
I am sure there are extraterrestrial life forms. It's scientific consensus.
I do not think "the government" has proof and hides that from us.
The universe is big enough that life probably exists in other places. Anything advanced enough to reach us (an extraordinarily difficult feat) would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people, and people just want to believe in something fun to compensate for how boring modern life can be.
would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people
Never underestimate the stupidity of smart people/potential other sentient beings.
Also good to never underestimate human negativity bias, where the brain remembers bad things far more than it remembers positive things.
Look at air travel. We invented it over a century ago, and have made it safe enough that a single failure out of thousands of successful flights becomes newsworthy.
The statistical likelihood of stupid-yet-capable aliens happening to fuck up that badly is very small.
existence of extraterrestrial life
Absolutely certain
and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Completely absurd.
The Fermi Paradox is only a paradox if you apply a ludicrously unjustified value to the last figure in the Drake equation.
Technological civilizations are very likely self-extinguishing simply because technological power grows faster than any evolved species capacity to apply that technology to the benefit of the species.
Only way out of that would be that bio life is just a bootstrap for machine life and machine life just isn't that interested in interacting with biological life so we'll never see or hear from it.
I think that we may simply be among the first civilisations to reach such a technologically advanced point. By the time a species gets tech that can destroy their civilisation, i reckon they would most likely have also made a broadcast of some sort, either through radio or light or whatever else.
Granted, there's no real way to know any of this, us being the first is just what I reason is the most likely answer.
You have to account for the fact that, even if a civilization were to broadcast some sort of signal, it would take many millennia or eons for any signals to reach us. And even then, we would have to be advanced enough to be able to receive and interpret those signals at the same time they reach Earth.
There could very well be countless advanced civilizations whose signals just havenβt reached us yet, just as there may have been countless ones whose signals couldnβt be received or understood when they reached us, and theyβve died out or otherwise stopped transmitting before we could.
Keep in mind that the first radio broadcast on Earth was only 127 years ago. That means the farthest anyone could possibly detect any radio signal from earth is a mere 127 light years away.
While I 100% believe that the universe is probably crawling with extraterrestrial life, I don't think any of it has visited us here.
Any alien race who had the technology to travel across the galaxy would look at humanity the same way we look at an ant hill while we're driving down the highway, we don't even notice it.
Sure, there may be some alien scientists that want to study our planet the same way that our scientist want to study ants, but what are the chances they even know about us? And is there anything interesting enough about us to distinguish us from all the other ant hills?
Yep. The universe is so vast that alien life most certainly exists, but simply due to the distance between them and us weβll likely never detect it. The farther things are from us, the longer it takes for light to get to us. Something 100 light years away is just that, it takes a hundred years to get to us.
Humans have been around for an estimated 300,000 years, or 1.09575e+8 days. Here are a few things that would not have been believed possible by 99.9% of the population, including the most rational and logical thinkers, only 150 years ago (54,787 days).
- Microchips
- Nuclear weapons, and usable, controllable nuclear fusion/fission in general
- The Internet
- Electric cars
- Jet propulsion
- Smartphones
- Most fields of modern chemistry
- Most fields of physics
- etc.
Technological advancements happen at breakneck speed. One mans "you can't break the speed of light" is another mans "you can't fly, humans don't have wings!"
But scientific advancements happen that change our perspective. It's likely we'll never break the light barrier, if it's as solid as our understanding makes it seem. It's less likely we'll never find a way to sidestep that barrier by manipulating other forces. Let's say we find a way to create a gravity well that encompasses a craft. The person in the craft doesn't actually feel like they're falling at infinite-G, they just happen to get from one place to another incredibly fast, passing through various states of matter unperturbed on their way. To us, it looks like they broke the speed of light. In reality, they weren't actually "moving" in the way we think of movement, thereby not needing to break the speed of light.
These advancements happen all the time. If you brought a group of the top scientists from the 1850s to be here with us today, they would have have absolutely no idea what was going on and they would believe they'd gone insane. So many paradigm shifts have happened over the last 150 years that it would be impossible to make sense of it in their (remaining) lifetimes.
I don't know if we're being visited. If we are then it's not likely they're being of another race that came here in a ship. More likely they would be mechanical or biomechanical in nature, some sort of von Neumann probes self-creating and self-spreading reconnaissance craft for an ancient (dead?) race. Or maybe they tapped into another force we don't even have a name or vague idea about yet, maybe a driving force behind consciousness.
But regardless, UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) is a legitimate field of study and I look forward to seeing it grow.
I recognize that the universe is so vast that it's likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that's the extent of it.
I've seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don't "believe" that they do.
Really, I don't "believe" in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don't even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It's not a conscious choice or anything - it's just appears that there's a set of requirements that must be met before the position of "belief" is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of "believing" just isn't triggered, and it's not as if I can somehow force it, so that's that.
As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it's near certain that somebody would've blabbed something by now.
Beyond that though, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they're that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don't see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else's interests. That's our delusion - not theirs.
Statistically it is very unlikely that alien life doesn't exist. It's also extremely unlikely that we would ever find any unless we are entirely wrong about the nature of reality and physics.
i think space is too big for aliens to detect, traverse and find us... but thats just going by all known science/reality.
its most likely humans are lying/ignorant with regards to all of the alien-based conspiracies.
There is absolutely other life somewhere. None of it has reached or contacted us, though
I donβt think governments are concealing anything but I think once we explore and learn where to look, weβll find microbial life is everywhere. Maybe underground on Mars and near deep sea vents on Europa or the clouds of Venus.
I also think multicellular life and technological societies are rare, temporary, and fleeting. So, we wonβt be finding them. Earth is special in that it had 1,000 conditions that allows us to exist for a brief window. But weβre cavalier about climate change when it could cause ocean acidification and end a good chunk of humanity.
I kinda don't think there are little gray men
But I think we fundamentally do not understand what it is to be conscious. I don't think we know what is and is not conscious. I think we're limited by our brains and our dimensionality. I think there's a lot more right under our noses.
The universe is very very big. Unimaginably so. But we have absolutely no idea of how probable the appearance of life is, so we have no idea how probable is it for life to exist elsewhere. So my answer for the first question is: I don't know.
And for the second question, my answer is: haha.
I mean, it would be weird if they weren't out there somewhere but I don't think the government knows much more than we do
I do! Perhaps alien life could even be hiding in plain sight on Earth, and someday we will discover a virus or a bacteria that looks nothing like anything else on Earth and could've hitched a ride on a meteorite!
Google water bears.
I am certain that intelligent life in the universe is realively common, but that there is no real way to break or even bend the laws of physics to allow for FTL meaning that the chance of one ever enountering another is basically zero unless there are more than one species of intelligent life in a single star system.
I just read that as "Do you believe in Asians?" and at first I wondered whether that was racist, then I went like "Nooo, Asians, go!! I believe in you!! You can do it!!"
oh. like that secret asian man fellow.
Is this you?
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I believe in the boundless depths of the self. Beyond that I'm not sure.
Understanding why and how we're even conscious entities, assuming I believe you guys even exist, is the question that still needs to be answered regardless of aliens becoming known to us.
Of course Aliens is real, I didn't imagine the movie.
Extraterrestrial life on Earth, and government coverups? Zero evidence.
I'm agnostic. If you find the statistical probability argument for the existence of aliens salient, then by the same token you should believe that our reality is a simulation. In which case, the existence of aliens once again becomes questionable; the statistical probabilities of an infinite simulated universe are outside the realm of our current knowledge.
edit: See comment below on Nick Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis.
I don't follow how possible aliens = simulation. And what's the basis for what we experience being defined as simulation or not? Are we in a computer, or everything is a hallucination?
Sorry, I suppose people haven't heard of the "Simulation hypothesis" in philosophy.
Nick Bostrom argued that, statistically, it is more likely that we live in a simulation than not. Assume that an advanced civilization could build a machine with enormous computing power, sufficient to simulate a human mind and a universe "around" it. It follows that the number of such simulated minds/universes could be near infinite. So the probability of our actually being in a simulated universe dwarfs the probability that our reality is not a simulation.
OK I think I follow now. If one believes the possibility of aliens based on probability, then they should also consider the possibility that the universe is a simulation?
Yes, this is the idea. Although, as another noted, you can argue back and forth on whether Bostrom's argument holds.
I think that presumes simulating a universe and/or consciousness is even possible. We have no clue either way if it can be done, but we have evidence life exists, at least on Earth, so it is possible for life to exist somewhere else too. I believe aliens are more likely than us living in a simulation
Well I suppose it depends on your views of consciousness. Some would argue that our consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon grounded on the electrical impulses of our neurons. Personally, I'm convinced that the phenomenon need not be physical. It should be possible, with enough computing power, to model the same interactions. But I admit that if you reject this possibility, then the simulation hypothesis loses credence.
I lean towards no, which is a minority scientific position. The Fermi paradox is strong evidence against technological aliens, and of all the evolutionary history we have immediate abiogenesis is the most weakly supported. It happened early, but there's still a 10% chance of a thing randomly happening in the first 10% of geological history (to oversimplify the math).
If it's not that, it's eukariogenesis, but that seems a bit more inevitable given how cooperative bacteria can already be. The development of technology seems inevitable once a thing by chance becomes smart and dexterous enough, and every other step along the way has happened more than once. Earth-like planets are still thought to be abundant.
Edit: Oh, and no to any conspiracy. It would be really hard to hide obvious alien life, and there's no real motive for all world governments to unanimously do so. And conspiracies don't exist, because we're too disorganised to keep a huge secret for long.