RT: Alien cliques may be keeping Earth isolated - study

If the idea really is true that aliens are deliberately preventing humans from contacting them, then extraterrestrial civilizations most likely formed a number of cliques rather than a pan-galactic government, a new study suggests.

The Fermi paradox – named after physicist Enrico Fermi – says that if sentient life is not unique to Earth, then our galaxy should have plenty of other civilizations, including some more technologically advanced than ours. The paradoxical part is that we have not detected any signs of them.

One problem with this answer is that it would require the galactic community to form a united government to agree on and enforce such an information blockade. In a paper published online this week, astrophysicist Duncan H. Forgan used a model which showed that if there are indeed multiple civilizations in the Milky Way, they are much more likely to form a number of cliques than a single galactic club.

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a reply to: 2012newstart

If aliens really are attempting to prevent human/ET contact, would that not require human/ET contact?

You can't hold back a dog from running unless you physically build a fence around him or put a leash on him.

We would still see undeniable evidence of alien presence around us, which is not the case.

a reply to: 2012newstart

I think distance is what is keeping us isolated.
What do you think?

originally posted by: swanne
a reply to: 2012newstart

If aliens really are attempting to prevent human/ET contact, would that not require human/ET contact?

You can't hold back a dog from running unless you physically build a fence around him or put a leash on him.

We would still see undeniable evidence of alien presence around us, which is not the case.

Maybe were just in an isolated part of the universe.. And they are leaving us be..
Or maybe our technology is so far behind theirs that we do not know how to detect them yet.. Think of humans 10,000 years ago compared to those of today..
A caveman on Easter Island has no way of detecting civilisation in Europe..

originally posted by: gortex
a reply to: 2012newstart

I think distance is what is keeping us isolated.
What do you think?

Lol.. We posted that at the same time..

Great minds think alike huh..

a reply to: 2012newstart

People keep whisking up elaborate stories to explain the 'great silence.' Galactic treaties and hierarchies of choirs of benevolent versus malevolent aliens have been round the block a few times already.

Still, I like Forgan's work and he's always an interesting thinker on things extra, terrestrial and intelligent.

He's only having fun in this paper and playing around with ideas. For example he seeks to balance the possibility of evolving civilisations against the current understanding that such things are profoundly rare. He imagines several diverse civs coming to the boil across similar windows of time. In that scenario he pictures a 'galactic clique' of competing intelligences that consent to keep us lowly Earthlings in the dark about their existence. Obviously he doesn't go much further and avoids allocating reasons why we'd be out on the 'naughty step.'

In the end he puts it down as unlikely and requiring 'soft' thinking to take it seriously. He says the idea is insufficient to explain the 'great silence' although he leaves an element of doubt and possibility too.

originally posted by: Misterlondon

A caveman on Easter Island has no way of detecting civilisation in Europe..

True. However we, unlike cavemen, are finding news ways to send stuff into the depths of space. The probe Voyager has in fact left the Solar System. We also have powerful telescopes enabling us to see objects over ten billion light years away.

If something funky was going on, we would have seen signs - abnormal dimming of stars, or strange artificial structure around the Solar System, anything. Something would be at odd with our observations or laws of physics.

Or perhaps we have the most advanced technology in the universe???

they just see us as refugees, the same way most people see the refugees crossing the mediterranean, backwards and problematic at best.

originally posted by: tinner07
Or perhaps we have the most advanced technology in the universe???

Yeah. Something has to be first and it could be us.

A depressing and possible fact.

originally posted by: swanne

originally posted by: Misterlondon

A caveman on Easter Island has no way of detecting civilisation in Europe..

True. However we, unlike cavemen, are finding news ways to send stuff into the depths of space. The probe Voyager has in fact left the Solar System. We also have powerful telescopes enabling us to see objects over ten billion light years away.

If something funky was going on, we would have seen signs - abnormal dimming of stars, or strange artificial structure around the Solar System, anything. Something would be at odd with our observations or laws of physics.

But we often do find anomalies that are strange and unexplainable.
They are always explained by theories from scientists but that's all they are is theories and not fact.
A good example is the dimming star that has recently been discovered with claims of an alien structure around it.. We do not know what that is yet.

I personally believe there must be life elsewhere, there just had to be, and always believed we are pretty isolated in terms of our location..
Also I believe life elsewhere may not be like us and may have different signatures in space, which we have no yet been able to detect.

originally posted by: Kandinsky

originally posted by: tinner07
Or perhaps we have the most advanced technology in the universe???

Yeah. Something has to be first and it could be us.

A depressing and possible fact.

This is one of the best comments I have ever read.. Never really thought about us being the first, but your right we very well could be..

a reply to: Misterlondon

You could be right, of course.

However I still think that Time (window of opportunity for contact) and space (space to travel for a communication to arise) are more logical explanations for the absence of alien contact.

A massive, galactic-wide Order composed of countless different species and all agreeing / conspiring to keep us in the dark seems pretty unlikely to me. We are only one species of human on a tiny Earth and we already have trouble agreeing to a single order of things, we've had two world wars and countless revolution / coup d'état / guerillas in the last 100 years alone.

originally posted by: swanne
a reply to: Misterlondon

You could be right, of course.

However I still think that Time (window of opportunity for contact) and space (space to travel for a communication to arise) are more logical explanations for the absence of alien contact.

A massive, galactic-wide Order composed of countless different species and all agreeing / conspiring to keep us in the dark seems pretty unlikely to me. We are only one species of human on a tiny Earth and we already have trouble agreeing to a single order of things, we've had two world wars and countless revolution / coup d'état / guerillas in the last 100 years alone.

I do agree with your points on us being kept in he dark.. We are probably insignificant to advanced civilisations.
And if there is a galactic federation, which would mean they would have to be significantly more advanced than us, would probably view us as a violent race of beings in an early stage of evolution.
Using the caveman analogy again.. We would not ask a grunting caveman king to sit on the un security Council.

a reply to: Misterlondon

I am also saying that there is much disagreement in the security council itself.

A world-wide order is already hard to maintain... A galaxy-wide order composed of countless species with countless goals and countless needs is even more unlikely.

a reply to: 2012newstart


That dry discourse on possible interactions among galactic neighbors is a bit short in thinking. Underlying any association or not is the basic philosophy of each developing entity. While, for example, the Prime Directive may be the standard template for a general consensus of how to operate, we must allow for the rouges, the Borg-types.


There is plenty of evidence to show that Earth is being visited by both types. We have the typical UFO sightings of the last half of a century. We have the "medical exam" which seem to be part and parcel to some of the typical visitors. Unknown by many of you are the instances where there is evidence that humans have been taken and literally butchered and dissected to see what makes us tick.

Those cases are relatively few if matched with the relatively benign events of the medical exams, but they stand out as warning signs that Nazi-like creatures may very well be out there and dropping by here to add to their data bases even if they are only mildly curious and have no plans to enslave us.

One of the best arguments for beings coming from many places is right in our faces, and that is the many, dozens if not hundreds of different shaped UFOs that we have witnessed over the decades. As they obviously have a large variety of ships, so to will be their basic philosophies that they weave into how they actually interact with us. No body should expect a "rose garden" White House style landing. It is a far more thorny issue that most humans and their governments are not yet willing to concede.

Our only hope is that we are generally protected by some manner of a general order that binds most of those ETs. Admittedly, that is hard for we humans, always fighting among ourselves, to recognize as the likely reason why we are still in existance.

originally posted by: swanne
a reply to: 2012newstart

If aliens really are attempting to prevent human/ET contact, would that not require human/ET contact?

You can't hold back a dog from running unless you physically build a fence around him or put a leash on him.

We would still see undeniable evidence of alien presence around us, which is not the case.

I respectfully disagree.

1. If the technology is good enough, they could learn everything about us without us even knowing of their existence. Do you think "harmful" bacteria can see or understand humans, our technologies, or our attempts to quarantine them?

2. You're assuming they have a form that humans can even recognize. What if they're energy beings made from forms of light that are invisible to human eyes? Or what if they & their technology are microscopic? Or what if our perception of time is so slow compared to theirs that an entire "year" of their lives happens in a few seconds of our own time? In that case, they would literally be faster than our senses can perceive. So they could be all around us and we literally wouldn't even notice them.

3. And of course, I believe their technology would simply be too advanced for us to even recognize. It could be like an earthworm looking at a harpsichord or a lobster looking at a hard drive. All those creatures would see are clumps of material, even though most humans would understand they're actually advanced technology. So to our uninformed eyes, their technology could simply look like clumps of rock.

I can even imagine us being like a dog looking at a wireless router, not realizing that wireless signals are being transmitted around us all of the time. I've even imagined that they're actively shooting holograms and greeting songs to us, but we simply can't detect them. Imagine if it turned out that some of the subatomic particles that shower the Earth were really parts of wireless signals being sent to us?

a reply to: 2012newstart

SO Sorry! I thought to put my priceless thoughts in the OP, but the news was quite telling.
Well, what made me post it, was not so much the research of hypothetical possibility of galactic senate etc, but the fact that RT the official Russian English news agency post it. Perhaps the contact is not that much far off. We would be too stupid to imagine the world leaders don't know what we know, and much more. It is scheduled for decades. Is it now, or do we wait for some other event first?

a reply to: enlightenedservant

If that's where your thoughts lie, you'll enjoy the ideas of Gato-Rivera in this old paper - Brane Worlds, the Subanthropic Principle and the Undetectability Conjecture

Do mountain gorillas know that their `civilization' is embedded in a larger `civilization' corresponding to a much more evolved and intelligent species than themselves? Do they know that they are a protected species inhabitating a natural reserve in a country inside the African continent of planet Earth? The answer to these questions is certainly no, they do not know nothing about our social structure, our countries, borders, religions, politics, ..... nor even about our villages and cities, except perhaps for those individuals living in a zoo, or adopted as pets.

I think he pushes too hard and the gorilla analogy isn't as secure as was intended. It's still a very enjoyable paper and I keep going back to it year after year.

We could be absorbed within something like a Type 3 civ's territory and not have to know about it. It's an idea. If you think about the extent of human consciousness in the early Middle Ages, it barely reached past the visible planets. They didn't have the technology or the complex concepts to even allow the consideration of gas giants, pulsars and so forth.

There will be a time in the future when people look back on us and see the limitations of our thoughts; not in the next few decades, but 3, 4 and 5 centuries away.

I tend to favour the possibility that Earth is a lonely outpost and there might not be anything at all out there for a considerable distance in space and time.

An intriguing scenario ( one of many).

To play along , we would be a part of a group of Type 0 civilizations that have been designated to evolve with no known interference by a more advanced civilization ( Type 1 or higher).

But the big boys ( an advanced Type 2 or higher) would be calling the shots and I imagine would be deriving the decision to isolate younger civilations because the experiment of giving the perverial "kids the keys to the family car" and trying to excellerate a young civilization by giving them tech and the "galactic encyclopedia" didn't work out so well in the past.

I'd just be glad there is something out there that's 1st inclination is not to enslave us.