Speculation on the probability of extraterrestrial visitations

a reply to: dfnj2015

As I posted before, all of this wall of text and math is useless. We are limited to the Local Group, about 50 galaxies many of which are not habitable, because they are locked to us gravitationally. ALL others are moving away at faster than the speed of light as space-time expands.

There are no aliens coming here. Get over it. Go watch TV.

a reply to: Maverick7

ALL others are moving away at faster than the speed of light as space-time expands.

No. It is only beyond the Hubble horizon where that is the case. There are many galaxies within 4 billion parsecs.



But for all practical purposes, this galaxy is the only chance for contact. I think.

Excellent thread. Numbers aside, it's hard to believe that we are the only life in the universe. The idea is absurd if one really considers the number of stars, even assuming life must look more or less like us.

"Why would they bother visiting us" is an important question.

I think perhaps for a civilization to develop advanced technology, certain ingredients are needed.

For example the ability to manipulate tools. Fine motor control. Not just the ability to bang a stick on something, but the fine control needed for carving, building, etc.

While many such ingredients are obvious, some are not. Curiosity for example. Sometimes its a bad thing: what happens if I stick my fingers in that electrical outlet? But as a species, our curiosity is insatiable. What's on the other side of that mountain? Why does that bear not eat it's prey right away? What happens if I try to mix oil and water? As soon as we have the answer we search for the next puzzle to solve.

We spend significant time and resources on pure research with no specific goal. It is far from optimal. But it's hard wired. It's just what we do. What possible gain from studying the migration of monarch butterflies? It doesn't help us grow food or colonize planets, yet many people spend their lives on such things.

So what if a species needs this sort of drive to advance tech? Otherwise, as soon as they figured out how to get basic needs, they would go no further. They would sit back, get fat until the next extinction hit. But they would never develop rockets.

If this is the case, then every species with tech out there would investigate others, because that is what they do. It's hard wired.

A completely different angle, if you were alone on an island you would seek others. Even if you only found a squirrel that didn't even notice you, or a dog or whatever, no one wants to be alone. If a species is their own master, the universe becomes a vast and lonely place.

Anyway, just some thoughts. Hope it made sense

I guess it all boils down to the fact that even if there was a high probability of visitation by ET civilizations, you'd still have to prove that it actually happened. I know that it's statistically possible to roll dice and have it come up snake eyes 100,000 times in a row, but when did that (or did it ever) actually ever happen? Potential versus actual.

Even if Human life is just a happy accident. The enormous amounts of planets in the Universe I would think that the chance of the excact same accident that made us on Earth could happen on another Planet,

originally posted by: 11SK1180
Even if Human life is just a happy accident. The enormous amounts of planets in the Universe I would think that the chance of the excact same accident that made us on Earth could happen on another Planet,

Yeah, but in a case like this, because we still don't know how life actually began, the odds of it happening again can't be accurately estimated. Even though there are billions of planets out there, the mechanism is more important, and it might be that the odds against it happening again are higher than all the planets and stars and galaxies that ever existed or ever will.

An alien civilization only needs to explore 100,000 or so interesting planets at most. By then they will have all the answers we're looking for now. Things like planet resource mapping and planets with other life will become known. Maybe an exchange of knowledge and contacts with other civilizations keeps them from 'reinventing the wheel'. There is no need to explore millions of planets.

Millions of probes could also be a dangerous proposition. The probes could provoke hundreds of thousands of civilizations to view yours as hostile. It would be a race to see which one destroyed you first.

Only the best of the best aliens will be explorers, similar to our astronauts. Only one in a million of us will ever go to space. Access is not available for everybody. I think a similar ratio will be found with other species.

If aliens left behind a book that detailed how to make a warp drive we could build one. We are intelligent enough to unlock the secrets, we just haven't found them ourselves yet. The industrial and scientific revolution is only a few hundred years old. We are making up for lost time very quickly. Our intelligence is on par, our knowledge is not.

What if Galileo had looked at Mars and saw it speckled with artificial lights? Our research and development would have a drastically different path. Surely some other planets had that incentive.

I think we have been probed. Records of 'people from the sky' go back as far as written history. Much more frequently than 'people from the sea' or wherever. Thousands and probably millions of people have claimed to see some form of UFO. The only options are every single one of them is naturally explainable or we have been probed at least one time.