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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Going just on headline (paywall) this isn’t a surprise. Even astronomers will tell you they see things they can’t identify right away. Some are birds, some are balloons etc. it doesn’t always mean every UFO is an alien.
Shout out to that time in 1998 when the world-leading astrophysicists at CSIRO solved the 17-year-old mystery of the signals they were picking up and couldn't explain. Turns out they were caused by the office microwave whenever it was opened before it was finished.
I thought I was in for the worlds worst u/shittymorph attempt for a second.
The size & age of the universe pretty much tells us that it's never an alien.
I disagree. If things went the way we think they should have gone humanity shouldn't even exist. Billions of years ago some alien race should have mined out this entire solar system.
The fact that we are here and we have no solid evidence of aliens shows that something is very wrong with our understanding. Distances mean nothing when you have billions of years even without magical FTL travel.
Put some basic numbers to it. The oldest piece of metal (shapes by humans) we have found is about 7,000 years. I am going to make it worse and assume that there is metal we didn't find 10k years ago. With nuclear propulsion ship the nearest star is reachable. Let's assume it takes us with travel time 5,000 years to do this. Humanity goes from copper to two star systems in 15k years.
Now earth is going to be lazy and wait another 15k years before doing this feat again. Our new colony needs to grow so I am going to give them 15k years as well. We got a pace now. The star systems we have will double every 15k years.
Let's round down assuming some colonies fail and it makes the numbers easier. In 150k years humanity has 1k star systems. As a point of reference that is about the time difference between us and the first homo sapiens sapiens. In 300k years we have hit a million. At 450k years a billion. About 550k years, depending on how many stars there are in the galaxy, every star is now populated. 1/1000th of the time required from the Cambrian explosion until now.
From our understanding life was possible in our galaxy many billions of years ago. On average stars have 1.2 planets. There are about 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy. Of those about .2% are candidates for life. Based on our solar system there is about a 20% chance of life given the right conditions. From our dataset of 1 it takes 4 billion years to get sentient tool making social animals. Low end estimates of the number of aliens like us number in the thousands AT THIS MOMENT.
Again. We should not exist. Something is very wrong with our models. I am positive we will find the answer one day and I am betting it is going to break a whole bunch of theories.
I'm not doubting that something is out there.
It's just the MASSIVE amount of where and when that something exists makes it incredibly unlikely that something just happens to be right next to us at the same time that we exist.
There might be "people" out there with near-light speed travel that could possibly reach us. But when did they exist? We won't be seeing them if they lived and died out a billion years ago.
Space (crazy huge) times Time (crazy huge) is just an incomprehensibly big number. What are the chances that aliens are visiting a planet at the exact moment that the planet just so happens to be full of crazy people that claim to see aliens and make movies of aliens and seem obsessed with aliens?
How does this compare to the distance from my house down the street to the chemist's?
Peanuts
not hella far, but i still wouldn't want to walk it
I'm not sure why aliens that are going around the galaxy taking resources from various systems would exploit the resources of a system with life on it when there are probably trillions of exploitable systems that have no life.
I also am not sure why aliens who have technology so advanced they can achieve practical interstellar travel would need to mine entire solar systems for resources.
Because growth eats everything. Even if your economy only grew at .1% per year that would still mean a doubling every 720 years. For our 15k doubling species that would be a bit over 20x. About a million fold increase.
Secondly we don't see evidence that they did mine out uninhabited systems. There are over 5,000 exoplanets found that are terrible candidates for life. Yet they are there. Not used.
Third our system alone. Life would have been fine without Saturn. Even if our aliens are nice they still could have snagged that and not really impacted us.
I get why you feel this way but that’s not really how stats works.
I think the problem might be sociological. It may be impossible for a very large interstellar civilization to be stable let alone expand beyond a certain point.
More and more people are talking about Earth's population declining. The demographics curve may not be an exponential increase as civilization develops, but the planetary population may decrease as technology and wealth improves.
Aging populations may not have the resources to spend on interstellar travel, regardless of their relative wealth.
And these tendencies may be universal. The galaxy may be full of old, aging and slowly dying advanced civilizations and have few upstarts such as ours.
Sure and you know what? Three generations ago what you just said would be nonsense. The typical fertility rate of an American women prior to 1955 was 5!
Culture is fast. Demographics can spin on a dime. One decade everyone has kids and the next no one has them. All it takes is for a single culture on earth to push for growth and you get growth. We have about 190 countries. Pretend only one figures out the way to keep their population above replacement levels indefinitely. Given enough time what will happen to the other 189? Adapt or die. In order to stop growth you have to stop it fully. Even if there are alien species thst collectively decided to point a gun at their reproductive organs and butcher anyone who decides to make a better life for themselves, it still wouldn't explain what we see.
As I said, at any given moment there should be thousands and that has been true for Billions with a B years. Go ahead and play with the numbers. Make 99.9% of them act like pandas. That .1% will still Dyson sphere up everything.
Our models are wrong. Some step(s) in the process is/are basically impossible.
Well, your models are wrong. In both examples, you assume exponential growth will continue forever. Resource limits are a thing in the real world, as evidenced by every population in history (humans or animals).
I assumed linear growth and I assumed a frankly absurdly low growth rate. Under this model earth is only sending out a colony ship once every 15,000 years. Does that seem likely? We made 6 trips to the moon and about 50 years later are now planning more. Is there a single thing you can mention that humanity would only bother doing once every 15k years?
What is far far more likely is waves of ships, pauses of a century or less, more waves of ships...
Additionally I didn't assume forever. I assumed a malthusian growth pattern where by aliens keep growing until nothing is left.
Yeah, you assumed no catastrophic failures. On long timelines there are going to be world or civilization ending events.
There are so many species that were wiped out through their actions or just naturally. That's the point of the Drake equation; the sky should be full of other civilizations, but it isn't.
The common answer is that there may be a "great filter", some event that all advanced species encounter. Maybe it's ahead of us, or maybe it's behind us. It could be something simple like "walking upright is rare" or it could be some powerful weapon everyone discovers.
I'd suggest reading the article. It's here in the comments several times. The video of the hearing is well worth watching and pretty significant. That video is also here in the comments.
What's also significant is the extreme lack of evidence for any of the claims being made.
But this guy says another guy told him he knows guys that have worked on the UFOs! That's practically proof of aliens!
There's totes magotes aliens, bro. Swearsies.
It's true. I know a guy, who talked to a guy, who overheard a guy telling a dude he heard from a guy that it's true.
The hearing was never about presenting evidence. It is about creating a safe and transparent process for reporting unidentified flying objects. Then and only then could we have an actual discussion on anything further regarding the potential of extraterrestrials if credible evidence exists.
It was a guy chatting absolute shit, getting egged on by republican morons, that will amount to nothing.
TIL Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a "republican moron"
The republicans organised the whole thing, AOC was just there, doing her job. But yes, for her part in this I do view her as more of a moron than I used to.
Hey you're definitely ignorant of the hearing, and making a take based on a headline, but at least you're consistent.
lmao, sure thing pal.
If you'd watched the hearing you'd have heard both her line of questioning and her insistence on follow-up hearings, and wouldn't have played it off as "just doing her job"
Why even lie about such a simple thing?
Huh
Yes a person specifically employed to find information who then reports said information is 100% the same as dumb shit you said on a playground.
Exactly the same.
Huh
You have definitely not seen the hearing and it is beyond weird that you'd pretend otherwise on the internet.
Huh
Yeah, but all the other times it's aliens.