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I Don’t Believe in Aliens Anymore - Humanity must learn to find meaning without relying on gods or extraterrestrials.
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- Title
- I Don't Believe in Aliens Anymore
- Authors
- Published
- Aug 8 2018
- Word count
- 521 words
If it's just us, then there's an entire universe out there for the taking. It's too big a universe for just one nation, let alone a single corporation like SpaceX, so we need to get our shit together as a species and get to fucking work.
I always liked looking at it that way. If it's just us, we've got a rather monumental responsibility on our shoulders. That's one big, empty garden waiting to be cultivated.
Why? I've never understood this view, sounds like "manifest destiny but it's in space!". I guess my real question is why is spreading intelligent life or even life in general into the universe an admirable goal?
Not sure if it's admirable, but it sounds like fun, and we'll have a lot of time to kill.
Aren't you the guy who said that he sees no meaning in humanity and said that he wouldn't mind if we all suddenly disappeared?
not citations, that's only meaning of things he said as I remember them
I wemt through your history but didn't find it.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the scale of human history relative to other lengths of time. It rattles my brain that we only have 12,000 years or so of known history, but anatomically modern humans as a species were also here 188,000 years before that (16 times longer than all of known history), during which countless generations of our ancestors lived and died, raising families, dreaming dreams, solving problems, despairing and triumphing— all of them now long forgotten with nothing remaining except their descendants (us). That's hard enough for me to comprehend.
Then I remember that whole timeline of human existence was only 200,000 years long, and that the dinosaurs "roamed the earth" for at least 825 times that! That's 165 MILLION years of their existence, an impossibly large amount of time to fathom next to our own. We are a blip.
Now watch "Timelapse of the Entire Universe". At a cosmological timescale, the dinosaurs are a blip. Humankind (prehistoric or otherwise) doesn't even register. As if our brevity in time weren't enough, now think about space and its stupefying vastness. I was humbled to see the Pale Blue Dot image and read Sagan's accompanying text, but even that could never prepare me for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
The things we recognize as intelligence, culture, and technology are a microscopic, utterly brief anomaly in the lifetime of the universe. I think it would be an egregious mark of hubris (and irresponsible extrapolation) to say our 12,000-year trajectory will continue apace for the next n million years. I can barely predict what will happen in the next decade, let alone century or millennium or megannum. If our species survives even one-hundredth as long as the dinosaurs did, continuing its technological developments, it will by that time look unrecognizably different from the humanity of today. And even then it will still be the tiniest blip of an anomaly in the scale of the cosmos.
If another anomaly like this one were to appear somewhere else in the universe, the odds of it happening at the exact same time as ours while also being observable and near enough to interact with meaningfully are imperceptibly small.
Sorry for the long read. I grew up on Star Trek and was captivated by the idea that humanity's on the cusp of saying "hello" to our galactic neighborhood, a place teeming with humanoid life all operating at a technological level roughly equivalent to our own. I don't think that's going to happen anymore. I still think we need to get off this rock, it's our best chance for long-term survival. I think the universe is filled with wonders to explore. I think the greatest wonders of all may be what humans can become in the far future, how truly alien our own evolution will be, and if it will be enough to escape the great filter from putting us back in our place as the blip of an anomaly we are.
I should also say that while this outlook is rather nihilistic — certainly pessimistic — I consider it a great privilege to be alive, here and now, witnessing this blip as it occurs. That I'm conscious and self-aware is miracle enough, let alone capable of enjoying a level of security and comfort and happiness that is unparalleled even in modern history. We are, all of us living today, incredibly fortunate. I know this whole screed has read like an atheist sermon, but truth be told it's the sheer improbability of the whole situation that leads me to believe in a higher power. I just can't write off my sentience manifesting in the midst of this tiniest of blips as mere coincidence. But I guess that's a discussion for another day.
This is a very interesting short read, and it aligns quite well with my current thinking.
When I was younger, I believed in possible X Files type aliens, Greys, etc. Later I decided that was silly of me, but I was sure that given the billions of planets, there must be intelligent life out there. Now I am pretty sure we are the first. What do you all think about intelligent alien life?
Link to the Oxford study cited in the article [PDF]
"Dissolving the Fermi Paradox"
Abstract
The problem with that perspective is simple: here we are.
It happened once. If it can happen once, it can happen again.
It's always about us and we're always the center of everything. We're always special and unique. That plays out across all of history in every belief system. Eventually we learn that perspective is bullshit, every time. I doubt it'll be any different with regards to intelligent life in the universe.
We may have to search fifty galaxies to find another intelligent civilization. It's not a question of if there's another one out there. If we're here, someone else is out there somewhere, it's a big damn universe (infinite, by all measurable estimates). It's more a question of how rare an event life itself is. I think the 'intelligent' aspect is an inevitable outcome of evolution if you give it long enough to play out. It took us 4.5 billion years, roughly half of the time the universe has had habitable environments. Odds are pretty good most of the others out there aren't much further along than we are, if we're anything like an average case.
The universe is still just waking up.
Do you mean technologically? In terms of biological complexity, it seems to me our planet's biomass plateaued many millions of years ago. It's not unreasonable to think that a creature with human-like intelligence could have evolved much earlier than it took for us. And considering how quickly we're developing, another intelligent species could have millions of years on us. Think about that for a second. When we think about conquering the stars we're thinking on the scale of hundreds, or worst case thousands, of years. If the Great Filter is behind us and life isn't too rare we're late to the party.
As for why we don't see them, If intelligent life is really uncommon, there could be billions of light years between planets with it on average. If you can't find a way around light speed, how do you search/check/find everything within a sphere a billion light years across? It could be that difficult for a pair of civilizations to find each other, or last that long.
What does it matter if there are multiple intelligent species but they are so far apart as to never plausibly interact? I agree that it seems likely there are other species out there somewhere. I have no idea if we're ever likely to come across any though.
It’s not just a 3D problem of distance. There is also time. The chances of technological civilizations that last, say 100,000 years, overlapping seems really iffy as well.
I disagree on this point, evolution is not a good search algorithm. Getting trapped in local minima seems very possible.
My suspicion is we have our big brains because we evolved our social ability and massed ranged attack (human shoulders are way too good) in parallel.
But this doesn't really seem inevitable, we don't see any other social animals repeating either feat. Even though any of the great apes surely could they've got different niches and they seem to be stuck in em. At some point you would expect the other predators to be too evolved in their strategies that nothing can switch to social + ranged and thus get breathing space for evolving big expensive brains. This seems to be what happened for the entire reign of the dinosaurs. visual timeline of large animal evolution To get out of a local minima you need a near extinction event to let you roll the dice again. Eventually your 'near' extinction event will be an all life extinction event and you're back to square one.
Of course we can't really discuss this very sensibly because n=0, we can't use our own existence to argue about the probability of our existence since if we didn't exist we wouldn't be here to discuss it. Humans existence could be as inevitable a gravity or as unlikely a spontaneous teapots forming in orbit. It's like the WW2 missing bullet holes problem, except you've only got one plane.
Another problem might end up being that, while intelligent species exist, most are handicapped in a way that precludes technological civilization. I mean just out of the species that exist with us today, we've got Cetaceans with pretty massive brains relative to their bodies. But even if they have or develop a proper language, which is probably the biggest single factor in the evolution of a civilization, they don't have the manipulators to build anything. Even if they did, the fact that they're aquatic puts so many roadblocks on the development of technology. No fire. No smelting. No electronics. No radio. Imagine how many aliens there might be out there, fully capable of building a civilization mentally, but unable to because of their physical form. We lucked up immensely in that regard, with bipedalism, the miracle of human hands, and endurance running.
Hmm I dunno if you can develop the big brain and social coordination you probably manage with sign language or something. Technology and the physiology for it though yea right with you.
Although if your planet gravity is too high you might never make orbit with rockets, given how much we're struggling to justify it economically (having been able todo it technologically for what 50 or so years) I guess lots of intelligent species might be out there stuck or happy on their own planets.
Yeah, it's very possible Earth is on the small end for planets that can long term support life. Venus is only a little smaller and it lacks plate tectonics, which is essential for a lot of things, like maintaining a magnetic field, stopping a runaway greenhouse effect, stopping solar winds from stripping your hydrogen, etc.
Still, you would expect a technological civilization that lasted long enough to make it off a super earth. Sure chemical rockets don't do the trick with any efficiency, but access to space is very useful, and even on a planet twice as big as Earth you could build an SSTO with nuclear or beamed power and use it to bootstrap an orbital ring.
Yea, perhaps, it does kind of assume that the solar system & earths relatively benign history is normal though. How big a time-window to most planets get between events which would disrupt that progress?
FYI, your [visual timeline of evolution] link points to the same URL as the [WW2 missing bullet holes] link.
Oh thanks, fixed it.
I fully agree, to me the incomprehensible scale of universe is the best explanation for both why there is likely other intelligent life and why we haven't found them yet.
I don't know if we need to be the first. There are fairly common explanations people throw around like what other intelligent forms of life have developed and died out due to the general inhospitability of the universe, or because their intelligence allowed them to destroy themselves for whatever reason, or that it's difficult to actually travel the universe due to its size or the lack of faster-than-light travel.
It's certainly possible that life under whatever form it best survives in has developed before, or in parallel, across the universe, at least by my understanding. I don't find it surprising in the slightest, though, that none of it has made its way to us. Think about the difficulty we humans have with space travel. Human life is based on processes inherited from basic life forms that struggled to adapt to temperate conditions. I have difficulty seeing us expand organized human life to inhospitable planets, or to find the resources necessary to terraform other planets. I certainly don't expect us to colonize or even meaningfully explore beyond this solar system before organized human life collapses.
I'd like to have a reference for at least literally anything in my comment, but eh.
Why must we do either? The whole history of human civilization has involved us creating artificial environments to live in because natural environments are too much of one thing, not enough of another, and generally inhospitable to humans. As misogynistic as it sounds, our entire existence has involved the realization that Mother Nature is a heartless asshole and ought to be treated as such, that we have the ability and therefore the right to grab nature by the throat and force the world to accommodate us when it would rather see us all dead.
So why not do the same in space? Why not build artificial habitats instead of looking for "habitable" planets or trying to terraform inhospitable ones? Who needs to live on a planet if we can mine the shit out of asteroids for materials and build orbital habitats? Hell, we ought to mine the shit out of asteroids and turn them into habitats.
I forget who first said it, but the idea of terraforming and colonizing planets is akin to the idea of cavemen digging new caves to live in.
Are you saying that the next step is to create artificial space-faring habitats? Wouldn't it be more convenient to use atmospheres and masses that already fit some of the needs of our bodies? For someone with only hand-tools, digging a cave is more work than building a small house. Shouldn't we do what's easiest?
Yeah, exactly. Planets are hilariously mass inefficient for the living surface they provide, compared to huge stations using spin gravity. For example, Mars has about a third the surface area of Earth. If Mars was terraformed, that's all you get for your quadrillions, a third of an Earth with possibly insufficient gravity. If Mars was turned into a swarm of habitats, those habitats would have a combined surface area of over three hundred thousand Earths. And there are bonuses besides efficiency. Each of those habitats would have exactly the climate, illumination, radiation shielding, and gravity its builders wanted, rather than what they could make work with the planet provided. Power generation would consist of sticking a few panels on the bottom of your station to sit in perpetual sunlight. Spaceflight between habitats is as easy as spaceflight can be. New land can be built as needed rather than all at once, and the return on investment is immediate instead of taking several centuries.
And with modern construction techniques, those things don't have to be claustrophobic either. With carbon fiber, you can build gigantic open air ring habitats the size of countries, with nothing separating the inhabitants from space but the air over their heads, just like on planets.
EDIT: To be more direct, terraforming planets to live on, or even building settlements on unterraformed planets is going to be way, way, way more expensive per square kilometer than building free space habitats out of readily available asteroids and comets. The metaphor of the digging the cave being harder than building a house thing holds here as well: building habs is easier. Yeah it'd be easier still to use atmospheres and masses that fit the needs of our bodies, but we don't have any planets with those, so it's a moot point.
Yup. Also resistant to the majority of self inflicted extinctions, which I think are soon to become more worrisome than even the worst cold war scenarios. I mean five, ten years from now, it's possible some sufficiently motivated individual could build an incurable super-plague in their garage, and then it's curtains for planetbound civilization. A few decades from now and further development of nanotech and home manufacturing makes nuclear proliferation so much bigger a headache. There's an almost unlimited amount of uranium available in seawater, and all it takes is a few salted bombs. Habitats sidestep the disease problem through their distributed nature, and the nuke problem because there's no readily available fissionables unless you want there to be.
I like that.
The point of my comment wasn't precisely about living on planets vs. living in artificial environments, though I agree that we very well might be able to do quite a lot like you say, assuming there aren't more complications that make propagation unwieldy.
My point, though, is that beyond living around this solar system, how would we fare upholding organized life outside of it? The logistics and resources that would need to go into ensuring our survival over the millennia, assuming light-speed travel, might already be its own set of problems. We already have problems not destroying our own organized existence in the one place we know it can thrive, due to all the complications caused by human psychology that have been inherited from our evolution.
Compound all these issues over the amount of time it would take to encounter another organized life form out in space, and I'm sure it's justification enough for why we haven't had any aliens come on down to Earth. But who knows!
Let's not pretend everything is impossible when we've barely cracked comparably minor trivia like gravity and immortality. The outlook is bleak and space will be difficult, but we've still got a lot more to learn, and that may change one day.
I don't mean to say things like this are impossible, but it's at least a somewhat reasonable explanation for the lack of any aliens.
I'm personally not convinced we'll do it, but you're right that it's good to stay optimistic and keep trying to achieve it!
There's another factor: even if there are aliens, they probably don't want anything to do with us. The Daleks are hippies compared to humanity.
Read The Dark Forest for another possibility for our lack of finding other civilizations (but I would read The Three-Body Problem first, it is excellent).