People are so obsessed with contacting aliens, but maybe they are really really annoying.
I got some bad news for you. We are the annoying aliens.
“Squeglesquortsquersqueweldorf” [“The earthlings are broadcasting again. Maintain radio silence; do not respond!”]
I’m convinced of the dark forest hypothesis. Even 200 ly is too big for me.
So not too different from us then?
I did not order these ton of bricks, but I’m grateful. Thanks friend!
Space expands like bread expands, everywhere all at once. Your galaxies are like raisins in that bread. The space around them is carrying them while it expands. This means it’s pretty much guaranteed, you’ll eventually be gaining distance from all other galaxies faster than the speed of light. Because the distance isn’t a function of speed, but growth — so it can go faster than c. You, however, can never go faster than c. So, the picture is right.
Just invent wormholes to access hyperspace, and cross the universe in one step
I don’t think you want to deal with wormhole TSA, friend.
You go through TSA at the space ports before boarding the ship. The only thing different about going through a wormhole is a bit of turbulence, some spaghettification, and the unverifiable possibility that the physical organism which gets reconstituted on the other side is merely an empty vessel programmed to unconsciously imitate your habits and mannerisms, while the conscious entity that is you actually perished upon the dissolution of your original body.
unverifiable possibility that the physical organism which gets reconstituted on the other side is merely an empty vessel programmed to unconsciously imitate your habits and mannerisms
Oh yeah, I’ve tried anesthesia before.
Is that a theory about anesthesia? I haven’t heard about that.
I’m referring to ideas about teleportation and time travel, in which the physical organism dissolves and is reconstituted, and appears to be alive and conscious on the other side, but the actual conscious entity died upon dissolution and was not resurrected upon reconstitution.
Before anyone gets too cocky, remember that signal strength drops off at the square of distance. Even this tiny blip of range generally pales in comparison to the background radiation. We’re still almost invisible to our own technology at any serious distance.
For a reference, see how absolutely difficult it is to talk to the Voyager probes. The signal they receive is absolutely tiny. (20 billion times smaller than what it takes to run a digital watch, see the Deep Space Network for what does the talking).
If any aliens have heard us, their technology already outstrips ours by orders of magnitude.
Thanks for the pep talk.
And if their technology outstrips us by that much, would they even notice us?
Notice? Maybe. Care? Lol, no.
If we were the first other species they’d care
Not care like an ant colony a few thousand miles away or not care like an ant colony in my kitchen?
how exactly would you get an ant colony in your kitchen?
Same same.
Unless they need resources.
what resources do we have that wouldn’t be elsewhere, in likely greater abundance/concentration?
latest estimate is there are 6 billion earth-like planets in our galaxy. and 200+ confirmed temperate rocky planets we have catalogged already out of 2000 ID’d exoplanets.
what resources do we have that wouldn’t be elsewhere, in likely greater abundance/concentration?
Our women, duh. Do you not watch movies smh
biomass. more souls for the torment nexus.
what resources do we have that wouldn’t be elsewhere, in likely greater abundance/concentration?
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complex biochemistry & biodiversity
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life forms intelligent enough to serve as slaves
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technology*
*Yes, even if the aliens are far more advanced than us, they may still be interested in reviewing our technology. Because technological advancement is not a strictly linear process. Even if they’re far more advanced, we may have a few things that we’ve invented/refined that they haven’t. If I were to place bets, I’d wager on internal combustion engines and firearms as technologies that we may have refined to a greater degree than aliens. Neither of these would be entirely novel technologies, of course. Combusting fuel inside a cylinder to drive a reciprocating piston? Combusting mild explosives inside a barrel to impart kinetic energy into a slug to cause damage at long range? They surely would have invented such things already. But if the chemistry of their home planet is a bit different, or if they invented technologies that replaced these earlier, then they likely wouldn’t have put nearly as much time and effort into refining them over time. Our engines and guns are still probably ‘primitive’ to them on the whole, but they could still learn some things by studying how much we’ve refined and perfected these primitive technologies, as ours may be more powerful and more efficient than any of the ones they ever developed.
There’s a plethora of possibilities here, and as you say, they could be very “resource steered”. On a planet with absolutely massive reserves of easily available iron or aluminium, but basically no calcium oxide, reinforced concrete may never have been invented. Sure, based on the composition of the known universe, that’s highly unlikely, but it’s far from impossible.
I think we tend to forget how our society and technology is shaped by the materials available to us. A planet with a significantly different composition could quickly end up with drastically different technology. Regarding combustion engines: If their atmosphere has significantly less oxygen than ours, they would be so inefficient that they were abandoned early, while if their atmosphere has very high oxygen content the fuels could be regarded as too unsafe to work with, also leading to early abandonment.
If their crust, air, or water has significant acid content, they may never have gotten far with metal working (because everything just corrodes) and developed highly advanced polymers, ceramics, and glasses instead.
The list goes on and on…
- point is unlikely imo. Biology is messy and unreliable and beings smart enough to serve as useful slaves, are hard to deal with, especially hyper-social ones like us. And artifical sentience can easily be limited, while biological one needs eugenic efforts and still requires strict controls because of how evolution works. Robots are just easier, once you have figured them out. We are still in the infancy there.
Spot the USian. lol.
It’s true, though. And not exactly flattering.
But we have put a bonkers amount of research and development into those two technologies … technologies that are very ‘skippable’ for an alien race that may have developed better alternatives sooner.
Say … if Earth had much smaller reserves of fossil fuels, leading to the reserves running basically dry in the 1960s, then we might have moved on to electric vehicles much sooner. Which means we wouldn’t have put all the research we currently have into crazy refinements like electronically controlled ignition and valve timing, variable geometry turbochargers, oil additives, emissions control systems, etc.
If someone had invented a practical railgun in the mid-1800s, we may never have put so much scientific effort into firearms and may never have developed things like spitzer boattail projectiles, progressive twist rifling, non-corrosive primers, or even smokeless powder.
And maybe it’s just my own biases talking because those are fields I know fairly well, but I do think those are prime candidates for technologies we may have developed and refined more than advanced aliens ever did. And, no, that doesn’t reflect particularly well on us. But other technologies – like, say, polymer plastics or electronics – are things I think aliens would have developed no matter what, and probably would have developed more advanced versions than ours.
There still are other possibilities, though. Perhaps the aliens have a very cooperative and trusting society, so they never developed advanced cryptography and computer security. Perhaps they have better natural healing and self-regeneration capabilities, so they never developed medical technology and prosthetics to our degree. Perhaps they have a cultural/religious aversion to meddling with nature, so they never developed selective breeding, domestication, and gene editing. Perhaps their home planet has extremely stable and predictable weather patterns, so they never bothered with developing meteorology very much. Perhaps their planet has little or no atmospheric oxygen, making fire something they pretty much only see in laboratory settings, so our intensive development of fire detection and suppression technologies are novel.
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We don’t have to be unique, we might just be the next stop that has the resources. Maybe they’re supernaturally interstellar and can move on. Maybe they’re barely interstellar and can’t afford to skip. Maybe nearly every earth-like has life and it’s all deemed lower-ranking than this interstellar society. Maybe nearly every earth-like has life but this interstellar species has no anthropomorphic mammalian qualities and they don’t care. There’s no reason to beleive we can negotiate with aliens when humans largely do not respectfully negotiate with other species now. Hell, we don’t negotiate respectfully between ourselves
Soil. Go look around for soil on any other planet. There isn’t any.
There might also be a lot of value in studying alien intelligence. We don’t know because we’ve never met any, but imagine doing so is a serious way to discover something new about how the universe can be understood at all.
Edit: by that, I mean the taxonomy on our phenomenology. There’s nothing ontological about feeling “good” or “bad,” nor “confused,” “scared,” or “horny.” Not even of those “aha” moments when you figure something out.
We have hundreds millions of years worth of systems evolution in our head, creating a damn fine survival engine. Hell, it even helps us feel a little like we understand the universe and how it works. Surely theres not just our way to do that, and aliens could be interested in our way.
… human resources?
all our fears of aliens are just projections of what we do to each other.
hence all the raping, pillaging, and butt probing.
they probably here already.some of us might even be one.
spoiler
(I can’t find the actual scene where they explain how the aliens used the Hitler Berlin Games broadcast because it was the first really high-power transmission, but got as close as I could.)
There are around 20000 stars in that little 200-light-year-wide dot.
https://www.pas.rochester.edu/~emamajek/memo_star_dens.html and 1pc≈3.3ly.
The Fermi Paradox doesn’t seem that paradoxical when you see a map like this. Civilizations could be screaming into the void for millenniums without reaching the other side of the galaxy. Signal strength drops fast too. How would would ever distinguish a faded signal from background noise?
Currently reading through the 3 body problem and it touches the idea that maybe we shouldn’t scream into the void.
Too late for that. Early antennas threw radio waves all over the place.
TV and radio stations still do!
Aren’t they a little bit more directional towards the receivers these days? But then again, the stuff probably bounces around a lot anyway.
I was under the impression they became static in a light year or so.
FYI plural of millennium is millennia
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So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!
Amazing song. Link for reference:
This is an approximation, right? Because there’s no giant cosmic mirror that lets us see our galaxy from far away like this?
See the text in the bottom left of the image.
Just send a drone above the Milky Way and take a picture
200 light years radius is for radio signals to reach someone. 100 years radius for possibly receiving a signal back.
And that is if they received our signals, are able to identify that they are artificial signals out of the background noise of the rest of the universe because the signal degrades and gets weaker as the broadcast expands, they decide to send a reply back (even though they just recieve chatter at that point, not intentional communication to them), and then actually sends us a signal back. It’s no wonder that hasn’t happened yet.
There’s around 10-15,000 stars in a 100 light years radius. The chance that any of those stars have habitable planets with intelligent life with the technology to receive and send radio signals and is listening for extraterrestial signals and can discern those broadcasts from background noise and would reply to chatter… that’s a small chance. For context, we have only been explicitly listening for and sending signals intended for extraterrestrials for 64 years ourselves, so an identical civilization 100 light years away that received and replied to us immediately would still have 36 years of transit left on their reply.
200 light years radius is for radio signals to reach someone. 100 years radius for possibly receiving a signal back
So I have more bad news, the strength of our radio signals is not very strong either so by about 20ly, they fade into background noise so no one would be able to pick them up at all. (could be a lot less than 20ly too, possibly 5 ly depending on the signal)
Never give up! Never surrender!
Yeah I figured that that distance was wishful thinking.
Sadly
What’s also neat, is that this diagram won’t need updating any time soon. Maybe in a hundred years, we can swap the 2 for a 3 in the label. 🥴
Apparently “the first audio radio broadcast of voice and music occurred on December 24, 1906, when Canadian-American inventor Reginald A Fessenden transmitted from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. This historic transmission, heard by shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic Coast, included Fessenden playing the violin solo of ‘O Holy Night’ and reading from the Bible, marking the beginning of amplitude modulation (AM) broadcasting”.
I wonder if that’s what aliens would hear as the first sign of humans?
the first audio radio broadcast of voice and music occurred on December 24, 1906
And the strength of that signal would have been so weak that even at a distance of only 5ly (maybe less), background noise would drown it out completely.
No one knows we are here.
Further than I would have guessed!
It’s not the black square, it’s the tiny blue dot in the black square.
I’m aware. It’s still further than I would have thought
only 99,800 years to go. optimism!
*299,800
*width of milky way end to end
Little blue dot…of radio waves, lol.
True, but somebody could do a cool count-up “clock” like the “debt clock” that would count the stars that have heard our transmissions, so far.
Call the start 1926, though we had some largish transmitters earlier. By '26, I think they were all over the world, broadcasting every direction.
So call it 100ly, and get a count, then advance by 1ly/yr. The number of stars would go up as the cube of time.
“I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to any surviving Autobots taking refuge among the stars: We are here. We are waiting.”
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