Why Can't We See Evidence Of Alien Life?

http://www.33rdsquare.com/2012/03/why-cant-we-see-evidence-of-alien-life.html

by olalonde • 14 years ago

37 50 14 years ago

I've always wondered why humans are the only species on earth to build huge complex societies.

Why aren't there multiple species of intelligent life on earth? (yes some animals are pretty smart, but they don't build cars, make movies, have laws, etc.)

baddox2• 14 years ago

Perhaps multiple highly-intelligent species would be very unstable and likely to annihilate each other (at least if they both lived on land). Think about it: there's only one "superpower" right now.

eru3• 14 years ago

China?

Cushman2• 14 years ago

Humans didn't do any of those things for several hundred thousand years, either.

toast76• 14 years ago

It pretty much comes down to having thumbs.

gwern• 14 years ago

Intelligence is expensive[1], and there may be some sort of threshold effect. Let's ignore the last few centuries of Revolutions, and look at the longer scale. Humanity is recognizable back to 200k years or so; civilization in any sense goes back maybe 5k years. How successful was humanity's intelligence during those 195k years? Not very: humanity spread slowly, did not represent a huge population, and suffered many reverses. And that's not even getting into arguments about what the (extinct) Neanderthals mean with their larger brains.

[1] Metabolically and in other respects; if you doubt this, I've listed what I know about this in http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics and especially the footnotes & hyperlinks.

Cushman2• 14 years ago

> and suffered many reverses.

I think this is a crucial point. If all of humanity had been wiped out in a famine in Africa fifty thousand years ago, there wouldn't be anyone sitting around today wondering, "Why is it there aren't any civilizations?"

And there were probably millenia that went by when the odds of that happening dwarfed the possibility that we might survive long enough to develop a writing system.

blhack2• 14 years ago

Because we're the only ones with language. Language gave us a huge technical advantage over all of the other animals.

Typically, in species without language, it takes many generations for a "mutation"[1] to propagate across the species.

If I instinctually figure out a better way of hunting deer, which gives me an advantage over my competitors for mates, and I pass it on to my children, who pass it on to theirs, etc. eventually the new instinct will be present in most of the species.

(This is basic basic natural selection).

Language changed all of that. Now instead of waiting for offspring to carry a mutation, I can just tell people about the better way of hunting deer, they can do it, and they can tell people too.

Stuff spreads quickly. It makes humans able to evolve at a much, much, much faster rate than any other animal on the planet.

(And yes, really, humans are the only animals on the planet with language. Bird song, whale song, and tree-pheromones don't count.)

[1] In quotes because consciously iterating over a problem (like hunting deer) isn't a "mutation" in the classic sense.

lifeformed• 14 years ago

I guess the question is then: why are we the only ones with language?

joejohnson• 14 years ago

There were other species with language (Neanderthals, other proto-humans). Some of these species coexisted, and there is some evidence that they fought one another, and maybe killed each other off.

ComputerGuru• 14 years ago

>Because we're the only ones with language.

That theory is being steadily debunked. I cannot find the link, but I'm looking for it and as soon as I do, I'll post it - however, a very recent study involved showing dolphins in one aquarium a series of objects and recording the sounds they made when seeing them, then travelling to another aquarium hundreds of miles away, placing the objects in front of the dolphins, and playing back a recording from the earlier round. The dolphins, at a statistically-relevant exceedingly high percentage of the time, would then identify the object the recording was made in response to.

This link was posted in an HN comment maybe 3-4 months ago.

Other animals can communicate in front of each other (bees, elephants, etc.), but the ability to convey arbitrary messages to strangers is, I would say, the very hallmark of a language.

Edit:

Here we go:

* http://wakeup-world.com/2011/11/28/the-discovery-of-dolphin-...

In his bid to “speak dolphin” Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com, [...] designed an experiment in which he recorded dolphin echolocation sounds as they reflected off a range of eight submersed objects, including a plastic cube, a toy duck and a flowerpot. He discovered that the reflected sounds actually contain sound pictures and when replayed to the dolphin in the form of a game, the dolphin was able to identify the objects with 86% accuracy, providing evidence that dolphins understand echolocation sounds as pictures. Kassewitz then drove to a different facility and replayed the sound pictures to a dolphin that had not previously experienced them. The second dolphin identified the objects with a similar high success rate, confirming that dolphins possess a sono-pictorial form of communication.

That's the link I was referring to, and as far as I'm concerned, that's enough to treat dolphins as sentient beings.

Another HN link:

* http://current.com/community/91825903_scientists-say-dolphin...

In one study, [...] showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

[...]

In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.

After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learnt it from the former captive.

There are many similar examples, such as the way dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor.

Such observations, along with others showing, for example, how dolphins could co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat, have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.

What more do we need to stop being so arrogant as to think ourselves the only creatures on the planet capable of thinking, feeling, remembering, teaching, communicating, and being self-aware?

grepherder2• 14 years ago

Neanderthals? Yes with them our cousins there is the possibility of interbreeding having occurred, but most likely is that as a species as a whole they went extinct from competition. If even with our similarities and closeness there was enough competition to drive them extinct, I can hardly imagine any (land) species could have been thriving in coexistence with us.

pm90• 14 years ago

If I have to hazard a guess, I would say : learning

It is only humans that learn from their experience and pass it on. One generation teaches the next one what it learnt. If you sit still for a while and wonder just how we can make such complex things, its because we are building on the knowledge of those that came before us (I think Newton once said "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulder of Giants", which was a reference to Galileo, Kepler etc. all of whose work was important for Newton's own discoveries)

bane• 14 years ago

Because we aren't looking close enough yet. Reverse the question, an alien 200 light years from Earth, using technology at our current state-of-the art would likely not see any life on Earth either.

yanowitz• 14 years ago

The odds that we all evolved to that point of technology at the same time is tiny. It's far more likely that there are many civilizations in advance of us and far enough away that we'd detect something. Unless they already went quiet (deliberately or through extinction).

lisper• 14 years ago

Or because they plugged themselves into virtual realities that are more attractive to hang out in than physical reality.

rosebush• 14 years ago

Because they are hiding the evidence. They don't want us to find them. I don't blame them.

quandrum• 14 years ago

One argument I like is that alien civilizations are going to be either extremely more advanced than us, or extremely less advanced.

Human intelligence is only 5k years old, on a 4.5BB year old planet in a 14BB year old universe. Yet, our level of technological advancement means if FTL travel or communication is possible, we'll probably discover it in the next couple of hundred years, and we would probably get rid of the inferior EM waves as a medium.

How long would the average civilization be detectable by our current means under these conditions? Makes a needle in the haystack seem simple.

dctoedt• 14 years ago

> ...alien civilizations are going to be either extremely more advanced than us, or extremely less advanced.

Succinctly illustrated in http://xkcd.com/638/

evincarofautumn2• 14 years ago

Did you really mean to say that human intelligence began a millennium after the start of recorded history?

kamaal2• 14 years ago

I think by 'intelligence' he means intelligence required to make macro level impacts. Like traveling across oceans/seas, Living in mass organized colonies and cities, Math and things like that.

That sort of intelligence only developed recently(When compared on a time scale).

The earlier man had a pretty neat life, tending to food and rest and physiological activities all the time without having nothing much to worry about.

Its only when the Philosophers and thinkers started originating, did mankind get some direction to work towards.

batista2• 14 years ago

More like it he meant to give an order of magnitude correct answer, and could not care less about give or take 2-3 millennia.

lunaru• 14 years ago

Maybe we're galatic lottery winners wondering why no ones else has won the lottery? Our existence is a survivorship bias.

Also, take into account the possibility that other intelligent life might be more biological than technological (e.g. interconnected intelligence without technology like in Avatar).

Then factor in that intelligent life might be microscopic or just tiny.

It's really not hard to imagine that the search for alien life is a problem of asking a question for a rare/over-specified solution.

bluekeybox2• 14 years ago

> interconnected intelligence without technology like in Avatar

I have a feeling that the Avatar scenario is no more likely than tall blue-skinned humanoids. Our notion of intelligence pretty much defines it as collection of thought processes that end up manifesting themselves in the development of technology. Dolphins may be extremely intelligent on some scale unknown to us, but we don't observe them building submarines or decoding radio signals, so we don't consider them to be human-level intelligent. Similarly, to them, we may appear as these strange shore-bound small amphibious quadrupeds who carry various strange amulets on their bodies with which they do various strange things, all of them being of completely no use or interest to an average cetacean. I'm probably exaggerating cetacean intelligence a fair bit, but I just wanted to illustrate how closely our definition of intelligence is bound to the availability/use of technology.

grepherder2• 14 years ago

Yes, also yes to the exaggeration bit, but intelligence is just, well, intelligence. A complex "brain" can be about emotional depth, about being able to communicate that emotional complexity, it can be about processing senses in amazing ways or many other functions we may not even think of. That is just the complexity of a certain nervous system though, not intelligence per se, for us what matters is indeed problem solving capabilities which lead to technology.

mustafa0x• 14 years ago

> It's really not hard to imagine that the search for alien life is a problem of asking a question for a rare/over-specified solution.

Life is quite messy and obvious. It seems quite likely that traces would exist.

wunderland• 14 years ago

Aaah! Why did they show the beginning of the universe as God sneezing? I know this is for kids, so that's all the more reason why they shouldn't be including such nonsense like a god or religion in this video. That makes me angry.

carsongross2• 14 years ago

Lots of pat answers from the smart kids here at HN.

I dunno guys, maybe the universe is a lot stranger than we can get our heads around, and we should admit that we don't know.

cousin_it• 14 years ago

Embracing ignorance is not the right answer to ignorance.

For an example of a genuinely strange resolution to the Fermi paradox, see Paul Almond's "Civilization-level quantum suicide": http://www.paul-almond.com/CivilizationLevelQuantumSuicide.p...

carsongross2• 14 years ago

Admitting our own limitations in the face of a bizarre situation is not embracing ignorance.

There are a lot of scientistic answers in this thread that are as scientifically valid as "God created us uniquely in his own image". Admitting that would be a good first step.

MOAR DOWNVOTES!

maeon3• 14 years ago

1: We are unique in the galaxy because life is rare.

2: The galaxy is teaming with life, but just like a flower in the amazon rain forest is wondering why there is not life all around it, the flower simply lacks the basic tools necessary to find any evidence whatsoever of the lifeforms all around it.

3: Radio silence is required, as there is a bully in our solar system who sterilizes any life forms found. And as soon as we have the technology to broadcast our location, we will be extinguished by a process designed to keep this galaxy pure.

4: Life is right next to us, inside us, all around us. Just in alternate dimensions which make our galaxy look like a drop of rainwater. We just can't see it.

5: The human race is an experiment by a higher life form, and it's empty because it was designed to be empty. This one planet was seeded, and we are being watched.

6: DNA based life, like a virus, extinguishes all resources it can get it's hands onto, Humans will explode with productivity until we exhaust every resource available to us. We do not understand the word sustainable, even the green weenies acknowledge growth of O(n^n)

7: Humans are a weapon of mass destruction, and we have been planted, as a terrorist would plant a bomb in the other guy's house. We humans will consume every last calorie of energy from this universe. We are a weapon, and our growth is the explosion which will knock out the enemy alien.

8: When species get advanced enough to travel throughout the galaxy, we figure out that this isn't a universe at all, and we hack into the holodeck projectors in the wall and then forget about the useless projection that we call the universe.

9: The suns and phenomenon around us in the universe is an alien life form's abdominal fat, and we are bacteria who is growing inside it. As soon as we start consuming too much, demanding our life is more important than the natural decay of suns, the white blood cells will come to our planet and destroy us.

10: We will find life in other parts of the galaxy, as surly as the homo sapiens on the earth figured out that when you cross the great blue expanse, other strange cultures, much like our own, were growing there.

11: What we understand as the universe, with height width and depth, velocity, time, inertia and such, is a completely incorrect view of the universe. It's the same problem with how the flower sees the universe in terms of it's own life and needs. The flower only knows it's root structure and the properties of the ground, wondering why it doesn't find other flowers in its root structure. The flower simply cannot fathom that the life is actually touching it, around it, and inside it.

fpp• 14 years ago

A much simpler explanation ;-)

http://images.cryhavok.org/v/Calvin+and+Hobbes+-+Intelligent...

(Calvin & Hobbes: Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.)

acqq• 14 years ago

A bit of perspective:

Our technological civilization in the sense of being capable of wireless electromagnetic signaling exists only around 120 years -- it started only ten years before my granddad was born. 120 years is nothing compared to the existence of life on Earth -- at least 3 billion years: one part of 25 millions.

Only around seventy years the humanity also produces nuclear bombs. Now at this moment there are around 5000 actively deployed nuclear warheads in the world, waiting for a press of some button to fly to their targets, every one more orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_wea...

Now the oil reserves, if we continue only to use them without any growth (which is not what politicians and the electorate are used to expect) will last only for next 64 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves

How many years are left to the humanity to enjoy the possibilities of the electromagnetic communication?

We're sitting here discussing most of the time the solutions to the following big problems of humanity:

https://plus.google.com/117114202722218150209/posts/KhMRNmgG...

(the companies) "make these apparati that draw a box on somebody's computer screen. That person then types words into that box on their screen. Then, the Internet Startup uses some computer codes to copy those words onto somebody else's computer screen, so that other person can then read them."

eru3• 14 years ago

Why do you mention oil? Oil's useful for driving cars and flying planes, but we do not need to depend on oil for energy.

jcfrei• 14 years ago

so let's assume SETI is mostly looking for electromagnetic emissions as a trace for aliens. let's also assume that exchanging information via e.e. happens only during a very short timeframe for any given civilization (eg. ~200 years), because soon more advance communication methods arise (eg. quantum teleportation) and the communication via e.e. is left to a few nostalgic nerds (via transmitors far too weak to reach our galaxy). on a timeline of several billion years, this means that the chance that two civiliations are per chance roughly in the same state of development (eg. 200 years window of e.e. + the delay in lightyears for the emissions to reach our planet), is probably close to zero. (and this is probably true for any given technology).

at least that's my take on it. i'm pretty darn sure we're not the only ones out there.

cr4zy• 14 years ago

The probabilities all point to advanced life being close by, we just can't see it. Most likely because they don't want to disturb us. Like a lost tribe in middle of the Amazon, coming in to too close of contact with us would mean almost certain extinction.

Either that, or SETI is completely off.

ericb2• 14 years ago

I think SETI is horribly misguided. It may be there are other civilizations, but that they are smart enough to avoid each other.

I posit that the only aliens we want to meet are ones that are not interested in us. Any interest, given the likely difference in technological levels, is unlikely to end well for us. The book Guns, Germs, and Steel painted a not-so-rosy picture of the meetings of societies at even small differences of technological advances. These differences are likely to be magnified for races without a common ancestral history and similar starting point in time.

The wishful thinking of people hoping to meet alien civilizations includes assumptions like:

* Alien civilization began just like ours.

* Time passed.

* ????????

* Magically altruistic alien society arises.

If this is true, great. But do I want to bet humanity on it? Hell no.

nhaehnle2• 14 years ago

I don't want to discuss whether your pessimistic outlook is more realistic than an optimistic outlook. However, I'd like to point out that SETI isn't misguided in any case.

Heck, if your pessimistic outlook is correct, SETI is even more important, because it might provide the only early warning of an incoming invasion. That may not help in the end, but it's better than nothing.

ericb2• 14 years ago

I could be wrong on this point, but isn't the underlying assumption with SETI that when we listen that we will also respond?

kamaal2• 14 years ago

Why we can't find Evidence of Alien Life - We are not looking seriously. And that is because -

1. We waste far too much money on wars, weapons and fighting than what we should be spending on this sort of problems.

2. The pressing needs of human kind at this time are photo sharing apps and 'bird in pig' games.

3. No serious, I mean real serious intent on developing space travel, exploration and colonization.

4. Misplaced priorities, the people who can solve tough problems like educating kids, finding cures for diseases and space research are paid peanuts in comparison with people who are doing far easier jobs than them. There by scaring off more people working on those jobs.

5. Nation states must collaborate on working these kind of issues instead of developing weapons, wasting brain power, energy, money and resources to destroy each other.

Why Can't We See Evidence Of Alien Life?

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