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redonihunter350 days ago

It is not faith. It is numbers.

The Fermi paradox is based on assumptions  and those assumptions narrow the question down quite a bit. It basically is: are there colonizing and expanding civilisations in our galaxy that started doing this some million years ago. Of course not, because  they did not colonize earth.  It only becomes a paradox if you assume space colonizing intelligent life is the norm and life is so common that those civs spawn near each other.

There are at least 100 Billion galaxies that we can see. Even if you postulate that life is so rare, that only 1 in 100   Galaxies has 1  planet that evolves live, you still have a billion tries to evolve intelligence - in the part of the universe that is visible to us. And the current data and lab experiments point to a very much higher chance as 1 in 100 galaxies .  The current estimate for earth size planets is 16% per sun. Even if you shave that number for habitable and water and such, as soon as you have organic chemestry happening for a few hundred million years, there will be cells.

The universe is just too big to assume we are alone, but since it is so big, we also might be alone in our neighborhood - yet. And of course, intelligence is not necessary for life, amobea do just fine. And technology does not automatically follow from intelligence, see elephants and octopus or even our cousins, the apes.

So yeah, I do think there is intelligent life out there and it is only a question wether we will see evidence any time soon or not. Best candidate apart from them knocking is atmosphere on exoplanets. But small exoplanets are hellish to detect, let along analyze their atmosphere.

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FearCode349 days ago
only 1 in 100   Galaxies has 1  planet that evolves live

That's way too opimistic and also you forgot the most important variable: time.

The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and life began 3.8 billion years ago, out of the 3.8 billion years of life we took 3.7999... billion years to evolve to inteligent civilzations, this means life took 73% of the whole universe life time to appear*, that's a huge amount, which points out that yes, life is indeed extremily hard to occour even considering the size of the universe.

*= I put an asterisk in that "appear" because I know life may have already appeared and died, which is pointed out in the great filter theory. Which also postulates that inteligent life strugges to exist for long period of times.

In short, did/will inteligent life ever exist(ed) in a time frame other than ours? OF COURSE. 

Does that mean, by any chance, that there could be another inteligent civilization besides us right now? NO, we still don't know about that.

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redonihunter349 days ago

Optimistic? That is quite pessimistic, by a couple of zeros.

Anthropocentric argumentation is flawed. But you can estimate chances for life by  numbers that do not depend on our existence. Scientists estimate that there are about 300 000 000 planets in the habitable zone around planets in our galaxy. They exist whether or not we do. Give or take a zero, does not matter.

There are lab experiments that try to simulate conditions on early earth. If you mix the the chemicals and stir, you get small lipid bubbles and amino acids. And they only mixed it obviously for less than hundred years and not for 100 000 000 years. If you can get cells from the makeup of chemicals, you will get cells. It is Murphys Law backward. Abiogenesis occurs because it can.  

People do not intuitivly grasp big numbers and chances. In the visible-to-us   universe, there are about 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 planets that are in a place around their star to have conditions that allow life as we know it.

One could shift the goal post and speculate, we might be the first techno civilisation in our galaxy.  The need for heavier than hydrogen elements certainly limits possible life for the first 10 billion or so years.

Probably we will be the aliens invading other planets.

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FearCode349 days ago

All experiments you described are for testing LIFE IN GENERAL, and I agree with the statement "there's life outside of earth", but not inteligent life, that we can't be sure.

Probably we will be the aliens invading other planets.

Yes that's what I believe too, hence why humans are more dangerous.

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redonihunter349 days ago


You are right that I describe conditions for life in general. But here come the numbers I said previously.   If the  base to start from is  so often reached, there is bound to bbe intelligence.  Oh, one can shift the goal post to whatever one likes. Even to humanoid. But once you have nerves that can react to stimulus, it becomes advantageous to  remember and predict. What ensues is what we call intelligence. It is a prediction machine based on previous experience.

It might just be some of those nieches, a species can gain access to. Like flight. Even mammals learned it. And the pterodactylus and the avian-ancestors independently achieved it. I do not even count insects, because they are so small, flight is almost free.

And we see this for intelligence as well. Talking about higher intelligence. Like tool using or even tool making. Some birds can do that and cephalopods are also very intelligent. It is not a mammal thing. There might even be an incomprehensible swarm intelligence in bees or ants.

But I think the arbitrary goal post would be technology that can lead to space  travel. But even here, the universe is very big. We know it can happen, so there is no reason to believe it is a singular event. Whatever unlikelyness you attribute to it due to lack of data, the universe is still quite big.

On the thought about dangerousness, I think, if the aliens would come to us to fight, they would be more dangerous, because they would leave the peacelovers back at home. We on the other hand do have them  still here. While we whine about our worst specimen, as a whole we have quite decent members. (And this was actually a "problem" in war, with soldiers intentionally missing when shooting. We do not like to kill very much. Some even so little that they turn vegan)

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FearCode348 days ago (2 edits)

Yes, the universe is big enough to have intelligent life, so that we've found billions of habitable planets out there as you said, at this point according to all this vast amount of possibilities we should've already found at least a single clue about another civilization elsewhere, but still no evidence, why? We don't know, thus the Fermi Paradox. 

Whatever unlikelyness you attribute to it due to lack of data

It's not lack of data, I already gave you two possibilities in my previous posts. One of each is the Great Filter, which points out that intelligent civilizations usually face catastrophes over period of times that annihilates all civilizations in that planet, be it nuclear war, global warming, asteroids collision, death of a star, and so on...

As for being dangerous, assuming they existed and they are militarily  more advanced than us, yes that's more dangerous, but my point is not a "if" scenario, my point is the likelihood of that scenario, and yes comparing the likelihood of human killing themselves and alien killing us,  humans are for more dangerous.

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redonihunter348 days ago

You are mixing two different things. It was claimed that we are alone or that it is probable that we are alone. Alone in this context means, we are the only intelligent species. At all.

I argued against that, because the univserse is big. And even if you guess very pessimistic, the numbers are against that proposition. We know that life can happen, we know that intelligence can happen. If it can happen, it will happen.

But the universe being big also means two other things. It could be that the next life bearing planet is far away. And that we would be unable to see it.

The only thing the fermi thingy shows, is, that there is not an expanding colonizing tech civ near to us in time and space to have colonized us. It is neither a contradiction nor a paradoxon.

But as I previously wrote, even if you would lower the chance for an intelligent    species down to 1% per galaxy, you would still have  millions of those species. And none might be in the nearest 50 or so galaxies, including our own. For all we know it even the colonizing thing    could be happening in Andromada but not  (yet) in the Milky Way .

In my opinion the biggest chance lowering thing is, that we are among the first, due to there not being enough heavy matter  for  rock planets to form.

So you can easily shift the goal post to, we might be the first intelligent species capable of leaving their planet.

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FearCode348 days ago (1 edit)
The only thing the fermi thingy shows, is, that there is not an expanding colonizing tech civ near to us in time and space to have colonized us. It is neither a contradiction nor a paradoxon.

The name is Fermi Paradox, so yes, there's indeed a paradox, and no it does not talk about expanding colonizing tech civ., it's way more flexible than that, it talks about any evidence of any (human comparable) intelligent life at any given past time, and yet we haven't found any, which contracts to your math, because you said 1% per galaxy, earth is only 0.00000000001% of the milky way so where are all the other 0.99999...% of intelligent life in our galaxy? We haven't found, thus the paradox.

I never said we're probably alone, I said we don't know if we are alone or not, thus things we know for sure are more scary, like us destroying our own planet.

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redonihunter348 days ago

Is this a translation issue?

There was the claim that we might be alone. I ramped up the pessimistic approach by claiming for the sake of argument a low chance of having 1 intelligent species per 100 galaxies.  That is the 1%. And even with that, there are over  100 Billion galaxies (in the visible-to-us part of the universe...). That is 100 with 9 zeroes trailing. I could cut off 6 more zeroes and there would still be 1000 intelligent species  with that pessimistic approach of 1 species per 100 000 000 galaxies. I am not talking about our Milky Way right now.

And given that we have 300 Million planets in our galaxy that could potentially have such life, it do be a overly pessimistic approach.

Is there anyhting in that that you do not understand or dispute? This has absolutely nothing to do with the fermi paradox. The universe is big.

And on a trivial level, yes, of course, we do not have proof. But if you were to gamble with a demon, that we are the only ones in the universe, would you bet a dollar or not. You might change your mind, if the bet was about the galaxy, or for a bubble with 1000 light years around earth. The chance for another intelligent species approaches 1, the bigger you make the bubble, and as I like to say, the universe is big. So big that any intuition fails.

----------------------------

The fermi paradox is precisly about colonizing expanding life. Only if you assume that this would be "normal"  (or at least a percentage of species would do that)   and  life is abundant you  can go back in time and ask, what would have happend a billion years ago, when such a species would have emerged in our galaxy. They could have colonized  the better part of the galaxy in that time till now. 

While you can use this to "prove" that it has not happened (duh), you can not infer from it, why it has not. And that includes the explanation that we are alone in the universe. You can't prove from nothing. This would be the same faulty logic as UFO believers use. They do not know what that thing glowing in the sky was, so it must have been aliens. You can't infer from non-knowledge*.  But you can speculate, of course.

My faforite speculation is, that in our bubble of reach we are simply the first.  Someone has to be.


-----------------------------------

* Technically, non-knowledge is not the same as having found nothing were you would be able to find something. Like, you searched all your pockets and did not find your phone, so you do can conlcude, that it is not in your pockets. But you can't conclude for another person that they do not have a phone, just because you could not search their pockets. We barely see the person, let alone, if they have pockets or how big they are or if a bulge in there would be a phone or something else. Or in other words, while we can  as of now detect some exoplanets, there would have to be extreme scenarios to be able to tell, if there is life on those. From the other side of the telescopes, maybe someon sees our star and say, wow, nice sun, heavy elements and all, pity all we can detect are several gas giants, lets point our precious telescope to more promising candidates.

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FearCode347 days ago
There was the claim that we might be alone

If you're translating the text then, yes it may be a translation issue, my replies are small, you can easily check that I never said we're probably alone or not. I actually didn't make any bold claim, all I said was we don't know anything about the existence of intelligent alien life yet, and all we know so far is that we are our own danger.

On the other hand you are the one making bold claims without proof, you literally said that there is intelligent alien life out there without proving it, so far all I've been answering you is: you're wrong: ECREE, thus we don't know about that. ECREE is the famous quote "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Probability alone doesn't prove anything, that's the Fermi problem in general, and you're falling for it.

You also literally said in one post above "1% per galaxy" which is very different than 1 every 100 galaxies, but I forgive you on that because you may have chosen the wrong words on that post.

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