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Aliens likely won’t contact us for at least another 1,500 years.

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efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
L0st Id3ntity said:
Look up length contraction and consider relativity.
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That's not how relativity works.

The real reason is the study assumes a huge number of earth like civilizations scattered across the Galaxy, broadcasting simultaneously.
All together their broadcasts would have reached approximately half the Galaxy within 1500 years, according to the estimate.

See: www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/06/new-calculation-shows-well-make-contact-with-aliens-in-about-1500-years/


Edit: I should note that "huge number" is an exaggeration, as the article only assumes several hundred such civilizations over the 1500 year span.
 
L

Litan

Member
Bearjewpiter said:
I think that even if alien life did come through our solar system they wouldn't even look twice at us. If they have the capacity for interstellar travel, even in 1500 years we will look like ants compared to their level of technological progress. They'll probably soar right on past us to mine Venus and Mercury for fuel and leave again.
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People always say this and it sounds like such bullshit to me. Just because they're technological superior to us, we hold no interest to them?
When we start space travel, do you think we will do the same! Nah...we'll be excited as fuck to study or meet an alien civilization. See what their culture, food, life, architecture, history, etc. Is like.

Look at us. Ants ain't shit to us, but we studied them anyways and they're awesome.
 
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L0st Id3ntity

Member
F

Forerunner

Member
Q

qcf x2

Member
But are we decoding light waves into sounds? Seems to me the odds are solid that there were civilizations before us and there are some that are still around, and their signals would be everywhere in the galaxy by now. If they're out there, we likely aren't the first ones to use radio/TV signals.
 
F

FairyD

Member
They'll receive messages from earth 1500 years from now and then it will be another 1500 years until we receive the aliens return message.
 
E

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
qcf x2 said:
But are we decoding light waves into sounds? Seems to me the odds are solid that there were civilizations before us and there are some that are still around, and their signals would be everywhere in the galaxy by now. If they're out there, we likely aren't the first ones to use radio/TV signals.
Click to expand...
One of the estimates made by the researchers is that there have been no more than about 200 broadcasting civilizations in the Galaxy before us. I don't know how they arrived at that number, but when you consider that artificial radio signals can become too weak to detect at very large distances, along with the fact that advanced civilizations may broadcast in all directions increasingly less as time goes by, plus the fact that a majority of those 200 may have stopped broadcasting long ago, it's feasible that no alien broadcasts have been detectable in our vicinity during the last century.

Another thing, according to the gizmodo article, is that colonization of the Galaxy is not accounted for in this theory.
 
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Lovely Salsa

Banned
Spacefaring aliens is sciencefiction. Not going to happen. If there are, they are very very few so it wont matter in the end.

So many obsticles to overcome and even if they did that, why would they leave everything behind?
 
A

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Not that I think we're alone in the universe, but I wouldn't be surprised if intelligent civilization is rarer than people are imagining and/or that they occur infrequently enough to rarely overlap (e.g. perhaps its possible that other civilizations exist, but they're simply dead and new ones won't arise until we're dead).
 
G

Gnome Scat

Member
Good, all I want found before I die is the lowest form of life possible on another planet or moon. It's all the alien without all the colonization.
 
Lightning Count

Lightning Count

Member
By then humanity will reduced the world to rubble and what's left will resemble a post apocalyptic wasteland with only a handful of humans still around.
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
qcf x2 said:
But are we decoding light waves into sounds? Seems to me the odds are solid that there were civilizations before us and there are some that are still around, and their signals would be everywhere in the galaxy by now. If they're out there, we likely aren't the first ones to use radio/TV signals.
Click to expand...

We are. That's radio.

The downside is after enough distance, the wave is so spread out it's not distinguishable from the background 'noise'.
 
C

CitizenVectron

Member
Does this article take into account that TV and radio signals are so weak that they are barely detectable even at the edge of our own solar system? As radiation (radio signals) travel outward in a sphere, they drop in power immensely (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law).

Because of this, our normal signals won't even show up on someone else's scans, even a few light-years away. What would be visible would be radar sweeps (due to power), laser signals, etc.
 
T

Toxi

Banned
Fermi's Paradox is a lot less troubling when you remember space is big and the speed of light is not a suggestion but an actual limit. The reason we haven't met anything isn't because there's nothing out there; it's because it's incredibly unlikely for anything out there to reach us and vice versa.
 
T

tearsintherain

Member
Yeah, the article doesn't really make much sense. If aliens were out there broadcasting their own I love Zorg TV show, we would need to build a receiver like the size of a planet to receive and decode it.

Plus the period in which a civilization "radiates" signals like that outwards is fairly short, already in a hundred years we have moved from broadcast TV to mostly cable/satellite TV and will be moving to pretty much all tightband data transmissions within this century. So the window in which data can even be captured is fairly small.

Finally the Von Neumann uncontrolled replication issue - we are pretty close to launching tiny, tiny robots that can sail to hundreds of stars and beam back scientific data (Russian Billionaire and Stephen Hawking started an initiative to do just this a few months ago). Its probably 50-200 years from that to launch drones that can reach a target environment, deconstruct some asteroids and make a million copies, and launch those million copies into another thousand stars.

Any civilization that does this would have littered the entire galaxy within a million years. So... why isn't there the equivalent of space drone garbage all over our solar system? It could be uniquely human to want to explore the entire galaxy, of course.
 
S

SpaceWolf

Banned
capitalCORN said:
Lol, keep moving that goalpost. There are no aliens, only God.
Click to expand...

Don+t+fall+for+it+_24da37ce0060749a2308b49b7643e7e4.gif
 
SJRB

SJRB

Gold Member
If I was an alien species and stumbled upon this piece of trash I'd make a hard right at Uranus and just report back that there's no intelligent life in this quadrant.
 
B

Bearjewpiter

Neo Member
Drazgul said:
Ants, you say?

3206.jpg
Click to expand...

To shreds you say.

Lanthi said:
People always say this and it sounds like such bullshit to me. Just because they're technological superior to us, we hold no interest to them?
When we start space travel, do you think we will do the same! Nah...we'll be excited as fuck to study or meet an alien civilization. See what their culture, food, life, architecture, history, etc. Is like.

Look at us. Ants ain't shit to us, but we studied them anyways and they're awesome.
Click to expand...

There's really not a good reason why they wouldn't take notice of us and maybe they would expend their resources to study our planet but more likely than not, the ship will want to be as light as possible so any accidental first contact would be unlikely. They may send a probe from their planet but that would take time and resources to study something that is probably similar to however many species exist in the universe.

Kurdel said:
Thst reaction depends on how comon sentient life is in the cosmos, not on their technological progrss.
Click to expand...

This is a problem that won't be solved for a while. There is an absolute possibility that intelligent life exists in very isolated pockets throughout the universe. They may be fascinated by us and try to introduce themselves. This is not my belief but it is possible. I can't honestly say that with all the vastness of space and throughout the millennia that I believe we are unique or infrequent.

The reason I brought up the technology aspect is that in all likely hood the alien life that discovers Earth will be beings that have modified their selves to be androids essentially. They would need to live a long time to get most places and it's possible they could adapt their culture to space life so they could continue without the need for mechanical enhancements but we know humans wouldn't do well living in space for long and it would cause all kinds of problems with childbirth. It would be more likely that they'd basically be The Borg, they would probably be able to share knowledge and transfer to a new body when necessary.

And just like in Star Trek they may also be following their version of the prime directive. They probably realize that most species would panic and revealing themselves would do more harm than good for our culture. This is of course speculation and just my take but I still say that if they found us they probably wouldn't spare us much thought.
 
Y

yanipheonu

Member
It's actually kind of a neat idea that it isn't that were alone in the Galaxy, it's just taking a long time for them to contact us.

Like in 1500+ years the sky begins lighting up with distant messages. Interesting concept.
 
R

RedSwirl

Junior Member
I've thought through the Fermi Paradox several times and I personally think the two main problems are 1) the short amount of time we've been listening to and sending broadcast signals, and 2) the idea of just how "alien" aliens might be.

On point one: If aliens had come here and left as recently as 15,000 years ago we'd have no way of knowing that today. Some hunter-gatherers might have freaked out but they'd have no way of writing it down. If aliens had come and gone a million years ago there would be no humans to find, only maybe some apes walking on two legs. Add to that the fact that we've only been listening for broadcast signals for under a century. Sufficiently advanced aliens wouldn't even give a shit about radio signals. If aliens or probes had flown through the Solar System as recently as the year 1900 we wouldn't even have noticed. There's no way to know that aliens haven't been here a shitload of times.

Point two: The way we're even thinking about exploration and communication might just be a uniquely human thing. Live developing on other planets might just be totally outside our comprehension right now.

Edit: Prime Directive doesn't quite work out because all it take sis one rule-breaker to spoil the whole thing. Think about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. We're trying to Prime Directive them and it just isn't working.
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
RedSwirl said:
I've thought through the Fermi Paradox several times and I personally think the two main problems are 1) the short amount of time we've been listening to and sending broadcast signals, and 2) the idea of just how "alien" aliens might be.

On point one: If aliens had come here and left as recently as 15,000 years ago we'd have no way of knowing that today. Some hunter-gatherers might have freaked out but they'd have no way of writing it down. If aliens had come and gone a million years ago there would be no humans to find, only maybe some apes walking on two legs. Add to that the fact that we've only been listening for broadcast signals for under a century. Sufficiently advanced aliens wouldn't even give a shit about radio signals. If aliens or probes had flown through the Solar System as recently as the year 1900 we wouldn't even have noticed. There's no way to know that aliens haven't been here a shitload of times.

Point two: The way we're even thinking about exploration and communication might just be a uniquely human thing. Live developing on other planets might just be totally outside our comprehension right now.

Edit: Prime Directive doesn't quite work out because all it take sis one rule-breaker to spoil the whole thing. Think about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. We're trying to Prime Directive them and it just isn't working.
Click to expand...

An even creepier and sad thing that could have also happened is someone sent messages out to the galaxy but their planet got obliterated by the time we read the message.
 
K

Kai Dracon

Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
Article seems confused and all this still seems to really just be guessing in the dark. Articles like this rarely address problems like signal attenuation which means other intelligent life probably isn't ever going to see our television signals, and vis versa.
 
A

Alcoremortis

Member
Sometimes I wonder, what if we're the first? What if the reason we can't find anything is because all the other intelligent lifeforms are still in their Medieval time period or something?

It's probably better that we contact them first in any case. I don't want aliens bringing their alien diseases to our planet and wiping us out by accident.
 
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