I’m not certain why we’ve seen no evidence of alien civilizations. One good guess is that the speed of light really can’t be broken, so to have a civilization out there means very slow transit. But if that were true, why isn’t the sky lit up with old radio messages? Or maybe there’s just something better than radio. I don’t believe that technology runs away in every case and destroys intelligent life. But perhaps there’s some kind of technological threshhold before interstellar spaceflight which constitutes a transcendence, as in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and other far-flung sf epics.
I do think that there’s at least a chance that a lifeform bent on destroying all competition is the dominant entity in the galactic neighborhood. Cheery thought, but wouldn’t they be the most likely to survive? In a very short time, we’ve dominated and subverted every other lifeform on our planet. And we’re not even evil. Heh.
Enjoy nature while you can, kids
As technology becomes more advanced, and take-up increases, people in general become more apathetic, frivolous, and ineffective. The average person either doesn’t care about anything, is obsessed with something pointless (scientology, celebrity, Twilight, lolcats, computer games etc) or expends their energy ranting on the internet, rather than actually doing anything.
By the time intersteller travel becomes feasible, the general response will be one of mild curiosity, but total disinterest in actually undertaking the necessary exertion to do anything about it. They’ll just show a re-run of ‘Avatar’ on 3D TV, followed by all the Alien movies, which will cover the basic spectrum of outcomes, rendering further investigation unnecessary.
My understanding is that most of *our* radio signals are so weak that you’d be lucky to get ‘em from Pluto, let alone further out. There’s no reason to assume that other civilizations have better communications than we do.
Nope. Radio waves DO reach much further than Pluto, they just disperse and lose the “message”. So you wouldn’t any good tv show from the 50′s there, but you could backtrack the signal to its source, which is what the (serious) scientists mean when they talk about finding “alien comunications”. Of course we don’t want to actually record them and decipher them. What for? We would never get any meaning from them. Bear in mind that almost all recoveries of lost languages have been made from a certain “intermediate” source, like the Rossetta Stone. Actually finding a “code” that allows to decipher a language is about impossible, unless it’s a special kind of communication, like military instructions or somesuch. But poetry? Never.
The real issue is, of course, time. The universe is relatively young, and the posibilities for a planet to develop life at this point in time, let alone intelligent life, are very dim. We could say that Earth was “lucky”, and that it is in fact very possible that it is the only planet with life, at least in this galaxy. So far of course; it is sure to happen again somewhere, but it’s still a long ways in the future, and by then, life in this small corner of the universe will be very much extinct.
You don’t need to be so pessimistic about it, Time–how do you know we won’t just spread out and go on?
Rocketman, have you looked at NASA’s budget recently?
We might have a hope of spreading out when we stop spending so much of our resources and manpower killing each other here.
@DMG
I don’t think that will happen. There will always be too many groups which see the extermination of all different thinking people as the most important task in front of them (look at the massacre in that church in Baghdad). We will probably have killed the heck out of ourselves before science comes up with a way of traveling at significant sub-c speed.
Remember also that there is likely to be only a thin shell of dense radio waves (the heyday of radio and radio-television) followed by a more sparse layer (the post-radio-television era, with radios still around) and finally only a few scattered blips of radio transmission (anything where it’s still easier to broadcast via radio than satellite or cable). If not for the ubiquity of car radios, and the expense and limited regulation when it comes to satellite radio, I would have expected us to have passed right through the second layer and into the “scattered blips” stage.
“We’re gonna go to Mars, and then of course we’re gonna colonize deep space with our microwave hot dogs and plastic vomit and fake dog shit and cinnamon dental floss and lemon-scented toilet paper and sneakers with lights in the heels. And all these other impressive things we’ve done down here.
“But lemme ask you this: what are we gonna tell the Intergalactic Council of Ministers the first time one of our teenage mothers throws her newborn baby into a dumpster, huh? How are we gonna explain that to the space people? How are we gonna let ‘em know our ambassador was only late to the meeting because his breakfast was cold and he had to spend half an hour punching his wife around the kitchen? And what are they gonna think when they find out it’s just a local custom that over 80 million women in the third world have had their clitorises forcibly removed in order to reduce their sexual pleasure so they won’t cheat on their husbands?
“Can’t you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up?”
– George Carlin