Do you believe there is other Intelligent Life in the Universe

[Zora]

I guess a follow up question I should ask for everyone who said yes is whether you believe intelligence to build a technologically/cultural driven society is inevitable as long as there is life on a planet? Does evolution always result in intelligent beings?

This is a question that bugs me a lot too, but I'd answer no.

here's the thing, there's a legitimate question as to whether or not evolution "ends up" at intelligence in the human sense. Evolution is a blind process, and while natural selection gives the impression of some sort of purposeful process, all natural selection cares about is how well an individual succeeds at four f's, and well, intelligence doesn't seem necessary for that. And even supposing evolution itself wasn't an issue, there's a question of why we'd assume they discover the same technology we did. We're in the process of phasing out radio technology, is it that farfetched to assume another civilization on a completely isolated trajectory might skip radio technology altogether? I don't think it's that crazy of a thought.

[Sephex]

Who knows? It's not important to me. If there are aliens they are so advanced that they don't want anything to do with us. Hey you want to go hang out with a ton of ants? That's probably how they would feel about it.

Seriously, this is real life. A space faring race would have way more important things to do than bother with a low intelligence, volitale, and ugly race that we have going on this planet right now.

[Psychotic]

Yes. I also don't really believe the "humans are the real monsters!" trope. Yes, there's some truly atrocious things happening every day but how many days have you woken up to a peaceful and stable life? Admittedly this is a biased sample of affluent people who live in the west, but it's still worth something. Humanity is underrated.

[Foo]

Yes. I also don't really believe the "humans are the real monsters!" trope.

real_monsters.jpg

YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! AH, DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!

[Slothy]

Honestly, there's no real reason to assume that because a species may have achieved interstellar travel that they must be more enlightened, or moral, or whatever way you choose to describe it, than we are. I mean you could argue some relative stability on a planet would be required to get to that level of technology the way we did, but even if they were a race at peace with themselves, there's always rampant xenophobia for them to fall back on. Who's to say that they would even recognize a species like ours as life at all (or at least a comparable form of life), let alone as intelligent, sentient beings? They may believe their species is the only life with value and just start a genocide from one end of the cosmos to the other.

[Fox]

We're in the process of phasing out radio technology, is it that farfetched to assume another civilization on a completely isolated trajectory might skip radio technology altogether? I don't think it's that crazy of a thought.

And even if they didn't skip radio technology, we've had it for about a century and the time of the radio is already coming to a close. If other civilisations develop at a similar rate we could have received radio signals from hundreds of civilisations that we simply missed because we didn't have the capability to receive them when they arrived.

I guess a follow up question I should ask for everyone who said yes is whether you believe intelligence to build a technologically/cultural driven society is inevitable as long as there is life on a planet? Does evolution always result in intelligent beings?

Well, of the 8.7 million estimated species on Earth, so far only one of them has developed a technological/cultural society. Only a handful demonstrate anything like what we would call 'Intelligence'. And it took 5 mass extinctions before we reached this point. So I wouldn't say I think it's inevitable, no. But I do think that - given enough time - at least one species dominating through intelligence is fairly likely. However that time period is probably truly immense.

While I do think there is probably other intelligent life in the universe, a combination life friendly planets like Earth being rarer than we generally imagine, and development into intelligent life being less likely than we imagine, I expect the number of worlds that harbour meaningful life is very small. Planets capable of supporting very simple life that can cope with extreme conditions are probably common, but as soon as that life becomes multi-cellular I expect that number plummets to a truly tiny fraction.

[Noct]

I think there is.

We just don't see it because space is an incredibly big place. We have trouble monitoring our own solar system; monitoring the entire galaxy for signs of intelligent life is simply beyond us. Plus even if they do have FTL travel, there is no guarantee they are anywhere close enough to us for it to make a difference. Traveling at twice the speed of light doesn't mean much when you have tens of thousands of light years to cross.

And if FTL travel does exist, it could easily force them to rely on something other than radio waves and pulses of light for communication. They could easily have a satellite in the Oort Cloud broadcasting as loudly as possible without us knowing it's there because we are not listening for the right signals.

We also might just be in a dead zone, where civilizations don't generally flourish much and life-spawning planets are unusually rare. So aliens out there, but they don't bother to come here because they have no reason to even bother looking.

There are any number of reasons why there might be a lack of detecting alien life beyond it not being out there.

[Sephex]

Yes. I also don't really believe the "humans are the real monsters!" trope. Yes, there's some truly atrocious things happening every day but how many days have you woken up to a peaceful and stable life? Admittedly this is a biased sample of affluent people who live in the west, but it's still worth something. Humanity is underrated.

I respectfully disagree. Humanity is worthless garbage. The moment we go extinct the entire universe will breathe a sigh of relief.

[Bubba]

I really don’t understand how FTL travel could ever work. Travelling that speed would just kill you, surely. You can’t account for random space debris in your way and unless you’ve got some ultra-high def 4K force field on the front, you’re doomed.

I think Holly from Red Dwarf said it best

”Look, we’re travelling faster than the speed of light. That means by the time we see something, we’ve already passed through it. Even with an IQ of 6000 it’s still brown trousers time.”

B0E07580-B962-443A-A4BD-4EB8AC2FBE83.jpeg

[Noct]

I really don’t understand how FTL travel could ever work. Travelling that speed would just kill you, surely. You can’t account for random space debris in your way and unless you’ve got some ultra-high def 4K force field on the front, you’re doomed.

Space debris wouldn't be your biggest worry by far. At FTL speeds, colliding with light would be lethal. Jumping to FTL without some kind of photon shielding would be instantly and explosively messy. Any FTL travel would likely require either warping space and time in such a way as to avoid light and debris, travel through other physical dimensions, or forming some kind of field to protect against photon collisions.

The photon shielding would be interesting; properly designed, it could "catch" photons and effectively form a shield of light around the ship that serves to protect it from debris and other light. The result of this would be any ship leaving FTL travel would be particularly bright as the photons peeled off it once it exited. From a distance, this might even resemble a wheel of light in space, depending on the width of the protection field compared to the width of the ship.

Of course, colliding with some kind of large gravitational field would likely be instantly lethal no matter how much shielding you have. They would need some very advanced gravity sensors to avoid it.