reddit455 t1_jd0z6b9 wrote on March 21, 2023 at 1:09 AM

>What I'm saying is, perhaps we're the only intelligent species to have gone down this specific route of industrialisation to sending radio waves into space.

there are a lot more "perhapses"

> what if aliens simply aren't taking the same path we are (even though they may be as intelligent or more intelligent than us) and so that's why we haven't found any evidence; they're just not doing the same things as we are. If this is the case, then perhaps the nearest species that went a similar path to us is so far away and so uncommon that we may never know about them.

that is also possibly correct.

there must be tons of civilizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy.

...then where are they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life compared to the apparently high a priori likelihood of its existence.[1][2] As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."[3]

>Why do we assume

because it's all we KNOW.

we use radio, if ET uses radio, maybe we get lucky.

but since we have no idea what other means to employ - what can we possibly use other than that which we know?

they could just as easily not have eyes, ears or mouths.

jilljackmuse OP t1_jd108tt wrote on March 21, 2023 at 1:17 AM

And I agree that there must be intelligent alien species like us out there, but what I'm saying is perhaps they're just so rare, even rarer than Drake's Equation suggests because he didn't include what a species wants to do.

Did Neanderthals or Homo Erectus want to become a technologically advanced, "civilised" species? Did most hunter-gatherer humans choose this form of society or were they replaced or subsumed by human groups that did want to do this? Look at pre-historic Europe, Neolithic farmers were known for creating segregated societies and replacing entire areas with members of their own and leading to the near-extinction of Western European Hunter-Gatherers. And that's just one case. The Yamnaya people also replaced large parts of Europe. And that's just one small continent. This happened everywhere around the planet, but mainly with our species. If there weren't any groups of "civilised" humans or if those groups were defeated by hunter-gatherer humans, perhaps we'd be just like our ancestors were for 95% of our history.

Perhaps, intelligent aliens species just didn't go down the same path because they didn't want to.

srstable t1_jd198si wrote on March 21, 2023 at 2:24 AM

I mean, the adjacent line of thinking is "they didn't go down the same path and advanced faster than we have due to some other environmental influence or factor that we haven't encountered."

If your perhaps works, it works the other way, too.