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VendaGoat t1_jd0ya39 wrote

I didn't have to read a god damn bit of this to answer you.

My person, can WE travel across the galaxy to other planets in our lifetime?

Do we have that tech?

No, no, we don't.

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Devil-sAdvocate t1_jd1hv5e wrote

Exactly. No one thinks all intelligent life is more intelligent than us, they think any that has managed to travel to earth would be, and probably so regardless of how long it took them to get here.

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[deleted] t1_jd0y0k8 wrote

[deleted]

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd0yd42 wrote

I feel that's completely fair for us to think that way, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to think of intelligent aliens that way when not even other intelligent human species took the same path we did.

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reddit455 t1_jd0z6b9 wrote

>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"

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> 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.

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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?

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

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd108tt wrote

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.

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srstable t1_jd198si wrote

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.

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onlycodeposts t1_jd10zvr wrote

We don't.

I've read tons of stories dealing with alien encounters where the aliens are less advanced.

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Aardvark318 t1_jd1glzf wrote

If they're less advanced, how'd they get here? I'd love to see some of your sources.

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd11602 wrote

Could you send them forward? That sounds interesting but I'm assuming this is humans meeting aliens so Avatar is probably one example.

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ZylonBane t1_jd1puyl wrote

>Avatar is probably one example

You're not sure if Avatar is an example of humans meeting a less-advanced species?

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SirHerald t1_jd0zjb8 wrote

Any aliens able to travel to earth will be more technologically advanced than us.

They didn't do it in horseback

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd10ayo wrote

Sure, but we're assuming there are any aliens who can travel to Earth.

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Sunnyjim333 t1_jd14po4 wrote

There are documented UAPs (the tic tac videos) of things traveling at 50,000 mph and doing right angle turns. Diving into the sea and not making a splash. It's not the USA, Russia is using 50 year old tanks and 80 year old rifles. China just figured out how to make ball point pens. Maybe the Sentinelese?

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tenticularozric t1_jd1pw52 wrote

How do you know they aren’t fake, or disinformation, or misinterpretation of information? Because “highly official” Air Force guys say so? The whole recent wave UAP shit is suspicious af and more than likely “not aliens” and just some US government bullshit distraction stuff.

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Sunnyjim333 t1_jd34z54 wrote

Ahh, good point. All one can do is live our life, tell the people you love that you love them and be kind. Be well.

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Paradox_Dolphin t1_jd14wfk wrote

Yeah, you're totally right. Also, it doesn't require civilization or industrialization to become space fairing. Imagine this concept:

A type of life that isn't intelligent to our understanding. They're sort of like lichen, so a lot of symbiosis with other species to create one whole. Together, over millions of years, they build massive biological structures that contain entire ecosystems and platform up to the edge of their atmosphere. (perhaps they grow towards light)

In the ecosystems on the edge of their atmosphere, their life has evolved to survive in hard vacuum, high radiation environments.

Their planet gets hit by an asteroid, sending bits of the structure out into space. Space-faring life, no civilization. (this is like the panspermia argument, except it'd be an entire complex ecosystem drifting through space instead of a few micro-organisms)

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd15ls9 wrote

That would be very interesting, although how could we communicate with them? Would they even know we're here? Would we even know they're there?

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meat_popsicle13 t1_jd18h2p wrote

Maybe caring about those questions is a human preoccupation. Space lichens might just enjoy the sunlight and the peace of the hard vacuum. Questions are a plague of the brained.

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mikeholczer t1_jd1bb4q wrote

Because we have no means of ever communicating with one’s that haven’t, so they might as well not exist to us.

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd2caen wrote

So should Neanderthals and Homo Erectus not exist to us?

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mikeholczer t1_jd2e20d wrote

They have ways of communicating with us through the fossils and artifacts they left behind.

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MrBean1512 t1_jd1gmn8 wrote

Short answer is that we don't assume that. Not sure if you've heard of the fermi paradox but the solutions proposed to that seem pretty relevant to what you're asking here.

Long answer is simply that we don't think that but that our discussions typically revolve around advanced civs because they pose the most interesting and relevant discussions to our world today. We only talk about more advanced civs because the types of aliens relevant to our own interests and security would probably be advanced. A hunter-gatherer civilization probably wouldn't be a threat, we wouldn't be able to communicate with them from long distance, and they wouldn't visit us here on earth so we just don't talk about them as much. Scientifically speaking, aliens could be anything, but we just don't know. Your discussion above is one of many possible conditions of extraterrestrial life.

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DolorisRex t1_jd0yocw wrote

We can't describe civilizations we can't imagine, so we create stories similar to what we know.

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd0zizu wrote

That makes sense, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to assume alien species behave the same way we do.

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DolorisRex t1_jd0zt5v wrote

And in reality, they very likely wouldn't. But until we make contact with an alien culture and learn to understand it, we're limited by what we do understand.

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lost_in_life_34 t1_jd0z0zb wrote

It’s possible since all our tech advances have come because of outside stresses

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Ok_Meaning_2536 t1_jd0z8h7 wrote

I think the discussions usually revolves around aliens being here. Were just now barely going back to our own moon. So if there here..... They're crazy advanced. As far as aliens on other planets , in other stat systems. Can't really make an assumption. Could be anything there

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ttkciar t1_jd101o4 wrote

I will add to this that the lifespan of a civilization after its industrial revolution might be quite short.

Our own industrial revolution has given rise to two existential crises so far -- the threat of global thermonuclear war, and the threat of climate change. The first seems to be behind us, mostly, maybe, but there were some really close calls during the Cold War. We came this || close to going out forever. The second has yet to fully play out.

Those are just the existential crises which have emerged in the 260 years of industrialization, which in the cosmological timeframe is less than the blink of an eye. If we survive this one, there will doubtless be more.

For all we know, all civilizations in the galaxy follow the pattern of a long pre-industrial existence (3.4 million years, in our case), followed by a very short industrial period, ending in annihilation.

If that's typical, then technologically advanced civilizations would only account for about 0.008% of all alien civilizations.

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd10gwi wrote

Or perhaps almost no other intelligent alien species go through this process of "civilisation". Consider other intelligent human species and how they didn't have an agricultural revolution or civilisation. If Homo Sapiens hadn't arisen, would we be a planet with no intelligent species?

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JimmiRustle t1_jd14ifz wrote

To be fair most aliens come from places that are much worse off but that’s mainly due to poverty

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s1ngular1ty2 t1_jd14j4r wrote

It's wishful thinking. We think we will progress a lot further than we have and expect other races to have also.

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd15f66 wrote

Do you think we're near the end of technological progress?

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s1ngular1ty2 t1_jd18y5b wrote

No but the gains we have left won't be things that people assume are possible like faster than light travel, faster than light communication, easy space travel, etc. All this stuff will remain super hard to do or impossible.

We will likely get better computers, communication technology, telescopes, better power sources, better computer learning, maybe AIs, faster travel across earth, but that's about it.

Going out of our solar system or between galaxies is never likely to be a thing that people will do.

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd2c3vb wrote

Yeah, that makes sense to me. Hence why need to look after this planet and take climate change seriously.

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ricardo9505 t1_jd14qio wrote

You're missing a few key possibilities. Travel I'm space, why? Explore, conquer or survival due to lack of resources on home planet. Also if we did discover life on a other planet who knows what it will be. I'm sure there are planets with living microbes and bacteria, hell they survive near volcanoes here on earth. Possibly more advanced civilizations. If they're exploring I would imagine there's a possible unity among beings on their planet , some sort of peace to collectively use ideas and resources for the betterment of their species, existence.

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd15dan wrote

But then again, other human species had the potential and didn't take it, so why do we assume intelligent alien species would?

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imagicnation-station t1_jd1byqx wrote

I see what you're saying, and it does make sense.

However, think of the great achievements made during the Greek, Roman, Egyptian empires, as well as the Chinese Dynasties, etc. And now add to that, people like Galileo, Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, who added so much to science without an industrial revolution.

Beings with more intelligence would arrive at those mathematical principles that Newton arrived much faster perhaps? I am sure there might be other life forms out there much smarter than us, and that alone perhaps could make an industrial revolution irrelevant for their space exploration.

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd2c25m wrote

Except once again, we had Neanderthals and Homo Erectus who were close to or as intelligent as us, and we have no evidence of them being technologically advanced or contributing to science.

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imagicnation-station t1_jd39e29 wrote

I don't see how this is relevant. You were talking about the "industrial revolution" specifically being a factor for other alien species to have similar or more advanced tech than us.

The idea is that other alien species would reach our level of intelligence or greater. And regardless of an industrial revolution, technology would come about because of intellectual achievements similar to the ones I mentioned here on Earth (Isaac Newton, Galileo, etc).

Or, based on your neanderthal/homo erectus comment, is your question that other alien species can't and won't reach our level of intelligence (or greater) at all?

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd4tjku wrote

No, it's whether they even want to.

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imagicnation-station t1_jd4vfdv wrote

That's still a poor comparison.

I hope you understand that us (modern humans), neanderthals and homo erectus, during the cavemen era, none contributed to science. Not because they didn't want to, but because they didn't have enough time.

It took modern humans from cavemen times to 1700 C.E., for someone to come up with calculus. Neanderthals and Homo Erectus didn't have that time, not to mention, Homo Erectus was much less intelligent than us.

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jilljackmuse OP t1_jd5s12t wrote

Neanderthals have existed longer than Homo Sapiens have. You're assuming that the path we took is a normal and expected path. Why?

The way I see it, the path we took was very unlikely and most humans during the "cavemen era" did not agree to it considering we find evidence of "civilised" humans replacing and subsuming most hunter-gatherer human groups throughout the past 10k years, like how Middle-Eastern Neolithic farmers migrated to Europe and almost entirely replaced Western European Hunter-Gatherers and turned them into second-class citizens in the societies they created. Due to this, most biggest ancestral influence of Europeans comes from these Middle-Eastern farmers and not the indigenous Western European Hunter-Gatherers. These farmers were so influential, they're responsible for giving Europeans very pale skin (in comparison to the dark-skinned WEHG) and advanced (for its time) agriculture. And it wasn't just in Europe they did this, they also went into North-East Africa and Ethiopians/Somalis/Eritreans are about 40-60% Western Eurasian in genetic heritage.

If humans were more solitary like Neanderthals, then perhaps our agricultural and "civilised" ancestors would have stayed in small groups which would prevent civilisation that would could allow calculus to be discovered/invented (depending on your perspective of mathematics). But they didn't, they were known for having large tribes, large-scale migrations, trade routes that went across seas, tribal alliances to take over other human groups and then eventually agriculture and civilisation. I don't see this as part of what makes us intelligent because Neanderthals may have been as intelligent as us and yet they stayed in small groups and everything they made came from the local environment.

Also, Homo Erectus may not have been exactly as intelligent as we are, but they were still quite intelligent and they've existed far, far longer than we have with similar bodies that could allow tool-making and potentially language. They could still have come up with agriculture and civilisation and metal-working, but they didn't. Did they really not have enough time, or did they just not want to?

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imagicnation-station t1_jd850qa wrote

I am not assuming anything, but you're still proving my point.

The original point was that alien life with intelligence would need something like the "industrial revolution", but now you're talking about Middle Eastern Neolithic farmers who migrated to Europe.

The point regarding Neolithic farmers, that is just based on intelligence, and understanding to work as a society. This can easily be achieved by other intelligent alien life.

Another thing that you keep assuming is that, people without better clothing, getting sick from curable illnesses, without simple technology that could make their lives easier, didn't create better clothing, medicine, simple technology because they didn't want to, as opposed to just not being able to (due to not having enough time).

Why didn't Zorg come up with Algebra? Because he didn't want to, or is it because he was too busy hunting and taking care of/protecting his family?

Also, you have to realize, that those who contribute to knowledge, are very few, especially in the beginning. There was 1 Isaac Newton out of millions at that time. There was 1 Galileo out of millions at that time. It would require 1 out of millions and perhaps more for Neanderthals since they weren't living in civilizations.

So, now that we have calculus, because 1 person came up with it, and now is being taught in colleges/universities all throughout the world... would you say that before Newton came up with calculus, let's say the ancient Greek or Egyptian civilizations, would you say that the ancient Egyptians, who used lots of math, just didn't "want" to come up with calculus? Or would you say that humans didn't have enough time yet for that 1 person to come up with calculus?

So, this is why when you say, "Neanderthals didn't want to do X", it doesn't make sense, when the reality was that they just didn't have enough time like Egyptians and calculus.

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ZylonBane t1_jd1q3ct wrote

>Why do we assume aliens have similar technologies or more advanced technologies than we do?

We don't assume that.

What goofy-ass sources gave you that impression?

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ka_tet_of_one t1_jd12mc9 wrote

I am sure of a few things.

We are not alone in the universe.

I am sure that civilizations have risen and fallen everywhere. There are some places where unicellular life is just beginning, some places where life has just begun to emerge onto land, somewhere there are people who are the equivalent of us currently and doing the exact same thing, and somewhere is 100K years ahead technologically.

There is also life that we can't explain. Silicon based, gas based, life on a subatomic level.

There is life that we can't see. They exist in infrared or ultraviolet. They exist in gamma. Perhaps in radio waves.

There are beings of light, beings of time, beings who live on a scale that we can't even comprehend.

There is also a multiverse where infinite yous are doing slightly different things at slightly different times, where the differences create an entirely new timeline for that particular you.

There is also somewhere where other you and other me are having this exact same interaction.

I think we are all too far apart in spacetime to interact. We may find unicellular and bacterial life in our system, maybe even fish-type life on Io or Ganymede. I hope so.

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