There’s an entertaining article at Nautilus speculating on why we haven’t seen signs of intelligent alien life so far. Maybe they’re all dead:
The aliens may have found their grave. As we sweep the radio frequencies, we hear only noise; as we slew our telescopes, we see barren pixel after pixel. Is that because our fellow inhabitants of the galaxy have done themselves in, reducing their home planets to cinders? Is the night sky a charnel house hidden under a veil of tranquility?
Last year Jack O’Malley-James, an astrobiologist at Cornell University, and his colleagues Adam Stevens and Duncan Forgan published their analysis of this macabre possibility. Just as astrobiologists have started to look for possible biosignatures—evidence of life, such as water or oxygen in planetary atmospheres—they might also look for necrosignatures, the remains of annihilated civilizations. And if we ever do find them, it would not augur well for our own prospects, because what makes us think we could avoid the fate that befalls all other intelligent beings in the galaxy?
Another possibility, not original to me but in some ways even more disquieting than the idea that we’re the last survivors, is that we are the Ancient Ones—the most highly developed intelligent life in our part of the universe.
A gamma ray burst can ruin your whole (last) day.
Of course we could all be in a simulation, in which case the absence of evidence of aliens may be programmed in.
It’s a fun theory, and one which I’m incorporating in a book I’m working on. Essentially the idea is that advanced civilizations will eventually reach the point where they can create sophisticated simulations – video games but a century more advanced – with us as AI’s living within that simulation. Since an advanced race could create billions of sims the odds are that we are part of one of those rather than an ur-civilization on our own. As our games are 2-D – in other words ‘flatter’ than our own 3-D world – an alien race living in a universe with more dimensions could create a 3-D sim, or perhaps merely create the convincing illusion of a 3-D universe.
In which case we are exploring someone else’s imagined universe, and are likely to find only what they wish us to find. Might also explain why the apparent laws of space and time get so weird down at the quantum level. It might be the equivalent of looking really close at a TV show and discovering that Matt Lauer’s eye is really just some jumpy little dots.
or, this is crazy, maybe God created the universe out of excess zeal, the Bible is true, and we are the only ones He created in His likeness.
It doesn’t sound any crazier to me than alien created multiverses.
To get even more serious. I’ve begun to believe that our five senses are inadequate to explain what’s going on. Right at the level of trying to explain BLUE to someone born blind. I know humans will never stop trying, we can’t. But that is why faith to me is a matter of choice, It cannot be proven, it’s beyond us. But creation is amazing and beautiful beyond what it needs to be for a simple evolutionary, biological explanation of our being.
Yes, I know life is tenacious, some would say inevitable, in a carbon based world, but thats no reason evolution couldn’t stop at self replicating mold spores and instead go on to what we see today throughout the animal and insect kingdoms
Or maybe any beings smart enough to produce modulated electromagnetic radiation are smart enough to not pump an extra gazillion watts into the signal just so’s we can detect it.
Being created by God is no different than being a sim. God=Alien, same thing, some impossible-to-grasp super-being tinkers around and creates the universe. It’s the same story, just a bit more interesting and imaginative than the efforts of various wandering ‘holy men,’ self-appointed prophets and Galilean fishermen*. It’s almost a remake, only this time instead of a giant old white man with an impressive beard and a schizophrenic personality, we’re casting whatever alien race the special effects people can come up with.
*The Bible suffers from being a poorly-edited group project. Granted it has sold quite well – on the bestseller lists since the mid 15th century -but it really needed an editor and another couple of passes to make sense of the characters and their superpowers.
Roy Lofquist: Or maybe any beings smart enough to produce modulated electromagnetic radiation are smart enough to not pump an extra gazillion watts into the signal just so’s we can detect it.
That would work for a while, but energy and matter are fundamentals, and an advanced civilization will {presumably} use more and more energy and matter — tapping the entire energy output of stars, dismantling planets for raw materials, and so on. Along with exponential growth that would mean detection should be trivial.
Nor is light-speed a limitation. Once a civilization can convert water into fusion energy efficiently, they could colonize and expand exponentially across the Oort Belts between stars. Even if expansion were only at 1% of the speed of light, it would only take a few tens-of-millions of years to traverse the galaxy.
I prefer to think more conventionally.
We are one species of many groomed by advanced god-like aliens to battle for universal domination in a great game. Star Trek, Space Operas and 4X games are seeds to psychologically prepare our species and train us for the coming galactic war.
You heard it here first.
Andy- Kind of think Orson Scott Card beat you to it.
Steve
Steve,
I guess I should have read the whole series.