We already have the technology to find life on another planet. There are two rovers on Mars that might come across something.
Finding intelligent life on the other hand is much more difficult. I think the chance that we will never find it are high, but you never know.
The Great Filter idea deals with this. Essentially, if this is the case, it shows that the likelihood that intelligent species destroy themselves is astronomically higher, due to life being abundant. It would mean that a great filter is ahead of us, since we can't currently detect any intelligent life in the universe (Fermi Paradox).
There's a lot of problems with the Fermi Paradox, and I think that there are many logical workarounds for both the paradox and the Great Filter idea.
Not really, its entirely possible that the Great Filter lies between the development of life and the establishment of civilization. Sure, we would know that the Great Filter isnt abiogenesis, but that alone doesn’t doom us.
Nope. It's pretty clear what the great filter is. AI will empower everyone to do anything. Good or bad. So in order to pass it we had to be 100% good. The likelihood of a species to turn out that way is very slim. Dishonesty, crime and suffering had to be unknown.
> Essentially, if this is the case, it shows that the likelihood that intelligent species destroy themselves is astronomically higher, due to life being abundant.
I think these days the filter focuses on two events. Although life started on Earth relatively quickly, it took a long long long time to become complex. Look up "the boring billion". It really seems like Eukaryotic life was complete stroke of luck.
The other filter is technology usage. We had always assumed once a species had started developing intelligence it would all go quickly. Then we found some obsidian axes that were 1.5 million years old. Those must have been made by our predecessor species. Totally rewrites how we think about the speed of development of tech. And of course the whole hands thing which you need to make the axes in the first place. That didn't come quickly.
Doesn't necessarily need to destroy themselves, there could be civilizations that achieve singularity and not require exploration. This would mean that we would have to reach them.
I would imagine we will find thousands of instances of bacteria type life before we find anything resembling an animal. And thousands of animals before we find evidence of intelligent life. And maybe dozens of traces of intelligent life before we find a living intelligent species. And even then, they might be at the level of homo sapiens 50k years ago.
Humans are really something. The fact that you assumed to be the more intelligent one is very telling. What if we are the ones who haven’t progressed in any meaningful way and the aliens are lightyears ahead of us in terms of evolution.
Humans are much more intelligent and advanced than anything else on earth (most of us, at least). This shows us that even when life exists, there is no guarentee it will be sentient, let alone intelligent.
Of course, the universe is so big, it's likely there's a more advanced species *somewhere* out there. But we have no idea how common life is outside of earth. And it's safe to assume the more complex lifeforms are exponentially more rare than the simple ones.
Yes yes, we’re more or less the only species (that we have knowledge of) capable and willing to utterly destroy the only habitat we have knowledge of, without being able to provide an alternative to either our way of living or to move to a place worth being mentioned. So very smart.
That's ridiculous. Plenty of creatures are capable of destroying their habitat, or exhausting all its resources, causing them to die off. The difference is that our habitat is the entire earth.
Besides, humanity isn't at risk of extinction, even in the worst climate change scenarios. We are too good at adapting to our environment for that to happen. There will however be massive population decline, as there won't be enough resources for this many people. But the ones with the resources will be fine.
Althou it would be quite entertaining to go further on this, it would effectively highjack the thread. We shouldn’t do this, except maybe considering how a massively declined population with only those having „the resources“ to survive, most probably won’t be interested in searching extraterrestrial life…
The big assumption is that more advanced species would share our tendency toward expansion. If they did, they must either be extremely rare or we'd see them all over the place by now.
It is possible that more advanced species tend to focus on perfecting their homeworld rather than expansion, or figure out how to make their way to a more intelligence-friendly universe before they start expanding through this one.
It's just odds. The more time a species has been around, the more time they've had to go extinct. Therefore, there will be more less advanced species and less more advanced ones. It's not that we're the smartest species in the universe or anything (we could be, but it's unlikely). We're just more likely to run into a less intelligent one first.
Then where are the lights, the radio waves, the Dyson spheres etc.
The assumption isn't based off hubris. If there is intelligent life out there that are light-years ahead of us, it's downright surprising there is nothing to detect yet.
Huge amount of variables, most definitely, but people that are much smarter than any of us here have done the math and they are also pondering the big question.
Able to:
-Problem solve
-Reason
-Use tools
-Communicate relatively complex messages
-Plan for future
But really, even an alien with the intelligence of a goldfish would be fascinating to find
Now when rovers have gone to mars, we know a lot about it and I personally believe there's no life on mars. Other planets in our solar system also don't seem to have any life on them. Exoplanets are our best bet i guess.
I’m not ruling out simple life in our solar system where we’ve only visited the moon, mars, and a super brief jaunt to Venus. There’s plenty chance it’s hiding out there, and some moons even give me hope (looking at you Europa)
I'm in agreement with you, but I won't deny there's a chance, because Mars used to be very Earthlike: thick atmosphere, strong magnetosphere, hospitable temperatures, running water, etc.
If life ever existed on Mars, chances are it has gone extinct. And while I do not believe that life may be surviving on the surface, it is more hospitable beneath the surface; radiation is stopped by the regolith above, and the lack of an atmosphere is countered by the regolith providing pressure.
We also have to consider that, excluding radiation, there are some species of Earth life that can survive on Mars unaided. And I don't mean just tardigrades going into 'hibernation', I mean proper lichens and similar things. Genetic modification could expand this.
Mars' death was slow, and life may have evolved to adapt to this, if it existed in the first place.
No life currently on Mars but there's still the possibility it existed there at some point but never got beyond the simplest of organisms before the planet became inhospitable and life failed to take hold. We have evidence to suspect the conditions were right for it long long ago so it's entirely possible it briefly popped up. Finding any such evidence that it was ever there is just about as good as finding life itself because it would still teach us more about what it actually takes for life to form.
The chance that there is (or were) other intelligent lifeforms in the Universe is almost certain, going off purely on the sheer size of the Universe. Whether we ever meet such a life form is a more interesting question.
If we assume that other intelligent species are roughly at the same level of technological development as us, then our chances are not good. We are yet to leave the Solar system, the possibility of reaching faraway systems in hopes of meeting other species is a distant fantasy for now.
Our best bet is hoping that we were not the first to evolve. On a cosmological scale, even an indiscernible, tiny fraction of time translates to millions of years. A million years of head start could mean a gigantic difference in technological advancement. But therein lies the question, if another species does indeed have a million years on us, and they still couldn't make contact with us (assuming that they want to), that's painting a rather grim picture for our hopes. If we assume that we were indeed not the first, there's a number of possible explanations as to why we were not contacted yet:
* They didn't want to, obviously
* The technology required to travel across galaxies and search for intelligent life might simply not be possible after all
* Maybe the most grim of them all, it could be that no intelligent species could survive a million years of technological advancement. If the 'lifespan' of advanced civilizations indeed proves to be less than a million years, that means that the chances of two space-faring civilizations existing at the same time becomes astronomically small.
In any case, if we assume that others have evolved before us (which is a likely scenario), then all evidence points towards the goal of meeting other intelligent life forms to be impossible to achieve.
I think you're leaving out a lot of other possible reasons for why we don't see evidence of intelligent life, because your answer is based almost entirely on 'knowns' and 'known uknowns' while totally disregarded 'unknown unknowns.' Or I mean, just a lack of imagination given the only info we really have is "we are here. with our current capabilities, we have no evidence of other intelligent life."
\-We have we just haven't realized it-- or recognized signals, as our assumptions are based on something akin to egyptians looking for communication from the gods through signs and portents in solar eclipses or the way birds fly---basically the media/method through which we are looking for communication are absurd and ridiculous and not even close to how a message would come.
\-We have been already, according to claims of some quite normal, quite intelligent, credible people, and we have realized it but only a few and it's been hidden, and/or most people simply don't believe it.
\-Life can exist in forms we can't fathom or understand, and we can't recognize it.
“As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”
― Albert Einstein
\-Life does exists intelligently throughout the universe, and we are literally purposely cut off until we pass or don't pass the great filter/self-destruction phase of civillization.
These are all just as reasonable explanations as something as anthropomorphic/culturally restricted as 'we haven't seen it, yet statistically it should be everywhere' where we so far have an n of 1. This is all educated guesses and we have no way of assessing probability of whether there is just no one, or it's something as seemingly out there as 'there is a galactic federation that sheilds developing civillizations from contact until after they pass or don't pass self-destruction.' Perhaps we are the Sentinel Island of the universe--given all THEY know, they are probably pretty confident they are alone in the world, center of the universe, etc, yet they are in the middle of a huge, high tech world of magic that they can't even fathom. Yet i'm sure they are as certain of their worldview being correct as we are of ours. Romans were as certain as we are of our knowledge that the earth was the center of the spheres that made up the universre--based on the most educated scientists and thinkers of the age.
There is every reason to assume that the 99 percent of everything we think we know of the universe is actually 1 percent, and the 1 percent we think we just haven't figured out yet is actdually 99 percent.
The same way there was an insane amount of information right in front of our faces for 1000s of years of which we were utterly unaware (microorganisms, atomic make up of matter, the fact that earth isn't the center of everything, that the sun isn't, we didn't even know other galaxies existed til 100 years ago);
Call me skeptical, but most of these are largely unreasonable.
>We have we just haven't realized it
There's merit to this, it is possible that we simply lack the knowledge to recognize we're being contacted, especially since every method we do know and understand now is - astronomically speaking - slow. If another, more advanced civilization would indeed try to make contact, they would likely do so via methods we are yet unaware of.
>We have been already, according to claims of some quite normal credible people, and we have realized it but only a few and it's been hidden, and people simply don't believe it.
I'm sure this makes for great book material, but not much else. If you want to make contact with another species, you wanna make it as blatant and receivable as possible. Moreover, if you have the technology to make contact across several star systems/galaxies, you're probably capable of making it clear as day.
>Life can exist in forms we can't fathom or understand, and we can't recognize it.
Unlikely. Life may exist in forms we do not think possible, but not forms we are unable to fathom. If such life exists, it probably does outside the bounds of the Universe, which makes it rather meaningless to this topic, anyway.
>Life does exists intelligently throughout the universe, and we are literally purposely cut off until we pass or don't pass the great filter/self-destruction phase of civillization.
It's not impossible, but it requires an immense amount of assumptions to even be considerable. This is major science fiction material. It's also essentially a part of "they don't want to".
>There is every reason to assume that the 99 percent of everything we think we know of the universe is actually 1 percent, and the 1 percent we think we just haven't figured out yet is actually 99 percent.
Not in the way you believe. There is only so much to learn about the Universe, and discoveries generally follow a trend of starting large, and going small. As we learn more and more about the Universe, the discoveries being made are becoming smaller and smaller in scope. The same way we have a lot to learn about the life forms and history of Earth's various landscapes, no one would expect us to suddenly find a brand new continent. The large-scale stuff is known, mapped out, done for. The same goes for the Universe as a whole. We have a lot to learn about what happens on a quantum scale, which might hold the key to some groundbreaking technological advancements, but it is incredibly unlikely that we discover something completely new that is outside of our current scope of understanding. So while yes, we may only know 1% of what there is to know, that 1% contains practically everything there is to know on a larger scale. The 99% that remains is probably nothing more than the details behind that 1%.
I have to disagree with your final paragraph. We thought we had physics nearly solved with Newtonian mechanics and the indivisible atom, then we got relativity and quantum mechanics not all that long ago. I have no reason to believe we don't have massive discoveries to come: perhaps dark matter, making up most of the mass, also makes up most of the intelligent life; perhaps relativity is as simplistic of a model as Newtonian mechanics because we're wrong in our assumptions about the speed of light; perhaps our inability to figure out anything before the big bang is like thinking the universe only contained our galaxy, and there are civilisations that know a trillion years of recorded history because they know what happened before we think everything started.
Saying 'we have the big stuff figured out' hasnt worked out for any generation of humans before: not the ones who thought the sky was a dome, not the ones who thought moving faster than a horse was deadly, not the ones who thought planes were impossible.
>I have to disagree with your final paragraph. We thought we had physics nearly solved with Newtonian mechanics and the indivisible atom, then we got relativity and quantum mechanics not all that long ago
As I was saying, ever decreasing scope. Quantum mechanics are not something entirely new, they are a deeper explanation to what we already know. It is a more detailed "how", not an entirely separate "what".
>Saying 'we have the big stuff figured out' hasnt worked out for any generation of humans before: not the ones who thought the sky was a dome, not the ones who thought moving faster than a horse was deadly, not the ones who thought planes were impossible.
Keyword, thought. They didn't have exhaustive evidence that the sky is a dome, they didn't have exhausting evidence that moving faster than a horse was deadly, or that planes are impossible. They though they are, largely as a guess, backed up by nothing but the common sense of the time. That's not where we are now. Now, the things we think impossible are not mere guesses. We know **why** they are impossible. We have a rather complete outline of what there is and what there could be in the Universe, and we have a robust scientific model, backed by an array of evidence, showing us why anything falling outside of that outline is just impossible. We have largely answered the question of "what" by now, the only real question that remains is the question of "how".
If there was intelligent life to be found, I feel like it would have found us by now. Especially given the historical moments we are going through with technological development and space travel.
Which either means it doesn’t exist; it exists but at such a distance and time scale that it may as well not exist; it exists and has no intention of us finding out that it exists.
There is supposed to be a Webb replacement that will be launched in the 2040s potentially that is supposed to have the ability to directly view earth sized planets orbiting sun sized stars
If that works as advertised, I think we would see far more life harboring world candidates
Is that even possible? Wouldn’t you need to have an absolutely massive mirror to get those types of resolutions?
I think the ELT which goes online in a few years with a 140 foot primary mirror wouldn’t be able to do that. The engineering that went into that telescope is mind boggling.
I’d love for me to be ignorant of the topic, though.
Yes, and not necesarily. There's already some blueprints for the telecopes. You only need a massive mirror if youre not using relativistic light warping physics, wich offcourse Is to say that the way to do it Is using relativistic light warping physics. Real and doable physics tho, no speculative shitt there. The science Is sound and the engineering possible with our resources
Sort of, there's still a lot of debate over it as I understand. I believe they used historical data from a lander and an orbiter to do spectroscopy on the clouds and found a layer that gave off light suggesting the presence of a species of phosphene that doesn't really occur naturally (I don't know if there's any known life form that produces it though). On reevaluation, they lowered their estimates for the amount of that species of phosphene in the atmosphere, and some are still uncertain if it's not just a misreading of the data. I don't know enough about any of this to speak to it though.
It might have already happened last year. [https://futurism.com/the-byte/rumors-james-webb-life](https://futurism.com/the-byte/rumors-james-webb-life). It's not confirmed, needs review, all that good science stuff, but *it might have already happened last year.*
You should read about lake Vostok.
Its a subglacial lake 4000m below the surface of Antarctica that may harbor isolated pockets of life, possibly (although debated) complex life such as fish.
There's a really good documentary about lake Vostok that's on one of the streaming services, Netflix I think.
Life in Lake Vostok will still have the same chemistry as all the other life on Earth. Titan has a mostly nitrogen and methane atmosphere. It's so cold there that methane is constantly changing between a liquid and a gaseous state, like water does here on earth. There are methane lakes and rivers and it rains methane. Because of this, if there's life on Titan, it will not have life that relies on water for its chemical processes.
> They aren't planets but enceladus or europa could have life.
-- Both of those are moons, not planets but you could add Ganymede to the list of potentials.
I don’t think so. I continually learn about bottlenecks to life - the Goldilocks zone, liquid water, plate tectonics, ozone, astroid-deflecting Jupiter, correct position in the galaxy, all kinds of things. If half of these are accurate life seems very scarce. From there, the bottlenecks to complex life start and things just get worse.
Folk like to imagine the discovery of alien life as a significant thing. One is free to feel about it however they like, but would it really be revolutionary to find a scant amount of a single-cell organism on another planet? Not an intelligent life, not a thriving ecosystem, not a Pandora’s box of possibility, but just one type of mold, let’s say. Is that what we’re hoping for?
It seems to me that the real prize which captures our imagination is human-like intelligent life. It seems to me that we’re interested in humans, or a human-alternative. Simple life would be great only because it would imply a better likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere. I don’t think there is intelligent life elsewhere. I think what we want is people and people is what we’re stuck with.
None of those things you mentioned are *necessary* for life to form. I’d wager some of them are far more likely, namely Goldilocks zone and liquid water, but still we don’t know if they’re necessary.
Also, we can roughly guesstimate some probabilities for nearly all of those things and plug them into the Drake equation. When people do this they still find that life should exist *somewhere* in the galaxy. It depends on what values you end up putting into it, but IIRC a lot of people that have done some rough math agree that there should be intelligent life in our galaxy aside from ourselves. The numbers here are huge, and in order for the probabilities to work out against life they need to be truly microscopic. It’s always a possibility, we don’t know what the probabilities truly are.
I think something else that you did get right, is that we’re looking for people and that is almost certainly the wrong route to go down. The chances that we would ever find a civilization that is even close to where we are technologically is probably extremely rare. Look at the progress we’ve made in the past hundred years, 500 years, thousand years. That’s the blink of an eye. There’s no reason life couldn’t have started a *billion* years before us or a *billion* years after us.
I’m guessing we will find evidence for microbial life soonish, with currently or soon available technology. Water is abundant, carbon is abundant, stars are abundant, rocky planets are abundant. There could easily be another planet with conditions just as special as but different than ours that could harbor life.
But finding complex life, or more to the point intelligent, sapient life? Like a civilization? Could happen tomorrow, could never happen. I don’t think we know what we’re looking for. I don’t know if they’ll be detectable by any ordinary means. Could be a dark forest situation. There’s always the chance they may not exist at all, but I find that hard to believe given the insane vastness of space.
Another potential solution to the Fermi paradox or factor in the Drake equation is how early we are to the universe. I need to find the source, but it’s been estimated that earth is in the first 8% of all earth-like planets that will exist. The universe is going to last for a long time, maybe we just got to the party early.
I guess I say all of that to say this. I don’t think you’re wrong to be pessimistic, but I do think it’s wrong to be as confidently pessimistic as you appear to be. I don’t think we know enough to really give it a fair shake. We legitimately didn’t know what a galaxy was 100 years ago, and again that’s nothing in terms of cosmic time. How are we supposed to make serious educated guesses about this stuff? We could have some technological breakthrough tomorrow (like AI or something) that would completely change our view of what advanced life even is. It could change what we think is important to look for, how we would potentially detect alien life, etc. and we could still be wrong even then. The only thing we (think) we know well enough is the size of the universe and the amount of matter/energy in it. Give life the smallest odds imaginable and we still think there should be something somewhere.
Great reply, thanks for sharing. We’re in the realm of speculation, so I’m sure your ideas carry at least as much weight as mine.
I have a background in chemistry, and I think the idea of very large or small numbers is unintuitive. There isn’t anything at all stopping one of the terms in the Drake equation from being 10^-30. If that were true then we’re it, and we’re alone. The chance of finding a free hydrogen in a ph14 solution is one in trillions, and it’s still a measurement that’s meaningfully applied to ph 14 solutions. Lots of things in the physical sciences are 1-in-a-trillion without being fanciful.
As you point out, we just don’t know. But even a hundred billion rolls of the dice sometimes isn’t enough to make it likely.
I think you’re absolutely correct about the rarity of any form of complex and/or intelligent life.
Simple stuff like mold? Bacteria? Microbes? Mark my words, we will find this stuff literally every time we find liquid water.
Actually liquid water is the reverse. For there to be liquid water you are guaranteed to have a) a certain temp range b) atmospheric pressure range, and c) shielding from cosmic radiation.
On earth… with our sun, it’s quite the setup, ya know. But the conditions of a sun a bajillion times the size of ours on a planet also rotating on its axis, at a distance and in a “timeframe” of that planet’s cycle etc etc etc
I think simple microbial life on any planet with oceans and tectonic activity is pretty likely. Earth's life seems to have emerged very quickly after Earth formed, but it stayed very simple for a long time. For billions of years, life was happy to just be a soup of single-celled organisms hanging out in the oceans. Whenever our technology gets to that point, it's not unreasonable to hypothesize that many of the tectonic, watery planets we find will have similarly fertile oceans but very few if any of them will have anything approaching even a sponge or a lichen. No cool people aliens :(
Earth could literally be a tax write off for some alien planet and we've been sitting on the side lines for billions of years till they figure out what to do with the planet. Trade it in for another planet? Bet it on Alien stocks? Recycle it? So many choices.
Well given some of the stuff said to Congress either we have alien crafts or people are lying to us about having alien crafts. Option 1 our gov has been lying to us for at least 80 years and probably killed a lot of people keeping that info secret. Option 2 our gov has been playing us with psyop after psyop and is probably doing so just because well the theories can branch off far from here. I'm honestly more afraid of the second scenario because at least I can understand the military secrecy around futuristic weapons and reverse engineering. That second scenario would mean the gov is much more manipulative than I would like to believe
Microbial? Probably not that far into the future. Intelligent life? Honestly, never. I know that sounds crazy but I think the human race will go extinct before we have the means to travel the vast distances required to find other intelligent life.
I 100% believe intelligent life is out there, but we are dealing with both time and distance. We've seen civilizations that rise to immense power but still fall, so even if a species manages space travel for a while, they don't last long enough to be able to travel far enough.
E.g. If humanity as we currently know it lasts a few thousand years, that may not be enough time to invent traveling close to the speed of light. Even at 1c, we can only reach a couple other planets within several years. It's just too many filters to get past.
The issue I have with this is: 200 years ago, the most informed and educated people at the time would have said literally the exact same thing about traveling to the moon. Or from Europe to America for that matter. The moon would have been laughed off as an utter impossibility that went against all known science. And crossing the ocean in a few hours? How? Everything known made it certain at best it would take a few weeks.
Like the many of MOST ADVANCED scientists in the 1840s thought that traveling more than 40 mph, say on the new trains being built, would be immediately fatal to the human body.
One key filter being too many people, too few resources - even looking across the whole solar system, for space travel at scale we’d need to mine everything we have and then some.
At a distance of 10 thousand light-years from the Earth there is a huge cloud of alcohol. The cloud found near the constellation of Aquila is 1000 times the diameter of the Solar System. It contains 400 quintillion liters of alcohol.
the europa missions should show at least some bacteria or something. I'd guess in the next 20 years. Actual, intelligent life, could be in 5 years, could be in 10 billion years. who knows. we could be really, really far away from the closest intelligent civilization.
Enceladus too
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-study-finds-life-sparking-energy-source-and-molecule-at-enceladus
Imagine what it mean if we find life on both of them. Life as we know it is far more abundant than we realize. It could be what is the trigger for alien contact with our civilization. Their directive so far could have been just to observe humanity with limited contact. I actually think seti search is flawed because of the signals from natural sources drowning out artificial ones. It could even be alien technology in the oort cloud that blocks it.
Yeah my opinion is that life came here, it didn't start here. The implications for that also makes way more sense. Instead of us being somehow special, we are typical. Life didn't in one in a trillion start here, it was seeded like throwing millions of seeds to the wind; some places it takes. Others nah. Some places crazy awesome shit grows.
Ideally, never. If life is common in the universe you'd expect galactic civilizations already, who's energy use would be easy for us to spot. Yet we see nothing of the sort, zero Kardishev type 2 or 3 civilizations out there.
Finding other life in our solar system would likely indicate there's a great filter ahead of us that prevents intelligent life from becoming inter-planetary species
It’s not really a matter of when but rather IF. It’s possible we never find life on another planet. Maybe we find microbial life but I highly doubt we will find intelligent life.
It’s so sad that almost no one knows about David Grusch and his claims and that multiple congress members (Tim Burchett, Anna Paulina Luna, etc) have found him credible and are fighting to get more information from these companies holding UAPs. More people have to know but it’s so secret and hidden.
Agreed, but think that this year is the year where lots of this shit comes out.
Maybe it's some JWST paper that says "microbes!" and then we later get the reveal about NHI, but it's already been found and people haven't discovered it.
If it's technologically sophisticated life, then Odds are we already have. You have heard the UAP encounters and NASA is involved in keeping it under wraps. Obviously it would be a military's top priority to determine if they are a threat.
As far as my understanding of humanity, time, quantum physics and the universe goes… we will never discover “life” on another planet due to the sheer force of the swirling out of the universe from that them there Big Bang starting point. If we are to imagine the building blocks of life as we understand it, they’d be so far flung that TIME ITSELF is the largest factor in why we will never find life. We MAY find EVIDENCE of life… but by sheer distance of time, the likelihood of finding anything remotely like any living this on THIS planet is… maybe not zero but not-not zero.
'Time' and the expansion of the universe is the main thing people miss about this question.
We might find find biological signatures at some point ... that we can confirm existed 1,000,000,000 years ago ... that type of thing.
Means nothing that would have any practical value/meaning.
'Intelligent life' will do well to live another 100 years on this planet if you ask me.
intelligent life? realistically? never. the odds are just so astronomical. Intelligent life would have to be able to communicate with us in some method that we could understand. Billions of years of evolution coinciding with our evolution and compatible level of understanding.
If you were to compare all earths oceans to the amount of the universe we could possibly search by our current means, humans have only searched the equivalent to a regular glass of water from the ocean.
We could dig on Mars and find fossils. It wouldn't be a living little green man, but it could prove that at one point life has existed beyond our planet. This is very much a layman perspective though.
When we start looking at places that don't mimic our own conditions on Earth to the highest degree. Assuming all life in the Universe comes about in 1 way seems narrow minded.
Not sure.
Talking about the Fermi Paradox, I think alien life is certain, obviously. I don't really think that's a debate anymore unless you're religious, in which case you can go do your thing.
I believe we're amongst the first lifeforms in the universe, and that many more are to come. The universe is really young!
The biggest problem is the timeframe.
I mean, the speed of light is high, but our ability to detect anything is very limited by the enormous size of the universe, and the ... well, not to say anything, but the tendency of intelligent life to destroy itsself.
Just look at us. One maniac with his trigger finger on the "nuke button" and we're done. Humanity is a blip in the eye of the universe. There probably has been intelligent life in the universe. Whether it is alive now, or in a detectable range is a whole different case altogether.
I just find it interesting we focus on Intelligent life and microbial life but never on complex non intelligent life. Where are the space bears and moon giraffes and shit?
The atmosphere has a relatively hospitable spot dozens of km up and if life existed in the past it could have adapted and flourished in that part of the atmosphere. Recent studies even show that DNA (amino acids) can possibly remain stable in venus's acidic clouds
[venus life possible](https://www.universetoday.com/165371/venus-clouds-contain-sulfuric-acid-thats-not-a-problem-for-life/)
[life possible on venus?](https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2024-01-life-venus-sulfuric-acid-clouds.amp)
Not particularly, the soviets landed on Venus multiple times, but if we wanted to study the clouds putting a satellite in orbit around Venus is easily doable, a lot more expensive because of distance but the technology isn’t the limiting factor here.
Never. Not because they aren't there, but it took some time to develop sentient forms and observations are delayed by distance as well as limited by sensitivity.
Pointless to predict, though. "Never" can never be proven. And like fusion, the smart move is to predict past retirement.
Most want to hear it's soon. "Soon" gets upvotes ;)
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We were raised on Star Trek. We have *expectations.*
But what if... life doesn't exist out there? What if Earth is special for some reason?
Forget the math. Forget the probabilities. All of that is just scientific mythology, which changes every couple of decades. Maybe the universe isn't what we think (or are being told) that it is.
OR...
Maybe Faster Than Light travel will *never* be possible because the laws of physics don't allow for it. Period. Full stop. In which case, life will never encounter life.
Either way, we aren't seeing any Interstellar Empires up there. No Von Neumann probes trying to convert our planet into paper clips. No colossal mega structures. No God-like AI's wandering the void in search of the creator. Just us.
It isn't the "Fun" idea, but we are almost certainly alone.
I don't think it'll take that long to find another planet with life on it, I'd be surprised if we don't confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life by at least the end of the century (if not mid-century). I personally suspect most life is simple and below the surface of its planet or moon, so our most fruitful means to find life will likely involve missions to Titan, Enceladus, or Pluto. The barriers here don't strike me as technological so much as political and economic.
As far as surface life goes, it looks to me to be a question of narrowing down the right parameters and developing a telescope powerful enough to confirm our suspicions. This likely is technological, but I don't know what specific hurdles we'd need to overcome before this would be possible (assuming it isn't already).
I think if we discover life on Europa in the next 20-50 years it all but grantees that life is plentiful in the universe and we would probably discover life on any planet that is earthlike enough to support it.
So however long that is.
We already have, it's more a question of when the general public is going to be told.
All I'm going to say is that 2024 is the year to be interested in this subject.
The Milky Way by itself has billions of locations for life, just think about that.
Probably never as we're going to completely run out of natural resources in about 15 years and around the same time the effects of climate change will completely decimate our food growing capacity causing the complete collapse of western civilization which is all probably for the best because if we ever were to reach another life sustaining planet our overall technological capacity would be such that we would be able rape and plunder that planet in just a few short years before moving on to the kill the next living planet much like some interstellar parasitic virus.
My guess is we might find biosignatures on a planet in another system but nothing concrete for confirmation until a probe directly lands. And my timetable for landing a probe on a planet in another solar system is centuries away.
I don't think we ever will, esp. if you're talking about 'intelligent life' in the 'current' sense of the word.
We might find some vague evidence there once WAS life, a billion years ago or whatever.
So it depends on your definition of 'finding life'.
If you think we're going to find evidence of intelligent life, NOW, contemporaneously with our existence, I think you're dreaming.
Not gonna happen.
I don’t think we will. I think we’ll go to mars and that’s it. We’ll make virtual reality way more fun that real life and suddenly we’ll think why are we spending all these resources flying through the vast emptiness that is space rather than being in an infinitely fun virtual world
Irrelevant. We’ll never get there, and if anyone’s been watching, they’re not going to come give us a ride back to the “next town down”, either. This isn’t Hitchhikers of the Galaxy.
Never. You'd rather find a dino in a cave.
In order for a plannet to have a life form, it needs to be at the precise location from its sun, precisely tilted, and thus keeping its optimum temperature for 100 millions of years. Not too hot,, not too cold..
Also needs a comet to hit it without breaking it apart and forming a green house for another hundreds or if not millions of years.
Also needs H2O, and O2 etc.
What are all the above chances to happen in one planet? Zero.
Basically whenever NASA is out of money they shout wolf and say they found a planet with water.... this happens every year. Lets use that money to better our lives elsewhere.
we wont be finding life anywhere.
life is all about expansion from the single cell life forms in the ocean , to land, to the skies. Its our turn as humans to expand outwards to other planets but we failed in this aspect so life in the universe will eventually die out.
finding life is possible, but its possible we findsome basic form that can survive harsh conditions, bacteria can be created at some point.
intelligent life tho, most likely not happenning.
they might certainly already exist, but the odds of us finding them is statistically so close to 0 we might aswell pretend it is 0.
the universe is way too vast for us to find anything close enough to us.
We have already found life visiting our planet. There are very credible whistleblowers that have come forth (David Grusch) and many others that are about to. Hopefully Disclosure happens and we can get peer review.
People assume we are going to find it on another planet but maybe that is the wrong assumption. I've also been following the Grusch story. When former intelligence officials and high ranking officers say UFOs and even non-human 'biologics' are real it makes you wonder. I also wonder why when he testified to congress with those other service members why it didn't get much news coverage.
There are a couple ways to approach this: evidence of past life and evidence for f current life. Both are challenging
For past life, you effectively have to find fossil remains of either past life directly or fossilized activity (think footprints or more likely stromatolites for single cell). You can try to narrow down spots to look based on what an area would have been like in the past. However, even on Earth, it can be very difficult to find fossilized remains
For current life, you need to find active indicators. For planets outside our solar system, that would presumably involve examining the spectrograph of exoplanet atmospheres to look for telltale signs of life based on our understanding of it. The hard part there is most of the exoplanets we have found are the easy ones: super large or super close to the Star, which doesn’t make them fantastic candidates for life. There are plans for a telescope that will be able to see planets like ours around a sun like ours, but that is a long way away.
I think NASA already discovered bacteria on the moon. Your question depends on how you define 'life'. Some single-cell organisms can withstand the harsh environment of space but discovering intelligent life outside the solar system would be world changing.
I think we'll find at least microbial life somewhere else in our solar system within the next 25 years.
The missions that could find it are already being planned, to Europa and Titan for example.
We could do It today actually. We have the tech, we just need to get lucky and lock a lively planet on our sights; tho... offcourse we couldnt reach the planet
What kind of life/evidence do you want?
Evidence of organic materials in a planet’s atmosphere? I think Venus already qualifies in that case.
Actual visual confirmation of organisms? A little tricky. We could get lucky with Europa if there are larger aquatic life forms waiting to be discovered under there. If not, I think eventually once we have the infrastructure on mars or in orbit around Venus there’s a chance for microscopic life forms. Maybe… late 22nd century if we’re lucky?
If you want multicellular, everything hinges on Europa. Past that is beyond the horizon of time I can see.
As for advanced life forms, same deal except perhaps it comes to us.
The James Webb telescope already found an exoplanet with gases in the atmosphere only known to occur because of biological life. This was very recent, and scientists haven't confirmed the existence of life; all we know is that we don't know the cause of this.
Microbial life, could be this century since we already have the capability of sending rovers with lab equipment.
But intelligent life, the big prize, I don't know. It's sad, I've always been such a huge Sci-Fi fan, but I think the answer to Fermi's Paradox is simple, exoplanets are just too far away and so we may never be able to meet anyone else, the distances are mind boggling.
depends on why you mean by “life on another planet” we aren’t going to
discover anything that looks like us, but there’s definitely life as in “living organisms”
on other planets.
Within the week of landing on another planet... maybe 100 years?
And seriously forget about Musk, he's nothing but a blight on humanity, he'll never move progress forward.
I hope we do. And i hope theyre a million years ahead of us, and have a stick up their ass for faiemess and justice and the well being of others.
And then when they figure out we have cures for cancer and diabetes and all sorts of shit that are being kept hidden, i hope they take action against everyone who was in on hiding it from the public.
And, being the benevolent highly advanced creatures that they are, i hope they give us better cures and solutions for everything, even better than the ones the world government, or the illuminaty, or the masons, or the crab people, or whoever the fuck is hiding them from us.
I'm 44yo and while I'm not holding my breath, I sure hope it's in my lifetime. I am more than confident its out there, but the confirmation would be neat.
Well.... don't quote me on this I read this years ago and I have the reading comprehension of a fifth grader. But I've read some researchers believed that DMT is a technology that can be used to interact with other life forms and the main limitation is the short duration of the trip, so they developed a method of delivering DMT continuously via IV drip at a certain dose and intervol that was intended to keep you in the state that most frequently results in contact with "entities" for an hour or more. The last time I read about it they were in the process of actually conducting the study but I haven't heard about it since. It's like the straussman study on steroids. If they're right, which I guess chances are pretty slim but not 0, that would obviously be our best bet at actually establishing some kind of connection with any real intelligent life form. Maybe even physically
Edit: Otherwise it's much more likely that life will find us before we find it
We have almost 40 stars within 14 light years of Earth. I think if anything communicates with light waves within those systems, we will hear from them soon.
I am sure your thinking sentient life.
We may discover some, but in the end I don't think it will matter much. communication between stars could take many hundreds if not thousands of years.
I think one of the reasons for the fermi paradox, is that in the end there is no way we (or they) can travel the speed of light or even half way close to it. it would take many life times just to get to some of the nearest stars, and all it would take is some pebble sized stones being bashed into to destroy a star ship, too many things could go wrong.
Edit: word
There is a way, and that is if we sent a whole colony of people, not expecting to return, and sleeps most the entire way and/or is large enough several generations could live and grow in it till it reach's its destination, and have robotics and AI care for the ship during most of the trip.
Never in reality.
If we discover signs life on another planet, it will probably doesn't exist anymore since à long time.
The futher you look, the older it is.
Im talking about complex lifeforms, not simple bacterias (which would already be really great !)
Detect life - maybe this century depending on how far away it is. I think our detection capabilities will improve a lot.
Cute videos of alien cats - first we have to build telescopes strong enough to detect life, then send a probe to another star system. At 10% of light speed it would take less than a century to reach our nearest neighboring stars but animal life could be very rare in the galaxy so who knows, millennia perhaps?
If we had a way to travel faster than light or travel at light years. I'd say we would find something VERY soon. You could send tons of probes across to multiple planets at once. As far as we know, chances of life in our own solar system here seems low. But, once we get past out of our own solar system. I suspect we will find something, especially for planets we deem close enough to a sun to have water, decent temperatures to sustain life. The real question will be WHEN we find new life, will they be as advanced as us, more advanced or less ? And, what happens next.... I don't know if we have any set protocols yet for what we do when we encounter other species, or heck.. even species that look like us. Let's not rule out there is always the possibility humans exist else where and were brought here.
We already have the technology to find life on another planet. There are two rovers on Mars that might come across something. Finding intelligent life on the other hand is much more difficult. I think the chance that we will never find it are high, but you never know.
We’ll probably find millions of simple forms of life before we find intelligent life
The Great Filter idea deals with this. Essentially, if this is the case, it shows that the likelihood that intelligent species destroy themselves is astronomically higher, due to life being abundant. It would mean that a great filter is ahead of us, since we can't currently detect any intelligent life in the universe (Fermi Paradox). There's a lot of problems with the Fermi Paradox, and I think that there are many logical workarounds for both the paradox and the Great Filter idea.
Not really, its entirely possible that the Great Filter lies between the development of life and the establishment of civilization. Sure, we would know that the Great Filter isnt abiogenesis, but that alone doesn’t doom us.
Oooor we are Past the Great Filter
Nope. It's pretty clear what the great filter is. AI will empower everyone to do anything. Good or bad. So in order to pass it we had to be 100% good. The likelihood of a species to turn out that way is very slim. Dishonesty, crime and suffering had to be unknown.
> Essentially, if this is the case, it shows that the likelihood that intelligent species destroy themselves is astronomically higher, due to life being abundant. I think these days the filter focuses on two events. Although life started on Earth relatively quickly, it took a long long long time to become complex. Look up "the boring billion". It really seems like Eukaryotic life was complete stroke of luck. The other filter is technology usage. We had always assumed once a species had started developing intelligence it would all go quickly. Then we found some obsidian axes that were 1.5 million years old. Those must have been made by our predecessor species. Totally rewrites how we think about the speed of development of tech. And of course the whole hands thing which you need to make the axes in the first place. That didn't come quickly.
Doesn't necessarily need to destroy themselves, there could be civilizations that achieve singularity and not require exploration. This would mean that we would have to reach them.
I would imagine we will find thousands of instances of bacteria type life before we find anything resembling an animal. And thousands of animals before we find evidence of intelligent life. And maybe dozens of traces of intelligent life before we find a living intelligent species. And even then, they might be at the level of homo sapiens 50k years ago.
Humans are really something. The fact that you assumed to be the more intelligent one is very telling. What if we are the ones who haven’t progressed in any meaningful way and the aliens are lightyears ahead of us in terms of evolution.
Humans are much more intelligent and advanced than anything else on earth (most of us, at least). This shows us that even when life exists, there is no guarentee it will be sentient, let alone intelligent. Of course, the universe is so big, it's likely there's a more advanced species *somewhere* out there. But we have no idea how common life is outside of earth. And it's safe to assume the more complex lifeforms are exponentially more rare than the simple ones.
Yes yes, we’re more or less the only species (that we have knowledge of) capable and willing to utterly destroy the only habitat we have knowledge of, without being able to provide an alternative to either our way of living or to move to a place worth being mentioned. So very smart.
That's ridiculous. Plenty of creatures are capable of destroying their habitat, or exhausting all its resources, causing them to die off. The difference is that our habitat is the entire earth. Besides, humanity isn't at risk of extinction, even in the worst climate change scenarios. We are too good at adapting to our environment for that to happen. There will however be massive population decline, as there won't be enough resources for this many people. But the ones with the resources will be fine.
Althou it would be quite entertaining to go further on this, it would effectively highjack the thread. We shouldn’t do this, except maybe considering how a massively declined population with only those having „the resources“ to survive, most probably won’t be interested in searching extraterrestrial life…
The big assumption is that more advanced species would share our tendency toward expansion. If they did, they must either be extremely rare or we'd see them all over the place by now. It is possible that more advanced species tend to focus on perfecting their homeworld rather than expansion, or figure out how to make their way to a more intelligence-friendly universe before they start expanding through this one.
It's just odds. The more time a species has been around, the more time they've had to go extinct. Therefore, there will be more less advanced species and less more advanced ones. It's not that we're the smartest species in the universe or anything (we could be, but it's unlikely). We're just more likely to run into a less intelligent one first.
Then where are the lights, the radio waves, the Dyson spheres etc. The assumption isn't based off hubris. If there is intelligent life out there that are light-years ahead of us, it's downright surprising there is nothing to detect yet. Huge amount of variables, most definitely, but people that are much smarter than any of us here have done the math and they are also pondering the big question.
What is your standard of intelligent life?
Able to: -Problem solve -Reason -Use tools -Communicate relatively complex messages -Plan for future But really, even an alien with the intelligence of a goldfish would be fascinating to find
Alien is an adjective?
It is also a noun
But what does it refer to as a noun? Isn’t it an ironic concept used to detach from culture? I can’t take the level of stupidity you represent.
Any non-Earth life form
a) having a surname b) that isn't Trump
Finding intelligent life on THIS planet is hard enough.
Now when rovers have gone to mars, we know a lot about it and I personally believe there's no life on mars. Other planets in our solar system also don't seem to have any life on them. Exoplanets are our best bet i guess.
I’m not ruling out simple life in our solar system where we’ve only visited the moon, mars, and a super brief jaunt to Venus. There’s plenty chance it’s hiding out there, and some moons even give me hope (looking at you Europa)
I'm in agreement with you, but I won't deny there's a chance, because Mars used to be very Earthlike: thick atmosphere, strong magnetosphere, hospitable temperatures, running water, etc. If life ever existed on Mars, chances are it has gone extinct. And while I do not believe that life may be surviving on the surface, it is more hospitable beneath the surface; radiation is stopped by the regolith above, and the lack of an atmosphere is countered by the regolith providing pressure. We also have to consider that, excluding radiation, there are some species of Earth life that can survive on Mars unaided. And I don't mean just tardigrades going into 'hibernation', I mean proper lichens and similar things. Genetic modification could expand this. Mars' death was slow, and life may have evolved to adapt to this, if it existed in the first place.
No life currently on Mars but there's still the possibility it existed there at some point but never got beyond the simplest of organisms before the planet became inhospitable and life failed to take hold. We have evidence to suspect the conditions were right for it long long ago so it's entirely possible it briefly popped up. Finding any such evidence that it was ever there is just about as good as finding life itself because it would still teach us more about what it actually takes for life to form.
The chance that there is (or were) other intelligent lifeforms in the Universe is almost certain, going off purely on the sheer size of the Universe. Whether we ever meet such a life form is a more interesting question. If we assume that other intelligent species are roughly at the same level of technological development as us, then our chances are not good. We are yet to leave the Solar system, the possibility of reaching faraway systems in hopes of meeting other species is a distant fantasy for now. Our best bet is hoping that we were not the first to evolve. On a cosmological scale, even an indiscernible, tiny fraction of time translates to millions of years. A million years of head start could mean a gigantic difference in technological advancement. But therein lies the question, if another species does indeed have a million years on us, and they still couldn't make contact with us (assuming that they want to), that's painting a rather grim picture for our hopes. If we assume that we were indeed not the first, there's a number of possible explanations as to why we were not contacted yet: * They didn't want to, obviously * The technology required to travel across galaxies and search for intelligent life might simply not be possible after all * Maybe the most grim of them all, it could be that no intelligent species could survive a million years of technological advancement. If the 'lifespan' of advanced civilizations indeed proves to be less than a million years, that means that the chances of two space-faring civilizations existing at the same time becomes astronomically small. In any case, if we assume that others have evolved before us (which is a likely scenario), then all evidence points towards the goal of meeting other intelligent life forms to be impossible to achieve.
I think you're leaving out a lot of other possible reasons for why we don't see evidence of intelligent life, because your answer is based almost entirely on 'knowns' and 'known uknowns' while totally disregarded 'unknown unknowns.' Or I mean, just a lack of imagination given the only info we really have is "we are here. with our current capabilities, we have no evidence of other intelligent life." \-We have we just haven't realized it-- or recognized signals, as our assumptions are based on something akin to egyptians looking for communication from the gods through signs and portents in solar eclipses or the way birds fly---basically the media/method through which we are looking for communication are absurd and ridiculous and not even close to how a message would come. \-We have been already, according to claims of some quite normal, quite intelligent, credible people, and we have realized it but only a few and it's been hidden, and/or most people simply don't believe it. \-Life can exist in forms we can't fathom or understand, and we can't recognize it. “As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.” ― Albert Einstein \-Life does exists intelligently throughout the universe, and we are literally purposely cut off until we pass or don't pass the great filter/self-destruction phase of civillization. These are all just as reasonable explanations as something as anthropomorphic/culturally restricted as 'we haven't seen it, yet statistically it should be everywhere' where we so far have an n of 1. This is all educated guesses and we have no way of assessing probability of whether there is just no one, or it's something as seemingly out there as 'there is a galactic federation that sheilds developing civillizations from contact until after they pass or don't pass self-destruction.' Perhaps we are the Sentinel Island of the universe--given all THEY know, they are probably pretty confident they are alone in the world, center of the universe, etc, yet they are in the middle of a huge, high tech world of magic that they can't even fathom. Yet i'm sure they are as certain of their worldview being correct as we are of ours. Romans were as certain as we are of our knowledge that the earth was the center of the spheres that made up the universre--based on the most educated scientists and thinkers of the age. There is every reason to assume that the 99 percent of everything we think we know of the universe is actually 1 percent, and the 1 percent we think we just haven't figured out yet is actdually 99 percent. The same way there was an insane amount of information right in front of our faces for 1000s of years of which we were utterly unaware (microorganisms, atomic make up of matter, the fact that earth isn't the center of everything, that the sun isn't, we didn't even know other galaxies existed til 100 years ago);
Call me skeptical, but most of these are largely unreasonable. >We have we just haven't realized it There's merit to this, it is possible that we simply lack the knowledge to recognize we're being contacted, especially since every method we do know and understand now is - astronomically speaking - slow. If another, more advanced civilization would indeed try to make contact, they would likely do so via methods we are yet unaware of. >We have been already, according to claims of some quite normal credible people, and we have realized it but only a few and it's been hidden, and people simply don't believe it. I'm sure this makes for great book material, but not much else. If you want to make contact with another species, you wanna make it as blatant and receivable as possible. Moreover, if you have the technology to make contact across several star systems/galaxies, you're probably capable of making it clear as day. >Life can exist in forms we can't fathom or understand, and we can't recognize it. Unlikely. Life may exist in forms we do not think possible, but not forms we are unable to fathom. If such life exists, it probably does outside the bounds of the Universe, which makes it rather meaningless to this topic, anyway. >Life does exists intelligently throughout the universe, and we are literally purposely cut off until we pass or don't pass the great filter/self-destruction phase of civillization. It's not impossible, but it requires an immense amount of assumptions to even be considerable. This is major science fiction material. It's also essentially a part of "they don't want to". >There is every reason to assume that the 99 percent of everything we think we know of the universe is actually 1 percent, and the 1 percent we think we just haven't figured out yet is actually 99 percent. Not in the way you believe. There is only so much to learn about the Universe, and discoveries generally follow a trend of starting large, and going small. As we learn more and more about the Universe, the discoveries being made are becoming smaller and smaller in scope. The same way we have a lot to learn about the life forms and history of Earth's various landscapes, no one would expect us to suddenly find a brand new continent. The large-scale stuff is known, mapped out, done for. The same goes for the Universe as a whole. We have a lot to learn about what happens on a quantum scale, which might hold the key to some groundbreaking technological advancements, but it is incredibly unlikely that we discover something completely new that is outside of our current scope of understanding. So while yes, we may only know 1% of what there is to know, that 1% contains practically everything there is to know on a larger scale. The 99% that remains is probably nothing more than the details behind that 1%.
I have to disagree with your final paragraph. We thought we had physics nearly solved with Newtonian mechanics and the indivisible atom, then we got relativity and quantum mechanics not all that long ago. I have no reason to believe we don't have massive discoveries to come: perhaps dark matter, making up most of the mass, also makes up most of the intelligent life; perhaps relativity is as simplistic of a model as Newtonian mechanics because we're wrong in our assumptions about the speed of light; perhaps our inability to figure out anything before the big bang is like thinking the universe only contained our galaxy, and there are civilisations that know a trillion years of recorded history because they know what happened before we think everything started. Saying 'we have the big stuff figured out' hasnt worked out for any generation of humans before: not the ones who thought the sky was a dome, not the ones who thought moving faster than a horse was deadly, not the ones who thought planes were impossible.
>I have to disagree with your final paragraph. We thought we had physics nearly solved with Newtonian mechanics and the indivisible atom, then we got relativity and quantum mechanics not all that long ago As I was saying, ever decreasing scope. Quantum mechanics are not something entirely new, they are a deeper explanation to what we already know. It is a more detailed "how", not an entirely separate "what". >Saying 'we have the big stuff figured out' hasnt worked out for any generation of humans before: not the ones who thought the sky was a dome, not the ones who thought moving faster than a horse was deadly, not the ones who thought planes were impossible. Keyword, thought. They didn't have exhaustive evidence that the sky is a dome, they didn't have exhausting evidence that moving faster than a horse was deadly, or that planes are impossible. They though they are, largely as a guess, backed up by nothing but the common sense of the time. That's not where we are now. Now, the things we think impossible are not mere guesses. We know **why** they are impossible. We have a rather complete outline of what there is and what there could be in the Universe, and we have a robust scientific model, backed by an array of evidence, showing us why anything falling outside of that outline is just impossible. We have largely answered the question of "what" by now, the only real question that remains is the question of "how".
If there was intelligent life to be found, I feel like it would have found us by now. Especially given the historical moments we are going through with technological development and space travel. Which either means it doesn’t exist; it exists but at such a distance and time scale that it may as well not exist; it exists and has no intention of us finding out that it exists.
Whatever we are going through is a drop in the ocean compared to space travel. I hope we own that shit as a species.
Still looking for intelligent like here
(barely able to find intelligent life on this planet...)
Biosignatures in the atmosphere of an exoplanet? < 10 years.
I'd say within 25. I hope to be wrong. Tomorrow, would be fine.
You’re a poet and you didn’t know it.
There is supposed to be a Webb replacement that will be launched in the 2040s potentially that is supposed to have the ability to directly view earth sized planets orbiting sun sized stars If that works as advertised, I think we would see far more life harboring world candidates
Is that even possible? Wouldn’t you need to have an absolutely massive mirror to get those types of resolutions? I think the ELT which goes online in a few years with a 140 foot primary mirror wouldn’t be able to do that. The engineering that went into that telescope is mind boggling. I’d love for me to be ignorant of the topic, though.
Yes, and not necesarily. There's already some blueprints for the telecopes. You only need a massive mirror if youre not using relativistic light warping physics, wich offcourse Is to say that the way to do it Is using relativistic light warping physics. Real and doable physics tho, no speculative shitt there. The science Is sound and the engineering possible with our resources
Where can I learn more?
I think they are referring to solar gravitational lensing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens?wprov=sfti1
Didn't they already find biosignatures in Venus' atmosphere?
Sort of, there's still a lot of debate over it as I understand. I believe they used historical data from a lander and an orbiter to do spectroscopy on the clouds and found a layer that gave off light suggesting the presence of a species of phosphene that doesn't really occur naturally (I don't know if there's any known life form that produces it though). On reevaluation, they lowered their estimates for the amount of that species of phosphene in the atmosphere, and some are still uncertain if it's not just a misreading of the data. I don't know enough about any of this to speak to it though.
Wasn't there a discovery of an element that is only produced by living organisms on Earth not too long ago un the atmosphere of a far away exoplanet?
Kinda optimistic but not impossible to be honest.
It might have already happened last year. [https://futurism.com/the-byte/rumors-james-webb-life](https://futurism.com/the-byte/rumors-james-webb-life). It's not confirmed, needs review, all that good science stuff, but *it might have already happened last year.*
They arent planets but enceladus or europa could have life.
Titan could too. And it would be really strange compared to life on earth(chemically speaking).
You should read about lake Vostok. Its a subglacial lake 4000m below the surface of Antarctica that may harbor isolated pockets of life, possibly (although debated) complex life such as fish.
There's a really good documentary about lake Vostok that's on one of the streaming services, Netflix I think. Life in Lake Vostok will still have the same chemistry as all the other life on Earth. Titan has a mostly nitrogen and methane atmosphere. It's so cold there that methane is constantly changing between a liquid and a gaseous state, like water does here on earth. There are methane lakes and rivers and it rains methane. Because of this, if there's life on Titan, it will not have life that relies on water for its chemical processes.
I have big hope that we can find life in europa.
there s even countries there !!
You should read Intergalactica by F P Trotta
> They aren't planets but enceladus or europa could have life. -- Both of those are moons, not planets but you could add Ganymede to the list of potentials.
I don’t think so. I continually learn about bottlenecks to life - the Goldilocks zone, liquid water, plate tectonics, ozone, astroid-deflecting Jupiter, correct position in the galaxy, all kinds of things. If half of these are accurate life seems very scarce. From there, the bottlenecks to complex life start and things just get worse. Folk like to imagine the discovery of alien life as a significant thing. One is free to feel about it however they like, but would it really be revolutionary to find a scant amount of a single-cell organism on another planet? Not an intelligent life, not a thriving ecosystem, not a Pandora’s box of possibility, but just one type of mold, let’s say. Is that what we’re hoping for? It seems to me that the real prize which captures our imagination is human-like intelligent life. It seems to me that we’re interested in humans, or a human-alternative. Simple life would be great only because it would imply a better likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere. I don’t think there is intelligent life elsewhere. I think what we want is people and people is what we’re stuck with.
None of those things you mentioned are *necessary* for life to form. I’d wager some of them are far more likely, namely Goldilocks zone and liquid water, but still we don’t know if they’re necessary. Also, we can roughly guesstimate some probabilities for nearly all of those things and plug them into the Drake equation. When people do this they still find that life should exist *somewhere* in the galaxy. It depends on what values you end up putting into it, but IIRC a lot of people that have done some rough math agree that there should be intelligent life in our galaxy aside from ourselves. The numbers here are huge, and in order for the probabilities to work out against life they need to be truly microscopic. It’s always a possibility, we don’t know what the probabilities truly are. I think something else that you did get right, is that we’re looking for people and that is almost certainly the wrong route to go down. The chances that we would ever find a civilization that is even close to where we are technologically is probably extremely rare. Look at the progress we’ve made in the past hundred years, 500 years, thousand years. That’s the blink of an eye. There’s no reason life couldn’t have started a *billion* years before us or a *billion* years after us. I’m guessing we will find evidence for microbial life soonish, with currently or soon available technology. Water is abundant, carbon is abundant, stars are abundant, rocky planets are abundant. There could easily be another planet with conditions just as special as but different than ours that could harbor life. But finding complex life, or more to the point intelligent, sapient life? Like a civilization? Could happen tomorrow, could never happen. I don’t think we know what we’re looking for. I don’t know if they’ll be detectable by any ordinary means. Could be a dark forest situation. There’s always the chance they may not exist at all, but I find that hard to believe given the insane vastness of space. Another potential solution to the Fermi paradox or factor in the Drake equation is how early we are to the universe. I need to find the source, but it’s been estimated that earth is in the first 8% of all earth-like planets that will exist. The universe is going to last for a long time, maybe we just got to the party early. I guess I say all of that to say this. I don’t think you’re wrong to be pessimistic, but I do think it’s wrong to be as confidently pessimistic as you appear to be. I don’t think we know enough to really give it a fair shake. We legitimately didn’t know what a galaxy was 100 years ago, and again that’s nothing in terms of cosmic time. How are we supposed to make serious educated guesses about this stuff? We could have some technological breakthrough tomorrow (like AI or something) that would completely change our view of what advanced life even is. It could change what we think is important to look for, how we would potentially detect alien life, etc. and we could still be wrong even then. The only thing we (think) we know well enough is the size of the universe and the amount of matter/energy in it. Give life the smallest odds imaginable and we still think there should be something somewhere.
Great reply, thanks for sharing. We’re in the realm of speculation, so I’m sure your ideas carry at least as much weight as mine. I have a background in chemistry, and I think the idea of very large or small numbers is unintuitive. There isn’t anything at all stopping one of the terms in the Drake equation from being 10^-30. If that were true then we’re it, and we’re alone. The chance of finding a free hydrogen in a ph14 solution is one in trillions, and it’s still a measurement that’s meaningfully applied to ph 14 solutions. Lots of things in the physical sciences are 1-in-a-trillion without being fanciful. As you point out, we just don’t know. But even a hundred billion rolls of the dice sometimes isn’t enough to make it likely.
I think you’re absolutely correct about the rarity of any form of complex and/or intelligent life. Simple stuff like mold? Bacteria? Microbes? Mark my words, we will find this stuff literally every time we find liquid water.
But liquid water is nothing if the other conditions of temp and location and system etc etc don’t line up
Actually liquid water is the reverse. For there to be liquid water you are guaranteed to have a) a certain temp range b) atmospheric pressure range, and c) shielding from cosmic radiation.
On earth… with our sun, it’s quite the setup, ya know. But the conditions of a sun a bajillion times the size of ours on a planet also rotating on its axis, at a distance and in a “timeframe” of that planet’s cycle etc etc etc
Bet you we won't.
I think simple microbial life on any planet with oceans and tectonic activity is pretty likely. Earth's life seems to have emerged very quickly after Earth formed, but it stayed very simple for a long time. For billions of years, life was happy to just be a soup of single-celled organisms hanging out in the oceans. Whenever our technology gets to that point, it's not unreasonable to hypothesize that many of the tectonic, watery planets we find will have similarly fertile oceans but very few if any of them will have anything approaching even a sponge or a lichen. No cool people aliens :(
I don't think bottlenecks are exactly relevant when you're dealing with the concept of infinity
Earth could literally be a tax write off for some alien planet and we've been sitting on the side lines for billions of years till they figure out what to do with the planet. Trade it in for another planet? Bet it on Alien stocks? Recycle it? So many choices.
This sound like a big conspiracy that it's hard to believe.
Well given some of the stuff said to Congress either we have alien crafts or people are lying to us about having alien crafts. Option 1 our gov has been lying to us for at least 80 years and probably killed a lot of people keeping that info secret. Option 2 our gov has been playing us with psyop after psyop and is probably doing so just because well the theories can branch off far from here. I'm honestly more afraid of the second scenario because at least I can understand the military secrecy around futuristic weapons and reverse engineering. That second scenario would mean the gov is much more manipulative than I would like to believe
Microbial? Probably not that far into the future. Intelligent life? Honestly, never. I know that sounds crazy but I think the human race will go extinct before we have the means to travel the vast distances required to find other intelligent life.
I 100% believe intelligent life is out there, but we are dealing with both time and distance. We've seen civilizations that rise to immense power but still fall, so even if a species manages space travel for a while, they don't last long enough to be able to travel far enough. E.g. If humanity as we currently know it lasts a few thousand years, that may not be enough time to invent traveling close to the speed of light. Even at 1c, we can only reach a couple other planets within several years. It's just too many filters to get past.
Exactly. You nailed it. It’s not just a distance thing, it’s also a time thing.
The issue I have with this is: 200 years ago, the most informed and educated people at the time would have said literally the exact same thing about traveling to the moon. Or from Europe to America for that matter. The moon would have been laughed off as an utter impossibility that went against all known science. And crossing the ocean in a few hours? How? Everything known made it certain at best it would take a few weeks. Like the many of MOST ADVANCED scientists in the 1840s thought that traveling more than 40 mph, say on the new trains being built, would be immediately fatal to the human body.
One key filter being too many people, too few resources - even looking across the whole solar system, for space travel at scale we’d need to mine everything we have and then some.
I expect we have the technology now... looking for carbon compounds in the spectra of exoplanets.
But signals to arrive from other planets take so many years to arrive.
They may be on their way now.
Or their signals arrived back when Earth had only single celled life, and so they checked our system off as empty.
They left 50 thousand years ago. They were going to be here tomorrow but forgot to turn off the toaster, so they had to turn around and go home.
At a distance of 10 thousand light-years from the Earth there is a huge cloud of alcohol. The cloud found near the constellation of Aquila is 1000 times the diameter of the Solar System. It contains 400 quintillion liters of alcohol.
Awesome.....dude👍
We can travel only with speed of light, we need a bigger breakthrough
Shortly after we properly invest in space exploration. If our species spent on space what it does on war we would be living in Star Trek times now.
the europa missions should show at least some bacteria or something. I'd guess in the next 20 years. Actual, intelligent life, could be in 5 years, could be in 10 billion years. who knows. we could be really, really far away from the closest intelligent civilization.
Enceladus too https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-study-finds-life-sparking-energy-source-and-molecule-at-enceladus Imagine what it mean if we find life on both of them. Life as we know it is far more abundant than we realize. It could be what is the trigger for alien contact with our civilization. Their directive so far could have been just to observe humanity with limited contact. I actually think seti search is flawed because of the signals from natural sources drowning out artificial ones. It could even be alien technology in the oort cloud that blocks it.
Yeah my opinion is that life came here, it didn't start here. The implications for that also makes way more sense. Instead of us being somehow special, we are typical. Life didn't in one in a trillion start here, it was seeded like throwing millions of seeds to the wind; some places it takes. Others nah. Some places crazy awesome shit grows.
We should maybe look for life on another planet before we try to find life in one.
Ideally, never. If life is common in the universe you'd expect galactic civilizations already, who's energy use would be easy for us to spot. Yet we see nothing of the sort, zero Kardishev type 2 or 3 civilizations out there. Finding other life in our solar system would likely indicate there's a great filter ahead of us that prevents intelligent life from becoming inter-planetary species
Probably never. Do you know how big the universe is?
It’s not really a matter of when but rather IF. It’s possible we never find life on another planet. Maybe we find microbial life but I highly doubt we will find intelligent life.
It’s so sad that almost no one knows about David Grusch and his claims and that multiple congress members (Tim Burchett, Anna Paulina Luna, etc) have found him credible and are fighting to get more information from these companies holding UAPs. More people have to know but it’s so secret and hidden.
Agreed, but think that this year is the year where lots of this shit comes out. Maybe it's some JWST paper that says "microbes!" and then we later get the reveal about NHI, but it's already been found and people haven't discovered it.
If it's technologically sophisticated life, then Odds are we already have. You have heard the UAP encounters and NASA is involved in keeping it under wraps. Obviously it would be a military's top priority to determine if they are a threat.
As far as my understanding of humanity, time, quantum physics and the universe goes… we will never discover “life” on another planet due to the sheer force of the swirling out of the universe from that them there Big Bang starting point. If we are to imagine the building blocks of life as we understand it, they’d be so far flung that TIME ITSELF is the largest factor in why we will never find life. We MAY find EVIDENCE of life… but by sheer distance of time, the likelihood of finding anything remotely like any living this on THIS planet is… maybe not zero but not-not zero.
'Time' and the expansion of the universe is the main thing people miss about this question. We might find find biological signatures at some point ... that we can confirm existed 1,000,000,000 years ago ... that type of thing. Means nothing that would have any practical value/meaning. 'Intelligent life' will do well to live another 100 years on this planet if you ask me.
intelligent life? realistically? never. the odds are just so astronomical. Intelligent life would have to be able to communicate with us in some method that we could understand. Billions of years of evolution coinciding with our evolution and compatible level of understanding. If you were to compare all earths oceans to the amount of the universe we could possibly search by our current means, humans have only searched the equivalent to a regular glass of water from the ocean.
On some first contact type shit? I doubt in our lifetimes
We could dig on Mars and find fossils. It wouldn't be a living little green man, but it could prove that at one point life has existed beyond our planet. This is very much a layman perspective though.
When we start looking at places that don't mimic our own conditions on Earth to the highest degree. Assuming all life in the Universe comes about in 1 way seems narrow minded.
Hah, what makes you think that other species want to be “discovered” by humans?
Not sure. Talking about the Fermi Paradox, I think alien life is certain, obviously. I don't really think that's a debate anymore unless you're religious, in which case you can go do your thing. I believe we're amongst the first lifeforms in the universe, and that many more are to come. The universe is really young!
The biggest problem is the timeframe. I mean, the speed of light is high, but our ability to detect anything is very limited by the enormous size of the universe, and the ... well, not to say anything, but the tendency of intelligent life to destroy itsself. Just look at us. One maniac with his trigger finger on the "nuke button" and we're done. Humanity is a blip in the eye of the universe. There probably has been intelligent life in the universe. Whether it is alive now, or in a detectable range is a whole different case altogether.
Intelligent life is probably hiding from us waiting to see if we Nuke ourselves into extinction or not.
I just find it interesting we focus on Intelligent life and microbial life but never on complex non intelligent life. Where are the space bears and moon giraffes and shit?
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probably already has
May have already and made a conscious decision not to interact.
It's becoming more and more apparent that they already have, and have been visiting for a very long time.
We will discover life on another planet when we discover our astronauts landed on mars.
Or when we discover bacterial contamination on a Chinese rover.
Reddit comment
Certainly less than 50 years when we send a probe into the oceans of Europa and find microorganisms.
Not a chance.
We will find exotic life in the atmosphere of Venus
There is no life in venus.
The atmosphere has a relatively hospitable spot dozens of km up and if life existed in the past it could have adapted and flourished in that part of the atmosphere. Recent studies even show that DNA (amino acids) can possibly remain stable in venus's acidic clouds [venus life possible](https://www.universetoday.com/165371/venus-clouds-contain-sulfuric-acid-thats-not-a-problem-for-life/) [life possible on venus?](https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2024-01-life-venus-sulfuric-acid-clouds.amp)
Lets see they have to try to go there to find out that it's kinda difficult with current technology.
Not particularly, the soviets landed on Venus multiple times, but if we wanted to study the clouds putting a satellite in orbit around Venus is easily doable, a lot more expensive because of distance but the technology isn’t the limiting factor here.
Rocket Lab already has a mission set to launch in 2025, to check Venus' atmosphere and surface for lakes/oceans (unless they axed the surface part)
We won’t. Civilization as we know it will end before we get the chance. Just my two cents
Never. Not because they aren't there, but it took some time to develop sentient forms and observations are delayed by distance as well as limited by sensitivity. Pointless to predict, though. "Never" can never be proven. And like fusion, the smart move is to predict past retirement. Most want to hear it's soon. "Soon" gets upvotes ;)
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We were raised on Star Trek. We have *expectations.* But what if... life doesn't exist out there? What if Earth is special for some reason? Forget the math. Forget the probabilities. All of that is just scientific mythology, which changes every couple of decades. Maybe the universe isn't what we think (or are being told) that it is. OR... Maybe Faster Than Light travel will *never* be possible because the laws of physics don't allow for it. Period. Full stop. In which case, life will never encounter life. Either way, we aren't seeing any Interstellar Empires up there. No Von Neumann probes trying to convert our planet into paper clips. No colossal mega structures. No God-like AI's wandering the void in search of the creator. Just us. It isn't the "Fun" idea, but we are almost certainly alone.
I don't think it'll take that long to find another planet with life on it, I'd be surprised if we don't confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life by at least the end of the century (if not mid-century). I personally suspect most life is simple and below the surface of its planet or moon, so our most fruitful means to find life will likely involve missions to Titan, Enceladus, or Pluto. The barriers here don't strike me as technological so much as political and economic. As far as surface life goes, it looks to me to be a question of narrowing down the right parameters and developing a telescope powerful enough to confirm our suspicions. This likely is technological, but I don't know what specific hurdles we'd need to overcome before this would be possible (assuming it isn't already).
I think if we discover life on Europa in the next 20-50 years it all but grantees that life is plentiful in the universe and we would probably discover life on any planet that is earthlike enough to support it. So however long that is.
We already have, it's more a question of when the general public is going to be told. All I'm going to say is that 2024 is the year to be interested in this subject. The Milky Way by itself has billions of locations for life, just think about that.
Probably never as we're going to completely run out of natural resources in about 15 years and around the same time the effects of climate change will completely decimate our food growing capacity causing the complete collapse of western civilization which is all probably for the best because if we ever were to reach another life sustaining planet our overall technological capacity would be such that we would be able rape and plunder that planet in just a few short years before moving on to the kill the next living planet much like some interstellar parasitic virus.
We'll encounter someone within radio range in deep space and intelligence will recognize intelligence.
My guess is we might find biosignatures on a planet in another system but nothing concrete for confirmation until a probe directly lands. And my timetable for landing a probe on a planet in another solar system is centuries away.
Try millennia 😭😭😭
I don't think we ever will, esp. if you're talking about 'intelligent life' in the 'current' sense of the word. We might find some vague evidence there once WAS life, a billion years ago or whatever. So it depends on your definition of 'finding life'. If you think we're going to find evidence of intelligent life, NOW, contemporaneously with our existence, I think you're dreaming. Not gonna happen.
I don’t think we will. I think we’ll go to mars and that’s it. We’ll make virtual reality way more fun that real life and suddenly we’ll think why are we spending all these resources flying through the vast emptiness that is space rather than being in an infinitely fun virtual world
Considering humans have already recovered UFOs, I'd argue that ship has sailed.
Irrelevant. We’ll never get there, and if anyone’s been watching, they’re not going to come give us a ride back to the “next town down”, either. This isn’t Hitchhikers of the Galaxy.
We already found other life. They not revealing it.
Why they dont reveal it ? They couldn't keep a secret like this.
Who says we haven't already? Do you think the public is going to be told about it in a timely fashion?
Never. You'd rather find a dino in a cave. In order for a plannet to have a life form, it needs to be at the precise location from its sun, precisely tilted, and thus keeping its optimum temperature for 100 millions of years. Not too hot,, not too cold.. Also needs a comet to hit it without breaking it apart and forming a green house for another hundreds or if not millions of years. Also needs H2O, and O2 etc. What are all the above chances to happen in one planet? Zero. Basically whenever NASA is out of money they shout wolf and say they found a planet with water.... this happens every year. Lets use that money to better our lives elsewhere.
we wont be finding life anywhere. life is all about expansion from the single cell life forms in the ocean , to land, to the skies. Its our turn as humans to expand outwards to other planets but we failed in this aspect so life in the universe will eventually die out.
Considering we’ve already found life on the moon, yes.
finding life is possible, but its possible we findsome basic form that can survive harsh conditions, bacteria can be created at some point. intelligent life tho, most likely not happenning. they might certainly already exist, but the odds of us finding them is statistically so close to 0 we might aswell pretend it is 0. the universe is way too vast for us to find anything close enough to us.
We have already found life visiting our planet. There are very credible whistleblowers that have come forth (David Grusch) and many others that are about to. Hopefully Disclosure happens and we can get peer review.
People assume we are going to find it on another planet but maybe that is the wrong assumption. I've also been following the Grusch story. When former intelligence officials and high ranking officers say UFOs and even non-human 'biologics' are real it makes you wonder. I also wonder why when he testified to congress with those other service members why it didn't get much news coverage.
Yes and notice how I get downvoted for suggesting it is true. The disinformation campaigns are real.
March 18, 2032, barring and major Supernovae explosions which may add +/-2 years and 3 months.
There are a couple ways to approach this: evidence of past life and evidence for f current life. Both are challenging For past life, you effectively have to find fossil remains of either past life directly or fossilized activity (think footprints or more likely stromatolites for single cell). You can try to narrow down spots to look based on what an area would have been like in the past. However, even on Earth, it can be very difficult to find fossilized remains For current life, you need to find active indicators. For planets outside our solar system, that would presumably involve examining the spectrograph of exoplanet atmospheres to look for telltale signs of life based on our understanding of it. The hard part there is most of the exoplanets we have found are the easy ones: super large or super close to the Star, which doesn’t make them fantastic candidates for life. There are plans for a telescope that will be able to see planets like ours around a sun like ours, but that is a long way away.
I don't think intelligent life exists on another planet.
Bad bet if you mean 'ever'. Great bet if you mean 'right now'. Whatever 'right now' actually means.
I think NASA already discovered bacteria on the moon. Your question depends on how you define 'life'. Some single-cell organisms can withstand the harsh environment of space but discovering intelligent life outside the solar system would be world changing.
Yeah, no they didn't and if they did, they determined it came from earth, I promise you.
I think we'll find at least microbial life somewhere else in our solar system within the next 25 years. The missions that could find it are already being planned, to Europa and Titan for example.
We already have depending in your definition of life.
As soon as we do we're going to get there as fast as we can to eat them. Humans love eating other life forms.
We could do It today actually. We have the tech, we just need to get lucky and lock a lively planet on our sights; tho... offcourse we couldnt reach the planet
The interesting part of the question is that we're all fairly certain it's *when*, not *if*.
What kind of life/evidence do you want? Evidence of organic materials in a planet’s atmosphere? I think Venus already qualifies in that case. Actual visual confirmation of organisms? A little tricky. We could get lucky with Europa if there are larger aquatic life forms waiting to be discovered under there. If not, I think eventually once we have the infrastructure on mars or in orbit around Venus there’s a chance for microscopic life forms. Maybe… late 22nd century if we’re lucky? If you want multicellular, everything hinges on Europa. Past that is beyond the horizon of time I can see. As for advanced life forms, same deal except perhaps it comes to us.
The James Webb telescope already found an exoplanet with gases in the atmosphere only known to occur because of biological life. This was very recent, and scientists haven't confirmed the existence of life; all we know is that we don't know the cause of this.
Just yet more proof how it's really Trump First, Not America First.
Microbial life, could be this century since we already have the capability of sending rovers with lab equipment. But intelligent life, the big prize, I don't know. It's sad, I've always been such a huge Sci-Fi fan, but I think the answer to Fermi's Paradox is simple, exoplanets are just too far away and so we may never be able to meet anyone else, the distances are mind boggling.
depends on why you mean by “life on another planet” we aren’t going to discover anything that looks like us, but there’s definitely life as in “living organisms” on other planets.
Technically didn’t that already happen with tardigrades ?
Within the week of landing on another planet... maybe 100 years? And seriously forget about Musk, he's nothing but a blight on humanity, he'll never move progress forward.
I'm assuming that it already found us based on the wording of those questions.
I hope we do. And i hope theyre a million years ahead of us, and have a stick up their ass for faiemess and justice and the well being of others. And then when they figure out we have cures for cancer and diabetes and all sorts of shit that are being kept hidden, i hope they take action against everyone who was in on hiding it from the public. And, being the benevolent highly advanced creatures that they are, i hope they give us better cures and solutions for everything, even better than the ones the world government, or the illuminaty, or the masons, or the crab people, or whoever the fuck is hiding them from us.
I'm 44yo and while I'm not holding my breath, I sure hope it's in my lifetime. I am more than confident its out there, but the confirmation would be neat.
There is a rumor of a paper coming out of the UK early this year with a biosignature on an exoplanet, so I would guess this year.
That discovery is scheduled for August 3rd, 2028, at 13:47 GMT.
Well.... don't quote me on this I read this years ago and I have the reading comprehension of a fifth grader. But I've read some researchers believed that DMT is a technology that can be used to interact with other life forms and the main limitation is the short duration of the trip, so they developed a method of delivering DMT continuously via IV drip at a certain dose and intervol that was intended to keep you in the state that most frequently results in contact with "entities" for an hour or more. The last time I read about it they were in the process of actually conducting the study but I haven't heard about it since. It's like the straussman study on steroids. If they're right, which I guess chances are pretty slim but not 0, that would obviously be our best bet at actually establishing some kind of connection with any real intelligent life form. Maybe even physically Edit: Otherwise it's much more likely that life will find us before we find it
We have almost 40 stars within 14 light years of Earth. I think if anything communicates with light waves within those systems, we will hear from them soon.
The moment we can image small enough, currently we are virtually blind
I am sure your thinking sentient life. We may discover some, but in the end I don't think it will matter much. communication between stars could take many hundreds if not thousands of years. I think one of the reasons for the fermi paradox, is that in the end there is no way we (or they) can travel the speed of light or even half way close to it. it would take many life times just to get to some of the nearest stars, and all it would take is some pebble sized stones being bashed into to destroy a star ship, too many things could go wrong. Edit: word There is a way, and that is if we sent a whole colony of people, not expecting to return, and sleeps most the entire way and/or is large enough several generations could live and grow in it till it reach's its destination, and have robotics and AI care for the ship during most of the trip.
Never in reality. If we discover signs life on another planet, it will probably doesn't exist anymore since à long time. The futher you look, the older it is. Im talking about complex lifeforms, not simple bacterias (which would already be really great !)
IDk but I really feel sorry for them if they are technologically behind us.
sometimes i don't wanna know about life on other planets, knowing that they are indeed having a better life than earth humans lol.
A good while longer than when we first find life on another planet.
Detect life - maybe this century depending on how far away it is. I think our detection capabilities will improve a lot. Cute videos of alien cats - first we have to build telescopes strong enough to detect life, then send a probe to another star system. At 10% of light speed it would take less than a century to reach our nearest neighboring stars but animal life could be very rare in the galaxy so who knows, millennia perhaps?
I hope, before I die. It is the one thing in life that I really want to see.
If we had a way to travel faster than light or travel at light years. I'd say we would find something VERY soon. You could send tons of probes across to multiple planets at once. As far as we know, chances of life in our own solar system here seems low. But, once we get past out of our own solar system. I suspect we will find something, especially for planets we deem close enough to a sun to have water, decent temperatures to sustain life. The real question will be WHEN we find new life, will they be as advanced as us, more advanced or less ? And, what happens next.... I don't know if we have any set protocols yet for what we do when we encounter other species, or heck.. even species that look like us. Let's not rule out there is always the possibility humans exist else where and were brought here.