Aliens – There Are None Wednesday, Jan 11 2006
space 7:46 am
People have been talking about the extraterrestrials again. The former Canadian minister of defense is arguing for public hearings on “exopolitics” and a “Decade of Contact”, delegating public monies to education regarding our unearthly bretheren. Meanwhile, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is worried that alien signals received by SETI could contain viruses bent on taking over the world’s computer networks.
The latter speculation is original thinking, I must admit. Thinking “outside the box” in this way is helpful in recognizing and addressing genuine future risks, even though I think this particular concern is off-base. It’s also consoling that the mainstream media is willing to cover it, because some of the most truly serious risks to our well-being as a civilization will indeed sound “fringe” before they make headlines (nuclear weapons, chimera virii, others you haven’t heard of).
But there are no aliens. Not around here, anyway. Why not? Because if there were, they’d already be here by now.
Radio has been in use for almost a hundred years. The Earth is surrounded by a sphere of intense electromagnetic activity almost 200 light years in diameter. It only gets more intense as time elapses. Short of bending space, there is no way we can ever take that information back. It’s on its way out to the cosmos, in every direction at the speed of light.
You can’t miss it. Natural phenomena, like supernovae and the cosmic microwave background radiation, have a characteristic signature that could never be confused with the orderly pulses of language and images. Information-theoretically, apples and oranges.
Radio is easy to invent, once you get to a certain stage as a civilization. You can’t afford not to invent it. Harnessing electromagnetic waves to facilitate near-light-speed communication among the members of a civilization is as natural as constructing shelter or combating disease.
The Milky Way galaxy is about ten billion years old. Yet it’s only a hundred thousand light years across. That’s a ratio of a hundred thousand to one. If there were aliens about, we’d be bathed in radio signals continuously. Maybe they showed up so recently that their radio waves haven’t hit us yet? Implausible. If life were to evolve in this galaxy, it would have done so already, and they’d be blasting us with their television dramas.
Perhaps alien civilizations have evolved to a medium of communication beyond electromagnetism? That could be the case, but then they’d be colonizing other worlds. Even moving at a tenth of the speed of light, saturating the galaxy with their presence would only take a mere million years, tops. But where are they?
Our solar system is appealing. We have a stable, mild star capable of providing billions of exawatts of free power to any alien race interested enough to set up shop here. There is no reason to pass us up. But our neighborhood is silent.
An advanced extraterrestrial civilization couldn’t be missed. Life is constructed to flourish and reproduce. At no point will it collectively say, “we’ve had enough”. Individual beings must explore, travel, and consume. Barring dictatorial control forbidding space travel, it’s bound to happen. Not as a trickle, but a flood. Once a form of travel becomes technologically feasible, it becomes progressively easier until millions can do it.
The fact of the matter is simply that life is rare. Scientists believe there are a multitude of universes in existence, probably an infinite number. Presumably there are also an infinite number of intelligent civilizations. They are just separated by vast distances. The Self-Sampling Assumption compels us to treat ourselves as typical observers. If we’re typical, then typical intelligent civilizations are separated by such vast distances that for most practical purposes they are alone.
The lack of alien presence is also evidence that FTL (faster-than-light) travel is impossible. Either that, or we are the only intelligent species with a civilization in the universe. (Or, faster-than-light travel exists, but is sufficiently weak that it only permits travel at a few times the speed of light – unlikely.)
The popular obsession with aliens and UFOs closely reflects the obsession with fairies in the early 1800s, and the fixation on angels and demons before that, and beliefs in the presence of spirits throughout history. We just want to believe it because the possibility is so exciting. This article from The Onion does a great job poking fun at this human tendency. Also see this Tech Central Station article (“Internet Killed the Alien Star”) on how the Internet has helped us realize that alien visitation is make-believe.
If we want to witness bizarre new forms of life, or different types of intelligence, we’ll just have to create it. You might say that creating it isn’t the same thing as discovering, but this concern can be sidestepped by creating new forms of intelligence randomly, or constructing forms of intelligence that give rise to further forms in an unpredictable fashion. Both will happen, we just have to stick it out until the technology is here. You’ll get your aliens soon, star-gazers!
“Meanwhile, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is worried that alien signals received by SETI could contain viruses bent on taking over the world’s computer networks. [That] speculation is original thinking, I must admit.”
Hardly. I’m sure that I’ve seen it at least twice in science fiction stories.
His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem is the best known, but a few others are mentioned at the bottom of http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/15.40.html.
I see! Point taken.
The presence or absense of other intelligent life is a great philosophical discussion, mostly because regardless of the answer — we are alone or we are not alone in this vast (possibly infinite) universe — is profound. It is possible that there is a third answer…that we are simply first. After all, someone has to be first, why not us?
funny how the anthropomorphization of the universe always happens at the magic zone…that which is on the border of pop understanding. We already see the mythos created around quantum principals “we are all connected” (e.g. What the #%#@@ do we know?”
It did take 4 billion years for us to evolve, so it may not be so easy. However considering our feeble technology, we may not have the sensitivity to hear ET unless they are specifically “beaming” signals to us. As an example, it would be impossible to detect the signals leaking from earth with technology equivilant to our own more than a few dozen light years away.
Easy to create radio? Why do you say so?
Radio was a ‘logical progression’ the way humanity came to technology. IMO, there’s little reason to postulate that other species, in other environments, would have similar ‘logical progressions’ to their development of technology.
Case in point – aquatic life forms. They’ll have a rather rough time of it, without fire – if such creatures exist with advanced technologies, I’d suspect them of having significantly different capabilities from humans.
Another example might be creatures evolving on planets with scarce metallic resources. Or lots of other scenarios…
-John
Or, they’re flying about us now in tiny little nano-computers watching everything we do. Or, they’ve already turned the universe into a giant computer (like God?). Or, we’re part of a huge simulation run by aliens. If these sorts of things are possible, they’ve probably already been done. So the absence of SETI signals is just as likely to mean that there are already aliens out there!
If an alien civilisation compareable to our own exists it should achieve singularity within 200 or 300 years after the invention of radio. I think it is more likely that the aliens are to advanced. If technology on the planck-scale or even sub-planck scale is possible and they have uploaded themselves into the quantum foam or explored the higher-dimensional spaces of the multiverse as described by M-theory they would be invisible. They would transcend our universe before moving more than a few lightyears. It wouldn’t make sense for them to convert the universe into computronium. If they can create new universes with completly different laws of physics (for example a much higher light speed, a smaller planck length, more dimensions… everything that could be used for better information processing) why should they expand in this universe. It would be as pointless as trying to exploid the additional computational capacity of computerchips arranged as an abbacus.
FWIW,
“Scientists believe there are a multitude of universes in existence, probably an infinite number.”
that is a fairly silly comment, a gross simplification. Of the (many) utterly disparate competing interpretations in fundamental physics currently, yes, some vaguely involve ideas such as “many universes.” It is absurd to describe this situation as “scientists believe there are a multitude of universes.”
Consider this. Right now we’re moving over towards purely digital transmissions. It makes sense to, it’s more information dense. When that transition is compelte, analog signal will have existed for a mere century. Once it’s complete, our digital signals will be indistinguishable from noise, without the aid of codecs. Signals that can be understood “immediately” and without a huge amount of working will have been transmitted for a mere century. After that, earth goes seemingly quiet. If the signal doesn’t pass intelligent, radio-capable life during the 100 years that its travelling over any given planet, the intelligent life on that planet will miss it entirely. The same goes for aliens transmitting radio.
That means that if we are to discover intelligent life via radio, we have to detect radio from that 100 year time. If there is intelligent life in this galaxy, it would have had to transmit signals 100,000 years ago, if it were on the other side of the galaxy. If they were closer, or farther, the time changes. And if they’re even right next door in alpha centauri, we would have to have developed radio at effectively the same time, to within a century, in order to detect them.
To get these situations to align is nearly impossible.
Also consider that as we advance, broadcasts are becoming less common while directed transmissions, using dishes, are preferable because of the increased signal strength. Space-based communications will likely occur using highly directional systems, making broadcasts in space less likely to accidentally be detected by aliens. And as technology advances, weaker and weaker signals can be used. As it is, you’d be remarkably lucky to detect and identify ANY earthly signal from alpha centauri, nevermind 100 light years away.
Also consider, if wormhole technology makes FTL travel real, and if it’s easy, then transmissions will likely be routed through the wormholes rather than broadcast out into space. Even less signal will get to us.
The likelihood of detecting a signal, unless specifically designed to alert us of alien presence, and built and maintained for hundreds of thousands of years, is implausible.
Regarding space travel, a good question is, why would they come here? It’s been said that even with no FTL, aliens should’ve colonized the galaxy by now. Why? An advanced civilization has a small population growth rate. And in a hundred years we’ll be able, technically, to build megacities like Star Wars’ Coruscant, where entire planets are covered with city and house trillions of people. Iain M. Banks, commenting on the ideal habitat for human life, said that planets were a bad idea and that space stations and orbitals (mini ringworlds) were a far smarter idea. Going with that, why colonize at all, when space habitats could house all of humanity a billion times over, and thats only using the resources in the asteroid belt?
The only real good reason to go interstellar is for trade. Trade makes it all worth while, because it provides the only thing that post-Third Wave economies want: Novelty. New ideas, new inventions, new everything. Even if the galaxy is teaming with intelligent life, which it probably isn’t, why should we know? It’s not likely that we could detect them, and it’s implausible that there’s any good reason for them to colonize everything.
[...] For a past post on the topic, see ‘Aliens – There are None’. Of course, there are plenty of alien apologists in the comments. In my experience, belief in aliens tends to be symptomatic of naive, television-and-movies-based SL2 futurism. Geoffrey Miller thinks that we haven’t met aliens because they’re all stuck in wirehead mode, but I’m skeptical. [...]
[...] As another poster points out, because the sample set of life is 1, the standard deviation is infinite, so there is no reason for us to think that the vastness of the cosmos implies anything about the probability of life. It’s that intuitive feeling of the universe being big that causes people to think that there must somehow be aliens. But that bigness is merely big to us. The configuration space is so much larger, and indeed, most atomic configurations are not realized in this universe. People’s intuition is as if there is some cosmic arbiter that says, “okay, it’s been 100 billion planets, time to seed this one with life now!” Why at 100 billion? Why not seed life on every 10^10^123 planets, instead of merely every 10^11? The multiverse is infinite. There can be an infinite number of intelligent civilizations, each living alone in their own universe. To think that the vastness of space implies the presence of aliens is itself statistically ridiculous. See my other post on this topic: Aliens – There Are None. [...]
ur all the smartest STUPIDEST people ive ever came across……ofcourse theres life out there in parrallel universes and in our own galaxy…and if u dont belive me .wait till they revel the alien base behind the moon.then ull see…fucken idiots and just to put it out there….i think that the grays visiting us…are really us in the future……..just commin back to see how we lived now……….wat if…
[...] we’re used to knowing that we’re alone in our corner of space (and possibly in more than our corner), but back then it must have made the imagination run wild. Imagine thinking that we’ve [...]
[...] Michael Anissimov and George Dvorsky have covered this topic [...]
michael i donot agree with u bcause aliens could be living with us – only a handful of all the 5.5 billion people on our planet must be aware of them.
There are 1000 billion galaxies in our universe and there are approximately 100 billion stars in each galaxy ie 100×1000 billion stars ??So there is a very large probability of an alien race besides us…
bug Life on mars … that’s alien toooooooo
thnks
I think there is one planet for each of the species present on earth today, and all planets sent their samples here on earth and they are actually watching
us now,we being telecast on their TV’s as REALITY SHOWS. Haha
Distributed computing projects and the Singularity…
Finding the best projects to help …
Almost every point in your essay constitutes a logical fallacy. I will endeavor to identify the most glaring holes, in the hopes that you can refine your thinking about this issue.
Your main premise is that the size of space itself, coupled with the fact that we have received no contact as of yet, assures us that space is devoid of technological life.
Or as one of the follow-up comments phrased it :
“To think that the vastness of space implies the presence of aliens is itself statistically ridiculous.”
In fact, the opposite is true.
We only know one star system well enough to know whether it contains life or not: ours. And it does. (At least the last time I checked.)
The ratio of systems capable of supporting life to systems that actually do is currently 1:1.
Therefore, there is every reason to believe that every star system capable of supporting life does so – at least until this premise can be disproved by example.
Find me a iron-based planet with a magnetic field, water, a reasonable rotation, a stable star granting a plausible range of surface temperature etc., that DOES NOT bear life, and then it may be worth considering this conception of space as an unimaginably vast, barren wasteland. The real notion that is statistically ridiculous is the one that posits that the number of planets capable of supporting life is small.
“They would already be here by now.”
“We would already be bathed in their radio and television transmissions.”
I can think of any number of reasons why these events may not have occurred, even if space is chock full of complex, technological civilizations. I will give an example of the first one that comes to mind:
Broadcasting your location to the universe is a really dumb thing to do. Truly advanced societies will have figured out in fairly short order how to stop doing this. If intelligent life is common, there ought to be societies at many different levels of advancement. You really don’t want to invite the more advanced ones to come visiting you – for the same reason that it would have been undesirable for the Mayans or the Inca to have invited the Conquistadors.
(In fact, we ought to stop the way we are broadcasting, because right now we’re doing the equivalent of waving a big sign that says, “We are dumb, and we have a nice, life-supporting planet. Please come exploit us.”)
“The lack of alien presence is also evidence that FTL (faster-than-light) travel is impossible.”
Again, a logical fallacy. This would only be true only IF aliens that already exist MUST have already found us or made themselves known. There could be any number of reasons why they haven’t found us, or why we haven’t found them.
This is the kind of thinking that would say to the Wright brothers that humans cannot fly because no animal as large or larger than a human can fly. First, the premise is wrong (pterodactyls flew) and second, the absence of something does not disprove its existence or its possibility. In fact, we may well find evidence that FTL travel is possible, until then…
“Our solar system is appealing. There is no reason to pass us up. But our neighborhood is silent.”
Again, this basic flawed line of thinking. The absence if something does not by any means disprove it. (If all the planets we could see did not have moons, that would not disprove the idea that planets can have moons.) The first flaw is compounded by a secondary flaw – the notion that advanced societies have no reason to pass us up. I can think of dozens of them. (Intelligent beings may have decided that hierarchical societies like ours are unstable and dangerous. Our planet could have a red thumb-tack on the intergalactic map warning others to stay away. Or perhaps we could be an outlier – we simply don’t look to others like the kind of system that typically bears life. I could go on.)
“obsession with aliens …closely reflects the obsession with fairies. We just want to believe it because the possibility is so exciting.”
This is so wrong it is just plain sad. I am sure you can think of any number of things that humans first imagined before they later substantiated. What you are trying to deny here is the power of human imagination.
I have already mentioned the Wright brothers. My grandfather firmly believed it was impossible for men to walk on the moon. Ridiculous notion. The Americas were discovered because imagination led some Europeans to believe there was more out there. And they were astounded to discover … other societies! Who woulda thunk? And yet, in the end, it proved to be a no-brainer. There were other societies all over the place.
And indeed there are.
I think the lack of aliens suggests life is very rare or they are hiding or we are in fact in a computer program,a false reality possibly a future childs school project or some crazed god etc. and all our science and evidence is false,and we can only ever “know” our experiences,fascinating and entirely as valid as believing anything “outhere” exists at all.But life should and must be as common as dust,planets are plentiful,life very resilient,surely a billion year old civilsation must exist somewhere by now.So where are they???
i have some issues with your “rant” here’s some quick facts. they’ve been here. for a long time already. thousands of witness accounts, governmental confidentiality covering up thousands of events. but another thing i found interesting was your belief that radio is a fundamental advancement of a sentient race. there are countless technologies we have no capacity to understand that have been created. namely space travel. so why radio?
thirdly, you seem to talk much about radio signals and frequencies. but if you knew enough about it you would know that all transmissions turn into indistinguishable static noise and nothing else over a period of time and space.
fourth, must you be so close-minded? discovery is nothing more than curiosity and luck. how can you be so sure that we are alone in our universe or even our chunk of the galaxy? if we were created, in this unimaginably immense galaxy, (not to mention universe) why not others?
lastly, your statement proving faster than light travel does nothing of the sort. einstein believed it. he understood the fabric of space, more than anyone else anyway. we just have no idea where to begin understanding how it works.
but do you really expect an alien race far superior to humans to just show up on our planet and go door to door greeting people? if you truly understood what you were talking about you would know that life in our galaxy is not only plausible, but likely. im not saying this to insult you but rather to open your mind and urge you to understand and research more about these issues you fight against. im not even sure the original writer will read this, or anyone else. but a response from anyone would be a pleasant surprise.
I completely agree with the argument that there are no aliens. The “things” that people have been seeing thus far (UFOs and the likes) have been nothing more than artificial products. Of course, these “UFOs” were made with technology that is perhaps beyond what we are told we have at this point in time, just like how Apple might already have the technology for an iPhone 8 but is only about to release the iPhone 5.
The idea behind all this, I believe, is that ultimately human beings do not want to admit their solitude in this vast universe. Knowing that you are alone in such a gigantic place (the universe, that is) is a hopeless and even scary thing, to say the least.
As we know more and more about the planets and other heavenly bodies around Earth and found no life, this endless search becomes a quest for only knowledge, which eventually bores. Those behind the scenes have to come up with some type of a hope for us on Earth so that there is always the feeling “No worries, there are some others out there.” That serves as the fuel to continue the quest of knowing the universe (of course, searching for another possible place to live is a reason).
Yes. If there were aliens, they would have already landed in New York. The fact that no such public landing is alone a strong evidence that there are none.
What about the “witnesses” of all the interesting events that have taken place so far? Well, there is a big drama behind all of these. We might not have the technology and intelligence yet to know too much about the universe, but we have enough to make a lot of things happen in front of people’s eyes to make them believe they are real.
Treasure the Earth. It is the one and only. Stephen Hawkins, I thought you were smarter….obviously I was wrong.
Another point – many people have been thinking for the aliens. Why do you think they would like to hide themselves? Why would they always “disappear so quickly”? If we were to discover a planet with “things living on it” that we can reach with our technology, would we keep sending “flying objects” over simply to pay visit after visit after visit? For what?
Now, those who were “captured” by “aliens” – drama. It is drama to such extent that even they themselves thought it was real. Very simple, they were never told that they would be on the stage when the show had already begun.
I do not want to express stereotypical thoughts, but the U.S. government is expert in doing things like this.
Government-sealed documents? Yes. One day they will be made public, and then we will know that this is all “out of a good intention”. Then what? Very simple, someone just has to show on T.V. and make a public apology, and that’s it.
It is not worth spending time waiting for nothing but an apology. It is more urgent to find solutions to make our Earth a better place, and then we start from here to see if what we can do with the other planets with our technology. Finding another place to live is a very noble thought, for example, and one that is worth continual effort. Finding aliens, not so much.
There are no aliens. Good thing, too.
Given the usual estimates of the age of the universe then thousands, if not millions, of space-travelling civilizations have had more than enough time to develop and explore the universe.
Their tracks should be all around us in every direction. Not hidden, but openly observable. For instance, the radioactive tracks that various forms of propulsion would have produced like contrails on jets. None such seen anywhere so far.
For the idiots arguing that that they would have learned to “hide” their radio signals. Well, if any civilization “learned” to do this, hide their electromagnetic emanations, in the time it took for them to LEARN to do this and then HIDE their communications there would have been how many years and years of UNhidden communications signals washing over the rest of the universe before cloaking their signals.
That we have to look so hard and still have come up with nothing is not so much the result of the fact that we have just begun to search for extra-terrestrials, but that there is so literally nothing there.
People on the one hand routinely argue that they are so “sure” that there are millions of “intelligences” co-existing with us yet so unwilling to accept that by those odds we should have been overrun with alien visitations of a highly open nature.
The PROOF of our solitude in the universe stems from the very argument that other idiots in this forum are regurgitating: that since WE exist and WE are evolving space travel that there is a inevitable law of averages working to guarantee millions and millions of more civilizations like ours.
By exactly such “math” the non-existence of aliens is proven. The same numbers of that “formula of inevitable evolution” make it IMPOSSIBLE to ignore that at this stage of the universe the signs of alien life should be so undeniable and a phenomena as well-known as the sun appearing in the morning.
We are unique because the Universe actually conspires AGAINST life. Every law that we can observe in the universe works to make life highly unlikely. Every law in the universe works to break down and dissipate organic life UNLESS there is a outside intelligent force PRESERVING LIFE by direct intervention.
To point at our existence as PROOF of what the universe does on its own is myopic, wishful, and determined to ignore the evidence before us even in our own DNA.
We are CODED by a superior mind. The fantastically complex code that is in us had to be created and written first by a MIND. Not even multiple universes and untold years can substitute by “all possibilities” for a pre-existing mind with a purpose and intent.
That is why we are here. But we are not alone.