Dear Aliens; where the fuck are you?
I have this gut feeling that the day a human-crewed spacecraft makes it out to Jupiter an alien ambassador will appear and welcome us into the Galactic Federation. Well, a guy can dream anyway.
Try as we might, we just have not found any sign of alien civilizations out there in the stars. But odds are, we are just doing it wrong. All we can do is try and guess what they might look like, and seek that out. But isn’t that kind of like asking an ant what a human society might look like?
One of the best current theories is that an alien civilization would construct Dyson Spheres, but so far this search has come up empty:
A search for colossal feats of alien engineering called ‘Dyson spheres’ has so far found no convincing candidates within 1000 light years of Earth.
Solution? Build bigger and better detection systems. Which I am totally down with. What we have found with just the Hubble Space Telescope has been damn impressive.
It is becoming undeniable that space is far from dead, as many people still seem to assume. In fact, it gets more interesting the more we look. Like the possibility that this comet may well have wandered over from another solar system!
If it does have a dark passenger, at least these Teddie Bears in space might buy us some time:
Fermi Paradox be damned – I wanna party with Aliens!
I’ve always assumed one of 2 things:
First,the Universe is…extremely big. Big enough that even MANY advanced, galaxy-spanning civilizations may take a long time to run into each other. And we have barely made it off planet at this point.
Secondly, maybe they’ve visited, had a good look at us, and decided to leave us alone for several more centuries. See if we outgrow our warlike, destructive tendencies.
Yeah, I remember hearing a while back a theory that, in order to be able to actually cooperate enough for an alien civilization to become space-bound, they would have to have collectively accepted a “libertarian philosophy of non-aggression.” They’re probably waiting until we get closer to that society until they come up over to say “What’s up?”
Space hippies are not my future
While the idea of a “Prime Directive” is lovely, face to face contact is not that likely initially; leaked radio transmissions, stella husbandry, von neumann probes and fuck knows what else are more likely as first contact, and they’re all much harder to hide.
Other explanations range from the absurd to the scary to the depressing, I’d say the most likely explanation is that there are far fewer advanced life forms out there than we’d hope. Which sucks.
(I like big science fiction ideas, in case you hadn’t guessed.)
Worth a look at the variations of the Great Filter response to Fermi – the idea that some disaster regularly befalls intelligent civilisations before they become space-faring.
These could range from self-destruction to (as Stross often points out) going into a technological Singularity and spend all their time in virtual worlds made out of the computronium they’ve turned all their planets into.
Or, of course, they’re already here and just don’t want to let us play…
The problem with a Great Filter is it requires a pretty uniform psychology. It’s possible, but again only works if there’s a small number of species out there or you’d expect a few exceptions.
And it’s worth remembering that even human radio signals are (faintly)detectable for tens of light years, so as long as they make some noise before the singularity/apocalypse/whatever SETI should find something.
(Of course, if we’re going to bring up virtual worlds, it could be we’re already in one, but nobody bothered to program in any aliens…)