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miscellaneous musings
Morituri:
I think of how astoundingly unlikely the Great Silence seems - how could there be intelligent life here, on this one world, "way out on the unfashionable end of the west spiral arm" as one of our writers put it, and nowhere else? And yet, as we look around us, millions of light years in every direction, we see no evidence at all that anyone else exists now or ever has.
The Copernican principle has been stood on its head. Not only are we special, we are so damn special that apparently there is nothing like us in all the rest of the universe. We are at the very center of the universe, evidently, because there is nowhere else where anyone or anything can even see it. And that way lies madness, but still, there is the Great Silence and how else can we understand it?!
I don't think we're completely alone... the universe is too big for that. Physics allowed us to happen somehow, and the same physics are acting on squillions of other worlds. But at this point I'm pretty sure that intelligent life has to occur less than once per twenty galaxies. I don't know why we're so unlikely, but I'm able to accept that we must be. It's the only theory that matches available data.
But some of the other theories provide food for thought. There are a few in particular that say Aliens are well aware of us, possibly even present in this solar system, and monitoring our activities. The question then becomes, "Are We Being Watched?"
But my mind takes this question a different direction than most. If we are being watched, then what are our ratings like, and who handles our ad revenues? Do we get a lot of likes? Or is the audience disengaged and just putting us on for background noise? Are we providing important illustrations of timeless universal principles common to all species? Or are we the 'Florida Man' of the galaxy, just doing one astonishingly stupid thing after another and somehow surviving? Or maybe it's like pay-per-view and the audience is placing bets on how long we'll last.
That last one, anyway, would explain why they might be watching us but not making contact. If they're booking bets about how long it takes new species to self-destruct, then they've got to prevent would-be cheaters from coming down here and rigging the odds.
cesium133:
Well, we don’t necessarily know that we’re alone in the galaxy. We’ve just not seen any signs that we can interpret as coming from an intelligent species. Does an intelligent/advanced species have to communicate via radio? And if they do, will it be at an intensity that we would be able to detect? At this point we can barely detect that there are planets in other solar systems, let alone planets with life. For that matter, despite all the thought experiments about aliens watching our TV, would they be able to detect us? Our TV stations don’t broadcast at that strong of an intensity. An alien species watching from another solar system may deduce that there is life here, due to the oxygen in the atmosphere (or they might not… do they have different chemistry?) but they’re unlikely to see anything from that far away that suggests intelligent life.
sitnspin:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/news/a27934/galaxy-map-human-radio-broadcasts/
Is it cold in here?:
The greater the information density of a modulation system, the more it looks like white noise. They could be communicating by radio and we'd just never know it.
zmeiat_joro:
That's why the Fermi Paradox is nonsense -- we have only broadcast in easily decipherable codecs for a century, if that and we have now stopped. And the strength is nothing, it has not even went further than the Oort cloud.
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