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HD 137010 b (thelemmy.club)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

This is the main reason I've never taken the Fermi paradox seriously. I know it's only supposed to be a thought experiment, but way too many casual readers interpret it as some kind of scientific theory.

There's no paradox at all when you consider how unlikely it is that another civilization reached the same or similar technology level as us in the exact same microscopically thin slice of time that we've had radio. And that's even ignoring all the problems with detecting an alien radio signal in the first place.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (2 children)

    I always found it arrogant to presume aliens would want anything to do with us. If life exists on one other planet, then life will exist fucking everywhere and we wouldn't be special, it's not like life will have evolved on specifically two planets only.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    If the rare earth hypothesis is true, which I personally think it is because of how many coincidences it took to make Earth habitable, then I do think they would be interested.

    I mean we'd be very interested if we found another Earth-like planet with a civilization on it, so why wouldn't aliens? Presumably any species capable of that discovery would at least have a need to pursue new knowledge, otherwise they would not be able to advance scientifically.

    It's not about humans being special at all, rather the opposite. Intelligent life is likely to share at least some things in common with us. For example it's possible that they're also violent assholes like we are, and destroyed their own planet, so now they a need one and we fit the bill.

    If the rare earth hypothesis is false, then things simultaneously become more and less interesting. More interesting in that there's suddenly a whole galaxy of life-rich planets to explore, less interesting in that there would be nothing rare about an Earth-like planet and aliens may be less interested in us.

    But even then, I feel that someone's going to be interested. We have millions of species on this planet and that doesn't stop people from looking for new species.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    I'm being semi-facetious of course, I just always found it a bit funny to assume that life either only exists on Earth or on Earth and then like a few other planets. Presumably if life exists anywhere beyond Earth it would be safe to assume that life would be everywhere and not uncommon at all, for reasons of panspermia and because it would indicate life is an inevitable chemical process that would naturally spring up around the Universe.

    I'd say that the two extremes- life being unique to Earth, and life being ubiquitous in the Universe, are both more reasonable positions than life being unique only to Earth and just a few other places.

    I am a strong proponent of life being ubiquitous, because the Universe doesn't do "one off" phenomena, and as per my previous argument, if it's in more places than here, it's going to be everywhere. That's only my intuition, of course, we can't meaningfully say scientifically which is the case without more data either way.

    But to address the original argument- if we would say that life is indeed everywhere, then that would seriously diminish the interest of any would-be advanced alien civilization because they'd likely have seen it before. Interesting, sure, but not world-shattering, or even important enough to warrant direct communication, just like finding a new species of orchid deep in an Amazonian jungle would be interesting to botanists and maybe be photographed and put in a magazine but not even make the faintest blip on the radar of the corpus of scientific discovery as a whole.

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