"The Great Filter: Do We Live in a Dead Universe?" Topic

"Like most folks raised on steady diet of science fiction, for many years I've been disappointed in the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life in the universe. Except for those who purport to have had a close encounter of the decidedly alien kind, we've all learned to scale back our expectations and breathlessly await the announcement that our Mars probes stumbled across a slime mold, assuming that discovery of any kind of life, no matter how simple has great existential significance. And indeed it does, but not in the way you're thinking. If we find multicellular life anywhere, yet continue to fail in our efforts to make first contact with something that can carry on a conversation, we are essentially screwed. That's right. At this point, tripping across evidence of multicellular life anywhere but Earth spells our ultimate doom. Don't run for the bunker just yet. Follow the dismal logic.

The Fermi Paradox is that old saw of Ufology which points out how odd it is, given our Sun is a relatively young star, and that our galaxy contains billions of stars (many billions of years older than the Sun), a notable portion of which might be assumed to have vaguely Earth-like planets, that we still have no concrete evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. Since we are relative newcomers in the galactic neighborhood, one could reasonably assume that at least some portion of these civilizations would have mastered interstellar travel, and by conservative estimates they should easily have been able to colonize most of the inhabitable galaxy in as little as a few tens of millions of years. Sadly, there is no convincing evidence that this is the case, leading many theorists to conclude that either (1) everybody is really scared of something and thus staying quiet; (2) intelligent life is inherently self-destructive and once any civilization reaches a sufficient level of technological advancement it implodes catastrophically, or (3) we are well and truly alone in the universe. These are all equally unsatisfying propositions as we don't like to consider what would make everyone in the galaxy hide their heads under the covers, we are a little too enamored of our big brains and technological progress to admit we'll probably blow ourselves to hell at some point, and we're essentially sociable creatures that would probably die from loneliness if there was nobody out there to impress with our wit and charm. There is also the remote possibility that we are the recipients of an organized galactic conspiracy of "shunning". Perhaps we smell. This is unlikely, as any sufficiently advanced technological civilization will no doubt have invented Jovian strength deodorant and offered it to us along with world peace and the cure for cancer…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Or maybe we are just the ouput of a computer program running a simulation.

Maybe we're being "shunned".

Meh, we will.probably end up creating our own transhuman aliens if we.don't meet somebody out there.

I agree. Give us another 10,000 years and our descendants, as they expand out from Earth, will have evolved themselves far away from bog standard Earthling to adapt to the environment they find themselves in.

We already have examples in evolution, the Galapagos Finch.

Given the popular SF trope of "Ancients" there is always option 4: we are (one of) the most advanced race and will turn out to be one of those Ancients to some civilization in a far future…

Then again the `great filter` could be Cthulu and co.
The aliens/gods are so advanced that we`re just less than ants to them.

It`s interesting how the search for life on Mars has gone though.
Viking lands, one of the life-detecting experiments is positive but the data does`nt fit the pre-conceived idea of how life should work there so the idea that Mars is a dead world gains hold in the scientific community.
Later probes send data that hint that there might just be something alive there but the jury is still out on the whole `Life on Mars` issue. The whole debate being influenced in a negative way by all the sensational faces/pyramids/ufo stories that circulate in the popular press.

So it could be that generally we do have the data already for life existing elsewhere in the universe but it just hasn`t been interpreted correctly due to our own bias as to what life `should` be.

For example, complex organic compounds in interstellar dust clouds? Does life actually need to live on planets to survive?

According to Wikipedia the observable universe is about 91 billion (= 91.000.000.000) lightyears. One lightyear is the distance that light moves (about 300.000 km/second) during one year. I have not taken in account the exact scale, but it seems to me that our own solar system is not more than something like a pea in a football stadium, or perhaps even in a city. So there could be millions of alien races in the universe that have not met and never will. I feel therefore that talking about "the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life in the universe" is rather naieve…

My hypothesis is that life may be abundant, but the road to intelligent life is far from straightforward.

It may be that the vast majority of life is simply single-celled life with the odd plants and animals of varying degrees of development. And of that small pool a tiny group turn out intelligent enough to make themselves noticeable in the cosmos.

We also underestimate the size of the universe. One might simulate the range of signals by gathering a lot of circular objects the size of plates, hula-hoops, circus tents, marbles, rings, basketballs and then drop them randomly over an area the size of Central Park and see how many overlap …

And on top of the vast scale of the universe, there's the vast scale of time. We've only been looking for traces for … one century? That's less than the blink of an eye. And with that blink we've only been looking at the other pea lying next to us, and searching for some kind of mirror image of ourselves in both biology and development. Indeed all rather naieve.